Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature [1 ed.] 0367861275, 9780367861278

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Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature

“Hope” and “modernism” are two words that are not commonly linked. Moving from much-discussed negative affects to positive forms of feeling, Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature argues that they should be. This book contends that much of modernist writing and thought reveals a deeply held confidence about the future, one premised on the social power of art itself. In chapters ranging across a diverse array of canonical writers – Henry James, D.W. Griffith, H.D., Melvin Tolson, and Samuel Beckett – this text locates in their works an optimism linked by a common faith in the necessity of artistic practice for cultural survival. In this way, the famously self-attentive nature of modernism becomes a means, for its central thinkers and artists, of reflecting on what DeJong calls aesthetic utility: the unpredictable, ungovernable capacity of the work of art to shape the future even while envisioning it. Tim DeJong received his PhD in English at Western University and is currently employed as a lecturer in the English Department at Baylor University. His academic essays have been published in Modernist Cultures, Research in African Literatures, College Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and English Studies in Canada. His poetry appears in Rattle, Roanoke Review, Booth, Kindred, Nomadic Journal, Common Ground Review, and other journals. He lives with his wife and three children in Woodway, Texas.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

64 Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing Writing in the Wings Graham Wolfe 65 The Nationality of Utopia H. G. Wells, England, and the World State Maxim Shadurski 66 New Oceania Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific Edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long 67 French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK Edited by Irving Goh 68 Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China Modernism, Travel, and Form Jeffrey Mather 69 Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections Matthew James Vechinski 70 Baroque Lorca An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage Andrés Pérez-Simón 71 Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature Tim DeJong

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Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature

Tim DeJong

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Tim DeJong to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-86127-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01705-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For my mother, Margaret, and in memory of my father, Jack

Copyright Acknowledgments

AESTHETIC THEORY by Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. English translation copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Original, German-language, edition copyright 1970 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Used by permission of University of Minnesota. “Death,” translation copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; from SELECTED POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE by Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), from TRILOGY, copyright ©1945 by Oxford University Press; Copyright renewed 1973 by Norman Holmes Pearson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “The Graves” from RAPTUS by Joanna Klink, copyright © 2010 by Joanna Klink. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Contexts of Modernist Hope 1 1 The Image in the Mirror: Aesthetic Utility in Late James 26 2 Screened Anxieties: Hope and Fear in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

53

3 Unpredictable Texts: H.D.’s Grammar of Creation 80 4 Recovering Democracy: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

110

5 Refusing Silence: Art as Deferment in Waiting for Godot and Endgame

139

Coda: Legacies of Modernist Hope: Poetic Unknowing and the Call to Wonder 169 Bibliography Index

177 189

Among artists of the highest rank, such as Beethoven or Rembrandt, the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality; this, truly, would be a worthwhile object for the psychology of art. It would need to decipher the artwork not just as being like the artist but as being unlike as well, as labor on a reality resisting the artist. If art has psychoanalytic roots, then they are the roots of fantasy in the fantasy of omnipotence. This fantasy includes the wish to bring about a better world. —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor There stands death, a bluish distillate in a cup without a saucer. Such a strange place to find a cup: standing on the back of a hand. One recognizes clearly the line along the glazed curve, where the handle snapped. Covered with dust. And HOPE is written across the side, in faded Gothic letters. —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Death,” from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Acknowledgments

This book has been about six years in the making. While writing is a solitary pursuit, many of the ideas in these pages were tested and honed through conversations with colleagues and friends as the manuscript developed. Some of the individuals who were influential in shaping the direction of the book may not even be aware of the role they played in its creation. As guest editor for a 2014 special issue of Research in African Literatures, Yogita Goyal suggested that the concept of hope was central to my essay on Melvin Tolson (later to become this book’s fourth chapter) and should be foregrounded. This observation led me, indirectly, to this book’s main topic and argument. I first tried out the term “aesthetic utility” in a non-academic setting, springing it on Andrew C. Wenaus, whose response, while he may no longer recall it, was typically generous and helpful. While I studied and taught at Western University, when this book barely existed except as a distant possibility, Stephen Adams, Joshua Schuster, Rasmus Simonsen, Michael Sloane, and Andrew Wenaus offered thoughtful advice and ideas. At Baylor University, where almost the whole of this book was written, I have benefited from discussions with many friends and colleagues. Julia Daniel, Alex Engebretson, Tara Foley, Alex Holznienkemper, and Bill McDonald provided welcome intellectual engagement on matters including, but not limited to, this book’s topic. I especially want to thank Kevin Gardner for his unfailing support and encouragement and Richard Russell for his mentorship and keen critical eye. I’m grateful to the Department of English at Baylor University for a grant that helped to fund the research for this book and to the College of Arts and Sciences at Baylor University for granting me a 2016 Summer Research Sabbatical, which was spent in part on writing a chapter of this manuscript. Jeff Morris has been a constant friend and dependable source of insight; our conversations have consistently stimulated and enriched me. My editors at Routledge, Michelle Salyga and Bryony Reece, have been helpful at every step of the way in seeing this book to fruition. An earlier version of Chapter 2 of this book appeared as “Screened Anxieties: Affect and Temporality in The Birth of a Nation” in Modernist Cultures 14, no. 2 (2019): 129–150. An earlier version of Chapter 4

x Acknowledgments appeared as “Affect and Diaspora: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia” in Research in African Literatures 45, no. 3 (2014): 110–129. My sincere thanks to the editors at Edinburgh University Press and Indiana University Press for granting permission to republish these essays. My siblings – Joanna, David, Esther, Nathan, Carina, and Brendan – are never far from my mind, even if we are far apart geographically, and I am thankful for their presence in my life and their support in matters vocational and otherwise. Growing up as a middle child in a large family has probably influenced me in more ways than I can understand; looking back at my childhood, I can feel nothing but blessed to know something of what John Winthrop meant when he wrote that “to love and live beloved is the soul’s paradise.” To my parents, Jack and Margaret, to whom this book is dedicated, I owe a debt of gratitude for fostering my early love of reading. This book is, in one sense, a product of that upbringing and is a small but real proof of the reality of aesthetic utility in my own life. More importantly still, I am thankful for the freedom they gave me to nurture my own interests, even where this meant failure – to struggle to become a better version of myself in a space of unconditional acceptance. To my children, Edie, Gabe, and Owen: you fill my life with joy and provide daily immutable proof of the vast goodness of the world outside literature. Lastly and most importantly, to my wife, Biz: I’m thankful for every day we’ve shared together. Life with you orients me each day again toward all we were designed to hope for.

Introduction The Contexts of Modernist Hope

1.  Gravity and the Will to Hope At various moments during Alfonso Cuarón’s spectacular 2013 movie Gravity, the lead character, doctor-turned-astronaut Ryan Stone (played by Sandra Bullock), floats in space, untethered to anything, the rim of the earth a distant curve behind her. What little we learn about Ryan’s personal history reveals that she is also untethered in a more figurative sense: she has no partner, no family to speak of, and her life so far is defined mainly by a terrible loss – the death of her four-year-old daughter. When debris hits the Hubble telescope being repaired by Ryan and her fellow astronauts, everyone but Ryan perishes, and she is entirely alone. Ryan’s only chance of survival involves using the space shuttle Explorer to travel to a nearby Chinese space station, but when she discovers that the shuttle is out of fuel, she resigns herself to her fate. Speaking to the sole voice that comes faintly in over her radio, that of an Inuit radio operator named Aningaaq, she sums up her predicament: I’m going to die, Aningaaq. I know, we’re all going to die, everybody knows that. But I’m going to die today. Funny, that. You know, to know. But the thing is, it’s that I’m still scared. I’m really scared. Nobody will mourn for me, no one will pray for my soul . . . Will you mourn for me? Will you say a prayer for me? Or is it too late? I mean, I’d say one for myself, but I’ve never prayed in my life, so . . . nobody ever taught me how. Nobody ever taught me how.1 Ryan’s monologue more fully establishes the reason behind Cuarón’s decision to create her as a solitary, self-enclosed character with a tragic past. She has no one; she suspects her death will go largely unmourned. She can rely on no religious foundation, never having been taught to pray herself. And the incident that reverberates most through her life so far on earth is one of inexplicable loss and unspent grief. Cuarón has crafted a character who by all conventional standards has nothing to live for. Alone in space, and with her odds of survival astronomically slim, Ryan has more reasons than most to simply give up and die.

2  Introduction Which is what she plans to do. But as the oxygen depletes from the shuttle, she is visited by fellow astronaut Matt Kowalski, played by George Clooney, whom she saw drift out into space a short while earlier. Kowalski, a wisecracking veteran astronaut, uses what little he knows of Ryan’s life to offer a pep talk, convincing her to keep fighting: Listen. Do you want to go back, or do you want to stay here? I get it, it’s nice up here. You can just shut down all the systems, turn out all the lights . . . and just close your eyes and tune out everybody. There’s nobody up here that can hurt you. It’s safe. I mean, what’s the point of going on, what’s the point of living? Your kid died. Doesn’t get any rougher than that. But still, it’s a matter of what you do now. If you decide to go, then you gotta just get on with it. Sit back, enjoy the ride. You gotta plant both your feet on the ground and start living life. 2 The crisis Ryan faces here is an existential one in the most basic sense. What she does not have, what circumstances ruthlessly demand she conjures, is an obvious reason to keep living. While she does not conjure one, she does, as we soon learn, invent the return of Kowalski, whose motivational speech is a product of Ryan’s own mind – a survival mechanism she uses to force herself to persevere. And however improbably, Ryan does survive; at the end of Gravity, we see her swim, then crawl, then walk, pulling herself from the ocean as if reprising the actions of the first organism ever to do so. Ryan’s determination to go on can only emerge from her refusal to despair – from her belief that she still might live, given a certain course of actions and events. Her life thus hinges on her envisioning of a future in which she survives. It is a rudimentary form of hope, then, that fuels her and eventually saves her. Cuarón divests Ryan of any other would-be reason to hope – faith, family, career, wealth – precisely in order to make the argument that a more elemental hope predates and perhaps orders these, that as humans we are biologically predisposed toward hopefulness.3 Countless other tales of survival seem to say as much, that life itself is what we first hope for. Such a position reframes Nietzsche’s will to power as a less aggressive and more ideational will to hope. The evolutionary homage in the film’s final scene extends this idea to all animal life, but restricting ourselves to the human sphere, we might phrase the film’s claim as the following: the sole condition of our desire for an otherwise neutral future is that future’s possibility. The point is in question today in Gravity and many movies like it – movies that force their characters into situations in which they must ask themselves why they wish to keep living – exactly because so many of the cultural narratives by which hope sustains itself have begun, in our time, to seem profoundly exhausted.4 Increasing political tensions and

Introduction  3 divisions and the onset of climate change only exacerbate, for many, the sense of looming futility that makes such films seem especially apposite. As if in defiant response, Gravity enacts a return to the individual, biological wellspring of hope – hope as the simple hunger to persist into the future. But most of us today are not adrift in space; for most of us, persistence on some level is relatively assured. Once survival at the level of the individual has been established, further, socially and historically derived sources of hope are required in order to picture a legible, desirable, and achievable collective future. Our contemporary moment fosters a complex interplay between multiple narratives in seemingly irresolvable tension with one another. This book is about what can happen when narratives decline, intersect, or are brought to heel by outside forces: new formations of thought can create new avenues through which hope can be sustained. In Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature, I read texts produced by five modernist writers and artists – Henry James, D.W. Griffith, H.D., Melvin B. Tolson, and Samuel Beckett – from the beginning of the twentieth century to its midpoint. These writers occupy distinct and diverse subject positions and create artworks in a range of genres, including film, poetry, drama, and the novel. This book examines how what I’ve called the will to hope, manifested in and complicated by literature, reveals itself in their work. While modernism is not primarily discussed in terms of hope, it does have several hopeful strains. One thinks of the brash confidence of Ezra Pound, the esoteric messianism of Walter Benjamin, and the militant Futurism of F.T. Marinetti. But rather than examine such isolated, often widely variant specimens of modernist optimism, this book seeks to identify a deeper, less visible but arguably more potent form of hope that pervades the art forms of the era. For the geographic and formal breadth of the work of the artists I discuss intimates that a range of modernist texts might be considered applicable to the theme I am pursuing. Indeed, given the canonical status of the figures whose work I read, I would like to conjecture that their art offers a tentative blueprint for how to read the function of hope as a literary and philosophical concept within modernism more generally. Of course, a disclaimer attends this possibility: because periodization always involves generalization, attempting a systematic or exhaustive analysis of how hope inheres in texts across all of modernism is beyond the scope of this (or likely any other) book. I am not arguing that modernist artists were either more hopeful or less hopeful than those of any other era. Such a claim would be impossible to prove in more ways than one, not least because, as Andrew Delbanco reminds us, “We shall never get hold of mental states by making inventories of numerable things.”5 Rather, I propose that the historical conditions that shape modernist writing also shape a central feature of its hope – one I enumerate in what follows.

4  Introduction

2.  Modernist Hope and Aesthetic Utility Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 novel À rebours [Against Nature] describes the life of the aesthete Jean des Esseintes, whose disgust with bourgeois society leads him to retreat from the city to a life of private sensuality. At the novel’s close, ill health forces Des Esseintes to relinquish his decadent existence and l’art pour l’art beliefs and rejoin civilization. The book ends with this sentence: “Seigneur, prenez pitié du chretien qui doute, de l’incrédule qui voudrait croire, du forcat de la vie qui s’embarque seul, dans la nuit, sous un firmament que n’éclairent plus les consolants fanaux du vieil espoir!” (“Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who longs to believe, on the galley-slave of life who is setting sail alone, at night, under a sky no longer lit, now, by the consoling beacons of the ancient hope!”.)6 While the novel ends with the word “hope,” in its final pages its tone verges on despair. This was true of much of fin de siècle literature in the West, which narrates the end of an era of shared Christian cultural beliefs and values. As these eroded, the hopes they supported began to crumble as well. Franz Kafka’s summation of the human condition in modernity evokes this loss. Asked by his friend Max Brod whether it was still possible to hope, Kafka replied that there was “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.”7 Des Esseintes’s anguished cry is thus the apotheosis of the affective mood and philosophical spirit of Western literature at the onset of modernism, whose representative figure, for Walter Benjamin, is “the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.”8 This metaphor resonates throughout historical and current modernist scholarship.9 Critical explorations of the period tend to link it to darker and more negative theories, affects, or ideologies.10 Tyrus Miller’s description of late modernist writers typifies how the era as a whole has often been affectively characterized: Sinking themselves faithlessly into a present devoid of future, into a movement grinding to a halt and an aesthetic on the threshold of dissolution, the writers of late modernism prepared themselves, without hope, to pass over to the far side of the end.11 But were things really so invariably and uniformly bleak, so utterly hopeless, for the modernists, late and otherwise? In the present book, I unveil a different side of modernism, one that provides some counterbalance to a critical narrative that has overwhelmingly fixated on the negative. In his book Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, Philip Weinstein argues that for the modernist consciousness, “the drama of unknowing – of having to unknow, of realizing that one does not know and perhaps cannot know” takes precedence over, and even becomes a more accurate template for the representation of human experience

Introduction  5 than, the traditional Enlightenment program “of coming to know oneself and one’s world.”12 In this book, I build on Weinstein’s assertion that modernist artworks present and assume the world as radically unknown and unknowable. Uncertainty is thus a predominant modernist stance – a point I will return to in several places in the chapters that follow. But the space of unknowing is not inherently negative, however the recent literature on modernism has read it to date. Hope is just as likely to proceed from the condition of unknowing as are its more commonly ascribed affects such as despair, fear, shock, and alienation. In fact, not only does uncertainty not preclude hope, it may make it all the more necessary if civilization is to persist in the face of all the darker affects potentially brought to the surface by the modernist sensation of being unmoored and unfixed in the chaotic present. Each in their own way, James, Griffith, H.D., Tolson, and Beckett intuit and evoke this era-defining uncertainty. Their writing is deeply conscious of forces in their own time that threatened to tarnish or replace uncertainty with still more turbulent emotions. Most obviously, the two world wars cast a pall over the modernist decades, influencing these writers’ work in profound ways. In addition, as many critics have noted, much of modernist writing assumes or enacts a felt a divide between art and mass society – one that, to the same extent that it guarantees art’s autonomy by preserving it in a hermetically sealed extratemporal space, poses challenges for art’s continued cultural relevance in the world in which it is created. But the writers I examine respond to the predicament of modernist unknowing with a seemingly unlikely but ultimately resolute hope. This hope begins with their shared conviction that – as Huysmans’s hero des Esseintes belatedly discovers – aesthetic autonomy is a mirage. The artwork is always embedded in and shaped by its world. In fact, the very impossibility of aesthetic autonomy (which I discuss in more depth later in this introduction) becomes the source of these artists’ hope. Each writes out of a faith in a collective social future underpinned, at least in part, by art. This is the central argument of Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature: that whatever its varied objects, the modernist hope visible in the texts I examine is predicated on and sustained by a belief in aesthetic utility, which I define very simply as art’s effect on culture, or the power of the artwork to influence and change its society. The Oxford English Dictionary defines hope as “desire combined with expectation”: it is any orientation to a possible future that both wishes for and (to some degree) counts on its realization.13 This means that hope is not itself an affect, though it can register affectively; it is a disposition to which species of feeling such as longing or excitement can and often do attach themselves.14 Both desire and expectation must be present for hope to exist. Shorn of desire, hope is fatalism; shorn of expectation, it is fantasy. The texts I discuss navigate between these poles.

6  Introduction Rejecting hope as wishful thinking or escapism – the irrational determination to believe in a better future constantly undone by the facts of history – they simultaneously resist the stoicism, ennui, or despair that would emerge from a conviction of art’s uselessness. Instead, they gather and retain hopefulness by locating potentiality in art’s social effects, that is, by committing to the domain and influence of the aesthetic as integral to any desirable social future.

3.  A Philosophical Survey of Hope In what follows, I provide philosophical histories and contemporary surveys of the work surrounding the two terms that will guide my discussions throughout this book – hope and aesthetic utility. Because these concepts are so capacious and historically weighty that to do either justice would require a separate book, I will restrict myself to very brief summaries of the ideas of select major figures in the Western philosophical tradition. While hope does not receive extensive discussion in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, he includes “What may I hope?” at the end of his Critique of Pure Reason as one of three fundamental questions toward which all of “the interests of .  .  . reason” are inclined.15 For Kant, hope is founded on the existence of God and dependent on one’s own moral actions: “everyone has ground to hope for happiness in the measure in which he has rendered himself by his conduct worthy of it.”16 Hegel, too, is sanguine with regard to the future, but his perspective, if still theological, is less personal; he grounds his optimism in the gradual, beneficent coming-to-be of Geist, or Spirit. Where Leibniz declared our world the best of all possible worlds, Hegel reads world history as the difficult and laborious struggle of Geist toward its full realization – its necessary, immanent quest “to find itself, to come to itself, and to behold itself as actuality.”17 On the limited temporal plane attached to each individual human life, reasons for hope may be scant, since for Hegel only world-historical figures can be definitely said to have their wills aligned with that of Geist.18 Thus, even though Geist develops immanently in world history, we must restrict our greatest hopes to the transcendental plane. Such positive, theologically oriented depictions of hope are challenged by Arthur Schopenhauer, whose deep pessimism departs radically from the thought of Hegel and of earlier German philosophers. Schopenhauer explains culture, and even religion, as a product of the “will-to-live” that animates and directs every form of living matter, even plant matter. The will-to-live is “a blind, irresistible urge, as we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable nature and their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life.”19 Aside from this urge, human life would likely cease to

Introduction  7 exist, since for Schopenhauer “the world is just a hell” and “misfortune in general is the rule” in human affairs. 20 In the work of other thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept of hope is given widely varying treatment depending on the metaphysical perspective of the writer in question. As Mark Bernier has shown, hope is central, if underexplored, in the work of Soren Kierkegaard.21 By contrast, hope is nearly absent in the absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus, who grants that to live entirely without hope is impossible, but that it is only available to us in severely attenuated forms. In the Marxist tradition, the philosopher Ernst Bloch builds his entire oeuvre around the concept of hope. Bloch’s ideas are contained in his three-volume work The Principle of Hope, a rambling, digressive treatise that attempts to elevate the tenets of Marxism to the level of religious claims while avoiding metaphysical grounds for doing so. Terry Eagleton aptly calls Bloch’s philosophy “a profane version of [the] Pauline vision” of the eschaton, one that retains hope as an ordering principle in the world but directs it solely toward an earthly utopia. 22 According to Bloch, “man everywhere is still living in prehistory”; the course of events that will bring about a better world has not even begun. 23 While this utopia is not guaranteed to come about – its realization is dependent on the work of free human agents – its cause is greatly advanced by the fact that for Bloch hope “is not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but .  .  . a basic determination within objective reality as a whole.”24 What pushes this hope, and history, forward is the fundamental drive of “self-preservation,” expressible in each human life as individual economic interest. 25 The material endpoint of these hopes is the dreamed-of classless society, to which Bloch refers as “homeland” and in which – despite Bloch’s emphasis on the collective – “the individual, far from disappearing, himself first becomes free because he is capable of becoming human.”26 Death is still a reality in this far-off future, but Bloch suggests, albeit in frustratingly vague language, that the utopian society will search out “the remedy for death as one of its final problems.”27 Mysteriously, death will become “no longer the negation of utopia . . . but the opposite, the negation of that which does not belong to utopia.”28 Following Marx, Bloch restricts himself to the immanent plane, offering a wholly materialist account of history. But what Eagleton calls Bloch’s “manic Hegelianism” leads him to a picture of hope not wholly of a piece with this mindset.29 In particular, Bloch’s contention that hope is not merely a virtue or disposition but a property embedded into material reality strikes the reader as an unverified premise that borrows its force from the logic and language of metaphysics. Where a curious and finally perhaps insupportable fatalism thus runs through Bloch’s argument, Theodor Adorno finds hope in precisely the opposite notion – the possibility that the future is totally unfixed and

8  Introduction might yet be radically different from the present. In his Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes his rejection of Bloch’s (and Hegel’s) theory clear: “After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it.”30 Adorno’s view of the present is famously, deeply derisive; mass culture, he writes, has utterly overwhelmed individuality, leaving humanity “dragging itself along . . . an endless procession of bent figures chained to each other, no longer able to raise their heads under the burden of what is.”31 Importantly, this does not make hope impossible for Adorno; in fact, even though hope must go against the grain of current social reality, this very adversarial spirit makes it indispensable if humanity is somehow to alter the scarred present into a worthwhile future.

4.  Contemporary Explorations of Hope Hope’s history and significance as a concept ensures that it continues to prove a fruitful topic for investigation in the present day. Here I note some of the more current work on hope, much of which intersects profitably with my own. Andrew Delbanco’s book The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope focuses on cultural formations of hope in American history. Delbanco argues that broadly speaking, the ground or sponsor of hope in the last centuries in the United States has narrowed from God to nation to self. Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation uses a specific case study drawn from the history of the Crow Nation to examine how what Lear calls “radical hope” might allow cultures to persevere in the face of events that challenge not only their way of life but their life-worlds and existence. 32 In Hope without Optimism, Terry Eagleton contrasts authentic hope, which “needs to be underpinned by reasons,” with optimism, which he describes as a mere form of irrational fatalism.33 After providing a historical summation of views on hope and analyzing the work of Ernst Bloch, Eagleton uses literary examples to identify true, fact-facing hope as “whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees, from a general dissolution.”34 Discussions of hope wholly in the context of literature – such as the one my book provides – have generally focused on contemporary rather than modernist works. Among these, in Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past, Amir Eshel shows how in postwar German, Jewish, and Anglo-American literature, explorations of the past simultaneously conceptualize potential unrealized worlds. Eshel suggests that through what he calls its “prospective” dimension, the literary imagination is able to develop new methods of seeing reality that allow authors and their reading publics to envision alternate possible futures.35 David James’s book Modernist Futures: Innovation and

Introduction  9 Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel, while not directly about hope, makes a similar move, arguing that contemporary writers such as Morrison, Roth, and Coetzee look back to modernist techniques while formally and politically revitalizing them to achieve resonance in our own moment. And in Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature, Sean Grattan traces utopian inclinations through the landscape of canonical recent American texts, forcefully challenging the commonly assumed connection between utopian thinking (which is a kind of hopefulness) and insipidity. Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature shares at least some terrain with all the books listed above but overlaps neatly with none. I draw together modernist texts, hope, and a philosophy of aesthetic influence to make a case at once historical and literary. To reprise briefly, this argument is that modernist hope, though its objects are divergent, consistently founds itself on a faith in the reality of what I call aesthetic utility – the capacity of the artwork to influence and ultimately reshape culture. The process aesthetic utility captures has a long, debated, and complex life in the history of philosophy and literary theory. In what follows, I offer a fuller explanation of aesthetic utility, briefly map its historical background, and situate it within a more current critical context.

5.  A History of Aesthetic Utility The connotations of the word “utility” have likely ensured its long-­ maintained separation from the world of art. Utility puts us in mind of pragmatic, solution-oriented tools and processes. We generally see things as being useful when and because they are legible, definable, and manageable. But one premise of my argument is that utility need not be practical. While aesthetic utility shares the transformative properties of pragmatic utility – its ability to initiate a process of change, essential to the very notion of utility – it is in many other respects the antithesis of practical utility. Where practical utility is definite, local, fixed, limited, and typically concrete, aesthetic utility is non-local, often untraceable, and resistant to categorization or simplification. This is in part because the changes art produces first occur on the mental level, as processes that are invisible and undetectable – even, often, by the very subjects undergoing them.36 A significant implication of this fact is that aesthetic utility, though real and evident, is necessarily unpredictable. To try to contain the flow and direction of its impact is to make a category error with respect to the nature and purpose of art itself. A further corollary: there is no guarantee that aesthetic utility is necessarily a beneficial phenomenon. On the whole, as this book helps show, I believe that it is, but in certain places, and time periods, given works of art may well have negative effects on a

10  Introduction culture. This ungovernability is an unavoidable aspect of aesthetic utility (and is why I refrain from equating the term with aesthetic usefulness, which would more directly imply its benefits). Indeed, the volatility of aesthetic utility, its propensity to generate bad effects as well as good ones, is what led Plato to ban art from his proposed ideal society in the Republic.37 Since Plato, though, most philosophers have advocated for art as a vital component of the healthy society. Aristotle writes in Poetics that art provides a social good by allowing its audience to experience fear and pity at a remove and thereby creating an opportunity for catharsis, the “purgation of these emotions.”38 He adds that poetry is “a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” since poetry speaks to the universal and history the particular; while the historian can only document the past, the poet can also imagine the future.39 Horace concurs with Aristotle in The Art of Poetry, which contains likely the most famous of all maxims regarding art – that it succeeds when it “joins instructions with delight.”40 In British letters, Philip Sidney critiques Plato and follows Aristotle in affirming the benefits of poetry in “The Defence of Poesy,” published in 1595. The role of poetry, Sidney argues, is chiefly a moral one; its aim is “to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.”41 Philosophy and history both prove insufficient for this task, since the former speaks only in abstract terms and the latter only of particulars. Poetry, because it “coupleth the general notion with the particular example,” stands alone as the essential art linking these disciplines.42 The heir to Sidney’s task of advocating for poetry is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose stirring 1840 essay “A Defence of Poetry” remains, to my mind, stylistically one of the greatest in the English language. Shelley’s “Defence” is noteworthy especially in that he is the least defensive of poetry’s promoters. Where Sidney and others present somewhat muted claims for poetic influence – as when Sidney writes that poetry “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth”43 – Shelley is full-throated in his evocation of poetry’s power in the day-to-day world: Poets . . . are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary and painting: they are the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw with a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the truth that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.44 Shelley here uses the word “poet” “in the most universal sense of the word,” so that it includes such figures as Moses, Plato, and Jesus Christ.45 By such lights, Shelley argues, poetry is the source even of a “principle of equality” that led to the abolition of slavery and increased gender

Introduction  11 equality.46 The higher utility of poetry not only surpasses but engenders the “narrower [utility] of banishing the importunity of the wants of our animal nature,” which, Shelley indignantly observes, has been given precedence in his time, just as it arguably has in our own.47 In the German tradition, Kant’s Critique of Judgment seems largely to limit discussion of art’s effects in the world to the locus of the individual. For Kant, beauty involves “purposiveness without a purpose”: the beautiful object has a teleological bent, but without a concept to subsume under.48 The aesthetic judgment is thus one based on a feeling of pleasure, not cognition, but one that also demands universal assent. Kant resolves this conundrum by universalizing aesthetic judgments as occurring through the “facilitated play of the two mental powers (imagination and understanding) quickened by their reciprocal harmony.”49 In this way, “the mind is conscious of being ennobled . . . above a mere receptivity for pleasure” by the perception of beauty. By means of this sensation, the domain of the aesthetic points beyond itself, to “something that is neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible.” Thus “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good,” and art is responsible for the ennobling or elevation [Erhebung] of the individual mind.50 Hegel’s view of art is more world-historical in scope. In his work, art stands alongside philosophy and religion as one element of Spirit’s process of self-realization. The role of art, Hegel writes, is “to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration . . . and so to have its end and aim in itself, in this very setting forth and unveiling.”51 Though it does not point outside itself, art ultimately has a highly moral function: it is the means by which the gradually increasing spiritual freedom of humanity – what Hegel calls the Idea – is made tangible and visible. In this way it satisfies what Hegel calls “man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self.”52 By contrast, in the work of Schopenhauer, whose pessimism we have already observed, art is a sort of panacea. The artwork offers us a momentary escape from the will-to-live that animates us and through which all existence is experienced as suffering – specifically, boredom and pain.53 Since suffering is “essential to, and inseparable from, life as a whole,” art cannot relieve this burden, but only, by altering our mental state, make it temporarily bearable.54 In many ways, the aesthetics of Friedrich Nietzsche inherit and modify Schopenhauer’s. Initially, for Nietzsche, the great virtue of art is that it rescues us from the nihilism to which we would otherwise fall prey: hence his grand declaration at the close of The Birth of Tragedy that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon may existence and the world appear justified.”55 A decade later, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche reiterates this claim: “As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a

12  Introduction phenomenon of ourselves.”56 In early Nietzsche, then, if art does not quite occasion hope, it at least staves off despair, much as in Schopenhauer, though by different means. For Nietzsche, art helps us see ourselves as we truly are; without it “we would be nothing but foreground, and would live entirely under the spell of that perspective which makes the nearest and most vulgar appear tremendously big and as reality itself.”57 But in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes clear that in his estimation, art’s capacity to help us see our condition is not sufficient grounds to occasion hope for the future. Hence his reformulation of Schopenhauer’s will-to-live into the will to power, and his envisioning of the Overman [Übermensch] as the endpoint of human political and social aspiration, “the aim of the earth.”58 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche opines that it is time for man “to plant the seed of his highest hope,” which means “to not throw away the hero in [his] soul,” to strive to attain to that higher plane of earthly existence symbolized by the Übermensch.59 Physical life, of which this imagined specimen is the pinnacle, becomes for Nietzsche the ground and aim of hope itself: “Let your love for your life be love for your highest hope. And let your highest hope be the highest thought of life!”60 These exclamations can be read as Nietzsche’s attempt to resituate the soaring, longing-filled language of the Christian tradition within an entirely immanent, terrestrially focused vision of the future polis and community. The vast gulf between the ecstatic language of Zarathustra and the course of world history after Nietzsche is felt very strongly in the work of a thinker such as Theodor Adorno, for whom, as we have seen, the picture of world history and the future is one of gloom but for whom art remains necessary as a radical revolt against the given: “The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational.”61

6.  A  esthetic Utility in Contemporary Criticism and Theory This putative gap between art and the world it enters must foment either a creation of a space for aesthetics outside the social realm or a challenge to its dehumanizing values from within. The ongoing determination of which of these has occurred has marked out a continuing divide in literary theory and criticism that Adorno himself navigated with some difficulty. I mean the divide between what Rita Felski calls “theological criticism” – according to which art is valuable precisely due to its otherness, its separation from the world – and “ideological criticism,” according to which it is merely one more product in that world.62 With Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature, I consciously follow in the stead of Felski and other critics, who take the ideological tack, but with the significant proviso that the category of the aesthetic is no mere pawn of or window into history but catalyst of it in remarkable

Introduction  13 and complex if never precisely mappable ways. Among these critics is Elaine Scarry, whose book On Beauty and Being Just argues for a causal link between aesthetics and ethics, suggesting that social good can and does emerge from beauty. “Beauty,” Scarry postulates, “is a starting point for education” – a position she maintains to be true whatever one’s metaphysical presuppositions, and one that implicitly underpins my thesis regarding the reach and validity of aesthetic utility.63 In her wide-ranging study Dreaming by the Book, Scarry delves more deeply still into the processes by which writers use the materials and processes of language to work on the imaginations of their readers. In Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos, Alan Singer provides a sustained critique of anti-aesthetic modes of reading in the academy. Drawing on texts by Beckett, Melville, Joyce, and others, Singer maps the interstices between aesthetics, ethics, and politics in order to contend for the “potential cognitive usefulness of aesthetics as a means for rationalizing human community.”64 And in Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature, David Ellison traces the complex history of the relation between the aesthetic and ethical spheres through Kant and Hegel to Virginia Woolf, showing how their presentation as separate domains in Western philosophy is gradually interrogated and overcome in the field of literature. Together, these rich and challenging works comprise a welcome rejoinder to the commonly espoused notions that aesthetics has nothing to do with the ethical plane, that art has no real social force, or that the only worthwhile metric to use in interpreting artworks is to assess how they are implicated in systems of power or ideology. The books I list above provide broad, exhaustive, and sweeping accounts of the validity and reach of the aesthetic and document its rich interconnection with other aspects of social life. But they also help remind us, albeit in varying ways, that aesthetic utility is initially and fundamentally about the encounter of a human mind with an artwork. The very impossibility of charting art’s wholesale influence on social and ethical praxis has to do with the mysterious exchange inherent in that initial meeting between art and audience. We leave the theater, close the novel, finish the poem, experientially and psychically altered – but how? And in what ways do these changes shape our later actions and so, in multiplying their effects, insinuate themselves into history? Two books that ably rise to the challenge of exploring this question are Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature and Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature. The initial problem Attridge poses for himself in his book is that of how to differentiate literature from other kinds of writing. Literature’s unique capacity and influence, Attridge argues, derives from its quality of otherness or alterity, its introduction of a wholly new conceptual plane with which readers are confronted and by which they (and thus, slowly, history) are changed. Concerning what I term aesthetic

14  Introduction utility, he is both reserved and forceful, insisting that while literature “solves no problems and saves no souls . . . it is effective, even if its effects are not predictable enough to serve a political or moral program.”65 In Uses of Literature, Felski stresses that literature’s social value must begin with its immediate effects on its reader. She identifies four basic responses literature provokes: recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock. With respect to my project, the critical contribution of Felski’s book is to specify some instigating agents of what I here call aesthetic utility – namely, the affective changes wrought in the reader by a text in the moment of its being read. These categorizable modes of readerly response are signposts of how and where aesthetic utility originates, as literature functionally alters psychological, emotional, and cognitive states, and from there, flowers mysteriously into thoughts, actions, and events the numerous cultural and political dimensions of which cannot be precisely mapped. My own work assumes the reality of the process Attridge and Felski enumerate, but in Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature, I am interested less in the mechanics of that process than its implications for modernism and modernist writing. I argue that aesthetic utility forms a crucial and heretofore overlooked element of the thought-world of the modernist writers I investigate. This is evident not only because they defend it in their work but because their belief in aesthetic utility helped to predicate for them a version of hope with which they could write into a future that seemed, in many respects, increasingly ominous as the century progressed.

7.  Aesthetic Utility: Between Autonomy and Pragmatism “Poetry makes nothing happen.” This famous line from W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” puts my appeal to aesthetic utility to the test. In context, Auden’s jarring claim is softened by what follows it, the consolation that poetry nevertheless “survives / In the valley of its making” and is, finally, “[a] way of happening, a mouth.”66 In a clever gloss on the poem, Matthew Zapruder switches the natural emphases in the line, so that nothing becomes, counterintuitively, the thing that poetry makes happen: “Nothing, a mostly dormant idea that we probably don’t think much about (and if so pejoratively), starts to happen for us in the poem . . . .”67 But this imaginative reading is at least somewhat belied by Auden’s own pessimism with regard to poetry’s influence in the world. The passage that best sums up his view is found in his essay “The Public v. The Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” first published in the Partisan Review in 1939: For art is a product of history, not a cause. Unlike some other products, technical inventions for example, it does not re-enter history as

Introduction  15 an effective agent, so that the question whether art should or should not be propaganda is unreal. The case for the prosecution rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.68 To vouch for the reality of aesthetic utility, as I do in this book, is to argue the precise opposite of Auden’s view. In this book I claim not only that Auden is mistaken but that the writers I examine generally take aesthetic utility for granted, as a starting point for their work. Poetry – and not just poetry, since my argument expands to encompass the literary arts more generally – does make things happen, real things, all the time – even if, frustratingly, we can rarely pinpoint exactly what or how. That said, Auden is not alone in his resistance to acknowledging aesthetic utility. One way to contextualize this resistance is to note its connection to theories of the artwork’s isolation or separation from society or of an inherent opposition between art and society. For Theodor Adorno, the development of mass culture is antithetical to the flourishing of art, which, during the modernist period, was forced to turn away from traditional realism in order to resist and condemn the deadening onslaught of capitalism. Art, Adorno argues, becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as “socially useful,” it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it.69 In the modern period especially, Adorno believes, art exists only to indict society, which he saw as highly inimical to the creation of great art. The modernist concept of aesthetic autonomy, according to which the art object is in some sense free of the social realm, is incipient in Adorno’s thinking here. In his classic work Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger historicizes the rise of the concept of autonomy in the late-­ nineteenth century, linking it to aestheticism and to the avant-garde tradition that followed.70 Autonomy, which Bürger calls “the detachment of art as a special sphere of human activity from the nexus of the praxis of life,” formed a kind of crisis in aesthetic engagement and a significant cultural moment in nineteenth-century philosophy and literature.71 The apparent failure of art to impact society led to a withdrawal on the part of some artists from the social plane, a recursion to the worship of beauty and the defense of l’art pour l’art – art for its own sake. Such movements are chronologically and conceptually prior to the narrative of this book’s argument; indeed, their very limitedness helped

16  Introduction to provoke the determined social hope in which the authors I discuss invested. Bürger describes autonomy as a constrained (and bourgeois) “historical development,” and one with a built-in blind spot: “The category ‘autonomy’ does not permit the understanding of its referent as one that developed historically.”72 Critical axioms regarding the purity of the art object (its existence separately from its creator) or regarding the freedom of the artist to work outside and against the dictates of her culture are valuable theoretical tools because they can help us elucidate principles surrounding aesthetic meaning and the process of interpretation. But they do not, finally, absolve us from the fact that art is inevitably a product of cultural forces (as Auden noted) and equally a producer of cultural forces (as he denied), which is to say, inextricably bound up, for good or ill, with history itself. While the concept of the autonomy or freedom of the artwork is one alongside which aesthetic utility can be made to coexist only with care, contemporary studies of autonomy make space for its inclusion alongside the commitment to aesthetic utility I make in this book. They do so by qualifying its supposed existence in a kind of ahistorical space, noting its emergence as a historical phenomenon as well as a theoretical apparatus. Two examples will suffice. In Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life, Lisa Siraganian reframes autonomy as artists’ commitment to the idea “that the art object remains immune from society’s meaning” rather than from society itself.73 Autonomy connotes not the art object’s wholesale freedom from society but its freedom to mean independently of a given social interpretation – a freedom with its own social and political consequences. Autonomy thus becomes a “fascinating compromise” between writer, text, and reader, one that returns us again to the question of art’s influence on the world via the creation of a “politics out of a theory of beholding or reading.”74 In a similar vein, Andrew Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man recasts aesthetic autonomy as a means of modernist self-inquiry, a way for writers to create space for literature’s independence within a specific social framework. What Goldstone terms “relative autonomy” acknowledges the symbiosis between literature and culture but develops as a trope that allows “modernist writers to take account of, and seek to transform, the social relations of their literary production” by imaginatively emplacing visions of autonomy within art forms themselves.75 Even apart from arguments for aesthetic autonomy, the depiction of art as something fundamentally useless to society is not uncommon – and forces us to think carefully of what we mean when we talk about utility. Hannah Arendt poses these questions for us in her essay “Culture and Politics,” in which she proposes that artworks are superior to all other objects. Even after millennia they have the ability to shine for us, as they did on the day that brought

Introduction  17 them into the world. That is why they are the most worldly of all things. They are the only ones that are produced for a world supposed to outlast each mortal human being, and that therefore have no function whatsoever in the life-process of human society. Not only are they not being consumed like consumer goods, or used up like objects of use; they have to be lifted up out of this process of use and consumption altogether . . .76 The final goal of artworks, Arendt claims, is immortality; they are “imperishable from the standpoint of the political sphere and its activities,” because they have no bearing on or relation to it.77 Arendt here means immortality in figurative and not literal terms; the art object is immortal when and because it survives the death of the culture that produced it and lives on into the next one. For Arendt, the essential division between aesthetic creation and other forms of production is that art bears within it an inherent resistance to a utilitarian mindset – what Arendt calls a “suspicion of means-ends thinking.”78 This suspicion has political origins; it emanates from a distaste on the part of the ancient Greeks for the violence required in utilitarian forms of production, a distaste itself rooted in the fact that the Greeks’ “discovery of the political rested on the earnest attempt to keep violence out of the community.”79 If this distaste led to the creation and protection of a separate sphere for art, within which it could strive to attain immortality, several strands of Arendt’s argument are nonetheless worth challenging. In keeping with my commitment to aesthetic utility, I posit that she underestimates art’s immediate social relevance in favor of its longevity. We might observe, for instance, that it is not necessarily true that art objects are not “consumed like consumer goods”; do we not sometimes speak of consuming a movie, or a novel, or even a painting, in just this way? And while reading a book and eating a cheeseburger are not equivalent, both leave the consumer changed, whether mentally or physically.80 Furthermore, given Arendt’s reluctance to acknowledge the shaping of society by art in the short or long term, it is unclear why the survival to which all artworks attain should even be desirable. Of what value is immortality if – since it precludes influence – it is defanged? I believe the gap between my view and Arendt’s can be bridged somewhat by attending to her notion of utility. For Arendt, utility involves a concrete, goal-based, practical approach that is inhospitable to artistic creation. To understand “utility” in this (admittedly pervasive) sense of the term is to render it as something potentially ruinous for art and artistic flourishing. It is for this reason, I believe, that many modern-day poets and critics are as hesitant as Arendt to talk about poetry in terms of its social utility. In his book The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner argues that because the poem exists outside the world of capitalist labor and market value, “its usefulness depends on its lack of practical utility.”81

18  Introduction Poetry is useful – to the extent this can be possible on such terms – only insofar as it does not enter the messy real world of human affairs. Matthew Zapruder offers an equally paradoxical assessment. In his excellent book Why Poetry, he calls the poet’s task “usefully useless” and avers that although poetry is “vital to our survival,” it performs this vital role by evading utility as traditionally understood.82 Poetry’s value emerges in how it presents “the possibilities of language freed from utility.”83 In so doing, it “draw[s] us into a different form of attention and awareness.”84 But its effectiveness is restricted, for Zapruder, to the realm of language: the medium in which we apprehend it also delimits its impact. I think there is something admirable and protective in these reticent, careful estimations of poetry’s social effectiveness. A major reason for the critical and artistic reluctance to merge terms like “aesthetic” and “utility” – to admit, straight out, that art has its uses, and is a potent social actor – is because this would seem to sully and cheapen the purity of the artist’s task. Merely one more tool in the global economy, art would be pragmatic, commercial, potentially didactic. It would be subject to the whim of market forces – and eventually, maybe, wholly fixated on them. Interpretation, too, would suffer, constantly drawing us back into the exhausting confines of the narrow world art in fact seems intent on freeing us from. My usage of the phrase “aesthetic utility” downplays none of these very real concerns. Instead, my response is to flip “utility” on its head by asking why we must expect so little of the word. As Felski puts it, in academic circles there exists “a deep reservoir of mistrust toward the idea of use.”85 But utility can be profound and multi-faceted. Why must it be measured? Why should something have to be calculable or predictable to be effective? An irony obtains here. We wish to keep art separate from crass notions of utility. But it is the lens through which we define such terms as usefulness and utility that tells us whether the realms even need separating. As I see it, the contemporary and limited understanding of utility originates in two thought systems. One is the commodifying, mechanistic superstructure of late capitalism, which understands and values all products solely in economic terms and via cost-benefit analyses. The other is a post-Enlightenment materialist mindset prejudiced in favor of empirical data and quantifiable evidence and against mystery, indeterminacy, and the hidden life-world of the individual mind. Both these forces have combined to create an episteme in which whatever cannot easily be quantified, predicted, or apportioned into units of value, whatever does not leave a clear material trace, must be classified as useless. In contrast, I argue that resistance to the uncategorizable or ineffable requires denying most of the invisible work through which a culture actually survives and prospers. If these cultural forms of thinking have taught us what counts as utility, so that we understand the word by their lights, then

Introduction  19 to affirm aesthetic utility is to reject their lesson – an action that, in my estimation, needs repeated doing.

8.  Literary Expressions of Modernist Hope If aesthetic utility is the ground for modernist hope, can any cultural source be identified as the origin of this chain of cause and effect? At the risk of oversimplification, I would suggest that exactly insofar as modernism appears historically as a crisis of the new – a crisis of epistemological, psychical, and spiritual proportions – it occasions the need for a hope founded on aesthetic utility. The heterogeneous texts and writers I discuss imply that this feature of modernism is not limited to any one strain, chapter, or movement within it. The texts in question range over a timespan of some fifty-five years, from 1902 to 1957, covering roughly the whole of the modernist period. They were written by individuals who held a range of sexual, national, gender, racial, and ethnic identities and who produced texts in genres including the novel, film, poetry, memoir, and drama. This breadth intimates that more work can yet be done to localize iterations of modernist hope to particular sites of being and doing but also shows that hope is not entirely subordinated to any of these identities, though it is often tethered to them in fruitful ways. In the first chapter of this book, I begin by considering the lineaments of hope in two late Henry James novels, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. The chapter seeks to clarify James’s conception of the relationship of aesthetics to ethics, and relatedly, art to life, through an analysis of the heroines of these two novels, Milly Theale and Maggie Verver. I show that each of these protagonists draws from the realm of the aesthetic in order to respond to situations of extremity in their own lives. The unpredictability of aesthetic utility ensures that Milly and Maggie must each come to grips with the fact that the social power of art must be harnessed to an ethical framework in order to provide sustainable hope for the future. The same is true of James, for whom the novel must not only represent the world but imagine avenues to a better one. My second chapter seeks to prove the reality of aesthetic utility by examining a mistaken understanding of it. Proceeding from the premise that modernism is characterized by deep uncertainty, the chapter contends that D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation contains two significant responses to this uncertainty: hope and fear. But the hopefulness signaled by Griffith’s film is problematic, firstly because it presents a racist vision of society, and secondly – and relatedly – because it rests on a flawed understanding of aesthetic utility. Despite its virtuosity, Griffith’s film denies the necessary indeterminacy of art in favor of a brute didacticism and an appeal to verisimilitude. These strategies reflect Griffith’s aggressive, confident form of hope, one that is ultimately undermined

20  Introduction by the film’s own anxieties concerning the realization of the future it depicts. The book’s third chapter engages with the work of H.D., focusing especially on her autobiographical novel The Gift and her collection of long poems, Trilogy. Interpreting H.D.’s art and aesthetic philosophy alongside her spiritual practices, I show that the animating principle in H.D.’s work and thought is that of creativity. For H.D., each creative act is absolutely new but also partakes in a tradition of aesthetic communication traceable throughout history. It thus demonstrates a paradoxical singularity and connection I term identity within uniqueness. Through this mechanism, art offers its audience both continuation and change and therefore enables hope for the social future over against the warfare and violence that beset H.D. throughout her career. In Chapter 4, I read Melvin B. Tolson’s long poem Libretto for the Republic of Liberia as undergirded by a transnational and multi-ethnic politics of identification. Tolson’s Marxist-democratic vision of a future utopian society centered in Africa but extending throughout the world is rooted in his belief in what I term the recovery of democracy – the possibility of meaningful and egalitarian connection between individuals otherwise divided by class, race, or language. While Tolson stresses throughout his poem the ways in which difference is embedded into society at all levels, his poem itself works to spark confrontations between these sites of difference, including from the spheres of high and low culture, Western and African ideologies, and capitalist and socialist mores. In this manner, and with typically modernist self-referentiality, Tolson’s poem both affirms and exemplifies aesthetic utility – the “work” art performs in culture – as the vehicle that enables us to go beyond merely envisioning a future toward fashioning it. Finally, Chapter 5 argues for the presence of an unlikely and weak hope in Samuel Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame. This hope, I contend, is occasioned by art’s capacity to defer – to fill time with provisional but necessary meaning given the apparent absence of other sources of hope. The world of Beckett’s drama is structured by the impossibility of ascertaining the basic conditions of existence. Against this deficit of knowledge, art provides solace and hope in its very being; as ­future-directed aesthetic communication, its production signals a commitment both to the world Beckett lived in and the world it could become. What ties these disparate artists together, then, is that their obligation to their chosen vocations subsisted not simply for its own sake – neither for love of beauty nor out of a longing to escape – but for the sake of the cultures in which they were invested. Their art contains an ethical slant: to put it simply, they cared about other and future human lives (and where this attention to others’ lives was flawed or compromised – as in Griffith’s case – their art turned against itself). This book thus offers

Introduction  21 a window into a species of modernist writing that shares William Faulkner’s conviction, expressed in the final line of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that “[t]he poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”86

Notes 1 Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2013; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014). 2 Cuarón, Gravity. 3 The phenomenon of suicide, which can occur for many and complex reasons, qualifies but does not refute this possibility. In many cases, suicide takes place when hope for the future, while existent, is simply overwhelmed by pain in the present. For our purposes here, though, the disposition to hope needs only to be general and not absolute or universal. 4 I am thinking here of movies such as Children of Men (2006), one of the standout films of this millennium, also directed by Cuarón; John Hillcoat’s 2009 adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel The Road; Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014); and Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), among others. 5 Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6. 6 Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1975), 335; and Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 181. 7 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 116. 8 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings: 1927– 1934. Vol. 2., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 733. 9 See, for example, Astradur Eysteinsson’s authoritative The Concept of Modernism, in which he sums up the scholarship to date on modernism as having observed in its writers an “extraordinarily bleak view of modern culture and society,” one according to which “the heritage of bourgeois humanism and all the values it was taken to ensure are evidently at sea.” For Lawrence Gamache, modernism exhibits “a preoccupation with the present” precipitated by “the loss of a meaningful context derived from the past, from its forms, styles, and traditions.” More recently, in his book Modernism, Michael Levenson sketches the historical progression most commonly espoused in the literature: “In the decades after Darwin, the skeptical drift – from world to self, from object to subject of perception – suggested a risk of essential loneliness within a world that was itself absent of meaning.” See Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 30, 36; Lawrence Gamache, “Toward a Definition of ‘Modernism,’” in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. McNiven (Cranbury, NJ London: Associated University Presses, 1987), 33; and Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 93. 10 This trend has been furthered by works such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars; Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings; Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s edited collection

22  Introduction

11 12 13 14

Bad Modernisms; and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1999), 14. Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 10. “hope, n.1,” OED Online, accessed July 31, 2019, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88370?rskey=b7Gzye&result=1. Terry Eagleton argues in his book Hope without Optimism that there is in fact no characteristic feeling, symptom, sensation or behaviour pattern associated with hope, as there is with rage or horror. This is because it is a species of desire; and though desire is an experience, it is associated with no definitive sensation or affect. One can hope without feeling anything in particular.

Hope is, however, usually accompanied by feeling, and its opposition to fear, which is definitely an affect, has helped to unmoor it somewhat, at least in the popular imagination, from its traditional, orthodox seat as one of the Christian virtues (an unshakeable confidence in God’s providence and beneficence). As I use the term, hope is an affective disposition, a posture toward the future that, while it is not inherently an affect, is affectively sticky – a zone of being to which certain kinds of feelings tend to attach themselves. See Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2015), 55. 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 635, A805/B833. 16 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 638, A809/B837. 17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), 28. 18 Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 32. 19 Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosophical Writings, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Continuum, 2002), 129. 20 Schopenhauer, Philosophical Writings, 36, 27, emphasis his. 21 See Mark Bernier, The Task of Hope in Kierkegaard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 22 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 63. 23 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Vol. 3, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 1375. 24 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 7. 25 Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1, 67. 26 Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1, 67. 27 Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Vol. 3, 1176. 28 Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Vol. 3, 1180. 29 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 109. 30 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York; London: Continuum, 1973), 320. 31 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 345. 32 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103. 33 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 3.

Introduction  23 34 Eagleton, Hope without Optimism, 114. 35 Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 28–29. 36 Here I follow Rita Felski, who proffers a similar distinction regarding the word “use” and its implications for aesthetics in her book Uses of Literature: “Use” is not always strategic or purposeful, manipulative or grasping; it does not have to involve the sway of instrumental rationality or a willful blindness to complex form. I venture that aesthetic value is inseparable from use, but also that our engagements with texts are extraordinarily varied, complex, and often unpredictable in kind. See Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 7–8. 37 Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), Book X, 595a–608b/265–279. 38 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997), 10. 39 Aristotle, Poetics, 17–18. 40 Horace, The Art of Poetry, in Horace’s Complete Works, trans. John Marshall, Christopher Smart, and Earl of Roscommon (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1953), 381, 143. 41 Sir Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” in Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert Kimbrough (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 112. 42 Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” 116. 43 Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” 136. 4 4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Alasdair D.F. Macrae (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), 207. 45 Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 206, 219–220. 46 Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 220–221. 47 Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 225. 48 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), §10, 220/65. 49 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §9, 219/63. 50 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §59, 353–354/228–229. 51 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 1, ed. and trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, doi: 10.1093/ actrade/9780198244981.book.1), 55, emphasis his. 52 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, 31. 53 Schopenhauer, Philosophical Writings, 261. 54 Schopenhauer, Philosophical Writings, 159. 55 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Clifton P. Fadiman (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995), 89. 56 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 104, emphasis his. 57 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 79. 58 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Marianne Cowan (­Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1957), 116–117, 4. 59 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 9, 41. 60 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 45. 61 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 19. 62 Felski, Uses of Literature, 4–7.

24  Introduction 63 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 31. 64 Alan Singer, Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 16, 51. 65 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 4, emphasis his. 66 W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” in Selected Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1959), 53. 67 Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 207. 68 W.H. Auden, “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London; Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1977), 393. 69 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 225–226. 70 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 27. 71 Bürger, Avant-Garde, 36. 72 Bürger, Avant-Garde, 46. 73 Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 17, emphasis hers. 74 Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work, 20, 6. 75 Andrew Goldstone, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22, 4. 76 Hannah Arendt, “Culture and Politics,” in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, trans. Martin Klebes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 190. 77 Arendt, “Culture and Politics,” 196. 78 Arendt, “Culture and Politics,” 194. 79 Arendt, “Culture and Politics,” 191–193. 80 See on this point Attridge, who argues that literature’s singularity arises from the absolute newness of the transformative processes at work whenever we encounter art. See Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 24–25, 91–92. 81 Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 52. 82 Zapruder, Why Poetry, 208, 220. Reflecting on his path to becoming a poet, Zapruder seems to contradict his own story about literature’s social inutility when he prefaces a quotation from John Ashbery’s poem “The One Thing That Can Save America” by calling it “the poem that changed my mind about Ashbery, and therefore about contemporary American poetry, and I guess therefore my life.” As Louis Menand observes in his New Yorker review of the books of Zapruder and two other contemporary poets, these poets’ resistance to admitting the power of poetry to change lives is ironic given that their own lives were all materially and fundamentally changed by poetry. Menand closes his review with a concise description of the way aesthetic utility actually functions in the world: these poets, he writes, all tell pretty much the identical story about themselves. One day, almost inadvertently, they read a poem, and suddenly they knew that they had to become writers. They did, and it changed their lives. Later, they all wrote books about poetry. I read those books, and it changed my life. You read this piece about those books. Maybe it will change your life. If it does, the change will be very, very tiny, but most change comes in increments. Don’t expect too much out of any one thing. For although the world is hard, words matter. Rock beats scissors. It may take a while, but paper beats rock. At least we hope so.

Introduction  25 See Zapruder, Why Poetry, 77, and Louis Menand, “Can Poetry Change Your Life?,” The New Yorker, July 24, 2017, www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/07/31/can-poetry-change-your-life. 83 Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry, 14. 84 Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry, xvi. 85 Felski, Uses of Literature, 7. 86 William Faulkner, “William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,” Southern Cultures 12, no. 1 (2006): 71.

1 The Image in the Mirror Aesthetic Utility in Late James

Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with arrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention.1 –Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” Till the world is an unpeopled void there will be an image in the mirror. What need more immediately concern us, therefore, is the care of seeing that the image shall continue various and vivid. 2 –Henry James, “The Future of the Novel”

1.  The Novel’s Task: James and Bersani To read the endings of Henry James novels, especially the endings of the last novels he wrote, is to stand dizzily on a precipice, caught up in and often perplexed by all that has come before, alive and uncertain as to what will come next. One feels, inevitably, the jolt of returning from James’s carefully constructed narrative worlds to our own. While the shock of that return may help us to intuit, experientially, our own sense of the relationship between art and life, a thorough investigation of how James leads us both into and out of character and plot in his late novels The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904) will provide us with a deeper awareness of James’s own sophisticated understanding of that relation. The conclusion of Leo Bersani’s influential essay “The Jamesian Lie” provides a useful entry point into a discussion of how, for James, text and world intersect. Bersani ends his essay by critiquing what he calls the “theological bias” of the James novel, its propensity to put art above life, to worship design in a manner that purports to reach toward a realm beyond criticism.3 “[T]he necessary defect of James’s compositional ethic,” Bersani writes, is the very coherence and unity into which those analogies between his fictional world and the process of creating it allow him to

The Image in the Mirror  27 organize life. . . . The accidental, the inessential, and the incoherent are eliminated, and the “story” of human life finally appears secondary to the inspiration at its source.4 However, in the first of my two epigraphs, James himself resists Bersani’s observation, claiming in his famous essay “The Art of Fiction” that fiction should seek not to redeem life but only to capture it. Accuracy of representation is the only criterion of the good novel. This is a thesis James repeats throughout the essay: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”5 Does James, then, at the close of his career, simply fail to abide by his own aesthetic principles? Can we square his declaration that in essence, “the novel is history,” that it is “a direct impression of life,” with Bersani’s suggestion that James intends for the novel to surpass and defeat life?6 It helps to realize, contra Bersani, that James conceives of the novel less as salve for life than as spur to life. For Bersani, “James’s work is sustained by the hope, finally realized in the last lines of The Golden Bowl, that the novel itself can be discarded.”7 But in the quotation that comprises this chapter’s second epigraph, James supposes the novel to be – in a significant metaphor – “an image in the mirror” and, so far from imagining its eventual discarding, expresses his determination that this image “continue various and vivid.”8 James’s habit of looking toward the future, on weighing not only what the novel is but what it will do and be, reveals his uncommon and under-discussed interest in how the novel (and, in a broader sense, all art) can help form the future of the culture to which it is directed. James is no utopian, but he is committed throughout his career to the notion that the writer’s responsibility is not only to art but to the future of society. In a letter written near the end of his life, with the chaos of World War I as backdrop, James insists on the importance of continuing to work at his fiction: And yet I keep at it – or mean to; for . . . I hold that we can still . . . make a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss.9 The inkpot as aid in the making of civilization: this idea, so central to James’s philosophy as a writer, commits him to what I have termed aesthetic utility. It flows from his assertion in the preface to The Golden Bowl that “art is nothing if not exemplary.” Fiction, writes James, sheds needed light on what he calls “the religion of doing,” the fact that “among our innumerable acts, are no arbitrary, no senseless separations,” and because of this our literary deeds enjoy this marked advantage over many of our acts, that, though they go forth into the world and stray even in

28  The Image in the Mirror the desert, they don’t to the same extent lose themselves; their attachment and reference to us, however strained, needn’t necessarily lapse . . . .10 Here James notably considers the artist’s work – the “literary deed” – as merely one type of social action humans perform (though one with a special status). Rather than setting art against life, he integrates the former within the latter and thereby designates writing as an irreducibly cultural and moral act. For Daniel O’Hara, this instinct in James denotes his participation in what O’Hara terms “the writer’s faith,” a conviction of the social effects of writing that stretches back from James through Whitman to Wordsworth.11 A critical tension still inheres here. If James can successfully resist Bersani’s charge, he does so through the fidelity of his narrative art to experience – its mimesis, to use the term in the broadest, Auerbachian sense. Great art, to return to our second epigraph, is great insofar as it represents “life without rearrangement.” But how then can this reproduction of experience be “exemplary”? Mere accuracy of description would seem to tell us what life is, not how it should be lived. This conundrum gets to the crux of James’s understanding of his vocation and its relationship to the world, and the goal of this chapter is to address this specific question more carefully than has yet been done.

2.  James’s Moral Aesthetic We must begin with the fact that – as many critics have noted – James is a thorough moralist, in the best sense of that word. In his essay “Charles Baudelaire,” James writes, “To deny the relevancy of subject-matter and the importance of the moral quality of a work of art strikes us as, in two words, very childish.” These two aspects of any work increase in direct proportion to one another: “The more a work of art feels [morality] at its source, the richer it is; the less it feels it, the poorer it is.”12 For this reason, as James asserts elsewhere, “the quality of the mind of the producer” of an artwork shows us that “the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together.”13 Thus, as Laurence Holland shows in his magisterial study The Expense of Vision, morality in James is allied to form; they develop together and derive their shared force from each other.14 Over the decades, scholars have worked to explicate this relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic realms in James. Angel Medina observes ties between literature and moral philosophy in his reading of The Golden Bowl, arguing that both are tasked, fundamentally, with “elucidation of existence,” and that each in this way helps give rise to the other.15 For Martha Nussbaum, the same novel allows us to see how the Ververs’ developing aesthetic intuitions hone their moral capacity to deal with

The Image in the Mirror  29 the “contingent necessity” of life in a fractured world. Morality draws on art because it requires “respond[ing] with the vibrant sympathy of a vividly active imagination.”16 Writing elsewhere about The Golden Bowl, she concludes that “[m]oral knowledge .  .  . is not simply intellectual grasp of propositions; it is not even simply intellectual grasp of particular facts; it is perception,” which implies that for James “our whole moral task . . . is to make a fine artistic creation.”17 Following and revising Nussbaum, Daniel Brudney argues that Maggie Verver’s artistry, though it includes pretense and subterfuge, is fundamentally virtuous, because it is defined by tact.18 These often ingenious conceptions of morality in terms of aesthetics – which have continued both within and outside the context of Henry James scholarship19 – are fascinating, though I don’t have space here to deal with them at any great length. For our purposes, James’s stated understanding of how these spheres interrelate must take precedence. It’s worth reiterating that in his essays and prefaces James avoids any complete conflation of the two, and so, the sophistication of the work of Nussbaum and others on James notwithstanding, I will make the initial assumption that they are, in important ways, separate. I will pause here briefly to set out the stakes of my larger argument. To outline the moral framework that emerges from James’s aesthetic is crucial because the interplay between the two reveals the source and character of Jamesian aesthetic utility – the notion that art produces positive effects, both traceable and not, in the cultural landscape into which it enters. And this aesthetic utility, in turn, forms the basis for the modernist hope discernable in his novels. My argument in this chapter, in summary, is that James manifests the social and potentially moral role of art through the lives and actions of the heroines in his late novels The Wings of the Dove (hereafter Wings) and The Golden Bowl. In the way these heroines (Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, respectively) engage with questions of art, enter the terrain of the aesthetic, and become modernist artifacts and makers in their own right, they model a sophisticated awareness of aesthetic utility, of the power of art to shape others’ lives. But precisely because life cannot be reduced to art, nor the human being to an aesthetic object, these novels demonstrate that it is by yoking the aesthetic to principles beyond it that art can become a reservoir from which to draw in order to face an uncertain future. Indeed, the shifting relation between anxiety and hope on the part of James’s central characters at the conclusion of his late novels is a function not merely of their mastery of the aesthetic realm but of their awareness that its power to shape the future can be either positive or negative, depending on the ethical apparatus that augments it. In any discussion of hope, the future is always what is at stake and must therefore remain in view. Because of this, two particular tactics will inform my readings of these novels. One is to pay particular attention

30  The Image in the Mirror to what might be termed “scenes of possibility” – textual moments in which characters are presented with multiple possible paths from which to choose. Even if these paths are eventually closed off or shown to be mirages, the decisions characters make when in situations that highlight or test their agency can reveal a great deal about their perspective toward the future – and what, in general, the future seems to offer in the fictional worlds they inhabit. A second strategy I will follow in this chapter is to look closely at the endings of the novels. Since these reach as near to the future as any narrative contemporaneous with its writer can, they may help us gauge the overall attitude of that narrative to the future of the world it describes.

3.  Dehumanizing Economies Uncovering the presence of hope in James’s fiction requires outlining the cultural predicament to which his work responds. Broadly speaking, these novels fixate on a single recurrent phenomenon: the reduction of other humans to something less than human, typically in pursuit of a self-centered end. James’s central characters are often aware of this reduction – which impoverishes and falsifies experience – even as they (sometimes reluctantly) engage in it. This single societal error plays out in two distinct ways: in Wings the reduction of the human remains a chiefly economic problem, whereas in The Golden Bowl the same problem, while its origins are also economic, is transmuted into the realm of the aesthetic. Many critics have read Wings as a commentary on a dehumanizing system of economic exchange. For Anna Despotopoulou, it depicts a society in which “the marketplace is the generator of a new code of interaction.”20 William Stowe agrees: Wings is about a new world, a new market, a new system of exchange in which money has become the universal signifier, and other traditional tokens of signification – words, figures, works of art, religious symbols and practices, conventions of courtesy, “standards of ­decency” – have been set adrift. 21 Michael Trask suggests that this theme pervades not only Wings but all James’s late fiction, which “responds to a cultural context imagined at every level to be in danger of groundlessness.”22 The image of ­groundlessness – of being at sea or adrift – comes, in fact, directly from Lord Mark, one of the many embattled social strivers in Wings, who wonders aloud to Milly Theale whether it was a set at all, or wasn’t it, and were there not really no such things as sets in the place any more? – was there anything but the groping

The Image in the Mirror  31 and pawing, that of the vague billows of some great greasy sea in mid-Channel, of masses of bewildered people trying to “get” they didn’t know what or where?23 The chief figure for this social unrest, which forces people to treat other individuals as no more than means to a desired end, is, of course, Kate Croy, the high-minded but impoverished young woman whose actions dominate the early part of Wings. James begins the novel by carefully establishing how disposition and environment combine to leave Kate imprisoned by the social codes to which she must adhere. The disgrace her father has brought on the Croy name leaves Kate without real hope for advancement, except by the kind of marriage of convenience she cannot bear to accept. Kate’s separation from the stratum of society she longs to reach is written into the very streets of London; the “tall rich heavy house” of her Aunt Maud, herself an aspirant to London’s upper class, has, throughout her childhood, always struck Kate as further off and more occasional than anything else in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved .  .  . [it] seemed, by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight, discouraging vistas, perfect telescopes of streets, and which kept lengthening and straightening, whereas almost everything else in life was either at the worst roundabout Cromwell Road or at the furthest in the nearer parts of Kensington Gardens. (WD, 34) The long, telescoping roads that Kate must travel to reach her Aunt’s mansion seem to lengthen as she walks them. The path out of the circular and mazelike streets surrounding her childhood home is at once straightforward to take and impossible to complete, like a reminder of a life she cannot have. Thus, for Kate, the events conspiring to constrain her place in the world “complet[e] the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of fate” (WD, 55). Hope, of course, must be absent precisely to the extent to which fate is present. But Kate’s acute and determined mind instinctively refuses to succumb to fatalism. She knows that, outside of an unhappy marriage, her only chance for success is to embrace the consumerist system in which she is enmeshed and, by adapting its rules to her purposes, to outwit her foes. Kate’s success in her scheme – her manipulation, with her lover Merton Densher as her accomplice, of the heiress Milly Theale in order to inherit her fortune – is the central “crime” of Wings. In its reduction of a human individual to a pawn in a financial chess game, this plan stands as a metonym for the whole culture’s failings. And the same kinds of reductions are the central concern of The Golden Bowl, a novel that, as Jonathan Freedman has put it, “might be read as a trenchant allegory of life in a disenchanted, economically driven world.”24 The marriages

32  The Image in the Mirror of both Charlotte and the Prince, the star-crossed lovers, are symptomatic of this disenchantment, since in both cases “financial convenience, rather than the moral imperative . . . dictates the continuing acceptance of the yoke” that binds them to their respective spouses. 25 The strong sense in Wings of fatalism attached to finances, of individual worth as defined largely in terms of monetary worth, also imbues The Golden Bowl. The Prince Amerigo, poor in money but rich in title, senses that he is viewed by his father-in-law primarily as a financial investment whose “amount” must continually be “made sure”: He was being thus, in renewed instalments, perpetually paid in; he already reposed in the bank as a value . . . . The net result of all of which, moreover, was that the young man had no wish to see his value diminish. 26 If Amerigo seems perfectly comfortable with being surveyed in so mercantile a manner, it is because he understands well the world he lives in, a world marked by an essential lack of equity, governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantee and a high spirit for its chances.(GB, 244) In the face of such caprice, Amerigo reflects, self-interest is the only sensible credo: “it’s always a question,” he says to Charlotte early in the novel, “of doing the best for one’s self one can – without injury to others” (GB, 44).

4.  Anxious Heroines in Wings and The Golden Bowl Having set out the wider cultural epidemic James wants to address, we now turn to consider the attitudes of the heroines of Wings and of The Golden Bowl to this state of affairs. These women have much in common: both are intuitive and perceptive; both are often underestimated by those around them but rely on reserves of hidden strength; and both are, of course, betrayed by their husbands. But I want to begin by assessing their consciousness of, and attitudes toward, the social climate they inhabit. Critics including Gustavo Guerra and Hilary Margo Schor have commented on the extent to which Henry James embeds uncertainty into his writing. 27 As I argued in the introduction, both as affect and as epistemological stance, this uncertainty is endemic to modernism itself, and that it is produced formally and thematically in James’s novels indicates his position as inaugurator of the tradition. In its layered, syntactically

The Image in the Mirror  33 complex formulation – the meaning of each clause subtly augmented by the succeeding one – the James sentence is designed to provoke uncertainty in the reader; as it qualifies the sentence of which it is part, each next clause models the way the present extends into the future, continuously reshaping what is already present. This formal creation of unknowingness extends to James’s characters, enmeshed in complex social entanglements and repeatedly correcting each other’s sentences using endless pronouns with indeterminate referents. They must constantly explain themselves to each other, offering the reader what Trask calls a “relentlessly anticipatory” picture of the self. 28 Milly Theale and Maggie Verver emblematize this anticipatory uncertainty. Both are, in a word, anxious and, as such, represent James’s consciousness of the modernist predicament, the absence of familiar foundations. Milly’s concern about the future is repeatedly evident in the first part of Wings. Explaining her travel plans to Densher, Milly sums up her attitude toward the future: “I’m saving things up. I’ve enjoyed so what you speak of . . . that I’m watching over its future, that I can’t help being anxious and careful” (WD, 231). Not to seem anxious – not to give off “glimpses of the felt contrast between her fortune and her fear” – is one of Milly’s deep, if unstated, aims, but Kate Croy sees through the façade to the “avalanche Milly lived so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths” (WD, 263). Critics have generally understated the extent to which anxiety besets Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl. Not merely alongside, but perhaps in front of, Maggie’s oft-noted “courage” and “imaginative power” as shaper of her world, we must set her deep worry about the effects of her actions. 29 Maggie sees her father pursued by Mrs. Rance, a suitor interested in his wealth, and this triggers, James tells us, “one of [her] anxieties,” implying that she feels several (GB, 113). Her picture of herself, delivered to her father soon afterward, coincides with this: “I live in terror,” she insists. “I’m a small creeping thing” (GB, 134). This strikingly Kafkaesque image of Maggie as an insect hardly aligns with the traditional understanding of her as an artist par excellence, carefully manipulating her future. But her trepidation does not dissipate as she begins her machinations. The possibility that the “equilibrium” she has achieved with her husband might be upset by a mere word or two brings “her heart into her mouth” in “conscious fear” (GB, 310). This state of apprehension becomes a constant sensation for her in the novel’s final chapters: “‘I’ve nothing but my perpetual anxiety,’” she confesses to Mrs. Assingham (GB, 379). All she wants, she says, is “not to be afraid,” but even as she sets in motion the events that will consign her rival, Charlotte, to life in America, she “turn[s] over with anxiety the different ways” things might turn out (GB, 386, 463). Anxiety, I am arguing, is a natural response to not knowing, an epistemological status that fairly defines many of James’s protagonists (as Ruth

34  The Image in the Mirror Bernard Yeazell and Jonathan Freedman, among others, have demonstrated).30 The challenge for both Milly and Maggie is to transform this anxiety into something personally and socially productive. These protagonists both, in different ways, embark on what might be called affective projects designed to circumvent and reshape uncertainty. As their knowledge of themselves, their futures, and their worlds increases, Milly and Maggie can develop emotionally in one of only two directions: toward hope (if they discover positive things) or toward despair (if they discover negative things). In step with them, and by noting their successes and failures, the reader can intuit how we might frame these two divergent dispositions as warranted or needed in our own world. Milly and Maggie both draw from and rely on the world of art in their efforts to reshape anxiety into hope. It is because of this fact that their projects offer models of the reality, and the limitations, of aesthetic utility. But they differ greatly in the precise nature of their predicaments as well as in how they use the aesthetic realm to address them. Being so near death, Milly is (somewhat paradoxically) less anxious; starkly put, she has less of a future to imagine, and her fate is in some sense foreknown. This tragic fact, though, enables her to take on a strategy that Maggie resists; Milly takes on a more passive role, that of modernist artifact. She models her life on an artwork, but at the same time, she recognizes the need for a level of ethical reality beyond the aesthetic. Maggie, on the other hand, chooses a more active course, taking the position of modernist maker. She is creative, not merely imitative – a “superior artist” who uses language to craft “the most harmonious and inclusive design her world can sustain.”31 For this reason, Maggie bears greater responsibility for her choices and has more cause for anxiety about the future.32 In the following sections, I will examine, in turn, the choices of each of these protagonists in order to clarify the above distinctions and to show how James uses his heroines to set art within, and not against, the life of the culture it reflects and directs.

5.  Life as Art in The Wings of the Dove The final line of Wings is Kate Croy’s cry: “We shall never be again as we were!” (WD, 403). This sentence insists not only on an irretrievable past but on an impossible future, precisely by driving a wedge between them. As such, while on first glance it seems altogether devoid of hope, the statement may in fact express a countervailing optimism outside Kate’s own intentions. If past versions of the self cannot be recovered, change of some kind is imperative. Kate’s despair in this moment is occasioned by her recognition of a loss of innocence – the innocence that characterized her relationship with Densher before it was compromised by their shared plot to use Densher to gain Milly Theale’s money. Clearly, a certain hope accompanied that early innocence, namely Kate and Densher’s

The Image in the Mirror  35 hope for a long life of shared wealth and happiness. That particular hope has been extinguished. But this does not mean that hope as a concept has been removed from the frame of the novel. Hope subsists even at the end of Wings because the tension in Wings is less between hope and its absence (or, put differently, agency and fate) than between two types of hope – one that operates entirely within the logic of the economic realm and reduces everything outside the self to possible means to a desired end, and another (embodied by Milly) that, inspired by aesthetic beauty, seeks a way of being in the world that replicates that beauty through actions performed for others and through receptivity to the future. The former kind of hope compels Kate, not least because, as she well knows, commodity culture exerts a strong pull on her: “She saw as she had never seen how material things spoke to her. . . . She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources” (WD, 35–36). At the same time, Kate knows that she is ensnared in a social situation dominated by the rule of capitalist exchange. As Lord Mark explains Milly, “Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing” (WD, 106). It is Milly’s enormous potential value within this system that makes her so enticing to those around her, a fact Kate admits to her in a moment of candor: “‘We’re of no use to you – it’s decent to tell you. You’d be of use to us, but that’s a different matter. My honest advice to you would be . . . to drop us while you can’” (WD, 170). The novel’s repeated measuring of time in terms of money indicates that even the future has been absorbed into the economic domain, that the potential is always already financial. Lord Mark, for example, is a character who, while he “point[s] to nothing,” having no money and no real aim besides advancement, is valued solely on the basis of his potential to accrue capital and connections: “[h]is value was his future” (WD, 115). Far removed from wealth in every other respect, Merton Densher assesses Kate’s value, and therefore his own, using the same terms: he is struck, even while becoming a pawn in Kate’s scheme, by “the sense of his good fortune and her variety, of the future she promised, the interest she supplied” – a future to which, as he declares, he has a “subscription.” It is their “wealth of life” that gives Kate and Merton hope: though lacking money, they are rich in time, which might, cleverly used, give them access to the other sort of wealth, the sort that – in this world – makes time worth having (WD, 219–220). Milly Theale’s situation is diametrically opposed to Kate and Merton’s; she has nearly infinite wealth, but little time. But early in the novel, even Milly’s outlook is pervaded by her social climate: she too “ha[s] her rent to pay, her rent for her future” (WD, 155). Wings, then, is a narrative that depicts the search for a means of conceiving the possible outside the reach of the economic. The novel’s consumerist landscape extends to but does not completely envelop Milly Theale, in whom a version of Jamesian hope finds expression.

36  The Image in the Mirror Milly’s unnamed illness, which hangs over her almost from the time she is introduced, links her to the prospect of imminent death, and as such, would seem to remove any earthly grounds for hope. These are the unspoken but dire circumstances in the background during the moment when Susan Stringham comes upon Milly “seated at her ease” at the edge of a mountain precipice, surveying the world spread out before her (WD, 87). As many readers have noted, this passage parallels the temptation of Christ by Satan. 33 But what has remained unobserved is that the parallel is an inverse one. For while Christ resists temptation by renouncing the kingdoms of this world in favor of a higher purpose, Milly’s attitude is not one of renunciation: though “[s]he was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them” (WD, 87). 34 In fact, by the dictates of the reductionist marketplace into which Milly is soon to be fully immersed, what might tempt Milly in this moment is to renounce, not the world but her own life, since the brute fact (which she senses already) that her illness has denied her a future should imply the absence of material (or financial) hope and with it the will to continue living. Milly’s companion Susan fears as much. On seeing Milly sitting at the edge of the precipice, she imagines “the possibility of a latent ­intention – however wild the idea – in such a posture; of some betrayed accordance of Milly’s caprice with a horrible hidden obsession” (WD, 87). But Milly is not pondering suicide as she sits meditating on the precipice. The task with which she is engaged is that of devising a form of hope consonant with her situation – one that must necessarily exist outside the realm of the marketplace, according to which, as we have seen, what little time she has left can only be interpreted in nakedly economic terms. Contemplating both what she has and what she cannot have, the gap between her actual and potential self, she rejects suicide, “[knowing] herself unmistakeably reserved for some more complicated passage,” and achieves, in a moment of epiphany, an awareness of how to approach such a passage.35 Her method involves a defiant embrace of life in all its chaotic, if finite, potentiality. As Susan Stringham comes to realize, the future wasn’t to exist for her princess in the form of any sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn’t be for her a question of a flying leap and therefore of a quick escape. It would be a question of taking full in the face the whole assault of life, to the general muster of which indeed her face might have been directly presented as she sat there on her rock. (WD, 88) James offers us nothing definite here about just what Milly’s change of heart entails, but it takes the shape, at this initial stage, of something

The Image in the Mirror  37 both passive and affirmative. Milly deigns to “tak[e] full in the face the whole assault of life” but wears this martyr-like role not with resignation or stoicism but their opposite. Standing near Milly, Mrs. Stringham is conscious of having “beneath her feet a mine of something precious” – but not, as James takes pains to make clear, precious in economic terms: “She wasn’t thinking, either, of Milly’s gold” (WD, 88). Milly has allied herself to a set of motivations entirely outside the financial realm. It is because she affirms, joyfully and with vigor, the short amount of time left to her on earth, and especially because she performs this joy for others, that Milly becomes a model for a new ethic, one awakened and enlivened by, but not finally dependent on, aesthetic beauty. This may seem rather vague as yet. What, precisely, has been Milly inspired by, and what has she been inspired to? Sitting on the heights, at the edge of the cliff, Milly stares out at “a view of great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous” (WD, 87, emphasis mine). Aesthetic beauty, at least in part, has sparked her new enthusiasm for life. As Wings progresses, Milly develops and refines a newfound conception of social performativity as rooted in aesthetics rather than economics. In this sense, she becomes a kind of art object, but with the crucial distinction that, because she is living, she can act in the world in a way a conventional artwork cannot. Nowhere is Milly more obviously linked to art than in the much-­ discussed scene in which she is brought to tears after seeing a portrait of the Bronzino at Matcham. Effectively, the scene is one in which a portrait inspects a portrait, or art examines art – not only because of Milly’s conscious self-fashioning, but because she too is an artistic creation, a character in a novel. For Doran Larson, this scene foregrounds a trope in the novel wherein Milly is “seen as and sees the world in terms of portraiture,” while for Kenneth Reinhard she “functions as a kind of painting.”36 Reading this process somewhat more negatively, Anna Despotopolou contends that at Matcham “Milly becomes something other than herself; her exterior becomes the definition of her essence.”37 The novel itself explicitly hypothesizes a connection between Milly and the Bronzino; Lady Aldershaw conflates the two, staring at Milly “quite as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly” (WD, 139). But James does not wish to portray Milly as simply one artwork among many. Essential to the whole point of the novel is the manner in which Milly surpasses the aesthetic realm from which she molds her new persona. To understand how and why she does so, we must consider the painting and her reaction to it. She sees, through tears, the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high,

38  The Image in the Mirror that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question was a very great personage – only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. (WD, 137) What Milly observes here is not merely beauty but finitude. She reads in the painting an index of the fraught relationship between art and temporality. The woman is “handsome” and even resembles her, but her hair has “fad[ed] with time”; she expresses solemnity, not joy, and she is “dead, dead, dead.” As Kristin Boyce asserts, “what Milly sees when she looks at the portrait is death.”38 Milly’s immediate statement after seeing the painting – “I shall never be better than this” – is not a comparison to the Bronzino, as Lord Mark mistakenly thinks, but a rueful comment on her own temporal situatedness. The “this” she refers to is not the painting but herself. She makes this clear in her attempt to further explain: “I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again” (WD, 137). The inescapable temporality of beauty, evidenced by the faded Bronzino, puts Milly in mind of the fact that her own life, while filled with beautiful moments, is itself quickly passing, and may have already reached its apex. Milly’s resolve throughout the rest of the novel is to manifest as fully as possible the differences between herself and the Bronzino and so to affirm life rather than death. One notable contrast between them is affective: where the Bronzino is “unaccompanied by a joy,” Milly is characterized throughout the rest of Wings by her near-constant good cheer. Her will to hope, as it might be called, is a determined effort to assuage and defeat her anxiety. She is encouraged in this task by her doctor, the enigmatic Sir Luke Strett, who promises her that “the end of everything is far off” and that “the world’s before [her]” (WD, 255, 257). Milly’s radiant sense of joy leaves an impression on her social circle. By the time Milly hosts her dinner party in Venice, she has cultivated a persona so peerless as to leave even Kate in the shade, as Densher admits to himself: “She was acquitting herself to-night as hostess .  .  . under some supreme idea, an inspiration which was half her nerves and half an inevitable harmony” – an inspiration in the light of which Kate is “practically superseded” (WD, 302–303). In this sentence James deftly turns our attention both to Milly’s anxiety about the future – here, her “nerves” – and to the “inevitable harmony” that quells them, the manner of high aesthetic purpose that causes her bearing to be one of beauty. These characteristics, even as they compete within her, are themselves produced by what James ambiguously terms “some supreme idea.” This idea, I am arguing, is the incorporation of art into an ethical framework that molds its aesthetic utility – its effect on social reality. Thus the “inevitable harmony” guiding Milly’s persona also directs her actions, which are repeatedly other-directed. Everywhere in the novel she follows

The Image in the Mirror  39 the mantra she tells Susan: “One lives for others” (WD, 251). The same idea, though “a truth she didn’t utter,” is “folded finely up in her talk” with Densher: “I’m well for you – that’s all you have to do with or need trouble about” (WD, 229). Others’ descriptions of Milly follow the same track, astonished at a life lived so outside the economic imperative: “She’s really doing it for you”; and later, “She’s doing it for him” (WD, 237, 305). Thus Milly, while spurred to powerful realizations by aesthetic beauty, does not embody art uncritically but performs this calling to represent beauty in concert with ethical principles that, when acted upon, themselves aid in “harmonizing” her self-presentation. Milly sees that the aesthetic life and the ethical life can be linked precisely by aesthetic utility – the impact of art on the lives of those who encounter it. But what Milly has also realized is that art alone, since it cannot defeat time, provides no substantive practical ethics. Writing about The Golden Bowl, Leo Bersani identifies a “religion of art” in James premised on the axiom that “the observation of forms is sufficient to produce a conversion of being.”39 In one respect, one could say the same about Wings, since nothing else than “observing the form” of the Bronzino leads Milly to a life-changing realization. However, that realization, which neatly undercuts the action that led to it, is precisely that mere observation is not enough – that art, if it is not enacted in the world and accompanied by moral considerations that originate beyond it, has no reliable or lasting impact on its witnesses. Milly’s life becomes one of profound, but paradoxical, aesthetic utility, since it is through the very richness of art that Milly comes to understand its and her own insubstantiality, and with it the incapacity of art to provide a standard for living. In demarcating the complex interplay between the aesthetic and social worlds, James thus resists pure aestheticism while simultaneously affirming the myriad ways in which art can inform life. Milly, inhabiting a role inspired by beauty and tied to an ethic of altruism, symbolizes such aesthetic utility both in her life and in the manner of her death, and for this reason, she is the moral center of Wings. Where early in the novel she, like the other characters, lacks a firm foothold or sense of purpose, “really not having had from the beginning anything firm” to stand on, as she progresses she learns to establish for herself an “approach to the taste of orderly living” (WD, 146). Merton Densher, through whose consciousness the reader intuits many of the novel’s important scenes, is the chief recipient of the lesson Milly imparts. Throughout Wings he casts about for an ethical foundation akin to the one Milly establishes. Often we see his search for the relation between beauty and goodness, his instinctive and repeated overlapping of the aesthetic and moral realms: consider his reaction to the décor in Maud Lowder’s home – “Never, he felt sure, had he seen so many things so unanimously ugly – operatively, ominously so cruel”; his characterization of Lord Mark’s solicitation of Milly on her deathbed as

40  The Image in the Mirror both “sharp, striking, ugly” and as “evil”; or, again, his description of Mrs. Condrip’s furnishings as “ugly almost to the point of the sinister” (WD, 63, 328, 381). Milly’s subscription to “the taste of orderly living,” with its own aesthetic overtones, is the elusive ethical stance for which Densher unconsciously yearns. What Milly teaches him through her actions and her death is the need to reach beyond form into action: to nurture, through an “eagerness shamelessly human,” a willingness to see others as ends in themselves and to sincerely desire their happiness (WD, 115). Shortly before Milly’s death, Densher begins to recognize this, in a moment that may inaugurate his own moral transformation. Reflecting on the actions of those in Milly’s circle – himself included – he perceives them accurately, as governed by a kind of expensive vagueness made up of smiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements, all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as he now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct interest of every one’s good manner, every one’s pity, every one’s really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the cliché went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to reflect it. “The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind –!” our young man had more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the rest of the proposition drop . . .. (WD, 347) Densher’s failure to complete the sentence, in depriving it of its verb, perfectly dramatizes the chief flaw of a culture that prizes outward form: the inability or unwillingness to translate sentiment into action. The “mere aesthetic instinct” of this social class results in a “conspiracy of silence,” a veneer safeguarding the truth that, by denying any one person culpability, indicts them all. In perceiving herself as a kind of living artwork, in embracing the reality of “the great smudge of mortality across the picture,” Milly transcends this imprisoning and lifeless aesthetic. It is for this reason that Kate Croy’s final exclamation – “We shall never again be as we were!” – while not hopeful from her own point of view, does register a sense of hope that the limiting social environs in which James’s characters strive can be transformed by the aesthetic utility Milly Theale symbolizes (WD, 403). The plot of the ending, too, makes this manifest: in bequeathing Densher part of her fortune, Milly forgives him, and Densher in turn rejects the reductive economic logic of his culture by averring that he will not marry Kate unless she agrees not to accept Milly’s money. Milly’s ethical aesthetic constitutes an embrace of life and the material world rather than a rejection of it, and insofar as her character is an avatar of James’s own hope, it too is founded on the

The Image in the Mirror  41 possibility of art as a means to engage and build the world and thereby to counter the anxiety that proceeds from the epistemic uncertainty coloring the modernist moment.

6.  A  estheticism and Anxiety: Maggie Verver as Modernist Maker In the passage from Wings I just quoted, Merton Densher recognizes the danger inherent in living with the “beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,” the “forced suppressions” that surround Milly Theale and her coterie. The same dangers are alive in The Golden Bowl, with the crucial difference that where Milly is the object and willing victim of these kinds of deceptions, Maggie Verver, in order to take control of her world, begins actively to produce them. This is why – as I suggested earlier in this chapter – Milly is the more passive of the two heroines and Maggie the more active. To understand how the narrative arc of Maggie Verver’s choices ultimately evoke a sense of hope predicated on aesthetic possibility, we need to return to a very different affective disposition: Maggie’s anxiety, which I elaborated on earlier in this chapter. The emotional state of anxiety is typically preceded and informed by the cognitive state of uncertainty. It is uncertainty, as I argued earlier, that conditions and structures the thought-worlds of both Milly and Maggie early in these novels. But more can be said about the precise origins of the concern about the future evidenced in Maggie’s words and actions. Maggie and her father, Adam Verver, begin the novel as characters for whom beauty, and the category of the aesthetic in general, is not merely a shaping but a determinative influence on every other aspect of their lives. Mr. Verver sees himself, not incorrectly, as “equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty” (GB, 104). Given this talent, his corresponding ambition is nothing if not grandiose: “a world was left him to conquer and he might conquer it if he tried” (GB, 104). Under Adam Verver’s aestheticizing touch, all becomes suggestion and performance, even vice; even in his weaker moments, he betrays only “the imitation of depravity” rather than the real thing (GB, 93). But something troubling lurks beneath this polished exterior, and Mr. Verver is too intelligent not to be unaware of it. The difficulty flares up for him, briefly but keenly, during one of his many conversations with his daughter, in his recognition that [s]he had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified, “generalized”, in its grace, a figure with which his human connection was fairly interrupted by some vague analogy of turn and attitude,

42  The Image in the Mirror something shyly mythological and nymph-like. The trick, he was not uncomplacently unaware, was mainly of his own mind; it came from his caring for special vases only less than for precious daughters. (GB, 139) Here Adam Verver reflects on his tendency to remove his daughter from the category of the human and place her in the category of the aesthetic – not merely despite, but perhaps because of, his love for her. To love vases less than daughters is well and good, but to think of daughters and vases as comparable in any meaningful sense should invite critique. Nor is this instance isolated. Mr. Verver even considers his wife’s untimely death a blessing in disguise, in that his attachment to her, because it may have redirected and sapped his passion for beautiful art objects, might have led him “into the wilderness of mere mistakes” (GB, 105). In short, Adam Verver suffers from a tendency to blur the lines between the merely aesthetic and the complexly ethical, and therefore ­ between objects and humans, always with the tendency to think of the latter in terms of the former, applying “the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions” (GB, 145). James makes it clear that the former – the beautiful object – wins out in such calculations: “It was all, at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle” (GB, 146). And Mr. Verver is important for our purposes precisely because his moral affinities are so obviously allied with those of his daughter and indeed, in significant ways, forge them. Adam Verver’s function in the novel is largely to personify aestheticism, and his nearly unnatural closeness with Maggie links her to the same worldview. It is in her relationship with Amerigo, her husband, that Maggie most evinces her father’s way of seeing the world. “You’re a rarity,” she tells Amerigo, “an object of beauty, an object of price” (GB, 10). For his part, Amerigo is amenable to this sort of blunt objectification of his person: “I shall be one of the little pieces that you unpack at the hotels,” he says laughingly in response (GB, 11). In any case, what Maggie values in Amerigo – and has learned to value in ­others – is his surface, the picture he presents, rather than any tangible actions he might perform.40 The Ververs are sophisticated enough to be aware of the possible limitations of the aesthetic gloss they place on all objects and persons in their purview. And it is this inkling of awareness that becomes a major source of Maggie’s modernist anxiety. Sitting together in a hushed garden, father and daughter together feel “a kind of helplessness in their felicity” (GB, 123). But having safeguarded their happiness, they see a threat to it in the advances of Mrs. Rance, one of Mr. Verver’s suitors. Maggie is alarmed by this turn of events, unsurprising though it is (Mr. Verver is single, urbane, and very wealthy), because it tells her that the fact that she and her father have “created and nursed and established”

The Image in the Mirror  43 the perfect “rightness” of their own lives cannot protect them from an unanticipated future: mightn’t the moment possibly count for them – or count at least for us while we watch them with their fate all before them – as the dawn of the discovery that it doesn’t meet always meet all contingencies to be right? Otherwise why should Maggie have found a word of definite doubt . . . rise after a time to her lips? (GB, 123–124) Maggie’s discovery, here, intruding on a moment just short of bliss, is that the unpredictability of other human persons, their refusal to be mere decorative set pieces in one’s life – their attempts to wrest control over their futures, in short – leaves one’s own future impossible to certify. The realization is intolerable enough to her that she seeks its possible source (“I don’t think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all,” she asserts, in a moment of real clarity) and its solution, welcoming the idea of her father’s remarriage, and shortly thereafter, asking him to invite Charlotte Stant to the estate at Fawns (GB, 129). If an aestheticizing disposition that reduces persons to art objects has instilled anxiety in Maggie, logic dictates that a means for defeating this anxiety would require the acquisition of a new moral disposition, perhaps one grounded in a more robust sense of others’ innate value and personhood. In some sense, it might be fair to say that the whole second half of The Golden Bowl is the story of Maggie’s failure to discover such a mindset, and of her resulting reversion to the world and language of art and artificiality to attempt to win back control over her life. In Wings, Milly Theale becomes an exemplar of virtuous action for us because, being so near to the end of her life, she uses art as an inspiration to go beyond art, and in this sense takes on the role of a living, dynamic artwork. But Maggie, because the whole of her future extends before her, would feel her own agency too constricted by such a choice. Instead, she becomes a modernist artist, charismatically manipulating others’ lives to achieve her ends via virtuosic social performance. Her art-making is produced by and in a world that relies on the power of appearance, connotation, and surface. But the limitations of art are revealed by all that remains unsaid and unknown despite Maggie’s eventual success. Because she does not rely on a moral framework outside the aesthetic, Maggie cannot fully resolve her anxieties, though she takes bold steps to assuage them. Of course, Maggie is not literally an artist. But the imagery surrounding her character in the novel so obviously styles her as metaphorically taking up the enterprise that critical consensus on the point is widespread. Eileen Watts and Joseph Boone, for instance, both see Maggie as a novelist. According to Watts, Maggie’s task is to “write her own version of the truth . . . by making intellectual connections”; for Boone,

44  The Image in the Mirror Maggie makes “conservative writerly efforts . . . to inscribe the narrative of her shaky marriage within a traditional novelistic pattern.”41 David Craig concurs, positing that “James allows himself to be displaced in the compositional process by Maggie,” so that “the resolution that she invents is also the ending to the novel.”42 Scott Pollard offers a different metaphor: Maggie stands as “the quintessential Jamesian puppetmaster,” her artwork finally inseparable from her identity.”43 Taking a more metatextual approach, Mark Reynolds suggests that Maggie’s art allows other individuals the freedom to be artists, to “construct [their] own fictions.”44 These comparisons of Maggie to an artist are warranted not least because James himself provides us with one. Early in Book II, as Maggie begins to sense that not all is well in her world, she devises a plan for how to retain and secure her place in it nonetheless: She reminded herself of an actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. . . . Preparation and practice had come but a short way; her part opened out, and she invented from moment to moment what to say and to do. She had but one rule of art – to keep within bounds and not lose her head. . . . She said to herself, in her excitement, that it was perfectly simple: to bring about a difference, touch by touch . . . . (GB, 322) James’s depiction of Maggie as an actress is striking in itself, but the specific image is more evocative still: Maggie is an actress who goes off script. Whether she does so because of necessity (she has forgotten her lines) or ambition (she has come up with better lines) James does not say, and precisely by leaving it unsaid, he leaves the second, more unusual option available to us. The standard script, in this case, the one Maggie rejects, presumably includes the standard scenes and lines likely to emerge in the wake of a discovered affair: the accusations, the fallout, the guilt, the reparations. In rejecting this common method of dealing with Amerigo’s betrayal, Maggie consciously places her hopes in the effectiveness of a recourse to aesthetic modes. The goal of artifice – of acting out a role – is precisely to “bring about a difference, touch by touch,” in the several actions of the other major players: to control her future by controlling others. James is blunt enough about Maggie’s Machiavellian motives with respect to those around her – “she rose,” he writes, “to the desire to possess and use them” – that critical attempts to retain her as the moral center of the novel have much to reconcile (GB, 334). This passage clearly delineates Maggie’s implicit belief in aesthetic utility. Art has the power to alter social reality, if only she can sufficiently master its modes. Hence her abrupt determination, here, to cast off convention in favor of ingenuity. Art can repair the “crack” introduced into

The Image in the Mirror  45 her life by Amerigo’s affair, the same crack symbolized by the one in the golden bowl itself. As she tells Fanny Assingham in a moment of candor, she wants “[t]he golden bowl – as it was to have been. . . . [t]he bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack” (GB, 456). Maggie wants to use art to make life more artlike. Alongside the aim of retrieving her husband, then, what she calls “the conquest of appearances” – the aesthetic instantiated as civilizational norm – stands as a second, separate end (GB, 458). This points us to the great irony of her situation: her break with convention, her recourse to inventive role-­playing, is really a gambit to restore to her life the formal, neat, predictability of an unblemished art object – to return, in other words, to a convention she can count on. Maggie believes in art more than she understands it; what she learns at the end of the novel is that its utility, while potent, is unpredictable, that it cannot be tethered to a program, even one as smoothly executed as hers. Maggie, it turns out, is a consummate artist, able to read others’ motives and thoughts sufficiently to choose the plan of action that will best suit her own ends. As the novel nears its conclusion, Maggie and her father have every reason to quietly revel in their mastery over others – a mastery that is itself a function of their superior knowledge. Adam Verver wordlessly communicates this satisfaction to Maggie in the scene (one Judith Chernaik rightly calls the “most horrible” in the novel) featuring the metaphorical image of Adam guiding his wife Charlotte by a leash around her neck: I lead her to her doom, and she doesn’t so much as know what it is, though she has a fear in her heart . . . she’s afraid of so many other things that she sees multiplied round her now as portents and betrayals. (GB, 508)45 But Mr. Verver is unwittingly describing not only Charlotte but his daughter Maggie. For as her father and her rival Charlotte prepare to depart, Maggie finds herself placed in the very position in which she had earlier, perhaps a little too confidently, placed Charlotte – that of “having gropingly to go on, always not knowing and not knowing!” (GB, 448). This is made clear repeatedly in the final pages of The Golden Bowl, not least in the climactic scene in which Maggie and Charlotte, after circling one another surreptitiously, finally face off during the dinner party at Fawns. Here Maggie’s only goal is “to try to look as if she weren’t afraid. If she could but appear at all not afraid she might appear a little not ashamed . . . it being fear all the while that moved her” (GB, 479). This complex amalgam of fear and shame does not lift from Maggie’s consciousness even when the conversation goes the way she had hoped, with all incriminations left unvoiced. She waits, at the end of it, not only for Charlotte’s kiss on her cheek but “till the weight should be

46  The Image in the Mirror lifted” (GB, 479). But on one of their final days together as a group – the sultry Sunday afternoon during which Maggie meets Charlotte in the garden rotunda – the weight is yet present: in the “consensus of languor” that drifts over the estate at Fawns, Maggie intuits a hidden “community of dread” (GB, 515). With this in mind, we turn to the final scene of the novel, which has received a great deal of critical attention, in part because of its vexing, even paradoxical nature. In its structure, the ending is essentially comic: Maggie achieves her goal, sending Charlotte and her father to America. But its mood is essentially tragic, working against the plot. In the novel’s final sentence, which depicts Amerigo embracing Maggie, the emotion of despair cannot be missed: “And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast” (GB, 567). For Aristotle, pity and dread are the defining emotions of tragedy, and most scholars see the reference as not only deliberate but as capturing the intended mood of the novel’s whole conclusion.46 But whence comes Maggie’s fear and dread, given the success of her ploy? David Craig’s sophisticated discussion of Maggie’s predicament is worth quoting at length: By her metamorphosis into the Princess, Maggie has transfigured her world into her own fairy tale. Her metamorphosis brings entrance into the world of art, a world in which the very process of living is joined to the use of artistic imagination. Yet Maggie finds her triumph disquieting because she discovers that having specified her end – her reunion with her husband – and the means for achieving that end – her social artistry – she cannot know the end itself. She finds the artistic forms with which she has transfigured her experience so ordered and fixed that they threaten to restrict the possibilities of her life.47 Craig’s reading here gets us well on our way. But I want to diverge from his analysis in one major respect: it is because the possibilities of Maggie’s future remain unrestricted, rather than restricted, that she feels as she does at the novel’s close. Art has not closed off her future; it has failed to close it off in the way that she hoped. Recall that for Maggie, as for Milly Theale, the aesthetic is a category through which one reorients anxiety into hope. Her artistry to this point has consisted in “avoiding the serious, standing off, anxiously, from the real” (GB, 485). The completion of her task forces her back into the real, without a construct to fall back on and without solace from whatever new trials the future might present. Art, whatever its social efficacy, is not a medium that can shield us from the vicissitudes of the future: it is more likely to widen social

The Image in the Mirror  47 possibilities, in liberating if sometimes terrifying ways, than to restrict them. This is why an ethical bedrock outside aesthetics, such as Milly Theale’s recourse to living for others, is so needed. Maggie senses as much, dimly, in casting herself as the “scapegoat” tasked with removing a threat from the community, but what that entails as regards her future remains vague for her: “it wouldn’t be their feeling that she should do anything but live, live on somehow for their benefit” (GB, 469). The “conquest of appearances” Maggie inaugurated, while it achieved what she hoped it would, is no safeguard from the shock of the new reality to which she must adjust, and to address which she lacks the requisite knowledge or norms. In closing The Golden Bowl on a note of trepidation and doubt, James insists on the unpredictability and volatility of the aesthetic experience generally (and in doing so, repudiates Bersani’s thesis). As Judith Chernaik writes, the endings of James novels “are only apparently conclusive, if we are to read James consistently. The case is over, finished – and yet it is difficult to see it as settled.”48 The ungovernable nature of aesthetic utility is intrinsic to its power, and James, precisely because he wishes to capture rather than to counter the uncertainty endemic to his own era, leaves his characters in varying states of trepidation as they prepare for what is to come. The Golden Bowl, then, rejects the aestheticism of the Ververs, teaching us, in Ruth Taylor Todasco’s succinct formulation, that “mere form stultifies the realization of true affinities.”49 The tendency to aestheticize is a tendency to gloss over, to soften, the hard edges of the reality of the lives beyond one’s immediate circle. If they never quite resolve this moral failing, the Ververs are perceptive enough at least to address it. As Adam Verver ponders aloud to his daughter, There seems a kind of charm, doesn’t there? on our life . . . . A kind of wicked selfish prosperity perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything, down to the last lovely object for the last glass case of the last corner, left over, of my old show. That’s the only take-off, that it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid – lying like gods together, all careless of mankind. (GB, 365) Countering his daughter’s initial objections to this observation, he elaborates with more precision: “we’re tremendously moral for ourselves,” he allows, but their very focus on only themselves, on “want[ing] always the same thing,” leaves them open to the charge of a kind of solipsism – a willingness to discard the outer world in order to make their own lives beautiful (GB, 366). This desire to make life itself into a kind of art, which also animates Maggie’s project to win back her husband, must ultimately fail, for two interconnected reasons: first, because it misrepresents life, which is always more messy and uncontained than the art

48  The Image in the Mirror to which it gives rise, and second, because it in turn underestimates art, which, to do justice to life, must itself capture those same messy and uncontained aspects.

7.  Turning to Fiction, Returning to Life These reflections bring us back around to the query with which I began this chapter. The ambiguous endings of these novels, with their denial of closure, affirm James’s conviction that the “air of reality” is the “supreme virtue of a novel,” as he observes in “The Art of Fiction.”50 Kate Croy and Maggie Verver, whose words and actions texture these novels’ conclusions, strike us as less hopeful than despairing, in keeping with the dominant mood of the era. Indeed, given the doubt firmly inscribed in these novels, we may well wonder how aesthetic utility can foment hope. Here we must differentiate between character and audience. James’s novels can cultivate hope in the reader even through the depiction of anxiety or despair. Significant cultural lessons, for example, can be gleaned from Milly Theale’s heroic embodiment of an ethics inspired by art, and equally from Maggie Verver’s masterful if misguided attempt to control her future as modernist artist. For James, one way the artistic endeavor can encourage hope is by offering an incomplete or inverted picture of human possibility, in the very representation of our common failure to reach that possibility. As Laurence Holland writes, the James novel is ultimately concerned with “revealing the possible might-be in the form of the might-have-been and its betrayal, rendering the world not redeemed but redeemable in the process of its tragic wastage.”51 Precisely in this way – to answer the question with which we began – the novel can be both mimetic and exemplary, imagining how we might live by revealing how we do live. For this reason, James’s conception of the novel as “the image in the mirror,” which titles this chapter, is perfectly apt: the novel – like the mirror’s reflective surface – both informs us what we look like and invites us to refine that appearance until it meets our aspirations. This exploration of hope in James’s late novels demonstrates, I think, his view of the novel as an instrumental, socially engaged creation, of “language as something that acts upon and changes the world in which we live,” as Gustavo Guerra has put it.52 But it also helps to clarify James’s status as a great mind engaged in communicating not only between continents but between eras. James is at once the inheritor of a received tradition and the inaugurator of a new one. Modernists following James were increasingly compelled to venture toward formal experimentation, toward a rejection of straightforward realism, and toward strategies that might highlight or ironize the divide between art and mass culture. But James, pressed by the notion that, as he writes in his essay “The Future of the Novel,” “the future of fiction is intimately

The Image in the Mirror  49 bound up with the future of the society that produces and consumes it,” clings to an inveterate idealism in his fiction, which thrums with the constant certainty that the only resource from which the novel can draw is life itself – the contemporary world and consciousness.53 As a result, formal ingenuity and daring in James must always be reconciled with representational accuracy. Art requires the mapping of form onto formlessness, but the traditional aesthetic demands of form – beauty, symmetry, closure – would seem to work against the fidelity to human experience James prizes. It speaks to the range of James’s genius that his late novels, in their slippage between perfect coherence and sublime confusion, between a longing for closure and the recognition of its impossibility, navigate between these poles and, in so doing, remain alert both to received literary traditions and to the modernist ethos. In his depiction of the power of art to create unguessed individual and social paths, James brilliantly establishes the indeterminacy of any given ending, the absence of knowledge regarding our shared future that opens up to his characters and readers alike the divergent possible emotions – anxiety but, equally and even surpassingly, hope – that attend the task of encountering it.

Notes 1 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 177. 2 Henry James, “The Future of the Novel,” in The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 250. 3 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1969), 154. 4 Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, 154. 5 James, “The Art of Fiction,” 166. 6 James, “The Art of Fiction,” 167, 170. 7 Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, 155. 8 James, “The Future of the Novel,” 250. 9 James to Mrs. Alfred Sutro, August 8, 1914, in The Letters of Henry James, Volume 2, ed. Percy Lubbock, (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 388. 10 Henry James, “Preface to the New York Edition, 1909,” in The Golden Bowl, ed. Virginia Llewellyn Smith (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), lx–lxi. 11 Daniel T. O’Hara, “Henry James’s Version of Judgment,” Boundary 2 23, no. 1 (1996): 66. 12 Henry James, “Charles Baudelaire,” in French Poets and Novelists (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 64–65. 13 James, “The Art of Fiction,” 181–182. 14 For Holland “[t]he moral implications of James’s fiction are to be found not only and not principally in the judgments he passes on his characters but in the fully creative function of James’s form, whether comic or otherwise.” See Laurence B. Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), xii.

50  The Image in the Mirror R.P. Blackmur, another estimable James critic, agrees. “So central were morals to James,” he writes, even though he was a dissenter to the forms in which morals are abused, that there was not ever quite enough for him in any part of the world either to fall back on or to go forward with. It was so in his own mind; his convictions never matured as ideas, but as images or metaphors, as aesthetic creations, always to be created afresh. See R.P. Blackmur, “Henry James,” in Studies in Henry James, ed. Veronica A. Makowsky (New York: New Directions, 1983), 103. 15 Angel Medina, “Edwardian Couples: Aesthetics and Moral Experience in The Golden Bowl,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): 63. 16 Martha Craven Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): 34. 17 Martha Nussbaum, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature,” The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 10 (1985): 521, 528. 18 Daniel Brudney, “Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (1990): 397–437. 19 See for example Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 20 Anna Despotopoulou, “The Price of ‘Mere Spectatorship’: Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove,” The Review of English Studies 53, no. 210 (2002): 229. 21 William Stowe, “James’s Elusive Wings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 198. 22 Michael Trask, “The Romance of Choice and The Wings of the Dove,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 32, no. 3 (1999): 358. 23 Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, ed. J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 100. Hereafter cited intext as WD. 24 Jonathan Freedman, “What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge,” The Cambridge Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2008): 99. 25 Judith Chernaik, “Henry James as Moralist: The Case of the Late Novels,” The Centennial Review 16, no. 2 (1972): 111. 26 Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. by Virginia Llewellyn Smith (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 238. Hereafter cited in-text as GB. 27 As Gustavo Guerra comments, [t]he Jamesian text moves more comfortably – to the painful discomfort of most readers – in a mode of writing that questions without providing answers, that suggests more than asserts, that hides more than shows. That mode of writing is a direct cultural reflection of, as well as an answer to, the cultural uncertainties of the times. See Gustavo Guerra, “Henry James’s Paradoxical Bowl: The Reinstatement of Doubt in Fin-de-Siècle America,” Style 32, no. 1, (1998): 66. Hilary Margo Schor concurs, emphasizing how this evincing of uncertainty affects the reader and the reading process: The novel makes the shock of knowing contiguous with the shock of reading – it deliberately displaces our comfort, and yet it leads us

The Image in the Mirror  51 carefully along the series of disruptions (temporal and structural as well as erotic and just plain creepy) so we are following, consciously, a hunt for certainty. See Hilary Margo Schor, “Reading Knowledge: Curiosity in The Golden Bowl,” The Henry James Review 26, no. 3 (2005): 238. 28 Trask, “The Romance of Choice,” 369 n. 14. 29 Daniel Brudney, “Knowledge and Silence,” 415; O’Hara, “James’s Version of Judgment,” 68. 30 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 123– 125. Freedman uses the striking term “negative knowledge” to sum up the limitations of Maggie Verver’s discoveries about herself and her world, writing that “she has achieved, more or less, nothing.” See Freedman, “What Maggie Knew,” 112–113. 31 Yeazell, Language and Knowledge, 86. 32 Catherine Cox Wessel puts the point finely in her comparison of the two protagonists: Maggie accepts from her family the role of scapegoat, as Milly Theale accepts the role of dove from her predators in The Wings of the Dove; but Maggie uses her meekness as a means to success in this world, not transcendence of it. See Catherine Cox Wessel, “Strategies for Survival in James’s The Golden Bowl,” American Literature 55, no. 4 (1983): 584. 33 On Milly as Christ figure, see Holland, The Expense of Vision, 307; Millicent Bell, “The Dream of Being Possessed and Possessing,” The Massachusetts Review 10, no. 1 (1969): 97–114; Brenda Austin-Smith, “The Reification of Milly Theale: Rhetorical Narration in The Wings of the Dove,” Journal of Narrative Theory 30, no. 2 (2000): 187–188; and Kenneth Reinhard, “The Jamesian Thing: The Wings of the Dove and the Ethics of Mourning,” Arizona Quarterly 53, no. 4 (1997): 124–125. 34 For a detailed response to the inaccurate assumption that Milly personifies an ethic of renunciation, see Marcia Ian, “The Elaboration of Privacy in The Wings of the Dove,” ELH 51, no. 1 (1984): 107–136. 35 Critics generally regard Milly’s viewing of the Bronzino at Matcham as producing a moment of epiphany but seem much more reluctant to attribute a similar moment of catharsis to her mountaintop journey. This may be because the latter occurrence is narrated from the perspective of Susan Stringham, so that as readers, we are at a greater remove from Milly’s consciousness. Nonetheless, if Susan’s viewpoint can be assumed to be trustworthy, the evidence is straightforward. James writes, “The image that thus remained with the elder lady kept the character of a revelation” (WD, 88, emphasis mine). 36 Doran Larson, “Milly’s Bargain: The Homosocial Economy in The Wings of the Dove,” Arizona Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1995): 91; Reinhard, “The Jamesian Thing,” 127. 37 Despotopolou, “The Price of Mere Spectatorship,” 238. 38 Kristin Boyce, “What Does James Show His Readers in The Wings of the Dove?”, The Henry James Review 35, no. 1 (2014): 4. See also Holland, The Expense of Vision, 303. 39 Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, 149. 40 Other readers have observed this trait in the Ververs. Nussbaum summarizes it as “the inveterate tendency of both father and daughter to assimilate

52  The Image in the Mirror

41

42 43 4 4 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

people, in their imagination and deliberation, to fine objets d’art.” Critics disagree, however, on the precise motives and effects of this inclination to, in Jean Gooder’s phrase, “prefer artificial gestures to human actuality.” See Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals,” 31; Jean Gooder, “The Golden Bowl, or Ideas of Good and Evil,” The Cambridge Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1984): 144; Eileen H. Watts, “The Golden Bowl, a Theory of Metaphor,” Modern Language Studies 13, no. 4 (1983): 171; Freedman, “What Maggie Knew,” 112. Watts, “A Theory of Metaphor,” 170; Joseph A. Boone, “Modernist Maneuverings in the Marriage Plot: Breaking Ideologies of Gender and Genre in James’s The Golden Bowl,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 101, no. 3 (1986): 374. David Craig, “The Indeterminacy of the End: Maggie Verver and the Limits of Imagination,” The Henry James Review 3, no. 2, (1982): 134. Scott Pollard, “Artists, Aesthetics, and Family Politics in Donoso’s El obsceno pâjaro de la noche and James’s The Golden Bowl,” The Comparatist 23 (1999): 47. Mark Reynolds, “Counting the Costs: The Infirmity of Art and The Golden Bowl,” The Henry James Review 6, no. 1 (1984): 22. Chernaik, “Henry James as Moralist,” 119. For Marianna Torgovnick, the terms “pity” and “dread” in James “deliberately echo” Aristotle’s use of them in Poetics; see Marianna Torgovnick, “Gestural Pattern and Meaning in The Golden Bowl,” Twentieth Century Literature 26, no. 4 (1980): 452. Brudney notes that the ending “suggests the classic emotions of tragedy,” even if, in his estimation, Maggie does not give up trying to defeat it (Brudney, “Knowledge and Silence,” 416). Yeazell comments on the artificiality of the comic structure of the ending: “what we really witness here is less a closed fiction than a character struggling to will such a fiction” (Yeazell, Language and Knowledge, 125). Craig writes that James’s ending “denies the immanence of a romantic world, the orange blossom principle of endings in which the conclusion redeems the characters’ ‘real’ tribulations” (Craig, “The Indeterminacy of the End,” 142). Craig, “The Indeterminacy of the End,” 140. Chernaik, “Henry James as Moralist,” 116. Ruth Taylor Todasco, “Theme and Imagery in The Golden Bowl,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4, no. 2 (1962): 237. James, “The Art of Fiction,” 173. Holland, The Expense of Vision, 327. Guerra, “Henry James’s Paradoxical Bowl,” 62. James, “The Future of the Novel,” 247.

2 Screened Anxieties Hope and Fear in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

1.  The Birth of a Nation as Test Case for Aesthetic Utility From our discussion of Henry James, a few characteristics can be observed as common to the varied examples of modernist hope I survey in this study in addition to the preeminent one I’ve identified, namely, that it is founded on a belief in aesthetic utility. One is the anxiety or doubt that inscribes itself as hope’s inverse. Wherever hope appears – except when it takes the form of religious certainty – it appears as an affective and consciously willed response to a subject’s lack of complete knowledge. As we saw with Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, this willed response can waver, and does not eliminate the possibility of a felt anxiety existing alongside it. Indeed, in many cases hope can be forged as a reaction to such an anxiety, as a determination to quell or curb it. Thus to speak of modernist hope is often, by necessity, indirectly to speak of its more troubled twin, which I am calling anxiety but which could also be called fear; equally, it is indirectly to speak of uncertainty, the general epistemological condition that occasions both these dispositions and, in many ways, structures the entire philosophical and literary landscape of the modernist era. The second unifying characteristic we can observe is that the object of modernist hope is ineluctably social. It reveals an investment in the lifeworld of not just an individual but a broader culture and often civilization generally. Modernist hope is always tied, if not to the polis as such, at least to the future community out of which the polis must emerge. Beyond these two features of modernist hope – its proximity to anxiety and its investment in society – we cannot be more specific without doing injustice to the diverse forms of modernist aspiration. The work of many modernist writers is illuminated by other kinds of hope besides the one I am concentrating on in this study. The speaker in T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” to take an obvious example, is clearly invested in a Christian hope, differing in kind and degree from modernist hope as I define it. But of course, a text can easily reveal multiple forms of hope that can intersect and even compete with one another.

54  Screened Anxieties For these reasons, to try to locate the object of modernist hope writ large with any precision is a foolhardy task. The present chapter, which deals with D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation (hereafter Birth), is partly meant to emphasize and point up this fact. Griffith’s hopes, which have been identified and discussed already by many film historians and scholars of American history, were certainly socially directed; moreover, as this chapter endeavors to demonstrate, they coincided with a powerful strain of modernist anxiety that underlies and inspires his cinematic efforts, and yet, at the same time, they differ widely from the hopes of the other modernists I examine, in that they were troublingly racist. But Griffith nonetheless labored under the aegis of a modernist hope founded on a confidence in aesthetic utility. Indeed, he believed more passionately than most in the power of art to mold society. Thus he fits into this book as a sort of cautionary example, a test case of the fact that aesthetic utility is not always engineered toward a social good. Modernist hope can be hope for an outcome that history judges to be wrong. But it is not only the objects of Griffith’s hopes as revealed in Birth – segregation, discrimination, and racial inequality, among others – that I find wanting throughout this chapter. I argue that his understanding of aesthetic utility is also problematic. My definition of aesthetic utility hinges on the premise that, while art affects society in lasting and foundational ways, these effects can never be known or predicted in advance. To try to shape or mold an artwork to a particular end or program is to misunderstand the kind of utility art must be allowed to exercise in order to be fully art. It is to conceive of “utility” in the pragmatic, instrumental sense in which we generally use it, rather than in the special sense in which (I am insisting) we must use it when we consider art’s social function. Griffith does exactly this: while he embraces art as a means to effect social change, he resists and denies its unpredictability and instead tries to tether it to a particular, didactic program of historical revisionism. Griffith holds, then, to what we might call an instrumentalist understanding of aesthetic utility. I borrow the term “instrumentalist” from Derek Attridge, who, in his book The Singularity of Literature, summarizes instrumentalism as follows: What I have in mind could be crudely summarized as the treating of a text (or other cultural artifact) as a means to a predetermined end: coming to the object with the hope or the assumption that it can be instrumental in furthering an existing project, and responding to it in such a way as to test, or even produce, that usefulness.1 One hypothesis of this chapter, which we shall explore in more depth, is that the flawed objects of Griffith’s hope and his flawed means of achieving them may be related. Put another way, Griffith’s aesthetic beliefs

Screened Anxieties  55 seem to inform and shape the political and social overtones of his film, in a manner roughly analogous to the way form shapes content.

2.  D.W. Griffith and the Power of Film Studies of D.W. Griffith often cite his exuberant claim, first reported in the New York Times Magazine, that the great power of movies lies in their ability to allow the viewer to “actually see what happened” in the past. Griffith was confident that film technology would revolutionize education: [The] time will come, and in less than ten years, when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again. . . . There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history.2 For all the regularity with which it is cited, the quotation has rarely if ever been fully parsed. To the twenty-first-century scholar, Griffith’s optimism about film may seem not to be worth remarking, since it rests on the uncritical and long-refuted assumption that the camera offers us access to unvarnished, otherwise inaccessible historical truth. Moreover, Griffith situates his dream of film’s triumph over history within the schoolroom. Film boasts a power to represent history that is beneficial precisely insofar as it is used to teach. Griffith is discussing film technology in general here, not necessarily cinema or his own work particularly. But as the historical record and other scholarly research has shown, his prediction dovetails with his own filmmaking process and his beliefs about cinema. First of all, Griffith clearly saw film as a vehicle capable of transporting its viewers back into the lived past. Verisimilitude was for Griffith a kind of aesthetic bulwark, both a starting point for the cinematic arts and a realm in which they could not be matched by other forms. Accounts of the making of Birth indicate that Griffith was keen to push the illusion of history recreated, of the screen universe as identical with the physical one, to its furthest limits. He tended to equate the world cinema represented with the world in which it was represented: “The whole world is a stage,” he reportedly said while filming Birth, paraphrasing and repurposing Shakespeare.3 Billy Bitzer, the cinematographer of Birth, later recalled that during filming, it was as though the whole production company had been transported back in time to 1865 and that “in Griffith’s mind we were.”4 Small details were painstakingly researched and double-checked for accuracy. This determination to hew to the historical record wherever possible was later both used to market the film and referenced in praise of it.5 Indeed, in his public comments on Birth, Griffith resorted

56  Screened Anxieties to the rhetoric of historicity, suggesting that the film was “only a photoplay reproduction of what actually occurred and what is down in black and white in the pages of American history.”6 In certain respects, this summary is not entirely inaccurate. Birth features four “historical facsimiles” that function as overt advertisements of its attempt to recover the past: President Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Robert E. Lee’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, and the riot in the State House of Representatives. These facsimiles were carefully reconstructed from available photographs and documents (the call for volunteers and the assassination were both based on Nicolay and Hay’s definitive biography of Lincoln). The establishing long shots used to create these scenes together with the stillness of the camera combine to convey an air of detached objectivity, as though allowing the spectator to peer down at a moment in history. Even insignificant occurrences, such as Lincoln giving his hat and coat to an aide during the assassination scene, are designed to add not only suspense but verisimilitude, since real life, too, is full of such mundane moments.7 Ironically, however, Griffith’s own skill as a director and filmmaker undercuts his claims regarding Birth’s reconstitution of the past. The many hours Griffith spent in transforming the thirty hours of raw footage shot during the making of Birth into a finished film replete with iris shots, close-ups, fade-ins, fade-outs, and elaborately constructed cross-cutting testify to his understanding of the patent artifice of the cinematic gaze.8 While he publicly insisted on blurring it as much as possible, Griffith was far from unaware of this distinction between filmic reconstruction and historical event. The numerous ways in which his movie departs from the history it purports to capture have already been catalogued by enough critics that I need not belabor the point.9 One early and egregious example will suffice. Immediately after offering, in an introductory intertitle, the supposed motivation for the film’s creation – to generate anti-war sentiment – the film’s next intertitle reveals its actual, racist thesis, placing the blame for American social ills on blacks: “[t]he bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion” (Birth). This is a viewpoint the film will not relinquish even where it makes evasions of fact a necessity. Ironically, the ideological fervor of Birth is, in part, the source of Griffith’s insistence on the film’s validity as a historical document: it offered a means of rationalizing his racist attitudes. As Edward Campbell writes, Griffith’s demands for precision were a kind of smokescreen: “Inordinate attention to minor details provided authenticity for an interpretation which was itself not accurate.”10 Griffith was equally insistent that the main goal of Birth was to instruct its audience. His belief that art’s social role is to teach the public is documented in many places.11 Further, Griffith saw cinema’s captivating, totalizing creation of a visual world as harboring a powerful means not only to inculcate ideas but to distinguish itself from older art forms

Screened Anxieties  57 and thereby achieve its own place in the literary pantheon. An early anti-­ censorship intertitle in Birth, Griffith’s “Plea for the Art of the Motion Picture,” makes this clear; by citing “the Bible and the works of Shakespeare” as examples of works produced by and through artistic liberty, Griffith subtly advertises the heights at which he is aiming (Birth). Rarely circumspect about his ambitions, Griffith stated at the New York premiere of Birth that his goal “was to place pictures on a par with the spoken word as a medium for artistic expression appealing to thinking people.”12 While Griffith wanted cinema to reach the artistic level of the spoken word, he also wanted it to be elevated above and distinguished from theater, with which it had to compete for early moviegoers’ attention.13 To do so, he claimed that cinema’s advantage over theater is precisely its nearness to the real, that it “approaches more closely real life.”14 In the same vein, Griffith welcomed the shift from a “histrionic” or melodramatic to a more “verisimilar” acting style that had begun to take place during his earlier work as a director for Biograph.15 Finally, it’s worth noting that Griffith’s argument is prima facie not without merit; the camera’s ability to document the world in a manner that seems to mirror human perception itself is, by most accounts, what sets it apart from other art forms. That moving pictures could record past events, thus authenticating them for posterity, was revelatory to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century positivist minds already predisposed to be swayed by notions of evidence and scientific method.16 And still today, film draws a great deal of its narrative weight through its seeming invisibility, which imperceptibly draws viewers into the world it conveys; as Tony Barta argues, in the cinema “we are lulled by the apparent transparency of the screen, the solidity of what is depicted.”17 We might say that in cinema, mimesis obscures diegesis; the role of craft, the veneer of artifice, is minimized by the unassuming presence of the medium, offering an invisible window through which we may gaze. Tom Gunning calls this aspect of film its “innate tendency toward mimesis,” which “becomes a sign of narrative realism, naturalizing the process of storytelling.”18 Griffith’s understanding of film as a mirror of the world finds an echo in the contemporary filmgoer’s common complaint that a movie is too unrealistic. We typically want the filmic world we perceive in the theater to resemble our own; in many cases, we want to be able to pretend it is our own. But that very pretense, by insisting on its own presence, undoes Griffith’s argument, inscribing an insurmountable barrier between the camera’s gaze and the spectator’s. Since the earliest days of cinema, the film arts have subsisted on the same suspension of disbelief we carry into the other narrative arts, such as the novel. And that suspension of disbelief is important exactly because of the difference between the literary world and the real one, existing not to bridge them but because they cannot be bridged. As Samuel Johnson once put it, “Imitations produce pain

58  Screened Anxieties or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.”19 A failure of mimesis in a movie does not lead to the spectator’s sudden realization that what they have been watching is not “true”; it leads rather to a dissatisfaction with the internal logic of the narrative world of the film, into which the spectator has consciously agreed temporarily to enter. In agreeing to enter the filmic world of Birth, then, spectators sought not history but story, not the past recreated but the past reconstituted for the purposes of entertainment. Griffith imagined his film would also educate its audience; more accurately, we might say that it transfixed a great segment of it while angering another. The film has become at least as well-known for the protests, riots, and arguments over censorship it sparked as for any of its specific content. But initially, it proved massively influential; Melvyn Stokes estimates that along with its fellow prewar blockbuster Gone with the Wind, Birth “perhaps did more than anything else to disseminate a romantic and biased view of the Lost Cause to a mass American audience.”20 Stokes’s claim both underscores and vouches for Birth’s aesthetic utility and invites us to reevaluate our understanding of the concept. Birth’s social impact, it must be said, was enormous, perhaps immeasurable; it was also profoundly negative in the near-term. To take one example, the film’s spell of immense popularity paralleled the return to prominence of the Ku Klux Klan. Tom Rice cautions us in this regard: a straightforward relationship of cause and effect between the film’s release and the Klan’s resurgence surely oversimplifies the matter. The true history, he writes, is far more “complex, stuttering, and far-reaching,” involving, among other things, the repeated appropriation for their own purposes of the film by the Klan once it had achieved wide notoriety. 21 Nonetheless, Rice allows that “initial screenings of Birth in 1915 . . . contributed to the legitimization of an urban Klan and helped, at least ideologically, to transform a local historical group into a national institution.”22 Stephen Weinberger also downplays the extent to which the film contributed to racist policies and actions; while it “demeaned blacks and reinforced negative attitudes,” he writes, these issues pale in comparison to real-world problems inspired by racism, such as “lynchings and discrimination in housing, employment, transportation, and education.”23 That said, while the influence an artwork exerts on the imagination and consciousness of its audience often cannot be directly linked to tangible examples of injustice, this does not entail that such links do not exist. Indeed, it is difficult to extemporize about the social role of art precisely because such links are almost always impossible to fully ascertain. Within the larger scope of this book, it can at least be said that Birth’s initial effects were negative – which means, in turn, that we must admit an important corollary to our discussion of aesthetic utility. This corollary is simply the following: while we tend to presume that the social effects of art are beneficial, this cannot simply be assumed,

Screened Anxieties  59 especially in the case of a single artwork. The unpredictability of aesthetic utility guarantees, among other things, the continual possibility that a given artwork will make the world a worse place, not a better one. This unfortunate fact is true, I think, of Birth, though it must be said that its social impact continues today, far beyond the height of its ­popularity – and that the lessons we draw from it today are very different, perhaps, from those gleaned by its first audiences. 24 Partly for these reasons, Birth has been the subject of abundant critical attention, from seminal essays by scholars such as Michael Rogin and Clyde Taylor to more recent contributions by Susan Courtney, Dick Lehr, Eric Olund, Melvyn Stokes, Michele Faith Wallace, Courtney Barrett, and others. 25 The social and historical contexts of the film and its tumultuous reception history have been carefully analyzed. However, relatively scant attention has been paid to the movie’s complex relationship to modernism. Given the initial sketch I have offered in this chapter of D.W. Griffith’s views of art and of history, Birth might well be said to be an outlier within modernism, the product of aesthetic principles contrary to those of other key modernist figures. Its nostalgic certitude, too, seems to connect Birth more strongly to the past than to the future. However, in this chapter I will seek to unveil Birth’s modernist tendencies by considering a further underexplored dimension of the film: its affect. Griffith’s overweening confidence in the power of cinema and of Birth is belied by a deep anxiety in the film over its role and reception, an anxiety which, rendered most plainly in the film’s wavering between hope and fear, is Birth’s signal affect. I first demonstrate the presence of this anxiety in the facial cues of the film’s characters, whose expressions often mirror and evoke the emotional tenor of the film. I then show how the film’s formal manipulations of temporality further denote an attempt to exercise control over history and over its audience. In turn, these insights pave the way for a new reading of the film’s conclusion. Griffith’s prediction ultimately reveals, both poignantly and troublingly, his longing for an aesthetic control that remains necessarily beyond reach. The points in Birth at which directorial control falters indicate a fundamental tension in the film, one produced by its imbrication within, and simultaneous attempt to disavow, a basic epistemological uncertainty that also features as one of the key markers of modernist consciousness. In this way, the anxieties present in Birth reveal it as a product of its time but are also the catalyst for a totalizing and finally imprisoning aesthetic, an understanding of which enables us to see anew the connection between the film’s politics and its form.

3.  Birth and the Modernist Future The textbook (if by now somewhat well-worn) understanding of literary modernism is that it enacts a rupture with past traditions, thereby producing and recording a sensation of being unmoored in the present

60  Screened Anxieties and – having “wreck[ed] the old world in order to make room for the new,” to borrow Heather Love’s phrase – advancing precariously toward an unknown future. 26 If Birth participates in this movement, we might surmise that it does so largely through its formal innovations, which include its popularization of a specifically filmic language. After all, in other respects Birth reads as antiquarian, as anything but modernist: its unabashed nostalgia has traditionally been understood as working against its groundbreaking formal sophistication. 27 But while Birth is indeed a deeply paradoxical film, the paradox is misplaced insofar as it is understood to subsist in the contrast between Griffith’s romanticization of the past and his pioneering mastery of cinematic tropes. No such simple divide between form and content is possible; Griffith’s vision of the South, for example, is created and sustained in part by his remarkable camera work. 28 Rather, the tension in Birth appears in the distinction between aspiration and reality, between the wishes the film encodes and the limitations it resists. The aesthetic and societal ambitions of Birth originate in Griffith’s twin convictions that cinema can speak the truth of history and that by doing so, it can teach its audience to live out of that history into the future. As Michael Rogin writes, Birth was created to be “the screen memory . . . through which Americans were to understand their collective past and enact their future.”29 But these convictions, taken together, augur a still deeper one. At its core, Birth is a fantasy of historical control, the compendium of Griffith’s belief in the power of art to bend society and even history to the artist’s will. Birth exerts a tremendous effort to control the commitments of its audience, willing them by turns to hope for and fear the various futures it names. Far from excluding Birth from the modernist landscape, this determination to recover an idealized past and to shape an ideal future reveals it as documenting a disavowal of the epistemological uncertainty that colors much of what was produced in the modernist era – one by which the film, too, is strongly beset. In his oft-cited analysis of Birth, Michael Rogin elaborates on the film’s relationship to the history it seeks to document: Griffith’s aim was to abolish interpretation; that project made representation not an avenue to history but its replacement. Griffith claimed to be filming history in Birth, just as he said he was filming his father, but he also claimed to be bringing a new history into being. . . . It replaced history by film. Presented as a transparent representation of history . . . the film actually aimed to emancipate the representation from its referent and draw the viewer out of history into film.30 I propose here a minor but critical emendation of Rogin’s claim. Birth is not, precisely speaking, an attempt to replace or to eradicate history but

Screened Anxieties  61 an attempt to control it. No outright denial of history, either overt or covert, is made in the film (though history’s malleability and its concomitant shaping toward precise socio-political ends in the auteur’s hands is everywhere tacitly assumed). The implications of the distinction between eradication and control become clear when we conceive of history as both past and future, rather than simply as past. History is a continuum into which Birth arrives not as an attempted endpoint but as a product evincing its creator’s strong consciousness of – and determined battle against – his own temporal limitedness and subjectivity. We can now begin to see why Griffith’s avowal of film’s educational and representational capacities was so crucial for him. If it can both fully recreate and successfully teach the past, cinema can inaugurate a desired future through the very force with which it overmasters history. As a Griffith newspaper advertisement for Birth puts it, “The mistakes of the suffering past teach us to avoid the terrific pitfalls of the now present and the nearing future.”31 These “terrific pitfalls” underscore how Birth is a product of modernist pressures that are only further revealed by its attempts to exorcise them. Halfway through the film, an intertitle urges that the past, and not the present or future, is the sole object of focus: “This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction Period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.”32 This statement conceives of past and present as a chasm across which no influence or connection can be traced. But in fact, Birth is an expression of the opposite conviction – that past, present, and future are inexorably intertwined and that the film alone can untangle these knotted strands in a way that will guarantee a legible future. The anxieties on display in Birth differ from those in other modernist works because they are so intricately tied to the racist beliefs of Griffith, its director, and of Thomas Dixon (who wrote The Clansman, the novel on which Birth is based). As many scholars have pointed out, one of the most pressing of these fears was the migration of Southern black workers to northern cities, which had begun in the early twentieth century.33 Another was the increasing role African Americans were obtaining in political affairs.34 But both these fears are secondary to a still more essential one: the fear of miscegenation. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Birth is propelled, beginning to end, by its terror at the prospect of marital, but especially sexual, union between blacks and whites; Susan Courtney aptly calls Birth “American cinema’s primal fantasy of miscegenation.”35 Given that these desired and feared futures roil so near the polished surface of Birth, the film, while it reads in certain respects as anti-modernist, nonetheless exemplifies an instance of both modernist anxiety and, with it, as though marshaled to meet it, modernist hope. Before analyzing the film’s scenes, I want to situate Birth more clearly within modernism by delineating my reading of modernist uncertainty and the film’s relation to it. The definition of modernism I offered earlier

62  Screened Anxieties entails that the era is defined by aesthetic rupture and by increasing doubt in the human ability to use the past as a guide for the future. However, it must be acknowledged that modernist artists valued and responded to this rupture in a wide variety of ways. One trait easily associated with modernist writing, in fact, is confidence. Ezra Pound’s era-defining aphorisms and critical bravado come to mind here, as do the brash manifestos of F.T. Marinetti and the futurists. But the presence of this aesthetic confidence, especially when brandished as a sort of salve for, or response to, a deep ambivalence toward tradition, often appears in direct correlation with a tendency toward anti-democratic political views. Overconfidence about the precise social role of art and about its transformative power – sometimes paired, ironically enough, with a derisive attitude toward the public consumption of art – can be easily wedded to (though not equated with) a totalitarian mindset. As a politically and ethically troubling modernist document, Birth is a fascinating outlier here in that its apparent assertiveness masks a deep concern about the future and about the capacity of great art to counter this concern. The aesthetic confidence to which Birth aspires interests me here insofar as such confidence would seem to eliminate the need for either hopefulness or fearfulness on the part of the modernist creator. An aesthetics of power and control rejects hope and fear as unnecessary precisely since they indicate frailty. For while hope and fear are opposites in that they signal, respectively, an expectation of a positive or a negative outcome, they are alike in that they register human limitation, revealing their possessors as subjects lacking complete control over their futures, subjects conscious that some events, and their causes and effects, are outside their agency. Thus, registering the disposition of any artwork toward the future – not only how it exudes hope or fear but how it reads its own display of these emotional registers – offers us an index of its reaction to the fact that certain historical processes are beyond its control. In many respects, aesthetic modernism more generally dramatizes a weakening of epistemological confidence: the determined daring, the will to novelty present in so much of its art and literature follows in the wake of the realization that fully knowing oneself or one’s world is impossible. In the case of Birth, this surrender is evident even though it is resisted rather than willed. On a careful viewing, the hopes and fears it manifests become increasingly visible, as though through a flimsy veneer. Protesting the very social changes that made modernism possible, Birth invokes the power of art – literalized in the sustained cinematic illusion of veracity and the manipulation of temporality – to cling to the belief that the past can be retrieved and the future predicted. It is precisely where this control slips – where the façade of absolute authority is shattered – that we see the film’s frailties and anxieties and how much of its lasting significance ironically derives from its inability to adhere to its own aesthetic codes.36

Screened Anxieties  63

4.  Visual Representations of Affect in Birth Susan Courtney has shown how, beginning with his early work for Biograph, Griffith’s films “invite spectators to identify variously with suffering white women and with white and non-white men in ‘feminized’ conditions to produce the spectatorial ‘agony’ often associated with Griffith’s cinema.”37 Courtney’s reading of Birth focuses on bound, subjugated, or otherwise “feminized” figures, all of which are eventually rescued not only by parading Klansmen but, in a manner of speaking, by the carefully orchestrated temporal logic of the film. Building on her work, I wish to pay closer attention here to the way Griffith encourages the potential adoption by his audience of particular attitudes toward the future – ranging from anticipation to terror – by strategically revealing these attitudes in the faces of his characters. These emotions are almost always visible on the faces of white, female characters, since (as Courtney has shown) it is these characters who inhabit the nexus of spectatorial sympathy the film seeks to establish. In this way, sublimating its own fraught attitudes toward past and future, Birth becomes a record of its own attempt to wrest control over both domains by replicating, and then satisfying, these attitudes in the mind of an ideal viewer. Other critics have traced examples of the complex transference of fears related to race and gender through which Birth expresses a distinct crisis of white masculinity.38 I want to focus on one significant aspect of how the film’s patriarchal understanding of gender is legible in terms of affect. Broadly speaking, men are the central actors of Birth; they perform, in physical, bodily ways, and the more heroic their characters, the more their feelings tend to be controlled or masked. (Indeed, by the end of the film, some of the film’s white male heroes – Ben Cameron in particular – are literally masked by their Klan hoods, entirely obscuring the potential presence of any affective states that might mark them as feminine.) In contrast, white women in Birth are the recipients of actions performed by black or white males; within the purview of the film, their task is less to act than to feel and thus to become emotional cues for the spectator. Two emotions they feel with regularity are hope and fear – in part because hope and fear create very legible facial expressions, and are thus useful to Griffith as a poignant means of inciting sympathy in his audience, but also because Birth, which Griffith advertises as being focused on the past (defensively pleading that it is “not meant to reflect on any race or people of today”), is really at least as oriented toward the future (Birth). The intertitle to one of Griffith’s most famous juxtapositions of long shots with close-ups encapsulates the proposition that in Birth, men act and women feel: “While the women and children weep, a great conqueror marches to the sea” (Birth). This sequence demonstrates the human cost of war through a close-up of a despairing woman and her

64  Screened Anxieties children. A slow pan to the right reveals a panoramic view of marching troops, emphasizing the connection between military endeavors and the suffering citizen. 39 This is a pattern used throughout Birth: female faces are used to narrate the emotional cadences of the film’s main plot points, most of which are instigated by men. For example, in an early scene, Elsie Stoneman clings to her brothers before they depart for the war; once they depart, she raises her hands to her face in anguish then collapses on the front steps of the family home. Shortly thereafter, the invasion of the Cameron estate by a Negro militia occasions an opportunity for Griffith to present the viewer with two simultaneous and opposing emotional responses. As the girls hide in the cellar, young Flora Cameron quivers with happy excitement, only to be scolded by her older sister Margaret, who wrings her hands in fear. The two sisters’ faces offer a contrast in possible affective orientations toward the future. By showing Flora’s carefree silliness checked by her sister’s sober apprehension, Griffith reminds the viewer of the grave threat of miscegenation and encourages an appropriate reaction (fear), all while inviting the viewer to identify with besieged femininity. A wider range of affects is visible soon afterward, when the Cameron family receives news of the death of Wade, the second son, and of Ben’s grave injury. After reading the news, Flora Cameron glares with hatred and ineffectually waves her clenched fists, but following an intertitle that reminds us of “[t]he woman’s part,” the sisters are next depicted in postures of mingled grief and consolation (Birth). “The woman’s part” clearly provides the film with its textures of feeling, but Birth regulates these feelings, overtly indicating which are acceptable and which are not. By doing so, the film downplays the real anxieties at stake while authorizing itself as a controlling force, master of the affects it locates in the faces of others. Griffith’s control of these affects is especially notable during the sequence in which Mrs. Cameron and Elsie plead with Abraham Lincoln to pardon Ben Cameron, who is in danger of being hanged as a war criminal. We witness fear give way to hope on their faces as Elsie concocts a plan: “We will ask mercy from the Great Heart” (Birth). Their excitement shifts to doubt as they prepare to petition Lincoln, and doubt turns to despair on Mrs. Cameron’s face as she is initially rebuffed. However, she is spurred by Elsie to persist. Meanwhile, a parallel iris shot reveals Ben waiting in his hospital bed, his face virtually blank, before transitioning quickly to a fadeout – a visual reminder that his life hangs in the balance. In the following scene, Mrs. Cameron’s head sinks dramatically, evoking her despair; but just as she turns to shuffle away, Lincoln reaches out and touches her shoulder, granting her request. Again, the two female figures in the scene are proxies for the viewer’s expected response to this sudden positive turn of events: Mrs. Cameron

Screened Anxieties  65 sinks to her knees, overwhelmed, while Elsie clasps her hands to her face in delighted hope. In either case, while it calibrates them to maximize the visceral enjoyment of its audience, the camera places itself at a remove from these future-oriented responses. If the camera has any analogue here, it is to Lincoln, the “Great Heart,” who benignly pens a pardon for Ben Cameron, his small act of mercy rewriting the futures of the film’s principal characters. These visual representations of hope and fear in Birth reveal Griffith to be interested in depicting hope and fear (and thus a whole range of attitudes to futurity) only insofar as he can depict them in a manner that, first of all, adheres with exactitude to his rigid racial, sexual, and economic codes and that, second of all, exonerates his film from the charge that any uncertainty – any hope, any fear – is imbricated within its own narrative logic. This is the same narrative logic by which Griffith promises, through Birth, a complete rehabilitation of the disappeared past. Such a promise proceeds from an aesthetic philosophy that insists on the ability of the auteur to consider history objectively, from without – and thus not to be subject to the messy emotions and the indeterminacies that living in history makes inevitable.

5.  Parallel Editing and Temporal Control Birth is a movie captivated by the future but set almost entirely in the past, so I want to remark briefly on how Griffith situates it in relation to the history he seeks to recover. Critics have labeled Griffith’s representation of the past in Birth as fundamentally nostalgic – “history without guilt,” in Daniel J. Walkowitz’s neat phrasing.40 This nostalgia is especially evident in the film’s early scenes, in which slaves dance happily for their masters while the Northern visitors to the Cameron estate look on. Such scenes evoke what Everett Carter has called “the Plantation Illusion,” a fantasy of the supposedly idyllic character of Southern plantation life.41 But Birth is not nostalgic merely in order to rehabilitate a romanticized past or to convince the spectator of the rightness of the Southern agrarian way of life. Nostalgia offers a means of looking back that also, paradoxically, enacts a gaze forward from the past back to the present. Consider the intertitle that introduces us to the town of Piedmont, where the Camerons live: “Piedmont, South Carolina, the home of the Camerons, where life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more” (Birth). As the phrase “is to be no more” reveals, nostalgia acquires power in Birth not simply as the attempt to restore and sustain a lost (and in some ways fictive) past but as a means of indicating the film’s temporal assuredness. Griffith not only knows this past; he knows it elegiacally: he can interpret the implications of its vanishing from the vantage point of the present. Any grief over what has been lost is thus

66  Screened Anxieties mitigated by Griffith’s confidence in the film’s ability to incorporate that loss into a lesson that will help to shape a narrative of the present and future. The shaping of that narrative, of course, depends on more than the film’s historical accuracy: it depends on its capacity to transmit the lessons of history to its audience. It is for this reason that didacticism, along with verisimilitude, informs Griffith’s aesthetic. Where Griffith uses verisimilitude to establish control over the past, he uses didacticism to establish it over the spectator. Griffith’s assumption that the filmmaker holds a position of power over his audience is evident in the tendency of Birth to compel assent through the power of spectacle. It seems fair to say that one of cinema’s innate qualities is its appeal to viewers to surrender their critical faculties and submit to its sensory inundation. Indeed, the enjoyment we derive from watching films may consist, in part, in this very surrender; as Courtney writes of Griffith’s films, “spectatorial pleasure is organized around our having to submit to the machinations of the cinematic apparatus.”42 This was likely still more true at the outset of the film era, when the impressiveness of the moving camera’s gaze was still so novel as to preclude, perhaps, other forms of judgment. Early audiences captivated by a new technology may not have been as attentive to the precise methods by which sound and image were manipulated to create a filmic reality.43 As arguably the first film auteur, Griffith’s magisterial use of these methods only further enhanced cinema’s overwhelming effect on its audience.44 Detailed and authentic-seeming war footage, panoramic wide shots conveying sublimity, dizzyingly rapid cross-cuts, and abrupt shifts from close-ups to long shots and back again all form part of Griffith’s strategy to leave viewers “enthralled by the affective power of his spectacular, driving narrative.”45 Griffith’s goal of spectatorial s­ tupefaction – apparent, as Russell Merritt writes, in the late chase scenes that work to “cut off intellectual analysis with a nerve-wracking assault on the spectator’s emotional faculties” – suggests his patronizing view of the filmgoer but also further indicates his conception of art.46 Where other modernist works prize ambiguity, texture, and multiplicity of meaning, Griffith saw film’s potential precisely in its ability to remove these features from the project of aesthetic communication. Griffith’s affinity for visual spectacle, for the sublime, speaks to his desire to create an image for viewers that will absolutely refute the possibility of other ­interpretations – an image that, by its very totality, will render superfluous their collective capacities to imagine. An implied inequality between director and audience manifests itself repeatedly in Birth through Griffith’s virtuosic manipulation of temporality. One way Griffith highlights his film’s control over time is by representing the characters and audience of Birth as comparatively in thrall to time’s power. The film’s farewell scenes offer useful sites for the

Screened Anxieties  67 dramatization of this contrast. Once Lincoln’s call for volunteers goes out, crises of impending separation and uncertain return play out in scenes both grand and quiet. The Cameron family members bid goodbye to the three Cameron brothers, and the town of Piedmont to its departing soldiers. The music changes from mournful, as personal goodbyes are exchanged, to brightly celebratory, as the town sees its heroes off, to quietly contemplative, as Elsie tells her father that her brothers have left for the front. The faces of the Cameron family, of Elsie, and of the people of Piedmont express a similarly wide range of emotions, from pride to sadness to worry to excitement. The clear subtext here – indicated by the music and its abrupt shifts in mood – is that the characters in these scenes simply do not know what to feel, because they do not know what the future will bring. As if assuring its audience that it is not prey to the same fickleness, the film’s next intertitle reads, “Two and a half years later” – a diegetic jump forward in time that advertises cinema’s imperviousness to the very farewell scenes it has just illustrated (Birth). While Griffith sometimes used intertitles to speed up time, he is still better known for his ability to slow down time through parallel editing. The importance of parallel editing originates in the simple fact that, as Tom Gunning writes, “[a]ssembling several shots allows temporal relations that are elusive in the single unedited shot.”47 That is, because the typical film is a composite of edited and assembled shots, a range of possibilities opens up with respect to filmic treatment of temporality.48 One of Griffith’s lasting contributions to the art of cinema was his popularization of the technique of parallel editing (or cross-cutting), which involves the interweaved juxtaposition of two or more simultaneously occurring scenes. One effect of this technique, as Stephen Kern notes, is to “expand time” for the spectator.49 The expansion of time requires slowing it down, eschewing “real time” in order to fully represent simultaneity. Such manipulations necessitate a departure from strict mimesis; Griffith’s use of them despite this drawback demonstrates his awareness of the overwhelming effect these techniques generate. Griffith’s success in using parallel editing to manipulate time and to induce various affects in his audience anticipates important later movements in cinema, primary among them what has become known as the “montage” style developed by filmmakers in the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s. While the ambitions of these later filmmakers were not identical with those of Griffith, they do share some important features, among them the general desire to “overcome the barriers separating life and art” – a goal manifested in, for example, the naturalism of Pudovkin and the utopianism of Eisenstein.50 In addition, the radical disjunctions effected by the montage style – a style whose central characteristic, Eisenstein writes, is “the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other,” which produces a “shattering” force51 – bespeaks a form of authorial control and mastery, as well as an intent to play on the emotions

68  Screened Anxieties of its audience, that ultimately rendered the Russian avant-garde movement susceptible to appropriation by fascist ideology, as scholars such as Mark Antliff have demonstrated.52 Griffith’s pioneering work in this area owed to his intuitive understanding of the way parallel editing can be used to influence the reception of filmic content. As Tom Gunning details in his book D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Film, parallel editing is an especially powerful tool for the production of affective responses such as suspense, via what Gunning calls “a pattern of delay.”53 Parallel editing gives Griffith another means not only to provide his audience with compelling drama but to subject them to his authorial control, stoking in them both hope and fear and then deferring the outcomes of events to maximize their immersion in his narrative. The film’s climax offers a compelling instance of how Griffith uses parallel editing to both increase suspense and challenge the viewer’s perceptual habits. As the Klansmen ride to save Elsie Stoneman from a leering Silas Lynch, who has declared his intention to marry her against her will, the intercutting scenes in which we are privy to the actions of Silas and Elsie – never long to begin with – grow shorter and shorter. Elsie faints and Lynch catches her in his arms in a scene that commands less than three seconds of screen time. We are transported to a scene of conflict in the streets, then back to Lynch, who looks up as though having heard something; this scene lasts less than two seconds. In these expertly intercut scenes, Griffith demands the audience’s capitulation to the film’s control of time and space by overwhelming them with rapid images that provoke a strong emotional response. As the images increase in visual potency, Griffith shortens the length of time they are onscreen, relying on the effect created by their sudden disappearance. When Griffith shifts our attention to the party in the cabin, an intertitle furthers this sensation. Reading simply “Meanwhile, other fates –,” the intertitle remains unfinished, both submitting to the relentlessness of the images around it and evoking the spectator’s inability to form complete thoughts amidst the escalating tension (Birth). Further establishing its narrative control, the film returns only sporadically to the question of these “other fates” – those of Margaret Cameron, Dr. Cameron, Phil Stoneman, and the Union soldiers holed up in the cabin. Indeed, at one point in the sequence, more than three minutes of real time passes between sightings of these characters – an absurdly long deferral in such heightened circumstances. In such instances, Birth’s temporal dexterity functions partly to ensure that its characters and its audience lack that same dexterity and that it alone is capable not only of rendering the past exactly but of ordering and organizing the future. Griffith’s willingness to manipulate time and history to achieve his aims is often at odds with his stated claim that Birth is able to recover and represent a “pure” history of the South: his formal machinations exist in a strange tension with the strictly mimetic rendering Birth purports

Screened Anxieties  69 to offer. The film’s inevitable failure to live up to its own unreachable standards creates – as Merritt points out – fissures or cracks, places in which it reveals itself as self-contesting, inconsistent, what Merritt calls “formally ungovernable.”54 Some of the film’s most crucial scenes remain ambiguous precisely because Griffith, for all his professed dedication to verisimilitude, refrains from explicitly or accurately representing scenes whose potential actualization he dreads. In other words, it is exactly where the film itself – not its characters – becomes fearful that its grand project of mastering history falters. As Merritt has shown, this is evident in the film’s portrayal of Gus in the much-discussed scene in which he chases Flora, which depends at least as much on an implied shared racial hatred as it does Gus’s literal – and potentially harmless – words and actions.55 But another aspect of Birth’s narrative sleight of hand is worth observing here. It is not only the inconsistency between the actions of Gus and the negative assumptions about his character that betray the film as marked by racial fears. These fears are also strikingly evident – more so, in that they directly pertain to the manipulation of temporality – in the editing of the various shots that compose the scene. As Flora nears the cliff from which she will eventually jump to her death, the camera follows the actions of three characters: Flora, Gus, and Ben Cameron, each covering the same ground in succession. In the moments before the impending standoff, Griffith increases the viewer’s suspense by showing each character in isolation. This strategy renders it briefly unclear whether Gus is closer to Flora than Ben is to Gus, granting the audience hope for a happy resolution. This ambiguity fades as Flora scrambles up the rocky ledge. After beginning with a close-up of her face moving into the frame, Griffith situates the camera at a slightly greater distance to accentuate Flora’s perilous position on the cliff edge. The next shot is of Gus ascending the path Flora has just climbed; recognizing it, the viewer becomes aware of her plight just before Flora herself does. Her head turned away from the camera, looking back toward where the viewer must assume Gus is positioned, she waves her hands in panic. The camera backs away, and we view the scene from the same increased distance used earlier; from this vantage point, we see Gus enter the frame, mere feet from where Flora sits distraught. He is visible from the chest up, the rest of his body obscured by an outcrop he has yet to scale. As seen in Figure 2.1, Flora extends her arms in front of her pleadingly, emphasizing her helplessness. Griffith then returns to Ben Cameron, who is now in a frenzy. Emerging from between some trees, he yells for Flora and abruptly runs out of the camera’s view. We come back to Flora; again, the camera shoots from a middle distance, so that Gus’s chest and head are visible behind her. The camera moves to another close-up, making Flora’s fright obvious and increasing the audience’s dramatic

70  Screened Anxieties

Figure 2.1  F  lora’s plea for help.

Figure 2.2  Gus ascends the precipice.

involvement in her predicament. An  intertitle appears, indicating her next words: “Stay away or I’ll jump!” (Birth). Two more close-ups of Flora precede a long shot, shown in Figure 2.2, in which the dark figure of Gus, silhouetted against the sky, clearly advances toward Flora, climbing up the outcrop. Brought back to Ben Cameron’s location down below, we watch as he spots Flora’s location and sprints in her direction. Yet another close-up of Flora, now overtly panicked, heightens the tension further. Then the camera moves back again to its more removed position, enabling

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Figure 2.3  F  lora prepares to leap, with Gus framed behind her.

us to situate Flora with respect to Gus – and we see that Gus is still at chest-level below Flora, most of his body blocked out by the outcrop (see Figure 2.3). From a crouching position, Flora rises to her feet. The camera shifts to a close-up of Gus, whose advance on all fours symbolizes his predatory, animalistic nature. He moves past the camera’s vision; then, following a brief long shot in which Flora waves her arms one last time, we are returned again to the framing middle distance view of the clifftop, this time to watch as Flora jumps to her death. Another long shot depicts her body falling down the cliff face. As it rolls to a stop, Gus climbs to the promontory where Flora was, and a final long shot shows him standing there, legs aggressively wide, before he flees. The purpose of the above exhaustive description of the movements leading up to Flora’s death emerges in three key moments I have isolated. In the first, shown in Figure 2.1, Gus appears in the background as Flora realizes that she has nowhere to turn. The second, Figure 2.2, shows Gus moving further up the path, taking several distinct steps toward Flora and inviting the possibility that he is now close enough to physically harm her. The third, Figure 2.3, shows Gus after his recent advance; but he is not any closer to Flora than he was in Figure 2.1, even though he just took several steps up the hillside. He remains visible only from the chest up, still having to surmount a final ledge to reach Flora. In other words, a small but critical spatio-temporal incongruity problematizes the scene. Gus manages at once to climb up after Flora and to remain rooted to a spot just far enough from her that he cannot attack her. Given the obvious care and attention to detail in Griffith’s editing and choreographing of this sequence, it’s worth probing why Gus

72  Screened Anxieties is simultaneously – and contradictorily – ascendant and immobile, approaching Flora and all the while remaining where he is. To understand this apparent mistake, we must recall the fear that most animates the film and the history of its making: that of miscegenation. Gus’s attempted rape of Flora, while it caricatures black males as violent and sex-starved, also metonymizes an anxiety over potential interracial unions. To read this climactic moment in the film symbolically is to see this anxiety in full flower. And it is death that intervenes: Gus’s desires are stymied by Flora’s honor-saving suicide. But while Flora flees to her death to evade capture, it is also the careful orchestration of Birth that prevents Gus from reaching her. In showing Gus below the outcrop even after he has been depicted ascending it, Griffith manipulates time and space to defer the realization of Birth’s most-feared outcome. To do so requires surrendering the pose he has tried to maintain throughout, that of the absolute accuracy of the film’s dramatization of history – the equivalence of its universe with our own. Keeping Gus suspended on the mountainside even as it sends Flora to her death, Birth abjures the eventuality it documents, thereby exposing itself as subject to the whims of history. The fascinating bind in which Birth is caught reveals the paradox bound up in Griffith’s aesthetic: his film, when it finally reveals glimpses of the longings and the dread it encodes (a white America and miscegenation, respectively), does so by straying from its agenda of perfect verisimilitude – the very point of which is, by imagined extension of its temporal control into and over the present and future, to render both longing and dread unnecessary.

6.  Modernist Uncertainty and the Ending of Birth Capitulating to its own anxieties, Birth is a product of its moment in that it represents that era’s sense of unknowing, its susceptibility to an unpredictable future. I have argued that Birth’s uniqueness among works of its time period results from the film’s determination to suppress the affects that reveal these uncertainties. These affective postures include hope as well as fear; and the ending of Birth, because it occurs furthest forward in time, even depicting an unrealized future, offers us an accurate reading of some of its unvoiced hopes. The dramatic action of Birth concludes with the victory of the Klansmen over Silas Lynch and his militia, punctuated by a celebratory parade. The “helpless whites” who could do no more than “look on” earlier in the movie, to cite one intertitle, now clap and wave, their exuberant relief serving as a visible analogue for the spectator’s emotions (Birth). Three brief postludes follow this scene, each enriching the film’s record of its own hopes. The first is set during the election following the Klan’s triumph and depicts political disenfranchisement – blacks prohibited from voting by Klansmen on horseback. The second concludes the character

Screened Anxieties  73 arcs of the Cameron and Stoneman families by providing glimpses of the happy marital unions of the two principal couples. The third and final postlude differs from the other two – and from the whole film – in that it is set in the future, not the past. An intertitle longs for the replacement of the rule of “bestial War” by the dominion of “the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace,” and two tableaus briefly depict each (Birth). First, captive souls struggle within a hellish landscape overseen by a god of war astride a bull; then, a Christ-like figure presides over an all-white garden party. Parallel edits link the scene of Ben and Elsie on their honeymoon, gazing wistfully at the ocean, to the joyous gathering above which Christ is seated, such that in the last scene, Ben and Elsie seem to be looking at the heavenly city that contains that gathering rather than at the ocean. The film ends with a final intertitle: “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!” (Birth). The first two of these three postludes celebrate a nation united by its exclusion of black citizens from basic civic and societal institutions. Blacks are withheld the right to vote, and the film’s white characters unite in marriages that symbolize a final erasure of the specter of interracial relationships. Insofar as these scenes spell out the hopes of Birth, its hopes are clear, and clearly racist. However, the inclusion of the final postlude – the only one set in the future – makes reading the film’s ending a less straightforward task. Arthur Lennig rightly observes a disjunction between this last coda and the rest of the film: “It is hard to conceive the relation between the allegorical finale and the play proper.”56 I contend that the reason for this disjunction is that the scenes of hell and heaven are the only ones in Birth that fully depart from its rigorous bent toward verisimilitude, its treatment of the camera as an instrument for the retrieval of historical truth. At the very last, Griffith admits, as it were, the capacity of cinema to imagine rather than to merely record. We must consider, then, from Griffith’s perspective, what value could inhere in these final religious tableaus that outweighs the appeal to historicity so prevalent in the film. Barrett suggests that the death of Lincoln requires the instantiation of a new governing authority, which can only be God Himself.57 Courtney, too, sees the invocation of supernatural authority as central, commenting that the ending depicts “a new white order divinely envisioned by [Ben Cameron], the film, and its spectator.”58 Nonetheless, no turn to explicitly religious figures or doctrines appears anywhere else in Birth, which makes its sudden borrowing from Christian iconography disorienting. In this case, an insight into the process of the film’s composition is crucial. Rogin reminds us that “[t]he original ending of Birth, ‘Lincoln’s solution,’ showed masses of Negros being loaded on ships to be sent back to Africa.”59 In this scene – eventually removed because it too obviously demonstrated the film’s obsession with racial purity60 – an intertitle reasserts Lincoln’s authority, and Birth, while still depicting an envisioned

74  Screened Anxieties future rather than the historical past, avoids straying too far from the willed mimesis that has patterned it throughout. Given the consistently racist subtext of Birth, and the absence elsewhere in it of religious symbolism, its rendering of a surge in the still-nascent Back-to-Africa movement would likely capture the film’s true hopes more accurately than do its closing images of the god of war and the Prince of Peace. Thus, we should read Birth’s religious ending less as a record of its own hopes than as a concession to the likely hopes of its audience and as an attempt to meld its supremacist reading of history with the nation’s still predominantly Christian beliefs. Griffith’s invocation of Christ and his New Jerusalem functions as a final effort to convince his audience – an audience he has thus far patronized and denigrated – that his worldview is commensurate with their own. The film even abandons its verisimilar style to make this plea. And why must Birth do this except because it is uncertain of its own success? Birth’s ending admits to a final anxiety it everywhere denies, a worry that its object – the pure representation of history, the wielding of cinema as aesthetic didacticism – will still leave room for varying interpretations or ambiguities. Birth, a filmic attempt to banish the need for hope and fear in art, finally proves to be hopeful and fearful about its own reception. That these fears were to prove justified, both in the immediate aftermath of the film’s release, which incited riots and protests, and on a timeline extending to the present day, hardly needs stating. The film remains a useful object lesson in part because of the intricate connections, laid out in part here, between its racist ideology and its aesthetic of historical and authorial control. The originating vision that inspired the film, in Thomas Dixon’s novel and in D.W. Griffith’s imagination, was a toxic one; but this vision was abetted by, and may have even helped to inculcate, the film’s misguided aesthetic goals. The Birth of a Nation has been hailed as a formal marvel and at the same time denigrated as racially poisonous; but as this chapter has shown, in one sense the movie is not only an ideological but a formal failure, since it is unable to live up to its own impossible aims. That is to say, Birth is a failure on Griffith’s own flawed terms, and the fact that the film outstrips them is its own curious testament to Griffith’s brilliance and to the film’s rich complexity. In any one artwork, the precise relation of cause and effect between politics and aesthetics must typically remain mysterious, and we cannot extrapolate a general principle regarding their connection within this film beyond that the two can emerge in consonance with each other and can directly influence each other. But in the case of Birth, at least, the unifying theme behind this link can be more precisely established. What the film evinces above all, in both form and theme, is a longing for control – over its subject matter, over its audience, and finally over history itself. I’ve argued here that this longing, which emanates from and

Screened Anxieties  75 reflects a powerful fearfulness and uncertainty due to the rapidly changing cultural landscape of America in the early twentieth century, renders Birth a kind of unwillingly modernist document. In the end, Griffith’s reductive aesthetic philosophy already presages that the troubling social hopes invested in Birth would go unrealized. More than this, the film cannot sustain its own totalizing vision, finally surrendering its pretensions to control over the future and over its own self-contesting significations. Birth’s lasting message, then, may be an unintended one: that the kind of control – aesthetic, historical, political – for which Griffith agitates remains something art, in all its unpredictable dynamism, is unable to provide. For many modernists, relinquishing this sort of control meant that hope was more tenuous, prone to transform back into anxiety or even despair. But it was just as likely to make modernist hope more urgent. If the lineaments of aesthetic utility could not be guaranteed, artists were left to proffer their work to the future as and with a kind of trust, one it would be the privilege and duty of later generations to answer.

Notes 1 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 7. 2 Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), 100. The same quotation, in full or in part, appears in much of the scholarship on Griffith and on The Birth of a Nation. See for example Geoff Pingree, “History Is What Remains: Cinema’s Challenge to Ideas about the Past,” in Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film, ed. Richard Francaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 36–37; Marilyn Fabe, Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 17; Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations 9 (1985): 184; and Robert Lang, “The Birth of a Nation: History, Ideology, Narrative Form,” in The Birth of a Nation: D.W. Griffith, ed. Robert Lang (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 4. 3 Lehr, Birth of a Nation, 136. 4 Quoted in Jenny Barrett, Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 128. 5 On Griffith’s efforts to market Birth as historically accurate, see Brian J. Snee, Lincoln before Lincoln: Early Cinematic Adaptations of the Life of America’s Greatest President (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 38. On its enthusiastic critical reception, see Arthur Lennig, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of The Birth of a Nation,” Film History 16, no. 2 (2004): 123–124; Rogin, “Sword,” 184; Tom Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 20; and Lehr, Birth of a Nation, 199. 6 Arthur Lennig, “Myth and Fact,” 125. Griffith was so confident about the historical accuracy of Birth that he publicly offered $10,000 to the president of the NAACP if he could find anything erroneous in it; see Rogin, “Sword,” 184, and Lehr, Birth of a Nation, 178.

76  Screened Anxieties 7 Brian Snee argues that Birth’s historical facsimiles enable it to occupy a generic “space somewhere between docudrama and documentary . . . a state between reality and fiction” that he defines as “hyperreality” (Snee, Lincoln, 34, emphasis his). Such a Baudrillardian move is not necessary for my purposes here, but the terminology is instructive in that it denotes Griffith’s desire to use Birth to enter into a cinematic territory that is more than, or not merely, fictional. 8 Lehr, Birth of a Nation, 134–135. 9 See, for example, Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 18, 46, 48; John Hope Franklin, “Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History,” The Massachusetts Review 20, no. 3 (1979): 427–429; Melvyn Stokes, “Rethinking Griffith and Racism,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015): 605–606; Barrett, Shooting the Civil War, 132; and Lehr, Birth of a Nation, 270–272. 10 Campbell, Celluloid South, 49. 11 According to Jenny Barrett, Griffith “approached film as a morally and socially educational tool” (Barrett, Shooting the Civil War, 151–152). Terry Christensen uses the same phrase, suggesting that Griffith “saw film as an educational tool, and . . . set out to use it as such”; see Terry Christensen, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon (New York; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 20. In Arthur Lennig’s words, Griffith made a “sincere effort to use the screen as a pulpit” (Lennig, ‘Myth and Fact,” 118). 12 Quoted in Lennig, “Myth and Fact,” 123. 13 “When the present day stage can show one-half to its credit that the motion picture can, then will be the time for criticism,” Griffith asserts in one interview. “It is the stage that should be defended when in comparison with the motion picture.” See Robert E. Welsh, “David W. Griffith Speaks,” The New York Dramatic Mirror, January 14, 1914, 49, 54. 14 Welsh, “David W. Griffith Speaks,” 49. 15 This shift was, however, a complicated one; in his early years at Biograph, Griffith favored the histrionic style. For a detailed analysis of his transition, see Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 75–98. See also Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 225–227. 16 Tony Barta, “Screening the Past: History Since the Cinema,” in Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, ed. Tony Barta (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 3. 17 Barta, “Screening the Past,” 2. 18 Gunning, D.W. Griffith, 18. 19 Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare [1765],” in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 7, ed. Arthur Shero (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1968), 78. 20 Melvyn Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 120. See also Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens, 216, wherein Rice also recounts some of the film’s shifting reception history: The repositioning of Birth in a modern social context may have renewed interest in the film, but it also altered its reception once more. When the Portsmouth New Haven Herald advertised a screening of Birth in January 1939, it contained a picture of a Klansman on a horse. Above the picture was the tagline, “The dreaded Ku Klux Klan rides again!” A few months earlier

Screened Anxieties  77

21 22 2 3 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

a piece in the New Yorker, entitled “Other Times, Other Morals,” discussed a recent screening of The Birth of a Nation near Times Square. The writer explained that in 1915, “when the Klan rode out to save Lillian Gish the audience stood and cheered. Last week a new generation hissed the Klan and applauded ironically when Miss Gish repressed the foul mulatto.” Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens, 3. Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens, 44. Stephen Weinberger, “The Birth of a Nation and the Making of the NAACP,” Journal of American Studies 45 (2011): 79. For instance, as Melvyn Stokes observes, when the film was reissued in 1930, audiences reacted to it very differently than its first viewers had: they “liked the action sequences but laughed openly at the film’s archaic sentiments.” See Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film, 129. Much of the literature on the film cites and draws on Rogin, “Sword,” and on Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 15–37. Recent contributions to the scholarship on The Birth of a Nation include Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Lehr, The Birth of a Nation; Eric Olund, “Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics in The Birth of a Nation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 4 (2013): 925– 943; Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michele Faith Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 1 (2003): 85–104; and Barrett, Shooting the Civil War. See also The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015), an issue dedicated to reassessing the film’s legacy. Heather K. Love, “Forced Exile: Walter Pater’s Queer Modernism,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2006), 19. Elaine Frantz Parsons, “Revisiting The Birth of a Nation at 100 Years,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (2015): 596. Clyde Taylor offers perhaps the most compelling rejection of the possibility of divorcing the film’s formal achievements from its political claims; see Taylor, “Re-Birth,” 17. Rogin, “Sword,” 151. Rogin, “Sword,” 185. Lennig, “Myth and Fact,” 126. The Birth of a Nation, dir. by David W. Griffith (Epoch Producing, 1915; Image Entertainment, 1998). Hereafter cited in-text as Birth. Baldwin, “Black Empire,” 600; Olund, “Geography,” 927; Fabe, Closely Watched Films, 22; and Christensen, Reel Politics, 18. Olund, “Geography,” 926. Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies, 19. See also Baldwin, “Black Empire,” 600; Barrett, Shooting the Civil War, 140; Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies, 5; and Rogin, “Sword,” 166–167, 175–178. Here I concur with Merritt, who argues that Birth “bristles with discordant elements, overtones out of control, that fight the dominant themes.” See Russell Merritt, “D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Going After Little Sister,” in Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), 233. Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies, 23.

78  Screened Anxieties 38 Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies, 65; Rogin, “Sword,” 166–184; Olund, “Geography,” 937; Everett Carter, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation (1915),” in Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context, ed. Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 15. 39 Marilyn Fabe writes that Griffith used close-ups to allow “spectators to better observe and hence to relate empathetically to the expressions on the character’s face, thereby increasing their emotional involvement in the story” (Fabe, Closely Watched Films, 14). 40 Daniel J. Walkowitz, “Re-Screening the Past: Subversion Narratives and the Politics of History,” in Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, ed. Tony Barta (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 49. On Birth as a nostalgic work, see also Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film, 38, and Carter, “Cultural History,” 12. 41 Carter, “Cultural History,” 11–12. 42 Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies, 30. See also Stephen Weinberger, who observes that film boasts “an unmatched power to manipulate its viewers and deprive them of the opportunity to use their imaginations or make independent judgments” (Weinberger, “Birth and the Making of the NAACP,” 86). 43 Brian J. Snee notes that the popular style of early films such as Birth was to strive for “invisibility” through the “concealment of artifice,” which “meant that audiences were encouraged to suspend their disbelief and become immersed in the narrative.” The result, Snee observes – especially in the case of historical films – is that “the viewer gets an education in historical causality that often flies under his or her critical radar” (Snee, Lincoln, 28). 4 4 Tom Gunning argues that Griffith succeeded in this respect by integrating cinema’s ability to astound into fully-fledged narratives. His “transformation” of the art of film was less his innovative use of any one cinematic technique than his talent for “codifying filmic devices pioneered by others in terms of storytelling” (Gunning, D.W. Griffith, 41). Storytelling may in fact be the very oldest means we know of generating uncritical assent. 45 Olund, “Geography,” 937. 46 Merritt, “Little Sister,” 220. 47 Gunning, D.W. Griffith, 26. 48 On Griffith’s sophisticated use of these techniques with respect to temporality, see also Rogin, “Sword,” 157. 49 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 30. 50 Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avantgarde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 169. On Pudovkin’s naturalism, see David Harrah, “Aesthetics of the Film: The Pudovkin-Arnheim-Eisenstein Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 13, no. 2 (1954): 164–165. On Eisenstein’s utopianism and the broader utopianism of the avant-garde, see Hagener, Moving Forward, 167, 202. 51 Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” in Eisenstein, Film Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 37–38. 52 See Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 53 Gunning, D.W. Griffith, 103. 54 Merritt, “Little Sister,” 219.

Screened Anxieties  79 55 56 57 58 59 60

Merritt, “Little Sister,” 227–228, 234–235. Lennig, “Myth and Fact,” 119. Barrett, Shooting the Civil War, 147. Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies, 97. Rogin, “Sword,” 153. As Lennig reports, a Censorship Board deemed the scene “too inflammatory” and demanded its removal (Lennig, “Myth and Fact,” 125).

3 Unpredictable Texts H.D.’s Grammar of Creation

To accept life – but that is dangerous. It is also dangerous not to accept life.1 –H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision

1  The Challenge of H.D.: Seeking a Foundation In his 1967 book Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Vincent Quinn summarizes H.D.’s career by asserting that her best works are her early Imagist poems, in part because her later writing, while strong in places, suffers from imprecision and inconsistency. According to Quinn, H.D.’s mid-career novels and poems feature a “vague prescription of optimistic fatalism” (curious phrase!); they are resonant with hope but of a kind that doesn’t bear up under scrutiny. “Examined closely,” Quinn concludes, “her certainties appear to be merely hopes stiffened by unusual self-confidence.”2 The sort of bravado entailed by ill-founded hope masquerading as certainty might put us in mind, again, of a figure like D.W. Griffith. But as I will show in this chapter, the dissimilarities between Griffith and H.D. prove greater than the similarities, in part because – contra Quinn – H.D.’s hope never pretends to be other than what it is. This does not make defining the function of hope in H.D.’s work a simple task, however. In this chapter I want to answer Quinn’s charge by untangling the nature and resonance of the hope that inheres in H.D.’s work, the logic of which is substantiated by her complex conception of the relation between art, temporality, and society. In doing so, I will draw on H.D.’s early theoretical text Notes on Thought and Vision; the POOL Group film Borderline; her autobiographical novel The Gift; and Trilogy, the long poem in three parts she composed during World War II. Quinn’s declaration that posterity would view H.D. as an Imagist poet, since this early period of her career occasioned her best work, seems to be affirmed by the general consensus of those with a passing knowledge of the poet. This despite the fact that the label “Imagist,” affixed to H.D. by Ezra Pound in 1912, was one she resisted for most of her career3 and despite the fact, too, that most prominent H.D. scholars

Unpredictable Texts  81 now see Trilogy as her highest achievement.4 One reason for this broad public unfamiliarity with H.D.’s later poetry, perhaps Trilogy especially, is that its highly esoteric, spiritual, densely sourced content distances it from the contemporary reader. As Gloria Fromm observes, in her post-Imagist phase, H.D. attached herself to such an array of ideas both plausible and implausible – from magic, astrology, and spiritualism to the cabala and psychoanalysis – and such an assortment of men and women . . . that her character as a poet is particularly hard to define.5 The men in H.D.’s life – most prominently Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and, of course, Sigmund Freud – did impact her thought and writing in varying and significant ways. But it is the mélange of beliefs to which H.D. subscribed, increasingly from the 1930s onward, that presents a real challenge to the critic seeking a through-line. H.D.’s unorthodox spiritual journey began in her childhood; she was raised as a member of the Moravian church, a heterodox offshoot of Christianity dating back to the fifteenth century and known for its valorization of the feminine. By the time she had matured as a poet, she drew for creative inspiration from a heady mix that included the teachings of the biblical Gospels, Egyptology, astrology, ancient Greek paganism, and the psychoanalytic ideas she gleaned from Freud. Though ideas from these traditions appear throughout her later poetry, to simply argue on H.D.’s behalf for the combined power of these gathered systems of belief will be unconvincing to most readers.6 Most major critics of H.D. have instead opted to select a single concept or belief system under which the others can be subsumed and to recast her artistic methodology in its light. For example, in Psyche Reborn, perhaps the seminal text on H.D., Susan Stanford Friedman divides H.D.’s career influences into two main areas, the psychoanalytic and the spiritual; these two areas create the bipartite structure of Friedman’s book. In the first part of the book, Friedman identifies H.D.’s thought as rooted in a Freudian vision of the “universality of humankind’s deepest desires and fears.”7 In the second part, she points to the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah as the preeminent source from which H.D. draws to develop her dialectical model.8 Where Friedman finds two main conceptual wellsprings of H.D.’s thought, other scholars narrow the options down to one. Adalaide Morris argues that H.D.’s later work coalesces under the “master metaphor” of “projection.”9 For Dennis Brown, the Gnostic tradition is the one with which she is most fruitfully allied.10 Albert Gelpi and Rachel Blau DuPlessis both see a maternal or feminist consciousness as the originary force in H.D.’s poetics.11 And for Margaret M. Dunn, the central concept is that of self-expression; the poem Trilogy is about nothing so much as H.D.’s own development as a poet.12

82  Unpredictable Texts These efforts to find a coherent center of H.D.’s thought are all defensible to varying degrees, and some have been very helpful in elucidating important aspects of her work. If they run the risk of oversimplifying H.D.’s sources of inspiration and forms of belief, it may be partly in order to salvage for modern readers a framework in which her ideas might be comprehended rather than simply dismissed as incompatible or nonsensical. As Jason M. Coats observes of H.D.’s Trilogy, if it had been written in prose, “we would be left with a situation in which the speaker’s bizarre syncretism of Moravian Christianity, Egyptology, Greek ritualism, astrology, and occult spiritualism might easily be dismissed as crankery.”13 Lawrence Rainey, attacking H.D.’s “pseudohistorical uniqueness,” goes so far as to perform this dismissal: “She really does believe,” he writes, “in a mix of bland notions from popular occultism and generalizations that denounce contemporary humanity in the abstract and yet promise everyone that he or she is assured of being a god.”14 In the present moment, certain stipulations obtain if we want to read H.D.’s work in a sustainable and illuminating way. Clearly, one would hope to find an animating principle or purpose in her work differentiable from the cohort of mysterious beliefs and traditions to which she attaches herself. One aim of this chapter is to locate that principle. Another is to demonstrate, in doing so, that modernist hope is essential to H.D.’s project as a writer and that this hope is neither mirage nor smokescreen but is substantiated in and through H.D.’s aesthetic and ethical commitments. The diffuseness of H.D.’s spiritual interests suggests that no single one will satisfy as a foundation for all the others. Rather, some outside idea, separate from any individual religion or psychoanalytic theory, serves as a basis, enabling H.D. to draw from the traditions she does without devolving into incoherence. Rather than subordinating her artistic practice to any of her religious beliefs or psychoanalytic ideas, it is helpful to think of these as interchangeable or as different aspects of a single phenomenon. It is true that, as Elizabeth Anderson writes, H.D. “did not see art as a replacement for religion but as a means to, and expression of, spiritual understanding.”15 But for H.D., art is only not a replacement for religion insofar as religion does not need displacing, since it is already a form of artistic expression (as, equally, artistic practice is spiritual expression). As evidence, consider H.D.’s discussion of Christ in her enigmatic salvo into art theory, Notes on Thought and Vision, which she wrote in in 1919: “The Galilean conquered because he was a great artist, like da Vinci.”16 She interprets the words and actions of Jesus as motivated by a desire to observe, sustain, or create beauty in the world: The Galilean fell in love with things as well as people. He would fall in love with a sea-gull or some lake-heron that would dart up

Unpredictable Texts  83 from the coarse lake grass . . . . Then, he would look at Peter with his great archaic head and Jude with his intense eyes, and he would exclaim suddenly: “Ah, but your faces, your faces are more beautiful, more charged with ideas, with lines that suggest and bring me into touch with the world of over-mind thought, than many, many sparrows. . . . He would be angry, as he looked at the little girl’s face, that she was surrounded by such ugliness. He would look at her for a long time because of the beauty of the little, straight nose, the hair clinging like seaweed to the fine little skull, the very white hands. He would have liked to stay looking at her for hours, like the blue grasslily. But he was afraid they would break in, suddenly again, with their heavy, black clothes, and ugly voices. So he said, “Daughter, I say unto you, Arise.”17 This re-imagining of Christ, written during H.D.’s Imagist period, reveals that she was strongly influenced by Emersonian and transcendentalist thought (her passing reference to “over-mind” follows on a long discussion of it earlier in the text). The passage also evinces her continuing fixation on ancient Greek art and ideas. Note, for instance, that the disciples have been transformed, here, into classical statues of a sort. Especially striking is that in H.D.’s retelling of one of Jesus’s miracles, in which he brings a dead girl back to life, the miracle is performed somewhat begrudgingly. This Jesus values beauty over resurrection; he seems to prefer looking at the deceased girl’s fine Greek features to raising her to life. Thus the resurrecting vision is first, and primarily, an aesthetic vision – which means that H.D.’s forays into tarot cards, Egyptology, the Kabbalah, and the like capture her interest not, in the first place, as further avenues to scientific or religious truth but because they are variations on the theme of the expression of beauty. To say that the aesthetic principle is paramount for H.D. is a critical starting point, though no more than that. In what follows, I will identify what it is about artistic practice that makes it possible for H.D. to understand metaphysical systems in terms of it. Then I will show how this philosophical framework reveals H.D.’s affirmation of aesthetic utility as the condition of her hope for society.

2  Art against War, or the Rejection of Fatalism To move toward a fuller understanding of H.D.’s conception of art, we can begin with the following proposition: the opposite of art, for H.D., is war. The overwhelming impact of the world wars on H.D.’s personal and artistic life is perhaps the most widely accepted aspect of H.D. scholarship. Friedman observes that World War I “constituted a kind of death for H.D.,” from which it was her life’s work to try to recover.18

84  Unpredictable Texts And much of H.D.’s most important work was written during or otherwise colored by the psychological trauma of World War II, including the London bombings and the constant threat of imminent death they invoked. As DuPlessis concludes, “it would be hard to overemphasize the roles of the two World Wars in H.D.’s imaginative and moral life.”19 For H.D., art and war – especially poetry and war – were diametrically opposed, in constant tension with each other, as though each symbolized opposing powers in a spiritual conflict upon which the fate of civilization depended. (In this sense, H.D.’s views are essentially Gnostic.) In a 1943 letter to Mary Sarton, H.D. expounds on this tension: “plants and trees make countries, for us poets, at any rate and if everyone had just a little seasoning of the poet in his make-up, there would be, there could be no more war.”20 More poetry entails less war, though which will predominate remains in doubt: for H.D., who had survived one world war only to be caught up in another, there could be no guarantee that humanity’s aesthetic impulses would overcome its destructive ones. Even in writing The Gift, as DuPlessis notes, H.D. must have felt the possibility that it was “potentially [her] last work, possibly even a lost work.”21 The wartime setting of H.D.’s work thus reveals both her uncertainty regarding the future and her conviction of the moral urgency, for creators, practitioners, and audiences of art, to produce and wield it boldly and courageously, more so now than ever. Why is art the opposite of – and antidote to – war? Most presciently, as Joseph Riddel writes, because war destroys while art creates: “War is a smashing of the old gods, an assault upon walls, the burning of books and the violation of sacred space. Against this force the creative genius stands, affirming its Dream by continuing to indite upon the wall.”22 War traffics in death and brings fear. Art, by contrast, is fundamentally life-giving and hopeful. More than this, it is in the nature of the making and encountering of art to open up new potentialities, to expand the horizon of the possible (a point we will return to later), whereas war is engineered to shrink that same horizon to an almost unbearable smallness. In her wartime novel The Gift, H.D. describes in stark terms the psychic trauma the London bombings created in her: The silt of time is dynamited to powder, along with the walls of the house on the corner; while one’s own walls still shake with the reverberation, there is that solemn pause; time is wiped away. In three minutes or in three seconds, we gain what no amount of critical research or analytical probing could give us, knowledge of the reactions of man in danger, of men in danger, of all men and all women; we shrink, we become time-less and are impersonalized because we are really one of thousands and thousands who are equally facing a fact, the possibility, at any given second, of complete physical annihilation. 23

Unpredictable Texts  85 The emphasis here is on war’s effect on temporality: “time is wiped away” for the survivors of the onslaught, who “become time-less” and de-­ individualized in the face of imminent possible death. Becoming “timeless” here does not mean becoming eternal or entering a space outside time. What H.D. is mourning here is time’s removal, its absence – the dearth of potentiality, the avenues toward better futures the war systematically erases. This is true both culturally and at the individual level: I had gone round and round and now I had made the full circle, now I had come back to the beginning. But the words of the hymns were trite, were trivial and the net of the fowler was no longer a neat Asiatic metaphor but an actuality. But it shall not come nigh thee, at this moment was almost a displeasing thought, for sometimes when the mind reaches its high peak of endurance, there is almost the hope – God forgive us – that the bomb that must fall on someone, would fall on me – but it could not – it must not. Because if the bomb fell on me, it would fall on Bryher and Bryher must go on. That is the way we are trapped, that is the way I was trapped. (Gift, 217) Here H.D. records a moment of near-breakdown, a moment at which her mind “reaches its high peak of endurance,” but one which, in so doing, offers a penetrating glimpse into the war’s affective impact even on those who remain physically unharmed. Hope is here transformed into a morbid inversion of its usual state: H.D.’s narrator longs for death simply because through death, her constant fear of death will be vanquished. Only her desire that Bryher, her lover and close confidante, continue to live imbues H.D. with the will to endure. War thus “traps” individuals between their commitments to the world they have known and its inexorable demolition of that world, reducing the spectrum of what can be hoped for even as its destructiveness makes the objects of that hope all the more indispensable. In short, war makes fatalism appealing. For H.D., this is war’s great psychological threat, its central power most in need of resisting. Given H.D.’s aversion to war, this indicates that fatalism itself, as a moral guide or philosophical system, strongly repelled her. And here, as a way forward, I want to momentarily turn back to the point with which I began this chapter: namely, that it has been challenging for H.D.’s readers to assimilate the variety of her sources and texts into a coherent framework, and that in response to this difficulty critics have typically chosen a single feature present in her work – the feminine or maternal impulse, the Kabbalah, projection, Gnosticism – as a lens through which to understand everything else. It is noteworthy and instructive that these reductions of H.D.’s mishmash of spiritual and aesthetic traditions to a single subsuming master narrative often invite, in the critic performing the reduction, a concession that it ultimately implies a certain fatalism

86  Unpredictable Texts on H.D.’s part. (Recall Vincent Quinn and his charge of H.D.’s “vague prescription of optimistic fatalism.”) Such concessions occur because the single archetype or tendency identified in H.D.’s ideas typically has about it an absolutist and transcendentalist flavor, such that no departures from its pattern can be possible. So, for Friedman, H.D. is no optimist, since “[h]istory is not a progression” but rather a repetition of basic essences. Indeed, she may be something near to a fatalist: “H.D.’s belief in the continuity of pattern ordering the multiplicity of historical event is actually a darker view than Freud’s in some ways.”24 DuPlessis concurs: “Despite her gender critique and her narrative and linguistic innovations, H.D. felt the new did not really exist.”25 Rafaella Baccolini identifies memory as the structuring principle in H.D.’s poetics but must allow, similarly, that “in past, present, and future the pattern is ­identical – and thus, by implication . . . there is no progress in time, no evolutionary change possible for the future.”26 Finally, for Alicia Ostriker, H.D.’s wartime poetry, despite its improvisational aesthetic, is meant to instill a sense of trans-historical finality: “The reader of such a poem knows from the outset that the poem’s goal is some sort of closure or resolution, and experiences confidence and certitude that the universe of this poem will be ultimately coherent.”27 One sees the value in these assessments; it is true, for example, that H.D. understood the universe to be a fundamentally coherent, unified entity. But to accurately untangle her aesthetic principles (if we are not to find them, at the last, internally inconsistent) will require discovering a core concept that reflects her transcendentalist impulses and her faith in ultimate coherence while simultaneously remaining committed to her rejection of fatalism, so clearly visible in her writing on war. In summary, we seek an animating foundation in H.D.’s work that coincides with the idea that the spiritual and the aesthetic are merely different iterations each of the other; that emanates from the conviction that war and art are diametrically and essentially opposed; and that does not entail the conclusion that H.D. is a fatalist. We could ask, again, with Riddel, what it is about art that makes it the opposite of war; alternatively, we could seek to pinpoint an aspect of art that links it to the ritual of religious practice. In each case, the answer is the same: it is creativity. It is creation that most fully divides art from the destruction war brings. And it is creation, too, that links the aesthetic realm to the spiritual one. In The Gift H.D. recalls a childhood scene in which this relation becomes especially apparent: The “thing” was that we were creating. We were “making” a field under the tree, for the sheep. We were “making” a forest for the elk, out of small sprays of a broken pine-branch. We ourselves were “making” the Christmas-cakes. As we pressed the tin-mould of the lion or the lady into the soft dough, we were like God in the first

Unpredictable Texts  87 picture of the Doré Bible who, out of chaos, created Leo or Virgo to shine forever in the heavens. “We” were like that, though we did not know it. Our perception recognised it, though our minds did not define it. God had made a Child and we children in return now made God; we created Him as He had created us, we created Him as children will, out of odds and ends; like magpies, we built him a nest of stray bits of silver-thread, shredded blue or rose or yellow coloured paper; we knew our power. We knew that God could not resist the fragrance of a burning beeswax candle! (Gift, 89) As Elizabeth Anderson comments, in this passage “the domestic creativity of children echoes divine creativity, conjuring a scene of divine immanence.”28 Indeed, the children’s actions are more than echoes. In participating in simple acts of creation, the children become agents of a power both within and outside themselves, one they seem both not to understand and to understand: “we did not know it” fits uneasily alongside “we knew our power.” The undecidability of knowledge and action in this scene conveys something ineffable yet inviolable in the process of creation itself. The notion that “we children in return now made God” is not mere fancy but emphasizes the close link, for H.D., between creativity and divinity: the former is the essential property of the latter, in which we all share whenever we create. Now that we have established that the principle of creativity is pre-­ eminent in H.D.’s thought, connecting artistic practice to religious vision, it remains to examine in what ways aesthetic creativity refutes or denies fatalism. For H.D., creation is never merely rehearsal or repetition. Rather, the creative act is by definition singular and unpredictable. It is an act that carries within it a quality characteristic, for H.D., of all art – one I will term identity within uniqueness. Because the creative action, through which the finished artwork is produced, manifests identity within uniqueness, it opens up the possibility of aesthetic utility: the unquantifiable impact of art upon the society it enters. In what follows, I argue that this conception of art undergirds H.D.’s wartime novel The Gift and career-crowning long poem Trilogy. These works celebrate creative acts not merely as spiritually potent but as containing aesthetic utility precisely through the unpredictable, singular way in which they uncover the common identity at the heart of all human culture. Art in general and literature in particular thus become for H.D. the central source of social hope for both artist and audience in the modern era.

3  Artistic Creation in H.D.: Identity in Uniqueness Delving into H.D.’s understanding of creation and its proximity to modernist hope requires a closer look at the process of the creation and

88  Unpredictable Texts reception of literature. Derek Attridge, in his book The Singularity of Literature, provides a useful contemporary theoretical lens through which to understand H.D.’s work. I will describe Attridge’s argument briefly, qualify my argument by outlining some important differences between his conception of literature and H.D.’s, and then more fully elaborate his theory in order to show how it might fruitfully be applied to H.D.’s corpus. In The Singularity of Literature, Attridge argues that the work of literature comprises an event of invention in which otherness or alterity is brought into view, both intruding upon and reshaping the paradigm of the conventional or familiar. The process of literary invention encompasses both the creation and reception of the literary work; moreover, the process requires the engagement, throughout, of the active and passive faculties of both writer and reader. At stake in the event of literary creation is the intrusion of the new, which shapes what Attridge calls literature’s singularity. According to Attridge, “innovation and unpredictability have been central to the practice and appreciation of Western art from its beginnings to the present day,” so that “some sense of strangeness, mystery, or unfathomability is involved in every encounter with the literary.”29 The encounter to which Attridge refers – first experienced by the creator of the work, during the creative process, and then by its audience, in the “performance” of the literary work as literature – describes writerly or readerly contact with what Attridge calls the other. “The other,” he clarifies, “is not the real, but rather a truth, a value, a feeling, a way of doing things .  .  . that has been historically occluded and whose emergence or re-emergence is important for a particular time and place.”30 The other is what lies outside the public consciousness of a given culture, often because that culture’s norms and values depend on its exclusion. The effectiveness of the literary event, argues Attridge, subsists in its ushering of the other into the terrain of the familiar, thereby reshaping cultural assumptions and producing social change. As we will see, Attridge’s account of literary invention dovetails remarkably with H.D.’s understanding of art as the revelation of identity within uniqueness. But Attridge’s notion of otherness is worth pausing on, because it is where his picture of literary creation departs most significantly from that of H.D. Attridge clarifies that his version of otherness “is neither a mystical ideality not an inviolable materiality, neither a Platonic Form nor a Kantian Ding an sich.”31 Again, in noting that a responsible critical reception of literature, because it is also singular and creative, shares in the essential property of literature itself, Attridge offers a cautionary aside: This prospect of an endless chain of responses may sound alarming, but it only becomes so if we conceive of literature as possessing an extractable content which can finally be isolated – and hence

Unpredictable Texts  89 possessing those qualities of self-presence, universality, historical transcendence, and absolute signification on which the Platonic tradition of aesthetics is based. But literature is characterized precisely by its lack of any such content – which, of course, is why we re-read, with no end in sight of our re-readings.32 A brief way to summarize these considerations is to note that Attridge is working in the poststructuralist tradition, drawing on the writing of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and others. H.D., by contrast, is a committed structuralist: in her estimation, otherness can be defined not only negatively, as Attridge does, but positively, as a set of tropes, symbols, or ideas that emerge universally in artistic (which for her also means religious) practice throughout all times and cultures. Hence her declaration, in Notes on Thought and Vision, that in the act of creative perception or reception “[w]e look through a window into the world of pure over-mind.”33 This view, stated early in her career, is one she never disavows, although it is augmented by her later writings. She belongs, in other words, to precisely the “Platonic tradition of aesthetics” against which Attridge positions himself, though in other respects their views of artistic creation overlap productively. Because H.D. is a structuralist, her view of the source of invention Attridge calls “otherness” is distinct enough from his to require a different name in her rendering of it. For Attridge, otherness – the mysterious source, somehow both outside the subject’s consciousness and available to it, from which the creative event arises – is that which has been excluded from a given social reality. For H.D., it is that which has always been intrinsic to reality, though it may have been tarnished and neglected by negative forces. I will term this aesthetic source “identity,” using the word in the sense of sameness, affinity, or similarity. Identity, here, is a connective tissue of symbol and meaning that lies at the root of the various cultural forms of art and belief that have arisen throughout history as though in unconscious response to it. H.D.’s belief in what I am calling identity is what makes her, in the first place, a structuralist. It is this belief that allows H.D. to syncretize so many modes of religious expressions and unify them under the aegis of art; they are all, for her, correlating modalities that reflect a single unified reality. As will become clear in my reading of Trilogy, the ancient past and the art produced throughout history provide a major resource for the artist working today to discern the lineaments of this identity. H.D.’s fixation on Hellenic art and culture, so prominent during her Imagist phase, can be explained in large part by seeing it as a function of her search of the past for the identity that defines the art of any era. To provide a concrete example of the way H.D. enacted this search during her career, let me turn briefly to the film Borderline (1930), which H.D. created, starred in, and wrote about while a member of the POOL film group.

90  Unpredictable Texts Many critics have observed that H.D.’s investment in what I am calling identity – and what others have variously termed Otherness or Platonic essence – is fundamental to her work in cinema.34 Despite the complex racial and gender dynamics of Borderline, H.D. was adamant in her writing about the film that its true concern is the representation of beauty. In an essay written to explain the film, she insists that “[t]here is no such thing as any fixed art standard. There is beauty, there has always been beauty. The problem in every art period is to present that beauty in a form allied to its environment and time.”35 In Borderline, the contrast between movement and silence assumes a special thematic weight; scenes of stillness coincide with those of action as if to compare the potentialities latent in photography and film respectively. Whenever movement takes precedence in this film, it does so in juxtaposition with an embodied center of stillness and poise. In one scene featuring Astrid, the character played by H.D., Astrid’s solitary card game is disrupted by a sudden gust of wind ruffling the curtains. The game is played and eventually abandoned under the shadow of a large stuffed seagull, whose wings are raised as if it is on the verge of flight. The film is constantly drawn toward such scenes, which depict the restive silence immediately preceding or following motion, as though it is in those moments that the human form can somehow become something besides itself, or that the vexingly quotidian material object can assert itself as symbol. In a scene midway through the film, Astrid pauses and stares directly and unflinchingly into the camera for more than ten seconds, her face perfectly still. This is not the only time Borderline fixates on such stretches of immobility. These isolated overtures to stillness insist to the viewer on the photographic rather than the cinematic capacities of the camera. In doing so they force us to conceive of film as image, or as a compendium of ultimately static images. By situating bodily stillness within and in contrast to agitation, Borderline consciously monumentalizes and aestheticizes this stillness, willing image to become symbol. For whenever image becomes symbol, it reveals identity, the similitude that bridges various art forms and eras, and finally makes beauty recognizable as itself. At the same time, H.D.’s embrace of a new technology – cinema – in order to create art serves as a needed reminder that identity is not merely a resource to be dredged from the past; it must be constantly and innovatively recreated in the present. H.D.’s fascination with film speaks to her awareness that for any artist (and any reader), each moment of involvement in the process of creation (or apprehension) is necessarily unique, since it is one that has never been experienced in just such a manner by just such a consciousness at any other time in history. This uniqueness is as essential to H.D.’s picture of the artistic endeavor as identity and must, paradoxically, be paired with it. Throughout H.D.’s work, these

Unpredictable Texts  91 elements of the creative process are considered to be necessary and interdependent. To be axiomatic: for H.D., the process of artistic creation always involves the presentation of identity within uniqueness.

4  Identity and Uniqueness in The Gift Before turning to Trilogy, I want to examine two early passages from H.D.’s novel The Gift that showcase this principle more fully. Considered in temporal terms, identity affirms agelessness, whereas uniqueness affirms immediacy, the absolute singularity of the now. One task H.D. sets herself in The Gift is to establish how both of these chronological accounts – the historically invariable and the shockingly new – can coexist in the (literal) magic of the moment of creation. In the first passage I will look at, the narrator, a very young girl, is helping her brother spell words using the small lettered squares their mother has taken from a cardboard box. The narrator does not yet know how to spell but begins suddenly to comprehend the relationship between sign and sound figured in each letter: It might even be perceived that miraculously, a round shape in black, on the yellow square of cardboard, was somehow alone and staring at me . . . . It was a game, it was a way of making words out of words, in fact it was a spell. The cuckoo clock would not strike; it could not, because the world had stopped. It was not frozen in time, it was like one of Papalie’s water-drops that he had brought down from the mountains or from a trip to the Delaware Water Gap, in a jar. It was a drop of living and eternal life, perfected there; it was living, complete, not to be dried up in memory like pressed-moss . . . (Gift, 42) The “Gift,” the central and titular trope in The Gift, is a kind of possession or membership – the fact of belonging to an artistic community in which the reader is also enjoined to participate. The ability shared by the members of this community is, quite simply, to recognize and celebrate identity, the connective force and basic attribute of art. The scene I have transcribed above, wherein the narrator begins to learn to spell, is a momentous one, because while it does not depict artistic creation as such, it recounts the germination of the mechanisms through which the narrator will become part of the community to which the Gift has been entrusted. The pun on “spell” – indicating the dual meanings of the word as both the ordering of letters and as supernatural charm – emphasizes the sense in which creation, here the simplest of mental acts, contains a power at once aesthetic and spiritual, even magical. But H.D.’s real focus here is on using this memory as an opportunity to reflect on the relationship

92  Unpredictable Texts between art and time. On the one hand, “the world had stopped”; on the other, it “was not frozen in time.” The moment that inaugurates H.D. as future creator is “a drop of living, and eternal life”; it is “living, complete, not to be dried up in memory.” H.D. wants here to evade sterile notions of transcendence, ahistoricity, or timelessness. Such notions evoke identity, but at the cost of uniqueness; they remove the lived moment from the material world and place it in an outer, metaphysical realm. H.D.’s goal in this passage is to evoke identity – the “drop of living and eternal life” – without minimizing uniqueness, the singular immanence of the spatio-temporal event in which this identity is couched. In this way, identity and uniqueness combine in the artwork to bring the past into the present without by that action diminishing the newness or immediacy of the artwork as it is experienced. This bridging of past and present is depicted in another early scene in The Gift in which the narrator recalls attends a theater production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a child. The narrator is initially struck by the fictiveness of the events taking place on stage: Now Little Eva died and it was just as if she had died, but then she came back again in a long nightgown. Little Eva was not really dead at all. She was the same little girl with the long gold hair who was driven in the chariot down the street, and she would do it all over again in Allentown or Easton, Ida said. (Gift, 45) And yet, the young girl’s immersion in the realm of art – even via an amateur theatrical production – enlarges the story and actors, so that the events depicted take on the power of an alternate reality all their own: “Little Eva was really in a book, yet Little Eva was there on the stage and we saw her die, just like the book, Aunt Belle said, though we hadn’t read it” (Gift, 45). The spectator’s entry into the space of the aesthetic produces a kind of willed forgetfulness, within which the staged world of art becomes truer, even, than the world that gives rise to it: The bloodhounds really did chase Eliza on the ice. She screamed and jumped on the pieces of ice and you forgot that it wasn’t ice at all. You forgot the people around you and that you were in the theatre, you forgot you were in a town even, that you would have to go home after this. That is how it was. . . . I could see that they were really very good dogs, yet at the same time, something else in me that listened when Ida reads us a fairy tale, would know that they were terrible and horrible dogs . . . . (Gift, 45) In this scene, then, and by extrapolation, in all genuine experiences of art, the world of art briefly crowds out the prosaic, “real” world. Two aspects of this process need to be noted. The first is that after this aesthetic experience, the everyday reality into which the narrator re-enters

Unpredictable Texts  93 is forever changed, not because that world itself has actually materially changed, but because the perspective of the narrator has been permanently altered. As H.D. writes, “it was over. We went home. But the street would never be the same again, it would always be different, really everything would always be different” (Gift, 47). Here we are granted a small snapshot of how, for H.D., art transforms reality, albeit in unpredictable ways, through the uniqueness of the perceptual field in which it is generated and received. Importantly, too, we see that the artwork’s uniqueness proceeds not only from its creation, but from its reception by the reader willing to be changed by it. Without such an audience, aesthetic utility is impossible. But in the moment when its audience engages with it, the work of art is newly made in the perceiving of it; the faithful reception of art, too, is in this sense a creative act. In this way, as Attridge writes, rather than merely “re-creating the past, artistic inventiveness . . . bridges past and present. An artistic invention is inventive now.”36 The second aspect to note is that the bridge to the past occasioned by the play is not only a movement to a particular time and place, but a movement of connection to the identity that binds together all art, from whatever time or place. The narrator herself clarifies this in her reflections on the performance: Oh well, I know it was only Little Eva in a jerry-built, gold chariot, and yet it was the very dawn of art, it was the sun, the drama, the theater, it was poetry – why, it was music, it was folklore and folksong, it was history. It was all these things, and in our small town, on the curb of the pavement, the three children . . . who stood watching, were all the children of all the world . . . . It was art or many of the arts, concentrated and maybe consecrated by the fixed gaze of these same American children, who in the intensity of their naïve yet inherent or inherited perception, glorifying these shoddy strolling players, became one with their visionary mid-European ancestors and their Elizabethan forebears. (Gift, 48) As this passage emphasizes, the quality of the art may be immaterial; what matters is that it is incorporated by the right kind of vision. Here the performance of “shoddy strolling players” becomes a conduit to identity through the “intensity” of the “fixed gaze” of the children watching them. Such examples illustrate the concept of identity in uniqueness as the fundamental feature of the aesthetic experience. They also reveal the importance of audience and reception to a full understanding of the artwork. The fact that art is not merely created, but communicated, is of course essential to its potential utility, and H.D. becomes increasingly invested in this utility as her career advances.

94  Unpredictable Texts The uniqueness of each aesthetic situation, and the fact that what I am calling identity seems to accrue as a kind of compendium of the continued advance of art’s creation and reception, suggests too that identity can never be fully defined or known in advance. Each new artwork, each new reading, each new performance, must in fact redefine identity, if ever so slightly, in its very coming into being. As Attridge puts it in his perceptive account of literary creation and reception, [t]he uniqueness to which the response must do justice is not an unchanging essence, not the sum of the work’s difference from all other works as it appears in a particular time and place, but the inventive otherness of the work as it emerges through my creative act of comprehension (and my acknowledgement of its limits), that is to say, its singularity.37 In this sense, the act of critical reception is itself an act of creation, furthering the grand project of art which, for H.D., is our only defense and weapon against the militarization of culture and the onslaught of war. Attridge again: “the inventive work giving rise to the inventive response . . . is how all invention occurs.”38 This chain of aesthetic creativity and response is the Gift, which H.D. entrusts to her reader and which – in its active deployment as aesthetic utility – is the source of her modernist hope. H.D.’s confidence in the social power of art is already evident in Notes on Thought and Vision, in which she asserts that “[t]wo or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought.”39 Significantly, these “two or three people” are not only innovators and creators, changing culture through art and ideas; they are readers, with “the right sort of receiving brains” (my emphasis). It appears that a form of passivity, one that involves openness to the future, is a basic component of artistry. This foregrounding of passivity owes not only to H.D.’s intuitive understanding of how creation takes place, but to the unfixed, always-becoming nature of the identity that inheres in all art, which entails a surrendering of the will to forces outside the self. As Susan Acheson comments in an astute eschatological reading of Trilogy, for H.D. “life and wisdom, are in the unknown – not just in what is presently unknown but someday may be known, but in ‘unknowability’ itself.”40 The identity at the core of art must be understood as fundamentally unknown despite its universal reach: it is a set of structural relations between objects and ideas that art makes visible, but never fully tangible, and never predictable beforehand. As we saw in The Gift, this receptiveness to the future is a twofold process. First, it is a key element of the creative process, during which artists interact with identity in its constantly new and unthought forms. Second, and no less critically, it is required for audiences, as they engage

Unpredictable Texts  95 with the uniqueness and identity of the artwork in order to shape a response that is itself creative. In both cases, this receptivity to possibility is in fact the fulcrum through which art changes the subjects it touches; it is also, therefore, the mechanism by which society progresses. This dynamic is effectively captured by Attridge, for whom invention always takes place through the irruption of the other into the same. The artist’s initial encounter with otherness is never pure; it is always inflected by the particular perspective of the subject encountering it. As Attridge puts it, “when I encounter alterity I encounter not the other as such (how could I?) but the remolding of the self that brings the other into being as, necessarily, no longer entirely other.”41 This means, importantly, that creation does not simply result in the production of a new thing but a new self, because it alters the perceptive field of the creator who finds inspiration (or, equally, is found by it).42 For this reason H.D. describes the experience of perceiving art in strikingly scientific terms, as provoking not only connection but physical change. Upon seeing ancient Egyptian art, she writes in The Gift: I am for a moment (through a picture carved on a wall, tinted with just such bright colours as we had in our own paint-box) Egyptian; a little cell of my brain responds to a cell of someone’s brain, who died thousands of years ago. (Gift, 51) The momentary link here between ancient creator and contemporary receiver designates the ways in which art is, for H.D., trans-historical: first, in the consonance it sparks between them (a consonance we could also call the transmission of identity); and second, in its transformative capacity: its ability, in the act of communicating beauty, to teach its audience how to see the world in aesthetic terms.

5  Trilogy and the Necessity of Aesthetic Utility In what space remains, I would like to apply the core arguments set out in this chapter to a reading of H.D.’s long poem Trilogy. In what follows, I will show how H.D.’s theory of art – buttressed by and explained, again, in light of Attridge’s work – bears upon, and finds its full articulation in, the poem that has become her most critically esteemed. Doing so will reveal the precise nature of the hope in her work: quixotically modernist, far from fatalistic, and grounded in an assertion of the reality of aesthetic utility. Trilogy is about the necessity of artistic creation in the face of outside pressures antithetical to it: where such creation originates, how it persists, and what its effects might be in the as-yet-undecided future. The Walls Do Not Fall, the first of its three parts, begins by describing wartorn London during the blitz: “rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my)

96  Unpredictable Texts old town square: // mist and mist-grey, no colour.”43 London, seen by many as the apex of Western civilization, is beset by destructive forces: “ruin opens / the tomb, the temple” (Trilogy, 3). The war has intruded into the realms of the past and of the sacred, so that “the shrine lies open to the sky” (Trilogy, 3). Amid this setting of despair and the fatalism it threatens to invite, another power lurks, this one much more beneficent: so, through our desolation, thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us through gloom. (Trilogy, 3) It leaves the poem’s speaker – having survived the psychic terror and pressure of war – questioning the significance of her survival: “we w ­ onder / what saved us? what for?” (Trilogy, 4). Assessments of the beginning of the poem have underemphasized the striking lack of agency the speaker-poet ascribes to herself here. The issue is not one of gender; the use of “we” enables the poem’s collective subjects to be both male and female, negating that possibility. Rather, the point is that something in the call to create and the act of creation originates outside the conscious will and, as we have already seen, requires a curious passivity or receptivity: the experience of invention is an experience of coming upon a form, a phrase, a solution that seemed, in retrospect, to have been waiting in advance, or even one of being found by the form, phrase, or solution in a moment of illumination.44 Similarly, the speaker in Trilogy records her relative lack of control over the context of the poem’s coming into being. Rather in the manner of Eliot’s catlike fog, “inspiration stalks” her – and having found her, it leaves her initially uncertain of the purpose of the aesthetic enterprise to which she has been, as it were, summoned. The speaker’s uncertainty as to the endpoint of her aesthetic project accentuates, from the very beginning of the poem, the impossibility of understanding the identity that inheres in art fully or in advance. It therefore helps to refute the charge of H.D’s fatalism. As we will see, further examples of H.D.’s resistance to didacticism and overt absolutism appear throughout Trilogy. At the same time, if the speaker cannot name with precision the success or final goal of her project, her immediate task is clear: to work within language to uncover and recover identity, in opposition to the forces that suppress it, among them militarism and scientism. Principally, these enemies diminish and demean the sort of work to which H.D. feels she has been called: they snatched off our amulets, charms are not, they said, grace;

Unpredictable Texts  97 but gods always face two-ways, so let us search the old highways for the true-rune, the right-spell, recover old values . . . (Trilogy, 5) In these lines, the speaker depicts the creative task as a search. What has been submerged must be brought back to the surface. Attridge’s theory comes very close to this account: “novelty,” he writes, is achieved by means both of the refashioning of the old and of the unanticipated advent of the new; or, more accurately if more paradoxically . . . the advent of the new is a particular kind of refashioning of the old.45 For H.D., this means that identity, the structuralist essence that unifies all artworks and gives them their trans-historical power, requires continual unveiling if the contemporary pressures conspiring to eradicate art are to be subdued. This identity is paradoxical in nature. On the one hand, it exists everywhere. As Friedman writes, Trilogy expresses H.D.’s conviction that “the ultimate reality of any single moment in history is contained in a pattern of essential experience which informs all time.”46 On the other hand, it is not easily discernable or definable. One must know where to look, but more than this, one must know how to see. In Tribute to the Angels, the second book in Trilogy, the speaker witnesses a flowering tree – “an ordinary tree / in an old ­garden-square” – and mysteriously intuits its significance, the need to include it in her poem (Trilogy, 83). This creative flash appears to have come to her from an outside source, again highlighting her relative passivity as scribe. At the same time, she uses the experience to separate herself from those who are unable to perceive through things to the aesthetic identity behind them: A new sensation is not granted to everyone, not to everyone everywhere, but to us here, a new sensation strikes paralyzing, strikes dumb, strikes the senses numb, sets the nerves quivering (Trilogy, 83) The repetition of the word “strikes” evokes the physicality of the epiphany described. As in so many places in Trilogy, the cascading effect of similar sounds via consonance and slant rhyme overwhelms the senses.

98  Unpredictable Texts Language is being pulled apart, turned over, or pried open, suggesting that the mysterious “sensation” the words describe is buried in their very structures. A little further on in the poem, H.D. testifies to the ability of music to capture the ineffable, something the poet wants to approximate in language: music sets up ladders, it makes us invisible, it sets us apart, it lets us escape; but from the visible there is no escape; there is no escape from the spear that pierces the heart. (Trilogy, 85–86) The contrast between the realms of war and art – which, as we have suggested, are for H.D. the twin, opposed moral forces operating in the universe – is here delineated as an opposition between the visible and the invisible. The invisible essence at the source of art is a potential pathway to an escape from the visible injustices of everyday violence. This essence is both in the language of poetry and is hidden by it; it is “what words conceal” (Trilogy, 14). “I know, I feel / the meaning that words hide,” the speaker declares elsewhere (Trilogy, 53). Insofar as the history of art is the history of the unfolding of an identity unknowable in advance, the task for both artist and reader is to discover it (which also means to rediscover it), to illuminate it afresh in and for their own era: chasm, schism in consciousness must be bridged over; we are each, householder, each with a treasure; now is the time to re-value our secret hoard in the light of both past and future . . . (Trilogy, 49) This “secret hoard” is the compendium of religious belief and aesthetic achievement, which are, in H.D.’s estimation, the heartbeat of human civilization. Delving deep into these works and traditions will in turn produce new ideas and creations that will sustain a culture wracked by warfare. As Attridge observes, such critical participation

Unpredictable Texts  99 in the lineage of creation is a significant part of how new artistic invention occurs: if the new context relates to the earlier one in more profound ways, new possibilities of invention in works and oeuvres (different but not entirely distinct from their original inventiveness) may come into being. This capacity for reinventing invention is at the heart of artistic survival.47 The dense and allusive sourcing of H.D.’s Trilogy works on the same principle – the use of the old (and what in the old will never grow old) as foundation of, and source for, the surprising new. This newness is a necessary element of the artwork and a function of the contemporaneousness of the artist, who exists in the present and creates into the future. All creativity, even though it searches out and works to recover identity, carries with it an element of risk, since its act of recovery itself reshapes identity. For this reason, for H.D. art involves the presentation of identity within uniqueness: the uniqueness is the voice, or medium, or form, that recasts what is proper to truth and beauty in a heretofore unconsidered light. At the end of The Walls Do Not Fall, in her injunction to the reader to take up the challenge of creation, H.D.’s speaker sets out this postulate explicitly, first recording an imagined objection to her system of thought and then answering it: no comment can alter spiritual realities (you say) or again, what new light can you possibly throw upon them? my mind (yours) your way of thought (mine), each has its peculiar intricate map . . . my mind (yours) has its peculiar ego-centric personal approach to the eternal realities, and differs from every other in minute particulars . . . (Trilogy, 51–52) The concept of difference within sameness is evoked in this passage by small linguistic shifts and echoes. The parentheses suggest an easy affinity between you and me while at the same time dividing them, on the

100  Unpredictable Texts page, into separate subjectivities. In its double phrasing, the question that forms the initial objection undercuts itself, offering a hint that the same problem might be stated in multiple ways in order to reveal new solutions. The multisyllabic, refracting words “peculiar,” “personal,” and “particular,” alike but distinct, demonstrate the same principle. Even where “peculiar” repeats, its new context shades it with new meaning. H.D.’s speaker insists here that the world is always revelatory, remade by each individual gaze. Idiosyncratic attentiveness to reality is therefore both valuable and needed in a time when uniqueness is stifled by conformism, apathy, and violence. Further, each new creative act opens up further possibilities, enriching the perspectives of those who come into contact with it and thereby making further invention possible. As H.D. writes in Notes on Thought and Vision, My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.48 We can say more about the precise character of the unique and emerging artistic voices in H.D.’s milieu. “The pattern of H.D.’s own life and work is profoundly dialectical,” as Friedman observes, and for H.D., the movement of art is toward the merging or synthesis of these opposed binary forces, among them new and ancient, orthodox and heterodox, material and immaterial, immanent and transcendent, and, not least, male and female.49 This last opposition structures much of Tribute to the Angels (the second part of Trilogy) and arguably all The Flowering of the Rod (the third) and is therefore worth considering in more detail. The final sections of Tribute to the Angels devote themselves to an elaborate description of the “Lady,” who appears to the speaker of the poem instead of the angel Gabriel. The poem provides a long list of ways and places the Lady has been seen throughout history, from “an empress, / magnificent in pomp and grace,” to “a wisp of a girl / trapped in a golden halo” (Trilogy, 93). She seems sometimes to take on the attributes of the Virgin Mary – but, the poem cautions, “the Child was not with her” (Trilogy, 97). After adding the detail that the Lady carries a book, the poem’s speaker guesses at how the curious reader might surmise the Lady’s identity: she is Eve, carrying the Book of Life, or “[t]his is a symbol of beauty (you continue), / she is Our Lady universally” (Trilogy, 102). H.D.’s response is that this summation, though accurate in its way, is insufficient. Her further comments about the Lady sketch her largely via negation, but she adds that she is the counter coin-side of primitive terror;

Unpredictable Texts  101 she is not-fear, she is not-war, but she is no symbolic figure of peace, charity, chastity, goodness, faith, hope, reward . . . (Trilogy, 102) H.D. purposely leaves the Lady’s identity indistinct, but we get nearest to the truth here. Albert Gelpi summarizes these attributes with the claim that the Lady is “the apotheosis of the Self.”50 It might be more accurate, however, to call her the apotheosis of art. We have already seen that for H.D. art and war are opposed, and here the Lady is termed “not-war.” Further, the speaker’s other clarifications about the Lady – such as that she is not “frozen” or “shut up in a cave” – balance the identity or connective reality that inheres in the Lady with the uniqueness she figures (Trilogy, 103). This is why she doesn’t merely symbolize any one virtue; art, in its full expressive power, can embody any or all of them. H.D. thus presents art as a feminine figure, inextricably tied to and congruent with the resources available in language (“mer, mere, mère, mater, Maia, Mary,” as H.D. articulates the progression) (Trilogy, 102). The point is not that art and artistic creation are inherently feminine or maternal in all times and places but rather that in H.D.’s own era, artistic creation is synonymous with feminine power in order to balance scales that have been dramatically tipped against women through a long history of patriarchal oppression.51 One aspect of the Lady’s mission, quite clearly, is to counter this oppression. Paired with her resolute power, her evident femininity shapes her as a revolutionary figure – capable, as all great art is, of enacting positive social change. Similarly, in The Flowering of the Rod, Mary Magdalene’s disruption of traditional mores – “it was unseemly that a woman / appear at all” – obviously indicates their, and not her, inadequacy (Trilogy, 137). In their transformative potential, her actions cohere with H.D.’s larger vision of the eventual synthesis of apparent but resolvable antinomies. To work toward this synthesis, H.D. insists, is both her task and her reader’s, a task consistently pointing to and invested in the social future. The book that the Lady, representative of art, carries in her hand is not, after all, the Book of Life. It is simply creation – the act that, we recall, links the spiritual to the aesthetic. And H.D.’s account of creation fixates on its uniqueness. For this reason, the speaker comments that the book’s “pages, I imagine, are the blank pages / of the unwritten volume of the new,” a book we, too, have been entrusted to write: her book is our book; written or unwritten, its pages will reveal a tale of a Fisherman, a tale of a jar or jars,

102  Unpredictable Texts the same – different – the same attributes, different yet the same as before. (Trilogy, 102) A clearer poetic articulation of the concept of identity in uniqueness is hardly conceivable. The broad nature of the tale is known in advance, whether or not it has yet been written; but its precise features, the elements that bring it out of antiquity and into the present, can only be named as inspiration creates them. Riddel nicely captures the paradox here: “Art and literature are at once products of alienation and emblems of the original order regained. Every poet is an excavator in the Egypt of his own inwardness.”52 Aesthetic experience necessarily involves, then, “the discovery of the infinite in the lived moment.”53 It should be clear by now how this assertion demonstrates the nature and necessity of hope in H.D.’s work. Art, in all its forms, comprises the excavation of identity, the central and connective narrative binding all art together; and this identity is above all a necessity, the lifeblood and greatest expression of any culture. Put simply, the value of identity guarantees the validity of aesthetic utility. H.D.’s most direct assertion of this claim, appearing in The Walls Do Not Fall, comes in the form of a judgment against those who would dare argue otherwise: we, authentic relic, bearers of the secret wisdom, living remnant of the inner band of the sanctuaries’ initiate, are not only “non-utilitarian”, we are “pathetic”: this is the new heresy; but if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgment on what words conceal? (Trilogy, 14) I have insisted that one feature of aesthetic utility is its unnameability, and H.D. likewise dismisses “the practical issues of art / and the cataloguing of utilities,” but she does distinguish one ingredient in its vitality: “so what good are your scribblings? / this – we take them with us // beyond death” (Trilogy, 22, 14). Identity, recovered and built in art, produces resurrection – an important if mysterious theme in Trilogy, because it is one of the few concepts H.D. uses to articulate the object of her modernist hope.

Unpredictable Texts  103 H.D.’s expressed hope in resurrection extends, at times, into an assertive confidence that would seem to affiliate her with Christian doctrine: “we pause to give / thanks that we rise again from death and live,” she writes in Tribute to the Angels (Trilogy, 70). In the Christian tradition, hope is a kind of certainty, since the desire and expectation that combine to form it are maximal and unwavering: what the religious believer wants beyond all else is exactly what he or she is certain will happen. But as we have seen in this chapter, H.D.’s resistance to absolutist or fatalist ideas renders her work separate from orthodox Christian thought (despite her allegiance to her Moravian upbringing, which she never entirely abdicated). H.D. certainly incorporates Christian ideas and beliefs into Trilogy, but these are subsidiary to, rather than the source of, the hope the poem expresses. While H.D.’s hope is linked to resurrection and the symbolic defeat of death, it emphasizes immanence more than transcendence. As Elizabeth Anderson writes, “for H.D., redemption is discovered within material particularity,” not separately from it.54 H.D. does not deny the possibility of transcendence, but her writing about it is consistently hesitant, unwilling to commit too fully to a narrow understanding of its meaning. In The Gift she cautions, “Yet we must not step right over into the transcendental, we must crouch near the grass and near to the earth that made us” (Gift, 50). Resurrection in Trilogy is thus difficult to define. Early in The Flowering of the Rod, in which the theme of resurrection is predominant, H.D. uses the word as a synonym for love: “let us leave pity // and mount higher / to love – resurrection” (Trilogy, 114). Most presciently, resurrection for H.D. seems to be about action rather than dogma, doing rather than saying. It is more event than idea: In resurrection, there is confusion if we start to argue; if we stand and stare, we do not know where to go; in resurrection, there is simple affirmation, but do not delay to round up the others, up and down the street; your going in a moment like this, is the best proof that you know the way . . . (Trilogy, 116) This use of the term embraces its connotations in all belief systems rather than one, dismissing argument and dissension in favor of “simple affirmation.” In including resurrection as a central trope in Trilogy, H.D. comes nearest to a more traditional form of religious optimism, asserting that “we know ultimately we will find / happiness” and offering as proof the words of Christ to the thief on the cross next to him (Trilogy,

104  Unpredictable Texts 117). But her very refusal to precisely delimit “resurrection” or unite it to a single faith tradition underscores the sense of uncertainty that still inheres in H.D.’s modernist hope. In part, this uncertainty stems from another aspect of the identity H.D. seeks to unveil in her poetry. It is not only necessary but is unpredictable, its purposiveness unquantifiable. Among other things, this implies that because the final responsibility rests on us both to search out identity and to allow it to transform our lives, a positive outcome in the struggle between the forces of war and art cannot be guaranteed. Much work remains to be done, as the speaker in Trilogy makes clear: “we have not crawled so very far // up our individual grass-blade / toward our individual star” (Trilogy, 23).55 H.D.’s allusions to stars and blades of grass elliptically demonstrate that her interest is predominantly in this world and the known reality rather than some other one; furthermore, the repetition of the word “individual” points to the solitary nature of the task. Despite the fact that we perform it in community, each vision is a new, wholly unique emendation of the totality and coherence toward which all aesthetic projects strive. The passage that concludes Tribute to the Angels, which H.D. ­italicized – perhaps to underline its importance – vividly illustrates the unpredictability of art and its effects: we know no rule of procedure, we are voyagers, discoverers of the not-known, the unrecorded; we have no map; possibly we will reach haven, heaven. (Trilogy, 59) These lines function both as a call to arms for fellow artists and seekers and as a description of the elusive character of the creative process. No method can be mandated, no convention followed; and crucially, this is a function of the “possibly” in the couplet that ends the section, marking the speaker’s refusal to promise a safe end to the journey. It is exactly because religious fatalism is rejected that the familiar script that prescribes fatalism must also be rejected. If the end must remain in doubt, so must the means. The impossibility of knowing where art will lead has two major implications for H.D.’s modernist hope. First, it clarifies the fact that this hope is needed. From the future’s unknowability and the denial of fatalism follows the moral urgency to hope in the present, and

Unpredictable Texts  105 ideally to fashion this hope into action. Second, because art does lead somewhere  – and, potentially, somewhere better – this hope is justified. Art’s latent power, if only it is directed and followed honestly and courageously, opens a pathway to a future worth the tribulations that precede it.

6  Art as Ethical Injunction These accounts of variant futures, whether pregnant with potentiality or bereft of it, really mean to urge upon us choices not only aesthetic but moral, competing ways to approach and inhabit reality. I’ve saved a discussion of the enigmatic quotation that forms this chapter’s epigraph until now, but it, too, whatever else it says, presents the reader with a choice: to “accept life” – which I take to be the aesthetic, moral, art-­affirming, path – or not to accept it. Either option, H.D. insists, is fraught with peril. All paths are dangerous, because (to repeat the quintessentially modernist truism) inherent to human existence, above all, is its ultimate unknowability. But there exist more than one kind of danger. Really, for H.D., there are two: there is the dynamic, even beautiful danger of increased opportunity, of radical openness, the healthy danger that comes with facing and even embracing transformative possibilities to see where they will lead; and there is the reductive, blinding, negating danger of closing off avenues to futurity, of eliminating eventual potential selves – the danger caused by denying or repudiating aesthetic utility. All of H.D.’s work, but especially her late work, is a plea to nourish and inculcate, as creators and audiences, that enriching first version of danger, the one stemming from an attitude essentially accepting of life and valorizing of art.56 To read H.D. in this way is to see how deeply a form of social hope invests her writing. As artists and as readers, we are engaged in a process we cannot fully understand. History exists on a continuum between war and art, and the responsibility of poet and reader alike is to move it away from war. The composing of literature is thus, like all art, an ethical activity not only because, in Attridge’s terms, it involves an encounter with “otherness” but because it orients us toward a positive social future, one whose basic characteristics – among them peace and resurrection – we can surmise but never precisely enumerate. In an essay on the function of the palimpsest in H.D.’s work, Paola Zaccaria encapsulates how this hope animates and motivates the poet. It is as if, Zaccaria writes, in her poetry, H.D. had tried to live through all previous cultures, constantly going down further into the past to resurrect herself, not in the present, but in a future passionately envisioned as different, where nothing is lost, but nothing remains as it was.57

106  Unpredictable Texts Susan Acheson puts the matter equally aptly, observing that in Trilogy H.D. conceives of time as “both as shaped and as open.”58 Shaped, yes – but into a form it is our task not to know but only to guess, and finally to shape by guessing. This last point marks the overlap, for H.D., between time and art. We can conclude that what is true of time – its shapedness and openness – is also true of art (and maybe, indeed, is true because it is also true of art), since these two qualities correspond, respectively, to identity and uniqueness, the defining elements of the artistic endeavor. If these binary oppositions are at once incompatible and indispensable, this simply means that both in the process of its creation and as it pertains to the future, the artwork must finally remain a paradox, at once protecting and inscribing the secrets art unveils to posterity.

Notes 1 H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1982), 39. 2 Vincent Quinn, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (New York: Twayne, 1967), 147–148. 3 See Miranda B. Hickman, “‘Uncanonically Seated’: H.D. and Literary Canons,” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 10; Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 4; and Aliki Barnstone, Introduction to H.D., Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rod (New York: New Directions, 1998), vii. 4 In consonance with more recent critical estimation of Trilogy as H.D.’s best work, Susan Gubar offers a useful if somewhat disparaging assessment of her Imagist phase. See Susan Gubar, “The Echoing Spell of H. D.’s Trilogy,” Contemporary Literature 19, no. 2 (1978): 201. 5 Gloria G. Fromm, “The Forging of H.D.,” Poetry 153, no. 3 (1988): 170. 6 In an otherwise perceptive article, Jason M. Coats makes the heroic attempt: “H. D., the true believer of all of [these ideas] at once, can speak them back into existence and reap the benefits of their protective energies on behalf of her readers.” See Jason M. Coats, “H.D. and the Hermetic Impulse,” South Atlantic Review 77, no. 1/2 (2012): 84. 7 Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 87. 8 For Friedman, “the Kabbalah, more than any specific mystical or philosophical source, offered H.D. a clearly dialectical model of transcendence that solved her dilemma of duality in the realm of symbol.” Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 279. 9 Adalaide Morris, “The Concept of Projection: H. D.’s Visionary Powers,” Contemporary Literature 25, no. 4 (1984): 413. 10 Dennis Brown, “H.D.’s Trilogy: Modern Gnosticism?,” Literature and Theology 10, no. 4 (1996): 358. 11 See Albert Gelpi, “Remembering the Mother: A Reading of H.D.’s Trilogy,” in H.D.: Woman and Poet, ed. Michael King (Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 173–190; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 51.

Unpredictable Texts  107 12 Margaret M. Dunn, “H.D.’s Trilogy: A Portrait of the Artist in Full Bloom,” CEA Critic 48, no. 3 (1986): 29–37. 13 Coats, “H.D. and the Hermetic Impulse,” 83. 14 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1998), 164. 15 Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2. 16 H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, 27. 17 H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, 28–29. 18 Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 9. On World War I’s influence on H.D.’s mental health and its contribution to her breakdowns, see also Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 27–29. 19 DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, 73. On the effect of World War II on H.D.’s individual works, particularly Trilogy and The Gift, see Sarah H.S. Graham, “‘We Have a Secret. We Are Alive’: H.D.’s Trilogy as a Response to War,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44, no. 2 (2002): 161; Adalaide Morris, “Autobiography and Prophecy: H.D.’s The Gift,” in H.D.: Woman and Poet, ed. Michael King (Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 229; Jane Augustine, Introduction to H.D., The Gift: The Complete Text, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 2; and DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, 86. 20 Mary Sarton, “Letters from H.D.,” in H.D.: Woman and Poet, ed. Michael King (Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 55. 21 DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, 77. 22 Joseph N. Riddel, “H. D. and the Poetics of ‘Spiritual Realism,”’ Contemporary Literature 10, no. 4 (1969): 466. 23 H.D., The Gift: The Complete Text, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 109. Hereafter cited in-text as Gift. 24 Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 112. 25 DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, 28. 26 Raffaella Baccolini, “‘And So Remembrance Brings Us to This Hour in Which I Strive to Save Identity’: Figures of Memory in H. D.’s Late Poetry,” in H. D.’s Poetry: The Meanings that Words Hide, ed. Marina Camboni (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 165. 27 Alicia Ostriker, “No Rule of Procedure: The Open Poetics of H.D,” in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DePlessis (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 340. 28 Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination, 110. 29 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 12, 77. 30 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 39. 31 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 76. 32 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 93. 33 H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, 18. 34 See Jonathan Foltz, “The Laws of Comparison: H.D. and Cinematic Formalism,” Modernism/Modernity 18, no. 1 (2011): 6; Jean Gallagher, “H.D.’s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 3 (2002): 410; DuPlessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, 57; and Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 137. 35 H.D., “Borderline: A POOL Film with Paul Robeson,” in Close Up 1927– 1933: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedburg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 226. 36 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 45.

108  Unpredictable Texts 37 38 39 40

Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 91. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 92. H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, 27. Susan Acheson, “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge’: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy,” Literature and Theology 12, no. 2 (1998): 195. 41 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 24. 42 This has been perceptively observed by Marina Camboni, who writes that for H.D. creation seems to be a process, leading not only to the created object, but also to further definition of the creator-artist. Rooted in an inchoate spiritual energy, such a creation exceeds both subject and object, and accounts for the mysterious power of words, reaching well beyond the craft of the artist. See Marina Camboni, “Between Painting and Writing: Figures of Identity in H. D.’s Early Poetry,” in H. D.’s Poetry: The Meanings that Words Hide, ed. Marina Camboni (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 53. 43 H.D., Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rod (New York: New Directions, 1998), 3. Hereafter cited in-text as Trilogy. 4 4 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 42–43. 45 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 24. 46 Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 103. 47 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 47. 48 H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision, 24. 49 Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 152. 50 Gelpi, “Remembering the Mother,” 185. 51 Many scholars have read H.D. through a feminist lens, particularly Trilogy, where the theme is unquestionably present. Albert Gelpi sees the locus of attention in Trilogy as not only feminine but maternal (Gelpi, “Remembering the Mother”). Brown likewise asserts that in Trilogy “‘feminine’ nurture is made central to civilization” (Brown, “Modern Gnosticism,” 357). Camboni, noting H.D.’s dualist tendencies, suggests that the final scene in Trilogy depicts “a solution of male-female antagonism” (Camboni, “Between Painting and Writing,” 59). Finally, Augustine argues that The Gift, too, is a strongly feminist text, a “narrative of female empowerment [that] embodies H.D.’s belief in an eternal creative feminine spirit continually manifesting as the living bearer of peace to the world” (Augustine, Introduction to The Gift, 1). 52 Riddel, “H. D. and the Poetics of ‘Spiritual Realism,”’ 457. 53 Riddel, “H. D. and the Poetics of ‘Spiritual Realism,”’ 465. 54 Elizabeth Anderson, “Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets,” Christianity and Literature 62, no. 1 (2012): 122. 55 In this context, see also Attridge: “Nor need creation be dramatically sudden. It is often a gradual process of false starts and wasted efforts, erasures and revisions, slowly inching nearer to an outcome that, one can only hope, will be the desired one” (Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 25). 56 Attridge terms this sense of danger “risk.” His assessment of its inevitability coincides with H.D.’s conviction of its reality in the artist’s life. For Attridge, risk entails responsibility, which makes us ethical actors, as both writers and readers: Although responsibility is a concept we employ for our dealings with a wide range of entities, including persons, cultures, and the natural environment,

Unpredictable Texts  109 it is not one generally used of artistic creations. It provides, however, a useful way of indicating the strange compulsion involved in creative behavior, a compulsion that is manifested in a minor way as I grope for sentences to articulate ideas or let a favorite poem work freshly upon me, and more consequentially in major acts of inventiveness, verbal or otherwise. It is a compulsion that leads to risk, a crucial concept in any consideration of creativity. Since there can be no certainty in opening oneself to the other – certainty being by definition excluded – every such opening is a gamble. I trust the other before I know what the other will bring. (Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 124). H.D.’s poetics thus affirms Attridge’s contention that “[t]o read a literary work responsibly . . . is to trust in the unpredictability of reading, its openness to the future” (Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 129–130). 7 Paola Zaccaria, “Beyond One and Two: The Palimpsest as Hieroglyph of 5 Multiplicity and Relation,” in H. D.’s Poetry: The Meanings That Words Hide, ed. Marina Camboni (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 86. 58 Acheson, “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge,’” 192.

4 Recovering Democracy Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

1  The Politics of Aesthetic Utility To begin where the last chapter left off, and via a provocative question: What if, partly as a means of uncovering the political possibilities latent in aesthetic utility, a poet applied to human subjects the notion of identity ascribed by H.D. to art and to time? In certain respects, Melvin B. Tolson’s 1953 modernist long poem Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (hereafter Libretto) constitutes an answer to this question. A brief review may be in order here. The texts and writers I’ve examined to this point testify not only to the fact of aesthetic utility but to its qualities, especially its ungovernability. The unpredictability of aesthetic utility means that modernist hope, while it can subsist on the function of art, cannot veer too near certitude; as road map to the future, art always carries with it risk. This risk also complicates the vexed relationship between art and politics, since the unpredictability of the artwork denotes its innate resistance to narrow political programs or agendas. The novels of James, for instance, are far too capacious for such links to be immediately or obviously tenable. Of H.D.’s work, little more can be said politically than that it is pro-art and anti-war – a stance adaptable to many political stances, and therefore truly co-optable by few. D.W. Griffith stands as the consummate counterexample, negatively proving the same point: his underestimation of the volatility of aesthetic utility – a miscalculation with its own political basis – ultimately caused him to pit his directorial genius against itself. What might it look like, though, to politicize aesthetic utility? Most pressingly, it would require committing to more than the mere fact of art’s influence on society: it would require specifying the nature of this influence, with the goal of directing it toward a desired political end. At the most elementary level, many modernist writers did as much – if only by envisaging aesthetic utility as grounds for social hope rather than some other, potentially darker orientation, such as fear or apathy. But the attendant danger here, namely that the politicization of art often involves the reduction of its possible meanings, is one of which most modernists were only too aware. In this sense, the open-endedness of aesthetic utility is one of its virtues, a quality through which it avoids

Recovering Democracy  111 being tethered to limited and overly pragmatic agendas or ideologies. At the same time, art inevitably assumes an increasingly political dimension in situations of repression, volatility, or unrest, precisely because the endpoint of such climates may be one in which the very possibility of art itself (and the freedom to create it) is placed under attack. For this reason, in totalitarian regimes art can acquire political resonance simply in virtue of existing. In any situation of political extremity, the artist who does not respond directly can appear aloof or uncaring – a lack of response that can itself be taken as a kind of political choice. The question becomes one of function: What can art really do in the world in response to – and in order to shape – social realities? Precisely because art need not be purposive or didactic in this way, one answer has been that to view art in this way is to misunderstand its role. This was the view of Wallace Stevens, who puts it bluntly in his well-known essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”: “I might be expected to speak of the social, that is to say the sociological or political, obligation of the poet. He has none.” (Stevens alleviates this judgment somewhat shortly afterward, adding that the poet’s role “is to help people live their lives.”)1 Another possibility is that because art can only exist in the sphere of the aesthetic, the realm of imagination, where its utility must remain unfixed and unguessed, it derives its primary political potency from the act of witness. This act – in practice, the simple insistence on historical accuracy – takes on political connotations especially when the history being documented involves pain, suffering, or trauma. As a graduate student, my acceptance of New Critical axioms asserting the absolute separation of text from author and history was shattered all at once, as I watched a professor leading a graduate seminar on Yeats break down in sobs while reciting “Easter, 1916.” And how often, out of the direst social and political realities, is a terrible beauty not born through the artist’s act of witness? Of course, the utility of such an act remains precisely indefinable; it is impossible to say whose minds are changed, and how, or to which ends, upon such encounters. Few contemporary writers are as associated with the poetry of witness as Carolyn Forché, who uses it to powerful effect in her poem “The Colonel.” The speaker begins by explicitly declaring the historicity of what the poem describes: “What you have heard is true.” The poem ends on a horrifying, memorable image, as the titular colonel pours a bag of human ears out onto the dinner table and sweeps them to the floor: Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. 2 The poem leaves open-ended the question of who will do the work of atoning for the terrible injustices it recounts; the dismembered ears are pressed to the ground as if listening for the strains of a redemption

112  Recovering Democracy undiscoverable in the human world, the world of the reader. “The Colonel” is therefore a poem of witness that also addresses the limits of witness, challenging the reader to do more than to read, to enact the response for which these ears, no longer belonging to bodies, still seem to wait and listen. The sort of actions whose necessity the poem impresses upon us are those outside the realm of art. Art’s political role as such is to force upon us the importance of such actions, though not to substitute for them. These considerations are germane to this chapter because they help us to see the contours of the challenge faced by Melvin B. Tolson in 1947, when he was named poet laureate of the African republic of Liberia and asked to compose a poem in commemoration of its centennial anniversary. Tolson was a poet keenly invested in the question of the social role of art, and the poem he wrote in response to this request, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, demonstrates his conviction of the reality and power of aesthetic utility. It reveals, too, the power of the act of witness as a politically motivated aesthetic gesture. But Libretto also initiates an exploration of other prosodic strategies besides that of witness that might serve as expressions of belief in the ability of art to conjure social change. I don’t have space here to produce a taxonomy of the ways in which art and politics can intersect. But with a brief nod to the potential efficacy, in terms of political critique, of what Northrop Frye called the “low mimetic” modes of satire and irony, I want to suggest that Tolson chooses in Libretto to move in the other direction, toward the imagining of a near-fantastical utopia that is politically compelling precisely because of its radical dissimilarity to any current social reality.3 In his poem, Tolson performs this act of political imagining alongside, rather than instead of, an act of political witnessing, since he believes that both can be effective means through which art speaks to and transforms society. Indeed, Tolson does not so much argue for the fact of aesthetic utility as simply assume it throughout his poem. He shapes his poem’s political trajectory by interrogating more closely the social function of the artwork: that is, he investigates not just whether but how art shapes the world. His answer to this question, on which I’ll elaborate in my reading of Libretto, is that art works, against all the constructed and artificial forces resisting it, to recover democracy. I use democracy here in its broadest sense, referring less to the particular form of government that is its endpoint and most common definition than to the principles that serve as the foundation for that form of government – to wit, the ultimate commonality, equality, and potential unity of the world’s inhabitants. Democracy for Tolson is nothing less than faith in collectivity, writ large, as a meaningful organizing principle. Art is the form of imaginative expression that, if inchoately, urges and engenders this faith and even carries it out in the free transmission of ideas from artist to

Recovering Democracy  113 audience, or writer to reader. Tolson’s vision is of a world transformed from its current state as a “ferris wheel / of race, of caste, of class” to one in which, “free and / joyful again, all mankind unites” – and he believes that art can be one agent, though not the sole agent, of this transformation.4 Tolson does not spell out explicitly how art and the artist can achieve such lofty goals, but it is clear that he does not believe that any one work (and certainly not Libretto alone) can accomplish it. Rather, the implication in Libretto is that all art contains a unifying force that operates on a long, unseen historical trajectory. If the single artwork is a solitary product of creative action, art’s cumulative cultural power appears through distributive action – the sharing of created things. The spread of art is the spread of ideas, and for Tolson, the best of these work to affirm our common kinship as humans. In this way, art is a social and political force that aids in the linking of otherwise separated monads. Metaphorically, and maybe even more than metaphorically, the function of art is to produce the overcoming of mere subjectivity. This conception of art is an ambitious one, connecting the aesthetic realm not only to politics but to ethics. By showing us truer versions of ourselves in relation to one another, art also shows us how to be and how to act. In recent decades, much of the commentary on the politics of aesthetics has criticized any straightforward reading of the artwork’s benefits, arguing that its chief attribute as traditionally defined – beauty – can occlude or obscure social realities as easily as illuminate them. But critical resistance to this axiom has also persisted. Let me point briefly to one notable counterexample. In her short, remarkable book On Beauty and Being Just, the philosopher Elaine Scarry makes a sophisticated case for the link between beauty and justice. For Scarry, the unity, equality, and symmetry inherent to beauty are apotheosized in the image of the trireme ship, its 170 oars striking the water in perfect rhythm. This image epitomizes the connection between visual beauty and political possibility, since “out of the spectacle of the trireme ship, Athenian democracy was born.”5 Scarry’s argument differs from that of Libretto in important ways: she focuses on beauty, a material property of art, rather than on art itself, and perhaps for this reason, the examples she uses are drawn primarily from the material world and from the visual arts. For Scarry, beauty is fundamentally generative – it “brings copies of itself into being.”6 By contrast, Tolson sees art’s connection to virtue partly in its propensity to eliminate the inessential, to reveal unnecessary barriers and impediments to social equality for what they actually are. But Scarry’s understanding of how beauty points us to justice and Libretto’s argument that art can be an engine of social and political unity share many commonalities. Scarry observes, for example, that “what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in the search

114  Recovering Democracy for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation.”7 Tolson’s poem both discusses and embodies the enacting of this same process through the communicative, democratizing power of poetic language, which, as carrier at once of beauty and otherness, brings otherwise disjunctive entities into closer contact. For both writers, too, this movement is not merely conceptual but psychical. Scarry claims that in seeing the beautiful object, we are taken outside ourselves: “At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering.”8 In Tolson’s terms, this decentering of the self, applied on a grand scale, results in a democratizing of the whole, a movement away from tribal instincts and toward universal ones. “Folded into the uneven aesthetic surfaces of the world is a pressure toward social equality,” writes Scarry – a pressure that, in Libretto, is concentrated and celebrated in virtuosic prosody.9

2  Tolson and the Modernist Canon My argument so far has been that Tolson’s grand vision of aesthetic utility manifests itself as a will to democracy, founded on a belief in the potential efficacy of art. But to discover the origin of Tolson’s vision requires that we delve into Tolson’s socio-political position as a black avant-garde poet in the American mid-twentieth century. Tolson’s ambitious insistence on poetry’s power to build bridges, to counter hierarchies and divisions with overtures to democracy, is reflected in his struggle to do the same throughout his own career. Tolson faced such challenges in two significant ways. First, Tolson sought to integrate the black literary tradition in America with a high modernist canon from which it had been, by and large, long excluded. Second, and relatedly, he hoped to dissolve the distinction between “high” and “low” (or elitist and populist) poetic forms by writing a work of enduring power and appeal. These claims, sometimes considered in conjunction, have both reached near-consensus in the growing body of critical work on Tolson. In a 1966 interview, Tolson himself alludes to his goal of merging black and white poetic cultures: “I, as a black poet, have absorbed the Great Ideas of the Great White World, and interpreted them in the melting-pot idiom of my people. My roots are in Africa, Europe, and America.”10 In an analysis of Tolson’s Harlem Gallery, Craig Werner argues that through this cross-cultural rootedness – one that almost undoes a conventional understanding of what it means to have “roots” – the poet “confront[s] a cultural context which assumes and at times enforces the reality of racial (black-white) and aesthetic (popular art-high culture) distinctions” and works to expose them as “at best simplistic and at worst destructive.”11 David Gold concurs, writing that Tolson “tried to meld high-modernist techniques with an African American consciousness to create a voice that

Recovering Democracy  115 would speak across both race and class boundaries.”12 Michael Bérubé analogizes Tolson’s use of modernist forms to invasions of foreign territory, describing him as a “literary version of the maroon, the escaped slave living on the frontier.”13 For Matthew Hart, the great achievement of Tolson’s poetry is its “insist[ence] that blackness is equal to poetic modernity and that modernist form is no barrier to blackness.”14 Other critics claim that Tolson sought to revitalize within modernism an African tradition already latent there. Aldon Nielsen writes that Tolson “came to see modernist poetics as having been already arrived at by African aesthetics, thus rendering the African-American tradition primary rather than merely imitative.”15 Keith Leonard puts the matter similarly: “Modernist poetics was not a master narrative to claim for black people but an innovative literary culture that had its roots in African culture and that needed to be reclaimed.”16 Another divide also preoccupied Tolson’s writing: that between the literary and popular arts. Tolson worked throughout his career to cultivate an audience that would embody the merging of these camps. He addresses the issue explicitly in his long poem Harlem Gallery (1965), which features two speakers, one arguing on behalf of “high” art and the other declaiming for mass appeal. In Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon – perhaps the most perceptive study of Harlem Gallery – Michael Bérubé demonstrates that Tolson’s book enacts these tangled issues more than it resolves them, partly because “modernism,” as movement and signifier, remains as contradictory and self-contested as it is capacious. Tolson, Bérubé writes, “valorizes the avant-garde over against the ‘kitsch’ of mass culture even as he renews the Romantic revolutionary’s faith in the power of the avant-garde to transform the masses” and so “winds up, in short, a poet divided profoundly against himself.”17 Libretto, though more overtly political than Harlem Gallery in many ways, raises the same concerns, constantly working to resolve supposedly insurmountable antinomies and to erode long-held associations between, for example, whiteness and academic poetry and blackness and the folk or vernacular tradition, even as the poem assimilates all of these categories into itself. Dense with annotation and allusion, almost comically difficult to parse in places, Libretto is Tolson’s self-conscious retort to our culture’s tendency to think of academic poetry as a white discipline. But its resistance to the casual reader is also strategic. Tolson viewed difficulty in poetry as a means of access to the canon, entrance into which would guarantee an audience for his poems in the long term if not the near term.18 As Bérubé writes of Harlem Gallery, Tolson’s idea is that “difficulty ensures popular resistance, and popular resistance in turn ensures eventual popular acclaim.”19 This attempt has proved less than wholly successful; a victim of his own lofty ambitions, Tolson has remained largely unread, caught between African American critics who chided

116  Recovering Democracy him for his poetry’s inaccessibility (Bérubé notes that with the publication of Libretto, he lost much of his black audience) and establishment critics who grew to “disdain” him precisely because of the marginal position he so obviously occupied. 20 But what originates as a pragmatic attempt to shift the balance of power within modernist poetics and to prove himself on a historical playing field culminates, in Libretto, as a thematic instinct on Tolson’s part to search out and argue for deeper, more collective realizations of unity. Tolson’s confident overstepping of aesthetic boundaries in the poem implies a rejection of other traditionally distinct cultural binaries and categories and implies, further, that the artist’s role may be to imagine an unrealized future precisely in order to begin to make that future politically conceivable, if not immediately achievable. In this manner, Tolson’s understanding of aesthetic utility subsumes the act of witnessing within a still more daring conception of art’s political and social role.

3  Liberian History and Poetic Responsibility The democratic and utopian overtones of Libretto emerge not only from Tolson’s own history as a poet but from the complex history of Liberia, the country he was commissioned to write about. Liberia is a relatively small country, its role in the history of the black Atlantic a minor one in purely geographical or numerical terms. Symbolically, however, Liberia retains lasting significance as a country invested with visions of diasporic promise but burdened by legacies of disappointment. Its very name comes from the Latin for “freedom,” a hopeful declaration outweighed, like the brief periods of optimism that have stirred the nation, by an overshadowing history of bloodshed and unrest. Liberia was officially founded in 1847, some twenty-seven years after the American Colonization Society embarked on the project of returning freed slaves to West Africa from the United States. This endeavor was opposed by most blacks, who recognized the society’s goal to recolonize Africa as principally motivated by fear, political expediency, and the belief that whites and blacks could not coexist peaceably within shared borders.21 Nonetheless, over the course of the nineteenth century, several thousand emancipated African Americans received passage to Liberia, retracing the slave routes that had brought their ancestors to the Americas. But the newly arrived settlers in Liberia quickly adopted the colonialist and racist mores of the Western culture, from which they had been transported. Indeed, as Ikechi Mgbeoji points out, the colonialist ideology behind Liberia’s beginnings is inscribed in its very motto: “The love of liberty brought us here” – a statement that not very subtly excludes the indigenous population of the area in favor of the recently arrived settlers from the United States.22 However noble the manumitted African Americans’ attempt at self-governance may have been at the outset, the

Recovering Democracy  117 social and economic advantages they held over the indigenous population helped to rapidly usher in a caste system that lasted for more than a century. In the foreword to Slaves Today, a novel based on what he saw and experienced during a three-month stay in Liberia in 1931, George Schuyler laments the living and working conditions of native Liberians, stating that the purpose of Slaves Today is to “help arouse enlightened world opinion against this brutalizing of the native population in a Negro republic.”23 At the same time, the question of Liberia’s future had become a focal point of two competing arguments for the achievement of racial equality: Marcus Garvey’s “Back-to-Africa” movement and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism. For Garvey, Liberia’s self-governance represented the beginning stages of Africa’s ascendance as a site of relocation and refuge for Africans displaced by diasporic movements. In a 1923 letter to Liberia’s president, Garvey encourages the “furtherance of the plan,” already some years in the making, to assist in the development of Liberia, industrially and commercially, by the settlement in some parts of the country of a large number of American and West Indian colonists who desire repatriation to their native land, Africa, for the establishment of permanent homes.24 At this point, Garvey’s dream of an African nationalist rebirth centered in Liberia was already on shaky ground, facing opposition both from the Liberian government and from outside financial interests, and by 1924, his hopes for Liberian colonization had collapsed completely. Du Bois, meanwhile, advocated against relocation to Africa in his magazine The Crisis: “no person of middle age or beyond should think of migrating from the United States to Africa for permanent residence.”25 He also accused Garvey of planning to use Liberia as a platform for his own political career; in Du Bois’s estimation, Garvey sought “to make a start in Liberia with industrial enterprises. From this center he would penetrate all Africa and gradually subdue it.”26 But Du Bois’s own feelings concerning Liberia were mixed. While he did not advocate for emigration to Liberia, when he visited there in 1923, Du Bois was both moved by the occasion of setting foot on African soil and impressed by the local culture. His essay “What Is Africa to Me?” indicates that Du Bois was invested in the success of Liberia because it represented the possibility of an autonomous and flourishing postcolonial African democracy – one that might set an example for other cultures within and around the black Atlantic. In different ways, then, Liberia figured in early-twentieth-century black political movements as the emplacement of an envisioned end to diaspora, whether more chiefly symbolic (as for Du Bois) or actual (as for Garvey). But in the event,

118  Recovering Democracy neither Du Bois’s nor Garvey’s hopes for Liberia were realized. Rather, the systemic injustice experienced by the indigenous population as well as the continued hardships faced by many of the settlers made evident the fallacy of the vision of Africa as mythic timeless origin. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Liberia remained a sign of political possibility overcome time and again by a condition of diasporic melancholy. The years following World War II were the most economically prosperous years in Liberia’s history. Led by President William S. Tubman, who enthusiastically courted American businesses such as the Ohiobased tire manufacturer Firestone, the government of Liberia increasingly turned to foreign investment as a means of developing a more robust national economy. In 1947, the centennial anniversary of Liberia coincided with the beginning of its ascendancy as America’s most trusted African ally. At a ceremony honoring the centennial at the Liberian Embassy in Washington, D.C., Tubman named Melvin Tolson the poet laureate of Liberia. In writing his long poem Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, which he published in 1953, Tolson’s challenge was to balance elegiac attention to Liberia’s tumultuous history with the civic and optimistic tone expected in a national poem composed by a poet laureate. This twofold challenge contains the key to the singular mood of Libretto, which is at once brutally honest about Liberia’s past and daringly confident about its future. In Libretto Tolson imagines African diaspora as both an historical phenomenon and a continuum through which to explore the limits and possibilities of human connection and democratic existence – an existence nurtured by, and protective of, the art it inspires. Over the course of Libretto, then, Tolson’s vision of the nation moves from a temporally and spatially bounded reading of Liberian history to a futuristic vision that extends Liberia – and by extension Africa – beyond the restrictions of nation or continent, culture or race.

4  The Democratic Character of Libretto The appeal to democratic values in Libretto is most first discernible stylistically, in its conflation of high modernist form with African American poetic idiom. As I mentioned earlier, this aspect of Libretto has already been discussed in detail by other scholars, so two brief examples will suffice here. In the second stanza of Libretto, Tolson characterizes Liberia as “Mehr Licht for the Africa-to-Be” (Libretto, 16). “Mehr Licht,” the German words for “more light,” are apocryphally said to be Goethe’s last words. Using the final utterance of one of the great thinkers in the Western literary tradition to inaugurate a newly liberated African nation, Tolson synthesizes the historical developments of Africa and the West, invoking a connection between ostensibly distant cultures. The merging of traditions also appears in the formal structure

Recovering Democracy  119 of Libretto; its eight sections are named after successive notes on the diatonic scale, which finds its origins in the European musical tradition. But at the same time, the opening section of Libretto assumes a stridently African American rhythm. As Edward Brunner observes in his annotation of the poem, it features “a set of contrasts resembling a call-and-response pattern” of the sort popularized by the blues and folk tradition in black culture. 27 In subtending this call-and-response pattern within an overarching framework of Western origin, Tolson initiates the overlapping of the Western modernist and African American domains consistently featured in his poem. The Western mode may seem to be the dominant one, since it encompasses the whole Libretto, while the call-and-response technique is used only in the beginning section and at intermittent points throughout the poem. But the poem’s opening lines not only address this apparent power imbalance; they inscribe a sudden reversal in which Liberia, as “the quicksilver sparrow that slips / The eagle’s claw,” resists appropriation by the colonialist powers that hope to control it (Libretto, 7–8). In an endnote explaining his description, in line 42, of Africa as a “Question Mark,” Tolson recalls that Africa has been called “a moral interrogation point that challenges the white world” (Libretto, 42 n). It is through the assertive and ultimately hopeful character of this challenge that the question mark of Africa evades the potentially simplistic and limiting answers it might provoke. In another instance of the connective tactics of Libretto, Tolson incorporates various languages into the poem to demonstrate that its reach is transnational, limited neither to Africa nor to the Americas. Michael North has described the modernist movement as an attempt on the part of both black and white writers to “free” language, “in dramatically different ways,” from the constricting effects of a limiting political culture.28 The rich and sprawling language of Libretto is part of this attempt. The poem contains “phrases in a dozen languages,” as Brunner notes, and it circumvents tradition in order to reinvent it, “mount[ing] a series of raids against various kinds of established authority.”29 That the languages featured in Libretto are foreign to one another allows us to consider how such foreignness might be re-examined, how meaning achieves a tenuous transmission across and between dialects. As Brent Hayes Edwards has observed, the interaction between or interweaving of different languages can provoke moments of unexpected harmony, what he calls a “foreshadowing of community” in “the articulation of a connection across difference.”30 The proximity of myriad voices and languages to one another in Libretto marks the poem as transnational both in scale and agenda. The heterogeneous vocabulary of Libretto urges adaptation rather than stagnation, dynamism rather than fixity, and above all it underlines the requirement – by requiring it of the reader – to encounter the language, and with it the worldview, of the other. Mikhail Bakhtin has

120  Recovering Democracy demonstrated the necessary link between language and worldview: “all languages of heteroglossia . . . are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values.”31 The diverse languages with which Libretto challenges the reader remind her of the necessary subjectivity of any one viewpoint, whatever the language that shapes and accompanies it. Of course, this inescapable subjectivity also circumscribes the limits of identification: but so far from suggesting that identification with the other is unavailable, it makes the need for it all the more evident. While the radical alterity that language symptomatizes causes the speaker of Libretto moments of doubt – “the letter killeth five hundred global tongues,” he notes, even as he speaks in several of them – the confluence of dialects in the poem dramatizes the navigation of ideas and relationships across the dividing lines of languages to suggest that the barriers they create are permeable (Libretto, 523). The first section of the poem, “Do,” poses Liberia as a repeated one-word question. Throughout, the answers invoke both the nation’s bloody past and its aspirant aims; Liberia is “Black Lazarus risen from the White Man’s grave” – a source of African hope despite white colonialist injustices (Libretto, 38). Indeed, while Tolson has not yet identified aesthetic utility as its source, his modernist hope rings throughout the first section of the poem. Its last stanza invokes the present moment as pivotal – an opportunity, given Liberia’s newfound wealth and democratic government, to restore the freedom of its original vision to its future inhabitants: Liberia? No waste land yet, nor yet a destooled elite, No merry-andrew, an Ed-dehebi at heart, With St. Paul’s root and Breughel’s cheat: You are The iron nerve of lame and halt and blind, Liberia and not Liberia, A moment of the conscience of mankind! (Libretto, 50–56) This typically rich passage alludes both to Liberia’s troubled past and to its indeterminate present: Liberia is currently both “Liberia and not Liberia,” free and not free, a nation unable thus far to live up to the promise embedded in its founding. This liminal state is full of pain, given the nation’s history of strife, but equally of hope in that it presents a moment during which the “conscience of mankind” might finally become visible. The poem’s second section begins by citing an African proverb: “The Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu chanted: / ‘Brow tron lo – eta ne a ne won oh gike!’” (Libretto, 58). Most critics agree that the “Good Gray Bard” is Walt Whitman, whom Tolson here locates in Africa. This imaginative

Recovering Democracy  121 placement of the great American poet dismisses the limitations imposed by linguistic barriers (Whitman speaks in an African language) as well as by physical distance.32 The global hybridity posited in this gesture is underlined by the content of the proverb itself, translated in Tolson’s endnote as “The world is too large – that’s why we do not hear everything” (Libretto, 58 n). The poem’s transnational impulse is a response to this lament and is expressed both as challenge and as corrective: in more grandiose terms, then, Libretto is an attempt to make the world smaller through language. The second section of the poem builds on the first by enacting the principles through which the speaker’s hope for Liberia’s future might be realized – namely, artistic, linguistic, and poetic hybridity, a vision that can encompass and unite diasporic communities. Art is the medium through which these links are forged, and aesthetic utility is therefore the fulcrum from which Tolson’s modernist hope extends. Reflecting on the ancient economic practices that shaped modern civilization, the poem’s speaker envisions “[s]ea lawyers” who, in service to their rulers, “[m]ixed liquors with hyperboles to cure deafness” (Libretto, 67). Figuratively, Libretto might be said to share that aim. Its locution is not so much in a language as between them. It is in this sense that, as Matthew Hart argues, Libretto can be termed a “black Atlantic” poem: while its subject is the country of Liberia, it remains attentive to the interstices between nations and ethnicities rather than focusing solely on one state.33 Through the voice of Jehudi Ashmun, a Congregational minister who sailed to Liberia in the early nineteenth century, Tolson imagines these ties as familial bonds: He said, “My Negro kinsmen, America is my mother, Liberia is my wife, And Africa my brother.”(Libretto, 251–254) Using figures and events drawn from Liberian history, Tolson establishes a rough historical framework in his poem only to veer from it to geological time (“Glaciers had shouldered down / The cis-Saharan snows  .  .  .”) before ending with a fantastical ode to a future Liberia of the poet’s imagination (Libretto, 227–228). The poem’s ambition, which follows from Tolson’s estimation of art’s renewed cultural power, is to help to cure a “deafness” that inheres in our relation to our shared past as well as to each other. While it has repercussions on a global scale, this deafness is especially apparent in the case of Africa: “‘Seule de tous les continents,’ the parrots / chatter, ‘l’Afrique n’a pas d’histoire” (Libretto, 170–171). This saying – “Alone of all the continents, Africa has no ­history” – condemns the crimes perpetrated on the continent and the mindset that allowed for them, the unwillingness or inability to

122  Recovering Democracy recognize the essential validity of other selves. In narrating this history from an explicitly internationalist perspective, Tolson encourages in Libretto a rekindling of this recognition and its attendant benefits. This recognition, and the democratic equality it necessitates, can only be possible if the forms of systemic oppression prevalent in many places in the world of Tolson’s time emanate from conditional, socially constructed paradigms rather than inherent ones. Tolson stresses the temporal and spatial limitations of any one group’s dominance over another in part to reinforce the arbitrariness of some of our deepest-rooted and most endemic divisions. The fundamental inessentiality of hegemonies of language and nation is a key tenet of Libretto, and in the futuristic utopia of the poet’s imagination, these reductive categories will have been overcome, bringing the most deeply engrained and lasting struggle for equality in human history, that between rich and poor, to the fore. For Tolson’s vision of the world is in many respects a Marxist one. This becomes evident not only through close readings of his poems but by examining other aspects of his career as a teacher and cultural critic. Gary Lenhart writes that in “Caviar and Cabbage,” a column Tolson wrote for the Washington Tribune from 1937 to 1944, Tolson consistently hammered “the Big Boys” whose limitless greed promoted colonialism in most of the world and racism in the United States. He stated frequently that the cause of racism was capitalism, the profits of which required an exploited low-wage class.34 From Tolson’s perspective, the source of all problems in political and social relations is economic and not race-based. In Libretto, Tolson evokes this principle in his summary of the American Civil War, during which, he writes, “the bells of Yankee capital / Tolled for the feudal glory of the South” (Libretto, 101–102). Here the central distinction between the opposed sides is found in their differing economic systems – the North’s comparatively advanced, the South’s outdated. The lines that follow reinforce the connection between money and racial power. The history is a thoroughly capitalist one, in which a “family name / Dwarfed signatures of blood,” and a “decision’s cash / And credit bought a balm for conscience” (Libretto, 108–109, 114–115). Tolson concisely summarizes this conceit later in the poem: it is the fate of all cultures, he writes, to “read the flesh of grass / into bulls and bears” (314–315). As Brunner notes, the phrase “flesh of grass” is redolent of Isaiah 40:6: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.”35 The bulls and bears to which these terms are subordinated refer, of course, to the stock market; Tolson’s lament is that the latter should control the former, that the fact of human mortality should be made to serve the whims of the capitalist engine. In “Ti,” his wide-ranging examination of African and world history, Tolson insists more explicitly on the historical and theoretical

Recovering Democracy  123 pre-­eminence of the economic binarism in modernity: “Before hammer and sickle or swastika, two / worlds existed: the Many, the Few” (Libretto, 341–342). The divide between those who stand to gain by the capitalist system and those who stand to lose by it predates any of the political ideologies written to explain it and is the original inequality on which all other systemic injustices are based. “Like some gray ghoul from ­A lcatraz, / old Profit, the bald rake paseq, wipes the bar” – ­passing, in the poem’s next lines, through eras and nations like an avaricious ghost (Libretto, 347–348). In his endnote to these lines, Tolson refers to the paseq as “the most mysterious sign in literature.” The word is Hebrew, and its literal meaning is “separated,” but its function in ancient literature is actually to unify the current text with a preceding one. It is a vertical line, rendered like so: |, and is meant to reassure the authenticity of the current text’s phrasing as compared to the original or source version (Libretto, 348 n). Here, personified as “Profit,” the dividing function of the term is given precedence. It is money, Tolson argues, that inaugurates and sustains the separation between peoples and cultures, even if that separation is technically inessential. In delineating the wide-ranging effects of this inequity, Tolson paints an unequivocally dark picture in the final four stanzas of “Ti.” This section of Libretto exemplifies what I have called the poetry of witness, a politically conscious testament to atrocity that refuses to allow it to be minimized or erased. The gallery of images and ideas from which Tolson selects and arranges his litany of troubles is astonishingly vivid: “gold fished from cesspools,” “epitaphs in blood,” “the pelican’s breast rent red to feed the young,” “the church of the unchurched,” “maggot democracy,” and (in a line he lifts from Baudelaire) “the oasis d’horreur dans un déserte d’ennui” [“oasis of horror in a desert of despair”] (Libretto, 405, 409, 417, 420, 426, 429). And in the poem’s long final section, Tolson amplifies his indictment of the world’s horrors, historical and current, conjuring a savaged landscape in which “barbaric yawps shatter the shoulder-knots of white peace”; in which unapologetically colonialist “britannia rules the waves”; in which, since “pin-pricks precede blitzkriegs,” we are forever on the verge of war; and in which no survivors are left in ruined cities to witness “blind men gibbering mboagan [“death”] in greek / against sodom’s pillars of salt” (Libretto, 514, 516, 531, 552–553).36 The causes of such evils may be too complex to summarize, but at the end of “Ti,” shortly before he offers his vision of the future, Tolson symptomizes them as stemming from a deep-seated human impulse toward “tenotomy,” or division: Things-as-they-are-for-us, nullius in verba, speak! O East, O West, on tenotomy bent,

124  Recovering Democracy Chang’s tissue is Eng’s ligament! (Libretto, 455–460) Here Tolson uses the image of conjoined twins to intimate a natural, inborn connection between cultures that have been conditioned to view themselves as not only distinct but opposed. In the poem’s final section, Tolson insists on the potential of art to counter such a mindset, uniting high with popular culture, past with future, and east with west. This aesthetic utility does not undo or ignore the weight of history (the poetics of witness in fact accomplishes the opposite), but offsets it through an imaginative, communal response that conceives of a social reality as yet unrealized. A small, striking phrase alerts us to the paradox embedded in such a technique, which demands attention both to a painful past and a hopeful future. Early in Libretto, Tolson describes Africa as the “Mother of Science” but adds that Africa has been torn asunder and is now “lachen mit yastchekes” (Libretto, 273–274). The phrase is Yiddish; its literal meaning, Tolson’s note tells us, is “laughing with needles being stuck in you.” He adds a secondary, more figurative definition: “ghetto laughter” (Libretto, 274 n). Ghetto laughter is the response of the unjustly treated to the fact of their victimization. But it is an active and not a passive response, seeking to construct the very change in which it expresses belief. Far from minimizing the reality and reach of the ghetto, the phrase “ghetto laughter” means to remind us of its continual repercussions. But through the paradoxical reaction of laughter in response to ­suffering – so at odds with the material conditions represented by the ghetto – ­Tolson insists on the agency of human subjects, their ability to reject, in responding to mistreatment, the expected reactions these conditions seem to impose on them.

5  Tolson and Afrofuturism In other words, the mood that comes into focus toward the end of Libretto is an affective anomaly: the poem’s confident and assertive response to tragedy appears entirely (but intentionally) out of step with the sad realities of Liberia’s past. The poem’s affect is anomalous because it responds to catastrophe with hope, ruin with optimism, the ghetto with laughter. This approach may strike the contemporary reader as counterintuitive, even irrational. After all, in Tolson’s initial and lengthy survey of the global and Liberian past, we surmise little of the modernist hope on which (I argue) his poem rests. This is the poetry of witness, which demands fidelity to lived experience. But the past has already morphed into a present that, Tolson argues, offers us greater grounds for hope – grounds, even, to paint a fantastical picture of the utopian future envisioned in “Do,” the poem’s eighth and final section. Tolson’s paean to this dreamed-of social future actually begins at the end of “Ti,” as the

Recovering Democracy  125 speaker looks back at a bloody past scarred by “Yesterday’s wars” and “Yesterday’s wills,” during which the ferris wheel of race, of caste, of class dumped and alped cadavers till the ground fogged the Pleiades with Gila rot . . . (Libretto, 462, 474–477) This scene contrasts with the present-day situation, a democratic freefor-all in which “unparadised nobodies with maps of Nowhere / ride the merry-go-round!” (Libretto, 486–487). As Robert Farnsworth explains, the terms “ferris wheel” and “merry-go-round” can be traced back to one of Tolson’s newspaper columns from 1940. There, the poet argues for a historical progression from the former to the latter: The history of man heretofore has been the history of the rise and fall of nations. I presume to call this the Ferris Wheel Theory of History . . . I have another theory. It is based on economic and racial brotherhood. I presume to call this the Merry-Go-Round of History. On the merry-go-round all seats are on the same level. Nobody goes up; therefore, nobody has to come down . . . . Racial superiority and class superiority produced the hellish contraption called the Ferris Wheel of History. Democracy will produce the Merry-Go-Round of history.37 In a letter to his editor explaining the final section of Libretto, Tolson links the symbols of the Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round to the past and future respectively.38 Libretto’s bold, hopeful claim is that democracy of the kind only just installed in Liberia when Tolson was commissioned to write the poem is the antidote to the seemingly unending varieties of oppression by which Liberia was beset. The “Merry-GoRound of History” represents Tolson’s vision of the utopian future he depicts at length in Libretto’s last section. Combining a radical Christian moral philosophy with a Marxist understanding of economics, Tolson pictures a future social compact governed by political equality and affective community. This political compact does not align perfectly either with the socialism Tolson promoted in his career as a public intellectual or with democracy in its conventional forms. In Libretto, the civilizational transition from the “Ferris Wheel” of caste to the “Merry-Go-Round” of brotherhood is only predicated on democracy insofar as democracy is enacted less as a system of political organization than as an ideological force dissolving the power structures that wall humans off from one another. Thus the poem contains no direct political injunctions; rather, it is woven through with an implied demand for recognition of the other (especially the weaker) and a mingling of supposedly distinct

126  Recovering Democracy languages, ideologies, and categories, whose integration produces the very unification the poem formally represents. Tolson’s pairing of the economic doctrine of Marxism and the religious principles of Christianity is an incisive example of this tactic. In describing the respective heads of these movements as “Marx, the exalter” and “Christ, the Leveler,” Tolson differentiates between the two, perhaps implying that Marx’s ideas give the proletariat a voice, while Christ’s teachings humble and shame the proud (Libretto, 361, 363). In any case, Tolson indicates that the synthesis of socialist and Christian ideals, rather than their mutual exclusion from one another, might foster the cultivation of an ethic of unity. The confluence of such ideologies, underpinned and promulgated by art, produces a social ethic that rejects past, simplistic political or religious affiliations in favor of more radical and self-­questioning forms of inquiry. Art figures heavily here for Tolson because it demands, both of reader and writer, a kind of uncertain generosity, an emotional willingness to reach beyond the borders of the conventional and into the unpredictable but potentially liberating arena of the unknown. This unachieved political ideal is given texture in the exuberant final section of Libretto, which sequences dreamlike descriptions of futuristic vehicles of transportation, all African in origin. The stylization and utopianism of the whole of Libretto – but especially this section – allow us to situate it as a precursor text in the Afrofuturist literary tradition.39 Afrofuturist texts draw from genres such as science fiction and magic realism to theorize possible global African futures. While it remains rooted in an awareness of the historical and material realities that have shaped the conditions of diaspora, much of Afrofuturism’s power derives from its imaginative reach, its refusal to limit itself to the strictly mimetic in its speculative and sometimes fantastic depictions of black futurity. Tolson refuses these limits as well, conflating technologies of transportation with post-nationalist politics in order to sketch a new world order. Each next vehicle Tolson describes offers an increased capacity to travel farther and faster, well beyond the borders of Liberia if necessary – the expanding territory navigable by each machine signifying the continuing advance of the transnational unity his poem promotes. These vehicles include, in order, “The Futurafrique,” a sleek futuristic automobile; “The United Nations Limited,” a high-powered train; “The Bula Matadi,” a large cargo ship; and “Le Premier des Noirs,” an airplane belonging to a company called “Pan-African Airways” (Libretto, 575–693). Tolson then theorizes a more explicitly political construction, a pan-African governmental body that provides leadership and renewal not only to African culture but to the world: The Parliament of African Peoples, chains riven in an age luminous with alpha ray ideas, rives the cycle of years lean and fat, poises the

Recovering Democracy  127 scales of Head and Hand, gives Science dominion over Why and Art over How, bids Man cross the bridge of Bifrost and drink draughts of rases from verved and loined apes of God with leaves of grass and great audiences . . . (Libretto, 711–722) In this representative passage, Tolson imagines a future Africa – whose riven chains indicate the absence not only of slavery but of the various forms of colonialist oppression the continent has had to endure – at the forefront of “an age luminous with alpha ray / ideas” (Libretto, 712–713). The overcoming of ignorance and prejudice requires the union of apparent opposites, including “lean and fat,” “Head and Hand,” and Science and Art (Libretto, 714–715). Again, Tolson insists on the ultimate insubstantiality of received categories and names two of the forces capable of transcending them, Science and Art. Science is granted “dominion over Why” – the realm of explanation, origin, and causation – but Art, in turn, is granted dominion over “How” (Libretto, 716–717). If science provides a schema by which we understand social change, the poem argues, art provides the spark by which change actually happens. In part, this aesthetic utility is the fruit of the perfect kinship between poet and audience – the Whitmanian “leaves of grass” paired with the “great / audiences” receptive to them – for which Tolson longed throughout his own career (Libretto, 721–722). The poem’s climactic description of this unified world culture is unabashedly earnest, almost to the point of triteness: “free and / joyful again, all mankind unites, / without heralds of earth and / water” (Libretto, 700–703). In his note to these lines, Tolson defines “heralds” as “ancient symbols of submission” (Libretto, 703 n). Thus, in this envisioned future, submission, domination, structures of power, and forms of slavery both literal and figurative have been permanently consigned to history. For Tolson, the free, democratizing exchange of ideas, produced and championed in artworks of various kinds, is the linchpin to this portent of global success. Tolson’s Libretto thus exemplifies, in many ways, what Yogita Goyal has identified as a shift from realism to romance within post-nationalist literature of the diaspora.40 Throughout much of Libretto, Tolson works to secure Liberia within a particular black Atlantic history, and part of the text’s optimism is located in its more pragmatic political hope for a new Africa able to divest itself of the travails of its past. At the same time, the affective register of Libretto is one of radical hope, produced by the poem’s willingness to imagine a transnational political structure not limited by race, class, or nation. By the end of the poem, Tolson’s “visionary strain meets and exceeds his searing critique,” as Edward Brunner puts it; the hopeful appeal to the future outweighs the unflinching assessment of the past and present.41

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6  Cultural Melancholia and Tolson’s Modernist Hope Tolson’s confidence about the prospects of a free Liberia was not entirely unwarranted. Liberia had been a founding member of the United Nations in 1945, and its government was internationally involved in the years after World War II. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference, Liberia joined several other Asian and African nations in officially condemning colonialism. Liberia’s independence also paved the way for many other African nations to follow suit. As Tolson points out in a 1965 interview, “In 1947 . . . there were only two independent black countries in Africa. Today there are thirty-three. It is a vision, right out of the Apocalypse.”42 This historical development helps to make Tolson’s surrealistic depiction of the African future less tendentious, even if we know today, as Tolson might have seen already in 1965, that most of the republics formed in Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century were little more than puppet governments installed to provide flimsy validation of the reign of autocratic and sometimes genocidal dictators. Indeed, the historical record comes much closer to reaffirming Tolson’s initial critique than to reflecting what Matthew Hart calls the “gaseous optimism” of its last section.43 Since 1980, when Samuel Doe led a military coup against the government, Liberia has been one of Africa’s bloodiest nation-states. Doe was in power for ten years before he was executed and his own government overthrown by the Charles Taylor-led National Patriotic Front of Liberia. This coup precipitated a civil war that left nearly a quarter of a million people dead. The historical record, in other words, is consonant with the fortification of power structures rather than with their erosion; with the erecting of social barriers rather than with their dismantling; and, most of all, with the demanding reality of a violence whose unutterable, unimaginable immensity makes Tolson’s Afrofuturist vision seem a quaint delusion, and as such, perhaps even a disservice. Moreover, an honest accounting of such histories must reckon not only with their immediate victims but with the scope of their aftereffects. Anne Anlin Cheng performs this work in a different social context in her book The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, which assesses the effects of racial discrimination on American culture. Working from the premise that grief is one of racism’s primary affective manifestations, Cheng suggests that such grief manifests itself in American culture largely in terms of a complex and ongoing history of melancholia, one that afflicts both dominant and minority ethnic groups.44 Following Freud, Cheng defines melancholia as “a condition of endless self-­impoverishment” in which subjects become “psychically stuck,” unable to free themselves from their psychologically scarring pasts.45 White mainstream culture is implicated in this melancholia because the history of slavery and exclusion it struggles both to deny and to transcend is so

Recovering Democracy  129 at odds with its national ideology of freedom and equality. In the minority subject, meanwhile, melancholia is experienced as an internalized and gradually unnoticed deep sadness that ultimately “conditions life for the disenfranchised and, indeed, constitutes their identity and shapes their subjectivity.”46 This situation of endemic and systemic cultural melancholia demands some gesture toward a reparative solution, but Cheng is wary of any answers that might underestimate the extent to which constructs such as race have shaped the very thoughts and identities of individuals subjected to them. For Cheng, this conditioning has produced a cultural melancholia that inevitably prevents us from seeing the social other fully or fairly. The pervasiveness of melancholia reorients our ethical responsibilities, requiring that we recognize, if not the other, the interstitial space between self and other: “an in-between place, the middle ground that is not a copout but a crucial, strategic position in a divided world.”47 In focusing on this difficult-to-define “in-between space,” Cheng subsumes the relation between self and other to the cultural melancholia into which we are all assimilated. As a result, the “redemptive possibility of recognizing the self in the other and vice versa . . . proves to be difficult, if not impossible,” and the only plateau to which we can hope to attain is, finally, “a kind of knowing, in the fullest and most present sense of knowledge, that the distance between self and other is neither measurable nor stable.”48 Cheng’s cautiousness regarding the possibility of connection across difference is reminiscent of the Afropessimist movement, a tradition in African scholarship that emphasizes the systemic injustice that has continued to flourish on the African continent since the postwar decades and the difficult (not to say impossible) process of reconciliation or empathy between Africans and other ethnic groups given the history of violence and oppression that divides them.49 The interdisciplinary character of Afropessimist thought makes it resistant to reductive definition, but two important texts often associated with it, Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, seek to examine conditions of existence in Africa and the diaspora in the context of both socio-historical developments and the ongoing construction of what might be termed the ontology of race. In many ways the scholarship of Afropessimism is dominated by the question of agency, black and otherwise: to what extent, it asks, is redress or understanding possible given the legacy of brutality, slavery, and apartheid in black history – and how has African thought itself fallen prey at times to the very structures of oppression and despair it seeks to oppose? In a summarizing article, Mbembe insists that “African criticism, dominated by political economy and by the nativist impulse, has from the outset inscribed the quest for political identity within a purely instrumental and short-term temporality.”50 In a 2003 conversation between Saidiya Hartman and

130  Recovering Democracy Frank Wilderson III published in Qui Parle, Hartman observes that many scholars are quick to overlook the boundaries imposed by otherness in their efforts at identification – ignoring, to borrow Cheng’s terminology, the instability of the distance between self and other. In so doing, Hartman argues, they elide the subjectivity of the individual with whom sympathy is sought: It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see everyday.51 In this way Afropessimism responds to a critical tradition in which, as Wilderson III puts it later in the same interview, “people consciously or unconsciously peel away from the strength and the terror of their evidence in order to propose some kind of coherent, hopeful solution to things.”52 They may do so, Hartman suggests, as part of an “attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves.”53 These words could also perhaps be used to object to the tenor of Libretto – a poetic catalogue of injustice that ends in a surprising burst of optimism at once global and Afrocentric. One way to situate Tolson’s optimism alongside the melancholia Cheng identifies – and to consider Afrofuturism in light of ­A fropessimism – is to posit a distinction in role between the poet and the theorist. The differing freedoms and responsibilities of each are reminiscent, perhaps, of Aristotle’s comparison of the poet to the historian, in which he writes that the latter is committed to transcribing the actual, while the former is free to conjecture the possible. Certainly, Tolson’s choice to end Libretto by forecasting a bright future despite past travails should be considered in light of his responsibility to Liberia as its poet laureate. His reading of Liberia’s future is informed by a hope that, given its tumultuous past, might appear to border on irrational. But to refuse cynicism, to insist on the possibility of what appears unlikely, may be one of the poet’s great freedoms, and responsibilities. As Farnsworth argues, Tolson clearly saw himself in the vanguard of an army of black cultural soldiers who would make the African past a centerpiece of the world’s future, not by re-creating the flip side of white racism, but by realizing a more racially enlightened democratic dream.54 If this dream has not been fully realized either in Tolson’s time or in our own, it’s possible that its very presence, if only as a social ideal, remains a vital ingredient in whatever progress has been achieved.

Recovering Democracy  131 For it was Tolson’s belief in the social capacity of art to change cultures that resonates everywhere in Libretto and that rests at the foundation of his hope for Liberia’s future. As I have shown, this belief is both described in the poem, in its rendering of a future that grants art “dominion . . . over How,” and enacted throughout its sections, in the way its willful admixture of languages, dialects, and histories fashions it into a truly transnational, democratic piece of writing (Libretto, 716–717). This heterogeneity reflects Tolson’s conviction that one great virtue of art is its utter disregard for boundaries and borders, national and otherwise. Artist and audience are separated not by ideology, skin pigmentation, gender, or ethnicity but merely by the distance between one mind and another – a distance the artwork is able to bridge in mysterious and multitudinous ways. Of course, Libretto itself remains mostly unread today, its complexity distancing it from all but the most committed readers. The poem’s denseness suggests, to its likely detriment, an unnecessarily strong investment on Tolson’s part in attaining to the elitist standards of the established modernist aesthetic of his time. But Libretto’s reach continues to increase, and its own effect remains incalculable. Additionally, for all its academic allusiveness – indeed, in many ways because of it – the poem looks outward, not inward; its argument concerns art in general. In fact, the argument for looking outward from self to other, or from individual to nation to world, is the thread that unites the whole poem and constitutes Libretto’s appeal to the reader to work to challenge the systemic patterns through which melancholia insinuates itself into modern culture. This is a solution that fits the problem, given that melancholia involves the incorporation of feelings of loss or shame: “the melancholic has introjected that which he or she now reviles” and is left “almost choking on,” Cheng writes, “the hateful and loved thing he or she just devoured.”55 That is, melancholia designates a psychosocial condition in which the affective response to the loss of a loved object or condition is directed inward, and this negative affect begins to nurture and simultaneously feed on itself. In stark contrast, the moment of identification with another self, produced, in many cases, by the artwork, is one in which affect is directed outside the self, externalizing affect rather than internalizing it. In this way, art and artistic creation gestures toward a means of escaping the closed loop of attachment and reattachment to the sources of pain and grief from which the melancholic subject seeks to flee. While Cheng notes that her study offers not only a record of the aftereffects of grief but “a revelation of transformative potentials within grief,” she concludes that such grief and its sources are finally too imbricated in the very origins of American culture ever to be escaped.56 While its reach goes far beyond a strictly American context, Libretto is very much about this same cultural grief – its sources and fixations – but the poem valorizes, in the end, the various forms of democratic and

132  Recovering Democracy interstitial connection produced in and through art by which such melancholia, and its sources, can be exposed and redressed. Tolson’s surprising insistence on the viability of hope also encourages us to reconsider the scope and direction of current affect theory. In recent years, the dominant critical trend in affect studies has been to focus on negative emotions, dark feelings, and troublesome aspects of social relation, often (though not always) to the exclusion of more remedial forms of affect. Indeed, the rise of affect theory hinged on analyses of shame in the work of Silvan Tomkins, first by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later by Elspeth Probyn and others. Since then, the focus in affect studies has unquestionably been on states of psychological relation founded in disjunctions between self and other or between self and world.57 Even recent examinations of positive affects – here I am thinking of Laurent Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and Sarah Ahmed’s The Promise of H ­ appiness – are guided by the thesis that such affects are often in fact reducible to what Tomkins would call toxic attachment scripts, propagated by systems of power that enmesh those consumed by them in unattainable and ultimately undesirable fantasies. While the contributions to the field offered by these analyses have been valuable, it’s worth remembering that affective relation can be as much about unity as disparity and can provoke solidarity as much as it can provoke grief. Indeed, as Sean Grattan reminds us in his book Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature, such attachments are required in order for any imagined better world to be forged, even and especially amidst turmoil and upheaval. Libretto takes its place within the literary history of utopian thought, and utopias, as Grattan writes, do not begin with memories of a nostalgic or edenic past; they begin with a lengthy engagement with the horrors of the present and a desire to make the world new. Utopian imagination emerges from the muck and slime of the present as an attempt to refashion the world into something not merely bearable – though the bearable is more important than not – but enchanting and joyful.58 Such imagination is itself hope-giving and can exist alongside “a very real understanding that myriad injustices ranging from the small to the large continually buffet us.”59 Indeed, Tolson’s cataloguing of these injustices is exhaustive, but Libretto reminds us that optimism is necessary too, however hard-won – that hope in its various iterations (political, moral, and socio-economic) can be more than an insidious myth manufactured and propagated by the dominant culture to quell dissent. A poetics of identification can be, in fact, that very dissent, finding strength precisely in the varieties of hospitality and recognition it depicts and envisions.

Recovering Democracy  133 While his work reads scenes of crisis and oppression as almost unmitigated by small acts of human goodness, the “almost” looms large for Tolson. His prognosis is therefore one of unfashionable hope, in more than one sense of the term. It is unfashionable, first, in the sense of being out of fashion – out of step with an academic culture that all too easily dispenses with the idea of hope as insufficiently rigorous, distanced, or intellectually honest. Second, and more crucially, it is unfashionable in the more literal sense of being unable to be fully fashioned: it always insists on the potential of the future, it never ignores present-day injustices, and it is always in a state of self-reassessment. And if the day-to-day circumstances of the postwar era (or of our own era, for that matter) would seem to dictate that such hope is both unwise and unrealistic, it may be for just this reason that Tolson insists upon it. Tolson’s rhetoric of confidence is less a prediction of the future than an avowal of the human ability to improve that future – and of the centrality of aesthetic utility to the possibility of doing so. Evincing the outlines of a faith that persists in the face of difficult odds, Tolson’s rhetoric of unfashionable hope finds a contemporary echo in Cheng’s observation that scenes of anguish and aggression serve to remind us of “the impossibility yet urgency of sympathy.”60 Indeed, the very emotional bond between separate individuals that sympathy instantiates serves to underscore, by its impermanence and fragility, the fact that we are all in some sense alien to one another. This makes any form of hoped-for political community across lines of race and class a tenuous venture. Cheng locates within human relationality “a crisis of unbridgeability” that must be navigated within, and not over against, the pervasive climate of racial melancholia within which it takes place.61 She concludes, in a tone somewhat melancholic in its own right, that the democratizing identification Tolson’s poem champions remains highly constrained by its own (which is to say, our own) inadequacies: In a world defined by sides, where everyone speaks in the vocabulary of “them” versus “us,” not to take a side means to exist in an insistent, resistant middle ground that is also nowhere. The perspective that sees beyond the self is also the perspective that takes on the view of the other, which is also an impossible perspective. . . . To hold that vision of knowledge, reserve, contemplation, vigilance, and multiplicity is also to remain homeless.  .  . . [U]nderstanding may mean understanding the limits of understanding.62 Cheng’s argument here restricts the scene of identification to one of fantasy and wish-fulfillment: the self can only identify with the nebulous space between self and other, never with the (technically unreachable) other. But at the same time, this very space uniting self and other can itself only be present through some form of identification, however

134  Recovering Democracy incomplete it must remain. The displacement of the basic centrality of emotional connection thus effects a kind of double move in which we come to identify not with the other but with our own limited attempts to sympathize. This model of identity and identification, while intelligible on a theoretical level, is difficult to use as a blueprint for effective activism at the level of real-world relationships. To “exist . . . nowhere,” to “remain homeless,” can only be undertaken as an intellectual exercise, not a practical one; and even at the level of theory, it seems to require a certain rescinding of political action. Cheng asserts as much, calling “the ‘no place’ that is nonetheless an imperative” “the difference between ethics and politics.”63 Tolson’s Libretto is instructive here because it articulates, by celebrating and instantiating the transformative power of art, a potential and provisional strategy for filling the gap between the ethical and the political. For while Libretto is a necessarily political text – after all, it is a national poem written to celebrate the birth of an African democracy – the real weight of its politics emerges less in any explicit manner than in its ethic affirming linguistic and ethnic hybridity and the transience of social categories. In this way, Tolson both situates Liberia within the historical and spatial black Atlantic and positions Liberia within his poem as the ground zero for a reconfiguration, through a poetics of optimism, of the possibilities inherent in diasporic community. As a final example of his undeterred hope, consider this encouragement from Tolson to his readers: O Peoples of the Brinks, come with the hawk’s resolve, the skeptic’s optic nerve, the prophet’s tele verve and Oedipus’ guess, to solve the riddle of the Red Enigma and the White Sphinx.(Libretto, 371–376) The enigma and sphinx might be taken to represent past and present, socialism and capitalism, East and West; most likely they symbolize some combination of those three. Their entrenched opposition is the riddle in need of solving, and to do so, Tolson believes, we will need to wear many different hats: those of the soldier, the skeptic, and the prophet. In a sense, then, the unfixedness of identity here becomes a boon, a means of reaching between and beyond fixed patterns of behavior to challenge what underlies them. The “tele verve” through which we attempt (within and outside the world of art) to shape a better world is – by the creative imagination it demands and the aesthetic utility it produces – the very path toward one. For this reason, the most apt symbol to which to return in the leaving of Libretto may be that of the paseq, the dividing line in an ancient text

Recovering Democracy  135 whose interruption of that text marks its unity with preceding texts. Tolson captures this disjunction in a single line of his poem: “O Age, pesiq, O Age” (Libretto, 367).64 The two divided ends of the line are precisely identical, bridged by the very word that denotes their division. This mirror effect creates a chiastic structure whose perfection intimates that the action by which the paseq links distinct subjectivities overcomes the brute fact of their separation. And for Tolson, it is the artwork that performs the connecting action of the paseq, its other-­ directing and unifying reach modeling, via word and image, the good future not yet gained.

Notes 1 Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 27, 29. 2 Carolyn Forché, “The Colonel,” Poetry Foundation. Accessed October 16, 2018. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49862/the-colonel. 3 See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223–239. 4 Melvin B. Tolson, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, in Anthology of Modern American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 418–470. Hereafter cited in-text as Libretto. For ease of reference to any edition of the poem, all citations refer to line number rather than page number. 5 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 104. 6 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 3. 7 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 30. 8 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 111. 9 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 110. 10 Melvin B. Tolson, “A Poet’s Odyssey,” in Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 184. 11 Craig Werner, “Blues for T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes: The Afro-­ Modernist Aesthetic of Harlem Gallery,” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 3 (1990): 453. 12 David Gold, “‘Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock’: The Integrated Rhetoric of Melvin B. Tolson,” College Composition and Communication 55, no. 2 (2003): 243. 13 Michael Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 145. 14 Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 144. 15 Aldon L. Nielsen, “Melvin B. Tolson and the Deterritorialization of Modernism,” African American Review 26, no. 2 (1992): 246. 16 Keith D. Leonard, Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 200. 17 Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 71.

136  Recovering Democracy 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 143. Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 131. Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, 170, 63. For a summary of the early years of Liberia’s history, see Ikechi Mcbeogi, Collective Insecurity: The Liberian Crisis, Unilateralism, & Global Order (Vancouver; Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2003), 4–5. According to Mgbeoji, the nation of Liberia “was conceived in fear by those who could not contemplate coexistence with black people in the post-Civil War era”; see Mcbeogi, Collective Insecurity, 2. For a detailed history of the American Colonization Society, see Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). For an examination of the long-term effects of the project of colonization in Liberia, see Claude A. Clegg III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For an assessment of Liberian political history and possible democratic reforms, see Amos Sawyer, Beyond Plunder: Toward Democratic Governance in Liberia (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005). Mgbeoji, Collective Insecurity, 5. Mgbeoji, Collective Insecurity, 6. Marcus Garvey, “Letter to President of Liberia Introducing Delegation,” in Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Volume 2, (New York: Arno, 1969), 367. W.E.B. Du Bois, “On Migrating to Africa,” in W.E.B. Du Bois on Africa, ed. Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. and Edmund Abaka (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2012), 109. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Back to Africa,” in W.E.B. Du Bois on Africa, ed. Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. and Edmund Abaka (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2012), 107. See Brunner’s footnote to the section title “Do” in his annotated edition of Libretto. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-­ Century Literature (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11. Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 143, 145. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 68. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 291–292. In his annotation of Libretto, Edward Brunner suggests that the phrase refers to Walt Whitman; see Tolson, Libretto, 57 n. Kathy Lou Schultz also assumes that Whitman is the figure meant; see Kathy Lou Schultz, “To Save and Destroy: Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Theories of the Archive,” Contemporary Literature 52, no. 1 (2011): 124. Keith Leonard is more expansive in his attribution, calling the Good Gray Bard “an amalgam of an African, Tennyson (whom Tolson mentions in his notes), Whitman, and Tolson himself” (Leonard, Fettered Genius, 218). Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry, 163. Gary Lenhart, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 66. Isa. 40:6 KJV. See Tolson, Libretto, 314 n.

Recovering Democracy  137 36 “Death” is Tolson’s brief translation of mboagan; see Tolson, Libretto, 552 n. 37 Quoted in Robert M. Farnsworth, Melvin B. Tolson, 1898–1966: Plain Talk and Poetic Prophecy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 157–158. 38 Farnsworth, Melvin B. Tolson, 153. 39 The term “Afrofuturism” was first coined by Mark Dery in 1994 to describe a black futurist literary tradition focusing on the intersections between race, futurity, and technoculture. See Flame Wars: The Discourse by Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). Further discussion of Afrofuturism can be found in a special issue on the topic in Social Text 71 (2002) and in The Black Imagination, Science Fiction, Futurism and the Speculative, ed. Sandra Jackson and Julie E. Moody-Freeman (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 40 Yogita Goyal, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 228. 41 Brunner, Cold War Poetry, 151. 42 Tolson, “A Poet’s Odyssey,” 192. 43 Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry, 174. 4 4 Evidence for this continuing “melancholia” is plentiful. To take one example, in Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. provides a contemporary examination of American race relations that “exposes the illusion at the heart of this nation by pointing out the concrete effects of persistent racial inequality.” See Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016), 8–9. 45 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8. 46 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 24. 47 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 190. 48 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 180, 189. 49 Among the many uncertainties surrounding the discourse of Afropessimism is whether its focus is more to delineate a condition or to advocate a particular response to that condition. Scholars also remain divided on the question of whether (or what kind of) solutions are available for the problems Afropessimism enumerates. In his book In Search of Africa, Manthia Diawara criticizes Afro-pessimism as “a fatalistic attitude toward economic and social crisis,” arguing that what he calls “the naturalization of Afro-­ pessimism” has resulted in “a continued reign of misery, African-on-­A frican violence, and oppression of women” on the African continent. Diawara records a discussion with the Guinean novelist and Afro-­pessimist Williams Sassine in which Sassine avers that “[t]he only solution is violence. You must break everything. As they say, ‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ Things will just continue if you don’t destroy them.” See Manthia Diawara, In Search of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 38–39, 53. In the domain of cultural studies, the debate over Afropessimism takes place in a more theoretical context; see in particular Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-­Pessimism and Black Optimism,” In Tensions 5 (2011): 1–47, and the essay to which Sexton responds, Fred Moten’s “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218, in which Moten argues for a counterintuitive optimism discernable in (and despite) Fanon’s analysis of the lived experience of blackness.

138  Recovering Democracy 50 Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” trans. Steven Rendall, Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 263. 51 Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 189. 52 Hartman and Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” 183. 53 Hartman and Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” 185. 54 Farnsworth, Melvin B. Tolson, 68. 55 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 9. 56 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 65. 57 Among others, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), in which Berlant critiques toxic cultural affective attachments to a hoped-for but increasingly unavailable and even oppressive future. 58 Sean Austin Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 20. 59 Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid, 20. 60 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 189. 61 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 189. 62 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 194. 63 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 195. 64 Pasiq is a conjugation of the Hebrew word paseq; in his notes to the poem, Tolson translates the former as “divided,” the latter as “divider.” See Tolson, Libretto, 367 n.

5 Refusing Silence Art as Deferment in Waiting for Godot and Endgame

1  Beckett’s Minimal Hope In his essay “Can Thought Go on without a Body?,” first published in English in 1989, the postmodern thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard emplaces human achievement within a scale and timeline beyond comprehensible proportions. Lyotard’s essay foregrounds the slow, universal entropy that would seem, on a wide-enough view, to render all earthly hopes and aspirations null: While we talk, the sun’s getting older. It’ll explode in 4.5 billion years. It’s just a little beyond the halfway point of its expected lifetime. It’s like a man in his early forties with a life expectancy of eighty. With the sun’s death your insoluble questions will be done with too.1 This thought experiment puts into question the final value of all thought experiments, given that the eventual demise of the universe will spell the demise of human culture in its totality, along with every idea to which it has given rise: With the disappearance of earth, thought will have stopped – l­eaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. It’s the horizon itself that’ll be abolished and, with its disappearance, your transcendence in immanence as well. If, as a limit, death really is what escapes and is deferred and as a result what thought has to deal with, right from the beginning – this death is still only the life of our minds. But the death of the sun is a death of mind, because it is the death of death as the life of the mind. 2 Lyotard’s point in the essay is provide a ground to deconstruct human thought itself, especially the extent to which its existence is necessarily corporeal and terrestrial. His true concern over the death of the sun, which entails, for him, “the death of death” as a concept, may therefore be more academic than genuine. But as it concerns hope, his point remains valid, since it places an absolute upper limit on the value of

140  Refusing Silence the humanist, utopian, and political ideals that provided solace to many modernists and, as we have seen, informed their aesthetic principles. To ask this final question – that is, in the face of death, and not just individual but cultural death, why does art matter? – is to broach an abiding concern in the work of Samuel Beckett. Beckett is likely the most-discussed, most celebrated, and most important playwright of the twentieth century. The sheer volume of criticism generated by his plays alone provides an argument against writing about him: What more can there be to say? But to write a book about modernist hope without including Beckett – maybe the most incisive and, at least on the face of it, most pessimistic of modernist writers – would be to duck the pressing questions toward which this book has been gradually heading. In this chapter, then, I’ll explore the ethos of Beckett’s work, limiting my discussion to his two most famous plays, En Attendant Godot and Fin de Partie, translated into English by Beckett as Waiting for Godot and Endgame.3 My argument is that hope emerges in these plays through a vision of aesthetic utility that sees art as a form of deferment, a way of filling time with meaning and thereby refusing the silence that otherwise beckons. To explain the apparent lack of hope in Beckett’s work, it helps to consider the historical context in which he wrote. Born in 1906, Beckett lived through two world wars, and as many critics have noted, World War II and the horror of the Holocaust in particular influenced his worldview and writing.4 In a literary context, Shane Weller identifies Beckett as a “late modernist.” For Weller, late modernism is distinguishable from earlier high modernism through its apparent “loss of faith in the power of the word that is intimately bound up with a loss of faith in the human as such,” which leads to “a lack of faith in the power of art” to change the world.5 Whether this lack of faith, and the aesthetic pessimism it represents, can be entirely substantiated in Beckett’s work is a different question. The slipperiness of his own novels and plays – their (and his) resistance to criticism – is one inoculating force against such a claim. It is difficult to impose any totalitarian schemata on a literary corpus that, by accommodating nearly all interpretations, fully accepts none. As Simon Critchley observes, Beckett’s works remain one step ahead of us; for each interpretation that seeks to contain them, they “continually seem to pull the rug from under the feet of the philosopher by showing themselves to be conscious of the possibility of such interpretations.”6 Another point in favor of the possibility of hope in Beckett is that (as Weller, himself a careful and disciplined reader of Beckett, notes) many of his most distinguished readers, from Theodor Adorno to Stanley Cavell to Jacques Derrida to Maurice Blanchot, if they do not exactly endorse Beckett as a hopeful writer, at least defend him against the pure nihilism he is accused of by his more dismissive critics.7

Refusing Silence  141 Is there meaningful hope in the Beckettian universe? Perhaps surprisingly, it is rarer to find a critic for whom hope is nonexistent in Beckett’s work than to find those for whom it is present. In discussing Endgame, Evan Horowitz searches for the right word to define the play’s mood: “It’s not hope we’re talking about, and certainly not escape – the despair is all too real and all too authentic. Rather, it’s something like indeterminacy.”8 Horowitz settles on “possibility” – which remains, he cautions, “only a possibility and not really a hope.”9 But this evasiveness is unsatisfying, since hope itself must be logically entailed by its possibility. John Robert Keller distinguishes between the impossibility of hope for “the Beckettian narrative-self” and its potential existence for the reader or audience, “though it hides within the texts, within the primal text-­ making.”10 Here, too, the distinction may be too neat: surely some Beckett’s characters are more hopeful than others, and for only a few, if any, is it definitively absent. Most other critics can espy at least a hint of optimism in Beckett.11 Herbert Blau sees an instructive parallel in the story of the two thieves crucified next to Christ, to which Vladimir refers near the beginning of Waiting for Godot. “As Beckett didn’t invent despair,” Blau writes, “neither does he rest in it. Salvation is a fifty-fifty chance . . . his favorite parable: the two thieves, one of whom was saved.”12 This consensus might indicate that the question of whether Beckett is hopeful obscures other, deeper questions. The general critical tendency to read our bleakest twentieth-century artist through a lens of resilient optimism (a tendency I admittedly further in this chapter!) is instructive in its own right. A point to which I’ll return: maybe we can link the hopeful tenor of such readings to Beckett’s own compulsion to write into a future he could not know on the basis of no metaphysical or ethical foundation he could guarantee.

2  Form against Content: The Beckettian Bind While the copious literature on Beckett does not permit space for an exhaustive review, I will begin by noting a through-line that connects some more recent discussions of his plays, namely, the examination of Beckett’s work in connection with music. This connection is certainly well-justified; Beckett was interested in music throughout his career not only for the enjoyment it provided but because he believed music contained an ineffable, non-referential purity toward which he strove in his writing. Colin Duckworth describes Beckett’s “constant yearning” to be “a composer of sounds that happen to be words.”13 In an oft-quoted letter to the New York director Alan Schneider in 1957, Beckett characterizes his work in musical terms, calling it “a matter of fundamental sounds . . . made as fully as possible.”14 At issue here is Beckett’s stated desire to escape the burden of referentiality, to reject the imposition of mimesis, while still using the medium of language.

142  Refusing Silence With this “refusal to represent,” Beckett sets himself an impossible task, one he surely knows is impossible.15 Writing about Endgame, Claudia Olk suggests that Beckett achieves his goal of escaping referentiality, since the play “presents language-games that are not tied to external reference.”16 The language of Endgame “becomes a game that approaches the condition of music” and thereby reveals “that interpretation can never function as closure.”17 Courtney Massie takes Olk’s claims a step further, arguing that Endgame produces a language that is no longer merely words but “resides firmly in the space between words and music.”18 Its dialogue is “both language and music and . . . neither language nor music.”19 These readings of Endgame capture well the play’s sentiment regarding language but miss its cumulative effect. Endgame is a paradox, since the play and its characters search for a way out of meaning but are everywhere stymied; if anything, the play’s reticence and minimalism create more reference and meaning, not less. As Paul Lawley notes, Endgame “only tends towards the abstraction of music: it has not achieved it.”20 The great Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn puts the matter more simply still: “Beckett never sacrifices meaning to sound.”21 In Endgame, as in his other works, Beckett’s language does not reside between language and music; it is wholly, undeniably, language, with all the attendant implications. Even where it refuses to refer to the world we know, it must refer to a shared reality and not a private one, using a communicative resource in which we all partake. But why should this be a problem? Early in his career, in a 1937 letter to Alex Kaun, Beckett outlines a view of language that will become for him a kind of mission statement: more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.  .  . . [t]o drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through . . . . 22 For Beckett, language as signifier is unsatisfactory because in the very act of representing, it inevitably falsifies reality, placing a screen between us and the essence (or lack of essence) at the heart of things. From this idea originates a chaotic or destructive impulse in Beckett, one tethered uneasily at best to his creative genius: Beckett is a poet but distrusts beauty; a master of style, he is suspicious of form. The scandal for Beckett is that in art, mimesis seems always to beautify what it portrays; without fail, the finished work is neater, more perfect, more ordered than the world it renders. Especially when allied to representation, form itself becomes a kind of lie. Leland de la Durantaye observes this quandary keenly in his book Beckett’s Art of Mismaking. The project of “mismaking” to

Refusing Silence  143 which the book’s title refers spans the entirety of Beckett’s career, but the word itself appears hard to pin down: mismaking is “ruptured writing,” or “word-storming,” or “logoclasm”; it is an attempt to do in the verbal arts what Marcel Duchamp did in the visual arts. 23 “Beckett sees the time come for literature to do as the other arts have done – to strike out on its own and strike out against itself.”24 And yet it’s difficult to say what it would look like for language to “strike out against itself.” I assume it looks like Beckett’s corpus. But the challenge for de la Durantaye (and really, for Beckett) is that its very usage renders mismaking a self-betraying activity. One would expect mismaking to be something like the opposite of making, but it is not. It is not even a cousin to making. Rather, it is a subset of making, though a peculiar and paradoxical one. Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame reflect this very problem. While their concern is the possibility of ultimate meaninglessness, the plays themselves are fated to make meaning. Many Beckett critics have noted this tension in his work. For Ramona Cormier and Janis L. Pallister, the nihilism of Waiting for Godot is belied by “the need to express meaninglessness through meaningful form,” which imbues the play with its central irony. 25 For Beckett, as Seán Kennedy notes, “[f]orm must accommodate itself to chaos, not chaos to form.”26 Beckett makes the same point in a much-cited 1961 interview with Tom Driver: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”27 But if its message is one of formlessness and decay, a carefully formed artwork can only mean in a self-contesting way. This is why Beckett so often spoke and wrote of art in terms of failure. The phenomenon I am observing here was perhaps most fully explored and explained in “Trying to Understand Endgame,” Theodor Adorno’s complex essay on the Beckett play. Endgame, Adorno writes, is “organized meaninglessness,” turned against itself, since its content negates (or is negated by) its form: If drama were to strive to survive meaning aesthetically, it would be reduced to inadequate content or to a clattering machinery. . . . The explosion of metaphysical meaning, which alone guaranteed the unity of an aesthetic structure of meaning, makes it crumble away with a necessity and stringency which equals that of the transmitted canon of dramaturgical form. Harmonious aesthetic meaning, and certainly its subjectification in a binding tangential intention, substituted for that transcendent meaningfulness, the denial of which itself constituted the content. 28 We can interpret this insight – which extends beyond Endgame to Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s late fiction – in the following way: in much of Beckett’s work, there exists a basic opposition between the ontological

144  Refusing Silence disposition of the text (as form, as crafted art object) and its semantic disposition (as content, as the text’s argument for the fragmented and disordered nature of reality). The theme of the work runs counter to the mode of its expression. In Theodor Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus Aesthetic Theory (which he planned to dedicate to Beckett), he suggests that other great writers of the modernist era, such as Kafka, grapple with this same problem. In the hands of such artists, “Art responds to the loss of its self-evidence not simply by concrete transformations of its procedures and comportments but by trying to pull itself free from its own concept as from a shackle: the fact that it is art.”29 It is this ­situation – the immutable fact of being art – from which Beckett’s work tries, and fails, to wrest itself; and this must be so because for Beckett, reality no longer offers a social context in which the artwork’s ­necessity – not its meaning but the validity of its meaning – can be assumed. Adorno elaborates on the same aesthetic situation elsewhere in Aesthetic Theory, in passages that seem to have Beckett in mind: Works in which the aesthetic form, under pressure of the truth content, transcends itself occupy the position that was once held by the concept of the sublime. In them, spirit and material polarize in the effort to unite. Their spirit experiences itself as sensually unrepresentable, while on the other hand their material, that to which they are bound external to their boundary, experiences itself as irreconcilable with the unity of the work.30 In Beckett, then, what Adorno calls “spirit and material” are opposed, sometimes diametrically so. One way to resolve this tension would simply be to stop writing, which would leave us with silence. Silence figures heavily in Beckett, but its valences are at least twofold. Is silence rest, completion, closure; or is it void, emptiness, death? Our enduring cultural fascination with Beckett, I believe, is rooted in his ability to write between these conceptual oppositions, forsaking neither – to write toward them, his work evincing both longing and melancholy, sometimes simultaneously. Or as Beckett ambiguously put the matter in a 1954 letter to Eduoard Coester: “And then what about silence itself, is it not still waiting for its musician?”31

3  Unknowing and Aesthetic Self-Critique So far, I have attempted to highlight and synthesize what strikes me as the essential challenge presented by Beckett’s work – one noted, in different ways, by others, as I hope my review of the literature makes clear. Beckett’s elusiveness means that what one does with this challenge typically reveals as much about the critic as it does Beckett himself. But here, in keeping with the theme of this book, I want to consider what

Refusing Silence  145 Beckett’s quandary entails for the related concepts of modernist hope and aesthetic utility. I contend that we can glean hope from Beckett’s art and that (as with the other writers I have discussed in this book) Beckett’s hope is predicated on the social power and meaning of art itself – though it obtains precariously as a foundation and differently than for other modernists. Beckett is unconvinced of art’s transcendence, but he clings to its utility, if only as a weak but needed stratagem for enlivening and lengthening the otherwise potentially vacant and null episteme in which we exist and persist. I use the word “episteme” pointedly, since the real issue, for Beckett, has to do with knowledge – more particularly, our endemic lack of it. Herbert Blau calls this lack of knowledge “the ground rhythm of Beckett’s thought.” Beckett’s work, Blau writes, “turns over and over the epistemological burden of knowing too much of an impermeable too little.”32 Likewise for Weller, to experience Beckett’s art is to experience “the impossibility of knowing.”33 Indeed, if Beckett’s thought offers us the zenith of modernist consciousness, it reveals that era as defined, perhaps most fundamentally, by an awareness of epistemological lack. Hope appears in modernist writing as an affective and intellectual response to that felt lack. Beckett’s own philosophy was to remain within the condition of not-knowing he understood as part and parcel of our humanness. This natural hesitancy infiltrated his writing to a great degree. As he put it to Driver, “The key word in my plays is ‘perhaps.’”34 When asked about his religious beliefs, Beckett resisted definite labels. While he admitted to “hav[ing] no religious feeling” in his interview with Driver, he also consistently denied being an atheist.35 Beckett’s art occupies this same religious and philosophical middle place or no-place, so that, as Terry Eagleton puts it, while “there is no redemption in Beckett . . . his world looks like the sort of place where the term still has meaning.”36 One way of redeeming Beckett’s view of art would be to posit that in his texts, content is simply overmastered by form – that the aesthetic effect of the work refutes, in its very being, the truth content of its claims. This is the route taken by some Beckett critics. For Duncan McColl Chesney, form can unearth a “semblance of otherness” that produces, in Beckett’s plays, a “glimmer of . . . hope . . . through the dialectical play of their formal elements in aesthetic semblance.”37 Sandra Wynands makes a similar case, suggesting that the very shape of the plays reminds us of their artificiality and hence of the distinction between the views of the characters and those of Beckett himself: By no means do Beckett’s texts endorse the characters’ situation (beyond compassion for their self-created hell) or present their mode of existence as inevitable and inescapable. The obviously stylized nature of Beckett’s dramatic dialogues and sets, however, draws

146  Refusing Silence attention to the constructedness of the dramatic situation and hence to the presence of the dramatist beyond the stage who has arranged the text in terms of metaphoric meaning. . . . [T]he audience reads the play as an artistic construct, not an inescapable force of nature. The artist implicitly points the way out.38 Through this and similar formal means, including comedy, Wynands argues, Beckett “achieves distance from the dramatic situations” he creates and thus “allows audiences to envisage other, better, modes of existence.”39 This is an ingenious reading, but it presents us with new problems to consider. First of all, the tension remains; style is still pitted, here, against subject matter. And to elevate the shape of the plays over their words may only increase, rather than resolve, their antithesis. More pressingly, form is given precedence by Wynands at the expense of limiting the reach and universality of Beckett’s characters. Maintaining a kind of distance from Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot or from Hamm and Clov in Endgame allows us to cling to faith in a mode of existence better than theirs, but at the cost of lessening the dramatic power of the plays. If these characters’ plights are not also ours, the stakes are minimized. And it seems clear that the plays matter to so many and have been so enormously influential exactly because the characters’ perspectives do resonate with our own reality. I want, therefore, to offer an alternative option to escaping the Beckettian bind. If the overall semantic weight of Beckett’s drama and fiction is cast toward pervasive meaninglessness, thereby working against the appeal to meaning his works enact simply by being artworks, then we must seek out those moments of reprieve in Beckett, the glimpses of light that pervade the content of his texts and, in so doing, briefly allow design and message to converge. Such moments can arise in simple ways. For example, one of Beckett’s characters might express a belief in any of the strata his works implicitly affirm: community, communication, language, a social future. More indirectly, but sometimes still more potently, wherever art – in whatever form – becomes the subject of Beckett’s inquiry, his work generates opportunities for reflection on the value and purpose of art itself. These opportunities do not inevitably occasion hope, but their very recurrence spells out a deep need: that of the modernist artist to justify, existentially but also socially, the practice that is his or her vocation, the making of art. We have come full circle, in a manner of speaking. The primary method through which Henry James, the subject of this book’s first chapter, advances his view of the value and purpose of art is by figuring the heroines of his late novels, Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, as art object and artist-figure respectively. Beckett does much the same thing in Waiting for Godot and Endgame. As several critics have observed,

Refusing Silence  147 the lives of his characters revolve around aesthetic practices, obliquely and less so. Curtis Brooks argues that in Waiting for Godot, Estragon “is the poet; he quotes Shelley, appreciates the beauty of the maps of the Holy Land, and dreams.”40 Added together, such moments do comprise evidence for Estragon’s artistic bent. Estragon is also the pessimistic figure in the play, however, and his art-making tendencies seem sporadic at best, no longer a defining part of him. In fact, it is Estragon’s companion Vladimir who is most interested in art, even though he is not an artist. When he and Estragon trade insults, the devastating, knock-out blow occurs when Estragon calls Vladimir a “critic.”41 This is at once a Beckettian joke and an insight into Vladimir’s character, for he is indeed a critic, puzzling over stories and trying to work out how they fit into and refigure the nature of reality. In Endgame, the matter is more straightforward. Hamm, as Adorno observes, “considers himself an artist.”42 As such, he shows at various points during the play that he “still hopes for salvation through his art; hopes to move his audience to gratitude, win their love through telling his story,” in Stanley Cavell’s words.43 Such metafictional entanglements, in which art becomes a mechanism through which to consider art, run not only through James and Beckett but through much of modernist discourse and literature. Clement Greenberg identifies this practice as one of modernism’s defining ­elements – “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”44 But Beckett’s attentiveness to art initially produces less a defense of aesthetic disciplines than a thorough critique of them. It is as though Beckett holds art up to the microscope within his plays, weighing its worth even as he creates it.45 And as readers we must not turn, at least at the outset, from the possibility that art itself will be found wanting.

4  The Logic of Deferment in Waiting for Godot and Endgame The clue to the major conceptual overlap between Beckett’s two most famous plays is in their titles. (Ruby Cohn emphasizes this fact in her book Back to Beckett by titling her chapters on the plays “Waiting” and “Ending.”)46 The great theme of both plays is time. What Adorno writes of Endgame, that “the temporal itself is damaged,” is also true of Waiting for Godot.47 The characters in these plays alternate between attempting to heal this existential wound and despairing at the impossibility of doing so. The picture of the world given us by these plays is in keeping with Beckett’s epistemic humility, his conviction that not knowing is the basic condition and problem of existence – not knowing why we are here,

148  Refusing Silence what we should do, or where we are going. In this respect, his plays and novels are guesses, estimates, varying in the degree of hope and sustenance they offer to the fellow unknowing traveler. My argument in what follows is that in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, there is no assurance of a human social future. But neither is there absolute despair. Beckett’s characters act out of a deep suspicion that time is “empty,” that nothing they do can invest it with real meaning or significance. But within that vacancy, art in the Beckettian landscape produces a logic of deferment. That is, art – making it, experiencing it, critiquing it – becomes a means of filling in the emptiness of temporality, creating meaning where there was none (and where there may ultimately, for Beckett, still be none). Beckett is less confident than H.D. or Melvin Tolson (or, certainly, D.W. Griffith, though for him the question is a thorny one) of art’s beneficial and necessary uses. Thus, while he still believes in aesthetic utility, which (as for the other writers we have discussed) grounds his modernist hope, Beckett’s model of aesthetic utility is cautious, his hope markedly tentative. For Beckett, art is neither a means of salvation nor the thing that will save us. At most it may point to what will; but whether this is so is not something we can know. In Waiting for Godot and Endgame, art is a stratagem, a social tool, useful because it “stretches” time by filling it, deferring the ending we sense and fear. Art is the engine of Beckett’s logic of deferment. It elongates the gap between the present reality, in which we suffer and in which our knowledge of reality is sharply limited, and some eventual, yet unknown future reality in which either we will gain a more complete knowledge or the very conditions through which knowledge can be acquired will become extinct. This last possibility is one that, especially in Endgame, Beckett’s characters are sometimes convinced has already taken place. But this state of affairs, in which knowledge as a category will no longer exist, can only be truly activated by the “death of death” described in Lyotard’s essay. Beckett’s characters still live, even though at times they wish to die; and on a broader level, audiences still read and watch Beckett’s plays. Silence remains at a remove. Hope is extant in Beckett, then, and the role of aesthetic utility is precisely to create a space for it. But Beckettian hope is a weak form of modernist hope. One way to specify this weakness is to note that hope in Beckett’s plays has no definite object or outcome. In direct contrast to other modernists (think, say, of Tolson’s utopianism!), the object of Beckettian hope must remain basically undefined. Since it only exists through the logic of deferment, it can only express a wish for more time  – or, at most, for the uncovering, in some future time, of a new form of knowledge that would allow us, in turn, to fix more precisely the object of our hope. But over against the weakness of hope in Beckett, we must account for its persistent continuation. Bennett Simon observes in Beckett’s plays “a constant urge, even if sluglike in intensity, to start again, to try to regenerate”; the primary means of expression of this urge

Refusing Silence  149 is aesthetic.48 Its manifestation is the visible effect of a drive to be and to mean that can also be construed as a basic will to hope.

5.  Waiting for Time to Tell If Vivian Mercer’s quip about Waiting for Godot – that it is a play in which “nothing happens, twice” – is not wholly accurate, it serves nonetheless to redirect our attention to the play’s narrative pace, in which the action seems an aside, a pause, a prelude to genuinely significant events. “The substance of the play is waiting,” as Hugh Kenner matter-of-factly puts it.49 Both the plot of the play and the episodic, seemingly disconnected manner in which it unfolds emphasize this truth. As Michelle Ty writes, Beckett displays a “formal commitment to the temporality of now,” a focus on the present that reveals “the difficulty of narrative accretion.”50 The act of waiting puts time in the thematic center of the play. Paradoxically, the activity of waiting both accentuates the presentness of the present by forcing characters (and audience) to become conscious of time’s passing and delegitimizes that same present, since waiting is a passive activity, one that is by definition subordinate to the person or event whose arrival will signal the waiting’s end. Thus Beckett at once foregrounds time and diminishes it. The issue is not only that, as John T. Dorsey notes, waiting “is an emptiness which aches to be filled, a wearisome and distressing gap between two points in time” but also that the gap formed by waiting is so vast in Waiting for Godot that it threatens to obscure entirely the two points in time that putatively produce its beginning and end.51 That is, waiting is so intrinsic to Vladimir and Estragon’s existence that it comes to seem more representative of time’s true essence than the wait’s exigence (which is unknown) or its object (which is Godot). Rolf Breuer defines Godot as “that which gives meaning to Vladimir’s and Estragon’s waiting,” and this may be true; it may be what Vladimir and Estragon want to be true.52 But while their hopes are personified by the mysterious figure of Godot, the unspoken possibility that waiting itself must provide the only ground for its own meaning serves as their greatest fear and creates the play’s undercurrent of dread. What happens to time when the act of waiting occludes origin and object? For one thing, basic concepts such as sequence, causality, and narrative begin to collapse in on themselves, so that the stories of our lives no longer have identifiable patterns. For this reason, while Vladimir and Estragon are certain of their task – to wait for Godot – much else, including memories of recent events, completely eludes them: ESTRAGON:  We came here yesterday. VLADIMIR:  Ah no, there you’re mistaken. ESTRAGON:  What did we do yesterday?

150  Refusing Silence VLADIMIR:  What did ESTRAGON:  Yes. VLADIMIR:  Why .  .  .

we do yesterday? (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when you’re about.

(WG, 11) Vladimir faults Estragon for his own inability to locate himself temporally, but his assignation of blame is half-hearted, as if he knows the problem’s roots run much deeper. At the beginning of Act II, Vladimir, still reading the world around him for signs of meaning, clings to faint recollections of the previous day, whereas Estragon – blunter, more taciturn, and more prone to despair than his companion – has forgotten their earlier escapades almost entirely: VLADIMIR:  The tree, look at the tree. Estragon looks at the tree. ESTRAGON:  Was it not there yesterday? VLADIMIR:  Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember? We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn’t. Do you not remember? ESTRAGON:  You dreamt it. VLADIMIR:  Is it possible you’ve forgotten already? ESTRAGON:  That’s the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget. VLADIMIR:  And Pozzo and Lucky, have you forgotten them too? ESTRAGON:  Pozzo and Lucky? VLADIMIR:  He’s forgotten everything! (WG, 39)

This failure to remember, which afflicts both Estragon and Vladimir but especially Estragon, is symptomatic of a mode of being in which no event is distinguishable from another. In a sense, then, the real deficiency lies not with the characters’ memories but with their daily lives. For both Vladimir and Estragon, the meaninglessness that derives from waiting has made monotony the chief quality of existence. Functionally, no day differs from another. All of them are marred by a barrenness, a void where meaning should be that renders remembering specifics pointless and ineffective. Phrasing the matter in theological terms, Curtis M. Brooks argues that Waiting for Godot expresses “a lamentation over the loss of sacred time and a powerful expression of the tyranny of profane time.”53 Or, put differently, “Time has stopped,” as Vladimir declares in Act I – has ceased to matter, if ever it did (WG, 24). The play’s two main characters deal with this state of affairs in different ways. Vladimir is quicker to hope and proactively searches out ways to reinvest temporality with significance. One option is to perform ethical actions in the hopes that they might fit into some larger moral framework as yet undiscerned. In Act II, when Pozzo falls and is unable to rise, Vladimir insists that they help him out of a premonition

Refusing Silence  151 that to do so might rescue their own lives from the futility in which they are mired: Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. . . . To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! (WG, 51) Much of Vladimir’s speech here accords with the reading of the play I have sketched so far. Vladimir singles out this day from others as one in which he and Estragon are needed, thus dividing it from the emptiness of ordinary time through the moral injunction with which it presents them. He verbally isolates the moment as temporally and spatially unique – “at this place, at this moment of time” – because it has provided them a chance to act as representatives and exemplars of all humanity. And he worries that with the passage of time, the opportunity will slip away and things will return to their typical vacancy. Vladimir’s monologue is reminiscent of what Wolfgang Iser, writing about Beckett’s fiction, calls Beckett’s “unveiling of our own need for fictions.”54 The dark potential inverse of Vladimir’s desperate effort to make time matter again is that his effort, rather than transcending the absurdity it fights against, may be entirely absorbed by it. This is the lens through which Estragon tends to view all his and Vladimir’s strivings. Spurred by Vladimir in Act II to remember the previous day, he concludes, “Yes, now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That’s been going on now for half a century” (WG, 43). What Estragon calls “blathering” is, in part, the attempt to use past and future, ethics and aesthetics, to construct a self and a narrative frame for that self to inhabit. Too quickly, such efforts are derailed at the outset by the inescapable sameness, not only of the day in question but of the very effort to make it less so: VLADIMIR:  Charming evening we’re ESTRAGON:  Unforgettable. VLADIMIR:  And it’s not over. ESTRAGON:  Apparently not. VLADIMIR:  It’s only beginning. ESTRAGON:  It’s awful. (WG, 23)

having.

Estragon’s verbal slide from “unforgettable” to “awful” is, in the space in which this play resides, iconic: the joke and the concomitant resignation rest in how quickly even the seemingly poetic becomes interminable. Late in the play Vladimir offers a diagnosis for this state of affairs: “All I know is that the hours are long, under these conditions,

152  Refusing Silence and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which – how shall I say – which may at first seem reasonable, until they become a habit” (WG, 51). What appears sensible, repeated endlessly with no discernable master narrative upholding it, gradually devolves into lunacy. “Habit” is a crucial word in the play, connoting both the essential similitude of any actions Vladimir and Estragon perform and the effect this similitude has on the characters’ mental states, dulling their capacity to fully enjoy or even fully experience the reality they inhabit. As Vladimir reflects near the end of Act II, “The air is full of our cries. . . . But habit is a great deadener” (WG, 58). To defeat the deadening force of habit requires a means of making the moment momentous, puncturing the stupor induced by time-as-waiting (“we are bored to death, there’s no denying it,” Vladimir admits) (WG, 52). Pozzo’s fall seems to present one such opportunity, affording Vladimir and Estragon the chance to help a blind man not only in need of saving but undeserving of it. But Vladimir is no savior, and the scene spins into farce. Vladimir falls while attempting to help Pozzo, and Estragon, in turn, falls while helping Vladimir. Only after this comedy of errors plays out are the two able to help Pozzo rise. These characters are unable to save themselves; their moral resolutions do not extricate them from the temporal bind they are in. The problem originates in the lack of knowledge I mentioned earlier, the impossibility of certitude that, for Beckett, assails all of humankind. Such knowledge would, Vladimir and Estragon agree, make sense of their endless waiting: ESTRAGON:  So long as one knows. VLADIMIR:  One can bide one’s time. ESTRAGON:  One knows what to expect. VLADIMIR:  No further need to worry. ESTRAGON:  Simply wait. VLADIMIR:  We’re used to it. (WG, 25)

“So long as one knows,” one can situate the scene of waiting within a context that demystifies it – a story with a beginning and an end. But at the end of the play Vladimir describes himself as one who “knows nothing” (WG, 58). In the world of Waiting for Godot answers to the most basic and pressing questions (“Who is Godot?” among them) are simply unavailable. This is made clear by Lucky’s spectacular monologue, an outburst at the midpoint of the play in which Lucky unleashes a pent-up torrent of theodicy that peters out in nonsensical rambling. Lucky’s monologue takes the form of a philosophical argument; it begins with the premise of God’s existence (“Given the existence . . . of a personal God . . .”) and relies on constructions such as “it is established,”

Refusing Silence  153 a phrase Lucky repeats four times. Especially when appended with “beyond all doubt,” which occurs twice, a clause such as “it is established” conveys confidence and certitude – exactly what Beckett suggests we do not have. It is instructive, then, that this phrase appears four times near the beginning of Lucky’s speech and is never again repeated in the rest of it (WG, 28–29). Lucky relies much more heavily on another key phrase: the elocution “for reasons unknown,” which he repeats ten times during his speech. Unlike “it is established,” “for reasons unknown” is a blanket admission of ignorance, one that evidently predominates in Lucky’s tangled thought patterns. Of the ten times Lucky uses the phrase, in three of them (including the first two occurrences) he attaches to it the qualifier “but time will tell.” It seems the solution to the problem of our general lack of knowledge is a vague one – how will time tell? – and one Lucky is confident enough to repeat only three times (WG, 28–29). Diminishing in coherence and assurance as it continues, Lucky’s monologue is an apt, condensed iteration of the play’s great theme: our inability to comprehend the basic truths of human existence and flourishing, and inextricably tied to it, our deep-seated longing to comprehend the same.55 If our lack of knowledge prevents ethical actions from establishing a framework in which the meaninglessness of waiting can be superseded, what role can art serve? An economy of form can provide no new knowledge; the play’s characters must remain in an epistemological deficit. What aesthetic form offers is a way of being – the shape of meaning, if not meaning itself – that carries one forward into an unknown future, thus deferring, given Godot’s failure to appear, that other sort of ending, in which form is entirely absorbed by chaos. The promised arrival of Godot induces hope because it is a salvific ending, of the sort that – if it were clear he truly believed in it – might link Beckett to the messianism of Walter Benjamin. But we can say very little about Godot. What is most significant about him is that he does not appear. In his absence, the characters are reduced to searching for glimpses of aesthetic meaning that might elongate time and fracture its emptiness, deferring the end of meaning altogether. For this reason, as Vladimir says to Estragon, what the characters do is secondary; “it’s the way of doing it that counts, the way of doing it, if you want to go on living” (WG, 38). Few stories in Waiting for Godot carry the resonance of art. To pass the time, Estragon requests that Vladimir tell him “the story of the Englishman in the brothel” – a ribald joke – but Vladimir demurs, uninterested (WG, 11). As the resident critic in the play, Vladimir seeks the kind of story that at least portends to hide deeper truths, those that might somehow disrupt the tedium of his passive existence. In his speech Lucky promises that time will tell; Vladimir hopes that art will make time tell, even if he does not know what it will tell him. He searches out such form

154  Refusing Silence and beauty, and the truth to which it seems somehow to be connected, because he is aware that his own daily life is bereft of all these: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? (WG, 58) Here at the end of the play, making the forthright attempt to fit his life into a narrative, Vladimir cannot see any larger purpose within which to subsume it. The bare truth of historical fact adds up to nothing in a universe that is only futile waiting. The great contrast to this moment of attenuated self-critique occurs near the beginning of the play, when Vladimir recounts to an inattentive Estragon the story of the two thieves crucified next to Christ: VLADIMIR:  Shall I tell it to you? ESTRAGON:  No. VLADIMIR:  It’ll pass the time. (Pause.) Two thieves, crucified at the same

time as our Saviour. . . . One – what? Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other (he searches for the contrary of saved) .  .  . damned. (WG, 9)

ESTRAGON:  Our VLADIMIR:  Our

The status of the story accrues not only through its claim to religious truth but through its symbolism: a sacred narrative, it stands as the longed-for nexus of literature and truth, story and meaning. Vladimir tells it in order to “pass the time”: this can be taken in the ordinary sense but also to suggest that this narrative, unlike the narratives of their lives, will defer meaninglessness in the telling. For Beckett, aesthetic utility operates in just this way, providing a foothold into significance where there was none, even if that significance might prove temporary. Beckett gestures to this compromise in one of his more wellknown sentences: “I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them.”56 But the shape of the story of the crucified thieves holds out enough of a promise of hope that Vladimir is compelled by the problem of its historicity. Where his own life appears to contain fact without import, the story of the thieves threatens to be the reverse, import without fact; and what Vladimir most wants to find is some overlap between these spheres. He comments on the inconsistencies in the apostles’ accounts but also on our propensity to believe in the most affirming and hopeful

Refusing Silence  155 of these accounts: “all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?” (WG, 9). Here art defers the problem of meaninglessness and the nihilism it invites partly through Vladimir’s wish that it might do more than merely defer. But as we saw with Henry James, some foundation outside the aesthetic – the realm of beauty – is required for literature to truly matter, which is why Vladimir is so preoccupied with the historical record. He senses that art can only speak with true power within the reality we inhabit, and not merely provide respite from it, if that power is sourced elsewhere than in the beauty of form – or, differently put, if the beauty of form is itself somehow mimetic, expressing, at its heart, a truth discoverable in the empirical world and not fundamentally foreign to it. To locate the story of Christ and the two thieves – replete with its drama of last-minute salvation – within history is so important to Vladimir because it would inoculate the story from the charge of being a mere panacea. However, little in Beckett – and little in Waiting for Godot – supports a reading in which Vladimir’s hope is realized (extant though that hope remains). We do find small testaments, though, to the possibility that, as Lucky puts it, “time will tell.” I noted earlier the incapacity of Vladimir and Estragon to remember the past – a symptom of the vacancy of their lives. But this incapacity is not total. Vladimir, in particular, is able to recall the events and settings of previous days, as when he reminds Estragon that the tree from which they’ve planned to hang themselves was there the day before. Not only that, the tree has changed, and Vladimir finally recalls how it has changed: “yesterday evening,” he says, “it was all black and bare. And now it’s covered with leaves” (WG, 42). Beckett’s stage instructions at the beginning of Act II, which note that the tree has “four or five leaves,” intimate that the formulation “covered with leaves” exaggerates somewhat (WG, 37). But the tree’s alteration, however minor, is significant, signaling the possibility of regeneration and rebirth. It is a small sign that, in a temporal framework still dominated by stagnancy and paralysis, the logic of deferment art produces may lead to transformation – that because we have not yet ended, something may still begin.

6.  Art as the Refusal to End We have not yet ended, but we seem closer to doing so in Endgame – by Beckett’s own estimation, a darker and “more inhuman” play than Waiting for Godot.57 Even the small signs of renewal we see in Waiting for Godot, such as the leaves blooming on the tree, are not present in Endgame. “Nature has forgotten us,” says Hamm to Clov, who doubles down, responding, “There’s no more nature.”58 The play’s landscape is virtually post-apocalyptic, so that even the cyclical rebirths of the changing seasons have ended. In Hamm’s summation midway through

156  Refusing Silence the play, being alive on earth is a death sentence, akin to having contracted an inoperable disease: Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that! . . . But what in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? That there’s manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you? (Endgame, 53) Time is a preoccupation in Endgame, just as in Waiting for Godot: but Endgame is pierced through with a sense of desperation at a level not present in the earlier play. The play’s name is taken from the final stages of a chess match, the sequence of moves that concludes with all the pieces off the board. Where Waiting for Godot seems situated in a trackless middle ground, Endgame is fraught with a consciousness of its own lateness, as though it takes place after the last gasps of a pointless history. Pol Popovic defines the temporal structure of Endgame as “a world of circular time” in which true change is impossible: no matter what happens, “the basic situation remains the same.”59 Thus, when Hamm asks Clov what time it is, Clov’s response – “The same as usual” – holds a certain logic (Endgame, 4). It is any time, and also no time, because temporal specifics no longer apply in a world that does not change. Maybe because of this changelessness, the characters in Endgame often long for completion, for the ending taking its course to be finally over with, as Stanley Cavell, among others, has noted.60 In Waiting for Godot the discussions of suicide are tinged by comedy, but in Endgame they seem only to represent the stark, black wish not to be any longer. “Outside of here it’s death,” says Hamm, and wants his internal consciousness, his sense of self, to match the desolation he believes is universal: “Put me in my coffin,” he orders his servant Clov (Endgame, 9, 77). Such declarations leave no room at all for hope. And yet hope is discernable in the play, however faintly. For Herbert Blau, Endgame’s “view of the future is the whisper of the faintest perhaps” – a perhaps that begins with the fact that the characters’ wish to end, to no longer mean, and to no longer hope is constantly frustrated.61 The drama opens with Clov’s toneless intonation: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” (Endgame, 1). Significantly, each clause in Clov’s sentence is a little longer, a little more fully formed, and arguably a little less certain of the completion he discusses. We are moving away from endings, not toward them. As Hamm says at the beginning of the play: “I hesitate, I hesitate to . . . to end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended and yet I hesitate to . . . to end” (Endgame, 3). This inability to depart, to fully take one’s leave, recurs throughout the play. As many critics have noted, when Clov leaves at the end of the play, he does so only momentarily. He then reenters and remains by the door until the play’s closing lines, unnoticed by Hamm but listening to

Refusing Silence  157 his words (Endgame, 82). At the play’s close, Hamm says to his handkerchief, “Old stancher! You . . . remain,” and uses it to cover his face (Endgame, 84). But Hamm himself remains, too, and so does Clov, watching from the doorway. We see that a curious resistance to finality interrupts and finally upsets Hamm and Clov’s shared hunger for it. Understanding the play’s hopeful impetus requires identifying what makes ending – wrapping up – such a challenge. Some critics have noted that language helps to ground the play’s characters within social roles, keeping them “obliged to each other,” as Hamm says to Clov before Clov makes to depart (Endgame, 81). Complete silence is simply not an option, even if desired; “one must rely on words to stanch words,” as Geoff Hamilton puts it.62 When Clov threatens to leave, asking Hamm, “What is there to keep me here?” Hamm answers, “The dialogue,” indicating the centrality of communication to the characters’ existences (Endgame, 58). For Ben Ware, such passages affirm the inescapability of language: whilst Endgame is strewn with fantasies of silence, efforts to defeat meaning, and illustrations of the apparent impossibility of human communication, what is ultimately shown is that there is nowhere else to go beyond ordinary language, however indeterminate or restricted this medium at times appears to be.63 As dependent, social creatures, we use language not only to communicate but in order to define ourselves in relation to others. The very concept of the subject is tied to language, especially language as spoken to and received from an other. In this sense, as Gerhard Hauck writes, dialogue in Endgame is a “symbiotic life support system”; both Hamm and Clov “know that it is the dialogue which keeps them here, ontologically as much as theatrically.”64 In a post-apocalyptic landscape, words defer silence and produce rudimentary meaning. Even when spoken in anger or hatred, they link humans to one another. But can mere dialogue be enough to create hope for the future? Hamm wonders aloud to Clov if their words and shared bond, their lives after the disaster, can possibly count for anything: “We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?” Clov’s response is instructive and swift: “Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!” (Endgame, 32–33). In the face of such cosmic indifference, everyday language can become a harsh reminder of its own purposelessness. Hamm’s task throughout the play is thus to give language a purpose. Let us return to the moment in which Clov threatens to leave: CLOV:  What HAMM:  The

is there to keep me here? dialogue. (Pause.) I’ve got on with my story. (Pause.) I’ve got on with it well. (Pause.) Ask me where I’ve got to.

158  Refusing Silence CLOV:  Oh, by the way, your story? HAMM:  (surprised): What story? CLOV:  The one you’ve been telling yourself all your . . . HAMM:  Ah you mean my chronicle? CLOV:  That’s the one. (PAUSE.) HAMM:  (angrily): Keep going, can’t you, keep going! CLOV:  You’ve

days.

got on with it, I hope. (Endgame, 58)

After positing that their conversation alone is enough to keep Clov around, Hamm immediately turns to the topic of the story he has been composing. In his first pause, one senses his realization that despite his claim to the contrary, dialogue alone won’t be enough. At the same time, Hamm may feel embarrassed about his need to create and experience art, given the apparent overwhelming futility of doing so. He is thus at once eager to discuss his story and irritable at having to cajole Clov to ask him about it. Once Hamm has narrated the story in its entirety, Clov demands that he continue, but Hamm explains that for now, he has nothing more to tell. Clov asks, “Will it not soon be the end?” – of story, of universe, or both. “I’m afraid it will,” Hamm replies, to which Clov responds with confidence that Hamm’s creative spark will be undiminished: CLOV:  Pah! You’ll make up another. HAMM:  I don’t know. (Pause.) I feel

drained. (Pause.) The prolonged creative effort. (Pause.) If I could drag myself down to the sea! I’d make a pillow of sand for my head and the tide would come. (Endgame, 61)

A direct contrast obtains here between artistry or creative effort and the wish to simply end. The two instincts are antinomies, each denying room for the other. Hence it is the drive not merely to speak but to create that defers endings and the desire to cease. Thus Hamm reflects on his refusal to end precisely in terms of his ability to create stories: “The end is in the beginning and yet you go on. (Pause.) Perhaps I could go on with my story, end it and begin another” (Endgame, 69). As in Waiting for Godot, the role of art is to stretch time and fill it with meaning. It is not only that stories are told but how they are told that makes this function evident. When Nagg tells his story – really only a lengthy joke about a tailor – to Nell, he switches his voice between four different registers and pauses in the telling to berate himself for his imperfect narration: “I never told it worse . . . I tell this story worse and worse” (Endgame, 22). Similarly, as Hamm recounts meeting a man who begged for bread for his dying child, he interweaves his own critical comments, signaled by shifts between what Beckett labels “narrative”

Refusing Silence  159 and “normal” tones. Whenever he switches to his normal voice, Hamm corrects or applauds what he has recited in his narrative voice: “No, I’ve done that bit”; “That should do it”; “Nicely put, that”; “A bit feeble, that” (Endgame, 51–52). Lapses or pauses in the narrating of these anecdotes always present sudden crises for the characters, because they involve a retreat from a made world of aesthetic form and the deeper meaning it promises to the real world, which is bereft of such meaning. As he nears the end of his tale, Hamm wonders how he might continue storytelling and how to drag characters and ideas from the barren world he lives in to the richer world he creates in his fictions: “I’ll soon have finished with this story. (Pause.) Unless I bring in other characters. (Pause.) But where would I find them? (Pause.) Where would I look for them?” (Endgame, 54). His uncertainty on the question of how to continue his story does not lessen his determination to keep telling it. As Endgame nears its end, he continues to shape and refine his own story’s most poetic lines: “You cried for night; it falls; now cry in darkness.” Even as they arrive, his story’s apparent conclusions are punctuated by ideas that defer them: “Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended. (Pause. Narrative tone.) If he could have his child with him . . . .” (Endgame, 83). It is clear, I think, that for Hamm and Clov, hope for the future is founded not merely on language but on language put to a specifically aesthetic use. Drawn from his own life and recast in careful language, Hamm’s story fills an otherwise shapeless stretch of time with a purpose that makes time bearable, however imperfectly. Art provides no final answer, decrees no platitude according to which sense can be made of the human condition. As Leland de la Durantaye comments (in a sentence I would soften only somewhat), “There was no idea to which Beckett remained so allergic as that language and art have a sacred force or function.”65 But for Beckett, art does fulfil a pragmatic function, enlarging and enlivening the social space in which we move enough that the future becomes a space open to new visions that may emerge. In Endgame we glimpse a crucial forecasting of the sort of deeper, stranger potentialities toward which art might attune us. It occurs when the characters, prompted by Hamm, attempt to pray: HAMM:  Off

we go. (Attitudes of prayer. Silence. Abandoning his attitude, discouraged.) Well? CLOV:  (abandoning his attitude): What a hope! And you? HAMM:  Sweet damn all! (To Nagg.) And you? NAGG:  Wait! (Pause. Abandoning his attitude.) Nothing doing! HAMM:  The bastard! He doesn’t exist! CLOV:  Not yet. (Endgame, 55)

160  Refusing Silence These attempts at prayer are at once earnest and ineffective. Hamm’s lack of success leads him to conclude, angrily, that God does not exist. Clov’s cautionary, enigmatic response – “Not yet” – is a telling one. Cavell calls it “the most definite expression of hope – or, for that matter, of despair – in the play, the only expression of future which is left unchallenged, by contradiction, irony or giggles.”66 Indeed, Clov’s rejoinder goes unchallenged – but what can he mean? The point is not that God literally has yet to be or that he only exists in the minds of humans. Rather, we must return to Beckett’s own theological position, which is an unfixed agnosticism, a denial of the possibility of fixed positions, a belief only in human unknowing. Against that backdrop, Clov’s statement can be taken to mean that God does not exist for us – that given our epistemological deficit, we are in no position to make definitive theological statements of any kind. Nonetheless, the statement is hopeful insofar as it imagines a future in which such statements will be possible. This is why the notion of deferral looms so large in Beckett. For Hamm and Clov, belief in God is impossible – but just as impossible is the absolute inability to hope, the inability to believe in a universal moral order. Faced with their own unknowing, the characters in Endgame defer and resist endings until they no longer have to choose between unknowable options, whether because one option or the other is closed to them or because new and unguessed answers present themselves. And for Beckett, we as writers and readers are likewise placeless and must rely on the provisional forms of art without knowing whether they augur a larger, hidden design. We are in the space – temporally, physically, spiritually – of Clov’s “Not yet,” a space in which we must wait for the unfolding of what we do not know.67

7  Beckett’s Aesthetic Utility; or, Writing toward the Life to Come There is thus in Beckett a counterintuitive openness to the future, an openness buoyed by art. This openness is produced by the logic of deferment I have discussed so far, but we can be more specific regarding how art enacts this process of deferment. Beckett defined his approach to creating literature as an analyzing one (in contrast to James Joyce, whose gift, Beckett argued, was a synthesizing one), peeling back and paring away everything needless to get at the root of meaning in language.68 This minimalist tendency in Beckett has the virtue of more clearly unveiling his vision of art, and so as a way into a difficult matter, I offer here a tentative Beckettian definition: art is a made thing in a ruined world. This definition puts strict limitations on the art object. For example, one cannot derive an ethics from art. This is textually evident in many places in Beckett’s work – in Vladimir’s musings on the historicity of the

Refusing Silence  161 story of the crucified thieves in Waiting for Godot, in the exhausted and exhausting persistence of Hamm’s narrative in Endgame, and so on. In Beckett’s texts, it is all art can do to keep itself alive; it cannot found or support any moral system. In this sense, for Beckett “art is neither better nor worse but simply of the world,” as Leland de la Durantaye puts it.69 Merely one more fragment of the dissolute reality it documents, art holds no saving power. But the possibility to which Beckett seems attracted – one never fully extinguished in his work – is that some overlap exists between the ethical and aesthetic realms, or that, differently put, each draws its power from the same source. Sandra Wynands captures this dynamic well, noting that Beckett’s “thoroughly immanent” worldview is nevertheless belied by an “insistent gesture toward the transcendent” that figures in his writing.70 It may be helpful to step momentarily outside the world of literature to Beckett’s personal biography, which reflects his strong commitment to ethical action. Bennett Simon records that Beckett was deeply involved in post-World War II reconstruction efforts, including “relief work with the Irish Red Cross in France immediately following the war.”71 Jack MacGowran, an actor who knew Beckett well and performed in many of his plays, notes in an interview Beckett’s “tremendous compassion for mankind,” calling him “a very generous man” who kept his kind acts (the giving away of most of his Nobel Prize winnings, for instance) quiet, not “want[ing] to take any credit.”72 Alongside such activities, can Beckett’s art-making be characterized as a frivolity, an endeavor he viewed as useless? Seizing on Beckett’s tendency to define art in terms of failure, Jerry Aline Flieger suggests that for Beckett, literature “‘fails’ to serve a useful purpose, or to propose solutions.” As such, “writing is the antithesis of achievement, an antidote to the adequacy of closure.”73 To make this claim, Flieger draws on Maurice Blanchot, who reads Beckett’s work as an inevitably futile rejoinder against “the infinite time of death,” the only way to provisionally deter which is “to say something at any cost, to tell a story.”74 Wolfgang Iser concurs, though from a slightly different perspective, writing that Beckett’s continued art-making is simply a function of being human: “we are alive because we cannot settle anything final, and this absence of finality is what drives us continually to go on being active.”75 This is a gloomy diagnosis in some respects, but then much of Beckett is gloomy. And there is certainly in Beckett an element of the shout into the void. And yet what these assessments seem to miss is that in the first place, to write is not merely to fail or to postpone but to create. Producing a text in language may defy a presupposed order, but it does so on the basis of some assumed properties of the literary artwork. To make these properties clear, we can ask a simple question: On which faiths is the act of creating literature premised? I count three interlinked assumptions, each building from the previous. First and most

162  Refusing Silence obviously, the writing of literature is premised on a belief in the validity and reality of human communication. This entails a belief in language itself as a connective tissue linking meaning-intending author and ­meaning-receptive audience. Beckett was constantly frustrated by the limitations of language, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, and yet he never forsook it, exhibiting, as Bennett Simon puts it, “a view of the difficulties of human communication and yet a deep regard for the struggle to maintain that communication.”76 Second, the fact that this communication is written communication, not merely spoken, adds a crucial temporal dimension to the beliefs it assumes. (Of course, Beckett wrote his plays to be performed, but he knew they would exist also, and in some ways primarily, as written and read documents.) Written communication implies faith in a future readership for whom the possibility of shared meaning will remain true. In fact, in this respect all writing is inherently hopeful (although perhaps it is too late in this book to be making this point for this first time). Insofar as it expects an eventual comprehending reader, all writing, even a text message or bumper sticker, hopes for a future in which language is a common and effective currency for the spreading of ideas that connect otherwise disparate individuals. Third, as art, literature is formal or aesthetic written communication, which adds a critical component to the assumptions I’ve laid out so far. This entails a belief not just in language, and not just in the future value of language, but in the future value of language as art. The implication of such a belief has to do not just with language but with the human community that shares that language. Literature expresses faith in the coming culture as one that will be receptive to more complex forms of meaning, one that will value beauty, one that will not merely read but interpret and not merely interpret but digest. If Beckett believed in aesthetic written communication, he believed not only in the logic of deferment – that art has the power to stretch time and postpone meaninglessness – but in what art can do as it stretches time. Thinking about what art does, in this case, means thinking about what happens when an audience member sees a play performed or when a reader encounters literary writing. On a grander scale, one can phrase the same question as follows: What is aesthetic utility for Beckett? Critics have provided different but related answers to this question. For Duncan McColl Chesney, Beckett’s writing reveals the artwork as a minimal, fractured, irrecoverable monad separated from society, and useless for politics, pleasure, entertainment, therapy, or what have you. But this very fractured-ness was in a way the starkest realism, and this irrecoverability, this uselessness, was in a way the most useful thing for a society in need of the most searching critique of its own current damaged state.77

Refusing Silence  163 Chesney lauds the impracticality of the Beckettian play as its virtue. Precisely by announcing itself as an unassimilable other in the wreck of modern society, Beckett’s work becomes, paradoxically, the thing society can use to assess its own damaged state. Writing about Endgame, Ben Ware makes an argument that resonates with Chesney’s. Endgame restricts itself to a cold, clear-eyed depiction of humanity in ruins because that depiction is where real newness originates: “for Beckett, the total devastation of humanity opens up a dialectical space in which the future of humanity can be imagined otherwise.”78 And most recently, Leland de la Durantaye echoes the same sentiment, describing Beckett’s strategy of “mismaking” “not as aimed at blunting or blurring capacities, but at sharpening them.” These metaphorical pictures of the artwork’s effect on its audience reveal, de la Durantaye writes, how Beckett’s writing can open out to “another world, a world of brilliant and desperate dedication, with the scream that things should be different, and the belief that they might be.”79 These astute formulations of aesthetic utility in Beckett have in common a perception of the chasm between, on the one hand, reality in the modern era in all its chaotic messiness and, on the other, the world we want to believe could exist – the better, more just, more civil, more equitable society we strive to build. The great challenge of Beckett’s work inheres precisely in his awareness of this distance between the felt and the hoped-for. To turn away from what he saw around him was not an option: Beckett’s writing is characterized by a deep fidelity to what he saw as the truth of modern human experience. His plays are not realist, but they are mimetic in the broad sense of the term. Erich Auerbach calls the literary arts “the history of the representation of reality,” and it is this history to which Beckett adds.80 That is, the worlds of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, while they are not our world, very obviously speak within and to and about our world.81 What these fictional worlds reveal, however, as Auerbach writes, is “the writer’s attitude toward the reality of the world he represents.”82 And Beckett’s elegiac, dismayed view of history is so strong, so all-­ encompassing, that it puts the legitimacy of art itself into question. Burdened by the ugliness of history and by the possibility of final entropy, how can art produce beauty while still capturing truth? In his interview with Tom Driver, Beckett says that to accurately measure the spirit of the age, contemporary art must take on a “new form,” one that “admits the chaos” or “accommodates the mess.”83 But art must always be formbound, even if this containment requires a turn from pure mimesis.84 In fact, this gives art its added power: besides representing reality, art has an endless capacity to re-imagine it. Authentic social change, real aesthetic utility, is produced through the balance between the artwork’s twin aims of representation and imagination. If only representation were

164  Refusing Silence possible, art would be sterile, merely a photo negative of empirical reality; if only imagination were possible, art would be irrelevant, having no purchase on the world in which we live. It is in the dynamic interplay between these poles that art acts on the imagination, and after that, on history. History, after all, is what is at stake: our shared cultural story, in which art plays only one part, though a significant one. The act of making is also an act of staking a claim on a future against which we ceaselessly measure the present. An exchange between Clov and Hamm constitutes Beckett’s brief excursus on the matter: “Do you believe in the life to come?” Clov asks. Hamm answers, “Mine was always that” (Endgame, 49). Hamm’s enigmatic response signifies that all our lives are always the life to come, that in some fundamental way we conceive of life as the life to come, that as writers, readers, artists, critics – ­humans, even – we are futurally conditioned, wired for hope. Our instinct is to suppose a future different in some way from our beleaguered moment, a supposition that becomes concrete through art. Living after the given and before the possible, we carry art like a dream through that middle space, letting it teach us how to move from one to the other. As such, art remains potent, unguessable, and not always even beneficial, but over time, we can discern its invisible reach in its visible effects, as it documents our common life, spurs the imagination, and in so doing, helps to invent the world.

Notes 1 Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought Go on without a Body?,” trans. Bruce Boone and Lee Hildreth, Discourse 11, no. 1 (1988–89): 74. 2 Lyotard, “Thought,” 75–76. 3 While differences obtain between the original French versions of the plays and Beckett’s English translations of them, these differences are not my focus in this chapter. Therefore, for ease of reference, I will refer to and quote from the plays as Beckett wrote them in English. 4 Adorno argues that Beckett wrote Endgame as a response to the Holocaust, calling the trash cans in which Nagg and Nell are kept “the emblem of a culture restored after Auschwitz.” The play refuses to locate itself in history only because one must “speak euphemistically about what is incommensurate with all experience.” See Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 13, 32. See also Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 240, and Peggy Phelan, “Lessons in Blindness from Samuel Beckett,” PMLA 119, no. 5 (2004): 1281. 5 Shane Weller, “Beckett and Late Modernism,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 97, 96. 6 Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), 141. See also James Acheson,

Refusing Silence  165 “Chess with the Audience: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986), 187. 7 Shane Weller, A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (London: Legenda, 2005), 6. 8 Evan Horowitz, “Endgame: Beginning to End,” Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 4 (2004): 123. 9 Horowitz, “Beginning to End,” 127. 10 John Robert Keller, Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 46. 11 See, for example, Gottfried Büttner, “Schopenhauer’s Recommendations to Beckett,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11 (2001): 116; Terry Eagleton, “Beckett and Nothing,” in Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Anna McMullan and S.E. Wilmer (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 37; Matthew Holt, “Catastrophe, Autonomy and the Future of Modernism: Trying to Understand Adorno’s Reading of Endgame,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14 (2004): 273; Eugene Webb, The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), 54; and Weller, “Beckett and Late Modernism,” 99. 12 Herbert Blau, Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 28. 13 Colin Duckworth, “Re-Evaluating Endgame,” in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, ed. Mark S. Byron (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007), 31. 14 Beckett to Alan Schneider, Paris, December 29, 1957, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume III: 1957–1965, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82. 15 Claudia Olk, “A Matter of Fundamental Sounds: The Music of Beckett’s Endgame.” Poetica 43, no. 3/4 (2011): 395. 16 Olk, “Music,” 396. 17 Olk, “Music,” 404, 410. 18 Courtney Massie, “‘Something Is Taking Its Course’: Endgame’s Frustrated Musicality and the Evolution of Beckett’s Late Dramatic Style,” Modern Drama 61, no. 1 (2018): 46. 19 Massie, “Frustrated Musicality,” 49, emphasis hers. 20 Paul Lawley, “Symbolic Structure and Creative Obligation in Endgame,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. Harold Bloom (New York; Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 97, emphasis his. 21 Ruby Cohn, “Waiting,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. Harold Bloom (New York; Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 45. 22 Beckett to Axel Kaun, Dublin, July 9, 1937, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 518. 23 Leland de la Durantaye, Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 15. 24 De la Durantaye, Mismaking, 71. 25 Ramona Cormier and Janis L. Pallister, Waiting for Death: The Philosophical Significance of Becketťs En Attendant Godot ( Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979), 105. James Calderwood makes much the same point elsewhere: “Beckett expresses the chaotic emptiness of life in a play that is scrupulously crafted and formed, and proclaims the meaninglessness

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26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45

of language in passages of arresting eloquence and beauty.” See James L. Calderwood, “Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot,” Modern Drama 29, no. 3 (1986): 371. Séan Kennedy, “‘Humanity in Ruins’: Beckett and History,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 198. Echoes of the same idea crop up often in the literature. For Angela Moorjani, “Beckett increasingly evoked the task of finding a new form that admits chaos without reducing it to form”; in the same vein, Sandra Wynands summarizes Endgame as “a dichotomy of form and formlessness.” See Angela Moorjani, “Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable: The Novel Reshaped,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 26; and Sandra Wynands, Iconic Spaces: The Dark Theology of Samuel Beckett’s Drama (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 12. Tom F. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 219. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 10. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 16. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 196. Beckett to Eduoard Coester, Paris, March 11, 1954, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 476. Blau, Sails, 183. Shane Weller, “‘Gnawing to Be Naught’: Beckett and Pre-Socratic Nihilism,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 20 (2008): 331. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” 220. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” 220. On the question of Beckett’s atheism, see Wynands, Iconic Spaces, 46, and Mary M.F. Massoud, “Beckett’s Godot: Nietzsche Defied,” Irish University Review 40, no. 2 (2010): 44. Eagleton, “Beckett and Nothing,” 37. Duncan McColl Chesney, Silence Nowhen: Late Modernism, Minimalism, and Silence in the Work of Samuel Beckett (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 185–186. Wynands, Iconic Spaces, 105. Wynands, Iconic Spaces, 105. Curtis M. Brooks, “The Mythic Pattern in Waiting for Godot,” Modern Drama 9, no. 3 (1966): 293. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 48. Hereafter cited in-text as WG. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 30. See also Horowitz, “Beginning to End,” 123. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85. S.E. Gontarski suggests that this metatextuality is observable throughout Endgame, since it is “a play about a play.” See S.E. Gontarski, “An End to Endings: Samuel Beckett’s End Game(s),” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 19 (2008): 425.

Refusing Silence  167 46 Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 47 Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 14. 48 Bennett Simon, Tragic Drama and the Family: Psychoanalytic Studies from Aeschylus to Beckett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 230. 49 Hugh Kenner, “Waiting for Godot,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. Harold Bloom (New York; Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 61. 50 Michelle Ty, “Beckett and the Character of the Unchosen; or, the Time of Precarity,” Minnesota Review 85 (2015): 133. 51 John T. Dorsey, “Images of the Absurd Life: Betsuyaku’s Idō and Beckett’s En Attendant Godot,” Comparative Literature Studies 20, no. 1 (1983): 26. 52 Rolf Breuer, “The Solution as Problem: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,” Modern Drama 19, no. 3 (1976): 232. 53 Brooks, “Mythic Pattern,” 295. 54 Wolfgang Iser, “When Is the End Not the End? The Idea of Fiction in Beckett,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S.E. Gontarski (London; New York: Anthem Press, 2012), 38. 55 Aubrey D. Kubiak, “Godot: The Non-Negative Nothingness,” Romance Notes 48, no. 3 (2008): 402. 56 Harold Hobson, “Samuel Beckett, Dramatist of the Year,” International Theatre Annual 1 (1956): 153. 57 Beckett to Alan Schneider, Paris, June 21, 1956, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 628. 58 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 11. Hereafter cited in-text. 59 Pol Popovic, “Beckett’s Endgame, as a Bond of Dependency,” Francofonia 25 (1993): 18. 60 In his essay on Endgame Cavell writes, “It is true that Hamm wants death, at least there is no life he wants, and one can say that his entire project is to achieve his death” (Cavell, Must We Mean, 133). 61 Blau, Sails, 183. 62 Geoff Hamilton, “Life Goes On: Endgame as Anti-Pastoral Elegy,” Modern Drama 45, no. 4 (2002): 623. 63 Ben Ware, “Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On the Ethics of Beckett’s Endgame,” College Literature 42, no. 1 (2015): 8. 64 Gerhard Hauck, Reductionism in Drama and the Theatre: The Case of Samuel Beckett (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1992), 120. 65 De la Durantaye, Mismaking, 147–148. 66 Cavell, Must We Mean, 147. 67 This situation may provoke a hope analogous to what Jonathan Lear calls “radical hope” – hope that “anticipates a good for which those who have the who as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it” (Lear, Radical Hope, 103). 68 Weller, Beckett and Nihilism, 48. 69 De la Durantaye, Mismaking, 148. 70 Wynands, Iconic Spaces, 172. 71 Simon, Tragic Drama, 240. 72 Richard Toscan, “MacGowran on Beckett,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S.E. Gontarski (London; New York: Anthem Press, 2012), 164– 165. For more on Beckett’s personal life and ethics, see James Knowlson’s

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84

excellent biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004). Jerry Aline Flieger, “Blanchot and Beckett: En Attendant Godot as ‘Discontinuous’ Play,” French Forum 5, no. 2 (1980): 157. Maurice Blanchot, “Where Now? Who Now?” trans. Richard Howard, in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S.E. Gontarski (London; New York: Anthem Press, 2012), 112. Iser, “The Idea of Fiction,” 45. Simon, Tragic Drama, 242. Chesney, Silence Nowhen, 147. Ware, “Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism,” 16. De la Durantaye, Mismaking, 164–165. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003), 548. Ernst Bloch writes that “realism in art is no descriptive or explanatory stock-taking, but it holds up, in an activating way, a mirror of immanent anticipation, it is tendential-utopian realism.” One could argue that Beckett’s drama produces the same effect, but from an inverse, critical perspective. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume Two, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 811. Auerbach, Mimesis, 535. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” 219. Simon O’Sullivan has suggested that the modernist turn away from mimesis may open up a new direction in aesthetics, insisting that “art might well have a representational function .  .  . but art also operates as a fissure in representation.” Through creating this fissure, writes O’Sullivan, art “transforms, if only for a moment, our sense of our ‘selves’ and our notion of our world.” See Simon O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art beyond Representation,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6, no. 3 (2001): 128, emphasis his. However dynamic it makes art, this perspective puts the limitedness of art’s social utility in clear view. The transformation it provides is “only for a moment,” and the end of every aesthetic experience requires a return to the empirical world against which the artwork fights. O’Sullivan’s position is not far from that of Theodor Adorno, who sees modern artworks as fundamentally antithetical to the materialist culture into which they intrude – though for Adorno, this state of affairs is contingent rather than necessary, so that it is possible to hold out hope that things could be different. Nonetheless, for Adorno, as things stand “[t]he happiness gained from artworks is that of having suddenly escaped” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 15). One thinks, too, of Schopenhauer, for whom art acts as an illusory salve, a welcome but temporary reprieve from the deathward tedium of everyday experience.

Coda Legacies of Modernist Hope: Poetic Unknowing and the Call to Wonder

Hope is a place held for the unknown, where you are beyond anything I can say. – Joanna Klink, “The Graves,” Raptus

Our attention to the work of Samuel Beckett has made clear that any investment in social utopias or the good actions which lead to it is still put to the test at both the individual and the cultural level by death, the greatest and final qualifier of human hopes. In his work Being and Time, Martin Heidegger suggests that our concept of time as a public, social phenomenon originates as an attempt to legitimize the individual life as contributing to a temporal community that extends beyond that individual’s death: Publicly, time is something which everyone takes and can take. In the everyday way in which we are with one another, the levelled-off sequence of “nows” remains completely unrecognizable as regards its origin in the temporality of the individual Dasein. How is time in its course to be touched even the least bit when a man who has been present-at-hand “in time” no longer exists? Time goes on, just as indeed it already was when a man “came into life.” The only time one knows is the public time which has been levelled off and which belongs to everyone – and that means, to nobody.1 For Heidegger, humans exist as “Being-With” [“Mitsein”], not only as “Being-There” [“Dasein”], and develop their understanding of time more through the former aspect of being than the latter. Hence, because it does not end with the ending of any individual life, time offers the individual a ground of hope beyond his or her own mortality, that is, one founded in community. But death complicates this ground inasmuch as it strips each individual from the community in whose future their hopes

170 Coda are founded. It is possible, of course, to hope for an outcome of which you will not be part. But the foundations of such hopes are maintained tenuously at best, since they falter whenever the self reasserts itself, as it is wont to do. As many of our best writers have recognized, our only recourse here is to face death straight on and reflect on how its reality – both what we know and what we do not know of it – must modify our hopes. In this final coda I will consider how death leads to a space of necessary unknowing and how contemporary poets wrestle with such unknowing, finding room to affirm a hopefulness in keeping with that of the modernist writers we have assessed in this study. We might begin prior to modernism, with the bravado of Walt Whitman, whose attitude regarding mortality is not merely hopeful but brashly confident. “Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?” he asks in Song of Myself. “I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.”2 Much here astonishes: the connection of death with good luck, which would have been as alien to the ears of Whitman’s first readers as it is to ours; the urgency with which Whitman “hastens” to make the claim; and his emphatic doubling down on his assertion with the clause “and I know it.” Whitman’s high-flown assertion cannot be neatly yoked either to philosophical or to religious traditions. His claim challenges the truism that we cannot know with absolute certainty what happens to the individual after death, since we meet there a frontier past which, by definition, no earthly evidence can be provided. Immanuel Kant takes for granted at the end of his Critique of Pure Reason the impossibility, from a logical perspective, of the kind of knowledge Whitman claims to have: “No one, indeed, will be able to boast that he knows that there is a God, and a future life; if he knows this, he is the very man for whom I have long [and vainly] sought.” Kant distinguishes between logical and moral certainty and argues that only the latter form is possible for ascertaining metaphysical truths.3 The same moral certainty might be said to function in those religious traditions which include belief in an afterlife. Even so, faiths such as Christianity offer few specifics about what happens to the body after death, so that even believers must draw from faith rather than empirical certainty. In this vein, Christian thinkers from Simone Weil to Christian Wiman have also made a case for doubt as a constitutive element of theology. In any case, Whitman’s use of the word “lucky” – hardly a Christian concept – effectively disjoins him from this history and places his claim in more esoteric territory. Outside the parameters of religious faith, we find in the question of death and what follows it one of the most basic sources of the modernist uncertainty with which the writers I have discussed must grapple, and one to which their hope constitutes one possible response. I have suggested that modernism develops as a civilizational coming-to-terms with the limits of human knowing. As such, it creates a cultural context

Coda  171 in which Whitman’s transcendentalist confidence no longer convinces. Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Death” [“Der Tod”], excerpted in one of this book’s epigraphs, reads as a quintessentially modernist exploration of how death constrains human hopes. Written in about 1915, “Death” encapsulates the tension in modernist appeals to hope despite death’s invariable omnipresence. The poem offers an image of death as a “bluish distillate / in a cup without a saucer.” The cup in question rests precariously on the back of a hand. It is old and little used: its handle is broken, and it is covered by dust. And yet the cup is what contains death: it hems it in, holds it back. The cup’s own surface tells us what it signifies: “And HOPE is written / across the side, in faded Gothic letters.”4 Inscribed with and symbolizing hope, this cup is an avatar of the fact that cultural survival continues, however weathered and self-contesting, in the face of our awareness of our common and impending mortality. Perhaps the foregoing chapters in the book are evidence for why this persistence should not be surprising. The modernist texts I’ve covered make visible an interwoven determination to hope and desire to create that together indicate a basic need to believe in the future even if and as the world goes awry. In our own time this need has arguably become visible at least in part through the attempt to force our way back into the realm of knowledge, to conquer unknowability through technological and scientific innovation – a quest that, as it continues apace, continues to fall short in many respects, since there are some questions no technological wizardry can answer. One cultural effect of this tactic has been a tendency to overstate our own capacity for knowledge. In this respect, the gradual post-history of modernism has been a movement away from the productive discomfort that so often attends unknowing toward a stance at once more assertive and less generative. This is, of course, an overly broad sketch of contemporary modernity, and some of our leading current poets are among many outliers contrasting the overconfidence I have noted. In the interests of space, I point here only to the work of Joanna Klink, Marianne Boruch, and Donald Revell, whose poems generously and brilliantly lead us away from hastily declared absolutisms toward a stance combining epistemic humility with epistemic openness. Such a mentality requires broaching the questions we cannot unequivocally answer from an initial posture of wonder and gratitude at what we are given to see and understand. It means, too, not to default toward negativity or fear when presented with our own limitations, nor to be hemmed in by a web of cultural assumptions or by our own prior convictions, but to be as open as possible to the newness that the future always brings. In this way, these poets uphold the modernist legacy I have traced in this book of accepting and even embracing the implications of the smallness of our window into reality – of being productively, affirmatively unknowing. Such a mindset is kin to Keats’s famous notion of negative capability – what he

172 Coda described as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”5 To be too hastily certain is dangerous in part because it can entail foregoing hope. In the words of Joanna Klink’s poem “The Graves,” “Perhaps / the way to despair is based in / certainty.”6 Overconfidence regarding our own claims to know can result in a narrowness of vision, against which the poems of Klink, Boruch, and Revell enact what might be termed a call to wonder, which is a call not to any particular system of belief but to the cultivation of a particular attitude in which to hold one’s beliefs. The call to wonder at once encourages engagement and receptivity and resists cynicism or fatalism. Insofar as it prevails in our time, the rejection of uncertainty reflects a contemporary aversion to mystery. We prefer to unmask and to ­demystify – tactics that are needed and salutary in some areas. But the world is full of mystery, so that to be demystified can mean to live blindly, to forgo the world in favor of one’s biases. “Let us love our lives,” Revell declares in his poem “Plenitude.” In doing so, we love the world – a love that is justified, because Sometimes, however lonely, a wealth beyond your reach is enough wealth, the plenitude of the lives of strangers is enough life, enough to prove the world adequate to desire though still strange.7 This longing for the world’s strangeness is resonant throughout Joanna Klink’s poetry collection Raptus, which mixes hope and elegy in equal measure. The speaker of these poems is both transfixed by the world and haunted by its inaccessibility. In the book’s first poem, “Some Feel Rain,” she catalogues the elemental sensations experienced by plant and animal life before admitting to her exclusion from all these connections to earth and to a resultant and lamenting “wonder . . . [w]hy the earth cannot make its way towards you.”8 The long poem “Sorting” tries to wrest a quantifiable kinship with human experience from its disparate constituent parts: “You have to hold it in mind all at once.”9 Klink’s poems weigh the ways in which we have separated ourselves from reality against the distant possibility of our reunion with some version of it, assessing “the parameters of uncertainty, of hope, / what we might be against what we have done.”10 There is sadness here, but the textures of grief and loss in these poems leave room everywhere for a future, an opening into a continuum within which some sense might be made of present and past travesties: Through long bewildered dusks, stalks grow; Rains fill and pass out of clouds; animals hover at the edges of fields

Coda  173 With eyes like black pools. For nothing cannot be transformed; Pleasure and failure feed each other daily.11 This welcoming of futurity is encompassing both in its scope – “nothing cannot be transformed” – and in its acceptance of risk: not only pleasure but failure are constituent elements of what is to come. In the same vein, the speaker in “Lodestar” watches herself “shine in unawareness,” observing how “everywhere we look out upon a darkness / whose scarcity we cannot comprehend.”12 What might have figured as an ominous statement is balanced by the surprising word “scarcity,” which renders our unknowingness almost comical in its innocence. We are like children in a dark room unaware of the existence of a light switch. If certainty is neighbor to despair, then what we do not know leaves room for hope, as Klink expresses in “The Graves,” a few marvelous lines from which I have excerpted as this coda’s epigraph: Hope is a place held for the unknown, where you are beyond anything I can say.13 In its emphatic linking of hope to a lack of knowledge, the first couplet expresses a conceptual possibility that was paradigmatic for the modernist writers whose work this book has explored: namely, the idea that hope is not only consonant with unknowing, it is “held for” it, naturally and productively emanates from it. Such crucial hope for the future finally pushes past the capacities of language itself: “you are beyond / anything I can say.” In this lyric address, the “you” becomes all the more resonant for its lack of specificity. Is “you” God? The universe? A lover? How precisely does the “you” affect the nature of the speaker’s hopes? The poem answers none of these questions, and this indeterminacy lends it its power: it is a text that not only describes uncertainty but fruitfully, enigmatically exemplifies it. So much, indeed, is inevitably beyond anything we can say, a fact which need not preclude our attempting to say it. Indeed, the artistic endeavor itself may be engendered by this limitedness. “Keats Is Coughing,” a poem by Marianne Boruch published in Poetry in 2017, compares to Klink’s work in its ambition to survey the limits of human knowing and making. The conceit of the poem is a layering of Rome, where the speaker recently visited, onto Denali, Alaska, her current location. This sparks a reflection on the similarities between mental and physical habitations and the way each survives as a type of accumulation built on ruins: “that’s so-called / civilization for you, to layer up, / to redo the already done.” Boruch’s definition of

174 Coda civilization implies a frailty inherent to all grand plans to discover and ­accomplish – a frailty that hinges on our inability to know. As Boruch writes, “From the start perverse, any premise. / Ask … we can’t know. To be ­compelled  // makes an occasion.” Pure knowledge is impossible because of the infinite depths not only of nature but of the human selves, which form a small part of it: “The wilderness in us / is endless.” In history, this inner wilderness often actuates itself as bloodshed. In an odd echo of Whitman’s nod to luck, Boruch describes the story of civilizational ebb and flow as “predator / and prey throwing coins to a fountain.” So much more than we think, the poem contends, is beyond our ability even to guess. “It’s the one big mess of us / in us, the generous extraordinary dead prove that”; and the exhortation in the poem, if there is one, is to examine this mess more closely, to dwell in it more consciously, and finally – on the ethical level – to eschew hierarchy and division in favor of attentiveness, especially to those lives presumed weaker or more insignificant, since, as the poem concludes, “Another life / isn’t smaller.”14 Reprised by today’s poets in its best, most hopeful forms, modernist uncertainty follows the intuition that a stance of epistemic humility can also be a commitment to the future – a future the poet begins to build by looking carefully at the world. This process of careful perception is what the call to wonder, once internalized, produces. “Next day is no way of knowing / and the day after is my favorite,” Revell writes in his poem “My Trip,” surrendering to the circumstantial aspects of existence but not without inscribing the poet’s investment in what might come next: “The work of poetry is trust / And under the aegis of trust / ­Nothing could be more effortless.”15 In “A Shepherd’s Calendar,” a poem that speaks to that effortless trust, Revell offers us the simple, perfectly contained image of a boy riding a bicycle in early-morning sunlight. It is an image that becomes profound because it tells us both how much we cannot yet know and how much that lack does not matter, given that Wisdom consists entirely Of afterwards, of far ahead Where time is finished with itself Just as the mountains over there Are finished with the sun. If “Wisdom consists entirely / Of afterwards,” it is, in some important sense, denied us; our endemic condition is one in which complete wisdom is more imagined than attained. Despite this acknowledgment of human limitation, the poem leaves us in a present mystically charged with happiness – “For now, / Joy,” the speaker concludes – one coeval with a willingness to anticipate but not demand eventual revelation and reconciliation, once “time is finished with itself.” In the meantime, as

Coda  175 the poem ends by observing, even our frailty, our insignificance, can be a kind of small miracle: “To be the wound of the sun / On Time’s face is beautiful.”16 Whether we see ourselves and our futures as lucky or unlucky, cursed or blessed, is thus not merely a matter of belief. It is a matter of disposition, and, finally, of perception: of how and what we choose to see, and how that way of seeing shapes our hopes, and from there, our further actions. Tragedy and pain and atrocity are obvious and real evils, and to flinch from them would be a moral failing. To espouse an ethic of wonder is not to deny these evident realities but to advance a reparative truth – that to make the world good requires first seeing its goodness, that what can be redeemed is worth redeeming. The closing encouragement of Revell’s poem “Leontes” affirms the same: We are so happy. The sunlight grows weaker. Reunion shakes the world. Let us speak of it.17

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 477. 2 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, in Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1959), 30. 3 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 650, A829/B857. 4 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1982), 145. 5 John Keats to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 27 (?), 1817, in Selected Letters of John Keats, Revised Edition, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 60. 6 Joanna Klink, Raptus (New York: Penguin, 2010), 19. 7 Donald Revell, Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2005), 94. 8 Klink, Raptus, 1. 9 Klink, Raptus, 11. 10 Klink, Raptus, 14. 11 Klink, Raptus, 27. 12 Klink, Raptus, 38. 13 Klink, Raptus, 17. 14 Marianne Boruch, “Keats Is Coughing,” Poetry Foundation, April 2017, www.poetryfoundation.org /poetrymagazine/poems/92670/ keats-iscoughing. 15 Revell, Pennyweight Windows, 155. 16 Donald Revell, Drought-Adapted Vine (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2015), 4. 17 Donald Revell, The English Boat (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2018), 3.

II

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Acheson, Susan 94, 106 Adorno, Theodor: Aesthetic Theory 144; on Beckett 140; on Endgame (Beckett) 143, 147, 164n4; on modernism 168n84; Negative Dialectics 7–8; on role of art 12, 15 aesthetic autonomy 4, 5, 15, 16 Aesthetic Reason (Singer) 13 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno) 144 aesthetic utility 5, 18–20, 23n36, 163–164; arguments against 14–15; and art 9–10; Attridge on 13–14, 24n80, 54, 88–89, 94; and Beckett 13, 145, 148, 154, 162–163, 168n81; and Birth (Griffith) 54, 56, 58–60; in contemporary criticism and theory 12–14; and Endgame (Beckett) 140, 163–164; and The Gift (H.D.) 87, 92–95; and The Golden Bowl (James) 28–29, 34, 44–45; and Griffith 148; and H.D. 87, 93–94, 148; history of 9–12; and hope in modernism 4–5, 9, 14, 19, 29, 53–54, 87–88; and identity 87–91, 110; and James 27–29, 49, 155; and Libretto (Tolson) 112–114, 121, 124, 126, 127, 131; and modernism 14, 19, 53, 110, 148, 168n84; and politics 110–113; and Tolson 112–114, 131, 148; and transformation 17, 24n80, 24n82; and Trilogy (H.D.) 87, 102; and uncertainty 40–43, 110; and Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 140, 154–155, 163; and Wings (James) 29, 34, 39, 40 affect theory 132 Afrofuturism 126–127, 130, 137n39 Afropessimism 129–130, 137n49

Ahmed, Sarah: The Promise of Happiness 132 Anderson, Elizabeth 82, 87, 103 Antliff, Mark 68 anxiety see uncertainty À rebours [Against Nature] (Huysman) 4, 5 Arendt, Hannah 16–17 Aristotle 46, 130; Poetics 10, 52n46 art: and aesthetic utility 9–10; autonomy of 15–16; and democracy 113–114; and Endgame (Beckett) 146–148, 158–159; and future 10–12, 46–47, 110; and The Gift (H.D.) 91–93; and The Golden Bowl (James) 26, 39, 41–48, 51n40, 146; H.D.’s creation of 80, 82, 83–84, 86, 89–91, 105, 108n42; and hope 11–12, 62, 84, 87, 104–105, 110–111, 168n84; and James 28, 29, 34, 146, 147; and modernism 15, 147; role of 11–12, 14–17; and Trilogy (H.D.) 98–101, 106; and Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 146–147; and Wings (James) 26, 29, 37–39, 43, 146, 148 Art of Poetry, The (Horace) 10 Ashbery, John: “The One Thing That Can Save America” 24n82 “Ash Wednesday” (Eliot) 53 Attridge, Derek: on aesthetic utility 13–14, 24n80, 54, 88–89, 94; on literary creation 95, 97, 98–99, 108n55, 108n56 Auden, W.H. 14–16 Auerbach, Erich 163 Augustine, Jane 108n51

190 Index Baccolini, Rafaella 86 Back to Beckett (Cohn) 147 Bad Modernisms (Mao and Walkowitz) 21n10 Bakhtin, Mikhail 119–120 Barrett, Courtney 59 Barrett, Jenny 73, 76n11 Barta, Tony 57 Baudelaire, Charles 123 Beckett, Samuel 169; and aesthetic utility 13, 145, 148, 154, 162–163, 168n81; compassion of 161; and creation of literature 160–162; and death 161, 169; on Endgame 155; and hope 3, 20, 140–141, 145–146; and language 142–143; and meaninglessness 143–144; and religion 145, 160; and time 149; and uncertainty 5, 145; see also Endgame (Beckett); Waiting for Godot (Beckett) Beckett’s Art of Mismaking (de la Durantaye) 142–143 Being and Time (Heidegger) 169 Benjamin, Walter 3, 4, 153 Berlant, Lauren: Cruel Optimism 132, 138n57 Bernier, Mark 7 Bersani, Leo 26–28, 39, 47 Bérubé, Michael: Marginal Forces/ Cultural Centers 115 Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith) 19–20, 76n7, 78n43; and aesthetic utility 54, 56, 58–60; and control of future 60–62, 65–66, 68, 72; and death 64, 69, 71–72; and emotions 63–65, 67, 78n39; ending of 79n60, 79n60; and fear of future 63–64; Griffth on historical accuracy of 55–56, 60, 75n6; and hope 59, 61, 63–65, 68, 72–74; and modernism 61–62; and nostalgia 65–66; and past 55–56, 58–63, 65–66, 68–69; and present 59–61, 65–66, 72; reception of 58, 59, 74, 76n20, 77n24; and religion 73–74; and spatial manipulation 69–72; and temporal manipulation 66–69; and uncertainty 19–20, 59, 61, 67, 72, 74–75; as visual spectacle 66 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche) 11 Bitzer, Billy 55 Blackmur, R.P. 49–50n14

Blanchot, Maurice 140, 161 Blau, Herbert 141, 145, 156 Bloch, Ernst 168n81; The Principle of Hope 7, 8 Boone, Joseph 43–44 Borderline (H.D.) 89–90 Boruch, Marianne 171, 172; Poetry 173–174 Boyce, Kristin 38 Breuer, Rolf 149 Brod, Max 4 Brooks, Curtis M. 147, 150 Brown, Dennis 81, 108n51 Brudney, Daniel 29, 52n46 Brunner, Edward 119, 122, 127, 136n32 Bürger, Peter: Theory of the AvantGarde 15, 16 Calderwood, James 165n25 call-and-response 119 Camboni, Marina 108n42, 108n51 Campbell, Edward 56 Camus, Albert 7 Carter, Everett 65 Cavell, Stanley 140, 147, 156, 167n60 Cheng, Anne Anlin: The Melancholy of Race 128–131, 133–134 Chernaik, Judith 45, 47 Chesney, Duncan McColl 145, 162–163 Children of Men (Cuarón) 21n4 Christensen, Terry 76n11 Clansman, The (Dixon) 61, 74 Coats, Jason M. 82, 106n6 Coester, Eduoard 144 Coetzee, J.M. 9 Cohn, Ruby 142; Back to Beckett 147 Collective Insecurity (Mcbeogi) 136n21 Concept of Modernism, The (Eysteinsson) 21n9 Cormier, Ramona 143 Courtney, Susan 59, 61, 66, 73 Craig, David 44, 46, 52n46 Critchley, Simon 140 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 11 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 6, 170 Crow Nation 8 Cruel Optimism (Berlant) 132, 138n57 Cuarón, Alfonso 1–3; Children of Men 21n4

Index  191 death 169–170; and Beckett 161, 169; and Birth (Griffith) 64, 69, 71–72; and Endgame (Beckett) 155–156, 167n60; and The Gift (H.D.) 84–85; and H.D. 83–84; and hope 1–2, 7, 169–171; and Libretto (Tolson) 123; and modernism 139–140; and Trilogy (H.D.) 102–103; and Wings (James) 34, 36, 38, 39–40 “Defence of Poesy, The” (Sidney) 10 “Defence of Poetry, A” (Shelley) 10–11 de la Durantaye, Leland 159, 163; Beckett’s Art of Mismaking 142–143 Delbanco, Andrew 3; The Real American Dream 8 democracy: in Africa 117–118; and art 113–114; and Libretto (Tolson) 20, 112–113, 118, 120, 122–127, 131–132, 134; and Tolson 114–115, 130 Democracy in Black (Glaude) 137n44 Derrida, Jacques 89, 140 Dery, Mark 137n39 Despotopoulou, Anna 30, 37 Diawara, Manthia: In Search of Africa 137n49 Dixon, Thomas: The Clansman 61, 74 Doe, Samuel 128 Dorsey, John T. 149 Dreaming by the Book (Scarry) 13 Driver, Tom 143, 145, 163 Du Bois, W.E.B. 117 Duchamp, Marcel 143 Duckworth, Colin 141 Dunn, Margaret M. 81 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 81, 84, 86 D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Film (Gunning) 68 Eagleton, Terry 7, 145; Hope without Optimism 8, 22n14 Edwards, Brent Hayes 119 Eisenstein, Sergei 67 Eliot, T.S.: “Ash Wednesday” 53 Ellison, David: Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature 13 Endgame (Beckett) 20; and aesthetic utility 140, 163–164; and art 146–148, 158–159; Beckett on 155; and chaos 166n26; and death

155–156, 167n60; desperation in 155–156, 163; and future 156, 157, 159–160, 163, 164; and Holocaust 164n4; and hope 141, 146, 147, 156–157, 159–160, 164; and inability to depart 156–157; and language 142, 157–159; and meaninglessness 143; and metatextuality 166n45; and religion 159–160; and uncertainty 147–148 Eshel, Amir: Futurity 8 Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature (Ellison) 13 Expense of Vision, The (Holland) 28, 49n14 Eysteinsson, Astradur: The Concept of Modernism 21n9 Fabe, Marilyn 78n39 Farnsworth, Robert 125, 130 Faulkner, William 21 fear see uncertainty Feeling Backward (Love) 21n10 Felski, Rita 12, 18; Uses of Literature 13, 14, 23n36 Fictions of Autonomy (Goldstone) 16 fin de siècle literature 4 Flieger, Jerry Aline 161 Forché, Carolyn 111–112 Freedman, Jonathan 31, 34, 51n30 Freud, Sigmund 81, 128 Friedman, Susan Stanford 83, 86, 97, 100, 106n8; Psyche Reborn 81 Fromm, Gloria 81 Frye, Northrop 112 future 138n57; and art 10–12, 46–47, 110; and Beckett 141, 148, 160; control of in Birth (Griffith) 60–62, 65–66, 68, 72; and Endgame (Beckett) 156, 157, 159–160, 163, 164; fear of in The Birth of a Nation (Griffith) 63–64; and The Golden Bowl (James) 41, 43, 44, 46–48; and H.D. 84–86, 92, 94–96, 98–99, 101, 104–106; and hope 2–3, 22n14, 29–30; and James 19, 27, 33–34, 48–49; and Libretto (Tolson) 116, 118, 120–122, 124–128, 130–131, 133; and literature 162; and modernism 4–8, 14, 20–21, 53; and Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 151, 153;

192 Index welcoming of 171–172, 174–175; and Wings (James) 35–36, 38–39 Futurity (Eshel) 8 Gamache, Lawrence 21n9 Garvey, Marcus 117 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) 11–12 Gelpi, Albert 81, 101, 108n51 ghetto laughter 124 Gift, The (H.D.) 20; and aesthetic utility 87, 92–95; and art 91–93; and death 84–85; and feminine 108n51; and hope 85, 94; and religion 86–87, 103; and World War II 84–85 Glaude, Eddie S. Jr.: Democracy in Black 137n44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 118 Gold, David 114–115 Golden Bowl, The (James) 19; and aesthetic utility 28–29, 34, 44–45; and art 26, 39, 41–48, 51n40, 146; dehumanizing economies in 31–32; and future 41, 43, 44, 46–48; heroine of 32, 33–34, 51n32; and hope 29–30, 41, 46–47; and morality 28–29; and uncertainty 33–34, 41–47, 51n30, 52n46 Goldstone, Andrew: Fictions of Autonomy 16 Gooder, Jean 51–52n40 Goyal, Yogita 127 Grattan, Sean: Hope Isn’t Stupid 9, 132 Gravity (Cuarón) 1–3 Greenberg, Clement 147 Griffith, D.W. 3, 80, 110; aesthetic beliefs of 54–55, 59, 66; and aesthetic utility 148; on film 76n13; film methods of 78n44; on historical accuracy of Birth 55–56, 60, 75n6; and parallel editing 67–68; and role of film 56–57, 60, 61, 66, 76n11, 76n15; and uncertainty 5; see also Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith) Guerra, Gustavo 32, 48, 50n27 Gunning, Tom 57, 78n44; D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Film 68 Hamilton, Geoff 157 Hart, Matthew 115, 121, 128 Hartman, Saidiya 129–130; Scenes of Subjection 129

Hatred of Poetry, The (Lerner) 17 Hauck, Gerhard 157 H.D. 3, 20, 110; and aesthetic utility 87, 93–94, 148; and artistic creation 80, 82, 83–84, 86, 89–91, 105, 108n42; and death 83–84; and fatalism 85–86, 96, 104; and feminine 81, 85, 108n51; and hope 80, 82, 83; as Imagist poet 80, 83, 89; impact of World Wars on 83–84; influences on 81–83, 106n6, 106n8; and uncertainty 5, 84, 108n56; see also Gift, The (H.D.); Trilogy (H.D.) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6, 8, 11, 13 Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time 169 Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (Quinn) 80, 86 Hillcoat, John: The Road 21n4 Holland, Laurence 48; The Expense of Vision 28, 49n14 hope 2–3, 167n67; and aesthetic utility in modernism 4–5, 9, 14, 19, 29, 53–54, 87–88; and art 11–12, 62, 84, 87, 104–105, 110–111, 168n84; and Beckett 3, 20, 140–141, 145–146, 148–149, 163; and Birth (Griffith) 59, 61, 63–65, 68, 72–74; in contemporary literature 8–9, 171–175; and death 1–2, 7, 169–171; and Endgame (Beckett) 141, 146, 147, 156–157, 159–160, 164; and future 2–3, 6–8, 22n14, 29–30, 53; and The Gift (H.D.) 85, 94; and The Golden Bowl (James) 29–30, 41, 46–47; and H.D. 20, 80, 82, 83, 87, 105; and James 34, 48–49; and Libretto (Tolson) 120–121, 124–125, 127, 130–135; and modernism 75, 171; and postmodernism 139–140; and Trilogy (H.D.) 95, 101–104; and uncertainty 46, 48, 49, 53–54, 75, 110, 171–173; and Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 141, 146, 150, 153–155; and Wings (James) 29–31, 34–41, 46; and written communication 162 Hope Isn’t Stupid (Grattan) 9, 132 Hope without Optimism (Eagleton) 8, 22n14 Horace: The Art of Poetry 10

Index  193 Horowitz, Evan 141 Huysman, Joris-Karl: À rebours [Against Nature], 4, 5 “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (Auden) 14 In Search of Africa (Diawara) 137n49 instrumentalism 54 Interstellar (Nolan) 21n4 Iser, Wolfgang 151, 161 James, David: Modernist Futures 8–9 James, Henry 3, 19, 110; and accuracy of representation 27, 48–49; and aesthetic utility 27–29, 49, 155; and art 28, 29, 34, 146, 147; and dehumanizing economies 30–31; and hope 48; and morality 28–29, 49n14; and uncertainty 5, 26, 29, 32–34, 47, 49, 50n27, 53; see also Golden Bowl, The (James); Wings of the Dove, The (James) Johnson, Samuel 57–58 Joyce, James 13, 160 Kafka, Franz 4, 144 Kant, Immanuel 13; Critique of Judgment 11; Critique of Pure Reason 6, 170 Kaun, Alex 142 Keats, John 171–172 Keller, John Robert 141 Kennedy, Seán 143 Kenner, Hugh 149 Kern, Stephen 67 Kierkegaard, Soren 7 Klink, Joanna 171; Raptus 172–173 Ku Klux Klan 58 Late Modernism (Miller) 21n10 Lawley, Paul 142 Lawrence, D.H. 81 Lear, Jonathan 167n67; Radical Hope 8 Lehr, Dick 59 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 6 Lenhart, Gary 122 Lennig, Arthur 73, 76n11 Leonard, Keith 115, 136n32 Lerner, Ben: The Hatred of Poetry 17 Levenson, Michael: Modernism 21n9 Levinas, Emmanuel 89 Liberia 116–118, 128, 136n21; Tolson as poet laureate of 112, 118, 130

Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (Tolson) 20; and aesthetic utility 112–114, 121, 124, 126, 127, 131; in Afrofuturist literary tradition 126–127; and death 123; and democracy 20, 112–113, 118, 120, 122–127, 131–132, 134; and economics 122–123; and future 116, 118, 120–122, 124–128, 130–131, 133; Good Gray Bard in 120–121, 136n32; and hope 124, 125, 130–135; and language 119–121, 134–135; merging of poetic traditions in 115–116, 118–119; as modernist poem 119, 131; and past 118, 120–125, 127, 130, 134; as poetry of witness of atrocities 123, 124; and present 120, 124, 133, 134; and uncertainty 126; and unification 125–127 literature: autonomy of 16; creation of 27–28, 88, 95, 97, 98–99, 108n55, 108n56, 160–162; role of 13–14 Love, Heather 60; Feeling Backward 21n10 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 139, 148 MacGowran, Jack 161 McCarthy, Cormac: The Road 21n4 Mao, Douglas: Bad Modernisms 21n10 Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers (Bérubé) 115 Marinetti, F.T. 3, 62 Martian, The (Scott) 21n4 Marxism 7, 122 Massie, Courtney 142 Mbembe, Achille: On the Postcolony 129 Mcbeogi, Ikechi: Collective Insecurity 136n21 Medina, Angel 28 melancholia 128–129, 131, 137n44 Melancholy of Race, The (Cheng) 128–131, 133–134 Melville, Herman 13 Menand, Louis 24n82 Mercer, Vivian 149 Merritt, Russell 66, 69, 77n36 Mgbeoji, Ikechi 116 Miller, Tyrus 4; Late Modernism 21n10 modernism 59–60; Adorno on 168n84; and aesthetic utility 14,

194 Index 19, 53, 110, 148, 168n84; and art 15, 147; and death 139–140; freeing of language in 119; and future 4–8, 14, 20–21, 53; hope and aesthetic utility in 4–5, 9, 14, 19, 29, 53–54, 75, 87–88; and past 21n9, 61–62; and present 4–5, 7–8, 21n9; and uncertainty 4–5, 21n9, 21n10, 32–33, 53, 61–62, 170–171, 174 Modernism (Levenson) 21n9 Modernism’s Other Work (Siraganian) 16 Modernist Futures (James) 8–9 montage style 67–68 Moorjani, Angela 166n26 morality 28–29, 49–50n14 Morris, Adalaide 81 Morrison, Toni 9 Moten, Fred 137n49 Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 7–8 Ngai, Sianne: Ugly Feelings 21n10 Nielsen, Aldon 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 11–12 Nolan, Christopher: Interstellar 21n4 North, Michael 119 Notes on Thought and Vision (H.D.) 82–83, 89, 94, 100 Nussbaum, Martha 28–29, 51n40 O’Hara, Daniel 28 Olk, Claudia 142 Olund, Eric 59 On Beauty and Being Just (Scarry) 13 “One Thing That Can Save America, The” (Ashbery) 24n82 On the Postcolony (Mbembe) 129 Ostriker, Alicia 86 O’Sullivan, Simon 168n84 Pallister, Janis L. 143 past: and art 93; and Birth (Griffith) 55–56, 58–63, 65–66, 68–69; and H.D. 86, 89, 92, 95–96, 98, 105; and hope for future 6–8; and Libretto (Tolson) 118, 120–125, 127, 130, 134; and melancholia 128–129; and modernism 21n9, 61–62; and movies 55, 57; and Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 151, 155; and Wings (James) 34 Plato: Republic 10

Poetics (Aristotle) 10, 52n46 poetry 10–11, 14–15, 18, 24n82 Poetry (Boruch) 173–174 Pollard, Scott 44 Popovic, Pol 156 Pound, Ezra 3, 62, 80, 81 present: and Beckett 148, 149, 164; and Birth (Griffith) 59–61, 65–66, 72; and H.D. 86, 92, 102, 104; and hope 132; and James 33; and Libretto (Tolson) 120, 124, 133, 134; and modernism 4–5, 7–8, 21n9 Principle of Hope, The (Bloch) 7 Probyn, Elspeth 132 Promise of Happiness, The (Ahmed) 132 Psyche Reborn (Friedman) 81 “The Public v. The Late Mr. William Butler Yeats” (Auden) 14–15 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 67 Quinn, Vincent: Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) 80, 86 Radical Hope (Lear) 8 Rainey, Lawrence 82 Raptus (Klink) 172 Real American Dream, The (Delbanco) 8 religion: and Beckett 145, 160; and Birth (Griffith) 73–74; and death 170; and Endgame (Beckett) 159– 160; and The Gift (H.D.) 86–87, 103; and Notes (H.D.) 82–83; and Trilogy (H.D.) 82, 100, 103–104 Republic (Plato) 10 Revell, Donald 171, 172, 174–175 Reynolds, Mark 44 Rice, Tom 58 Riddel, Joseph 84, 86, 101 Rilke, Rainer Maria 171 Road, The (McCarthy and Hillcoat) 21n4 Rogin, Michael 59, 60, 73 Roth, Philip 9 Sarton, Mary 84 Sassine, Williams 137n49 Scarry, Elaine 13; On Beauty and Being Just 113–114 Scenes of Subjection (Hartman) 129 Schneider, Alan 141

Index  195 Schopenhauer, Arthur 6–7, 11, 12 Schor, Hilary Margo 32, 50n27 Schultz, Kathy Lou 136n32 Schuyler, George: Slaves Today 117 Scott, Ridley: The Martian 21n4 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 132 Sexton, Jared 137n49 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: “A Defence of Poetry” 10–11 Sidney, Philip: “The Defence of Poesy” 10 Simon, Bennett 148, 161, 162 Singer, Alan: Aesthetic Reason 13 Singularity of Literature, The (Attridge): on aesthetic utility 13–14, 24n80, 54, 88–89, 94; on literary creation 95, 97, 98–99, 108n55, 108n56 Siraganian, Lisa: Modernism’s Other Work 16 Slaves Today (Schuyler) 117 Snee, Brian J. 76n7, 78n43 Song of Myself (Whitman) 170 Stevens, Wallace 111 Stokes, Melvyn 58, 59, 77n24 Stowe, William 30 Taylor, Charles 128 Taylor, Clyde 59 Tennyson, Alfred 136n32 Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger) 15, 16 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 12 time 169–170; and Beckett 149; and Endgame (Beckett) 156, 159–160; and The Gift (H.D.) 91–92; and Trilogy (H.D.) 106; and Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 149–153, 155 Todasco, Ruth Taylor 47 Tolson, Melvin B. 3; and aesthetic utility 112–114, 131, 148; and Afrofuturism 128, 130; and democracy 114–115, 125, 130; Harlem Gallery 114, 115; Libretto for the Republic of Liberia 20, 110; as Marxist 122, 125–126; merging of poetic traditions by 114–116; as poet laureate of Liberia 112, 118, 130; and uncertainty 5; see also Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (Tolson) Tomkins, Silvan 132

Torgovnick, Marianna 52n46 Trask, Michael 30, 33 Trilogy (H.D.) 20, 81, 82; and aesthetic identity 97, 101–102, 104–105; and aesthetic utility 87, 102; and art 98–101, 106; and death 102–103; and feminine 101, 108n51; and hope 95, 101–104; and religion 82, 100, 103–104; and uncertainty 94, 96, 101–102, 104; and World War II 95–96 Tubman, William S. 118 Ty, Michelle 149 Ugly Feelings (Ngai) 21n10 uncertainty 4–5; and aesthetic utility 40–43, 110; and Afropessimism 137n49; and Beckett 145; and Birth (Griffith) 19–20, 59, 61, 67, 72, 74–75; and Endgame (Beckett) 147–148; and future 174–175; and The Golden Bowl (James) 33–34, 41–47, 51n30, 52n46; and H.D. 84, 108n56; and hope 46, 48, 49, 53–54, 75, 110, 171–173; and James 26, 29, 32–34, 41, 47, 49, 50n27, 53; and Libretto (Tolson) 126; and modernism 4–5, 21n9, 21n10, 32–33, 53, 61–62, 170–171, 174; rejection of 171–172; and Trilogy (H.D.) 94, 96, 101–102, 104; and Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 147–148, 152–153; and Wings (James) 33–34, 38 Unknowing (Weinstein) 4–5 Uses of Literature (Felski) 13, 14, 23n36 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 20; and aesthetic utility 140, 154–155, 163; and art 146–147; and hope 141, 146, 150, 153–155; and meaninglessness 143, 150–151, 154–155, 165n25; and time 149–153, 155; and uncertainty 147–148, 152–153 Walkowitz, Daniel J. 65 Walkowitz, Rebecca L.: Bad Modernisms 21n10 Wallace, Michele Faith 59 Ware, Ben 157, 163 Watts, Eileen 43 Weil, Simone 170

196 Index Weinberger, Stephen 58, 78n42 Weinstein, Philip: Unknowing 4–5 Weller, Shane 140, 145 Werner, Craig 114 Wessel, Catherine Cox 51n32 Whitman, Walt 28, 120–122, 136n32, 171, 174; Song of Myself 170 Why Poetry (Zapruder) 18 Wilderson, Frank, III 130 Wiman, Christian 170 Wings of the Dove, The (James) 19; and aesthetic utility 29, 34, 39, 40; and art 26, 29, 37–39, 43, 146, 148; and death 34, 36, 38, 39–40; dehumanizing economies in 30–32, 35–37, 40; epiphany

in 36–38, 51n35; heroine of 32, 33–34, 51n32; and hope 29–31, 34–41, 46; and morality 38–40; and uncertainty 33–34, 38 Woolf, Virginia 13 Wordsworth, William 28 World War I 3, 27, 83 World War II 3, 80, 83–84, 142 Wynands, Sandra 145–146, 161, 166n26 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 33–34, 52n46 Zaccaria, Paola 105 Zapruder, Matthew 14, 24n82; Why Poetry 18