Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the

Twentieth Century
Also by Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell
WYNDHAM LEWIS AND THE CULTURES OF MODERNITY
(co-edited with A. Ga˛siorek)

Also by Nathan Waddell

MODERNIST NOWHERES: POLITICS AND UTOPIA IN
EARLY MODERNIST WRITING, 1900–1920
Utopianism, Modernism,
and Literature in the
Twentieth Century
Edited by

Alice Reeve-Tucker
University of Birmingham

and

Nathan Waddell
University of Nottingham
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Alice Reeve-Tucker and
Nathan Waddell 2013
Individual chapters © Contributors 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-35893-5

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1
Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell
1 The Point of It 19
Douglas Mao
2 A Likely Impossibility: The Good Soldier, the Modernist
Novel, and Quasi-Familial Transcendence 39
Scott W. Klein
3 Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the
‘Postwar-to-end-war World’ 56
Nathan Waddell
4 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia 74
Nick Hubble
5 Lesbian Modernism and Utopia: Sexology and the Invert in
Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction 93
Elizabeth English
6 Syncretic Utopia, Transnational Provincialism:
Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase 111
Glyn Salton-Cox
7 The Role of Mathematics in Modernist Utopia: Imaginary
Numbers in Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day 130
Nina Engelhardt
8 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen: Utopian Leisure in
the Age of Mechanized Hospitality 148
Shawna Ross
9 ‘Seeing beneath the formlessness’: James Baldwin, Toni
Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism 168
David James

v
vi Contents

10 Uncovering the ‘gold-bearing rubble’:

Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism 182
Caroline Edwards

Bibliography 204

Index 219
Acknowledgements

Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell would like to thank the Arts
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art, and the College of Arts and Law at the University
of Birmingham for financial contributions to ‘Modernism and Utopia:
Convergences in the Arts’ (an international conference held in 2010 at
the Birmingham and Midland Institute), at which most of the chapters
in this volume were first delivered as research presentations. Alice and
Nathan would also like to thank James Barnett for his help in organiz-
ing this event, Andrzej Ga˛siorek for his advice and support, and the
volume contributors for their patience. Thanks also to the contributors
for acting as reviewers of their colleagues’ work, to Alan Munton and
David Seed for consultations on individual chapters, and to Palgrave
Macmillan’s anonymous reader for an exceptionally detailed clearance
report which improved the volume further than we could have anti-
cipated. At Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, Ben Doyle, and Nick
Sheerin have been nothing but supportive. Thanks, finally, to Monica
Kendall for her copy-editing.

vii
Notes on Contributors

Caroline Edwards is a Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. She

is currently completing a monograph, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the
21st-Century British Novel, which explores the representation of time and
utopia in a range of twenty-first-century British fictions. Caroline has pub-
lished articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Contemporary
Literature, as well as reviews and interviews in Radical Philosophy, Historical
Materialism, Left Lion Magazine, and The New Statesman. Caroline is
co-editor of two edited collections on contemporary writers: Maggie Gee:
Critical Essays and China Miéville: Critical Essays (forthcoming). She is
Founding and Commissioning Editor for the monthly web-based journal
Alluvium: 21st-Century Writings, 21st-Century Approaches.

Nina Engelhardt is based at the University of Edinburgh. She received

her PhD in English Literature in 2012 and holds degrees in Comparative
and General Literature (an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and
a BA from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany). Her
research in the field of literature and science focuses on fiction and
mathematics, particularly on the employment of mathematics and
the philosophy of mathematics in illustrations of the early twentieth
century as a time of drastic change. Her PhD thesis examines modern-
ist interrelations of mathematics, literature, language, philosophy, and
other fields in works of the American writer Thomas Pynchon and the
Austrian authors Hermann Broch and Robert Musil.

Elizabeth English is a Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of

London. She is completing a book titled Lesbian Modernism and Genre:
Censorship, Sexuality and Popular Fiction, which examines the relationship
between popular cultural forms and lesbian literature in the first half of
the twentieth century. Her next project is a book-length study of the
speculative fiction writer Katharine Burdekin. She has a co-authored arti-
cle on teaching literary theory forthcoming in the pedagogical journal
English in Education. She is also currently co-organizing an international
conference on Lesbian Modernism, and is co-editor of the proposed col-
lection of essays Rethinking Genre: The Politics of Cultural Form.

Nick Hubble is Head of English at Brunel University, London. He

is the author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History,

viii
 Notes on Contributors ix

Theory (2006). He was a co-investigator on the ESRC-funded three-year

project ‘Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing’ (2009–12) and
is one of the co-authors of both a book-length policy report written
in conjunction with the think tank Demos, Coming of Age (2011), and
the forthcoming Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social
Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His current research focuses on
the relationship between writers and Mass-Observation. Recent publica-
tions include ‘Historical Psychology, Utopian Dreams and Other Fool’s
Errands’, Modernist Cultures, 3.2 (2008); ‘The Intermodern Assumption
of the Future: William Empson and Mass-Observation’, in Kristin
Bluemel (ed.), Intermodernism (2009); ‘Intermodern Pastoral: William
Empson and George Orwell’, in David James and Philip Tew (eds), New
Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses
to the Tradition (2009); ‘John Sommerfield and Mass-Observation’, The
Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, 8.1 (2012); and the
editorship of two special issues of the online journal Literary London
(‘Intermodern London’, 2009; and ‘Middlebrow London’, 2011).

David James is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at

Queen Mary, University of London. His books include Contemporary
British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008) and Modernist Futures
(2012). With Rebecca L. Walkowitz and Matthew Hart, he edits the
Columbia University Press book series Literature Now, and has edited a
number of collections including The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising
Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (2011) and, with Jeannette Baxter,
Andrea Levy: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (forthcoming). With
Andrzej Ga˛siorek he guest-edited a 2012 special issue of Contemporary
Literature on ‘Fiction since 2000: Post-millennial Commitments’. He is
currently editing The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945.

Scott W. Klein is a Professor and Chair of the Department of English at

Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Fictions of
James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design (1994), the
editor of the Oxford World Classics edition of the 1928 edition of Wyndham
Lewis’s Tarr (2010), and, with Mark Antliff, the editor of the essay collec-
tion Vorticism: New Perspectives (forthcoming). He has published essays in
such journals as ELH, Modernist Cultures, Twentieth Century Literature, The
James Joyce Quarterly, and The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies.

Douglas Mao is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.

He is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production
(1998) and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development,
x Notes on Contributors

and Literature 1860–1960 (2008), as well as the co-editor, with Rebecca

Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (2006) and the editor of the Longman
Cultural Edition of E. M. Forster’s Howards End (2009). A former president
of the Modernist Studies Association, he serves on the editorial boards of
Textual Practice, ELH, Modernism/modernity, and The Journal of Wyndham
Lewis Studies. He is currently at work on a book about utopias.

Alice Reeve-Tucker was awarded her PhD, which considers the role of
Catholicism in the inter-war writings of Graham Greene and Evelyn
Waugh, by the University of Birmingham in 2012. She is a co-editor of
Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011).

Shawna Ross completed her doctorate in English at Pennsylvania

State University in 2011. She is currently a Lecturer at Arizona State
University. Her book manuscript investigates the mutually reciprocal
growth of modernist narrative and modern leisure institutions (includ-
ing hotels, spas, and cruise ships) during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.

Glyn Salton-Cox is a PhD candidate in English at Yale University. He

works on twentieth-century literary, cultural, and intellectual history,
with a particular focus on the old and new lefts, form in the novel,
queer formations, transnational networks in relation to cultural nation-
alisms, and war literature and culture. His PhD dissertation examines
leftist self-fashioning in English fiction of the thirties and forties, and
the fate of a specifically Marxist form of queer subjectivity in wartime
Britain. An article drawn from this project, ‘Literary Praxis beyond
the Melodramas of Commitment: Edward Upward, Soviet Aesthetics
and Leftist Self Fashioning’, is forthcoming in Comparative Literature.
His second book-length project will explore the cultural history of the
Lumpenproletariat in London, Paris, and Berlin, and its constitution
alongside the formation of the normative working class over the long
twentieth century.

Nathan Waddell is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature

at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Modern John Buchan:
A Critical Introduction (2009) and Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia
in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (2012); a co-editor of Wyndham
Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011); and assistant editor of The
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies. He has published several scholarly
articles and chapters on twentieth-century writers, including Buchan,
Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Lewis, and Evelyn Waugh. He is also
the Secretary and Treasurer of the UK-based Wyndham Lewis Society.
Introduction
Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell

Modernist scholarship has developed fundamentally in the past two

decades. Significantly, long-standing formalist practices have given way
to contextual and historical methods of understanding modernism’s
textual innovations and artistic triumphs. Formalism has not simply
dropped out of these approaches, but cultural history is now the back-
drop against which formal developments are viewed. Likewise, utopian
studies has in recent years progressed in important ways. Whereas it
was once accepted wisdom to equate ‘utopianism’ with a specific formal
procedure (the literary utopia) or with a certain kind of socio-political
agenda (perfection-seeking), scholars have increasingly questioned
the essentialism by which utopian studies is sometimes underpinned.
These critical activities have in turn necessitated renewed engagements
not only with specific utopian texts and historical projects, but also
with the thought of key twentieth-century philosophers of utopian
discourse. The writings of such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Friedrich Hayek,
Fredric Jameson, Karl Mannheim, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Popper, and
Georges Sorel have been central to these debates, which have produced
fresh means of understanding utopianism in a range of artistic, cultural,
historical, philosophical, and social emphases. Like ‘modernism’, ‘uto-
pianism’ now means a multivalent phenomenon defined by ‘historical
specificity’, and a constellation of practices with ‘varied manifestations’
(Kohlmann, 2011, p. 3). However, although interactions between these
fields are increasingly common, work remains to be done.1 Accordingly,
this book offers readings of several writers – E. M. Forster, Ford
Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin,
Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen,
James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch – whose varied links
with modernism and utopianism invite fresh considerations of these
1
2 Introduction

discourses in cultural-historical and socio-political terms. Given that

utopianism arguably is the more contentious of these two concepts, we
want to begin this volume by establishing the character of contempo-
rary utopian studies in order to prepare readers for the author-specific
chapters below.
The conceptual pluralism of utopian studies is supported by Lucy
Sargisson’s observation that utopias ‘come in many different forms,
including theory, fiction and lived experiments’ (Sargisson, 2012,
p. 8). Observations of this sort are fundamental to twentieth-century
political philosophy and sociology, but it is only recently that such plu-
ralism has become a standard feature of the utopian studies discipline.
Sargisson’s emphasis on diversity derives principally from Bloch, whose
work was translated into English in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then,
Bloch’s multi-modal philosophy of utopianism has been the fulcrum
around which contemporary transatlantic and global scholarship
revolves. In such texts as The Spirit of Utopia (originally published as Geist
der Utopie in 1918) and his three-volume The Principle of Hope (first pub-
lished as Das Prinzip Hoffnung between 1954 and 1959), Bloch outlined a
specifically socialist philosophy that stressed utopianism’s nebulousness
as well as its omnipresence within a wide range of human endeav-
ours, from daydreams and fashion advertisements, to literature and
film, to jokes and fairy tales, to religion and pacifism, among others.2
Bloch’s insistence on the need for a distinction between abstract and
concrete forms of utopianism has been questioned (for example, Levitas,
1997), but his idea that abstract utopias are sealed off from historical
considerations, and that concrete utopias are imbricated in them, now
underpins numerous scholarly projects. Abstract utopias are compensa-
tory and can lead to what Karl Popper called ‘blueprint rationalism’, by
which he meant a form of imposed, inflexible socio-political change in
which ideological resistance is ruthlessly countered (see Popper, 1947).
Concrete utopias, by contrast, are wilful schemes in which reality as
it currently exists is taken as the basis of how it might otherwise be. Put
another way, concrete utopianism works within the structures of an
extant reality, whereas abstract utopianism seeks to evade that reality
in favour of a hypothetical, illusory alternative. Both urges operate within
Bloch’s model of utopianism as an impulse spread throughout human life
in copious forms.
There are clear links between Bloch’s utopian ‘impulse’ and Karl
Mannheim’s notion of a utopian ‘mentality’, which he detailed in
Ideology and Utopia (first published as Ideologie und Utopie in 1929).
However, though Bloch’s and Mannheim’s concepts of an open-ended
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 3

utopian yearning spread throughout human culture have been

criticized, in particular because of their apparent naturalism, utopian
studies now tends to be rooted in the Blochian and Mannheimian idea
of utopianism as a ‘problematic’, to quote Michael J. Griffin and Tom
Moylan, ‘that can trace those critical yet hopeful impulses that seek
to bring about a better world (however diverse, debated, conflicted, or
contested such tendencies may be in the cultures out of which they
arise)’ (Griffin and Moylan, 2007, p. [1]). Indeed, Benjamin Kohlmann
notes that ‘utopia’ has been reconfigured ‘as an exploratory, ubiquitous,
and multiform impulse, rather than as a set of ideologemes and propo-
sitions about the future – as conjectures about a different social order,
rather than as mimetic building plans to be used by totalitarian social
engineers’ (Kohlmann, 2011, p. 3). This anti-totalitarian emphasis ought
to be stressed. Although defining utopianism as a generalized ‘impulse’
means that such an impulse is not necessarily politically progressive (see
Geoghegan, 1987, p. 4), mandatory equations between utopianism and
authoritarianism, fascism, and totalitarianism have been dismissed for
their reductiveness. Utopianism may intersect with these ideologies, but
it is not indistinguishable from them.
Yet another complicating factor in the utopian ‘field’ is the persist-
ence of definitions which take as their starting point Sir Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516), but which then detail their models of utopianism using
a reductive version of More’s text and word. It is a familiar maxim, for
example, that the term ‘utopia’ refers to a no-place (u-topia) and also
that it evokes, homophonically, a good place (eu-topia) – thus capturing
a signified no-place that is also good. However, modern utilizations
of ‘utopia’ often take its ‘notness’ as meaning ‘unachievable’ – not
because unachievability might have been what More had in mind when
he coined the word, but on the less justifiable assumption that ‘not’
must mean ‘never’, rather than ‘not yet’ or ‘not here’. The key accom-
plishment of More’s Utopia is that it manages to articulate a complex
‘tension between the affirmation of a possibility and the negation of
its fulfilment’ (Vieira, 2010, p. 6), an ambiguity that the word ‘utopia’
itself articulates by virtue of its semantic doublings. These incongrui-
ties largely derive from the fact that the term ‘utopia’ was a pun used
by More in response to Desiderius Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1509),
in which double meanings abound. This originary context is often
elided in literary-historical and theoretical discussions of utopianism,
even though the term’s writerly origins, and its semantic ambiguities,
are regularly signalled in discussions of utopian thought. Moreover,
the fact that Utopia is as much an undercutting of ‘the good life’ as it
4 Introduction

appears to be an endorsement of it tends to be neglected, as does the

point that More was not the first author to write self-questioningly
about an ideal society. Such visions go back at least as far as Plato,
even if the precise kind of tensionality More brought to the discourse
represents a distinctive change of approach. Add to all this the difficulty
that the Middle East, Far East, and Pacific regions, among others, have
their own long-standing traditions of utopian and utopian-esque
philosophies (see Dutton, 2010), and it soon becomes clear that utopia’s
over-determinations are legion.
Ruth Levitas, following Bloch, has urged that the common root of all
utopian thinking has to be a ‘desire for a better way of being and living’
(Levitas, 2011, p. 8). She also concedes that this account only gets us so
far. Defining utopianism in this manner represents a capacious starting
point for further inquiry, but the account cannot accurately describe
all historical cases of utopianism because it is, as Levitas accepts, insuf-
ficiently specialized. Moreover, and as numerous scholars influenced by
Levitas recognize, to define utopianism as a category in any more detail
than a ‘desire for a better way of being and living’ is to risk adopting the
intolerance that according to such figures as John Gray, Russell Jacoby,
and Richard Taruskin is constitutive of utopianism in the first place.
Indeed, the terminological circularity that often plagues utopian stud-
ies derives from the fact that the word ‘utopia’ and its derivatives tend
to be used as if they have a single meaning, even if for as long as those
terms have existed there have been arguments about their desired and
possible significations. These disagreements show no signs of ending,
even in the wake of the aforementioned revolutions in specialized
utopian studies. For instance, Fredric Jameson has written that the ‘rela-
tionship between Utopia and the political, as well as questions about
the practical-political value of Utopian thinking and the identification
between socialism and Utopia, very much continue to be unresolved
topics today, when Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a
political slogan and a politically energizing perspective’ ( Jameson, 2005,
pp. [xi]–xii).3 Such sentiments, however, do not make for a good fit
with the circumstances described by Taruskin, for whom utopianism
not only is necessarily perfection-seeking, but has always resulted, and
will always result, in mass murder (see Taruskin, 2009, p. xii). For the
concerns of this present volume, such considerations – which hardly
exhaust the semantic tangles available to us here – signal a need for
precision when using a word as complex as ‘utopia’. However, they are
also symptomatic of an open-endedness at work in utopian studies that
has enabled such conflicting ideas to rub up against one another.
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 5

We suggest that the twentieth century was a century of utopianism

in at least three ways that are relevant to this volume. First, it witnessed
the production of some of the most famous of literary utopias and
dystopias, among them H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
(1974), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), and Brian
Aldiss’s White Mars (2000).4 Second, as already discussed, it involved a
significant and on-going re-theorization of utopianism as a category,
an effort leading to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
scholarly endeavours of such writers as Vincent Geoghegan, Fredric
Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Tom Moylan, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Darko
Suvin.5 Third, and far more problematically, the twentieth century
witnessed the rise of the so-called ‘blueprint’ utopias of such authoritar-
ians as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. The first
emphasis – the plurality of literary utopias that appeared throughout
the twentieth century – provides an important context in which to
reappraise a number of modernist writings and networks. The second –
the contemporary reformulation of utopianism as a concept – lets us
view modernist writers as ‘utopians’ in a more flattering light than
that term usually permits, as individuals self-reflexively probing the
natures of different communities, and the socio-political conditions
required for their transformation, in manners by turns challenging
and exquisite. The third – dictatorship – is a politics that the literary
figures explored throughout this volume questioned in complex ways,
but which also inspired them to elaborate different textual strategies in
response to particular political modes.
Accordingly, Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth
Century registers the connections between modernism and utopia in sev-
eral ways: it presents accounts of modernist and modernist-influenced
literatures, especially novels, which discuss twentieth-century utopian
ideas or projects; it shows how certain writers understood particular
literary and textual forms as in different ways freighted with utopian
possibilities; and it suggests that, long before the contemporary refor-
mulations of utopia began, various twentieth-century writers were
already thinking about utopianism as an intricately textured group of
tendencies. In particular the book sets itself against two claims which
have been detrimental to the field of utopian studies: first, the idea that
the signifier ‘utopia’ necessarily refers to something that is impossible;
and second, the assumption that utopianism inevitably means trying
to transcend human nature. John Gray makes both points when he
6 Introduction

writes that ‘[u]topian projects are by their nature unachievable’ (Gray,

2008, p. 24) and that utopian ‘adventures are products of a view of the
world, once found only in religious cults and revolutionary sects but for
a time firmly established in western governments, that believes political
action can bring about an alteration in the human condition’ (p. 29).
These criticisms often lead to two further claims: that utopianism is
irrelevant or that it lacks useful political content; and that utopianism’s
drive for transcendence unavoidably leads to intolerance and blood-
shed (as in Taruskin’s account). The essays in Utopianism, Modernism,
and Literature in the Twentieth Century resist the ahistorical nature of
these claims by showing how carefully twentieth-century experimental
writers thought u-topically; how resistant they could be to the absolut-
ism of certain kinds of political praxis; how precisely they advanced
their different proposals for bettering the modern world in relation
to specific historical contexts; and how imaginatively they incorporated
such proposals into literary form, gestures which often accompanied
self-problematizing and self-undermining systems of belief.
To reiterate, this book presents interpretations of an eclectic range
of writers: E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi
Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas
Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst
Bloch. As already implied, not all of these figures can be related to our
retrospective understandings of modernism in the same way. When
David Medalie notes that Forster is often taken as ‘an awkward straddler
of traditions’ (Medalie, 2002, p. 2), one whose modernist credentials
continue to be contested, he provides a description which could be
applied to any of the writers investigated in this book. Apart from Ford,
Forster, and Lewis, few of these figures regularly feature in accounts of
‘high’ modernism, and even the move of deeming Ford, Forster, and
Lewis high modernists is not always appropriate depending on which
segments of their outputs one has in mind (not to mention the question
of whether or not high modernism is a useful or fitting term here; see,
for example, Brooker, 2007). Likewise, apart from the important case
of Bloch, few of these writers feature in histories of twentieth-century
utopianism, even though they all have important things to say about
politics, social betterment, perfectibility, and idealism – topics with an
obvious relevance to utopian themes. Our purpose in soliciting essays
devoted to this cast of authors, then, has been to offer new accounts
of modernism using utopianism as a starting point (and vice versa). In
their different ways these writers participated in the initial development
of modernist techniques, produced canonical examples of modernist art,
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 7

or represent creative inheritors and champions of modernist stratagems

(or a combination of the three). Some played key parts in the cultural
and social networks through which different modernisms were facili-
tated, or offered outside viewpoints on modernism as a cultural activity.
Others invested in, or continue to promote, literary styles often deemed
modernist, even if we would not simplistically call all of these writers
modernists per se or modernists in the same respect. Ultimately, this
book explores the reactions to utopian ideas in a constellation of liter-
ary figures that provides us with new ways of grasping the link between
modernism and utopianism, an under-studied – though extremely
important – literary and socio-political confluence.
Utopianism, as we have stressed, should not be defined simply.
Indeed, in compiling this volume we have kept in mind the broad
remit of contemporary utopian studies and have not imposed a single
or restrictive definition of utopianism on our contributors. All we
requested of them upon commissioning their chapters is that they
be explicit about which meaning of the term they have in mind, how
they are using it, and why. Consequently, a variety of utopianisms are
presented in the chapters that follow, ranging from a ‘desire for the
world to come’ that takes complicated shape in Ford Madox Ford’s novel
The Good Soldier (1915), as explored by Scott W. Klein, to the originary
account of the utopianism-as-impulse model provided by Bloch, whose
literary criticism Caroline Edwards discusses in the volume’s closing
chapter. Other chapters consider the utopian contexts of E. M. Forster’s
short stories, Zamyatin’s We, and Katharine Burdekin’s inter-war
satires. Not all of the texts discussed here are formally ‘experimental’
in the ways customarily expected of modernist literature, but all of the
authors of these texts are related to modernism as a literary-historical
convergence by way of diverse social, cultural, political, and economic
discourses. The figures discussed in this volume provocatively engaged
with utopian sentiments, in either their fictional or their non-fictional
writings, and many of them expressed fine-grained, and usually self-
problematizing, accounts of how the artistic and social groupings
in which they lived and worked might be bettered. A mixture of
familiar and unfamiliar writers gives a broader picture of how the
experimental literary trajectories of the twentieth century evolved over
time, but it also enables meta-critical reflections on the varied ways
in which ‘modernism’ has been, and continues to be, formulated and
(re)canonized.
Indeed, given the ever-expanding nature of the field of modern-
ist studies, we hope that this volume might contribute to a better
8 Introduction

understanding of how utopianism and modernism overlap; to a

renewed consideration of how that intersection develops through the
different moments of a ‘long’ modernism running from the Edwardian
period to the later twentieth century; and to reflection on the putative
horizons of modernist writing and the alternative literary cultures from
which it can be differentiated. So, while this volume does not include
discussions of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, or Virginia Woolf,
for instance, comparably canonical modernist writers like Ford and
Lewis are represented. Forster has a part to play here, too, inasmuch
as his, Ford’s, and Lewis’s oeuvres give us insights into ‘the pace and
enthusiasm with which different authors altered their [literary] strate-
gies in response to the challenges of modernity experienced early in
the twentieth century’ (Stevenson, 2007, p. 209). Contexts beyond the
Anglo-American sphere are registered through Zamyatin and Bloch,
while the significance of the ‘intermodernist’ category marshalled
by Kristin Bluemel is maintained through Bowen, Burdekin, and
Mitchison. As Nick Hubble states in his chapter, this category allows a
restructuring of canonical literary hierarchies, with the effect of bring-
ing new relations between modernist and ‘non-modernist’ writers
into focus.6 A similarly complicated treatment of the modernism/
non-modernism boundary is provided by Glyn Salton-Cox’s chapter on
Rex Warner. Finally, David James conveys the development of modern-
ism beyond its supposed end-moment of 1945 (among other posited
limits) by attending to Baldwin and to Morrison, both of whom James
interprets as thematically and formally extending the modernist novel’s
spatio-temporal and urban interventions.7
All of the volume’s contributors discuss their focal authors in relation
to the literary and non-literary materials that they produced, and often
with regard to the socio-political and cultural backgrounds against
which those materials can be placed. Certain chapters – Edwards’s
and Waddell’s, for instance – take a broader view of ‘the literary’ than
others. Whereas the majority of our contributors consider short stories,
novels, and a smattering of poetry, Edwards and Waddell focus on
the writings about literature to which such figures as Bloch and Lewis
devoted so much time. Lewis elaborated a theory of satire that has often
been understood as simplistically ‘caustic’, with his epic satirical novel
The Apes of God (1930) frequently being viewed as his most caustic
fiction of all. However, Waddell adopts a different strategy here, using
the context of ‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetoric to read Lewis’s inter-war writ-
ings about satire as forming a utopian project in part designed to help
prevent future conflicts. Edwards approaches Bloch’s literary criticism
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 9

from a related point of view, reading his accounts of a wide range of

literary works as complex interpretations of the transformative potential
contained within diverse textual forms, and viewing his literary-critical
activities as part of a much grander project that sought ‘to discern
the utopian surplus and potential in high and low culture and relate
it to the struggles and possibilities of the present’ (Zipes, 1997, p. 6).
Whereas this volume as a whole adopts a generous perspective on
the potential links between literary production and utopian thought,
Edwards’s and Waddell’s chapters use a more restricted model of such
links to demonstrate how certain writers saw literary forms themselves
as having specific utopian functions.
In the hands of E. M. Forster, the form of the short story was par-
ticularly suited to conveying a melancholic sense of modernity’s
depredations. Writing about Edy Legrand’s Macao et Cosmage (1919),
Forster maintained that in ‘the heart of each man there is contrived’ a
‘magical island’ placed in ‘the past or the future for safety’, and which
is called ‘a memory or a vision to lend it solidity’ even though ‘it is the
outcome of our sadness, and of our disgust with the world that we have
made’ (Forster, 1920, p. 48). Forster’s concerns about the ‘made’ modern
world encompassed a number of anxieties, one of the most important
being the rationalization diagnosed by, among others, Weberian sociol-
ogy (an anxiety also discussed in Nina Engelhardt’s chapter, below).
In the opening chapter of this volume, ‘The Point of It’, Douglas Mao
is concerned less with disdain for the rationalized society as such,
however, than with Forster’s early reservations about the ideal society
envisioned by meliorist liberalism. His short stories ‘The Machine Stops’
(1909) and ‘The Point of It’ (1911) express these reservations by imag-
ining worlds in which intimacy, bodily delight, heroic possibility, and
intensity of experience are eschewed in the name of social stability and
personal safety. The Forster who comes into view here is resistant to the
liberal paradise that he has so often been taken to promote uncritically,
and dubious about some of the institutions and practices that would
help that ideal realm come into being.
This complex Forsterian manoeuvre can be usefully contrasted, Mao
argues, with a strain of modernist writing (including Woolf, Joyce,
Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams) that celebrates quotid-
ian experience rooted in some degree of material and psychological
comfort. The ‘anti-anti-utopianism’ of this latter approach, which
contrasts with the anti-utopianism of the Forster stories, insists that
(in Mao’s words) ‘there is something faulty in the assumption that
mediocrity will be the fate of existences transpiring under conditions
10 Introduction

of security and provision’. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915)
provides a rather different sense of the consequences of social security
and provision, which, in a famous passage from the text, are under-
stood as the superficial exterior forms of an inner psycho-social ‘prison
full of screaming hysterics’ (Ford, 1915c, p. 37). Scott W. Klein’s reading
of this text, in ‘A Likely Impossibility: The Good Soldier, the Modernist
Novel, and Quasi-Familial Transcendence’, shows that this tension is
further complicated by Ford’s rendering of familial relationships as
non-familial linkages, and vice versa. As Klein demonstrates, The Good
Soldier repeatedly undermines the idea of a perfected social edifice by
foregrounding the human irrationalities upon which it would neces-
sarily have to be built. By reading this narrative in relation to Ford’s
earlier, co-written novel The Inheritors (1901), Klein discloses how in
‘both novels passion and individuality bring tragedy, while suppression
and conformity create at least the possibility of a future collectivity’,
a typically Fordian predicament for which easy solutions are not
provided. In other words, The Good Soldier emerges from Klein’s account
as a representative instance of Ford’s ambition to use impressionism as
a way of grasping the complexities of modern life without giving rec-
ommendations as to how that life ought to be changed. Such a gesture
was itself made in the hope that impressionism might establish the
grounds upon which realistic socio-political agendas ought to proceed
(see Waddell, 2012, pp. 156–60).
The idea that certain kinds of writing might not merely discuss
utopian ideas but themselves act as utopian ‘conduits’ appears
throughout modernist literary cultures. Wyndham Lewis was one of
Ford’s contemporaries who endorsed this view, not only by writing
fictions which might help a sufficiently self-aware reading public
negotiate modernity’s pitfalls, but also by discussing the utopian
implications of different literary forms. Nathan Waddell in his chapter,
‘Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the “Postwar-to-
end-war World”’, investigates this aspect of Lewis’s output in relation
to his inter-war reflections on satire, and links it to the context of the
‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetorics which flourished between the two World
Wars. Lewis distrusted such rhetorics throughout his career, and Waddell
suggests that we can more accurately gauge Lewis’s literary development
by considering how his anti-war-to-end-war sentiments informed his
satirical aesthetics. Anne Quéma has argued that in Lewis’s oeuvre there
is a complex antagonism between his fiction and non-fiction, the
former being the repository of Lewisian dystopianism and the latter
‘the locus of Lewisian utopia’ (Quéma, 1999, p. 51). Waddell’s chapter
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 11

develops this argument by showing that one way of seeing this ‘utopia’
is as a self-problematizing literary discourse in which social betterment
is encouraged and dismissed. Lewis’s attitude towards satire changed
during the inter-war period as he became increasingly preoccupied with
international politics. Whereas in the 1920s and early 1930s he tended
to prioritize the non-moral potential of satire as a creative form, by the
late 1930s he had started talking about satire as a more straightforwardly
didactic endeavour. However, Lewis insisted throughout this period
that while satire might be used to encourage individuals to abandon
problematic modes of thought – war-to-end-wars thinking included –
the satirist nonetheless has to accept that his or her ability to affect an
audience is never guaranteed.
One of Lewis’s interlocutors in thinking about the possibility of a
‘war to end war’ was Naomi Mitchison, with whom he collaborated on
Beyond This Limit (1935), a story-book written by Mitchison and illus-
trated by Lewis. Apart from his many other achievements, Lewis’s most
aesthetically transgressive and innovative prose work, The Childermass
(1928), represents a highly idiosyncratic contribution to the tradition
of science fiction. In this respect, as well as others, Lewis can be aligned
with Mitchison, who was, as Nick Hubble shows in this volume in
‘Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia’, one of the twen-
tieth century’s most interesting science-fiction writers. Mitchison was
also a figure whose work blurs established boundaries between ‘mod-
ernist’ and ‘non-modernist’ styles. The concept of ‘intermodernism’
enables Hubble (in response to Fredric Jameson) to portray Mitchison
as a writer probing the utopian dialectic of identity and difference,
and whose interventions accentuate, and encourage us to question,
the canon-forming mechanisms through which literary modernism
has been privileged in certain literary histories. Two of Hubble’s claims
here are that Mitchison’s work – as represented by such fictions as The
Conquered (1923) and Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), among several
others – complicates established, hierarchical models of literary value by
working through wide-ranging ontological questions in the search for a
better society (a society that was in certain respects achieved in post-war
Britain with the emergence of the Welfare State in the late 1940s); and
that her output as a whole is animated by a complex utopian dynamic
which has key implications for our understanding of twentieth-century
modernity.
Mitchison was one of several writers in this period to have encoded
a questioning of sexual, and particularly lesbian, identities into her
fiction. Although The Conquered, for instance, is a historical novel
12 Introduction

concerned with a young man’s growing understanding of the dynamic

between imperial conquerors and oppressed natives, the novel has
been read as providing an encrypted account of gender equality and
lesbian sexuality (see, for instance, Collecott, 1999, p. 241). Katharine
Burdekin, as Elizabeth English demonstrates in her chapter in this
volume, ‘Lesbian Modernism and Utopia: Sexology and the Invert in
Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction’, was similarly committed to the explora-
tion of lesbian identities in encoded form, an exploration inseparable
from an allegiance to lesbianism as a channel for socio-political progress.
Burdekin’s utopian fictions of the 1930s, as English demonstrates, resist
the extremes of fascism, but they also articulate a complex inheritance
from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexology that informs
Burdekin’s assessments of the utopian potential of sexual difference.
As English argues, Burdekin’s decision to locate her accounts of these
issues in literary forms shaded by the fantastic and the futurological
should be read not as a turning away from contemporary issues, but as
symptomatic of a belief in a certain kind of form – the literary utopia –
as the most appropriate vehicle with which to communicate avant-
garde sexual ideas. Burdekin is thus one voice of a lesbian modernism
that turns to the anti-realist mode of utopian speculation to present
radical re-conceptualizations of heteronormativity and ‘othered’ sexual
identities.
In moving from Forster to Burdekin through Ford, Lewis, and
Mitchison we have in some ways come quite far from traditional under-
standings of modernist literature, especially those accounts which limit
the term’s applicability to such texts as Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922),
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Attention to these
works alone, however, gives a restricted sense of how interconnected the
modernists were with writers from other literary traditions, and of how
twentieth-century writers could occasionally adopt modernist styles in
particular areas of their creative output without permanently subscrib-
ing to modernist techniques. At a more complex level, prioritizing the
canonical figures of ‘high’ modernism makes it hard to appreciate that
certain kinds of literary styles deemed ‘modernist’ are not the exclusive
property of modernist writers. Juxtaposition, ambiguity, fragmentation,
and generic superposition, for instance, are all literary phenomena to
be found in 1930s ‘political’ (and especially leftist) fiction, despite the
fact that much of that fiction would not ordinarily qualify as literary
modernism. Rex Warner is one such writer from this period who for a
time produced literature shaped by formally experimental techniques,
but who is arguably best not taken as a modernist. This is because, as
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 13

N. H. Reeve explains, Warner belonged to a generation of writers ‘intent

on a radical and often histrionic break with such modernist trends as
they associated with the sterility and frustration of their world’ (Reeve,
1989, p. 26). Although there has been a tendency to see such figures as
Burdekin and Warner as part of a ‘second-wave’ or ‘late’ modernism (in
which 1920s modernist practices were displaced or supplemented by
different kinds of narrative experiment), it has become clear that more
nuanced means of describing their stylistic innovations, which cannot
be separated from their utopian commitments, are required.8
Glyn Salton-Cox answers this need in his chapter in this volume,
‘Syncretic Utopia, Transnational Provincialism: Rex Warner’s The Wild
Goose Chase’, in which he reads Warner’s 1937 novel in the context
of 1930s re-imaginings of national tradition. Warner’s relevance here
lies in his contribution to what Salton-Cox terms ‘a circuit of cultural
production transmitted by transnational exchange which promoted
an internationalism constituted by a parochial conception of national
tradition’. Although there has been a tendency, even among politically
committed literary critics, to construe 1930s leftist fiction as provincial
and insubstantial, Salton-Cox insists on the need to view such writ-
ers as Warner as engaging with wide-ranging questions of European
identity through what might be misperceived as, on the one hand,
superficially ‘insular’ literary and ideological forms, and, on the other,
a naïve conception of cosmopolitan internationalism. In Warner’s work
we can trace a utopian imaginary emerging through a negotiation
between investments in the radical potential of both English popular
tradition and Soviet revolution, an imaginary constructed against the
emerging horrors of European fascism. Hence Salton-Cox’s claim that
Warner’s text is at once generically cosmopolitan and ideologically
provincial, and because of this, in Salton-Cox’s words, ‘the paradig-
matic novel of thirties utopianism, in which the popular spirit of the
English radical tradition, energized by Bolshevik revolutionary élan,
overthrows the dystopian forces of British imperialism and central
European fascism’. Reading Warner in response to various dynamics –
among them socialist realism, Expressionist allegory, and other inter-
national leftist cultures – Salton-Cox positions The Wild Goose Chase
as a representative instance of a formally complex narrative to whose
generic inosculations canonical Anglo-American modernism stands as
a suggestive counterpoint.
Warner’s support of the Soviet Union and his ties with socialist
realism make for an interesting comparison with the oeuvre of Yevgeny
Zamyatin, a Soviet dissident whose most famous work, We (which
14 Introduction

was completed in 1921), is not only a landmark of European utopian

fiction but also a representative instance of an impersonal modernist
style. Its modernism – a strange hybrid of sparse, crystalline realism and
symbolist irony – is in certain respects compatible with the narrative
anarchy present in the work of another great twentieth-century utopian
writer, Thomas Pynchon, whose work Nina Engelhardt brings into
dialogue with Zamyatin’s in her chapter in this volume, ‘The Role of
Mathematics in Modernist Utopia: Imaginary Numbers in Zamyatin’s
We and Pynchon’s Against the Day’. For Engelhardt, imaginary numbers
have an important part to play in these texts insofar as they point to
a profoundly symbolic irrational domain. This domain’s relevance to
utopian ideals lies in its foregrounding of the mathematical realm as
simultaneously normative and destabilizing. To quote Engelhardt: ‘in
both novels the central role of imaginary numbers suggests a conver-
gence of modernist mathematics, literature, and utopia in ideas about
the freedoms implied by imaginary forms of existence’. In this chapter,
Zamyatin and Pynchon are explored through the history of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century mathematics, primarily to demonstrate that their
peculiarly modernist and post-modernist representations of imaginary
numbers enable formally experimental accounts of utopian change in
eras of political and technological rationalization.
‘Anarchist’ literary form is an especially important issue here. As
Engelhardt explains, Pynchon’s work ‘illustrates the transfer of anar-
chism […] from politics to other domains – particularly to mathematics’,
and in doing so mirrors transfer at the level of content with transfer at
the level of narrative structure. Shawna Ross, in her chapter ‘The Two
Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen: Utopian Leisure in the Age of Mechanized
Hospitality’, is similarly concerned with anarchist aesthetics, introduc-
ing and underpinning her account of Bowen’s work not only with
Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone but also
with a sense of the anarchistic potential of the hotel to challenge and
reformulate dominant capitalist formations. For Ross, Bowen’s novel
The Hotel (1927) and her non-fiction work The Shelbourne Hotel (1951)
provide insights into the workings of such spaces. However, they do so
by emphasizing hotel leisure spaces as stages upon which characters
can performatively create new interpersonal relationships and national
identities. Ross thus engages with the critical context of utopian spatial
theory, and argues that while hotels are determined by the economic
forces by which the individual self is often tyrannized, such spaces
can provide utopian ‘springboards’ from which to launch meaningful
re-conceptualizations of the self. Scrutinizing Bowen’s self-reflexive
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 15

investigations of her placement in the different histories of the Irish

nation, Ross presents a suggestively modernist Bowen who foregrounds
the utopian potential embodied in the small, local, and temporary.
Ross’s chapter thus links back to Mao’s but also sits perfectly
alongside David James’s, who in ‘“Seeing beneath the formlessness”:
James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism’ presents an
account of modernist continuities and utopian spatial visions in the
work of two writers, Baldwin and Morrison, who are linked through
their shared responsiveness to the ideological and ontological poten-
tial of lived, ordinary spaces. Moreover, Baldwin and Morrison are
both peculiarly sensitive to the link between urban representation
and literary form. James presents this conjunction as extending the
modernist novel’s preoccupation with subjective apprehensions of
everyday spatio-temporal perceptions. Like Engelhardt, James takes a
comparative approach to this topic, with Morrison’s work functioning
not merely as a later example of an earlier, Baldwinian style, but as a
creative extension and development of that style which indicates the
persistence and vitality of modernist aesthetics in the later twentieth
century. An important aspect of James’s discussion concerns the idea of
viewing things ‘as they are’ so that more realistic (or, in a Blochian sense,
‘concrete’) appraisals of how such things might be can proceed, an effort
which indicates, among other things, a Fordian resonance within such
work that problematizes any definite sense of a 1940s ‘end-point’ for
modernist innovation. In Baldwin’s and Morrison’s cases, as James
explains, it is ‘what the city’s existing condition, its coexisting damage
and potentiality, promises to inspire’, rather than what the individual
would rather the city be in some idealized alternative fantasy world,
‘that propels these writers’ experimental representations of space’.
Taking Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) and Morrison’s Jazz (1992)
as his focal texts, James offers a reading of mid- and late twentieth-
century narrative accounts of utopian urban possibilities framed by
the work of the Marxist geographer David Harvey, whose output dis-
closes an indebtedness to Bloch shared by all of the contributors to
this volume.
In response to this debt, Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in
the Twentieth Century closes with Caroline Edwards’s reading of Bloch,
and in particular his frequently overlooked writings about literature.
In ‘Uncovering the “gold-bearing rubble”: Ernst Bloch’s Literary
Criticism’ Edwards traces a line through the recent globalization of
modernist studies, and via the German Mittelstand’s (middle-class or
bourgeois) responses to the Weimar Republic’s political liberalism
16 Introduction

and cosmopolitan culture. Against this backdrop, Edwards introduces

Blochian Ungleichzeitigkeit (non-contemporaneity) – in one critic’s view,
the ‘surplus of meaning that can be released in the critical analyses
of ideologies that have lost their appeal’ (Terreblanche, 2010, p. 63) –
as an idea which underpins different parts of his philosophical and
literary-critical writing. Edwards’s claims in this chapter are twofold.
First, she proposes that considering Bloch in relation to modernist aes-
thetic practices allows us to grasp his philosophical achievements more
fully. Second, she argues that Bloch’s work, especially his concept of
utopian temporality, needs to play a central role in any ‘comparative
and/or post-colonial reading’ of modernist literary cultures, especially
those concerned with ‘the uneven, contradictory, and even reaction-
ary formal and political articulations that effloresced during the first
decades of the twentieth century’. Thus, Edwards offers an account of
Bloch’s work which in numerous respects functions as an overview of
some of the motivating ideas behind this volume as a whole. Edwards
also engages seriously with a writer for whom an appraisal of aesthetics
was necessary for elaborating a processual, anti-totalitarian model of
utopian change. As Edwards notes, literary texts can thus be identified
as ‘shaping powerfully utopian interventions into a social reality which
Bloch insisted is fundamentally unfinished and therefore capable of
being recalibrated in a more egalitarian fashion’.
Not all modernist writers were committed to the utopian refashion-
ing of society envisaged by Bloch, and some of the figures considered
in this volume were at different times drawn to politics that he would
have deemed intolerable. A writer like Lewis, for example, needs to be
viewed in very different ideological contexts to a writer like Morrison.
Not all modernist writers, moreover, can be deemed ‘utopian’ in the
same way when it is accepted that utopianism is over-determined.
Different modernist and quasi-modernist writers can and should be
described as utopian figures, but in order to categorize them in this
way our sense of what utopianism represents must be mutable. As
Peter Wagstaff notes, ‘[u]topianism is bewilderingly protean, both
in the forms it takes and the implications to which it gives rise’
(Wagstaff, 1996, p. [50]). This changeability means that a plurality of
approaches of the kind advanced here will help account for a plural-
ity of modernist utopianisms, even as ‘modernism’ as a category is
probed and questioned as this volume unfolds. The end result, in
our view, is a thought-provoking collection of essays which ought
to prompt consideration on how utopian ideas took shape in differ-
ent manners across the twentieth century, while at the same time
 Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell 17

encouraging further debate about the contours of modernism as a

literary-historical grouping.
This volume, then, is meant as a serious, but subjective, intervention
into the growing field of modernist and utopian studies. The plural-
ity of writers, texts, and styles presented in Utopianism, Modernism,
and Literature in the Twentieth Century is inseparable from the volume’s
central contention – namely, that the link between utopianism,
modernism, and literature in the twentieth century is a multi-sided
convergence which demands an equally protean critical engagement.
Russell Jacoby has pointed out that ‘utopians or their sympathisers’ tend
to be judged ‘as fool-hardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians
at worst’ ( Jacoby, 2005, p. [ix]). Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in
the Twentieth Century opposes such assessments by presenting a cluster
of discussions of twentieth-century writers for whom the convergence
of literature and utopian desire resulted in grounded, carefully judged
visions of socio-political betterment which resist the excesses of mur-
derous ideologies. If, as Leonidas Donskis argues, utopianism refers to
a ‘locus at which the various ideas and values of a culture are tested,
and where their consequences or implications are considered’ (Donskis,
2000, p. 2), then the writers discussed in this book ought to be seen
as figures keen to test the determining assumptions of the communi-
ties to which they belonged, and as willing to reflect, often extremely
critically, on the consequences of those assumptions and on the alter-
native visions with which they might be supplanted. Steeled by their
knowledge of the possibilities of aesthetic production, they resisted the
temptations of the ‘one perfect view’ in favour of the subjective and
self-reflexive perceptions which made their utopianisms always careful,
edifying, and provocative.

Notes
1. For some recent studies of the modernism–utopianism link see Bronner
(2012), Brown (2005), Gregory and Kohlmann (2011), Surette (2011), and
Waddell (2012).
2. See, as well as Bloch’s work, Hudson (1982).
3. The varying capitalizations of the terms ‘utopia’, ‘utopian’, and ‘utopianism’
also indicate a movement between accounts of utopianism that appear to
have in mind the imaginary nation-state presented in More’s Utopia, on the
one hand, and those that deploy the term more liberally, on the other. This
equivocation is long standing. Darko Suvin notes that he uses ‘“Utopia” with
capital U only for Thomas More’s State and title, and “utopia” with lower-
case u for all other references’. He also adds that he ‘would dearly wish to
see this basic semantic hygiene followed more widely’ (Suvin, 1973, [p. 17]).
18 Introduction

In Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century, the terms

‘utopia’, ‘utopian’, and ‘utopianism’ appear with a lower-case ‘u’ except
where upper-case spellings appear in quotations.
4. By ‘dystopia’ we mean in the first instance, considering the way the term
is generally deployed in utopian scholarship, a literary text describing a
(usually future) society in which nightmarish conditions prevail. The nuances
of literary dystopias are explored in more detail in the essays in the rest of
this volume.
5. See especially Geoghegan (1987), Jameson (2005), Levitas (2011), Moylan
(1986; 2000), Sargent (2000), and Suvin (2010).
6. See also Bluemel (2004; and 2009).
7. For more on modernist inheritances in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-
century writing, see James (2008; 2011; and 2012).
8. See Salton-Cox (forthcoming).
1
The Point of It
Douglas Mao

This chapter is centrally concerned with two stories by E. M. Forster.

One, ‘The Machine Stops’, has long been considered a classic of dysto-
pian fiction. For George Kateb in Utopia and Its Enemies (1963), Forster’s
story, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We (1924) taken together give vent to ‘almost every fear that utopian
ends arouse’ (Kateb, 1963, p. 20); Tom Moylan draws the title of his
2000 study of dystopias, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, from the last phrase
of Forster’s tale. ‘The Point of It’, published two years later, has not
been discussed in relation to problems of utopia, but I will be arguing
here that it offers key insights into the suite of values animating ‘The
Machine Stops’ and, by extension, a number of anxieties informing an
important strain of anti-utopian thinking. I will go on to suggest that
another line of modernist writing furnishes an effective riposte to such
anxieties, and that this riposte requires us to reconsider some prevail-
ing assumptions about the relations between quotidian existence under
capitalism and utopian imagining.
First published in 1909 and subsequently included in Forster’s second
collection of short fiction, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928),
‘The Machine Stops’ centres on a woman named Vashti, who, like the
other inhabitants of the future Forster conjures, lives in a single room
in a vast honeycomb beneath the surface of the earth. Like her fellows,
Vashti rarely leaves that room, since within it all needs are met at the
touch of a button. An encompassing entity known as ‘the Machine’
provides food, drink, light, ventilation, and entertainment; a button
somehow ‘produce[s] literature’ (Forster, 1909, p. 94); one may hear
whatever music one desires at any time; and there is no need to go
visiting other people physically, since one’s thousands of friends com-
municate with one through ‘speaking-tubes’ (p. 94) and ‘blue optic
19
20 The Point of It

plate[s]’ (p. 116). One can even listen to a friend give a lecture, which
appears a common pastime. Indeed lectures about art – such as Vashti’s
own lecture on ‘Music during the Australian period’ (p. 91) – are often
preferred to the thing itself. Near the beginning of the story, Vashti
turns off the ‘isolation-switch’ that had briefly blocked most inputs to
her room, at which

all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The
room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What
was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any
ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an
engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? – say this
day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation – a growing
quality in that accelerated age. (p. 94)

No other work of fiction anticipates quite so uncannily the ceaseless

visitation by others, through networks extending into one’s domestic
space, that defines existence in the age of e-mail, Facebook, Twitter,
and Skype.
The first crisis of the tale is brought on by the conversation Vashti
had isolated herself in order to hold, an exchange with her son Kuno
via optic plate. Kuno, we learn, had been a little odd even in the days
of his infancy at the public nurseries (a venue at which, as the preced-
ing quotation suggests, people do sometimes meet – though it seems
unlikely that this happens often, since Vashti has not seen a ‘fellow
creature […] face to face for months’ [p. 98] or entered the tunnel that
leads from her room to a public conveyance ‘since her last child was
born’ [p. 97]). Whatever the rationale for the public nurseries, lasting
parental-filial bonding is not encouraged: ‘the book of the Machine’,
the single printed object in Vashti’s room, states that parents’ duties
‘cease at the moment of birth’, and, though Vashti fondly remembers
teaching Kuno the basic life skill of using ‘stops and buttons’ (p. 108),
the Machine at some point ‘assigned him a room on the other side
of the earth’, under what had once been England (p. 97). Vashti’s room
is beneath Sumatra.
In the initial conversation, Kuno tells Vashti that he wishes to walk
upon the surface of the earth, which Vashti finds shocking and ‘con-
trary to the spirit of the age’ (p. 94), and that he wants her to visit him
in person. Vashti resists this request for some days and through several
exchanges, but eventually – for ‘she must brave the journey if he desired
 Douglas Mao 21

it’ (p. 97) – she undertakes the two-day trip to the other side of the
world by airship. On her arrival, Kuno tells her that he walked on the
surface even without receiving an ‘Egression-permit’ (p. 104), having
found a way out through a railway tunnel, and that he saw ‘the hills
of Wessex as Aelfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes’ (p. 110)
before the Machine dragged him back to the world below. Dismayed
by this account, Vashti warns Kuno that his fate will be ‘Homelessness’
(p. 112) or expulsion to the surface, which means death, because the
‘surface of the earth supports life no longer’ (p. 113). Kuno retorts that
he saw a woman living above ground, which Vashti thinks mad. She
returns by airship to her own distant room.
There is another act to this drama. Some years later, the Machine goes
into decline. Services are provided less and less reliably; the Mending
Apparatus proves unable to mend itself; complaints to the Central
Committee of the Machine go unanswered; and when at last the
Machine succumbs to ‘disintegration […] accompanied by horrible
cracks and rumbling’ (p. 121), people run screaming from their rooms,
to die either by electrocution on the live rails of the transportation sys-
tem or from such catastrophes as the crash of an airship through the
subterranean galleries. Vashti and Kuno meet their ends in the latter
fashion, but before they do, they enjoy a reunion. Instead of being
exiled to the surface, Kuno had shortly before been relocated ‘to a room
not far from her own’ (p. 117), so that he is able to find his mother
in the chaos. And in the last moments of their lives, they touch, their
contact accompanied by an epiphany:

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could
not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed
their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important
on the earth. Man, […] the noblest of all creatures visible, […] was
dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after
century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment
had seemed heavenly at first, […] [a]nd heavenly it had been so
long as […] man could shed it at will and live by the essence that
is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin
against the body – it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries
of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five por-
tals by which we can alone apprehend – glozing it over with talk
of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as
colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.
(pp. 122–3)
22 The Point of It

The sadness of the ending is mitigated not only by the contact between
parent and child but also by Kuno’s revelation that he has ‘seen’, ‘spoken
to’, and ‘loved’ (p. 123) people hiding among the mist and ferns until the
civilization of the Machine should end. To Vashti’s bitter prediction
that ‘some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow’, Kuno responds
confidently: ‘Never […]. Humanity has learnt its lesson’ (p. 123).
‘The Machine Stops’ thus delineates quite plainly a number of the
‘fear[s] that utopian ends arouse’. One is that, by giving itself over to
the care of machines, humanity diminishes rather than enhances its
chances of survival, since machines break down. Other fears pertain
to the moral and experiential deprivations humanity would suffer not
under the collapse of a regime like the Machine’s but under its per-
sistence, among which losses of intimacy and of corporeal joy figure
especially prominently. In Vashti’s world, one may have thousands of
friends (Facebook avant la lettre, again), but relationships between peo-
ple seem to lack the intensity and immediacy that pertain between the
individual and the Machine. Prior to the denouement, we witness only
one expression of exuberant feeling on her part – when, ‘half ashamed,
half joyful’, she murmurs ‘O Machine! O Machine!’ and kisses the book
of the Machine in a ‘delirium of acquiescence’ (pp. 95–6). Meanwhile,
the pleasures of bodily exercise are eradicated. Freed from physical toil,
the denizens of this future assume that progress tends towards absolute
liberation from the body, thereby losing both a source of pleasure and
an irreplaceable dimension of human experience.
The loss of intimacy and the loss of bodily delight can in turn be
understood as aspects of a more general modern tendency that Forster
finds worrisome, a rage for mediation crystallizing most prominently in
Vashti and her friends’ explicit mistrust of the firsthand. In the world of
the Machine, the only things that matter, at least to advanced thinkers
such as Vashti, are ideas; any moments deemed unproductive of ideas
(views of the Himalayas, the Caucasus, and Greece from the airship, for
example) are dismissed as a waste of time, and even ideas can appear
threatening if insufficiently removed from immediate experience. One
of the most admired lecturers in the world of the Machine is applauded
warmly when he advises: ‘Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possi-
ble tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing
element – direct observation’ (p. 114). This counsel accords perfectly
with the ‘terrors of direct experience’ (p. 97) that afflict Vashti more
than once during her airship journey.
Forster’s other fictions of the period are scarcely less earnest in decry-
ing attenuations of intimacy and bodily enjoyment, and like ‘The
 Douglas Mao 23

Machine Stops’ they associate these impoverishments with the drift

towards mediation that attains an extreme in Vashti’s world. Most
contain at least one character whose failure to connect with others
or discomfort with the body is coupled with a mistrust of spontaneity or
an unhappy relationship to the natural world, from the uptight narrator
and the pretentious artist Leyland in ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1904), to
the witty but horrible Mrs Failing of The Longest Journey (1907), to the
hay-fever-prone Wilcoxes of Howards End (1910). These negative models
are then contrasted with more vital and sympathetic figures such as
Gennaro and Eustace, touched by the madness of Pan in ‘The Story of a
Panic’, the outdoors-loving Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey,
and the Schlegel sisters, who by the close of Howards End have chosen
an old house and a meadow in Hertfordshire over the round of discus-
sion groups and play-going that had absorbed them in London.
The fiction in which Forster most emphatically asserts the importance
of intimacy and of relish of the body, however, is surely ‘The Point of It’,
first published in 1911, or two years after ‘The Machine Stops’. Forster
seems to have recognized an affinity between the tales, placing them
next to each other in The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, and indeed
the two have many elements in common, from such local details as
the deployment of Orion as a figure for heroic aspiration (about which
more below), to a governing concern with what matters in life. Where
‘The Machine Stops’ delivers its judgement on the latter question by
depicting a massively organized future society that deadens the soul,
however, ‘The Point of It’ presents, first, a poorly lived life in this world
and, second, a glimpse of an ideal mode of existence perhaps available
only in heaven.
The beginning of ‘The Point of It’ finds two youths, Micky and
Harold, in a boat in a channel. The latter is rowing in order to recover
his strength after an illness; swept up in the euphoria of physical exer-
tion and the prospect of helping his friend recover, Micky urges Harold
to row ever harder – until Harold collapses. Horrified, Micky stammers,
‘you oughtn’t to – I oughtn’t to have let you. I – I don’t see the point of
it,’ to which Harold, with his last breath, replies, ‘Don’t you? […] Well,
you will some day’ (Forster, 1911, p. 126). Twenty-two at the time of
the incident (and told by the doctor in the case that he considers Micky
responsible), Micky ‘expect[s] never to be happy again’ (p. 126). But he
does recover in time and goes on to lead a life of notably liberal virtue,
working hard in the British Museum and raising three children with
his wife, Janet, whose sternness of personality complements his own
mildness. We learn that where ‘Micky believed in love, Janet believed
24 The Point of It

in truth’ (p. 127), and indeed ‘toleration and sympathy’ increasingly

become the ‘cardinal points of his nature’: in good liberal fashion, he
allows that others’ faults are beyond their own choosing and grows
‘sweeter every day’ (p. 128). In middle age, he publishes some successful,
if not artistically distinguished, ruminations on the virtues of wisdom
acquired over a long life (‘Experience, he taught, is the only human-
izer’ [p. 129]); reaching his fifties, he gives ‘up all outdoor sports’ and
grows opposed to ‘late hours, violent exercise’, and ‘muddling about
in open boats’ (p. 129). Janet dies when Micky is 60, but he lives more
than a decade longer, until a freak accident sends him to the hospital –
where, overhearing conversations in which his son Adam derides him
as ‘played out […] for the last thirty years’ (p. 132) and in which Adam’s
son then describes Adam as ‘pretty well played out’ (p. 133), he absorbs
at last the truth that youth will never respect the wisdom of age. He
dies soon after, but the story does not end there.
After death, Micky finds himself buried in the sands of a Dantean
hell, where he soon recognizes that his situation is eternity’s verdict
on the mildness that had characterized his life. In the desert plain ‘lay
the sentimentalists, the conciliators, the peace-makers, the humanists’,
while Janet suffers the torments of the ‘mountains of stone’ hard by:
‘with his wife were the reformers and ascetics and all sword-like souls. […]
Micky now saw what the bustle of life conceals: that the years are bound
either to liquefy a man or to stiffen him, and that Love and Truth hold
each the seeds of our decay’ (p. 136). The story does not end even here,
however. Sometime after, what seems to be the voice of Youth itself
cleaves the darkness, bidding come to it ‘all who remember. Come
out of your eternity into mine. […] [H]e who desires me is I’ (p. 139).
Micky does desire, and after a second death finds himself able to walk
to the infernal stream dividing those who grew old from those who died
young. He stumbles into a boat, and though he cannot see who is at the
oars, he hears a voice saying ‘The point of it’ and beholds, at the end of
the story as he had at the beginning, the windows of a farmhouse on the
farther bank, catching the light of the setting sun. Micky’s accession to
some version of the crucial moment preceding Harold’s death is thus
also a return to embodiment, albeit on the terms of the afterlife. Clearly
answering the narrator’s earlier assertion that ‘[n]either in heaven nor
hell is there place for athletics and aimless good temper’ (p. 127), the
ending suggests that the true heaven is precisely where athletics and
aimless good temper prevail.
‘The Point of It’ presents a strange compound of severity and generos-
ity, to say the least. On the one hand, it courts dismissal in the terms
 Douglas Mao 25

Vashti applies to one of Kuno’s assertions – ‘the nonsense of a youthful

man’ (p. 97) – by so strenuously repudiating the kind of life to which
many well-intentioned people aspired in Forster’s day as in our own.
Breathtaking in its sweep, Micky’s discovery that ‘the years are bound
either to liquefy a man or to stiffen him, and that Love and Truth […]
hold each the seeds of our decay’ (p. 136) intimates not merely that
people should try to hold on to youthful openness but that the only
acceptable way to live is to die young. Apart from this immense deroga-
tion, on the other hand, the story’s moral stance is mainly conveyed
in prescriptions of authenticity unlikely to have troubled the most
inflexible Edwardian vicar. Like many of Forster’s early works (viewed
uncharitably), in other words, ‘The Point of It’ seems to position itself
as a rebuke to the complacencies of the educated British middle class
while sorting very well with those complacencies. And because its take
on what matters in life veers between the anodyne and the intransigent,
it seems to offer little in the way of guidance on how actually to live,
let alone of serious social commentary. I want to suggest, however, that
Forster’s repudiations in ‘The Point of It’ bear further scrutiny because
they illuminate some of the fundamental investments of ‘The Machine
Stops’ – and, by extension, of a strain of anti-utopianism exemplified
(and in literary history partly launched) by the earlier story.
We might begin with another of the illuminations to which Micky is
treated as he lies buried in the sands of hell:

one of the sins here punished was appreciation; he was suffering

for all the praise that he had given to the bad and mediocre upon
earth; when he had praised out of idleness, or to please people, or to
encourage people; for all the praise that had not been winged with
passion. (p. 134)

Micky’s failing seems to have less to do with untruthfulness than with a

want of deep feeling that finally precludes intimacy. Where he had once
(rowing with Harold) been so swept up in a shared excitement that he
scarcely thought how his passion might hurt the other person, he later
imposes a kind of distance between himself and others in part out of a
reluctance to injure. (In the aforementioned denigration of his father,
Micky’s son Adam notably indicts the ‘sloppy civilization’ engendered
by people ‘afraid of originality, afraid of work, afraid of hurting one
another’s feelings’ [p. 132].) This is no minor fault, of course: in the sur-
prising universe of Forster’s story, Micky’s idle praise earns a contrapasso
as dramatic and brutal as those meted out to Dante’s sinners. Indeed
26 The Point of It

one might say that ‘The Point of It’ completes the elliptical epigraph of
Howards End with a frightening conditional imperative: ‘Only connect …
or suffer the torments of hell.’
This harshness of judgement is matched, in its way, by the finale of
‘The Machine Stops’, where the ‘sin against the body’ committed by
Vashti and her fellows invites a destruction not unworthy of the God
of the Old Testament. Indeed it is not hard to recognize an allegory of
Micky’s way of living, or a literalization of its terms, in Vashti’s situation.
Where Micky’s very indulgence of others sets them at a distance, Vashti
keeps to her single room and, until the end of the story, joins with most
of her kind in finding the touch of other people abhorrent – as when,
during the airship journey, she turns too abruptly and the attendant

behaved barbarically – she put out her hand to steady her.

‘How dare you!’ exclaimed the passenger. ‘You forget yourself!’
The woman was confused, and apologised for not having let her
fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become
obsolete, owing to the Machine. (Forster, 1909, p. 101)

Satirically exaggerating limits on bodily proximity that some would

have regarded as especially pronounced in English conceptions of good
form, Forster represents the world of the Machine as one in which all
contact carries an air of impropriety – as does nearly all physical exer-
tion. When Vashti enters Kuno’s room, she does not ‘shake him by the
hand’, because she is ‘too well-bred’ to do so; she is also ‘shocked […]
beyond measure’ (p. 104) by Kuno’s question about why it would be
wrong for him to find his own way to the earth’s surface, and has appar-
ently admonished him, on another occasion: ‘It is not the proper thing,
it is not mechanical, it is not decent to walk along a railway tunnel’
(p. 106). Even visiting the surface with the proper permits eventually
earns her censure: ‘The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper:
it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits
that really mattered’ (p. 114).
‘The Machine Stops’ and ‘The Point of It’ are far from the only
Forsterian fictions in which good manners raise unhappy bars to inti-
macy; virtually all of the stories and novels include transactions in
which propriety and communion are at odds. More surprising than the
ubiquity of the theme, however, is Forster’s repeated implication that
if the object of politeness is to diminish the shock, violence, and pain
of human intercourse, the presence of true intimacy will be signalled,
precisely, by an eruption of shock, violence, or pain. ‘The Point of It’
 Douglas Mao 27

is especially striking in this regard, since it turns on a contrast between

Micky’s failures of connection in later life and what heaven seems to
regard as his great moment of success, when in uninhibited rapture
he helped bring about his friend’s demise. Intimacy and violence are
also linked in the finale of ‘The Machine Stops’, however, for if Kuno’s
blood running over Vashti’s hands underscores her complicity in the
disaster, it also seals the bond between the two: familial and bodily
senses of blood merge here, even as the opening of one soul to another
is accompanied by an opening of the fleshly envelope. In A Room with
a View (1908), to take another example, Lucy Honeychurch and George
Emerson are thrown together physically after a man standing beside
Lucy is murdered. In Howards End, to take one more, Mrs Wilcox’s
untimely death is one of the conditions permitting characters and
readers to discern the mystical aspect of her connection to Margaret
Schlegel, which in the terms of ordinary intercourse would not appear
particularly profound or extensive.
The two fears of utopia enunciated in ‘The Machine Stops’ – the fear
of a decline of intimacy and the fear of a twilight of the body – are
therefore linked to each other through Forster’s sense that a certain
risk to corporeal integrity is a key element of human experience. In
other words, Forster does not merely use the vulnerability of the body
to figure a desirable porousness in the boundaries of the individual soul,
but rather predicates both meaningful intersubjectivity and meaning-
ful inhabitation of the body on exposure to danger, thus adapting in
his own fashion a long tradition of treating mortality as a guarantor of
authenticity. To be sure, the basic corporeal deficit suffered by those in
the world of the Machine can be described as extreme want of exercise:
infants promising ‘undue strength [are] destroyed’, and with small
encouragement to undertake locomotion of any kind, Vashti exhibits
‘a face as white as a fungus’ (p. 91), lacks teeth and hair (p. 96), and
‘totter[s]’ when she walks (p. 98). Yet it matters that Kuno’s resistance
to his society’s surrender to decay consists of more than strengthening
his body in preparation for his expedition to the surface. He also risks
at least two forms of fatal accident (electrocution and a possible fall in a
daring jump) in the course of his adventure. Reacquiring the fullest sense
of living seems to mean embracing the possibility of radical injury –
a point reinforced by both stories’ endings, where an ultimate experi-
ence of corporeality (death or entry into a blissful rather than miserable
afterlife) coincides with a form of revelation.
At one point in Utopia and Its Enemies, his moving inquiry into why
benevolent souls sometimes ‘take fright at the thought of a general reign
28 The Point of It

of benevolence’ (Kateb, 1963, p. 2), Kateb responds to an observation

made by William James in, as it happens, the year that intervened
between ‘The Machine Stops’ and ‘The Point of It’. ‘[T]he possibility
of violent death’, James had written in ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’
(1910), is ‘the soul of all romance’ ( James quoted in Kateb, 1963, p. 116),
and it is precisely this kind of romance that Kateb subjects to critique.
Acknowledging that there can seem a ‘threat of moral flaccidity in a
safe and harmonious utopia’ (Kateb, 1963, pp. 115–16) and that ‘in
the utopian sensibility there is generally present some strong predilec-
tion for the neat and tidy, for the ordered and arranged’ (p. 119), Kateb
nonetheless dismisses the kind of infatuation with danger that we find
in Forster’s stories as a kind of aestheticism, a morally bankrupt hunger
for life as spectacle that persists especially among fantasists not them-
selves much exposed to instability or want. Concerning the alleged
character-deepening qualities of struggle, Kateb remarks that even were
it ‘demonstrated that the hard way of becoming generally virtuous may,
as things now are, culminate in richness of character, it would still have
to be demonstrated that richness of character can come only by that
hard way. Does not stability (with its peace and abundance) have an
equally commendable richness of character suitable to it?’ (p. 187).
As this last quotation hints, Kateb’s critique of the romance of violent
death is part of a larger questioning in Utopia and Its Enemies of asser-
tions that utopia must be rejected because it diminishes human beings’
opportunities for valour. Anti-utopians may claim that a society limit-
ing human chances for victory over real obstacles cannot be desirable;
some calling themselves utopians might assert that a genuinely perfect
condition would retain many dangers or lack the kinds of structures
that stabilize daily existence. Against these views, Kateb invokes the
long history of Western imaginings of perfected societies – from Plato
through More to the present – to insist that ‘utopia’ properly deployed
implies some form of structure and some (large) measure of security and
provision. The dominant line of thinking about ideal societies in the
West, Kateb asserts, evokes ‘a world permanently without strife, poverty,
constraint, stultifying labor, irrational authority, sensual deprivation’,
and the term utopianism is ‘being properly used when it is used to
denote the cluster of these and related things’ (p. 9).
Whether or not Kateb’s definitional strictures are perfectly defensible,
in the end, they find support in the point that anarchist utopias (such as
the future England of William Morris’s News from Nowhere [1890] or the
Anarres of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed [1974]) posit a large-scale
cooperation providing as much stability as natural conditions permit,
 Douglas Mao 29

while utopias that mandate changefulness (the ‘kinetic utopia’ of Wells’s

A Modern Utopia [1905], for example) tend to privilege styles of change
that would be minimally destabilizing. Even the utopia of incessant
competition adumbrated in neoconservative end-of-history fantasies is
rooted in a certain acknowledging of stability’s claims. Especially during
the ascendancy of such fantasies in the 1990s, capitalism could adopt
a utopian face precisely because history, in the sense of violent disrup-
tions of settled patterns of life, was said to have ended, and because the
question of basic provision was considered by such theories to be set-
tled (even if capitalism had not yet managed in actuality the feat it was
credited with having accomplished virtually).
In making his case for utopia, Kateb concedes the necessity of a trade-
off between intensity and stability. ‘The utopian’, he remarks, ‘would
accept a world where intense pleasures were scarce’ (p. 137), and ‘modern
utopianism’ can no more conceive of well-being as ‘a continuous suc-
cession of intense sensations’ than it can imagine it a ‘constant state
of low-level contentment bought at the price of human rationality or
creativity’ (p. 137). From such a perspective, the Forsterian romance,
with its subtle but rooted suggestion that true intimacy and vital
corporeality are impossible without danger, can read as a failure of social
and moral imagination more profound than any it purports to expose.
In this respect, it bears noting that Forster’s wariness of safety’s threat to
intensity places ‘The Machine Stops’ and ‘The Point of It’ squarely within
the dystopian genre as it has been characterized by Peter Firchow. In the
West, Firchow remarks, ‘there have been […] two opposing and perhaps
incompatible assumptions about ethics’: one, usually associated with
utopias, is ‘based on a version of the utilitarian calculus’, while the other,
whose affinities are with dystopia, privileges ‘the intensity (or depth or
quality) of an experience rather than the quantity of happiness it brings
with it’ (Firchow, 2007, pp. 8–9).
As the Forster of ‘The Point of It’ might have been quick to observe,
Kateb’s defence of utopia reads very much like a defence of the aspi-
rations of liberal democracy broadly conceived, according to which
people’s liberty to develop their capacities is predicated not only on
freedom from undue restraint of thought and conduct, but also on a
framework of safety and material provision far more robust than the
minimal guarantees of the Hobbesian or Lockean social contract. In
other words, Kateb’s utopia looks very much like an attainment of the
social conditions that liberal intellectuals around 1910 and again around
1960 thought not only desirable but achievable in the not-too-distant
future, thanks to advances in technology and political wisdom. For
30 The Point of It

Kateb at the tail end of a certain post-war optimism, and for Forster’s
contemporaries at the tail end of a certain nineteenth-century optimism,
the ideal society could be imagined not as an unreachable otherworld
or a creature of the remote end of history, but rather as an objective
possibly within humanity’s grasp. In the second sentence of Utopia and
Its Enemies, Kateb explains that the attacks on utopia with which he is
concerned ‘stem from the belief that the world sometime soon (unbear-
ably soon) will have at its disposal […] the material presuppositions of
a way of life commonly described as “utopian”’ (Kateb, 1963, p. 1). In
‘The Challenge of Our Time’ (1946), Forster had written famously:

I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism, and can look back to

an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud
on whose horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand. In many ways
it was an admirable age. It practised benevolence and philanthropy,
was humane and intellectually curious, upheld free speech, had
little colour prejudice, believed that individuals are and should be
different, and entertained a sincere faith in the progress of society.
The world was to become better and better, chiefly through the
spread of parliamentary institutions. (Forster, 1946, p. 54)

At one key moment in ‘The Point of It’ (written, we need to recall,

before the First World War upended faith in liberal democracy’s capacity
to provide the stability it promised) Forster suggests that the regnant lib-
eral bonhomie must nourish a mediocrity emblematized by the ‘bad and
mediocre upon earth’ (Forster, 1911, p. 134) who receive Micky’s unwar-
ranted praise. Reviewing his life in the world, Micky recalls that he

had seen good in everything, and this is itself a sign of decay. Whatever
occurred he had been appreciative, tolerant, pliant. Consequently he
had been a success; […] it was the moment in civilization for his type.
He had mistaken self-criticism for self-discipline, he had muffled
in himself and others the keen, heroic edge. Yet the luxury of repent-
ance was denied him. The fault was his, but the fate humanity’s, for
everyone grows hard or soft as he grows old. (p. 137)

Without relinquishing the claim that growing old is universally a

degeneration, Forster manages, through the assertion that the present
age favours the pliant, to evoke the baleful effects that may be expected
from a modernity whose pervasive mood is bland acceptance. As New
Humanists such as Irving Babbitt were arguing contemporaneously,
 Douglas Mao 31

the decline of the will to judge by objective standards, the ascent of

undifferentiating appreciation, might mark this ‘moment in civilization’
as the beginning of a precipitous decline.
It is thus not surprising that a recurrent motif in ‘The Machine
Stops’ is Vashti’s and her fellows’ acceptance of the second-rate. That
the optic plates give but a poor sense of the other speaker’s face is, we
are told early on, not considered a problem: ‘the imponderable bloom’
of expressive nuance, ‘declared by a discredited philosophy to be the
actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just
as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manu-
facturers of artificial fruit. Something “good enough” had long since
been accepted by our race’ (Forster, 1909, p. 93). When the Machine’s
services begin to decline, the changes are ‘bitterly complained of at
first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to
worse unchallenged’ (p. 119). Nor does ‘The Point of It’ omit to record
a similar acquiescence: near the end of his life, Micky looks back with
satisfaction upon his having ‘succeeded better than most men in modi-
fying’ the ideals of his youth ‘to fit the world of facts, and if love had
been modified into sympathy and sympathy into compromise, let one
of his contemporaries cast the first stone’ (Forster, 1911, p. 131).
In both stories, the antithesis of such modern compromise is again
the ‘keen heroic edge’ that presumably cuts rather than swaddles, and,
in both, residual possession of such edge is indicated by attraction to
the celestial, archaic figure of Orion. Kuno tells Vashti of his idea that
a certain group of stars looks like a man wearing a belt and a sword
and that he wants ‘to see these stars again’, ‘not from the air-ship, but
from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years
ago’ (Forster, 1909, p. 93). Discussing his regrets with his neighbour in
hell, before the opportunity to acknowledge his true desire presents
itself, Micky politely ventures, ‘It would be appalling, would it not, to
see Orion again […]? How I dreaded the autumn on earth when Orion
rises, for he recalled adventure and my youth’ (Forster, 1911, p. 135),
and indeed we know that in earlier years Micky had lingered on the
hunter’s figure in the sky (p. 127). Russell Jacoby has observed that ‘the
key dystopic books of the twentieth century […] damned contempo-
rary society by projecting into the future its worst features’, that where
‘[u]topias seek to emancipate by envisioning a world based on new,
neglected, or spurned ideas’, dystopias ‘seek to frighten by accentuating
contemporary trends that threaten freedom’ ( Jacoby, 2005, pp. 12–13).
The dystopia of ‘The Machine Stops’ does not appear especially liberal
or tolerant, but through the lens furnished by ‘The Point of It’ we can
32 The Point of It

see how it is shaped by Forster’s sense that the modern era might be
understood as the scene of a contest between two powerful constella-
tions of elements: liberal tolerance, progress, stability, mediocrity, and
timidity, on the one hand; forthright judgement, care for tradition,
danger, intensity, and heroic edge, on the other.
In a moment, we will see how Forster’s somewhat encrypted invest-
ment in this opposition aligns him consequentially with certain
modernist writers while setting him at odds with others. First, however,
it will profit us to notice that, in his expressions of solicitude on behalf
of intimacy and corporeal joy, Forster registers not only his wariness of
the liberal paradise but also his distance from some of the institutions
and practices that would usher that paradise in. Having described the
optimism of Victorian liberals in the passage from ‘The Challenge of
Our Time’ just quoted, Forster goes on to remark:

The education I received in those far-off and fantastic days made

me soft, and I am very glad it did, for I have seen plenty of hard-
ness since, and I know it does not even pay. Think of the end of
Mussolini – the hard man, hanging upside-down like a turkey, with
his dead mistress swinging beside him. But though the education was
humane it was imperfect, inasmuch as we none of us realized our
economic position. In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty
thoughts, and we did not realize that all the time we were exploiting
the poor of our own country and the backward races abroad […].
I remember being told as a small boy, “Dear, don’t talk about money,
it’s ugly” – a good example, that, of Victorian defence mechanism.
(Forster, 1946, pp. 54–5)

By the time Forster wrote these words, war and fascism had made
Micky’s kind of approach to living more attractive; indeed one could
describe Forster’s shift between 1911 and 1946 as a recognition of the
virtues of softness in this sense. Nonetheless, there is an instructive
residue of the Forster of ‘The Machine Stops’ and ‘The Point of It’ in
this quotation’s closing turn to good manners, that great enemy of
intimacy. Where the Forster of 1909 presents, in Vashti, a person easily
scandalized by Kuno’s aspersions upon the system of the Machine, the
Forster of 1946 exhibits a boy enjoined not to talk about money, but in
both cases politesse is associated with complacency about the progress of
society. In ‘The Machine Stops’, that is to say, the link between pro-
gressive sentiments and propriety is to be found in the fussiness of
Vashti, who believes that she lives in an advanced civilization marching
 Douglas Mao 33

towards yet fuller perfection; in ‘The Challenge of Our Time’, it registers

in the fussiness of liberals who are confident that the world will grow
better and better thanks to enlightened democratic governance.
This association between constraining politeness and liberal politics
broadly defined persists today, of course, in the form of anti-progressive
claims to wield hard truths about human inadequacy against the sof-
tening cant of tolerance. One curious, if voluble, recent instance of
this phenomenon can be found in the conservative sociologist Charles
Murray’s claim that an ‘ecumenical niceness’ practised by a liberal elite
is eroding less educated Americans’ sense of responsibility (Murray,
2012, p. 289), but the formula achieves its widest dissemination in
the still potent phrase ‘political correctness’, which implies that where
conservatives are passionate in their views, progressives are either too
timid to violate the protocols of groupthink or too wedded to propriety
to risk offending those who need to be offended. Had it been at his
disposal, Forster would surely have been tempted to apply ‘political cor-
rectness’ to the progressivism of his own intellectual milieu, from which
he sometimes demurred by pitting intimacy against a more abstract
concern with the fate of people one does not know – as by affirming
his devotion to personal relationships over causes and country (‘What
I Believe’, first published in 1938) or by endorsing the Schlegel sisters’
eschewal of discussion societies in favour of a domestic society feelingly
attached to the English earth.
If for Forster progressive allegiances could be associated with the
intimacy-inhibiting vice of correctness, they could also be associ-
ated with the corporeality-inhibiting vice of excessive intellectualism.
Regarding moments ‘unproductive of ideas’ as a waste of time, Vashti at
one point feels ashamed to have ‘borne such a son, she who had always
been so respectable and so full of ideas’ (Forster, 1909, p. 108), thus
bringing correctness and idea-centredness together in a way that might
caricature intellectual coteries in any age. Yet if Vashti’s technophilic
society of ‘advanced thinkers’ evokes Swift’s Laputa, it surely owes more
to the faith, shared by liberals, Fabians, and Marxists alike, that the
world can be remade by the implementation of good ideas. Especially
present to Forster in the first decade of the century may have been
the hopes engendered by Wells’s utopian writings: in 1947, Forster
explained that ‘The Machine Stops’ was a ‘reaction to one of the earlier
heavens of H. G. Wells’ (Forster, 1947, p. vii) and it is hard not to detect
in Vashti and her friends an echo of such high-minded societies as the
Cambridge Utopians. Founded by Amber Reeves following the publica-
tion of A Modern Utopia in 1905, as Robert Crossley (2011) has shown,
34 The Point of It

the group attracted a small number of Cambridge women (and some

men) for three years before it dissolved; a year later, ‘The Machine Stops’
was published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review. Whatever the precise
influence of Wellsians on Forster’s dystopia, his satire of fixation on
ideas perforce weighs against those intellectuals whose liberal paradise
seemed so to threaten the heroic edge.
Forster’s worries about the fate of the heroic within a culture of
acceptance align him with another major writer who would soon join
him on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, who had been influenced
by the New Humanists, and who would make the mediocrity of mod-
ern life one of the great themes of his writing. By the inter-war years,
of course, his and T. S. Eliot’s political positions would have diverged
sharply, Forster becoming a spokesman for secular liberalism and pub-
lishing one of the most famous statements in support of tolerance in
the history of English letters (‘Tolerance’ [1941]), Eliot attempting to
order a welter of political impulses into advocacy of what he would
come to call a Christian Society. As numerous studies of modernists’
political trajectories have confirmed, however, later differences often
obscure early commonalities, not only because writers changed their
views but also because political categories congealing in the 1920s and
1930s are often poor fits for earlier congeries of beliefs. The tonalities of
Forster’s and Eliot’s romanticisms prior to the First World War are obvi-
ously quite different: where it makes sense to describe the Forster of
‘The Machine Stops’ as harbouring a ‘residual romantic humanism’, as
Moylan does (Moylan, 2000, p. 111), Eliot was already mistrustful of
humanism’s complacency; where Eliot’s note is the despairing disap-
proval, or disapproving despair, of a prophet who wants also to be an
ironist, Forster sufficiently inhabits liberal Gemütlichkeit to mount what
we might call a more immanent critique. Yet their anxieties and some
of their figurations are closely akin. While no one would mistake ‘The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915) for ‘The Point of It’, both texts
deploy allusions to the Inferno to lament the second-rate existence of
an educated, reasonably affluent bourgeois. And while no one would
confuse the honeycomb of ‘The Machine Stops’ with the Europe of
The Waste Land (1922), both texts imagine apocalyptic resolutions to a
perceived problem of isolation in the modern world, ‘each in his prison’
(Eliot, 1969, p. 74) or her well-equipped subterranean chamber.
Against the impatience with soul-deadening modern routines dis-
played by Eliot and the Forster of these texts, however, we might
tentatively place another strain of Anglo-American modernism, one
that foregrounds how life need not want intensity even where it lacks
 Douglas Mao 35

dramatic incident. On the British–Irish side, exponents of this line might

include Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (as well as Forster himself, at
other moments); on the American, they might include such descend-
ants of Walter Pater as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. All
of these celebrants of the quotidian explore how exhilaration, wonder,
rich melancholy, or local heroisms can emerge in lives where security
and provision are moderate (Leopold Bloom) or even ample (Clarissa
Dalloway). And it is noteworthy that, especially in Woolf and Joyce,
what Kateb calls ‘richness of character’ emerges not only in the context
of a certain stability but also in conjunction with a sympathy and toler-
ance evocative of Micky in ‘The Point of It’.
Within the context of modernist responses to the ascent of liberal
ideals, then, texts affirming the possibility of enchantment, intensity,
or valour in the quotidian must surely be understood as in a crucial
sense anti-anti-utopian, to adopt Fredric Jameson’s useful formulation
( Jameson, 2005, p. xvi). If the anti-utopian moral of ‘The Point of It’
and ‘The Machine Stops’ is finally that a life lived over many years in a
state of relative material well-being is virtually guaranteed to be vacuous,
Mrs Dalloway (1925), Ulysses (1922), ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’
(1934), and ‘Danse Russe’ (1916) effectively retort that an ordinary day
can be full of moments of authentic intensity – moments that would,
even on anti-liberal romanticism’s terms, affirm the significance of the
lives that contain them. The point is not that the world we inhabit is
already utopia, but rather that there is something faulty in the assump-
tion that mediocrity will be the fate of existences transpiring under
conditions of security and provision. The anti-anti-utopianism of these
works thus inheres in their way of challenging Kateb’s conclusion –
which from this point of view cedes unnecessary ground to utopia’s
enemies – that the modern utopian must ‘accept a world where intense
pleasures [are] scarce’.
It is important to distinguish the anti-anti-utopianism described here,
which depends upon a highlighting of the value of concrete experiences
in the world we have, from a rather different utopian dimension, asso-
ciated with adumbrations of radical alterity, that critics have usefully
located in the same texts. In a recent collection of essays on utopia
and British modernism, Benjamin Kohlmann argues that as we pass
from ‘the time-travelling protagonists of Bellamy’s and Morris’s socialist
utopias to the more ambivalent, provisional utopian vision of modernist
and late modernist writers such as Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, and Auden’, we
will note an intensifying ‘tendency to present utopia as a critical engage-
ment with the lived spaces of the everyday’ (Kohlmann, 2011, p. 8).
36 The Point of It

Kohlmann focuses this point through influential heuristics from Michel

de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre that show (in Kohlmann’s phrasing)
how ‘even though the space of everyday life is a social product, it
can also become the site where oppositional modes of behaviour are
constituted and expressed’ (p. 8), but the yet broader frame for his
observations is clearly the line of utopian thinking descending from
Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, whose innovation was to conceive
of utopia as an anticipatory impulse threading through the moods of
daily life or an intimation of alterity glimmering through the mate-
rial culture of modernity. The Bloch–Benjamin line seems similarly
to inform Christina Britzolakis’s proposal, in an essay from the same
collection, that ‘the post-war experimental fictions Jacob’s Room (1922)
and Mrs Dalloway (1925) […] constitute ambiguously utopian forms
of reflection, which turn on the intersection of everyday and epochal
forms of awareness’ (Britzolakis, 2011, p. 122).
This Blochian and Benjaminian tradition, in which utopia is not a
place described in detail but a condition beyond our powers of represen-
tation, has been profoundly important as well for a number of recent
commentators on utopia whose interests extend beyond modernist
literature. In Picture Imperfect, Jacoby privileges ‘iconoclastic utopians’
(Bloch, Benjamin, Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, T. W. Adorno) over
such ‘blueprint’ utopians as More and Bellamy; linking the iconoclasts’
‘resistance to representing the future’ ( Jacoby, 2005, p. xvii) with a Jewish
tradition of rejecting graven images, Jacoby argues that these writers are
‘essential to any effort to escape the spell of the quotidian’ (p. xvii), by
which he means the power of an image-driven culture to stifle whisper-
ings of unvisualizable otherness. Jameson too has privileged utopian
non-representability on many occasions. In a 1982 piece, reprinted in
Archaeologies of the Future, he argues that the ‘deepest vocation’ of SF ‘is over
and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imag-
ine the future’, to ‘succeed by failure’ ( Jameson, 2005, pp. 288–9), while
in his introduction to Archaeologies, he notes that from some perspectives
utopia at best serves ‘the negative purpose of making us more aware of
our mental and ideological imprisonment’, which is to say that ‘the best
Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively’ (p. xiii). Jameson
also stresses the radical alterity of utopia in The Seeds of Time (1994), both
by way of illuminating utopia’s affinities with death and in pursuance
of the thought that ‘if you know already what your longed-for exercise
in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the suspicion arises that it
may not really express freedom after all but only repetition’ ( Jameson,
1994, p. 56). That glimpses of a radical utopian alterity flash forth
 Douglas Mao 37

plentifully in modernist texts can hardly be doubted; it would be a

strange reduction to deny the force of these de-naturalizations, from
within the quotidian, of the world at hand. Yet it is important, again, to
distinguish such properly utopian subversions from the anti-anti-utopian
affirmation we are concerned with here, which declares that conditions
of relative stability and peace are not inimical to experiential intensity.
The utopian strain marks a sharp disjunction between our world and
utopia; the anti-anti-utopian depends upon a continuity.
These considerations bear, finally, on the long-standing opposition –
again enunciated with particular clarity by Jameson – between utopia
and capitalism. At one point in Archaeologies, Jameson reinforces his
claims for utopia’s non-representability by asserting that any positive
definition of utopia will be ideologically freighted. Using as his example
Adorno’s suggestion that the ‘goal of an emancipated society’ might
be formulated simply as the imperative ‘that no one shall go hungry
any more’ (Adorno quoted in Jameson, 2005, p. 172), Jameson shows
how this ‘minimal Utopian demand, […] far from being purely formal
and without ideological content, vehiculates the most complexly
historical themes and undertones’ ( Jameson, 2005, p. 175), themes and
undertones having everything to do with long-running debates about
the relationships between survival, individualism, and private property.
In the very next chapter, however, Jameson summarizes the fruit of his
own inquiry as follows:

I conclude that it is still difficult to see how future Utopias could ever
be imagined in any absolute dissociation from socialism in its large
sense of anti-capitalism; dissociated, that is to say, from the values of
social and economic equality and the universal right to food, lodg-
ing, medicine, education and work (in other words […] no modern
Utopia is plausible which does not address, along with its other
inventions, the economic problems caused by industrial capitalism).
(pp. 196–7)

Jameson himself, that is, insists on the unimaginability (or the defini-
tional incoherence) of a utopia without basic amenities, the absence of
which he then refers to ‘the economic problems caused by industrial
capitalism’. Yet it is surely a distortion to identify capitalism, even in the
largest sense of the economic totality that presides over our world, with
deprivation tout court. We can certainly contrast utopian plenitude with
the perpetuation of scarcity, precariousness, and inequality that seems
ever more visibly integral to capitalism’s functioning, but this does not
38 The Point of It

entitle us to represent capitalism as a regime of pure scarcity or lack,

whatever that might mean.
One of the significant casualties of this theoretical slippage is the
recognition that we can hardly apply our imaginations to problems atten-
ding utopian plenitude – problems that, as we have seen, loom large in
anti-utopian critiques – unless we consider how the experiences of those
enjoying stability and abundance in utopia might be modelled by the
experiences of those enjoying relative stability and abundance in our own
world. Some lives under capitalism are lived amid what are at least felt to
be conditions of safety and provision, and some elements of these lives
necessarily furnish a basis for calling into question anti-utopian prophe-
cies concerning the malaises of utopian existence. This is not to say, of
course, that we must conceive of the quotidian in utopia as close in form
to daily life among the relatively privileged in our world, let alone that we
should suppress aspirations towards radical alterity in the name of utopias
more comfortably like situations we know. It is to insist, however, that in
some contexts, affirmations of intensity, of intimacy, of joy in our world
have the virtue of affirming utopia too, especially as against the fears of
pallor, deprivation, and mediocrity articulated in such venues as ‘The
Machine Stops’ and ‘The Point of It’. Representations of the plenitude
of the quotidian within materially well-sustained lives in this world, in
other words, are valuable not least for their intimations of how inhabit-
ants of utopia would cope with the putative dangers of plenty, tolerance,
and peace.
2
A Likely Impossibility:
The Good Soldier, the Modernist
Novel, and Quasi-Familial
Transcendence
Scott W. Klein

In the Poetics Aristotle writes of plot:

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing pos-

sibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents;
there should be nothing of the sort in it. If, however, such incidents
are unavoidable, they should be outside the piece, like the hero’s
ignorance in Oedipus of the circumstances of Laius’ death; not within
it […]. So that it is ridiculous to say that one’s Plot would have been
spoilt without them, since it is fundamentally wrong to make up
such Plots. If the poet has taken such a Plot, however, and one sees
that he might have put it in a more probable form, he is guilty of
absurdity as well as a fault of art. (Aristotle, 1920, pp. 84–5)

In addressing plots, absurdity, and the possible failures of art, Aristotle

considers poetry in its largest sense. Writing some centuries before the
advent of the novel, Aristotle applies his criticism to the genres of epic
and tragedy rather than to the fictions of the future. Yet such fictions –
many taking the nature of the future as their theme – provide a recurrent
subgenre within the innovative, overtly utopian and dystopian fictions
and fantasies that date from the time of Thomas More and continue
through escapist genre fiction of the present day.
The recurrent ideas typical of this subgenre often emerge in surpris-
ingly mainstream novelistic contexts. Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good
Soldier (1915) is an example of a novel that is quite free of overt fantasy
but that nonetheless places quasi-Aristotelian ideas of tragedy in appo-
sition to the idea of utopian fiction. These two tendencies remain in
uneasy balance, but their coexistence serves as a surprising test case for
39
40 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

the more general tension between these two kinds of narrative – tragic
tales of dissolution and idealist visions of social betterment – in the
English novel around the time of the First World War. There is no better
place to investigate Aristotle’s strictures about plausibility in the mod-
ernist novel, for The Good Soldier, canonical as it is, has always struck
some readers as absurd. The manifest blind spots of its protagonist, John
Dowell, whose failures of insight make Oedipus’s ignorance of Laius’s
death seem like the most straightforward of psychological realisms,
have been the source of particular complaint.1 However, the language
of the book registers this objection in advance. Dowell frequently notes
that aspects of his narrative and characters’ behaviours are ‘unlikely’,
and he even more frequently modifies his reports of characters’ actions
with the strong adjective ‘impossible’.2 Dowell uses the word ‘absurd’
to describe not only his passing observations but even finally his emer-
gence as a particular kind of social and national nullity, ‘[t]hat absurd
figure, an American millionaire’ (Ford, 1915b, p. 175).
What can one make of the novel’s meta-consciousness of its own
lapses of plausibility? One way to understand this is to establish how
The Good Soldier intertwines ideas of societal perfection and tragedy,
and then to analyse how the novel’s imagination of society and fam-
ily are less absurdist than they are representative of a particular type of
vision of the relationship between small and large social groupings –
the possibilities for the future – that is ultimately consonant with the
views held by Ford’s cohort of contemporary novelists. It may seem
surprising to list Ford among potential idealists. Ford went on the
record – and frequently – about his dislike of novels that abandoned
the canons of realism to describe mere pipe dreams. Ford devotes some
admiring pages in a 1908 essay to the works of H. G. Wells, but under
the subheading ‘More Kippses Wanted’ he rejects Wells’s fantasies,
noting ‘[i]t is for me a cause of lamentation that the author devotes –
I will not say “wastes” – his time to Utopias and airships’ (Ford, 1908,
p. 51) rather than producing such realist novels as the 1905 Kipps. Ford
notes in a later chapter on Wells in Portraits from Life (1937) that such
creations belong to hobbyism rather than to art: ‘If a gentleman prefers
as a pastime writing Utopias to playing Badminton or demon poker it
would seem to be within his rights’ (Ford, 1937, p. 118). Dislike of the
novel as mere pastime – the ‘nuvvle’, Ford often called it, imitating
the upper-class accent of the typical consumer of such trifles – was one
of Ford’s favourite hobbyhorses (see, for instance, Ford, 1930, p. 111).
The business of the novel was serious realism, in the mode of Flaubert
and Turgenev. In his study of Joseph Conrad, Ford reports that he and
 Scott W. Klein 41

Conrad agreed as a matter of fictional philosophy that ‘your business

with the world is rendering, not alteration’ (Ford, 1924, p. 223), and in
a study of Henry James he asserts: ‘It remains therefore for the novelist –
and particularly for the realist among novelists – to give us the very
matter upon which we shall build the theories of the new body politic’
(Ford, 1913, p. 46).
This last phrase, however, signals covertly how the idea of idealist
fantasy, both pro and con, springs up paradoxically in Ford’s early writ-
ings as a key to ‘theories of the new body politic’. Utopian fiction can
be the vehicle of theories of social organization, even if it also brings
with it the generic expectation that reality will be altered rather than
rendered. Ford’s early novels, even at the time of his strictures against
Wells, included both fairy tales and fantasy writings (such as Mr. Apollo
[1908] and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes [1911]), and Ford wrote, conversely,
an explicit satire of ‘simple life’ utopias in The Simple Life Limited (1911),
which he published under the pseudonym ‘Daniel Chaucer’. Ford titled
a chapter in The Heart of the Country (1906) simply ‘Utopias’ (see Ford,
1906, pp. 199–219), and he titled a 1911 essay in The Saturday Review
‘High Germany – II. Utopia’ (Ford, 1911). These treatments of favourite
geographical locations in Provence and Bavaria apply the term ‘Utopia’
loosely, describing actual locations as Ford’s personally idealized topoi.
But such a thematic tendency did not go unnoticed, even by Wells. In
a 1939 radio talk in Australia on the subject of utopian fiction, Wells
notes that ‘[t]here is a very charming and quite Utopian poem by Ford
Madox Ford, called “On Heaven”’, which Wells praises, along with
Henry James’s story ‘The Great Good Place’ (1900), for being ‘pervaded
by the same serenity, and both extremely well worth hunting out and
reading’ (Wells, 1939, p. 118). Kenneth Womack and William Baker
considered ‘On Heaven’ (written 1913; published 1918), whatever
its merits as poetry, to be sufficiently thematically relevant that they
included the poem as an appendix to their edition of The Good Soldier
as a reflection of the novel’s, or at least the narrator’s, yearnings for
earthly perfection.3
That such yearnings may be found in The Good Soldier may surprise
even experienced readers of the novel, which tells the labyrinthine tale
of two couples, John and Florence Dowell, wealthy Americans, and
Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, members of landed British society.
The novel dissects the prolonged adultery between Florence and
Ashburnham, and reveals the web of unfaithfulnesses and mutual
alienation that comes to undermine both marriages. Matters become
yet more complicated when Ashburnham becomes obsessed with
42 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

Nancy Rufford, the young ward of Leonora, and the whole of the novel
is told from the naive and at times fabulously inobservant perspec-
tive of Dowell, the deceived American husband. The novel ends for
some characters in suicide and madness, and, for others, in unreliev-
able frustration. Why look for utopia here? Mainly because Dowell
frequently frames his misunderstanding of the other characters and the
world in which he thought he lived in such terms. In the novel’s early
pages he thinks of the relationship of the four characters as a model
of ‘Permanence’ and ‘Stability’, an ‘extraordinarily safe castle’, asking
‘where better could one take refuge?’ (Ford, 1915b, p. 3). ‘Where better’ –
or ‘is there a better place?’ – is the very question asked by utopian
fiction, and Dowell throughout The Good Soldier asks if there is not
some transcendent realm where his imagined world of ‘good people’
and perfect human relationships could persist through space and time.
‘Isn’t there any heaven’, he asks towards the novel’s beginning, ‘where
old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn’t
there any Nirvana[?]’ (p. 3). At the novel’s end, after the exposure of the
betrayals and suffering that have undergirded the book’s friendships, he
asks: ‘Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whisperings of
the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they
like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?’ (p. 164).
The answer proffered by the novel is, patently, ‘no’. No such places
exist outside of misprision or fantasy. Dowell pursues a vision of an
idealized world. Because he believes that Florence suffers from heart
disease he admits explicitly that he seeks ‘a shock-proof world’ (p. 32).
He modifies descriptions of arguably negative traits by the adjective
‘perfectly’, in one case as many as seven times on a single page.4 His
mental armamentarium is even filled with ideolectic ideas of perfection.
After the death of Maisie Maidan, one of Ashburnham’s love interests,
he sees or imagines two nuns who appear before her bed as ‘two swans
that were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever it is’
(p. 51). There are no attestations elsewhere in English other than by
Ford to the term, suggesting that ‘kissing-kindness land’ is either Ford’s,
or Dowell’s, personal, if bumbling, idea of heaven.5 Yet life as it is
described ultimately in The Good Soldier is anything but heaven. It is
more a tragedy than a model of perfection, replete with sadomasochis-
tic impulses and imagery. For instance, at the height of her suffering,
Leonora imagines bringing a riding whip down across Nancy’s face
(p. 145). Dowell imagines Ashburnham’s treatment by Leonora and
Nancy as a bodily flaying, a primal ritual of tribal torture.6 Eventually
Dowell’s narrative reveals the primal sexual violence that underlies all
 Scott W. Klein 43

social life. ‘It was the most amazing business,’ Dowell says, describing
the final parting of Ashburnham and Nancy, with whom Ashburnham
is desperately in love, ‘and I think it would have been better in the eyes
of God if they had all attempted to gouge out one another’s eyes with
carving knives’ (p. 172) – an image that passes directly through Freud to
Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE). Dowell wavers about whether to
call his narrative a tragedy or not, at first calling it merely ‘the saddest
story’ (p. 1), which was the novel’s original title.7 By the narrative’s end,
however, Dowell has decided, stating ‘there was a great deal of imbecil-
ity about the closing scenes of the Ashburnham tragedy’ (p. 165).
This conclusion is scarcely surprising, even if Dowell’s judgements
are notoriously changeable. Ford noted elsewhere his investment in
Greek tragedy, and Dowell’s choice of generic label is the conclusion
of a series of novelistic allusions to explicit literary-historical tragic
motifs.8 Before her suicide at the end of Part II of the novel Dowell sees
Florence as an Oedipus figure, as she runs ‘with her hands over her
face as if she wished to push her eyes out’ (p. 70). Dowell describes the
Hurlbirds, Florence’s family, as acting ‘almost as if they were members
of an ancient family under a curse’ (p. 54), a kind of Americanized
house of Atreus in advance of Faulkner. And when he characterizes
the young Nancy as being able to ‘ride to the hounds like a Maenad’
(p. 85), Ford’s references to Sophocles and Aeschylus join with a nod to
Euripides’s The Bacchae (405 BCE) to complete a full range of allusions to
the Greek tragedians. Such parallels to classical figures may perhaps be
seen as little more than an adumbration of the later mythic methods of
James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, as when Dowell also describes the Spanish
courtesan La Dolcequita as Ashburnham’s ‘Circe’ (p. 37), or when
Dowell pictures Ashburnham as one of the ancient Greeks damned
in Tartarus (p. 175). Yet Ford does not conjure Dowell’s ‘tragic shades’
(p. 175) solely from the Greek tradition. When he describes Florence’s
self-dramatizing attempts to justify her passions as ‘all for love and the
world well lost’ (p. 81), Dowell inserts Florence into the tradition of
English tragedy, however mockingly late and debased. She becomes the
figure of Cleopatra from John Dryden’s play All For Love; or, The World
Well Lost (1678).
How can one coordinate or justify this coexistence of utopian and
tragic motifs in the same novel – both desire for the world to come
and recognition of the world well lost – without simply declaring that
the latter invalidates or shows the lie of the former, that one genre
trumps another? One apparently roundabout approach to this question
is to note that social and familial relationships in The Good Soldier are
44 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

unstable. All of the primary relationships in The Good Soldier have a

secondary and paradoxical status, in which familial relationships, both
of law and of blood, become reconfigured metaphorically, and at times
literally, as non-familial relationships. Conversely, merely social rela-
tionships are reconfigured as familial. Ford largely defines literal families
in The Good Soldier by dysfunction or absence. Ford presents Florence’s
family, the Hurlbirds, and Nancy’s family, the Ruffords, as divided and
abusive, even colluding in a most un-familial way with scandalous sex-
ual behaviour. Florence’s uncle implicitly expedites her youthful affair
with the young man Jimmy, whom he invites to accompany them on a
trip around the world, while her aunts cover up her sexual indiscretions,
refusing to tell Dowell why they oppose her marrying. Nancy cannot
be sure whether her mother, who is supposed to be dead, has become
a prostitute, and whether her legal father is her father in fact.9 None of
the main characters has children – indeed, Leonora’s failure to have
children is an important motivation for why she treats Ashburnham
as she does.10 Although a lengthy central section of the novel describes
Leonora’s and Ashburnham’s early lives and courtship, there are no
other references to members of their families in the novel. Ford more-
over provides no information at all about Dowell’s own upbringing. The
title deeds he carries to his inherited land in Philadelphia act as his only
metonymic anchor to either his geographic origin or his past.
Non-familial relations in the novel, on the other hand, become meta-
phorically strongly familial. Ashburnham acts as a substitute father in
several social and personal contexts. As a member, and believer in the
virtues, of feudal society he acts in loco parentis both on his own estate and
abroad. Dowell notes that ‘[t]o the poor and to hopeless drunkards […]
he was like a painstaking guardian’ (Ford, 1915b, pp. 6–7), going so
far as to provide legal defence for a young woman who is accused of
murdering her baby – another extraordinary lapse against familial
proprieties – and helping to reunite an estranged couple among the
staff at the Spa Nauheim (pp. 18 and 65). With Maisie Maidan, Dowell
proclaims, Ashburnham acts ‘almost like a father with a child’ (p. 42),
as Ashburnham claims in his own defence when caught kissing a young
woman on a train in what comes to be known as the Kilsyte case. Such
quasi-paternal roles, unsurprising in these contexts, extend into other
metaphors of familial relation that cross barriers of both age and gender.
Dowell comes to think of Edward as his ‘large older brother’ (p. 175),
but Leonora looks upon Dowell as though she were his sister or his
mother. Dowell says of Leonora’s look over dinner: ‘It was the look of a
mother to her son, of a sister to her brother’ (p. 21). Dowell also notes
 Scott W. Klein 45

that she listens to him ‘as if she were listening, a mother, to a child at
her knee’ (p. 32).
More generally, although neither Ashburnham nor Leonora are
literally related to Nancy, both act as parents to her, at least until
Ashburnham’s sexual attraction to Nancy causes him to fight against
his own quasi-incestuous impulses. Dowell’s own paternalism towards
Nancy shades into a desire to marry her that blurs her identity into
a mixture of becoming both his legal ward and his fiancée. Neither
Dowell nor Ashburnham, at different junctures in the novel, have sex-
ual relationships with their wives, and in both cases Ford describes the
lack of legal intimacy in terms of roles and role-playing that reduce the
idea of ‘wife’ to a place-holder in a legal and sexual game. Dowell refers
to Florence as ‘at once a wife and an unattained mistress’ (p. 32), and
he wonders if Florence, had he behaved differently, would have ‘acted
the proper wife to [him]’ (p. 57). Both phrases use the same language of
theatricality and role-playing that Dowell elsewhere uses to refer to the
Ashburnhams’ estrangement, that after a particularly arrant infidelity
Leonora never ‘acted the part of wife to him’ (p. 122). The Good Soldier,
in short, is replete with cross-circuiting of the usual dividing lines
between familial and social – and particularly sexual – relationships. The
novel places cultural ties and taboos in dangerously libidinal apposition
to the kinds of structures that are normally thought to be essential to
the well-being both of the society of the so-called ‘good people’ of the
novel, and of European society writ large.
Yet for Dowell, these cross-circuited relationships represent a kind of
perfect model of society and a desired future. When he notes that he
‘trusted in Edward and Leonora and in Nancy Rufford, and in the tran-
quillity of ancient haunts of peace, as [he] had trusted in [his] mother’s
love’ (p. 140), his simile suggests that non-familial groups can take the
emotional place of a singular source of a familial happiness (‘mother’s
love’) that is most notable in the novel by its absence. Moreover, the
structures and places of the past (the ‘ancient haunts of peace’) can
serve as a template for a perfection that could transcend societal change
and individual longing. Dowell’s perfect society may be imagined as the
macrocosmic expansion of an originating small group who are bound
not by blood but by self-election. Dowell can imagine nothing more
ideal than the initial grouping of the four people he describes in the
novel’s opening, locked in an aristocratic and timeless dance. Dowell
calls that dance a minuet de la cour, whose name suggests both aristo-
cratic stability (‘a minuet of the court’) and, punningly, a minuet of the
heart (‘de la coeur’). It serves as an economic emblem for the imbrication
46 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

of aesthetic form, social structure, and historical persistence.11 Dowell

wants nothing more than to remain at the centre of such a dance with
a wife who is sexually more like a sister, and two friends who serve
Dowell alternately as models of brother, sister, and mother. However,
by the novel’s end the altered remaining ménage – Dowell and the mad
Nancy – emerges as a mere parody of his earlier utopian hopes. He has
found the ideal home in Branshaw Teleragh – or at least Florence’s ideal
home, in Florence’s absence – and he cannot quite decide if Nancy’s
insanity makes her role as half-daughter, half-fiancée, a disappointment
or a kind of relief.
How can one explain Dowell’s model of a desexualized quasi-family
as a microcosm of societal perfection? Ford subtitled his novel ‘A Tale
of Passion’. If one takes that subtitle seriously one may read The Good
Soldier as a novel that projects and evaluates the role of individual fan-
tasy within the context of familial and social organization before the
First World War, a kind of Anglicized answer to Dostoyevsky’s Notes
from the Underground (1864). Ford’s characters, like Dostoyevsky’s earlier
narrator, can imagine perfect societies only in the absence of the kinds
of individual aberrance – mental and sexual – that are an inevitable
part of being human. The cour can only exist in the absence of the
coeur. However, one can see how these themes work more clearly if
one takes as reference point not Dostoyevsky, but an earlier and lesser-
known Ford novel, The Inheritors, which Ford nominally co-wrote with
Joseph Conrad in 1901.12 The Inheritors is a curious mixture of politi-
cal satire and roman à clef that, among other things, rewrites Heart of
Darkness (1899) as a colonial plot to enslave the Eskimos of Greenland.
It begins as overt science fiction. The novel’s first-person narrator,
Arthur Granger, meets a mysterious and beautiful woman who intro-
duces herself as a visitor from the Fourth Dimension, a character who
gradually infiltrates both the narrator’s family and his social world. She
is ‘adopted’ as a niece by his aunt and introduces herself to everyone as
his sister, with enough conviction that Granger, an early version of the
typically passive Ford hero, comes to call her his ‘pseudo-sister’ (Conrad
and Ford, 1901, p. 103), an apparent substitute for a biological sister
who died years before.
Initially Granger accepts the woman as a simultaneously sexualized
and desexualized partner, and in the same euphemistic social language
that clusters around Dowell’s relationship with Florence and Leonora
in The Good Soldier: ‘“Ah,” I said ironically, “you are going to be a sister
to me, as they say”’ (p. 37). Eventually, however, he falls in love with
the Dimensionist woman, even as he comes to realize the impossibility
 Scott W. Klein 47

of the relationship. He discovers that she is from the future, for that is
what the Fourth Dimension reveals itself to be. But she is also, literally,
the future itself. She is seductive, heartless, guaranteed to replace the
known world with whatever anti-traditionalist social and political
organization is to come. Granger cannot marry her, because the present
can never be mated to the future, and also because, as he notes with
typical Fordian irony: ‘One remembers sooner or later that a country-
man may not marry his reputed sister without scandal’ (p. 263).
Like the later Dowell, Granger sees in this imagined but doomed rela-
tionship a kind of vision of personal renewal. In Paris, Granger writes,
‘I seemed to be at the entrance of a new life, a better sort of paradise’
(p. 141). Indeed, he describes the woman as a transcendent vision of a
new world: ‘The sight of her had dwarfed everything,’ he declares, ‘made
me out of conceit with the world – with that part of the world that
had become my world. I wanted to get up into hers – and I could not
see any way’ (p. 129). The relationship with the Dimensionist woman
remains fantastical, even tragically absurd. But it is also, allegorically,
political. Initially Granger assumes that the Dimensionist woman is the
representative of a hostile country, misunderstanding her foreignness
as the sign of a threatening nationalism rather than of a time still to
come. The future might as well be Germany.13 The Dimensionist woman
becomes involved with social machinations that obscurely involve the
British press, international financiers, and corruption among politicians.
Her plans are coordinated to bring down the current social system and
to leave the Fourth Dimension in its place. The Dimensionist woman
denies her interest in local regime change, that she plans to ‘restore the
Stuarts’ (p. 97), but other characters whisper that she has a ‘real genius
for organization’ of Legitimist pretenders in France and Spain (p. 99).
This potential absurdity of a Europe befuddled between outmoded ideas
of political organization and contemporary corruption is mirrored by
the novel’s central conceit: the Duc de Mersch’s creation in Greenland of
a model state, ‘the model state, in which washed and broadclothed
Esquimaux would live, side by side, regenerated lives, enfranchised
equals of choicely selected younger sons of whatever occidental race’
(p. 45). As the Duc explains of Greenland before the collapse of his plans,
‘[i]t has been the dream of my life to leave behind me a happy and con-
tented State – as much as laws and organization can make one’ (p. 147).
The Inheritors makes clear, as its source text Heart of Darkness had
before it, that laws and organizations – not to mention European
monarchs – can only go so far to produce the happy and contented
state, that they may in fact undermine the state’s moral right to exist.
48 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

But the alternative, the force of charismatic individual personality, has

its political limits as well. The Dimensionist woman uses Granger’s
quasi-sexual attraction for her own Machiavellian political ends. Her
future has no room for such human traits as compassion or love, for
such expressions of individuality can lead to nothing but corruption
and failure. Ford places before his novel the epigraph ‘Sardanapalus
builded seven cities in a day. / Let us eat, drink and sleep, for to-morrow
we die’ (unpaginated title page). Sardanapalus, the legendary last king
of Assyria, was a byword in the Romantic era for the irreconcilable
coexistence of personal decadence and empire-building.14 The epigraph
suggests the necessary failure of politics that are based on human
weakness, but also on the historical inability to imagine a permanent
alternative. This theme is underlined in the novel by Granger’s plan to
collaborate with one of the novel’s doomed politicians on a book about
Oliver Cromwell (p. 109). Contemplating how history sweeps away
even those who attempt the most radical of social transformations,
Granger concludes: ‘There was no Cromwell; he had lived, had worked
for the future – and now he had ceased to exist. His future – our past,
had come to an end’ (p. 296).
What, then, to make of the confluence of utopian yearnings and
tragic futility in Ford’s novels? In The Inheritors the projected perfect
state of Greenland gives way before the corruptions of human politi-
cians and financiers, while the dystopian future is promised only as
a sweeping away of the affective qualities that make one human.
In The Good Soldier projected ‘perfect societies’ – represented by the
quasi-aristocratic organization of the pre-War spa and by Dowell’s fan-
tasies of a persistent quasi-familial grouping – are undermined by the
persistence within them of the irrationalities that are inseparable from
individuality, whether one be an Ashburnham, a Sardanapalus, or a
Cromwell. We may make partial sense of these novels’ admixtures of
tragedy and idealism by recognizing that these contradictions fit within
received generic patterns. Comedy is the generic obverse of tragedy, and
dystopianism is arguably the generic obverse of utopianism. However,
tragedy and utopian fictions are also thematic and structural inversions
of one another. This is most clearly seen in the ways that each genre
imagines the relationship between the individual and the collective. In
most classical and Shakespearean tragedy the suffering and death of a
single great man or woman typically acts as both the sign and threat
of a general social disintegration. In typical utopian fiction, conversely,
the exceptional health of the overall polis guarantees the happiness
and well-being of the multiplicity of average men. The potential
 Scott W. Klein 49

aberrations of individuality are held in check, unlike in tragedy, by a

social organization that is partly defined by its control of wayward and
merely human impulses.
In tragedy, the family acts as a microcosm for the state, and the destruc-
tion of one becomes a synecdoche for the destruction of the other.
In many tragedies, including the Oresteia (c. 458 BCE) and Hamlet
(c. 1599–1602), the potential dissolution of the state occurs because
of corruptions of unregulated sexuality, where adultery or incest
undermines familial stability. However, in utopian fiction the state (or
whatever serves the structures of social organization) often subsumes
the family, replacing unruly impulses – both the libido and petty self-
ishness – with a rationalized order in which the greater good trumps
individual advantage. In many utopian fictions, indeed, a state appa-
ratus specifically regulates sexuality as a powerful force in need of
rationalization. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for instance,
the social structures of both the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms
control sexuality for the public good. The Lilliputians recognize sexual-
ity as an animal function divorced from both the demands of family
and the soundness of the state, and they remove children from their
parents for education in public nurseries. The Houyhnhnms, wedded
to rationality as the ultimate good, mate for purely eugenic reasons.15
The Inheritors in particular registers a similar elevation of reason over
libido. Ford describes the Dimensionists very much in the mode of the
Houyhnhnms, as a race ‘clear-sighted, eminently practical, incredible;
with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art or rever-
ence for life’, unemotional even to the point that Granger describes the
Dimensionist woman’s voice as ‘listening to a phonograph reciting a
technical work’ (Conrad and Ford, 1901, p. 11). Once exposed to the
Dimensionists, Granger appears in his curious passivity to be unusually
amenable to a world that values abstractions of societal ‘good’ over
sexuality. His attraction to the Dimensionist woman often seems, like
Dowell’s attachments to Florence and Nancy, to be more theoretical
than primal, as when he notes wanly: ‘I wanted to make love to her –
oh, immensely, but I was never in the mood, or the opportunity was
never forthcoming’ (p. 205). As with Dowell, ideas for Granger can carry
more force than sexuality, as when Granger reads a well-crafted article
and relates that it ‘made [him] tingle with desire, with the desire that
transcends the sexual; the desire for the fine phrase, for the right word –
for all the other intangibles’ (p. 164).
This reaching for intangibles takes more general realist form in The
Good Soldier than in The Inheritors, which operates largely in the realm
50 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

of allegory. Yet in both novels passion and individuality bring tragedy,

while suppression and conformity create at least the possibility of a
future collectivity. Both novels imagine social structure as a microcosm
based on a small and closed set of social relations. Such a microcosm
offers either the possibilities of tragic dissolution – for, as Dowell reminds
us, ‘the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the
Goths’ (Ford, 1915b, p. 3) – or the extension of the kind of societal
‘family’ promised by Ashburnham’s theoretical belief in the collectiv-
ity implicit in the feudal system.16 Where The Good Soldier differs from
The Inheritors, however, is in its diagnosis of the topos of its utopia.
The Inheritors leaves open the possibility that the Future will still be
modelled along recognizable political lines. At the end of the novel
the Dimensionist woman marries the politician Charles Gurnard, and
the novel suggests that the future of England will be in the hands of a
new breed of politician, ‘the type of the age’ (Conrad and Ford, 1901,
p. 324). The Good Soldier, written closer to the beginning of the First World
War, imagines that future collectivities will bypass the state entirely –
not in the mode of fantasy, where communities achieve such perfec-
tion that political organization is no longer necessary, but by imagining
social organization as quasi-familial units which teeter paradoxically
on the edge created by the conflict between tragic and utopian collec-
tivities: created by sexuality at the same time as they reject sexuality as
dangerously destabilizing.
This seems radical when stated baldly, until one recognizes that
the ambiguously sexual quasi-family is a surprisingly typical mode
of social imagination in novels of the 1910s. E. M. Forster’s Howards
End (1910) and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), for instance,
also interweave utopian and tragic thematic elements, concluding
with implications of the future configured by the non-familial family.
Howards End presents a mixed clan of the landed Wilcoxes, the aesthetic
Schlegels, and the working-class Basts as the new, and presumably
permanent, residents of the novel’s titular estate. The manor house
becomes a tropological representation of the larger culture, much as
does Ford’s Branshaw Teleragh, an inheritance of the symbolic strat-
egies of the Victorian novel.17 The illegitimate child of Leonard Bast
and Helen Schlegel becomes a paradigm for the ‘melting pot’ of classes
in the future of England, as the depleted Wilcoxes take their secondary
place within the family structure. This quasi-family has been brought
together by sexuality, for it would not exist but for Helen and Leonard’s
liaison. But once it is constituted eros disappears: Leonard dies and the
marriage of Henry and Margaret Wilcox is barren.18 In Women in Love,
 Scott W. Klein 51

eros is a similarly essential but insufficient basis for social organization.

The marriage of Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen serves as the novel’s
concluding model for the potential revivification of culture, ab ovo and
away from mainstream society. But such a revivification, at least from
Birkin’s point of view, would not only need to include heterosexual
bonds but also blood-brotherhood with Gerald Crich. However poten-
tially homoerotic the Birkin–Crich relationship may appear to many
contemporary readers, Birkin’s model for a future polis is defined less
by its incorporation of competing forms of eros than by how such an
extended family or commune must work to transcend such individual
limitations (see Lawrence, 1920, pp. 199–201 and the novel’s closing
conversation).
How, then, can we also understand the other most significant feature
these novels have in common? For just as each of these novels portrays
societies that must impossibly both express and repress eros – to return
to our opening subject – each also contravenes Aristotelian proprie-
ties of stylistic realism and plausibility. Conrad and Ford subtitled The
Inheritors ‘An Extravagant Story’, and it lives up to the etymological
meaning of ‘extravagant’ – ‘wandering beyond borders’ – both by its
errancy from standards of narrative realism and by its transgressing of
the barriers that typically divide fictional genres from one another. Each
of the other novels contains less overt forms of unlikeliness that test the
borders of narrative realism. John Dowell’s failures of self-recognition
and The Good Soldier’s overall melodramas of suicides and madness are
simply special cases of moment where the canonical British novels of
the 1910s take odd stylistic swerves into the uncanny: other examples
include the strange shift of tone in the scene of the death of Leonard
Bast in Howards End and the Futurist tendencies of Women in Love,
including Gudrun’s nihilist but transcendent experiences in the Tyrol.
The conventional realist novelist could surely present all of these, to use
Aristotle’s terms, in ‘more probable form’.
Yet their failure to do so is not necessarily a mere capitulation to
‘absurdity’. Suzanne Keen has argued that many nineteenth-century
English novels include self-contained narrative byways that strain ideas
of both novelistic propriety and the subject matters that were considered
conventionally amenable to novelistic form. She calls these sequences
‘narrative annexes’, and she suggests that in such often self-contained
sections – as in the ‘New Eden’ sequence of Charles Dickens’s Martin
Chuzzlewit (1843–44) – the novelist is able to deal temporarily with
cultural matters that are too controversial or anomalous for the main
body of the novel. The typical response to such passages, she notes,
52 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

was critical cries of ‘Unlikely!’ and ‘Improbable!’ (Keen, 1998, p. 4).

Keen suggests that these annexes act as conduits into which authors
could channel uncomfortable cultural ideas and elements of romance
into their novel without allowing them wholly to deform it. Keen’s
analysis provides a useful framework for approaching the trouble
spots in these novels of the 1910s, for it provides a way of negotiation
between their themes and their stylistic anomalies. Utopian and tragic
motifs in these novels can only intersect imperfectly. Dowell can’t
decide if his story is tragic or ideal, Birkin can’t decide whether his ideal-
ized society is possible without Gerald, and the idyll of Howards End
may or may not survive the industrial ‘red rust’ (Forster, 1910, p. 289)
of the newly constructed suburbias that are encroaching from London.
When these fictions try to imagine the integration of such opposites,
the realist mode so admired by Ford breaks down. Authors of Victorian
novels, Keen suggests, cordoned off their narrative annexes within
their surrounding novels. In the novels of the 1910s, however, such
divisions are porous. Moments of improbability and generic anomaly
bleed into the larger narratives such that their moments of ‘unreality’ –
of symbolism, or improbability – become not an aberration but a note-
worthy effect of the narratives as a whole. Neither utopian fiction nor
tragedy are realist modes, and the thematic pressures of both in turn
exert pressure upon the generally ‘realist’ texture of these novels in
moments of heightened unreality and melodrama, moments which
Forster’s Margaret Schlegel might describe as having ‘the kink of the
unseen about them’ (p. 65). The novels, The Good Soldier among them,
suggest that the future is paradoxically predicated upon incompatible
versions of the family, as both the source of individual dissolution and –
when reconfigured as the quasi-family – as the potential model for
an ideal England. They imply that such a self-contradictory future,
particularly when set against the cultural and economic conditions that
were leading up to the First World War, may be strictly unimaginable
outside of fantasy.19
This is not to suggest that The Good Soldier should be read as either
an overt hybrid of genres, or as a self-conscious alliance between social
realism and dystopian futurism. But it is to claim that one should read
The Good Soldier, as critics have long read Howards End and Women in
Love, not merely as a prolonged experiment in untrustworthy narration,
but as a ‘condition of England’ novel, one that questions British social
organization at a time of political crisis, and whose narrative oddities
reflect the self-contradictory social ideas that its characters attempt to
hold in precarious balance. Its yearnings towards perfection may be
 Scott W. Klein 53

usefully seen then as not merely an effect of a nascent ‘high modernism’,

but also a part of a larger conversation about utopian cultural ideas that
were then circulating in other, mainly popular and fantastic, novels
of the day.20 As H. G. Wells said in his 1939 radio address: ‘“If only” –
that is the Utopian key note’ (Wells, 1939, p. 117). By asking ‘if only’
about the sometimes implausible intersections of personal tragedy and
a potentially utopian social organization, The Good Soldier questions the
validity of utopianism as a mode of fictional and social thought. The
novel also asks in parallel whether tragedy, because of its imbrication
in family and sexuality, must inevitably win the day. As Ford asks
in England and the English (1907): ‘Humanity is on the march some-
where, tomorrow the ultimate questions shall be solved and the soul
of man assuaged. Perhaps it shall. […] Or is this only rhetoric, or only
romance?’ (Ford, 1905, pp. 39–40). The Good Soldier, and the early mod-
ernist novels which cluster around it, answer in their different ways that
the soul of man can never perhaps be wholly assuaged, or the ultimate
questions answered. However, they also suggest that the competing
rhetorics of utopianism and tragedy can go some way towards qualify-
ing whether hope for the future may be best understood in the context
of an impossible ‘romance’ or, alternately, in light of a nominally realist,
but ‘unlikely’, fiction.

Notes
1. A contemporary review in The Daily Telegraph, for instance, noted the novel’s
‘strange, tragic atmosphere’ while claiming ‘one never knows into what by-
path the American first-person-singular is going to wander next’ (‘Current
Literature’, 16 April 1915). The Illustrated London News went further, calling
Dowell a ‘man-mouthpiece’ and calling the novel’s contrast between inner
and outer lives ‘incredible’ (‘New Novels’, 24 April 1915). C. E. Lawrence in
The Daily Chronicle called the bare plot ‘preposterous’ (‘Passion and People:
The Old Story in New Settings’, 28 April 1915). The best known of the novel’s
early reviewers, Theodore Dreiser, referred to Dowell as ‘blind as a bat, as dull
as a mallet, and as weak as any sentimentalist ever’ (‘The Saddest Story’, The
New Republic, 12 June 1915). These contemporary reviews may be found in
Ford (1915c, pp. 281–92).
2. See, for instance, his description of Leonora’s intimacy with Florence as
‘nothing could have been more unlikely’ (Ford, 1915b, p. 34), or his idea that
spitting on Ashburnham’s grave would be ‘about the most unlikely thing
I could do; but there it is’ (p. 72). The word ‘impossible’ occurs in the text
ten times, with valences ranging from the literal (Leonora’s ‘impossible job
of making Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband’; p. 40), to implying the
socially undesirable or absurd (that is, Ashburnham’s ‘impossible subscrip-
tions to hospitals’; p. 39).
54 The Good Soldier and Quasi-Familial Transcendence

3. See Ford (1915c, pp. 232–45). The poem originally appeared in On Heaven
and Poems Written on Active Service (London and New York: John Lane,
1918).
4. See the descriptions of Ashburnham’s eyes: ‘When you looked at them care-
fully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward, per-
fectly, perfectly stupid’, and ‘the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly direct
and perfectly unchanging’ (Ford, 1915b, p. 18). Variations on the root word
‘perfect’ appear nine other times in the novel.
5. The phrase also appears in Ford’s Between St. Dennis and St. George (Ford,
1915a, p. 184). Given the novel’s epigraph from Psalms 199.1, however,
Dowell’s phrase draws perhaps from Psalms 85.10: ‘Loving kindness and
truth have met together / Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.’
6. The imagery is particularly American: ‘They were like a couple of Sioux who
had gotten hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake. I tell you
there was no end to the tortures they inflicted upon him’ (Ford, 1915b,
p. 166).
7. Ford in his ‘Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford’ (1927) explains that the title
of The Good Soldier was changed at the request of John Lane, the original
publisher, because the coming of the War rendered a book by that name
unsalable (Ford, 1915b, p. ix).
8. For the influence of Greek tragedy on Ford, see The March of Literature (1938),
in which he notes that ‘the writer’s private life has been singularly domi-
nated by Greek tragedy’ (Ford, 1938, p. 118). Ford’s first post-war work was,
indeed, an unpublished translation of Euripides’s Alcestis, whose manuscript
may be found in the Ford Madox Ford archives at Cornell University (March
1919; Collection Number 4605, Box 2, Folder 2).
9. Nancy receives a telegram from her mother saying ‘you ought to be on the
streets with me’, a phrase that Nancy does not understand. The telegram
continues: ‘How do you know that you are even Colonel Rufford’s daugh-
ter?’ (Ford, 1915b, p. 157).
10. Ford called this establishment of character motivation ‘justification’. For
the importance of ‘justification’ to The Good Soldier see Levenson (1991,
pp. 102–20).
11. The Menuet de la Cour was a choreographed dance for one or more couples,
of unusual historical duration. It originated in eighteenth-century France
but was still danced through the time period of the novel. See Russell and
Bourassa (2007).
12. Max Saunders notes that Ford ‘did most of the writing himself, although
he discussed it extensively with Conrad’ (1996, pp. 135–6). Saunders cites a
letter of November 1899 in which Conrad wrote to Ford: ‘If I had influence
enough with publishers I would make them publish the book in your name
alone – because the work is all yours’ (p. 121).
13. ‘Where do you come from?,’ Granger asks her early on. ‘You must belong
to one of the new nations. You are a foreigner, I’ll swear, because you have
such a fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a
Prussian’ (Conrad and Ford, 1901, p. 5).
14. The quotation itself is obscure, and may be of Ford’s invention: it is only
otherwise attested in another of Ford’s works, Provence (1935, p. 244).
Sardanapalus was the subject of an 1821 tragedy by Byron; an 1827 painting,
 Scott W. Klein 55

The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix; and an 1871 watercolour,

The Dream of Sardanapalus, by Ford’s grandfather Ford Madox Brown.
15. See Book 1, Chapter 6, and Book 4, Chapter 8 of Swift’s text (1726, pp. 54–5
and p. 250).
16. In The Good Soldier Dowell notes the key issue that leads to sexual dissolu-
tion between Ashburnham and Leonora in exactly these terms: ‘his own
traditions were entirely collective, his wife was a sheer individualist’ (Ford,
1915b, p. 100).
17. In this regard I expressly disagree with Mark D. Larabee’s assertion that in
The Good Soldier Ford does not ‘address the condition of England as the
condition of an exemplary house (such as Forster’s Howards End)’ (Larabee,
2010, p. 91).
18. See Chapter XLIV of Howards End and the moment where Miss Avery shows
Margaret the nursery in Howards End and she ‘turned away without speak-
ing’ (Forster, 1910, p. 233).
19. Even a novel as overtly fantastical as The Inheritors shows an awareness of
its own negotiation of fictional and social genres, as when Granger notes
at a turn of the Dimensionist plot ‘we had passed out of a realm of farcical
allegory’ (Conrad and Ford, 1901, p. 186).
20. The year 1915 was also the year of publication, for instance, of John
Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, L. Frank
Baum’s The Scarecrow of Oz, and Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and his Aerial
Warship, popular fictions in which social, technological, or military progress
takes on unlikely or fantastical forms.
3
Providing Ridicule: Wyndham
Lewis and Satire in the
‘Postwar-to-end-war World’
Nathan Waddell

At an early point in H. G. Wells’s The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930)

there is a telling quip. In an inter-war modernity in which ‘[e]spionage
had never been so universal, conscientious, and respected’, and in
which ‘the double cross of Christian diplomacy ruled the skies from
Washington to Tokyo’, it is noted that

Britain and France, America, Germany, [and] Moscow cultivated

navies and armies and carried on high dignified diplomacies and
made secret agreements with and against each other just as though
there had never been that stupid talk about ‘a war to end war.’ (Wells,
1930, p. 8)

What makes the allusion to ‘that stupid talk’ so significant is the fact
that the ‘war-to-end-war’ rhetoric scorned here was made newly visible
during the First World War by none other than H. G. Wells. Such lan-
guage had played a part in the American Civil War (Schulte Nordholt,
1991, p. 223), but it was Wells’s book The War That Will End War (1914)
that really set the phrase in Western ways of thinking. In this text Wells
saw the First World War in its early stages as waged by a ‘warring sea of
men’ marked by ‘famine’, ‘hideous butchery’, and the signs of ‘disease’
(Wells, 1914, p. 12). He also branded the War ‘the greatest of all wars’, a
war whose magnitude came from the fact that it was ‘not just another
war’ but ‘the last’ (p. 11, emphasis added). Predicting a future in which
there would be ‘no more Kaisers’ and ‘no more Krupps’ (p. 12), Wells
claimed that the War implied a ‘pacification of the world […] for which,
by the thousand, men [were] laying down their lives’ (p. 13).
By 1930 things had reversed. When he wrote The Autocracy of
Mr. Parham Wells had long abandoned the ‘war-to-end-wars’ mindset
56
 Nathan Waddell 57

that he himself had popularized, and had instead reached a sceptical

perspective on a rather different Europe, one shaped by the Treaty of
Versailles and by the League of Nations. Wells was joined in his scepti-
cism by several figures, not least by Wyndham Lewis, who wrote to Wells
in 1928 to affirm a comparable outlook on ‘the questions of war and
Peace’ (Lewis, 1963, p. 180) which had troubled Lewis ever since he had
taken part in the First World War as an artillery officer. In 1942 Lewis
again wrote to Wells on this subject, stating that, ‘[l]ike the last, this war
is about war’ (p. 333). Lightly mocking the ‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetoric
that he, among many others, had questioned a decade previously, and
referring sarcastically to the key political players in the development
of Versailles, Lewis raised the possibility that this Second World War
had ‘a much better chance of ending war than the [Woodrow] Wilson
and [David] Lloyd George set-up had’ (pp. 333–4). However, Lewis
granted that he was probably being ‘too sanguine’ about the looming
conflict, and suggested that what was important was that the Second
World War didn’t end with another treaty that would set the stage for
yet more hostilities further down the line – or, as he more imaginatively
put it, that it did not ‘fizzle out in an orgy of mass-selfishness’ (p. 334).
When he realized that another world war was on the cards he had been
‘immensely depressed’, mainly because Britain ‘had been so fearfully
battered last time: and there it was, dancing that fearful dance again,
and working itself up into a fever’ (p. 334). Looking back in 1942 on
the build-up to war in the late 1930s, Lewis remembered that he felt he
could contribute to the war effort in an oblique way by ‘provid[ing] ridi-
cule and sedative’ (p. 334). However, he confessed that when he heard
‘the war-drums rolling again’ he ‘thought too much about [his] tribe [of
artists and writers]’ (p. 334) and too little about the humanity that was
about to live through another militarized nightmare.
This reference to providing ‘ridicule and sedative’ evokes the occu-
pation at which Lewis excelled, and to which he methodically turned
in the 1930s as political affairs came more and more to preoccupy
him – that of the satirist, a role he performed with such gusto that in
1922 the science journalist J. W. N. Sullivan called him ‘one of the best
living masters of English invective’ (Sullivan, 1922, p. 14). As a genius
of the broadside (or a ‘swashbuckler of mind’, in Sullivan’s phrase),
Lewis ridiculed multiple aspects of his time, thereby anaesthetizing, and
making conceptual space for alternatives to, the various tendencies he
loathed. Politics, and the links between politics and literature, were par-
ticularly pressing issues here. Lewis had throughout the inter-war period
been grappling with the question of just how far literature ought to
58 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

engage with political questions; since the days of BLAST he had backed
the view that ‘the artist is NOT a useful figure’, and had insisted that
‘the moment [the artist] becomes USEFUL and active he ceases to be an
artist’ (Lewis, 1915c, p. 40). However, Lewis recognized that the non-
political ‘purity’ of art was highly contentious, and, moreover, argued
that art might be political, in the sense of engaging with the politics of
its moment, even if it needn’t be politicized, in the sense of endorsing
a specific ideology. In the 1930s such distinctions became marked for
Lewis, as in this period he increasingly presented himself as a non-
didactic satirist hoping, nevertheless, to scrutinize social and political
questions. Surveying the field of contemporary fiction in ‘“Detachment”
and the Fictionist’ (1934), Lewis argued that a writer ‘must be peculiarly
handicapped if he is politically ignorant of or unsusceptible to the great
revolutions of opinion of his time’ (Lewis, 1934b, p. 226), but he was
also convinced that the best literary works were those which aimed ‘to
stand above the mêlée, and to function as an instrument of impartial
truth’ (p. 227). He maintained that such a ‘detachment’ was in certain
respects undesirable, as it threatened to separate the artist from the con-
cerns of his era, but he also pointed out that perfect objectivity (of the
kind available to a deity, say) was not attainable by human agents. Lewis
conceded that ‘sides have to be taken’ (p. 228) in writing, and especially
in satire, but he insisted that a writer needs to function ‘as an artist’
(p. 227) if he is to function effectively.
The distinction Lewis was aiming at here can be explained as the
difference between a writer who hopes to moralize and to influence
society, and an author who hopes to explore, without seeking to
find easy solutions to, social problems. For Lewis, satire belonged in
the second of these categories. There are moments in such texts as
The Childermass (1928), The Apes of God (1930), and Snooty Baronet
(1932) when Lewis writes as ‘an inveterate moralist’, ‘the dehumanis-
ing detachment of his method’ continuously being ‘counter-balanced
(and generally overwhelmed) by his conscientious, fiercely personal
disgust’ (Bradshaw, 2004, p. 222). However, Lewis’s general desire was
for a mode of satire within which moralism would be subordinated to
a ‘non-moral’ concern with what he took as the realities of human life.
Lewis viewed existence as inherently absurd, and his satire tackles the
apparently deterministic and mechanical properties of human life (both
of which he foregrounded in his satirical prose through an ‘external’
aesthetic that emphasized the jerky, machine-like movements of the
self). This approach was meant to expose the self’s ‘drastic limitations’,
as Lewis called them in Men Without Art (1934), by responding to ‘an
 Nathan Waddell 59

“expressionist” universe […] where everything is not only tipped but

steeped in a philosophic solution of the material, not of mirth, but of
the intense and even painful sense of the absurd’ (Lewis, 1934c, p. 232),
and its mockery was attuned, at least in Lewis’s rhetoric, to non-moral
principles, the satirist’s contempt being based in the first instance on
the folly of ‘gestation, metabolism, hunger and thirst, courtship, repro-
duction, and all the rest of it’, and on the irrationality of a universe of
‘terrestrial monsters’ living in an ‘evolutionist circus’ (p. 232), rather
than on hatred for this or that attitude or belief.
Lewis went to great lengths in his doctrinal writings to preserve this
‘objective’ version of satire, even though in both his fictional and non-
fictional compositions his antipathy to specific political trends often
spills through. The positivism upon which the concept of a ‘war to end
wars’ depends formed a key target for Lewis in this respect, and as his
theory of satire developed in the 1930s ‘war-to-end-wars’ sloganeering
increasingly featured in the novels and texts in which that theory was
advanced. Moreover, such books as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time
and Western Man (1927), Paleface (1929), and Men Without Art, among
many others, repeatedly emphasize the aggressive tendencies of a mod-
ern world in which, as Lewis saw it, politics was promoted as a remedy
for war even as governments prepared secretly for future conflicts, a
charge he levied in particular against liberal and parliamentary democ-
racies. Satire was crucial to Lewis’s consideration of these issues, as for
him it represented a way of highlighting the flaws of ‘war-to-end-wars’
rhetoric in an extended moment of global pressures; of questioning that
rhetoric without offering neatly defined alternative ways of resolving
political differences; and of showing that animalistic human subjects
are prone to, and constantly encouraged by culture to embrace, violent
behaviour. Consequently, Lewis suggested that wars will to a degree
be inevitable if man’s penchant for violence is ignored and human
savagery left unbridled.
My objective in this chapter is to explore the potential Lewis saw
within satire as a means of resisting the ‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetoric that
irked him from the First World War onwards. In discussing these issues
I will consider how his account of satire changed during the 1930s, and
how for Lewis the satirist is always an individual torn between a desire
to better his surroundings, and a recognition of the self-problematizing
ironies that satire as a mode, in different guises and at different times,
entails. In this respect I will be presenting Lewis as a utopian in the sense
that his desires for an ideal place or state of existence were contained
by a fundamental, and potentially debilitating, scepticism towards their
60 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

own conditions of possibility.1 Lewis described himself in The Mysterious

Mr Bull (1938) as ‘born, if ever a man was, for utopias, built upon a daz-
zlingly white and abstract ground’ (Lewis, 1938, p. 229), but he was also
well aware that such dazzling, abstract ‘ground’ might only be had at
the expense of its ability to be put into practice or, more troublingly, at
the expense of the objections (and perhaps the lives) of those with alter-
native visions of the ideal. Hence the complexities and tangles of his
inter-war account of satire, which Lewis made difficult on the grounds
that only a self-reflexive and ambiguous aesthetic could have any hope
of realistically linking up with the world at which it was targeted.

‘Peace’ after global war

At the start of the First World War many people believed that it would
be so ghastly that it would stop nations from ever again coming
to blows. Such a view ranged in character from the avowals of those
who believed that the War in some sense would make future wars
inconceivable, to the claims of those who felt that the conflict had to be
explained as a war from which humanity might take some sort of neces-
sary pacifist message. The ‘imagined war’ and invasion literatures of the
late Victorian and Edwardian periods had in fact engaged in detail with
the idea of a ‘war to end wars’ in advance of 1914, and in particular as
an Anglo-German feud seemed more and more likely (see Pick, 1993,
pp. 197–8). However, in the wake of Wells’s The War That Will End War
the ‘war to end wars’ concept acquired a new emphasis. His sense that
the Allies needed to get ‘into the heads of these Germans, and therewith
and thereby into the heads of humanity generally’ a spirit that would
‘end not simply a war’ but, moreover, ‘the idea of war’ (Wells, 1914,
p. 91) appealed to those who felt that the industrialized combat that
followed between 1914 and 1918 could or should never happen again,
even if the idea of a ‘war that would end wars’ ultimately emerged as
‘the ironic catch-phrase of a whole generation’s disillusionment’ (Lodge,
1984, p. 205). Indeed, the ‘war to end wars’ concept was soon judged a
fantasy, an idealistic wish to estimate the First World War as ‘so epochal
that it would, unlike all past wars, become the first war in history to
bring an end to the history of war’ itself (Rosenthal, 2011, p. 42).
The most thoughtful responses to these questions stressed the diffi-
culties involved in eradicating war due to man’s violent susceptibilities.
In direct response to one of the articles eventually republished as The
War That Will End War, Bertrand Russell in September 1914 rejected
the ‘war to end wars’ concept on several grounds. He argued that a
 Nathan Waddell 61

peaceful post-war Europe would need the victorious nations to abandon

the climate of distrust from which war had emerged in the first place;
that the Russian desire for a strong Slavic identity would, in the wake
of Germany’s probable defeat, lead to new conflicts on the Indian
frontier; that Prussianism and German militarism were unlikely to
vanish after the War, because Germany would inevitably seek revenge
on the nations which had destroyed its infrastructures; and that war
in general will only end when nations can refrain from fighting their
neighbours, even if they have a just cause to do so (Russell, 1914,
pp. 12–13). Moreover, Russell saw that Wells’s argument depended on
the assumption that, when the end of the War came, men who thought
as Wells did would be in power, even though such an outcome was far
from likely. By the closing months of the War, comparable kinds of
scepticism were commonplace. Aldous Huxley, for example, in a letter
from 12 August 1918 noted that in the post-war period a triumphant
Triple Entente might unknowingly re-invoke the Prussian brutality it
had just been challenging, ‘prussianism [sic] being infectious’ (Huxley,
1969, p. 160). Others appealed to the benefits of experience. In an arti-
cle in The Times on 14 September 1918 it was reported that James Bryce,
the British Ambassador to the United States between 1907 and 1913,
had said that if ‘the sins and sufferings’ of the War ‘could change men’s
hearts, make the thought of war hateful, and instil a love of justice and
right and human brotherhood which could restrain rulers from plung-
ing their peoples into war’ then a lasting peace might be conceivable,
despite the fact that, in Bryce’s view, ‘experience forbade that hope’
(Anon., 1918, p. 8).
In adopting such a reasoned but pessimistic outlook, Bryce was at
least in part responding to the optimism of President Woodrow Wilson,
who in his Fourteen Points Address to Congress of January 1918 asserted
that ‘[t]he day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the
day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular gov-
ernments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace
of the world’ (Wilson, 1918, p. 28). Though Bryce saw as desirable, but
unlikely, the possibility that the First World War might become a ‘war
that would end war’, Wilson adopted a more hopeful, albeit measured,
stance, viewing the events of 1914 to 1918 as a ‘culminating and final
war for human liberty’ that would end in a ‘just and stable peace’ pro-
viding that ‘the chief provocations’ (p. 31) of future conflicts could be
neutralized. Wilson’s enthusiasm for the League of Nations, which he
made evident in his Address to the Second Plenary Session of the Paris
Peace Conference of 1919, gave force to this rhetoric by promoting
62 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

‘permanent arrangements’ by which ‘justice shall be rendered and

peace maintained’, and by trying to ensure that ‘every people in the
world shall choose its own masters and govern its own destinies’ with-
out interference (Wilson, 1919, p. 410). During the wrangling over the
Treaty of Versailles that ensued in the United States Senate later that
year, Wilson wrote to his wife that if the Treaty was not ratified then
‘the War [would] have been fought in vain, and the world [would] be
thrown into chaos’; as he put it: ‘I promised our soldiers, when I asked
them to take up arms, that it was a war to end wars; and if I do not
do all in my power to put the Treaty in effect I will be a slacker and
never able to look those boys in the eye’ (Wilson quoted in Kraig, 2004,
pp. 177–8). Wilson’s depth of feeling was widely shared, but equally
there were those, such as the British trade unionist Holford Knight, who
were unconvinced. Writing in The Manchester Guardian on 20 May 1920,
Knight looked back on the ‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetoric of the preceding
half-decade and dismissed it as fostering useless illusions, while at the
same time he mourned those who were ‘urged by public orators to enter
the army to serve in “the war to end war”’ and who ‘believed these
pleas […] and fought and died’ (Knight, 1920, p. 9) to obey them.
Lewis questioned any and all ‘war-to-end-wars’ proposals as soon as
he encountered them. In the second issue of his Vorticist magazine
BLAST, the ‘War Number’ of 1915, Lewis rejected the ‘war to end wars’
concept on the grounds that he considered ‘[m]urder and destruction’
to be ‘man’s fundamental occupation’ (Lewis, 1915b, p. 16). Although
in the decades to come Lewis’s and Wells’s thinking on war, and espe-
cially on the problems caused by Versailles, would become close, Lewis
was in 1915 unable to believe the ‘PEACE-MAN’ who proclaimed that
‘[h]ere at last is such a tremendous War that it will exterminate even
War itself’ (Lewis, 1915a, p. 13). In an article in the ‘War Number’ titled
‘A Super-Krupp – Or War’s End’ Lewis mockingly declared that ‘[p]eople
will no doubt have to try again in 20 or 30 years if they REALLY like or
need War or not. And so on until present conditions have passed into
Limbo’ (p. 13). By the early 1920s, Lewis had become convinced that
the War would cast a huge shadow over the post-war period, thereby
shaping its structures and vocabularies with a contempt produced in
response to unimaginably destructive hostilities. Hence his claims in
‘The Children of the New Epoch’ (1921) that the post-war period would
be typified by ‘a sort of No Man’s Land atmosphere’ (Lewis, 1921,
[p. 195]), that its most intelligent individuals would have to become
‘entrench[ed]’ (p. 196) to survive, and that they would do so ‘with rage’
(p. 196). Moreover, as the decade unfolded Lewis increasingly suspected
 Nathan Waddell 63

that not only had the First World War not destroyed the possibility of
conflict in general terms, but that there was little hope of peace in the
‘growing violence’ and ‘political chaos’ (Lewis, 1927a, p. 88) of inter-
war modernity.
Like many others, Lewis traced the origins of this chaos to the politi-
cal shifts in Europe which took place in 1919. In the early months of
that year discontent with the way peace was being organized on the
Continent was voiced by several literary figures, among them Joseph
Conrad and Wells. In January 1919 Conrad claimed to Sir Hugh Clifford
that there was ‘something ill-omened in the atmosphere in which
the peace and reconstruction problems [were] being tackled’ (Conrad,
2002, p. 349). Wells argued in The Salvaging of Civilization (1921) that
another ‘well-organized war’ (Wells, 1921, p. 8) was likely on the basis
of the ‘timid legalism’ (p. 17), in his words, of the League of Nations,
which he saw as a fragile half-measure that exacerbated, rather than
assuaged, international tensions. This modified his earlier view, urged
in The War That Will End War, that ‘across the roar and torment of
battlefields’ might be glimpsed ‘the possibility of an organised peace’
(Wells, 1914, p. 14). In The Salvaging of Civilization Wells dismissed the
agreements of 1919, and queried mankind’s ability to build ‘a new order
of as yet scarcely imaginable interest and happiness and achievement’
(Wells, 1921, p. 11). These manoeuvres departed from In the Fourth
Year: Anticipations of a World Peace (1918), in which he saw the idea of
an emergent League of Nations as ‘urgent and necessary’ (Wells, 1918,
p. vii). However, having rejected the League as insufficient, Wells
insisted that a new order was needed if humanity was not to be carried
‘surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries, and
social débâcles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation
beyond our present understanding’ (p. 12). The ‘great creative effort’
(p. 13) required to avoid such outcomes, Wells argued, needed to
develop as ‘an armed and strong world law’ (p. 18), even though he
maintained that such an effort would be limited by the world-views
through which it would have to be conceptualized.
In the 1920s Lewis likewise felt that a ‘great creative effort’ was
needed to prevent war from happening in the future. For a time Lewis
saw fascism as the means with which such an effort might be advanced,
but he eventually abandoned this position in favour of more socially
democratic principles (see Munton, 1976; Ga˛siorek, 2001; and Phillips,
2011). In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis argued that in the context of ideo-
logies aiming to organize society ‘on a world-basis’ arguments about
‘the ethics of war’ – and thus, in a sense, about the very possibility of
64 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

war – ‘would become absurd’ (Lewis, 1926, p. 367). Lewis also claimed
that a worldwide ‘guarantee of peace on earth and the cessation of
wars’ (p. 53) could be had by ‘the agreement of the workers, through
their accredited representatives, to align themselves with the sovietic
and fascist power’, at which point a global and peaceable ‘unity would
immediately be achieved’ (p. 54). Lewis knew that ‘further wars and rev-
olutions’ would most probably occur before a unity of this kind could
become viable, but The Art of Being Ruled indicates that he thought such
conflicts were ‘not any longer necessary’ and that there was ‘no even
political excuse for them [sic]’ (p. 367). Of course, history shows us that
to propose absolutism as the means by which such a warless future
might be achieved was a mistake, but at this stage in his career Lewis
saw ‘the fact of political world-control’ implied by fascism as pointing
to futures in which humanity would be spared the ‘gymnastics’ which
turn individuals into ‘man-eating tiger[s]’ (p. 367). For Lewis, such an
eventuality was desirable even if it meant abandoning the generally
cherished footings of democracy, a system that he in any case felt was
to blame for the First World War to begin with (see p. 82).
Beneath the shifting terrain of Lewis’s politics during this period lies,
among other things, his distrust of the peace rhetorics of Versailles and
of the groupings that had ratified them. At the end of the 1920s Lewis
related the League of Nations to a ‘vast, undirected, [and] purposeless
impulse’ responsible for the hollow subjectivities produced under capi-
talism, deeming the League part of the consumptionist logics ‘resulting
in the endless rigmarole’ (Lewis, 1927b, p. 312) of commodity fetish-
ism, modern media cultures, and revolutionary politics. However, by
the mid-1930s Lewis was talking about the League in a different way,
mainly in response to such developments as the Locarno Treaties
of 1925, and with reference to the looming threat of another global
conflict. In Left Wings Over Europe (1936) he proposed that Versailles had
brought about an ‘unjust Peace’ (Lewis, 1936, p. 164), that the Treaty’s
terms ‘were harsh and unwise’, and that the Germans now had ‘a will to
regain – at all costs – their sense of national self-respect’ (Bridson, 1972,
p. 117). For Lewis, the League of Nations represented the ‘proximate
cause’ of the ‘new Great War’ (Lewis, 1936, p. 32) that would, follow-
ing a worldwide economic slump, ‘leave White Civilization even more
hopelessly bankrupt than at present, even more savage, fatalistic, and
helpless’ (p. 33). To talk in such a climate about war as being able to
end war was for Lewis completely untenable, not only because he felt
that inter-war European tensions were too complex to settle through
armed encounters, but also because he regarded ‘the man who comes
 Nathan Waddell 65

along with a plan for Eternal Peace’ as deceitful: ‘Politicians only talk
about peace-in-the-abstract’, Lewis maintained, ‘when they propose to
have war-in-the-concrete’ (p. 13). Indeed, Lewis wrote Left Wings Over
Europe to position himself ‘against war’ by showing how ‘irrational’ and
‘insane’ (p. 11) such arguments really were, and to expose the treachery
of those who presented another world war as the means by which ‘war’
itself might be nullified.

Satire in the 1930s

Lewis’s satirical novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s respond to a
world proclaiming itself finally beyond war even as within it the seeds
of future hostilities are being sown. In the ‘Foreword’ to his little-read
travelogue Filibusters in Barbary (1932) Lewis decried the ‘profoundly
depressing’ atmosphere of the ‘dying european [sic] society’ of the early
1930s (Lewis, 1932a, p. viii). Announcing his desire to kick ‘the dust
of moralist and immoralist England off his unlutheran feet’ ([p. vii])
he wrote: ‘Some relief is necessary from the daily spectacle of those
expiring Lions and Eagles, who obviously will never recover from
the death-blows they dealt each other (foolish beasts and birds) from
1914–1918, and all the money they owe our dreary old chums the
Bankers for that expensive encounter’ (p. viii). In turn, in The Apes of
God, in which the 1926 General Strike functions, in Morag Shiach’s
words, as a ‘pathology’ (Shiach, 2004, p. 237) of the economic and
ideological tensions of the preceding decade, Lewis dramatizes a society
being shaped by the ‘death-blows’ of 1914–18. The General Strike, as
Lewis depicts it, is symptomatic of the violence simmering within a
post-war society entering a period of economic weakness. The Apes of
God uses the First World War to describe metaphorically certain kinds
of bodily decay, as in the ‘no man’s land of death at the hollow heart
of [Lady Follett’s] decrepit body’ (Lewis, 1930, p. 29), and memories of
the conflict underpin the novel’s account of the striking labourers who
had kept Britain running before, during, and after 1914–18. Moreover,
in charting how London came to a standstill during the Strike, and in
particular how industrial action fostered civil disobedience in which ‘a
Police-inspector and two Specials [were] kicked to death’, and troops
fired ‘with machine-guns upon the populace’ (p. 618), The Apes of God
presents a society still gripped by the pugnaciousness that Lewis felt was
undermining the ‘peace through war’ slogans of the 1920s and 1930s.
On several occasions Lewis considered the problem of how to
keep society free from belligerent feelings when such emotions were
66 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

nourished by culture, advertisements, and journalism. His novel Snooty

Baronet is a case in point. At the beginning of this text, the titular
Baronet lands in an England whose train stations are covered with
posters featuring imperatives to ‘SEE YOUR OWN COUNTRY FIRST’,
‘BUY BRITISH’, and ‘BE MANLY! BE BRITISH! DRINK BEER!’ (Lewis,
1932b, p. 21). Placards and Sunday newspapers display comparable
instructions, and this ‘welcoming Ballyhoo’ (p. 21) confirms that
‘the War [is] not over’ (p. 15) inasmuch as it echoes Lewis’s concern at
the growth of nationalism and belligerent attitudes in post-war England
and Europe. These details resonate with Lewis’s ‘Introduction’ to Men
Without Art, where he wrote that ‘it is useless to talk of No more war,
of World Disarmament, while millions of children are being fed with
a warlike ideology’ by the ‘Church Brigade’ and by ‘the Hollywood
film-factory’ (Lewis, 1934c, p. 12), and this part of Snooty Baronet boosts
the critique, portraying the bellicosity and religiosity of posters and
‘sadly diminished British Sunday Newspaper[s]’ (Lewis, 1932b, p. 21)
as creating a chauvinistic atmosphere in which martial aggressiveness
is incubated. The fact that the Baronet is sent love letters ‘through the
post in coffin-shaped envelopes’ (p. 23) reinforces the novel’s concern
with a modernity marked by death, more specifically by the ‘contagion
of sacrifice’ experienced by ‘many self-collected and imperturbable
heroes of the history-book’ (p. 42), and by those, the Baronet included,
who had fought in the First World War.
The Apes of God and Snooty Baronet, among other texts, show that
Lewis in his fiction blasted the ‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetorics of the inter-
war period just as disdainfully as he had ridiculed them in BLAST. For
Lewis, the 1920s and 1930s were so clearly still gripped by the tenden-
cies that led to war in 1914 that ‘talk of No more war’ was self-cancelling,
even though he recognized that politicians continued to invest in the
concept to maintain the lie, as he put the point in Men Without Art, of a
‘just, humane, and enlightened régime “just around the corner”’ (Lewis,
1934c, p. 213). Lewis had nothing but contempt for such proposals in
the turbulent 1930s: ‘It is simply the part of a fool, and a pathetically
conceited fool at that, to suppose that it is pour nos beaux yeux [to please
us (colloquial)] that any salvationist is ever going to be bustling and
busy’ (pp. 213–14). Lewis’s satires, especially The Childermass, The Apes
of God, Snooty Baronet, and The Revenge for Love (1937), are not short
on caricatures of ‘salvationists’ of this sort, and it is arguable that all of
these texts try to subvert the idea that a ‘just, humane, and enlightened
régime’ might be reachable after a war so ‘final’ as to make war there-
after impossible. In their different ways these texts derive from Lewis’s
 Nathan Waddell 67

opposition to the positivism from which the ‘war to end wars’ notion is
inseparable, and with which he engaged in a number of contexts.
Lewis characterized Progress (with a capital ‘P’), the idea that human
history might be seen as a story of linear onward development, as a
sham, and his account of satire as a form is linked to his resistance
to those who thought otherwise. In Men Without Art, for instance,
Lewis suggested that ‘there is no “progressive” principle at work in life’
(p. 233), a point which dovetails with his argument, urged in Paleface,
that ‘“Progress,” […] as a notion, must be violently attacked and dis-
credited’ (Lewis, 1929, p. 247). However, Lewis also recognized the
impossibility of persuading ‘people to do anything without some sort
of idea of “progress” or betterment’ (p. 247). His acceptance of this
position is shown by the fact that during the inter-war period he per-
sistently made use of the satirical mode (which at the most basic level
aims to remedy, or at least highlight, the shortcomings at which it is
targeted), even as he no less frequently rejected ‘the millennial politics
of revolutionary human change, and endless “Progress”’ (Lewis, 1927b,
p. 422) as illusions. Lewis didn’t endorse a ‘static’ conservatism that
saw mankind as unable to better itself, otherwise he wouldn’t have
spent so much satirical energy throughout his career indicating how the
modern world might learn from its historical mistakes. But Lewis was
suspicious of political rhetorics which viewed man as having achieved,
or as inevitably coming closer to, some superior, unwarlike condition,
and especially when scientific progress had made it easier for men to
slaughter themselves in orgies of ‘mechanized violence’ (Lewis, 1929,
p. 246). Unconvinced by the perfectibilistic idea that mankind is able
unendingly (and unproblematically) to better itself, Lewis used satire to
affirm how effortlessly humanity’s savage impulses might be channelled
into politically and physically catastrophic forms.
Lewis substantiated these ideas by arguing that all ‘countries and
times’ are ‘situated for ever above […] a chaos of unintelligent passions’
(Lewis, 1934c, p. 214) that will be targeted by groups attempting to
profit from the violence that such passions, if appropriately manipu-
lated, might trigger. In a 1919 discussion of post-war art, Lewis wrote
that the First World War had not ‘changed our industrial society or the
appearance of our world’, nor had it ‘made men desire different things,
only possibly the same things harder still’ (Lewis, 1919, p. 113). The
same point holds for Lewis’s view of post-war society, which he con-
ceived as a world keen to see itself as ‘beyond’ war, even though beneath
its surfaces pugnacious tendencies thrived. Viewed from this perspective,
Lewis’s conception of satire might be described as pacifistic – not because
68 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

through satire he tried to show a world from which violence had been
jettisoned, but because through satire he focused on ‘those truths that
people do not care to hear’ (Lewis, 1934c, p. 100), on the ways in which
post-war human subjects might become violent even as the classes rul-
ing over them announced the ‘end’ of conflict in a world apparently
finished with militarized butchery. Put another way, Lewis viewed satire
as having an educative, though non-didactic, thrust: with ‘unpleasant
laughter, rather than with respectful and hortatory wrath’ (p. 142), satire
might dislodge the assumptions of his readers and educate them about
the belligerent tendencies of their surroundings, even if it did not have
to expose them to a tailor-made pathway to peace in the process.
Lewis defended satire as an aesthetic leading to a realistic consid-
eration of post-war life – to see things ‘as they were’ – and therefore
to allow strategies for the betterment of the world to proceed in line
with appropriately calibrated modes of inquiry. But as I have already
suggested, this model cannot be divorced from Lewis’s reservations
about the purity and efficacy of the satirical point of view. Elsewhere
in Men Without Art he wrote that any ‘artist who is not a mere enter-
tainer and money-maker, or self-advertising gossip-star, must today be
penetrated by a sense of the great discontinuity of our destiny’ (p. 103).
By this statement Lewis meant that any artist wishing to have a lasting
impact on society must oppose teleological conceptions of history, and
embrace a more difficult viewpoint ‘bent not so much upon pleasing as
upon being true’ (p. 99). Lewis dismissed the misleading consolations
of those who saw Progress as a necessary side-effect of modernity, and
derided those who viewed global conflicts as setting the stage, in their
sheer bloodthirstiness, for bloodless futures. However, Lewis understood
that although the satirist stands back from his victims and gazes upon
them from a self-defined and unsympathetic ‘transcendental viewpoint’
(p. 232), he nonetheless shares the destinies of the ‘terrestrial monsters’
(p. 232) thereby reproved first of all by belonging to Homo sapiens, and
second by belonging to the intersubjective networks through which
human identity takes shape and is continually reinscribed. These obvious
points imply key costs for the satirist, Lewis argued, because they mean
that to laugh satirically at others is, in fact, to laugh just as forcefully
at the self doing the laughing. When Lewis writes that the satirist looks
‘into the evolutionary machine’ and ‘explores its pattern – or is supposed
to – quite cold-bloodedly’ (p. 96), he gives away the point (through that
apparently innocuous ‘is supposed to’) that cold-bloodedness, another
term for the disinterestedness upon which satire rhetorically depends, is
only available to human agents in limited forms.
 Nathan Waddell 69

Lewis’s argument that ‘it is a dictate of nature that we should laugh,

and laugh loudly’ at those who have fallen into different kinds of ideo-
logical or ontological ‘slavery’ (p. 95) thus cuts both ways, for a laughter
aimed at such limitations can only come from a self comparably bound
by human life. Satire might try to offer non-moral commentaries on
social and cultural shortcomings, but, because the satirist belongs to
the evolutionary machine of a ridiculous humanity, his assessments are
impaired by virtue of coming from a self equally absurd. For Lewis, this
point didn’t mean that satire had nothing to offer the modern world,
but it did imply that satire’s observations were an expression, as he put
it in ‘Art in a Machine Age’ (1934), ‘of the keen appreciation we have
of the particular foolishness or futility that, as animals, willy-nilly we
fall into’ (Lewis, 1934a, p. 270). One such futility, as we have seen, was
the ‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetoric of the First World War and immediately
post-war periods. However, Lewis engaged with these discourses all the
way through the inter-war decades, especially in response to Neville
Chamberlain’s appeasement strategies (and his claim, after the Munich
Agreement in September 1938, that with Hitler’s cooperation ‘peace
with honour’ and ‘peace for our time’ had been secured), and in con-
nection with Maxim Litvinov’s endorsement in the mid-1920s of an
‘indivisible peace’, which Lewis construed in Count Your Dead: They
Are Alive! Or, A New War in the Making (1937) as the disguised revela-
tion of an impending European war (see Lewis, 1937, p. 317). Lewis’s
account of satire was not cordoned off from such problems, and in The
Mysterious Mr Bull (1938) he addressed the question of how to use satire
to denounce ‘war-to-end-wars’ thinking in a period when the satirist
was, in his view, marginalized and distrusted.

The garden path

In Left Wings Over Europe Lewis described the inter-war years as a ‘Peace’
which was ‘no peace at all’, one that had brought Europe ‘face to face
once more with the spectre of universal war’ (Lewis, 1936, p. 168). This
bogus Pax Europaea was for Lewis a ‘postwar-to-end-war world’ (p. 31),
an ironic phrase linked to his sense that ‘an unlimited number of wars
can be fought on the ground that the last one was not bad enough’
(p. 11). For Lewis, the view that the First World War ‘was fought […] in
the belief that such a war – so gigantic, costly, long, and without quarter –
would “end” war’ (p. 11) was mistaken precisely insofar as it relied on a
conception of ‘Peace’ so removed from plain experience as to have ‘no
more reality for us than one of the worlds of the Milky Way’ (p. 12).
70 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

Lewis argued that a better way of talking about modern conflicts was
to focus not on illusory notions of ‘peace-in-the-abstract’ (p. 13), but
on the more taxing problem of those ‘war[s]-in-the-concrete’ (p. 13) by
which such catchphrases as ‘“Perpetual Peace”, or “Indivisible Peace”,
or “Peace in Our Time”, or “Peace with Honour”’ (p. 14) are accompa-
nied. By focusing on war ‘divested of its “indivisible peace” trappings’ a
more productive forward path might be discovered. Such a path would
lead ‘not to the Millenium [sic], certainly; but not into another war
worse than the last, at least’ (p. 14). In other words, Lewis argued that
a more realistic review of the violent tendencies of twentieth-century
modernity might not lead to a future from which ‘difference’ had been
jettisoned, but it might enable an alternative reality in which passionate
disagreements did not necessarily end in war.
The Mysterious Mr Bull engages in depth with such issues. In Men
Without Art, and other texts from earlier in the decade, Lewis had
emphasized the ‘existential’ lineaments of his view of satire. By
contrast, in The Mysterious Mr Bull – a sociological text in which he
dissected the ethnic histories of the English people, and reaffirmed his
antipathy to the ‘war to end wars’ concept – Lewis emphasized the mora-
lism of satire, defining it as ‘a Hymn of Dispraise’ (Lewis, 1938, p. 143)
articulated by an individual ‘either more moral, or more intelligent,
than his victims, and so the representative of Light’ (p. 142). Existential
themes of the sort prioritized in Men Without Art took a back seat here,
as Lewis signalled the more immediately pressing agenda of using satire
to criticize a world in which his fellow Englishmen were displaying ‘a
strange lack of interest in the “crusaders”’ screaming ‘slogans’ at them,
and who were being drawn into accepting ‘another “great adventure”’
(p. 156) – that is, another world war – of the sort that had ended only
two decades earlier. Significantly, in this text Lewis redeployed the dis-
course of Left Wings Over Europe, arguing, through a sarcastic dismissal
of the ‘land fit for heroes’ concept promoted by David Lloyd George in
the so-called ‘Coupon Election’ of 1918, that the ‘world-fit-for-heroes-
to-live-in has been a worse world decidedly than the one in which there
were no “heroes”’ (p. 156). Lewis also urged that it wasn’t unreasonable to
assume that in 1938 the Englishman might welcome satire ‘at the
expense of those persuasive gentlemen who [were] trying to lead him
up the garden [path] once again’ (p. 156). In the shadow of another
world war, however, such a belief was flawed because England had
become ‘a society that turns indifferently away from any tonic criticism
of itself’ (p. 160). Indeed, at this date he viewed satire as an ‘art’
(p. 141) amounting to ‘a criticism of human society’ (p. 144), an art
 Nathan Waddell 71

whose value had been curtailed by the very thing – war – he saw satire
as being particularly empowered to oppose.
The First World War had been ‘an eye-opener for the Englishman’
(p. 156), Lewis argued, even if in certain respects the English had in
the intervening decades bolted into a ‘funk-hole’ (a protective recess
scraped out of the walls of a trench) of wasteful nostalgia, a ‘melan-
choly tête-à-tête with what remains to them of the past’ (p. 154). With
their heads buried in the sand, given that they preferred to forget ‘the
uncomfortable things to which Satire would draw their attention’
(p. 154), the English were a people being hoodwinked into a second
European war because they did not ‘wish to be led into open criticism of
anything or anybody, or indeed, into anything open at all’ (p. 157). For
Lewis, this scenario meant that an increasingly militarized world would
be less interested in how its perils might be questioned through art:

Our senses revolt at too harsh an exhibition of the uncivil and titanic
forces that underlie our life, and threaten us to-day almost palpably,
but which the men of Ben Jonson’s time were so prone to bring out
into the open and indecently to parade. We are more genteel. The
more deadly the poison-gases that are being manufactured in our
military laboratories, the more innocuous, it seems, must be the
lispings upon our stages. The bigger and better our bombs, or aerial
torpedoes, the more sleek and disarming our mufti, de rigueur in our
plush-upholstered stalls. (p. 140)

Riled by such a situation, Lewis argued that ‘[i]f it can be shown that
Satire is a medicine for the State, in the absence of which abuses may
grow to a fantastic rankness’, then his advocacy of the form was owed
‘something more than tolerance’ (p. 137).
However, Lewis was by this point convinced that while satirists
‘themselves have often been none too sure of their ground’ (p. 143), in
an England populated by individuals unwilling to have their assump-
tions challenged the satirist could not be sure of being heeded. This
was the case because in Lewis’s view England had become a nation
disturbed by the approach of war (and thus had become unwilling to
be distressed any further by having its susceptibility to sloganeering laid
bare), and because economic uncertainties had produced a sense that
change, the very thing the satirist desires, leads merely to the same
conditions reproduced in different forms. As a result, Lewis argued, the
English hoped that they might be ‘left alone for as long as possible with-
out interference’ (p. 159). To mention the fact that going to war in the
72 Wyndham Lewis and Satire

name of ending war – as the slogans of the crusaders implied – might

reinforce, rather than remove, the militaristic tendencies of modernity
was useless, as Lewis simply thought it would amount to whistling in
the wind. The satirist might set out ‘to destroy what he considers bad,
or undesirable, so that what is good, and desirable, may take its place’
(p. 144), but if there is no one willing to be exposed to, and learn from,
these processes then the effort is futile. Again, Lewis insisted that satire
need not have simplistic solutions for the problems it addresses;
recalling the terms of ‘“Detachment” and the Fictionist’, he wrote that
the satirist ‘is an artist in destruction: one whose purpose is a more rea-
sonable and beautiful social system’ (p. 145, emphasis added), but who
needn’t define in advance the shape that that more beautiful system
might adopt. And yet Lewis understood that for ‘criticism undertaken
with the deliberate purpose of changing what is criticized’ (p. 144) to
be useful it needs an audience, and a society, willing to be bettered,
and it was precisely an openness to betterment, to ‘ordinary routine
adaptation to environment’ (p. 154), that was in his view lacking in
1930s England.
All of which makes it clear that Lewis was at this point in time
extremely sceptical about whether or not satire could challenge such
abstractions as a ‘postwar-to-end-war world’, or a ‘world-fit-for-heroes-
to-live-in’, even though in the face of such reservations he continued to
invest in satire as a form. Of course, Lewis may well have been insisting
on the marginalization of the satirist because he suspected that by this
point in his career he had himself become ostracized as a writer, and
perhaps largely by his own hand. Indeed, following Lewis’s Hitler book
of 1931, now usually dismissed as his most tarnished work of that dec-
ade, it’s tempting to speculate that the Lewis of The Mysterious Mr Bull
might have been protesting too much, especially given that he had also
acquired a reputation, as W. H. Auden’s and Louis MacNeice’s descrip-
tion of him as a figure ‘fuming out of sight’ (Auden and MacNeice,
1937, p. 247) implies, for being barrenly rancorous and vituperative.
However, the fact that Lewis viewed satire as a discourse that could help
ordinary people question the idea that mechanized slaughter might
end warfare for good, coupled with the discernible links between such
books as The Mysterious Mr Bull and Left Wings Over Europe, implies that
Lewis’s concern at the marginalization of satire as a form was genuine.
In Left Wings Over Europe Lewis argued that modern selves were being
divided into those heading for ‘a mechanical, standardized society of
robots conveniently mesmerized by slogans – worn down, all over the
earth, into a monotonous consistency’, at one extreme, and into those
 Nathan Waddell 73

‘in which there is diversity and individual initiative’ (Lewis, 1936,

p. 22), at the other. The former tendency, Lewis wrote, was ‘the out-
come of an almost mad predilection for the abstract and the theoretic’,
whereas the latter was the consequence ‘of a sane and rational appetite
for the concrete and the real’ (p. 22). Satire, it seems fair to say, was for
Lewis a means of clarifying the ‘concrete and the real’, even though
he continually tried to anticipate the problems he faced in getting his
satirical insights heard.
Of course, the idea that Lewis’s inter-war account of satire was moti-
vated by his sense that the First World War hadn’t made the world a place
in which war could no longer happen has been suggested before (see, for
example, Munton, 1998). However, keeping in mind Lewis’s antipathy
to the constellation of phrases and concepts surrounding the idea of a
‘war to end wars’ enables us more accurately to gauge the scope of his
artistry. His questioning of this concept helped him to formulate a hypo-
thetically non-moralistic satire that was attuned to politics, but it also
enabled him more clearly to grasp the problems a socially conscientious
aesthetic had to confront in an epoch of violently competing ideologies.
Lewis invested in an aggressive form of satire that would help destroy
inadequate accounts of how a warlike modernity might be improved,
but his commitment to the transformative potential of satire always had
to contend with a scepticism about the ability of that aesthetic to affect
his audiences in meaningful ways. Hence his acknowledgement in The
Mysterious Mr Bull that ‘in a society whose values are so shifting and
uncertain as ours, it can be readily understood that the nature of the
authority by which the satirist holds up to scorn anything or anybody, is
a major problem for him’ (Lewis, 1938, p. 143), and his claim that in the
1930s satire might have saved the Englishman from war, even though
the English would not have satire ‘at any price’ (p. 160).

Note
1. I discuss this definition of utopianism at greater length in Waddell (2012,
pp. 8–14).
4
Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and
Intermodern Utopia
Nick Hubble

Introduction

Naomi Mitchison was the author of over 70 books published across

eight decades. It is possible to trace a particular progression within
the many strands of her career, which encompassed a wide range of
genres and non-fiction works. From the publication of her first novel,
The Conquered (1923), set in Roman Gaul, through to the reworking of
her Scottish ancestry in The Bull Calves (1947), her fiction was mostly
historical. Later on in her career, she wrote more science fiction such
as Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), Solution Three (1975), and Not By
Bread Alone (1983). This progression embodies the historic transition,
highlighted by Fredric Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), by
which science fiction has superseded the historical novel as the main
literary vehicle for the pursuit of utopia.
Jameson discusses utopia as both a literary form concerned with
conceiving alternate systems to apparently universal social orders, such
as global capitalism, and a product of historical and collective wish-
fulfilment. There is, he argues, always a mismatch between the historical
familiarity desired by the reader and the alien otherness necessary for
any system to be radically different: ‘The fundamental dynamic of any
Utopian politics (or of any political Utopianism) will therefore always lie
in the dialectic of Identity and Difference, to the degree to which such
a politics aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realising, a system
radically different from this one’ ( Jameson, 2005, p. xii). By arguing that
‘Utopia is philosophically analogous to the [historical] trace,’ Jameson is
able to realign the utopian dynamic as a temporal succession from the
state of the historical trace, which belongs simultaneously to past and
present and therefore ‘constitute[s] a mixture of being and not-being’,

74
 Nick Hubble 75

to that of utopia, which combines the present with ‘the not-yet-being

of the future’ (p. xv, n. 12). It is this understanding of the complex
temporality of utopia that leads to Jameson’s focus on science fiction,
because he sees that same temporality in the historical emergence of
science fiction in the work of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the later
nineteenth century – at the point at which, according to Georg Lukács,
the historical novel ceases to function as a genre – ‘as a form which now
registers some nascent sense of the future, and does so in the space on
which a sense of the past had once been inscribed’ (p. 286).
The first part of this chapter is concerned with looking at Mitchison’s
work in the above contexts both as a case study that will exemplify how
an author can work through the utopian dialectic of identity and dif-
ference, and as a challenge to some of the assumptions underpinning
Jameson’s position. To these ends, Memoirs of a Spacewoman and The
Conquered will be compared to show the aspects of complex utopian
temporality they share despite having been written nearly 40 years
apart. The two novels also share what can be described as a fairy-tale
sensibility characteristic of fantasy fiction and so raise further questions
concerning Jameson’s conception of science fiction, which, as China
Miéville has recently argued in Red Planets (2009), can be seen as part of
a wider critical tradition that privileges science fiction as progressive by
defining it against a fantasy seen as reactionary.
Therefore, the chapter will go on to consider whether such privileg-
ing may be thought of as analogous to the processes by which literary
modernism is placed above other forms of writing in a critical hierarchy.
The context for this widening of the debate is the recent advent
of the critical concept of ‘intermodernism’, which is designed to question
the canonical hierarchy which obscures certain mid-twentieth-century
texts from view because they variously express a concern with people
rather than writing itself, harness their poetics to political ends (often
radically eccentric), and utilize middlebrow and generic forms (see
Bluemel, 2009). Mitchison, of course, is a prime example of a mid-
century British writer whose work has largely been occluded in this
manner with the exception of her political writings and novels of the
1930s, in which her fierce opposition to gender-based and sexual repres-
sion made her a controversial figure even in that decade of controversy.
However, these texts are typically discussed more in terms of social
context than aesthetics.1 Kristin Bluemel originally devised the term
‘intermodernism’ as a means for collectively describing the practice of
one particular network of such politically engaged and eccentric writers
of the 1930s and the wartime years that followed: Mulk Raj Anand,
76 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

Inez Holden, George Orwell, and Stevie Smith (see Bluemel, 2004).
Mitchison was a friend of Smith and can be placed at the centre
of her own parallel network, which included writers as diverse as
W. H. Auden, Walter Greenwood, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis,
and Olaf Stapledon (see Mitchison, 1979). Identifying such networks
counters the ideological construction of writers as individual geniuses
and opens up new possibilities for readings that uncover the multiplic-
ity and heterogeneity of the utopian desires and impulses underlying
texts of the period. In this context, the otherwise uncanny-seeming
collaboration between Mitchison and Lewis, Beyond This Limit (1935),
is here read as an intermodern fantasy that works through the dialectic
of identity and difference in terms of life and death. After examining
the culmination of her political intermodern writing of the 1930s, The
Blood of the Martyrs (1939), the chapter concludes by assessing briefly
the utopian dynamic that animates Mitchison’s work across her career
and its relationship to our understanding of modernity.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman

Memoirs of a Spacewoman narrates various episodes from the life of its

scientist protagonist, Mary, a female inter-cultural communications
expert in a context in which it is made clear that one of the key
components of communication is contact between sex organs. The
fact that the novel principally involves Mary having a variety of sexual
encounters with various aliens and then investigating their reproductive
cycles turns it into a playful but telling corrective to the male-centric
American ‘Golden Age’ science fiction that had dominated the 1930s
and 1940s, and still persisted residually.2 The promise of perfection
held out by the alien cultures encountered in Memoirs of a Spacewoman
always turns out to conceal an insurmountable flaw – and yet, despite
this, the cumulative effect of the narrative is to create a liberating
interplay between identity and difference.
On her first ever space expedition, Mary’s task is to establish commu-
nication with the indigenous intelligent species, who are asymmetrical
radial life forms resembling five-armed starfish. Attempting to adapt
herself to their life rhythms leads her to realize how much her own sense
of identity – general outlook, thought processes, and moral values –
is rooted in the bilateral construction of human beings, whereas the
‘radiates’ simply don’t think in terms of either-or: ‘It began to seem
to me very peculiar that I should do so myself, and that so many of
my judgements were paired; good and evil, black or white, to be or
 Nick Hubble 77

not to be’ (Mitchison, 1962, pp. 26–7). Even her capacity for scientific
judgement gets ‘smudged out’ as she attains a new consciousness in
which choice no longer depends on a straightforward weighing-up of
alternatives but revolves around complex permutations of one to four
options out of five: ‘It thus came about that with no sense of awk-
wardness, two or more choices could be made more or less conflicting
though never opposite’ (p. 27). Drawn into this seductive alien world
of radical difference, with its promise of release from the tired old
dilemmas of human existence, Mary merges into an all-encompassing
relationship with the radiates and slowly starts to forget not only her
own name but also her initial curiosity as to why these creatures were
completely unable to defend themselves against their non-conscious,
insect-like predators, which the humans have called jags. Then,
one day:

I looked up and around slowly, I suppose in a way imitating the radi-

ates, and was suddenly aware of a jag high up but coming straight at
my eyes. And for a moment I was completely unable to save myself;
the simple courses open to me […] all seemed so equivalent that
I could do none of them. Luckily I […] snapped out of it with a
couple of seconds clearance, enough to duck forward so that the jag
shattered itself messily on my shieldings. (p. 29)

Identity and difference are brought into a sudden conflict by the impera-
tives of survival, and the utopian promise of life as a radiate is shattered
as messily as the predatory jag.
Afterwards, though, Mary is reluctant to settle again for a life made
up of only the old choices. When her lover tries to force her back into
the binary pattern by demanding that she should decide whether they
have a baby, she cannot make herself answer despite knowing that
her ‘original personality’ would have chosen to have a child and take
two years away from space exploration. They drift apart, and Mary
recommences exploration until a series of chance events leads to her
finally conceiving when her eggs get ‘inadvertently activated’ during
the first phase of communication with Vly, a two-sexed Martian who
has been temporarily traumatized into a state of (male) monosexuality
(pp. 63–4). Mitchison takes care to explain that the resultant baby is no
inter-species hybrid but a haploid child (that is, the mother’s chromo-
somes in the egg double to make up the full complement).3
Mary chooses the name Viola for her daughter because of its multiple
associations as a flower, musical instrument, and ‘as near a two-sexed
78 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

person as we get on earth’ (p. 66). The overall pattern of the novel can
be seen in this sequence of events, in which what initially appears as
a perfect existence free of the basic dilemmas of choice turns out to
have a number of very real limitations, leading in turn to a kind of
compromise position that is not perfect but which holds open more
possibilities than conventional binary thought.
The concluding sections of the novel deal with the consequences of
an all-female trip to a planet with a sentient, butterfly-like life form. The
butterflies are literally dazzling and tend towards a geometric perfec-
tion that, if fully attained, leads to apparent immortality within their
environment. However, their caterpillars are prone to the easy pleasures
of wallowing in the mud and ‘pattern-making’. The problem is that
the more the caterpillars give in to these temptations, the more likely
they are to emerge from their cocoons with uneven wings. Thus the
butterflies both constantly ‘sting’ the caterpillars when they stray, and
so induce guilt that dissuades them from their ‘wickedness’, and also
attack and kill those other butterflies who are deformed. This causes
the observing scientists to make comparisons between these puritanical
butterflies and the Spanish Inquisition, and to debate whether this kind
of behaviour might be justified if the outcome really is eternal life. Mary
thinks this might be the case, but one of her colleagues, Françoise, is
appalled and kills one of the ‘immortal’ butterflies in order to demon-
strate that they are not fully eternal beings.
As a punishment, Françoise is banned from ever leaving Earth again.
However, she gains partial redemption when she is asked to help out with
an experiment involving Mary that gets out of hand. Mary, a number
of other female scientists, and various female animals, such as Daisy
the dog (with whom Mary can of course communicate), have alien
pseudopods grafted onto them. These grafts initially generate both
contentment and a deepening of emotion among their hosts. However,
in a sequence first manifested in the smaller animals, these early stages
give way to an overwhelming urge for the host to rush into water, where
the grafts dissolve and enter the body to make contact with the host’s
eggs, resulting in violent pain or death. Despite having witnessed all of
this, Mary still eventually tries to get to the water, and it takes Françoise
and another three of her fellow scientists to hold her back and cut
the graft from her neck. Afterwards, Mary is able to get over her expe-
rience quickly because she cannot withdraw into herself, but has to
remain open to others in order to communicate with, and therefore
help the recovery of, her fellow human, Martian, and animal subjects
of the experiment.
 Nick Hubble 79

What is disturbing about these scenes allegorizing pregnancy is the

apparent equation that is implicitly suggested between grafted and
non-grafted female scientists, on the one hand, and the caterpillars
and the butterflies, on the other. As with the earlier sets of oppositions
in the novel, the pleasures of the grafting, and the desires it provokes,
are represented as caterpillar-like, polymorphous perversions that are
in contrast to the butterfly-like, higher perfection of being an objective
scientist. However, in this case, Mary identifies for the first time with
the familiarly human tendency towards polymorphous behaviour,
rather than with the utopian promise of ‘alien’ perfection held by a
radically instrumental science. This is also the first time in the novel
that polymorphous behaviour is shown as directly fatal. The novel ends
with Mary’s realization that being a communications expert means
not just keeping herself open to outside influences but also accepting
the possibility of being rendered so different as to become ‘someone
else’ (p. 159). Identity is not restored by surviving such encounters,
but in being able to look back at them, as Mary does at photographs
of herself with the graft, and recognizing one’s own self in that some-
one else. Mitchison’s key insight, revealed earlier in the novel, into
the possibility of spirally ascending the utopian dialectic of identity
and difference is of the necessity for humiliation. Being confident
and equable is no good because it suggests a closed identity, when
being open to difference and the future requires nothing less than
the willingness to take all the barriers down and run the risk of being
completely taken in or over. That willingness entails not just the risk
of being laughed at by others, but also a capacity for self-abasement to
the point of humiliation:

Out of the very bottom, when the moral and intellectual self one
so carefully builds up has been pulled down, when there is nothing
between one and the uncaring trampling foot of reality, then one
may at last and genuinely observe and know. (pp. 45–6)

The Conquered

Georg Lukács concludes The Historical Novel (1937) by bemoaning the

state of the genre in the 1920s and 1930s, and by calling for ‘renewal
in the form of a negation of negation’ (Lukács, 1937, p. 423). As I indi-
cated in my opening paragraphs, Jameson can be seen as arguing in
Archaeologies of the Future that, in effect, science fiction is the negation
of the negation with respect to historical fiction. Within this context,
80 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

the question arises as to whether Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman

represents a negation of her earlier humanist historical fiction.
Her first novel, The Conquered, dedicated to her brother Jack, is writ-
ten from the viewpoint of French Celts (standing in for Scots) being
overrun by the advancing Roman legions. The protagonist, Meromic,
whose association with wolf imagery appears ironic for much of the
novel, is torn between his sense of duty to his fellow Celts and his
sense of personal loyalty to a Roman, Titus – a dilemma which is com-
pounded by his further sense that both sets of obligations are keeping
him from a life of freedom. Like Memoirs of a Spacewoman, the novel
is about someone trying to escape the apparent binary choices which
serve to constrain so much of life. While Meromic is a man, this inabil-
ity to choose and his sexual attraction to other men serve to render him
symbolically as a ‘female’ point of identification within the novel. In
his first appearances he is inseparable from his sister Fiommar, but the
Roman invasion forces them to flee to a small island. Their intention
is jointly to commit suicide in order to preserve what is presented to
the reader as an Edenic state of noble savagery, but when Meromic is
unable to go through with the act, Fiommar kills herself while in her
brother’s arms:

Fiommar drew her knife, Meromic caught her to him with his left
arm, sobbing, ‘Don’t, don’t!’ She pulled his head down on to her
breast and held tight, stroking his hair and singing […].
Meromic, with his eyes shut, warm against his sister’s soft heart-
beating, felt her suddenly quiver all over; he looked up; she smiled at
him with all the colour ebbing out of her cheeks; her hands fluttered
for a moment over his face; she fell on her side. (Mitchison, 1923,
pp. 79–80)

In terms of the complex temporality that Jameson ascribes to utopian

fiction, the merging of Fiommar into Meromic not only ensures the
persistence of the historical trace of the Edenic state of nature their
initial relationship represents, but also prefigures the transformation at
the end of the novel by which Meromic transcends the limitations of
human choice. This blending of past, present, and future simultaneously
opens up a space for Meromic to work through the dialectic of identity
and difference. In The Conquered, this dialectic is presented in terms
of Meromic’s relationship to the opposed values of Celts and Romans,
whereas, in Memoirs of a Spacewoman, it is presented through Mary’s
 Nick Hubble 81

relationship to humans and aliens. What links the two protagonists,

and shows their genuine commitment to working fully through this
dialectic, is the capacity of both to put themselves through humiliation
rather than make a simple straightforward choice. Eventually, however,
on learning of the ignominious death by strangling of the great Celtic
leader Vercingetorix, Meromic comes to find his self-abasement, in the
service of the Roman he loves, unbearable. Thoughts race through his
head as he lies in bed unable to sleep:

In the woods to the north he heard a wolf howling, very far away: lit-
tle of a wolf he had shown himself, to wear the Roman dress and play
with the Roman children! He leapt out of bed and stood in the dark,
naked and quivering, his heart suddenly full of murder. He thought
of Titus, not as his friend, the one man to be depended on, trusted
in, but as the enemy. […] He thought of the children, not as the little
Caius who played horses with him, the little Laelia he carried about
the garden, but only as means to his revenge, small things, easy for
a one-armed man to kill. Hastily he went over to the wall and took
down the broad-bladed, Gallic knife. (pp. 283–4)

But Meromic is no more allowed to fall apart in this way by Mitchison

than Mary the spacewoman is allowed to run into the water under the
influence of her graft. Instead of becoming a wolf metaphorically and
murdering Titus’s children in their beds, Meromic becomes one literally,
magically transformed by the final appearance of a recurring storyteller
figure and, thus, finally finds freedom running through the woods.
This ending, however fantastical, marks a utopian resolution of the
dialectic of identity and difference as Meromic exchanges the oppres-
sive closed order of his human life for the radical difference of being a
wolf, while at the same time remaining recognizably himself. In fact,
his final transformation redeems what might otherwise be viewed as an
ineffectual and indecisive life, by retrospectively affording it Jameson’s
‘not-yet-being of the future’ alongside its more obvious mix of the
present and the past. Therefore, despite the historically contingent dif-
ferences – notably the increases in sexual freedom and the possibility
of women pursuing careers and being independent – between novels
written 40 years apart, it is clear that Memoirs of a Spacewoman does not
mark some sort of negation of Mitchison’s earlier historical fiction such
as The Conquered, because the same dialectical structure can be traced
across her literary career.
82 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

Intermodern fantasy

The example of Mitchison can be seen both to conform with, and

expand on, Jameson’s account of the relationship between historical
fiction, science fiction, and utopia because while she generates the
complex temporality he describes, she does this in part by employing
the modes and devices of a genre – fantasy – which he dismisses as
‘technically reactionary’ ( Jameson, 2005, pp. 57 and 60). The fairy-tale
sensibility which allows Meromic to be transformed into a wolf is still
present in Memoirs of a Spacewoman in the character of Daisy the talk-
ing dog, who retires from her work in the science labs at the end of
the novel and goes to live with Mary. As Walter Benjamin notes in his
essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936): ‘The liberating magic which the fairy tale
has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way,
but points to its complicity with liberated man’ (Benjamin, 1936,
p. 101). Such complicity with nature should be seen as a key com-
ponent of any viable utopia; not just in environmental terms or in
contradistinction to instrumental rationality, but also precisely as a
mechanism for resolving the dialectic of identity and difference in the
same sort of way as described above with respect to The Conquered. In
terms of the Marxist tradition, for example, such fairy-tale transforma-
tions offer a means of thinking through a radical alternative to the
alienated human condition under capitalism that holds open space for
a simultaneous identification with an Edenic past and a future species
being. From this perspective, fantasy seems exemplarily Jamesonian,
and it is, therefore, worth devoting some consideration as to why this
is not the case.
The roots of Jameson’s dismissal of fantasy lie in Darko Suvin’s
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), in which fantasy is described var-
iously as ‘“proto-Fascist”, anti-rationalist, anti-modern, “overt ideology
plus Freudian erotic patterns”’ (Suvin quoted in Miéville, 2009, p. 231;
originally in Suvin, 1979, p. 69). As Miéville notes, Suvin’s position
is that ‘science fiction is characterised by “cognitive estrangement”,
in which the alienation from the everyday effected by the non-realist
setting is “cognitively” organised’ (Miéville, 2009, p. 231). Although
fantasy also estranges, according to Suvin, it does so in an anti-cognitive
manner, which leads at best to, in Carl Freedman’s words, ‘irrationalist
estrangements’ (Freedman quoted in Miéville, 2009, p. 232). Miéville
argues that the idea that science fiction employs a ‘cognition effect’
authenticated by a claim to scientific rationality is nonsense, and that,
since Wells, the scientific plausibility of science fiction has been widely
 Nick Hubble 83

understood as a game played by the writer and readers that does not
withstand serious scrutiny. This line of argument leads Miéville to focus
on what he sees as a tactic by ‘high Suvinian’ critics to go on defending
their privileging of certain texts regardless of the weakness of the cogni-
tive estrangement argument:

One potential pitfall of the focus among Marxists on the sub-sub-

genre of utopian fiction, the sense that the fundamental differential
specificity of fantastic fiction, and certainly what gives it any political
teeth, is a utopia-function (which can easily of course, encompass
dystopias), is an implicit, sometimes explicit, claim that non-utopian
SF and fantasy are in some way at best attenuated utopias. But we
should not be seduced by the long and honourable tradition of left
utopias and utopian studies into foreclosing the reverse possibility
(which better serves the project of theorising actually-existing SF and
fantasy, rather than ring-fencing sections of the fields): that utopias
(including dystopias) are, rather, specific articulations of alterity and
that it is of that that SF/fantasy is the literature. In this model, the
atom of SF’s and fantasy’s estrangement, in other words, is their
unreality function of which utopia is but one – if highly important –
form. (Miéville, 2009, pp. 243–4)

On the face of it, this provides a better model than does Jameson for
accounting for Mitchison’s books by enabling them to be seen as fantasies
of alterity that go beyond closed utopias and open up a fundamen-
tally different set of human possibilities. However, Miéville’s ‘alterity’
could also be interpreted as simply one pole of Jameson’s utopian
dialectic of identity and difference, which as we have seen is perfectly
compatible with fantasy. Indeed, Miéville’s argument seems to be partly
constrained by an unconscious preconception that fantasy can’t
really be utopian, or else why does he insist on utopian fiction being
such a small ‘sub-sub-genre’? It seems possible that any iteration of
alterity must have a utopian potential, because it offers a potentially
alternative model of living, while any utopia must on some level be
an iteration of alterity. Once this artificial hierarchy is dismantled, it
becomes much easier to see the value of Mitchison’s work, in which
her use of fantasy is an integral part of her utopian dynamic, and
vice versa.
By analogy, one could go on to argue that the privileging of high
modernism over other aesthetic forms similarly conceals a wider range
of representational and narrative strategies for representing alterity and
84 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

human possibilities. Jameson’s essay, ‘Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam’,

concludes with the argument:

It may be the very conventionality, the inauthenticity, the formal

stereotyping of Science Fiction that gives it one signal advantage
over modernist high literature. The latter can show us everything
about the individual psyche and its subjective experience and aliena-
tion, save the essential – the logic of stereotypes, reproductions and
depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time.
( Jameson, 2005, p. 348)

In other words, certain science-fiction texts expose the materiality of

capitalist alienation more effectively than modernist texts, and for pre-
cisely this reason they are much more likely to offer a programmatic
set of solutions on the assumption, in John Clute’s words, that the
world ‘may be made to work’ (Clute, 2011, p. 4). Clute further suggests
that different genres handle anxiety in different manners, so that, in
distinction to science fiction, fantasy treats the world as a mistake that
can’t be fixed. The source of the anxiety that drove the genres of sci-
ence fiction, fantasy, and modernism during the 1920s and 1930s was
the cataclysmic experience of the First World War. Clute describes the
response of fantasy writers to the War – the most famous example being
J. R. R. Tolkien, who had been a signals officer at the Somme – as a
turning away from the twentieth century:

It was as though the world before and after the war had been, like
[…] Jekyll’s body and soul, irredeemably split into opposing trenches.
For the writers who engendered fantasy texts out of fissured lives […]
the world itself is understood to be wrong. It is shameful to admit to
the twentieth century. (p. 25)

It is this shame, in the form of humiliation and self-abasement, that

enables Mitchison’s protagonists to recognize themselves in their differ-
ence. Significantly, Clute identifies ‘recognition’ as the third phase of
his model of how fantasy works: wrongness, thinning, recognition, and
return (pp. 26 and 114–16). Something wrong is sensed, life is shown as
increasingly empty and meaningless until the moment of recognition,
when amnesia lifts and the protagonist can recognize him or herself for
both the alienated waverer, who has hitherto failed to act, and someone
now possessed of a wider vision and agency; a metamorphosis which
allows the protagonist to carry on with a renewed sense of purpose. This
 Nick Hubble 85

model can be applied to the other genres too. As Clute himself admits,
the moment of recognition in science fiction, which is arrived at through
the same sequence, is the moment when the protagonist realizes what
needs to be done ‘to fix [the World]’ (p. 26). In modernism, recogni-
tion, again similarly derived after passing through wrongness and
thinning, is the end in itself: the moment of affirmation that allows the
self to go on, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway (1925). By highlighting what unites these genres, rather
than what differentiates them, it becomes possible to see that all three
depend upon working through the dialectic of identity and difference.
This sense of modernism being interconnected with other aesthetic
forms is inherent to the concept of intermodernism, which allows us
to think about both social networks of writers (such as those listed in
the introduction above) incorporating practitioners from different gen-
res, and the individuals in those networks who practised in more than
one genre, such as Mitchison, Stella Benson, Aldous Huxley, Hope
Mirrlees, and Sylvia Townsend Warner (to name but a few). Considering
such networks does not produce a model which detracts from the
importance of Woolf, but provides a new, wider, heterogeneous account
of an intermodern British literary culture that both surrounds and
includes her. Mitchison actually provides an interesting parallel to
Woolf in that she was also the daughter of a very eminent father, and
there was a similar process (although the dates are different) of emerg-
ing from the constricted background of a very respectable late Victorian
family. As Susan Squier has noted, Mitchison’s post-war science-fiction
novels of feminist scientists are anticipated by Woolf:

As long ago as 1929, Virginia Woolf’s brief glimpse of the modern

novel in A Room of One’s Own suggested the new possibilities for
female friendship and collaboration that could be created by opening
the realm of science to women. In Life’s Adventure, by the fictitious
Mary Carmichael, Chloe and Olivia share a laboratory together,
mincing liver as a cure for pernicious anaemia. Woolf’s prototypi-
cal modern novel was modelled on Love’s Creation, the scientifically
informed novel published by Naomi Mitchison’s family friend, birth
control educator and paleontologist Dr Marie Stopes, who used the
pseudonym ‘Marie Carmichael’. (Squier, 1995, p. 176)

Another, even more unlikely seeming literary relationship is revealed in

Mitchison’s collaboration with Wyndham Lewis, Beyond This Limit – an
example of intermodern fantasy in practice.
86 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

Beyond This Limit

Mitchison and Lewis became friends after he wrote to her following

her favourable review of The Apes of God (1930) in Time and Tide. In
1934 they began work on what was to become Beyond This Limit. They
followed the plan outlined by Mitchison in a letter dated 14 May:
‘I should think the best thing would be for you to do the pictures and
me to write the fairy story around them’ (Mitchison quoted in O’Keeffe,
2000, p. 348). This became a full collaboration, with Lewis drawing
the 32 Indian-ink illustrations sometimes before, and sometimes after,
the relevant passages had been written and, according to Mitchison’s
memoirs, jumping on her ‘like a tiger’ if she got a word wrong in a
sentence (Mitchison, 1979, p. 148). In the novella, Phoebe Bathurst, a
wood engraver, may or may not get run over crossing a Paris street but
is, in any case, subsequently sucked down into a strange underworld
via the Paris Metro. The result is both surreal, with hints of Alice and
Orpheus, and an allegory of the progression of a woman artist from ‘safe
conventionality into courageous autonomy’ (Benton, 1990, p. 101).
Added spice is given by the fact that the drawings of the two main
characters, Phoebe and ‘the ticket-collector’, are clearly representations
of Mitchison and Lewis themselves.
Phoebe is famous for her ‘flowers and animals, which, on the whole,
she found preferable to people’, although the ‘cheques which the grav-
ers and scorpers and box-wood blocks made for Phoebe seemed always
to turn into other things very quickly’:

She was hard put to it sometimes to keep up with this puzzling

business of living when things were so continually turning into other
things. Francs to centimes, pounds to railway tickets and the cross-
ing of space, which was sometimes map inches readily held in the
brain box under the little felt hat and sometimes uncounted flashing
waves and trees and fields, or babies into real people, things seen
explosively by instants into small, grave, graved lines, eggs into ome-
lettes, one’s own lover into another woman’s husband. (Mitchison,
1935, pp. 3–4)

Here, not only do modernist mutability, social realism, and melodrama

collide in a manner that gives a political charge of radical eccentricity
to the poetics of the prose, but also the ‘wrongness’ and ‘thinning’ of
inter-war modern life is laid bare. As Phoebe passes ever deeper into
the underworld, a journey which somehow takes her to a dream-like
 Nick Hubble 87

London, she undergoes a series of shameful experiences as her Royal

Horticultural Society membership card turns out to be a forgery and, hor-
ror of horrors, she is turned out of the Reading Room for ‘NOT HAVING
HER READERS TICKET’: ‘Unforgettable humiliation for a highbrow, for
a respectable, Museum-fearing, law-conditioned bourgeoise!’ (pp. 16–18
and 38). The ‘talking’ of a highbrow play at the theatre is drowned out
by the audible thoughts of the audience on matters of personal inti-
macy and money: ‘Terrible nakedness!’ (pp. 47–50). Throughout this
descent into mania and alienation strides the enigmatic figure of the
ticket-collector, who accompanies but cynically refuses to guide Phoebe
on the grounds that she does not admit to being dead.
Even when they reach the end of the journey at the Hotel Terminus,
Phoebe still denies that she is dead. She wants to go back, she wants to
go on, but, as the ticket-collector points out, she is at the end of the
world. She denies this also, and wrenches open the opaque sash window
in the hotel bedroom to look outside. She gazes out silently for a minute
before walking unsteadily back into the room and acknowledging, ‘[i]t
is the end of the world’ (p. 57). This is the moment just before ‘recogni-
tion’, and its situation on the cusp of metamorphosis is illuminated by
Lewis’s drawing of the scene (p. 56).4 While Mitchison describes Phoebe
as looking very white on her unsteady return from the window, Lewis
portrays her both as staggering from shock and as translucent, so that
the window frame can still be seen through her (although not the solid
blackness outside the window). This image captures her devastation at
the realization of her own ‘thinning’, but also suggests to the viewer
that she remains distinct from the absolute void. This prefiguring of
Phoebe’s imminent self-recognition is swiftly confirmed by the text, as
the ticket-collector makes to return back the way they came and leave
her at the end of the world. She is dead, and for a moment he appears to
have the total disinterested powers of a non-human judge as he impas-
sively implies that she has paid for her journey to oblivion through her
inability to become aware. However, by recognizing that she is dead,
Phoebe is in fact recognizing that her alienated, conventional, conform-
ist self is dead, and that she is no longer trapped by that former identity.
She finds herself in her difference from her self, and thus refuses to
accept nothingness:

And she seized hold of the ticket-collector by the two lapels of

his coat, her fingers closing over the badge of his union. ‘We’ve
worked together’, she said. ‘You can’t just leave me like this! I won’t
let you go.’
88 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

The ticket-collector raised his own hands and laid them over hers
but did not tear hers away nor rise on wings out of her grasp. ‘Of
course, if you put it like that,’ he answered, ‘I’ll do what I can […]’.
(p. 58)

The ‘happy ending’ (Mitchison, 1979, p. 149) decided upon by

Mitchison, in which both continue their descent in a slow lift, indi-
cates the intermodern qualities of the tale maintained by curtailing
the possibility of what might perhaps be termed modernist negation:
Lewis wanted the lift to be blown to pieces (see O’Keeffe, 2000, p. 349).
Beyond This Limit, therefore, holds open the possibility of a more overtly
utopian transformation, as Phoebe and the ticket-collector collaborate –
as their co-creators had managed – in going on together in pursuit of
the redemptive promise of the not-yet-being of the future. To see how
the spirit of this intermodernist collaboration persisted into the Popular
Front politics of the second half of the decade, it is necessary to turn to
Mitchison’s The Blood of the Martyrs.

The Blood of the Martyrs

The main character of The Blood of the Martyrs is a male Celt, Beric, who,
like Meromic in The Conquered, is sexually attracted to other men and,
therefore, may be seen as Mitchison’s alter ego in the text. Beric is the
son of a British king, but having been brought up since childhood in
Rome as virtually the adoptive son of a senator, he is a master in rela-
tion to the household slaves, a number of whom belong to a clandestine
Christian church. His gradual involvement with the Christians is driven
by his love for one of his male slaves, Argas, but the communitarian
values of the church are against relationships because they make a
couple into the equivalent of an individual and so go against its spirit
(Mitchison, 1939, pp. 174–5 and 301). This means that the closest Beric
comes to physical intimacy is by washing his own slaves’ feet:

Gravely Manasses sat down on the bench and Beric knelt and undid
his sandals. It was the hell of a queer mixed feeling. He’d never be
the same again, never be able to be a master. A kind of panic caught
him and he stopped, holding on to the edges of the basin, his head
down. Then he realised that it was too late to get out of it now […].
Manasses was the deacon of the Church. Doing this for him, he had
accepted it, accepted the superior position of Manasses, who was, all
the same, the old Manasses who waited on him at table. There was
 Nick Hubble 89

something not very real about it all. He dried Manasses’s feet. He felt
dizzy with this unreality. (pp. 161–2)

Beric’s dizziness is both a product of his working through the dialec-

tic of identity and difference in a society divided between masters and
slaves, and of his recognition of the slavishness in his former undif-
ferentiated identity as a master, which is suddenly rendered completely
unreal. Simultaneously, the past, the trace memory of being part of a
free people that had been conquered, and the future, the ‘not-yet-being’
of ‘the Kingdom’ (of Heaven on Earth) prefigured in the communal love
of the Christian slaves, are brought explicitly into conjunction with
the present. It is this explicitness that marks The Blood of the Martyrs as
Mitchison’s most openly utopian novel. The pursuit of ‘the Kingdom’ is
widely discussed and placed in the context of an historical progression of
‘getting nearer’, which includes the Greeks who died at Thermopylae in
the cause of citizenship, Spartacus and the slaves who died for the idea
of equality, and the early Christians themselves, prepared to die in
the name of love (pp. 246–7). Much of the dramatic action turns on
Beric’s difficulty in choosing the right course of action in order to help
bring the Kingdom about. His killing of an informer, who causes the
Christian slaves to be discovered and arrested, brings him shame, but
he still also wants to kill the Roman who is leading the persecution of
the Christians. However, Argas argues that such an approach will lead
to them losing in the same way that Spartacus lost because he didn’t
know ‘the love that makes it all different’ (p. 274). This is not a spiritual
argument but one predicated on the understanding that the material
establishment of utopia as a communitarian society depends upon cre-
ating the conditions in which everyone recognizes their identity with
others and their difference from their selves.
In her previous (non-fictional) book, The Moral Basis of Politics (1938),
Mitchison dismissively notes that ‘the blood of the martyrs is notori-
ously the seed of the Church’ (Mitchison, 1938, p. 186), but also admits
that her previous understanding as an atheist of the actions of the
early martyrs as ‘ludicrous’ had been changed because she could now
see that they were opposing the conflation of earthly leaders with the
all-powerful state as objects of worship (pp. 56–7); a tendency visible
once again in the twentieth century with the rise of the fascist and Nazi
dictatorships. This contemporary context is openly referenced in The
Blood of the Martyrs by the Emperor Nero’s reflection on what he does
for the Roman people: ‘The music. The spectacles. Strength through joy!
They ought to be crazy about me. To love me. They ought to do more
90 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

than love me!’ (Mitchison, 1939, p. 256). Against this, the argument
voiced by Beric is that, deep down, everyone, including the Emperor,
really wants the Kingdom and that they are only held back by the rules
and norms of the hierarchical state. It is not for their beliefs that the
Christians are prepared to die, but in order to show that people can
choose to live differently. Unlike the hero of The Conquered, therefore,
Beric does not resolve his personal dialectic of identity and difference
by turning into a wolf; instead, he resolves it collectively by standing
passively alongside his fellow Christians in the Colosseum under the
gaze of Nero and the Roman populace, and being eaten by one. In
The Moral Basis of Politics, Mitchison discusses the problem of human
contact with other people in terms of the ‘pick-up which either does
or does not happen between audience and speaker’ (Mitchison, 1938,
p. 10). In The Blood of the Martyrs, Beric and Felicio, an educated slave,
are introduced at their first Christian meeting and walk home together
afterwards, awkward in their newfound equality and conscious of the
‘element of pick-up in it […] on both sides’ (Mitchison, 1939, p. 133).
Sitting in the stalls at the Colosseum, Felicio’s initial reaction to witness-
ing Beric dying in this public display of collective difference is to think
‘we could have had fun together […]. And it never went on. I’d hoped
it would’ (p. 377). However, immediately afterwards the further recogni-
tion strikes him that this is the true pick-up, that he does love Beric, and
that the bravery of the martyrs means that they must be in the right;
subsequently he becomes a Christian too. The transfer of allegiance
that Felicio undergoes, from preoccupation with his own individual
subjectivity to a sense of shared intersubjectivity with a particular other,
and then on to a full-blown collective intersubjectivity, correlates with
Mitchison’s own political and literary development across the 1930s, as
the pursuit of individual liberation from the constraints of prescribed
identities and fixed choices by letting former selves die, as in Beyond
This Limit, progresses into a shedding of that individualism in favour
of that same collective intersubjectivity – the material resolution of the
utopian dialectic of identity and difference.

Conclusion

In 1938, Lewis painted Mitchison writing the manuscript of The Blood

of the Martyrs in his studio – she only agreed to sit on the basis that
she could carry on with the book at the same time – and against her
wishes placed a drawing of the crucifixion to her side (Mitchison, 1979,
p. 144; painting reproduced opposite p. 121). The finished painting,
 Nick Hubble 91

with Mitchison’s frown of intent as she writes rendered in Lewis’s firm

style, doubly represents a purposeful modern commitment to Art. At
the same time, though, the painting also prominently features the
sign of the cross, identified in The Blood of the Martyrs with not just
Christ but also Spartacus, crucified with six thousand of his men along
the Appian way, as the symbol of ‘the Kingdom’ (Mitchison, 1939,
pp. 147–51). This juxtaposition of art and politics suggests that the
unconscious drive behind the artistic commitment of the modern
period was to build a utopian society on Earth. Certainly that is the
logic behind Mitchison’s own work, which has been traced in this
chapter. It is entirely consistent with this progression that Mitchison’s
major written output over the five years following The Blood of the
Martyrs was the huge wartime diary she kept for Mass Observation
as her anonymous contribution to a much wider collective project.5
After the Second World War, of course, it could be argued that the
foundation of the British Welfare State created a utopian society, at
least in comparison to the conditions in Britain and Europe during the
inter-war period, and Mitchison with her political involvement and
close personal connections to such figures as G. D. H. Cole, one of the
leading Labour intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, both contributed
to, and participated in, this development. However, this social progress
did not amount to ‘the Kingdom’, and, as we have seen, Mitchison
continued to work through the dialectic of identity and difference in
her post-war science fiction. Probably her work has not received the
attention it deserves because of the difficulty of both positioning it in
terms of genre, in which it blurs boundaries between historical, mod-
ernist, fantasy, and science fictions, and positioning her in terms of
the breadth of her literary, social, and political networking. However,
as this survey has demonstrated, it is precisely when the complex tem-
poralities, dynamics, and transformations that run through her various
fictions and other writings are treated as forming a sustained argument
that her work can be approached as one of the major utopian projects
of the twentieth century.

Notes
1. For example, Mitchison is used glibly to illustrate a number of contextual
points, but no evaluation of her work, other than to imply that We Have
Been Warned (1935) is trite, sentimental, and melodramatic, is offered by
Cunningham (1988, pp. 247 and 309). A much better account of her role in
the decade, with an extended reading of We Have Been Warned, is provided
by Lassner (1998, pp. 66–85). More is made of Mitchison’s aesthetics, with
92 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia

respect to her novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) and her poetry
in particular, in Montefiore (1996, pp. 125–9 and 163–8).
2. For a history of the ‘Golden Age’ period and its eclipse in the 1950s, see
Luckhurst (2005, pp. 50–119).
3. Mitchison knew the relevant science well. She was the sister of the eminent
geneticist J. B. S. ( Jack) Haldane, and the dedicatee of James Watson’s account
of his own role in the discovery of the structure of DNA, The Double Helix
(1968).
4. For a discussion of how illustration can illuminate the ‘cusps of the fantasy
story’, see Clute (2011, pp. 117–22).
5. A shortened version of Mitchison’s Mass Observation diary was eventually
published, and edited by Dorothy Sheridan, in 1985 as Among You Taking
Notes …: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939–1945. For details of the
Mass Observation wartime diaries as a whole, see Hinton (2010).
5
Lesbian Modernism and Utopia:
Sexology and the Invert in
Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction
Elizabeth English

Writing to the sexologist Havelock Ellis in 1934, H.D. dished what she
called the ‘“professional” dirt’ (Friedman, 2002, p. 501) on the author
Murray Constantine, whose true identity was a mystery to the reading
public and was subject to scrutiny in reviews.1 As H.D. reveals in this
brief character sketch, taken from the same source:

Well, to give you the ‘dirt’ on M.C. – she is about 40 – I remember

now – 38 – tall, dark, very strange & clever – but with the most
astonishingly un-charming voice I have ever heard out of (or even
in) the Middle West. I imagine she is from Australia, but won’t tell
me. She has rather taken to me – an American, of course, is not sup-
posed to have the ordinary ‘complex’ about ‘colonials.’ But she is
secretive, reticent, utterly un-English, yet keeps insisting there is no
trace of foreign blood in her (with possible ‘hope’ as she says of a part
of Jewish great grand-parent.) […] She has two daughters […]. The
husband & she ‘parted amicably’ she says; she lives in Hampshire
with a woman-friend, whom she is not in love with, a sort of Bryher,
who helps her. (pp. 501–2)

In a postscript H.D. further discloses that behind the masculine

pseudonym lay Katharine Burdekin (1896–1963), a woman who had
been publishing novels under her own name since 1922 (p. 502).
Unfortunately, little of Burdekin’s correspondence has survived, or, at
least, its whereabouts remains unknown. The only extant letter from
Burdekin to H.D., stored in the Beinecke Library, is marked ‘destroy’,
which suggests that she may well have instructed correspondents to
discard her missives.2 With such paucity of documentation, H.D.’s cor-
respondence becomes all the more valuable in building a portrait of a
93
94 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

woman about whom very little is known. Indeed, what is clear from
this handful of letters, and the absence of others, is that Burdekin was
fiercely protective of, even secretive about, her identity. What we do
know about her life is largely sourced from the scholar Daphne Patai’s
research and contact with Burdekin’s family in the 1980s, details of
which can be found in her invaluable forewords and afterwords to The
Feminist Press editions of the novels Proud Man (1934), Swastika Night
(1937), and The End of This Day’s Business (1989).
But much of what H.D. gleaned and relayed to Ellis is not far from the
mark. Though born in Derbyshire as Katharine Penelope Cade, Burdekin
did have ties with Australia having settled there with her husband and
children in 1920. By 1922 Burdekin had returned to England following
the breakdown of her marriage, going on to meet her ‘sort of Bryher’ in
1926, a woman who would become what Patai terms her ‘lifelong friend
and companion’ (Patai, 1989, p. 163), and together they raised their
respective children. Burdekin is an intriguing and elusive figure who is
difficult to situate within the familiar intellectual and creative networks
of her period. As her companion commented in a letter to Patai in
1984, ‘[w]e always talked a great deal, read very widely, belonged to no
coterie. […] We knew many writers but as isolated individuals. Indeed
we always lived in the country, very rustic and private with sorties to
London’ (quoted in Patai, 1989, p. 164). It is perhaps this choice of geo-
graphical and personal abstraction that has, in part, led to the neglect
of Burdekin’s work and to her exclusion from the narrative of lesbian
modernism, despite the fact that hers is a significant contribution to
the literary landscape of the 1920s and 1930s. Having published her
first novel Anna Colquhoun in 1922, she followed this with nine oth-
ers, six of which, beginning with the 1934 Proud Man, were published
under the name Murray Constantine.3 Though her final novel appeared
in 1940, she wrote prolifically until becoming seriously ill in 1955. The
majority of this work favours fantasy and speculative genres, turning
to the landscapes of the past and of the future to imagine utopian and
dystopian worlds that analyse contemporary politics and that dissect
the structures of Western societies, paying pointed attention to the rise
of European fascism (as seen most explicitly in the 1937 Swastika Night)
and the oppressiveness of gender constructions.
In communicating these titbits to Ellis, H.D. was in fact acting as an
intermediary between two friends: Ellis’s interest had been piqued by
the work of the mysterious Constantine, while Burdekin, according to
H.D., ‘worship[ped] H.E.’ in return (Friedman, 2002, p. 501). At a loss as
to how else to help Burdekin, whom H.D. believed was suffering from
 Elizabeth English 95

‘a deep and perturbing “gloom” or “suicide” fixation of sorts’ (p. 501),

she suggested that her friend contact the subject of her adoration. What
followed was by all accounts a brief correspondence: four letters from
Ellis, dated between 1934 and 1937, survive. The content is intriguing,
though not overwhelmingly revelatory: Ellis and Burdekin exchange
recommendations for psychological and sexological reading material;
they discuss shared experiences of Cornwall and Australia; Ellis sympa-
thizes with the difficult task of working with the editor Laura Riding;
he warns her of the hazards of the American market, and assuages her
fear that she may be experiencing a kind of creative obsession. Ellis also
relays tales of the fascination surrounding Constantine’s true identity,
as well as his enthusiastic recommendations of ‘his’ novels, and in par-
ticular Proud Man, to friends and publishers. Importantly, then, Ellis’s
letters provide Burdekin with creative and emotional support in their
wholehearted approval of her work.4
The discovery of this correspondence is highly significant, since
it tells us that Burdekin had an interest in theories of sexual inversion,
and that she had a relationship with one of those theories’ most famous
proponents. This acquaintance has not been heretofore acknowledged,
nor has the influence of sexology on Burdekin’s work, but recognizing this
debt is essential for understanding her utopian agenda. H.D.’s comment
in one 1934 letter to Ellis that ‘I find the book [Proud Man] is a sort of
touch-stone to other people’ (Friedman, 2002, p. 404) suggests that she,
at least, understood the connection. H.D. does not elaborate, but with
a little imagination it is tempting to argue that she recognizes Proud
Man as a potentially queer text, and that with the phrase ‘other people’
she refers to both the non-heteronormative identities littering the
novel and to those readers to whom it might speak. This chapter, then,
argues that Burdekin’s utopian fiction is populated by ‘other people’, or
sexually dissident identities, which Burdekin casts from the moulds of
popular sexological discourses, replicating the widely disseminated and
recognizable paradigm of the sexual invert. We might see Burdekin’s
choice of genre as a compromise, a decision to cloak her writing on
sexuality; this was, after all, a period which saw the work of James
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall, among others, subjected to
censorship or bowdlerization for supposed obscenity. But an alternative
to this, as I argue here, is to read Burdekin’s stylistic choice as sympto-
matic of her belief in a correlation between inverted identities and the
promise of utopia. By this term I broadly refer to an imagined commu-
nity that is an idealized fantasy of existence, correcting the failings and
flaws of reality.5 But my interest in this instance lies more in utopian
96 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

process and desire than in final products – in who and what is involved
in imagining that state, rather than the perfected result.6 Though we
might turn to many of Burdekin’s works, this chapter examines two
of her critically better-known novels, Proud Man (published under the
pseudonym Murray Constantine in 1934) and The End of This Day’s
Business (written in 1935 but published posthumously in 1989), and
the lesser-known The Rebel Passion (1929), to explore the way in which
Burdekin dovetails her utopian protagonists – those who represent
a superior world or strive towards a brighter, more evolved future –
with lesbian identities.
Thus I ultimately argue that Burdekin’s work can be resituated within
the body of writing we call lesbian modernism. Generally, we think
of lesbian modernism as literature characterized by its experiments in
literary form coupled with an engagement with the lesbian subject,
her desires and her identities. It is also defined, as Joanne Winning
suggests, by the ‘sets of discourses’ and the context which influences it
(Winning, 2001, p. 374). By highlighting Burdekin’s hitherto-ignored
relationship with the sexologist Ellis, I hope to expose a commonal-
ity with the work of other lesbian writers of the time. By embedding
sexological vocabulary in much of her speculative fiction, Burdekin is
in the company of such writers as Vita Sackville-West, Bryher, Radclyffe
Hall, Dorothy Richardson, and Djuna Barnes – women who turned to
sexological discourses for meaning, both in their lives and in their writ-
ing.7 The alliance of the lesbian with modernity and with the new has
often been noted, and it could be said that Burdekin takes this to the
logical extreme by associating the lesbian not only with modernity but
also with futurity, since the female invert both represents, and paves
the way to, progress.
Before looking at the significance of the invert in Burdekin’s fiction,
I first turn to her source material, the discourse of sexology itself –
the nineteenth-century study of sexual science, led by such figures as
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Otto Weininger. In his
1860s publications on homosexuality, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer
and homosexual rights campaigner, defined inversion as an erroneous
assignment of soul to body. His phrase ‘anima muliebris in corpore
virili inclusa’ (Ulrichs quoted in Ellis, 1924, p. 68) – ‘a woman’s soul
trapped in a man’s body’ – used to describe what he termed Uranism,
is a concept that runs throughout much subsequent theory (translation
from Sedgwick, 2008, p. 87). Sexology presented homosexuality as an
identity (rather than simply as sexual acts) and offered a model that
argued instincts were inborn and ineradicable, in some cases using this
 Elizabeth English 97

as a plea for tolerance and acceptance. But these theories were founded
upon a traditional, and conservative, notion of gendered behaviour, and
maintained an essentially heteronormative blueprint of desire. It was
reasoned that if an individual’s instincts were directed towards those of
the same sex, this would be both evidenced and justified by a misaligned
gender identity, thus keeping homosexual desire within the bounds of
a heterosexual paradigm. What then emerges from this remarkably
gender-determined framework is the archetypes of the mannish lesbian
and the effeminate homosexual man, those that possess the emotions
and behaviour of one gender but the body of another. As Ellis’s highly
influential and popular study of sexual inversion, volume two of Studies
in the Psychology of Sex, states ‘[t]he commonest characteristic of the
sexually inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity or boyish-
ness’ (Ellis, 1924, p. 244). As he explains further:

When they still retain female garments, these usually show some
traits of masculine simplicity, and there is nearly always a disdain
for the petty feminine artifices of the toilet. Even when this is not
obvious, there are all sorts of instinctive gestures and habits which
may suggest to female acquaintances the remark that such a person
‘ought to have been a man.’ The brusque, energetic movements, the
attitude of the arms, the direct speech, the inflexions of the voice,
the masculine straightforwardness and sense of honor, and especially
the attitude toward men, free from any suggestion either of shyness
or audacity, will often suggest the underlying psychic abnormality to
a keen observer.
In the habits not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for
smoking cigarettes […] but also a decided taste and toleration for
cigars. There is also a dislike and sometimes incapacity for needle-
work and other domestic occupations, while there is often some
capacity for athletics. (p. 250)

In his study Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing reaches

much the same conclusion:

The female urning may chiefly be found in the haunts of boys.

She is the rival in their play, preferring the rocking-horse, playing
at soldiers, etc., to dolls and other girlish occupations. The toilet is
neglected, and rough boyish manners are affected. Love for art finds
a substitute in the pursuits of the sciences. At times smoking and
drinking are cultivated even with passion.
98 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

Perfumes and sweetmeats are disdained. The consciousness of

being a woman and thus to be deprived of the gay college life, or to
be barred out from the military career, produces painful reflections.
The masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom, finds pleasure in
the pursuit of manly sports, and in manifestations of courage and bra-
vado. There is a strong desire to imitate the male fashion in dressing
the hair and in general attire, under favourable circumstances even to
don male attire and impose in it. (Krafft-Ebing, 1906, pp. 398–9)

These striking excerpts illustrate that for sexologists sexual difference

was both visible and tangible: lesbianism presents itself semaphorically
in that it is detected on the body from sartorial signals, recognizable
from a cropped hairstyle, disdain of feminine maquillage, masculine
tailoring, or even love of smoking. Such difference also manifests itself
in the rejection of the traditionally gendered activities of the domestic
sphere, and in a feminist demand for the right to those realms typically
barred to women. Female inversion, or lesbianism, then, is entangled
with political, and distinctly feminist, choices, and with a clamouring
for the rights and privileges already afforded to men.
Despite the lapse of time since its inception, sexology’s currency
held firm for an early twentieth-century readership. As Laura Doan
argues, after the First World War sexological works increasingly cir-
culated among writers, artists, and intellectuals, thus reaching a
sizeable audience who found in these theories a pertinent language
for comprehending and articulating gay and lesbian identities (Doan,
2001, p. 130). The intensely publicized prosecution and censorship of
Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) – what Doan calls ‘the
crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English
lesbian subculture’ (pp. xii–xiii) – undoubtedly had a significant part to
play in promoting knowledge of sexology and the dissemination of the
female invert as a recognizable figure. Burdekin’s Proud Man and The
End of This Day’s Business draw on these popularized theories, mapping
the identity of the invert onto the utopian, idealized protagonist, and
signalling that these novels say as much about their contemporary
moment as they do about the future.
These mappings and signallings are most explicit in Proud Man, a
story narrated from the perspective of a traveller sent from the future to
observe and report on 1930s England. This visitor hails from an egali-
tarian and peaceful way of life from which war, poverty, hunger, and
illness have been eradicated. Merely referred to as a Person, the creature
represents a race that has both physically and mentally evolved into
 Elizabeth English 99

single-sexed, highly conscious, telepathic beings who have achieved

the status of true ‘humans’ in contrast to the primitive ‘subhumans’ of
present-day England. With its reportage style, and the Person’s anthro-
pological cataloguing of subhuman identities and behaviours, the text
in some ways mimics the pseudo-scientific tone of sexological writing.
In the course of the novel the Person befriends three inhabitants of
twentieth-century England, who in turn act as guides and objects of
study. Each is troubled in their own way, and each receives emotional
and psychological counsel from the Person: the first guide, the priest
Andrew, experiences a crisis of faith; the second, the grief-stricken
writer, Leonora, is crippled by fear of creative inferiority; and finally,
Gilbert, a murderer, struggles to understand his violent impulses. In
separate instances, Andrew and Leonora express concern that the
Person’s indeterminate, non-gendered, and non-sexed identity might
impede its investigation by attracting unwanted suspicion. It is then on
their advice that the Person assumes an alias:

If you were a man your superiority and indifference wouldn’t matter

so much, because men don’t think that there can be anything supe-
rior to themselves. They wouldn’t for a moment think that you could
be a woman masquerading, if you were dressed as a man. But your
superiority is very wrong for a woman. It’s terribly unfeminine. But
fortunately your beauty is not specially masculine, you have no beard,
and your voice is all right for either sex. You may pass. I think you had
better align yourself with the small minority that dislikes men. Look
at me with mistrust and defiance. (Burdekin, 1934, pp. 146–7)

Andrew’s advice suggests that it is only by assuming the guise of the les-
bian that the Person’s behaviour, and its refusal to kowtow to the authority
of men, can be understood. Having affiliated itself with the ‘small
minority that dislikes men’, the Person continues its research at the
British Museum, and it is here that it meets its next guide, the writer
Leonora. Watching the Person across the desks, Leonora tries to
decipher its bodily codes:

She wondered why I wore no hat, how old I was, and what climate
and blood had given to me my golden-brown colour of skin. She also
considered that my hair would look better cut shorter or else worn
much longer, that I was very beautiful, that I took no interest in my
clothes, and was probably a homosexual. She looked under the table
to see what sort of shoes I had on, and finding them soft, without
100 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

heels, and far from the fashionable shape either for city females or
homosexuals, she thought I might make some kind of a living out
of the shape of my feet and would not risk spoiling them with hard
shoes. (p. 158)

After having invited the Person to live with her, Leonora also warns the
visitor to modify its behaviour:

I was going to suggest that you might find it easier to be homosexual

in your behaviour than feminine. If you decide to be that, you
can ignore the men and be interested in the women. The steady cold
way you stare at people would seem less strange then. It’s a very odd
way for a feminine woman to look at a man. (p. 198)

Several interesting points emerge from these extracts and the Person’s
attempts to ‘pass’ as a lesbian woman. Foremost, Andrew’s and Leonora’s
recommendations demonstrate an understanding of sexual identity
as visual and performative. Leonora, in particular, attempts to read the
Person’s identity using sartorial markers. Moreover, sexuality is defined
through the inversion of conventional gendered behaviour – to be a
lesbian is, in Leonora’s view, the antithesis of being ‘feminine’, which
is, by implication, passive. Burdekin, then, advocates that sexuality and
gender intersect and inflect one another. To adopt a lesbian subject-
position is to reject conventional femininity, and to establish a stance
which is essentially feminist and anti-patriarchal.
Such an alliance between politics and sexuality is further evident in
the Person’s interest in two particular social groups – male and female
‘homosexual hordes’, or ‘pack[s]’ (p. 34). Burdekin’s futuristic anthro-
pologist classifies these ‘packs’ as:

two small but ever increasing groups, one of males and the other of
females, who from adolescence revolted from their sensual dependence
on their opposites, and would seek companionship, solace, and even
sexual satisfaction among the members of their own sex. (p. 33)

Yet these men and women who blur the boundary between sociality
and sexuality are represented conversely as dystopian and utopian
communities, one nightmarish and repressive and the other idealized.
While the assembling of such male ‘hordes’ is motivated by the desire
to exclude and to denigrate women, so making male homosexuality
a natural extension of the abuses of patriarchy, female communities
 Elizabeth English 101

are formed from the evolution of the sex and the drive to advance
womanhood. As the Person states, these sororal groupings are based
upon the impulse ‘to organize themselves, to be loyal to each other, and
to replace their former natural indifference or hostility by feelings of
friendship and admiration’ (p. 34). The potentially romantic or erotic
collective is thus motivated by ideological and political awakening;
as the women draw together they become ‘more conscious, and con-
sequently rebellious’ (p. 34). Burdekin’s point appears to be that the
lesbian’s economic, social, and sexual independence from men allows
her to escape the damaging behavioural patterns located within hetero-
normative models of female gender identity.8
The implication of this bond between sexual and ideological choices
is sharpened in the context of Burdekin’s corpus. Her dystopian novel
Swastika Night, for instance, which imagines the world as it might be
were Hitler’s regime to prevail, pinpoints the heteronormative gender
dynamic, and its inherent worship of masculinity, as the foundation
for fascist ideology. If, as is suggested in Proud Man, the lesbian woman
approaches man as her equal, if she does not comply with the wor-
ship of masculinity, then the dynamic on which such movements are
founded falters. By aligning the lesbian with this futuristic, evolved, and
androgynous individual, Burdekin signals that her defiance of binary
gender categories and patriarchal authority promises to be socially
transformative.
The presence of the invert in The End of This Day’s Business is similarly
patent. In the year AD 6250 a reversal of roles has taken place, and
a matriarchal system dominates Western societies. Women hold all
positions of leadership and skilled employment, and control access
to knowledge and learning. Although men live healthy, free, and
seemingly happy lives – they are decidedly better off than the animal-
istic women who inhabit Burdekin’s dystopia in Swastika Night – they
have degenerated into an inferior and ignorant sex. Praised for their
beauty, strength, and modesty, men are viewed as sexual objects for the
gratification of women and for the continuance of the race. The novel’s
protagonist, the artist Grania, dreams of a society based on egalitarian
principles. With this end in mind she conspires to educate her son, Neil,
and four other men with a narrative of European history (a common
instructional device in Burdekin’s fiction). Grania reveals to her
students that their masculine forefathers were once leaders, inventors,
artists, and, moreover, the oppressors of the revered female sex. Grania
leads Neil through history: the Second World War, the persecution of
the Jews, the victory of the communists over fascists and the formation
102 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

of an egalitarian society, a fascist resurgence to reclaim male power,

and, in retaliation, a surreptitious mission to implement a matriarchal
system.9 Women, Grania tells Neil, secured power by eliminating the
father from the family structure, manoeuvring men out of the skilled
professions, barring their access to education, and introducing Latin as
a cryptic, female-owned language. The novel thus reverses patriarchal
hegemonic structures: the privileges of masculinity are redistributed,
feelings of inadequacy and shame surround the male instead of female
body, and the cult of masculinity is replaced by the worship of mother-
hood. The phallus as symbol is replaced with the womb, and the once
abject female body is now holy and revered; as Grania tells Neil, ‘[t]he
lack is far better than the possession’ (Burdekin, 1989, p. 47).
Once again, Burdekin’s protagonist is an image of the female invert.
Grania is described as ‘far too big for a woman’, as ‘muscular and heavy-
built’, and as ‘handsome, but not womanly’ (pp. 10–11). Her son Neil
also notes that she seems ill-suited to female clothes, since ‘[h]er long,
ugly, lumpy, masculine thighs would have been better […] in men’s
loose breeches. And her shoulders too would have fitted a man’s coat
better than that old orange woman’s jacket’ (p. 13). Grania herself
articulates a belief that she is innately or biologically more masculine
than other women, ‘born muscular’, in a way that is again reminiscent
of the bodily dysphoria of the invert (p. 97).10 When Grania attends the
men’s May Day celebration, which is also an arena for courtship, her
position as a medial figure is made manifest:

she stayed there, on the margin, between the noisy physical tumult
of the men and the quietness, the cold, spiritual strength and pride
of the women […], a strange and solitary figure, too tall and not
tall enough, too strong and not strong enough, too proud, and not
proud enough, symbolizing in her position the place, or no-place, or
every-place she had in the world. (p. 27)

As she watches from the margins, it is evident that Grania occupies an

intermediate or third place in society (in terms of gender, desire, and poli-
tics); alienated from her more feminine peers, she thus has no place within
the heterosexual and matriarchal systems she sees at work before her.
Since the matriarchal order forbids the transmission of historical
knowledge to the male sex, Grania’s ambition to educate men is classed
as a seditious plot. Thus, when Grania’s activities are discovered, she is
arrested and tried for treason by the German Supreme Council, which
is led by her past lover, Anna K. The references to the bond shared by
 Elizabeth English 103

Grania and Anna are oblique, but the relationship clearly holds erotic
potential. On Grania’s instigation the women have been separated for
five years, because Anna ‘may be the only woman in Europe who can,
who could, control […] [her] will’ (p. 139). Such influential attach-
ments, Grania realizes, would have stalled her revolutionary plans.
Their reunion is a scene of renewed protestations of love, and in the
nights leading up to her trial – at which she is found guilty of treason
and sentenced to death – Grania makes the most impassioned and
rousing political speeches of the novel. As the women discuss Grania’s
vision for a better future, Anna’s body shivers and her ‘scalp prickle[s]
and tingle[s]’, while Grania boils like ‘the inside of a volcano’, her heart
beating like a ‘dynamo’ leaving her in ‘a wringing sweat’ (pp. 151–3).
Physically expended, in a state of almost post-coital fatigue, Grania bids
farewell to her lover and potential ally:

She lifted Anna off the couch, kissed her, and took her gently to the
door. She put her outside, shut it and locked it. Then, finding she was
in a wringing sweat, she had a bath and went to bed. (p. 153)

Hence, what occurs in this final scene is Anna’s simultaneous political

and sexual arousal or awakening. Grania seduces Anna both intellectu-
ally and corporeally, exploiting their love to find a guardian for her
revolutionary concepts, so planting the seeds of ideological unrest:

You have the power of this land in you, you have the vitality, the
tremendous concentration, the spiritual strength and hardness of
a German person. You can use it for the safety and stagnation and
injustice and lovelessness of Germany and the world; or you can use
it for courage, Anna, for growth, for change, for love, and for a better
life. (p. 152)

Grania’s rebellion has fatal consequences (thus exposing the thin divide
between the utopian and dystopian narrative, or rather the fact that
one person’s perfect existence is potentially another’s nightmare), but
Burdekin signals that the utopian impulse – the drive for what Grania
terms ‘courage’, ‘growth’, ‘change’, ‘love’, and finally ‘a better life’ – will
live on and blossom with Anna, compelled by the impetus of same-sex
love and desire.
Though both Grania and the Person hail from the future, they are
paradigmatic of the contemporary female invert, and they are con-
structed using a language very much rooted in Burdekin’s present
104 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

moment. It is evident that Burdekin perceived a link between political

consciousness and female-centred sexuality. More specifically, for
Burdekin the invert is an agitator or revolutionary, pushing forward
the social, political, and even biological evolution of the species. It
is here that she is arguably indebted to the ideas of another popular
theorist of sexuality, Edward Carpenter. Though it is not certain that
Burdekin read Carpenter’s work, many of her ideas and imagery bear a
distinct resemblance to those of this socialist writer.11 One might point
out that both figures employ the image of the chrysalis and the butterfly
(or in Carpenter’s case the mayfly) as a metaphor for human evolution
and spiritual growth, or that they imagine the soul as something that
will ripen and swell as humanity evolves; both talk of civilization not as
the epitome of human achievement, but as a diseased institution bent
on self-destruction; both advocate a return to nature, a reduced reli-
ance on technology, and a dislike of clothes as adornment. However,
it is the status of the invert in Carpenter’s utopian evolutionary theory
which is most fascinating here. Carpenter argues that the invert, blessed
with knowledge of both sexes, is further evolved and possessed of a more
sophisticated, even supernatural, level of consciousness. Similarly, he
suggests that it is the man or woman who shifts conventional gender
paradigms – ‘the man […] who did not want to fight […]. [T]he woman
who did not care about house-work and child-rearing’ (Carpenter, 1919,
p. 58) – who can enable the progress of mankind. The invert, in
Carpenter’s mind, has the potential to be a ‘forward force in human
evolution’, to galvanize human development and to create a fairer, more
humane existence (p. 59):

The double life and nature certainly, in many cases of inverts

observed to-day, seems to give to them an extraordinary humanity
and sympathy, together with a remarkable power of dealing with
human beings. It may possibly also point to a further degree of evo-
lution than usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness,
very imperfectly realised, of course, but indicated. This interaction
in fact, between the masculine and the feminine […] may possibly
lead to the development of that third order of perception which has
been called the cosmic consciousness, and which may also be termed
divination. (p. 63)

Echoes of these ideas can be heard throughout Burdekin’s work, most

clearly in Proud Man with the Person’s observation that ‘[y]ou may
think that these homosexuals, who were physically of one sex and in
 Elizabeth English 105

behaviour of another, might with their dual natures be groping, in a

very clumsy and childish way, towards a more human state of existence’
(Burdekin, 1934, p. 38). Like Carpenter, the Person suggests that it is
gendered duality which propagates the potential for a higher existence,
though this comes with the caveat that such progress is stultified by
homosexual persecution (p. 38). The resemblance is also evident in
The End of This Day’s Business with Grania’s attempt to articulate her
role in the revolutionary action she has initiated:

this thing that lies in my mind, in my mind alone – as yet – this little
embryo of a vast change – it lies there like that little lump of life that
was Neil once lay in my womb – will it be born, and grow strong and
tall like him, and have a will and power like mine, and do? Or will it
be stillborn, just a sad little carcass, useless? (Burdekin, 1989, p. 29)

Carpenter also makes use of this reproductive metaphor in The

Intermediate Sex (1908):

It certainly does not seem impossible to suppose that as the ordinary

love has a special function in the propagation of the race, so the
other has its special function in social and heroic work, and in the
generation – not of bodily children – but of those children of the mind,
the philosophical conceptions and ideals which transform our lives
and those of society. (Carpenter, 1908, p. 70)

Grania and Carpenter conceptualize the impact of the invert in much

the same vein. Far from sterile, the invert’s fecundity is found in its
ability to propagate intellectual, socially transformative ideas. What it is
crucial to garner from this is that for both Burdekin and Carpenter the
invert is a venerated figure elevated above the throng of (heterosexual)
humanity by his or her heterodox nature, possessed of an acute under-
standing of society and the ability to enact social revolution.
But this is not an uncomplicated vision of the future. Sexual inversion
and homosexuality are by no means synonymous in Burdekin’s work,
and they deserve a more nuanced examination than is possible here.
Indeed, one might argue that these are as much narratives of transgen-
derism as they are of homosexuality. Nor is sexual desire given free rein,
but is instead implicated in a complex process of negotiation over the
form sexuality should ideally take. Reading across Burdekin’s corpus,
it is obvious that she sees sexuality as fractured between the spiritual
and the physical, love and lust, but she remains emphatic that the
106 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

spiritual should be victorious, and that, ultimately, sensuality should

be expunged from sexual identity. In another of Burdekin’s novels,
The Rebel Passion, we see this idealized vision of sexuality come to frui-
tion. In this lesser-known work, a twelfth-century monk is visited by
a messenger of God and transported to visions of the past, present,
and future. Again, it is Giraldus’s status as an invert, signalled by his
female soul as well as by his desire for a fellow monk, that makes him
one of ‘[t]he chosen servants of Christ’ who ‘shall be strong and pure
and pitiful’, and who will ‘understand men and women both, by virtue
of the nature God has given them’ (Burdekin, 1929, p. 60). Again, the
sentiment here is indebted to Carpenter, who also promotes the invert
as an intermediary between God and his people (Carpenter, 1919,
p. 58; 1st edn 1914). In Burdekin’s distant future, which is revealed to
the maligned Giraldus as a means of consolation, we are presented with
a vision in which women have morphed into near-men:

These women were strange to look at, and it took me some time to
get accustomed to them. The whole race was a little taller than it had
been, and the women more nearly the size of men […]. Their muscle
of body had developed so much that their waists had disappeared,
and now they were broad-shouldered, broad-hipped and broad in
the waist, so that they looked very sturdy and thick-set. (Burdekin,
1929, pp. 236–7)

Equality is achieved in this world through the shedding of feminin-

ity and the evolution of the female body to a more masculine state.
This prefigures the later The End of This Day’s Business and Grania’s
sense of being innately, even anatomically, more masculine than her
sisters, as well as her hope for a ‘sexless society’, which she realizes to
be ‘physically impossible […] [but] not morally impossible’ (Burdekin,
1989, p. 106). Thus, we might see this idealized future as one populated
by female inverts like Grania. But in this and other works we witness
Burdekin privileging spiritual and platonic forms of sexuality and love.
In The Rebel Passion chastity is revered by all, so much so that even
the ‘touching dances of the old days’ are avoided, lest they prove too
great a temptation (Burdekin, 1929, p. 274). Even the blessed servant
of God, Giraldus, must sacrifice his desires: as the messenger of God
informs him, ‘there will always be some who cannot eat the sweet apple
without sin, no, not ever in all their lives’ (p. 60). In a similar vein,
the futuristic Person, ‘an entity independent of others both physically
and emotionally, who is self-fertilising, and can produce young, […] alone
 Elizabeth English 107

and without help’, hails from an impassive society where the human
race has homogenized into a single sex able to reproduce without coitus
(Burdekin, 1934, pp. 22–3).
What stands out in each of these instances is the drive to homog-
enize society and even to create an asexual, androgynous ideal. As
can be observed from Burdekin’s imagined worlds, in which chastity
is either institutionalized (The Rebel Passion) or biologically enforced
(Proud Man), the very distinction and difference of sex and gender
would ideally be rubbed away, thus rendering the category of sexuality
essentially defunct. Her vision for sexual identity is therefore intricately
intertwined and reliant upon her fantasy of the evolution of gender. It
is not that Burdekin believes same-sex desire (or desire of any kind) to
be pernicious per se, but that we should strive towards an existence of a
higher order where such emotions and passions are irrelevant.
These narratives might initially disappoint us as puritanical, even
self-loathing, but Burdekin’s decision to suppress the somatic in her
utopian vision of sexuality is again testament to her sources, since many
of Ellis’s sexological case studies articulate a similar battle between
spiritual and physical expressions of love for women. One woman
relates, for instance, that ‘[a]t first my feeling for her was almost purely
physical, although there were no sexual relations. I hated this feeling
and have succeeded in overcoming it pretty largely. […] We both
consider sexual feelings degrading and deleterious to real love’ (Ellis,
1924, p. 233). In this respect Burdekin could be said to be participating
in what Jo-Ann Wallace terms, writing on Edith Lees Ellis (Havelock’s
wife), ‘sapphic idealism’, which is the celebration of lesbian love as
pure, spiritual, without shame, and, importantly, socially transforma-
tive (Wallace, 2006, pp. 183–99). The comparison will only take us so
far, since Wallace does not suggest that ‘sapphic idealism’ involves the
sacrifice of physical expressions of love, but it is useful nonetheless.
Again, this philosophy of lesbian love has its roots in sexological think-
ing, as Suzanne Raitt’s essay on the significance of love and emotion (as
opposed to, and often in place of, sexual acts) in turn-of-the-century
sexology demonstrates. Even such later theorists as Carpenter, Raitt tells
us, focused on the role of love and emotion as central to homosexual
identities (Raitt, 1998, p. 158).12
I conclude by returning once more to Burdekin, and by offering the
suggestion that she might have seen herself in this light – as an invert
insurrectionist. Carpenter boldly claims that ‘I think there is an organic
connection between the homosexual temperament and unusual psy-
chic or divinatory powers’ (Carpenter, 1919, p. 49). Thus, it is intriguing
108 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

that, in a letter to Ellis, H.D. recalls asking Burdekin ‘if her writing seems
in any way “mediumistic”’ (Friedman, 2002, p. 501) – an unsurprising
question given H.D.’s own interest in spiritualism. According to H.D.,
Burdekin responds that ‘she did at times, seem almost out of herself, or
in the hands of a “control”’ (p. 501). A letter from Burdekin’s companion
to Patai supports this idea of an occult interference: commenting upon
the nature of Burdekin’s writing, her companion describes Burdekin as
an ‘automaton’ and ‘visitant’ while in the grip of the authorial process,
and notes that ‘she was a piece of cosmic blotting paper, or sponge,
which some power squeezed, and out welled a strange confection’
(Patai, 1989, pp. 163–4). Burdekin thus positions herself as a literary
spiritualist, privileged with the duty of communicating a message from
a divine power. Lesbian protagonist and author alike, then, adopt simi-
lar responsibilities; both communicate ideas and observations which
possess the potential to galvanize social and political change. Thus,
what Burdekin and canonical lesbian modernists arguably have in
common is not only their interest in popular sexual discourse, but also
their celebration of lesbian desire and identity as potentially subversive
forces. Burdekin and her canonical peers are united by a shared utopian
intent: the desire to disrupt the heteronormative status quo and to
promote alternative, and better, ways of living and loving. For Burdekin
the anti-realist genre of utopian fiction is the chosen means by which
to achieve this, but she was not alone in turning to the fantastic with
radical ends in mind. Indeed, during this period, speculative modes
of writing were immensely popular among women authors. The list
is too extensive to be exhaustively detailed here, but one could cite
Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, Rebecca West, and Winifred Holtby
as a few better-known authors engaging with the form. One could also
refer to such evocatively titled texts as Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World
(1926), Victoria Cross’s Martha Brown, M.P.: A Girl of To-morrow (1935),
or Elise Kay Gresswell’s When Yvonne Was Dictator (1935) to gain a sense
of how speculative fiction was being used at this time. Many of these
writers turned to the genre to analyse the state of European politics, but
their attention was also clearly focused on the feminist politics of sex
and gender. For Burdekin, utopian fiction allows her to make the case
that the invert is an asset to society, both present and future. But more
significantly, the conventions of the genre, and the fact that it imagines
perfected forms of living, also allow Burdekin to embark on a process of
carving out an idealized form of sexuality.
In a letter to Ellis, H.D. notes reading some of Burdekin’s unpub-
lished ‘fables’, describing them as ‘excellent propaganda’, and hints
 Elizabeth English 109

at a plan to distribute these stories by ‘just leav[ing] them to be found

somewhere’ (Friedman, 2002, p. 423). H.D. treats Burdekin’s work as if
it were some kind of political tract to be subversively circulated among
fellow revolutionaries through guerrilla-like tactics. Her interpretation
is not at all far-fetched, for Burdekin’s work candidly dissects the very
structures of society, and suggests renewing and reworking our political,
social, and sexual frameworks for living. Yet, perhaps most revolution-
ary and modern of all, Burdekin suggests that at the very heart of this
radical upheaval will be the figure of the invert.

Notes
1. Reviews of Proud Man (1934), the first novel to be published under the name
Murray Constantine, point out that the flyleaf informs the reader that this is
the pseudonym of a well-known writer, suggesting that the publisher hoped
to engender fascination on the subject. For discussions of Constantine’s
identity see the following reviews of Proud Man: H.I.A.F. (1934), which
appeared in The Manchester Guardian, and Anon. (1934), which appeared in
The Times. The latter reviewer proposes that Constantine is female, while the
former seems to accept the author’s ostensible maleness.
2. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, H.D. Papers,
Letter from Murry Constantine [sic] to H.D. (1946). Friedman points out that
‘destroy’ is written in H.D.’s hand (2002, p. 551).
3. Burdekin also wrote under the noms de plume Katharine Penelope Cade and
Kay Burdekin.
4. New York City, The Dobkin Family Foundation, Archive of Katharine
Burdekin, Letters from Ellis dated 4 December 1934, 20 January 1935,
14 May 1937, and 24 June 1937.
5. I draw here on Darko Suvin’s definition: ‘Utopia is the verbal construction
of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions,
norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more per-
fect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based
on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis’ (Suvin,
1973, p. 30).
6. I draw here on Ruth Levitas’s inclusive definition of utopia which focuses
on the ‘desire for a better way of being and living’ (Levitas, 2011, p. 8), as
well as Tom Moylan’s argument that ‘utopian narrative is first and foremost
a process. […] That is, utopia cannot be reduced to its content’ (Moylan,
1986, p. 39).
7. Laura Doan argues that evidence of the presence of sexological works in
the personal libraries of such writers as Bryher, Sackville-West, and Hall
‘suggests that sexological works were not especially difficult to obtain for
wealthy and well-educated women of the upper or upper-middle classes’
(Doan, 2001, p. 133).
8. The difference here in Burdekin’s treatment of male and female homo-
sexuality is a nuance that demands more attention, but it can be explained
in part by the distinction made in sexology between ‘true’ and ‘acquired’
110 The Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction

inversion. Ellis, for instance, argues that inversion is ‘a narrower term than
homosexuality, which includes all sexual attractions between persons of the
same sex, even when seemingly due to the accidental absence of the natural
objects of sexual attraction’ (Ellis, 1924, p. 1). Edward Carpenter defends
the invert by stating that ‘too much emphasis cannot be laid on the distinc-
tion between these born lovers of their own kind, and that class of persons,
with whom they are so often confused, who out of mere carnal curiosity or
extravagance of desire, or from the dearth of opportunities for a more nor-
mal satisfaction […], adopt some homosexual practices’ (Carpenter, 1908,
p. 55).
9. Neither the Second World War nor the persecution of the Jews, Patai
points out, were fully underway when Burdekin was writing (Patai, 1989,
pp. 165–6).
10. For Ellis, the invert’s body is tangibly different. While he claims that ‘there
are no invariable anatomical characteristics associated with this impression’
(Ellis, 1924, p. 251) of masculinity, he contradicts this in noting the female
invert’s increased body hair, higher proportion of muscle to soft tissue
(which give inverts, Ellis states, ‘an unfeminine impression to the sense of
touch’), a different tone of voice, and atrophied sexual organs and genitals
(pp. 253–6).
11. However, Doan does point out that ‘[o]f all the treatises on sexuality in the
early twentieth century, Carpenter’s were by far the easiest to obtain’ (Doan,
2001, p. 143).
12. On this point I am indebted to Wallace, who makes the connection between
‘sapphic idealism’ and Raitt’s essay (see Wallace, 2006).
6
Syncretic Utopia, Transnational
Provincialism: Rex Warner’s
The Wild Goose Chase
Glyn Salton-Cox

British leftist literary culture of the 1930s was deeply invested in the
utopian possibilities of international exchange. The itinerancy of left-
ist writers, the international aspirations of important periodicals, and
the apparently insatiable appetite during the Popular Front period for
international writers’ congresses contributed to the construction of a
utopian imaginary from a broader set of leftist cultures. This imagi-
nary is traditionally seen as mediated by the émigré hub of Paris and
the Spanish Civil War, but it can also be triangulated between Central
Europe, the Soviet Union, and Britain. While many important cultural
figures attended leftist conferences in Paris and fought in or reported on
the Spanish Civil War, writers such as John Lehmann and Christopher
Isherwood were drawn to Central Europe (Isherwood also venturing
further afield to China), while organized trips to the Soviet Union
were attended by large numbers of British writers. Literary models and
theories from German-language and Soviet sources, circulated through
translations, travel, correspondence, and conferences, thus played an
important role in the development of a distinctive leftist aesthetic
during the period. In Raymond Williams’s term, the formation – the
aesthetic ideologies at play and the networks through which such
ideologies are propagated – of the thirties leftist imaginary was consti-
tuted by transnational circuits of production and fuelled by a belief in
the utopian possibilities of international exchange.
The most (in)famous reception involves many of the key early texts
of socialist realism from the Soviet Union: Fyodor Gladkov, Maxim
Gorky, Nikolai Ostrovsky, and Mikhail Sholokov had all been translated
by the late thirties, and influenced a wide variety of novelists during
the period, from the working-class novels of Lewis Jones to the more
neurotic work of Edward Upward. Less orthodox Marxist models were
111
112 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

also influential, including Sergei Tretiakov’s ‘factography’, a form of

anti-humanist reportage, closely associated with the work of Tretiakov’s
friend Bertolt Brecht, which aimed at the creation of a new, collectiv-
ized form of literary production. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories
(1935/39) was influenced by Tretiakov’s factography, which Isherwood
encountered during his time in Berlin. Soviet films such as Dziga
Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934) were also viewed extensively in
Britain during the decade, with W. H. Auden writing the intertitles for
a London showing of Vertov’s film in 1935. Meanwhile, these utopian
cultures were complicated by the contemporary reception of a Central
European dystopian imaginary, embodied by the refugees and exiles
from Nazi Germany, and given particularly influential cultural form
in the reception of Expressionism. The best-known instances of this
reception are Kafka’s fiction, newly available in Edwin and Willa Muir’s
translations in the thirties and rendered ‘prophetic’ by the Nazi seizure
of power, and German films including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
This formation reveals a series of transnational networks, debunking
accounts of the period which stress the British left’s isolation from
international leftist cultures. Such accounts have their roots in the
influential analyses of British leftist culture associated with the New
Left Review of the sixties, characterized by Perry Anderson and Tom
Nairn’s so-called ‘Anderson-Nairn theses’, and by Anderson’s 1968 essay
‘Components of the National Culture’, in which Anderson argues that
the ‘collective fever’ of thirties leftism was ‘provincial and insubstantial’
(Anderson, 1968, p. 11). Terry Eagleton continued this analysis in his
early work (see Eagleton, 1970, p. 17; and 1976, p. 21), as did Anderson
in Considerations on Western Marxism (Anderson, 1976, pp. 68–70). Their
conception of the isolation of the British left has become canonical:
Valentine Cunningham’s account of the period, for instance, even as it
stresses the prevalence of international travel, dismisses such itinerancy
on the part of thirties writers as a sort of immature craze for travel and
the exotic, and completely overlooks the extent of translation of impor-
tant Marxist texts during the period (Cunningham, 1988, pp. 377–418).
More recently, sympathetic accounts of the decade also tend (perhaps
unwittingly) to picture the British left as isolated. Anxious to exonerate
leftists of the period from the charge of ‘Stalinism’, such accounts often
neglect or repress important international exchange mediated by com-
munist cultural networks, particularly with reference to socialist realism
(Montefiore, 1996, p. 142; and Mengham, 2004, pp. 367–9).
But while an examination of the circulation of leftist culture during
the period dispels the myth of isolation, accounts which suggest that
 Glyn Salton-Cox 113

the thirties left was blithely cosmopolitan and dismissive of the utopian
claims of the nation are equally mistaken. This idea, that thirties leftists
took their utopian models exclusively from abroad, is typified by George
Orwell’s view that they ‘took their opinions from Moscow’ and were
‘always anti-British’ (Orwell, 1941, p. 406). Taking Orwell at his word,
Orwell scholars in particular have, as Philip Bounds puts it, tended to
see Orwell’s ‘shift towards patriotism as something wholly exceptional,
a sort of intellectual quirk which distinguished Orwell from an inter-war
left that was somehow more “internationalist” in perspective’ (Bounds,
2009, p. 41). Bounds rightly upbraids this tendency in his examination
of the ‘radical patriotism’ of British Communism during the Popular
Front period and its influence on Orwell’s famous ‘revolutionary patri-
otism’ of the early forties. As Bounds outlines, in the mid- to late thirties
there was an increasingly pervasive sense of the utopian possibilities of
popular national tradition, what Australian-born English radical patriot
Jack Lindsay called in England, My England (1939) the ‘genuine English
tradition’ of popular revolt (Lindsay, 1939, p. 14), which stretches back
to Saxon resistance to the ‘Norman yoke’ and includes the Peasants’
Revolt, the ‘English Revolution’, and Chartism. Rather than presenting
the ‘patriotism of the deracinated’ (Orwell, 1940, p. 103), British
Communism of the mid- to late thirties was firmly rooted in the nation,
even as it took its cue from a wider European concern with countering
fascism on its own grounds.
While transnational cultural exchange exposed leftist writers in
Britain to a wide variety of utopian imaginaries from abroad, one
such international imaginary was that of the return of the nation.
Indeed, Popular Front internationalism, with its fundamentally
Westphalian conception of national integrity, was increasingly consti-
tuted by a re-imagining of national tradition, a left patriotism deployed
against the ‘false patriotism’ of fascism and transmitted through ever-
proliferating networks of international congresses and internationally
minded periodicals such as International Literature and Left Review. The
leftist culture of the thirties was, then, characterized by what I call
transnational provincialism: a circuit of cultural production transmitted
by transnational exchange which promoted an internationalism con-
stituted by a parochial conception of national tradition.1 Transnational
provincialism had many different branches in Britain alone, includ-
ing the direction of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB’s)
literary-theoretical output, especially the work of Ralph Fox; British
documentary filmmaking, which deployed international person-
nel and techniques to explore parochial subjects; and the curious
114 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

phenomenon of the English petit-bourgeois novel, deeply provincial and

yet, pace Eagleton, engaged with wider, trans-European questions of
social identity. Through these diverse formations, a characteristic uto-
pian imaginary emerged, constructed through the promise of English
popular tradition and Soviet revolution and set against the dystopian
menace of European fascism.
In the following essay I shall explore one particular instantiation of
this imaginary: the literary genre of utopian fiction, the best exam-
ple of which is found in Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase (1937).
Warner was, in many ways, the classic ‘fellow traveller’ of the period.
He never joined the Communist Party, but maintained an allegiance to
Communism during the thirties. He was to be found selling the Daily
Worker on the streets in 1930, and in attendance at the 1938 Paris rally
‘For Peace and Against the Bombardment of Open Cities’ alongside
such figures as Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Ilya Ehrenburg, and
Louis Aragon (see Tabachnick, 2002, pp. 74 and 125). Expressing sup-
port for Popular Front policies during the mid- to late thirties, Warner
published a series of articles in leftist publications, including Left Review
and the Soviet journal International Literature (see Warner, 1936; 1937a;
and 1939). Like many other fellow travellers, Warner turned away from
Communism after the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union in 1939, and reverted to a conventional liberalism
for the rest of his career. Putting aside the biographical question of the
degree of his personal commitment to, or, as Cold War thinking would
have it, ‘apology’ for, Soviet Russia, I will instead focus on Warner’s
novel, reading it as a lightning-conductor for the various aesthetic
ideologies at play during the period.2 The Wild Goose Chase opposes
a fascistic metropole, part seat of a decayed British imperialism and
part Central European nightmare, to an oppressed countryside, site of
a very English, yet recognizably Bolshevik, revolution. Warner’s novel
unites within an Anglocentric frame the Central European dystopias
of Alfred Kubin and Franz Kafka, tropes from the fairy-tale tradition,
strains of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and key aspects of socialist realism. The
overarching plot device is taken from Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), with
its orphan-hero renamed George, who, assisted by his mentor, Joe (an
avuncular composite of Stalin and a sturdy English yeoman), overcomes
the fascistic government of the ‘Town’ and leads a largely peasant revo-
lution. In its Anglo-Soviet utopianism, which emerges against a Central
European dystopia, Warner’s novel deploys a diverse set of aesthetic
ideologies while performing a return to an idealized conception of
the nation, embodying the transnational provincialism of the period.
 Glyn Salton-Cox 115

Cosmopolitan in its generic constellation, yet often ideologically

parochial, The Wild Goose Chase is thus the paradigmatic novel of
thirties utopianism, in which the popular spirit of the English radical
tradition, energized by Bolshevik revolutionary élan, overthrows the
dystopian forces of British imperialism and Central European fascism.
The Wild Goose Chase opens with three brothers preparing to cross
the frontier from a sleepy provincial backwater to the unknown ter-
ritory beyond. They are seeking the ‘Wild Goose’, a mythical creature
said to have sired them and other inhabitants of their village. The
eldest of the three sons, Rudolph (a brawny, brainless empire-building
type), the middle son, David (a cerebral aesthete with close links to
the clergy), and the third son, George (a likeable rogue), set out on a
picaresque journey, which sees all three brothers cross the frontier to
a nightmarish, fascistic world. While Rudolph gets repeatedly lost in a
series of bizarre colonial endeavours, David is charmed by the culture
of the fascist metropolis, where he decides to reside. George, however,
who abandoned his presumably bourgeois upbringing to play football,
labour on a small farm, watch birds, and enchant the women of the vil-
lage, realizes that his individualistic search for the Wild Goose is flawed
and that his future must lie in well-organized collective action. He then
successfully leads a revolution, uniting the peasants and the workers
and bringing about the bloody overthrow of the fascistic government
beyond the frontier.
The imaginary of The Wild Goose Chase is at once recognizably English
and yet saliently Soviet. The name of the hero, George, immediately
signals an investment in heroic Englishness, a sign of the novel’s
‘redemptive Anglocentrism’ (Esty, 2004, p. 10) constantly reiterated
by the novel’s cultural geography and set against a critique of a spe-
cifically British imperialism in the figure of George’s brother, Rudolph.
Meanwhile, the picaresque plot of Warner’s novel is obviously drawn
from Fielding’s Tom Jones, a resonance also evident in George’s blithe
series of sexual conquests. However, The Wild Goose Chase is also
clearly a novel of revolution, deeply invested in the necessarily violent
overthrow of capitalism and fascism by collective action, and heavily
influenced by the socialist realist novel from the Soviet Union. While
the echoes of canonical Soviet fiction in Warner’s novel have been
pointed out by John Coombes, he does not elaborate on precisely how
the form of The Wild Goose Chase draws on socialist realism beyond
remarking on George’s ‘journey from innocence to experience’ and
status as a ‘positive hero’ (Coombes, 1994, p. 224). In fact, Warner’s
novel bears a very specific formal debt to the socialist realist novel in
116 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

three paradigmatic senses of the genre as outlined by Katerina Clark:

the novel’s deployment of what Clark calls the Soviet novel’s ‘sponta-
neity/consciousness dialectic’; Warner’s use of epithets as a device to
mark character; and the text’s ‘modal schizophrenia’, Clark’s term for
the tendency of socialist realist novels to shift modes in jarring fashion
from the realistic to the utopian. In the following section of this chapter
I will examine the first two of these formal features, and will return to
the novel’s ‘modal schizophrenia’ in due course.
Clark has argued that the plot and characterology of the socialist
realist novel hinges on a central dynamic of the Bolshevik imaginary:
the dialectic of spontaneity and consciousness, by which revolutionary
historical progress occurs according to a series of productive dialectical
confrontations between spontaneous popular will and disciplined
revolutionary consciousness (Clark, 1981, pp. 15–16). In the paradig-
matic socialist realist novel, this dialectic is typically played out in
the development of the protagonist, the ‘positive hero’ who matures
from a young, adventurous firebrand to a disciplined revolutionary.3
In Warner’s novel, George’s development tracks this dialectic with
remarkable fidelity. Initially interested mainly in adventure, George
comes to understand the need for well-organized collective action, thus
overcoming his initial untutored spontaneity through a new, disciplined
consciousness which will bring forth a new, tempered spontaneity. As
George remarks during his epiphany halfway through the novel:

‘How clearly do I see now that the city and its kings can never be sub-
dued, never even be seriously disturbed by adventurers! Only an army,
only the organized movement of masses can shake that government,
and my place is on no pedestal of my own, but shoulder to shoulder
with the peasants and with what portion of the town populace is
ready for revolt.’ (Warner, 1937b, p. 233, emphases added)

This passage signals a pivotal moment in George’s dialectical movement

between spontaneity and consciousness, the point at which he realizes
that he cannot search for the ‘Wild Goose’ alone and must fight as part
of a collective to overthrow the government of the ‘Town’. To do this he
must unite the somewhat backward peasants and workers and harness
their spontaneity to his newly found consciousness, which crucially has
been formed by advice from old-guard revolutionaries and sharpened
by violent encounters with village kulaks. Such transmission of advice
from revolutionary mentor to disciple is a vital part of the spontane-
ity/consciousness dialectic in the socialist realist novel, given particular
 Glyn Salton-Cox 117

familial emphasis during the high Stalinist period, when a ‘great family’
of fathers and sons became a central mythological focus of Soviet soci-
ety with, of course, Stalin as the ultimate father-figure of the Soviet
nation (Clark, 1981, pp. 114–25). In The Wild Goose Chase, George
finds a father-figure and chief revolutionary mentor in a revolutionary
farmer, Joe (!), whose daughter, Joan, he marries at the novel’s close.
George is thus enfolded into the pervasive familial myth of Stalinist
society through his marriage to the daughter of his chief mentor, Joe,
who is now George’s father-in-law, just as Stalin was ‘dear father’ to the
Soviet Union.
Joe’s obvious troping of Stalin is further achieved by means of a key
device from socialist realism. As Clark has shown, socialist realist texts
often deploy the device of epithets: for instance, in Maxim Gorky’s
Mother (1907), a key forerunner and model for the socialist realist novel,
the hero Pavel’s journey to consciousness is marked by his countenance
becoming more and more ‘stern’, ‘serious’, and ‘calm’ (Clark, 1981,
pp. 60–1). In The Wild Goose Chase, Joe’s special status is similarly
denoted by the use of the epithets ‘shrewd’ and ‘kind’: when George
first meets Joe, his future mentor ‘survey[s] the travellers’ with ‘shrewd
and merry […] eyes’ (Warner, 1937b, p. 80). Joe is then described as
‘shrewd’ twice in as many sentences: ‘But the farmer, after looking
George over shrewdly, said: “Don’t you believe it, squire,” […] his
mouth conveying a pleasant sense of welcome, though his eyes were
very shrewd’ (p. 82). Joe is also described as ‘kind’ twice in quick suc-
cession: ‘The farmer laughed and looked kindly at George’ (p. 83), and
‘a glow of kindness made beautiful his great face’ (p. 84). This process
of saturation of the same descriptors culminates in a passage where Joe
is described as ‘cunning-kind’ (p. 85), Joe’s two chief epithets joined in
summation of his character. While ‘shrewd’ might be an epithet most
obviously associated with capitalists, softened by his kindness and
inflected by his resolutely revolutionary standing, Joe’s shrewdness can
be seen as an iteration of the Stalinist trait of ‘seeing farther’. Joe’s ‘kind-
ness’ thus operates in a similar way to how Clark has shown smiling or
laughing to work in some Soviet novels, as a counterbalance to sterner
character traits (Clark, 1997, p. 40).
In contrast to Joe, the most prominent character in the novel with a
Russian name, Pushkov, is marginalized as a revolutionary who, although
he ‘constantly opposed the Government’, was motivated by personal
resentment against the authorities and who dies an ignominious death
(Warner, 1937b, p. 184).4 Pushkov’s death scene is a striking parody of
similar scenes in earlier Russian revolutionary literature, which very
118 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

often feature a noble, saint-like death for their revolutionary heroes.

Wasting away, and railing against an unfair world, Pushkov’s death is
deeply undignified, quite unlike, for instance, the dignity with which
Pavel’s mother meets her end in Gorky’s Mother. Pushkov is an acquaint-
ance and former comrade of Joe, and represents the false revolutionary
path to Joe’s correct direction, which gives their joint appearance in the
novel the air of a Stalinist succession narrative. Despite a moment of
pity for an old revolutionary cruelly treated by the authorities, George
underlines this aspect when he remarks on Pushkov’s death: ‘here, cer-
tainly, was not a leader to new things’ (Warner, 1937b, p. 284). But this
is a Stalinist succession narrative that proceeds according to a progres-
sive Anglicization of the revolutionary hero: after the death of Pushkov,
Joe – dear father yet English farmer – is the last remaining revolutionary
of the old guard; then, after the death of Joe, the baton is passed on to
George, the unmistakably English hero, to continue the revolution.
In fact, George appears not only to domesticate the revolutionary
energies of Bolshevik revolution but also, in a move tracked by Jed Esty,
to redeem Englishness from the excesses of a crumbling British imperi-
alism (Esty, 2004, p. 10). Eschewing his brother’s quixotic attempts at
empire-building beyond the frontier, George instead establishes himself
in Joe’s recognizably English country village, from where he plans the
overthrow of the fascistic ‘Town’, metropole of the colonial power which
controls the troubled countryside. The ‘Town’ had offered its subjects
the dubious benefits of ‘cigarettes, blue beads, and a repulsive medical
attendance’ (Warner, 1937b, p. 115), and George’s largely peasant revo-
lution is presented as the uprising of an autochthonous English popular
radicalism against an oppressive power which is simultaneously fascist
and imperialist. George’s revolutionary mentor not only figures Stalin,
but also the sort of sturdy English yeoman celebrated as the backbone
of the Peasants’ Revolt or in William Cobbett’s idealized vision of the
English countryside. Swilling beer, addressing George as ‘squire’, and
heartily welcoming visitors to his hearth, Joe appears as a very English
rebel. While organized in cells in Leninist fashion, George’s revolution
is planned from Joe’s farmhouse, which, despite its dilapidation in the
face of the oppression of the ‘Town’, is nevertheless presented as an
English pastoral idyll:

But, for all that, the building was a pleasant sight glowing red in the
setting sun, with boughs of cherry blossom visible behind angles of
brick, wistaria on walls and, so far as was possible in such a state of
disrepair, an air of tidiness, and a sense of comfort that came to the
 Glyn Salton-Cox 119

nostrils from the rich smell of animals, milk and vegetation. There
were swallows gliding in long curves in and out of the sheds; over-
head rooks flapped cawing black to tree tops, a natural scene. (p. 80)

The revolution, it seems, starts in Kent. This peculiar meeting of a

redemptive sense of English Gemeinschaft and the mythological struc-
tures of Bolshevik revolutionary élan is, however, central to the utopian
culture of the mid- to late thirties English left, ever ready to see in Wat
Tyler the precursor to Lenin, or even to assert that, as Jack Lindsay rather
over-confidently put it, ‘in England, as nowhere else, we can find a
solidly persisting communist tradition’ (Lindsay, 1939, p. 64).5 Warner’s
novel, published in 1937 but written during 1931–32, anticipates
the high point of such a synthesis later in the thirties, when Popular
Front culture became deeply invested in the popular national tradition
alongside the Comintern’s continued location of utopian promise in
the Soviet Union. But such a synthesis was not constituted solely by a
rediscovery of the popular radicalism of the nation alongside the inspi-
rational example of the Soviet Union. Like many utopian structures, a
dystopian element was also necessary to its development: a dystopia
located, of course, in Central Europe.
The Wild Goose Chase is a particularly salient example of the triangula-
tion of English thirties leftist literary production, only intelligible as an
Anglocentric domestication of Soviet forms and tropes which operates
against and is constituted through the dystopian imaginary of Central
European Expressionism. Just as Popular Front cultural politics required
a triangulation between the evils of fascism, a utopian conception of
the Soviet Union, and the promise of popular national tradition, in
Warner’s novel the allegorical dystopias of Alfred Kubin and Franz Kafka
are set against an investment in socialist realism and English popular
radicalism. At the same time, The Wild Goose Chase orders its narrative
by deploying the structure of the fairy tale, a genre which was para-
digmatic for the negotiations between utopian promise and dystopian
threat during the period.
The imaginary of the fairy tale is always in some sense simultaneously
utopian and dystopian: the community and/or individual is fundamen-
tally threatened, whether from internal corruption or external menace,
and then is rescued and redeemed through a utopian reversal. Such
a structure of the utopian reconstitution of community, inherent to
the genre, became particularly salient in twenties and thirties Germany,
where the fairy tale and fable experienced a revival. During the Weimar
Republic, leftist re-imaginings of the fairy tale flourished against
120 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

a backdrop of constant unrest and continual reversals of fortune, an

important but often overlooked part of the precariously utopian culture
of Weimar Germany, characterized by the pursuit of projects of radical
futurity in the midst of political and economic crisis. As Jack Zipes has
discussed in the introduction to his collection of translations of such
tales, Weimar leftist fairy tales took a number of forms, including didac-
tic leftist tales for children and more unsettling fairy tales for adults,
often drawing on Expressionism (Zipes, 1989, pp. 19–20). After the Nazi
accession the leftist fairy tale also had an important afterlife in the thir-
ties among German émigrés such as Walter Benjamin and Anna Seghers,
for whom the notion of storytelling as a means of survival was central
to the role of literature for exilic consciousness.6
In Warner’s novel, the main element of the fairy tale deployed is
the figure of the lucky third son of folklore – as W. H. Auden put it in
‘Danse Macabre’ (1937), ‘the Fortunate One, / The Happy-Go-Lucky, the
spoilt Third Son’ (Auden, 1937, p. 106). But while in this poem Auden’s
presentation of the third son is ambivalent, when Warner takes up
this trope it becomes positive. In The Wild Goose Chase, George’s status
as third son and his bizarre parentage as the child of the ‘Wild Goose’
allows Warner to sidestep the tricky problem of the class origins of his
hero. As a bourgeois, Warner was probably aware that he could not write
a convincing proletarian character, and yet a Soviet-style ‘positive hero’
could hardly have conventional bourgeois origins. Warner solves this
problem through both George’s position as a third son and his bizarre
parentage. The other main positive character in the novel is presented
similarly: Joe, representing the archetypal simple country dweller who
holds the key to the hero’s quest, is also, like George, the third son
of fairy-tale tradition. The novel’s debt to the fairy-tale tradition also
creates a palpable sense of menace throughout the narrative, with
the various oppressive agents of the ‘Town’ appearing in the guise
of uncanny, nightmarish figures, including giants constructed from
human flesh (Warner, 1937b, p. 348). At such moments, Warner’s debt
to Expressionist fantasy is also apparent, in particular to the allegorical
dystopia of Alfred Kubin’s novel The Other Side (1909).
While Warner’s novel is more usually seen as drawing on Kafka’s
The Castle (1926), which Warner read around 1931 in Edwin and Willa
Muir’s 1930 translation (see Tabachnick, 2002, p. 107), The Wild Goose
Chase bears a closer resemblance to Kubin’s novel.7 The Other Side is a
fantastic, Expressionist dystopia influenced by the fairy-tale tradition:
Kubin’s novel is set in the ‘Dream Kingdom’, a fantastic land con-
structed from houses in which terrible crimes have been committed.
 Glyn Salton-Cox 121

The inhabitants of the Dream Kingdom – the ‘dreamers’ – are unable to

distinguish between reality and fantasy, a tendency which finds expres-
sion in their worship of a clock tower in the city square. Here a parallel
with Warner’s novel emerges: in The Wild Goose Chase, the inhabitants
of the ‘Town’ worship a giant stuffed goose, which comes to symbol-
ize their false consciousness, just as Kubin’s ‘dreamers’ worship a clock
tower in a display of perverse idealism. Both The Wild Goose Chase
and The Other Side involve a more directly allegorical method than
that of Kafka, the clock tower and the stuffed goose clearly denoting
the idolatry of a deceived and complicit citizenry. As has been often
observed, Kafka’s hermeneutically resistant texts continually undercut
their own symbolism, leaving the reader with a sense of uncertainty as
to what crime Joseph K. has actually committed, or what the ‘Castle’
ultimately stands for, whereas Kubin’s and Warner’s novels have a
more directly allegorical structure which more doggedly names their
targets.
Such a directly allegorical structure also marks Warner’s depiction of
George’s various encounters with oppressive officials, another instance
of how the apparently ‘Kafkaesque’ elements of The Wild Goose
Chase are in fact closer to Kubin. As in The Castle, in The Wild Goose
Chase George repeatedly tries to obtain an audience with officials of
the ‘Town’ during his first visit, but his attempts are frustrated as he
comes up against endless waves of obstruction and oppression from
different levels of bureaucracy. The way in which the officials deal with
George is, however, closer to Kubin’s description of the absurd demands
of officials in The Other Side, which features the same structure of the
protagonist attempting to contact an obscure ruler. In The Other Side,
when the narrator attempts to contact the elusive all-powerful ruler of
the Dream Kingdom, he is told that he must take a ticket. But then he
is told that ‘to receive a ticket for an audience you need in addition to
your birth certificate, baptismal certificate, and marriage certificate, your
father’s graduation diploma and your mother’s inoculation certificate’
(Kubin, 1909, p. 61). Warner’s version pushes this surreal effect further,
with the questionnaire which must be filled in by visitors to the ‘Town’
consisting of a list of utterly bizarre questions, including instructions to
‘name two, or at the most three, animals’ and ‘what was the number
of the three musketeers?’ (Warner, 1937b, pp. 150–1). For both Kubin
and Warner, the oppressive and obscure bureaucracy asks specific and
detailed questions which directly reveal the absurdity of its dominion,
a slightly different sense of bureaucratic power than that which emerges
from its more obscure portrayal in The Castle.
122 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

However, the English reception of Kafka does have an important

part to play in the development of Warner’s novel, through Edwin
Muir’s preface to his and Willa Muir’s translation. In Muir’s preface,
he follows Max Brod in designating Kafka’s novel a ‘religious allegory’,
adding for the benefit of English readers that in this Kafka is aligned
with the Puritan allegorist John Bunyan: ‘The Castle is, like The Pilgrim’s
Progress, a religious allegory; the desire of the hero in both cases is to
work out his salvation’ (Muir, 1930, p. vii). This reading of Kafka has of
course been subjected to a number of robust critiques, but the salient
point is that Warner appears to have followed Muir’s identification of
Central European Expressionism with Puritan allegory.8 Contemporary
reviewers such as Joseph Needham picked up on the likeness between
The Wild Goose Chase and The Pilgrim’s Progress (Needham, 1938, p. 412),
while critical accounts such as N. H. Reeve’s have also placed Puritan
allegory at the centre of the novel’s narrative (Reeve, 1989, p. 2).
Bunyan’s influence is discernible in Warner’s novel, reinforced, as
Needham noted, by echoes of seventeenth-century prose. Indeed, in
a 1943 essay, ‘The Uses of Allegory’, Warner describes Bunyan and
Kafka as representing two different, but important strains of allegori-
cal writing: while Bunyan was engaged with ‘the throwing of bright
light on a definite belief’, Kafka’s allegory was, for Warner, ‘groping
toward a meaning that cannot be perfectly expressed’ (Warner, 1943,
p. 144).
Warner’s deployment of Bunyan in The Wild Goose Chase emerges
as a paradigmatic case of the domestication of international aesthetic
ideology. In attempting to render The Castle intelligible to English
readers, Muir appears to have scripted Warner’s own reception of Kafka,
familiarized through the influence of Bunyan. But in this moment,
Warner does not merely play a part in the Anglicization inherent in the
reception of Kafka, but also anticipates a key formation of the Popular
Front aesthetic, in which the reception of the dystopian imaginary of
Central Europe is a condition of the production of a utopia both transna-
tional and provincial. While Kafka was rendered ‘prophetic’ by the Nazi
accession, Bunyan was also lionized during the late thirties as part of the
Popular Front project of recuperation of the English radical tradition.
For such Popular Front radicals as Edgell Rickword and Jack Lindsay,
Bunyan was ‘a living part of the tradition’ of ‘great proletarian writer[s]’
who ‘embody the national spirit’ (Rickword, 1938, pp. 758–9; see also
Lindsay, 1937). Again, Warner’s novel anticipates the configuration of
popular national tradition and transnational forms which characterized
Popular Front cultural production. Meanwhile, Warner’s deployment
 Glyn Salton-Cox 123

of Central European Expressionist modes alongside Bunyan’s religious

allegory also demonstrates how utopian and dystopian generic conven-
tions operated syncretically during the period, a tendency which is also
at work at the novel’s close.
From Sinyavsky’s description of socialist realism as a ‘vinegret’ or
mixed chopped salad, to Svetlana Boym’s characterization of the mode
as a ‘monstrous hybrid of various inconsistent elements’, accounts of
socialist realism have stressed the incoherent eclecticism of the sources
of the socialist realist aesthetic (Boym, 1997, p. 121; see also Pesman,
2000, p. 289). These accounts have been overlooked by scholars of
thirties English literature, who have either tended to see the reception
of socialist realism as the dreary mimesis of a monolithically veridi-
cal aesthetic (Cunningham, 1988, pp. 299–301), or, more recently,
defensively proclaimed writers such as Warner as operating outside its
orbit (Mengham, 2004, p. 369). In fact, it is in precisely the disorderly
syncresis of The Wild Goose Chase that its most important similarity to
socialist realism is evident, for Warner’s novel’s eclecticism exhibits one
of the paradigmatic features of socialist realism. In accordance with
Zhdanov’s canonical formulation, the Soviet novel must represent ‘a
combination of the most matter-of-fact, everyday reality, and the most
heroic prospects’: this involves what Clark calls ‘its modal schizophre-
nia, its proclivity for making sudden, unmotivated transitions from
realistic discourse to the mythic or utopian’ (Clark, 1981, p. 37).
Symptoms of a similar ‘modal schizophrenia’ can be clearly observed
in Warner’s novel, which navigates uneasily between the picaresque, the
allegorical, and the hortatory in an attempt to open up literary space
for the work of revolution. At points, these shifts lead out onto utopian
vistas, operating in a very similar way to those of classic socialist realist
texts. Perhaps the best example of these shifts is found at the end of the
novel: following George’s successful revolution, Warner ends the novel
with George’s triumphant speech to the assembled population, the tone
quickly shifting to a mystical, utopian register. In particular, the final
passages of The Wild Goose Chase bear close comparison to the end of
Fyodor Gladkov’s 1924 proto-classic of socialist realism, Cement, which
was first translated into English in 1929, and became one of the most
important – if not the most important – models for future socialist real-
ist novels (Clark, 1995, p. 190).9 Gladkov’s novel features an energetic
hero, Gleb, who returns from fighting in the Civil War to find the local
factory totally dilapidated, and works tirelessly to get it running. At the
close of both Gladkov’s and Warner’s novels, the hero’s consciousness
merges with that of the people as he gazes at the assembled crowd.
124 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

Here are Gleb’s reflections just before he gives his speech towards the
end of Cement:

Wasn’t it worth while [sic] that all this countless crowd should come
here and rejoice in their common victory? He – what was he, Gleb,
in this sea of people? No, it was not a sea, but a living mountain:
stones resuscitated into flesh. Ah, what power! These were they who
with spades, picks and hammers had cut into the mountain for the
ropeway. (Gladkov, 1925, p. 303)

In this passage Gladkov performs a utopian subject–object resolution.

This is achieved first through Gleb’s dissolution into the ‘sea of peo-
ple’, which leads to an identification of the mass of people with the
mountain upon which they had been working, the labouring subject
thus becoming the object of labour. The effect created at the end of
Warner’s novel is remarkably similar. As George makes his way to the
rostrum to give his speech, he gazes at the crowd and realizes the
dissolution of their individual identities. ‘In the great throng it was
difficult for him to recognize the faces that he knew, so unanimous
was the expression of joy, so impersonal the strength of the assembly’
(Warner, 1937b, p. 437). George is then able to discern some faces in
the crowd, including the ‘distinct faces of peasants’ and the ‘stern
faces of the miners’ (p. 437), but this moment of recognition gives way
again to collective identity, which has a profound effect on George’s
own consciousness:

So rich was the detail of the crowd in which every man was himself,
and yet it was not by the detail that the mind of a spectator would
have been so moved, but rather by the mass, the embodiment of
so much joy. It could not have been of yesterday or to-morrow that
the men and women were thinking, although their fears and their
humiliations had passed with yesterday and it was on to-morrow
that their hopes, still ill-defined, were set; but now, poised between
the past and the future which were the springs of their being, the
momentary joy was clean, and George, as he made his way to the
dais, walked erect, thinking of the great conquest which had been
made and nothing else, for the sight and sound of so much liber-
ated life had, like a hot iron or a flood, cauterized and douched
quite clear his mind from every second thought which dwells
upon a tragic event past or a doubtful future. (Warner, 1937b,
pp. 437–8)
 Glyn Salton-Cox 125

Just as Gleb’s consciousness dissolves into the crowd, George’s

consciousness is fused with the ‘hot iron’ of the mass of people, a par-
ticularly Gladkovian image in which the industrial process functions
metonymically for utopian collective identity. Yet, at this very point
Warner extends the utopian shift of socialist realism into the realm of
the fantastic. Whereas in Cement Gladkov deploys similes and condi-
tionals to frame the apparently supernatural effects of Gleb’s collectivist
rapture – ‘it was as if the mountain had moved from its place and
fallen in a dreadful avalanche upon Gleb […] the high platform was
vibrating and swaying as though it were of wire […] it seemed that it
would break like a toy and fly through the air’ (Gladkov, 1925, p. 310,
emphases added) – in Warner’s novel, George witnesses a supernatural
transformation in the indicative:

But when the singing was over and the crowd and the generals were
standing for a short moment still, before dispersing, there occurred
an event so amazing that it may perhaps seem to some too big to
be believed; for we know, all of us, the nature of steel and concrete,
how stiff and intractable is their material, and how little apt for
volatility or dispersal; yet, if this story is to be believed, in the short
pause that followed the conclusion of the song, the whole massy
structure of the Anserium, blocks fitted each to each and long ribs
of metal, framework, surface and matter of the stupendous dome,
was suddenly whirled away, winnowed and dissipated in the upper
air like grain or stalks of straw; and what is perhaps even more
remarkable than the event itself is the fact that this convulsion of
nature was no hurricane, but happened in complete silence and a
dead calm. (Warner, 1937b, pp. 440–1)

This passage is directly followed by the final return of the ‘Wild Geese’
of the novel’s title, which completes the supernatural scene, ‘for these
creatures were rather altogether uncommon, with wings wider than
playing-fields, bodies like boats, and straight extended necks like a
flying forest’ (Warner, 1937b, p. 441). Warner’s novel is self-conscious
about this moment of fantastic transformation, as is evident in the com-
ments on ‘the nature of steel and concrete’ (which is also a clear echo
of Cement). Nevertheless, this acknowledgement of the strangeness of
fantastic elements does not erase their destabilizing presence. Indeed,
The Wild Goose Chase insists on the supernatural status of this transfor-
mation, maintaining that ‘this convulsion of nature was no hurricane’,
at this point again resembling Kubin’s fantastic narrative. In The Other
126 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

Side, following the apocalyptic series of transformations which attend

the destruction of the Dream State, the night sky appears for the first
time, having been previously permanently shrouded in darkness, ‘the
great cloud-bank that had been the Dream Kingdom’s sky had fallen’
and this signals, as in the above passage from The Wild Goose Chase, the
end of the illusory dystopic world (Kubin, 1909, p. 220). Here Warner’s
blend of Expressionism and socialist realism constructs a utopian mode
syncretically from dystopian and utopian generic conventions, the
novel closing on a moment which is simultaneously a Soviet collectivist
industrial sublime and an entirely fantastic moment of magical trans-
formation brought about through the destruction of an industrialized
cityscape.
While, then, the close of The Wild Goose Chase presents a Gladkovian
moment of dissolution of individual heroism into a collective identity
resting on the utopian mutability of the industrial materials of con-
crete and iron, it equally signals the destruction of the all-encroaching
machine-world of the ‘Town’, liberated from the constraints of the
sky-dome as the industrial is humanized by the return of open sky and
the appearance of the ‘Wild Geese’. Here Warner’s description of the
final dissolution of the capital’s hated machinery also presents one of
the novel’s echoes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Warner’s depiction
of the urban centre of the fascist state is taken straight from Lang’s
film, with the workers crammed into underground slums, the bour-
geoisie floating around ethereally under a sky-dome and the whole city
watched from a high-tech control centre by malevolent authorities. As
in Lang’s film, the physical structure of the city directly symbolizes the
oppressive class-structure of the state; and the utopian visions of The
Wild Goose Chase and Metropolis thus require the physical disintegra-
tion of the cityscape. Warner’s novel, however, refuses the ideological
configuration of Metropolis, which exhibits a conception of the capitalist
system as an all-encroaching, dehumanizing ‘machine’ resolved by a
humanist, social-democratic solution, as the ‘hand’ meets the ‘head’
through the figure of the ‘mediator’ who is, troublingly, the son of
the ruler. Unsurprisingly, contemporary German Marxist critics such
as Axel Eggebrecht attacked the film’s social-democratic resolution
in no uncertain terms (see Huyssen, 1986, p. 65). In Lang’s film, the
revolutionary movement is waiting for the arrival of the ‘mediator’. By
contrast, Warner attempts to insulate his novel from these critiques,
firmly aligning the novel against social democracy as a betrayal of the
revolutionary cause.
 Glyn Salton-Cox 127

This refusal of social democracy is handled through another

succession narrative, one which, like Pushkov-Joe-George, instantiates a
recognizably Soviet ideological structure within an Anglocentric frame.
George’s two lieutenants are named Stanley and Alfred, and they both
represent threats inherent to the communist movement from the right
and the left, respectively. Stanley is a reformist (depicted in recognizably
English trade-union cliché form, stolidly pipe-smoking and dedicated
but myopic), and Alfred an ultra-leftist, excitedly denouncing Stanley in
the name of ever more rashly radical plans for the revolution. Usually
bitterly opposed, Stanley and Alfred come together towards the end
of the novel in their aims to negotiate with the defeated king of the
‘Town’, a strategy George treats with suspicion. Predictably, George’s
concerns turn out to be entirely warranted, as the king attempts to poi-
son all three leaders. George, having refused the king’s offer of a drink,
survives to chase the king off, but Alfred and Stanley are both poisoned.
This polemic against social democracy is set against a dystopian vision
from Weimar Germany, itself Anglicized in the figure of Stanley.
George’s utopia thus emerges syncretically from a configuration that is
simultaneously transnational and provincial – a circuit of production
which vitally prefigures not only the Popular Front, but also dominant
discourses of the Second World War, even as Warner’s explicit ideologi-
cal recommendations in the novel remain firmly in the early thirties.
The infamous 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression between Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union is traditionally seen as the end of the influence
of the Popular Front, with the Treaty apparently making way for a very
different ideological moment during the first years of the Second World
War. Yet public allegiance to particular political positions is surely only
part of the ideological formations underlying any national imaginary,
and the importance of the 1939 Treaty should not be overestimated in
this regard. Warner, like many others, turned away from a political alle-
giance to Soviet Communism at precisely this point, and yet his novel
of 1941, The Aerodrome, continues the same structure of transnational
provincialism and syncretic utopia we have seen in The Wild Goose
Chase. As in Warner’s earlier novel, The Aerodrome features a dystopian
anti-fascist fable derived from Central European Expressionism and
driven by the plot of Tom Jones, a fable which gives way to an
Anglocentric utopia framed by the utopian shifts characteristic of Soviet
writers such as Gladkov. The Aerodrome builds on and intensifies the
process of Anglicization at work in The Wild Goose Chase: the whole
novel is set in an English country village threatened not by an external
128 Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase

threat, but by a home-grown fascism. The close of the novel, again

exhibiting a modal shift reminiscent of socialist realism, completes this
process:

I remember that night as we looked over the valley in the rapidly

increasing darkness that we were uncertain of where we would be or
what we would be doing in the years in front of us. I remember the
valley itself and how I saw it again as I had seen it in my childhood,
heard a late-sleeping redshank whistle from the river, and thought of
the life continuing beneath the roofs behind us. ‘That the world may
be clean’: I remember my father’s words. Clean indeed it was and
most intricate, fiercer than tigers, wonderful and infinitely forgiving.
(Warner, 1941, p. 302)

Here a dramatic rhetorical shift to a utopian mode is occasioned by a

pastoral vista, a glimpse of the ‘Deep England’ which Angus Calder has
identified as playing a central propagandistic role in wartime cultural
production (Calder, 1991, pp. 108–208). If, for the Warner of The Wild
Goose Chase, the revolution started deep in the English countryside,
then in The Aerodrome, a somewhat more mistily conceived utopia was
likewise located in the green fields of England.10
Both accounts emphasizing the isolation of the British left in the
thirties, and those resting on a conception of its unthinking cosmopoli-
tanism, must necessarily maintain the importance of the Second World
War as break: at this moment, a previously remote Britain becomes
the ‘island fortress’ at the centre of violent circuits of transnational
exchange, its newly urgent insular patriotism terminating supposed
British cultural isolation and rendering a jejune cosmopolitanism
defunct. But if we see the thirties as a decade of transnational provin-
cialism, and the Popular Front as the high point of such a system of
relations, then the imaginary of the so-called ‘People’s War’ begins to
look far more like the persistence of the constructions of the thirties left
rather than their undoing. Moreover, British wartime culture, like that of
the thirties left, was simultaneously utopian and dystopian, as fascist
threat coalesced a national imaginary invested in forms of utopian futu-
rity. The Aerodrome presents but one example of this persistence, with
others including Orwell’s position of ‘revolutionary patriotism’, the
role of Spanish Civil War veterans in setting up the Home Guard, and
the development of British documentary film. Such circuits of produc-
tion place British wartime cultural politics firmly within the traditions
of syncretic utopianism and transnational provincialism of the thirties
 Glyn Salton-Cox 129

left: the transition from the Popular Front to the People’s War might
be best seen, therefore, not as a great leap beyond the shame of the
Nazi–Soviet pact, but rather a short step from one neighbouring utopia
to another.

Notes
1. My development of this concept is indebted to Katerina Clark’s recent study,
Moscow, the Fourth Rome (2011), which charts how ‘nationalism, internation-
alism and even cosmopolitanism […] were imbricated with each other’ for
Soviet culture of the 1930s (Clark, 2011, p. 5).
2. For a sharp discussion of this tendency in work on the thirties, see Denning
(1998, p. 58).
3. See Gladkov (1925), Fadayev (1927), and Ostrovsky (1932–34) for paradig-
matic examples of this process.
4. Pushkov’s name recalls of course Alexsandr Pushkin, but also the eighteenth-
century Cossack rebel, Pugachev (1742–75), whose life Pushkin chronicled in
The History of Pugachev (1834). In Warner’s novel, Pushkov’s love of improbable
disguise – he rarely appears without a false beard or similar accoutrements –
would seem to parody Pugachev’s famed skill at impersonation, while also
perhaps recalling the disguises used by Trotsky while in exile.
5. This should give pause to Esty’s assumption that a younger generation
of English writers were not invested in similar structures of redemptive
Herderian contraction as the older modernists upon whom he focuses; indeed,
I would argue that the period’s ‘redemptive Anglocentrism’ might best be seen
primarily as a key feature of the anti-fascist left rather than of late modernism
(Esty, 2004, pp. 8–9).
6. As Benjamin put it: ‘Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale
had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest’ (Benjamin, 1936,
p. 89; see also Fehervary, 2001, pp. 122–47).
7. Michael Hamburger asserts that The Wild Goose Chase was centrally influ-
enced by Kafka (Hamburger, 1966, p. 127). For opposing views, see Crick
(1980, pp. 159–74) and Neumeyer (1967, pp. 630–42).
8. A correspondent of Muir, Warner later deferred to Muir’s critical judgement
on The Wild Goose Chase, agreeing that his allegory was more ‘extrovert’
than Kafka’s (see Neumeyer, 1967, pp. 634–5).
9. While their careers might seem completely divergent, it is worth noting
that Gladkov and Warner were part of overlapping transnational circuits of
cultural production: both had essays published in the same Soviet periodical,
International Literature (see Gladkov, 1934; and Warner, 1939).
10. Patrick Deer has argued that The Aerodrome satirizes ‘Deep England’, which
is part of the novel’s apparent critique of British wartime myth-making.
This argument not only overlooks the clearly exulted tone of the close of
the novel, but also fails to take account of Warner’s earlier deployment of
redemptive Englishness in The Wild Goose Chase (Deer, 2009, pp. 84–90).
7
The Role of Mathematics in
Modernist Utopia: Imaginary
Numbers in Zamyatin’s We and
Pynchon’s Against the Day
Nina Engelhardt

Introduction: utopia and science

Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is the first of ‘the “classic” modern utopias’
(Kumar, 1987, p. 23). Its conception of utopia is ambiguous, as its title
indicates – ‘is this eutopia, the good place, or outopia, no place – and are
these necessarily the same thing?’ (Levitas, 2011, pp. 2–3). This classic
modern literary utopia relates to the hopes and scepticisms surround-
ing the discovery in the early sixteenth century of ‘new and unexpected
worlds’ (Davis, 2000, p. 95). Columbus landed in the New World of
the Americas, the order of the universe was redefined by Copernicus
and Kepler, and the immense scientific and technical advances of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made visible formerly hid-
den realms of life and raised confidence in imagining worlds hitherto
inconceivable. As Lawrence Principe writes of the individuals of this
time: ‘Peering through ever-improving telescopes, they saw immense
new worlds – undreamt-of moons around Jupiter, the rings of Saturn,
and countless new stars. With the equally new microscope they saw the
delicate details of a bee’s stinger, fleas enlarged to the size of dogs, and
discovered unimagined swarms of “little animals” in vinegar, blood,
water, and semen’ (Principe, 2011, p. 2). In this scientific revolution,
natural philosophy, ‘which aimed to describe and explain the entire sys-
tem of the world’ (Henry, 2002, p. 4), was replaced by the beginnings of
the modern scientific search ‘for ways to control, improve, and exploit’
(Principe, 2011, p. 2) new and unfamiliar domains. Mathematics – as
the most exact science and the discipline whose findings are regarded,
as the historian of mathematics Jeremy Gray explains, ‘as among the
most certain and true things we know’ (Gray, 2004, p. 27) – was at the

130
 Nina Engelhardt 131

heart of the development of science. Galileo Galilei, commonly held

to be the father of science, argued that the book of nature ‘cannot
be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language
and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the
language of mathematics’ (Galilei, 1960, pp. 183–4). Science and math-
ematics proved to be potent means with which to understand and
change the natural world, ‘to give human beings greater power over
it, and to create the new worlds in which we now live so much of our
lives’ (Principe, 2011, p. 113). Given that seventeenth-century utopists
thus ‘lived in the formative period of a concept of progress based
on the conquest of nature, that is, science’ (Eurich, 1967, p. 271),
science took a prominent role in the literary examination of the
possibility to transform the world into an ideal order.
The political theorist Judith Shklar thus summarizes the eighteenth-
century philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet’s view
that science underpinned utopian hope: ‘science, by dispelling false
metaphysical notions and mere prejudices, must lead men to social
truth and virtue as well’ (Shklar, 1957, p. 5). While the sociologist
Krishan Kumar explains that science first plays a central role in
Campanella’s utopia The City of the Sun (1602), and that Bacon’s New
Atlantis (1626) subsequently ‘was most influential in fixing the associa-
tion between science and utopia’ (Kumar, 1987, p. 30), the historian
J. C. Davis highlights the scientific spirit and emphasis on reason that
underlie even the first classic modern utopia: ‘Utopia is a book about
the calculation of our interests. It is rational for us to pursue them in
ways appropriate to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and,
on the whole, we are rational’ (Davis, 2000, p. 107). Thus, from More’s
work onwards, literary conceptions of utopia are related to the begin-
nings of science and the emerging ability to control and manipulate
nature. Yet, while utopists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
witnessed the emergence of science, they could not have ‘imagined
the extreme dominance of science in modern society’ (Eurich, 1967,
p. 270), or the development of the concept of progress ‘to the conquest
of man, too, in the utopian societies of Orwell and Huxley’ (p. 271).
If the beginnings of the classic modern literary utopia correlate with
the rise of reason and science, the appearance of the literary dystopia
coincides with, and is an expression of, the critical revaluation of these
domains; ‘the “turn” towards dystopia from the late nineteenth until
the mid-twentieth century’ (Claeys, 2010, p. 108) ties in with ‘a wide-
ranging critique of the chief assumptions and postulates of modernity:
science, reason, democracy, the idea of progress’ (Kumar, 1987, p. 111).
132 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

Science is then no longer taken to lead to ‘social truth and virtue’

(Shklar, 1957, p. 5), and the fear of being controlled by the very means
which were hoped to shape nature into a perfect order contributes to
the conception of literary dystopias.
Critiques of reason and rationalization are obvious in both the
Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (written 1920–21; published in
English in 1924) and in the American writer Thomas Pynchon’s Against
the Day (2006). Yet, the two novels present the time of the revaluation
of science and utopia from different perspectives. We was written in the
period of changing views itself, and, as one of the first dystopian nov-
els, it depicts a future which uses science mainly as a tool for control.
By contrast, Against the Day was published roughly a century after the
events around which it revolves, and presents the past as a time when
diverse paths of development were still open. The critical evaluation of
a future deriving from the time of the increasing dominance of science
is thus complemented by a later view, which suggests that hope might
lie in reappropriating possibilities which were open at the beginning of
the twentieth century.
We and Against the Day react to what the sociologist Max Weber
described as characteristics of modernity, namely ‘rationalization and
intellectualization’ (Weber, 1918, p. 155). According to Weber, in the
modern West it is believed ‘that one can, in principle, master all things
by calculation’ (p. 139), yet the disciplines of calculation cannot pro-
vide ultimate answers since science ‘has seemed unable to answer with
certainty the question of its own ultimate presuppositions’ (Weber,
1915, p. 355). Most importantly for the discussion of We and Against
the Day, mathematics, which is at the forefront of modernist rationali-
zation, reveals the absence of stable foundations when undergoing a
‘modernist transformation’ (Gray, 2008, p. 1) in the so-called founda-
tional crisis of mathematics. During the crisis, which lasted from the
1880s to about 1930, mathematics ceased to be seen as the language of
the book of nature, and was increasingly conceived as an autonomous
language without direct relation to physical reality: ‘mathematicians
fashioned for themselves a new image of the subject: autonomous,
abstract, largely axiomatic, and unconstrained by applications even
to physics’ (p. 305). Both We and Against the Day take account of this
‘modernist transformation’ (p. 1), and use the concept of imaginary
numbers to illustrate that certain aspects of mathematics do not fit
easily with the notion of mathematics as the language of the book
of nature. As the term already indicates, ‘imaginary’ numbers – as
opposed to ‘real’ numbers – require rethinking the relation between
 Nina Engelhardt 133

mathematics and reality. (While a more detailed explanation of the

concept of imaginary numbers will be given below, an intuitive grasp
of the term ‘imaginary’ is sufficient for the moment.) Zamyatin’s and
Pynchon’s works draw parallels between the mathematics emerging in
the foundational crisis and wider modernist developments. I will signal
these links by referring to ‘modernist mathematics’ in the following
discussion, even though the term ‘modern mathematics’ is more
commonly used in the history of mathematics, and the usefulness
of the term ‘modernism’ in mathematics is still being discussed by
present-day scholars.1
In his essay ‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters’
(1923), Zamyatin holds that modernist mathematics can act as an exam-
ple for literature, as the ‘new mathematics’ (Zamyatin, 1923, p. 112) has
already drawn consequences from the realization that its supposedly
realist representation of nature in fact describes a world that has no
direct relation to reality but ‘is a convention, an abstraction, an unreal-
ity’ (p. 112). Similarly, so Zamyatin argues, literature should abandon
realism and find a new – modernist – means of expression: ‘Realism […] is
unreal. Far closer to reality is projection along speeding, curved surfaces –
as in the new mathematics and the new art. Realism that is not primi-
tive […] consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, nonobjectivity’
(p. 112). According to Zamyatin, then, the model of ‘new mathematics’
can inspire literature to surpass ‘primitive’ realism and become a more
adequate modernist response to a heterogeneous world.
Unlike Zamyatin, Pynchon is not a modernist but a post-modernist
writer. Yet, when Against the Day traces how hopes and possibilities of
the early twentieth century are transferred into imaginary domains,
the novel illustrates what David Weir calls the aesthetic politics of
modernism. Weir argues that modernist literature is ‘characterized by
nothing so much as a tendency toward fragmentation and autonomy’
(Weir, 1997, p. 5), and thus realizes anarchism in aesthetics at a time
when it fails politically. Accordingly, Against the Day could be said
to perform ‘literary anarchy’, as it denies a governing plot or literary
style but allows multiple plotlines and genres to coexist. Moreover,
Pynchon’s novel explicitly illustrates the transfer of anarchism, which
‘is associated primarily with a rejection of representative democracy’
(Cohn, 2006, p. 21), from politics to other domains – particularly to
mathematics. ‘The political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in
mathematics’ (Pynchon, 2006, p. 668), yet, unlike the political devel-
opment towards the First World War, which ‘wipe[s] Anarchism off
the political map’ (p. 1053), the emerging modernist mathematics is
134 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

free from the demands of representing physical reality. Autonomously

self-governing, modernist mathematics can thus be seen as a realm of
anarchy. By presenting anarchist ideas in the mathematical domain,
and by performing ‘literary anarchy’, Against the Day demonstrates a
particular kind of modernist aesthetic politics in its content and
in its form.
In We and Against the Day, the modernist transformation of math-
ematics is central to the illustration of dystopian and utopian states.
Zamyatin and Pynchon could draw on mathematical backgrounds and
were ‘acutely aware of the ongoing scientific and mathematical revolu-
tion’ (Cooke, 1988, p. 161). Though this quotation refers to Zamyatin,
a mathematician and engineer, it equally pertains to Pynchon, who
studied engineering physics. By taking account of modernist math-
ematics, We and Against the Day present a question that has been paid
minimal attention in scholarly discussions of dystopia: namely, the fact
that when the concept of dystopia emerges in the nineteenth century,
and when literary dystopias highlight the negative aspects of societies
based on science, understandings of science change drastically in what
could be called another scientific revolution. Thus, the literary critic
N. Katherine Hayles uses the case of physics to discuss the twentieth-
century development in the sciences as part of a general ‘profound
transformation in the ground of its thought’ that amounts to, in her
view, ‘a revolution in world view’ (Hayles, 1984, p. 15), whereas at
the core of We and Against the Day is the modernist transformation
of mathematics. Understandings of mathematics are intertwined with
the notions of science and reason, so when mathematics changes those
concepts are transformed as well. Consequently, when drawing out
the negative implications of the ideas of ‘science, reason, […] [and]
progress’ (Kumar, 1987, p. 111) as employed in classic modern literary
utopias, dystopias refer to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries’
understandings of these concepts, but do not consider the more recent
meanings that emerge with the modernist transformation of math-
ematics. We and Against the Day, however, take account of modernist
mathematics, and, as a result, they not only present mathematics as
an instrument of rationalization and control, but also identify in it a
positive ‘modernist’ potential. Thus, in We mathematics is presented
as preventing dystopia, and in Against the Day it promises to lead to
utopia. Finally, in both novels the central role of imaginary numbers
suggests a convergence of modernist mathematics, literature, and
utopia in ideas about the freedoms implied by imaginary forms of
existence.
 Nina Engelhardt 135

Mathematics and certainty: Zamyatin’s We and

Pynchon’s Against the Day

The traditional notion of mathematics which informs the first classic

modern utopias, and is also illustrated in Zamyatin’s and Pynchon’s
novels, is associated with certainty and truth. In We, the totalitarian
OneState’s citizens, who are identified not by names but by numbers, and
the first-person narrator D-503 value the certainty of mathematics: ‘This
is against nature: for a thinking, sighted creature to live among irregu-
larities, unknowns, X’s’ (Zamyatin, 1924, p. 170). Since unknowns can
be rendered manageable, and even be solved by reason, D-503 holds
mathematics to be the ‘highest thing in Man’ (p. 64) and considers
happiness to lie in the stable order it promises: ‘there’s nothing happier
than figures that live according to the elegant and eternal laws of the
multiplication table. No wavering, no wandering’ (p. 65). In OneState,
the unambiguousness of mathematics is translated into all other
domains, and the aim of the ruling class is a completely certain, predict-
able, and controllable life that guarantees ‘a mathematically infallible
happiness’ (p. 3). Art is therefore produced ‘rationally’, and no longer
relies on genius and its ‘attacks of “inspiration” – some unknown form
of epilepsy’ (p. 18); love has been ‘conquered, i.e., organized, mathemati-
cized’ (p. 22); and decisions are calculated using ‘moral math’ (p. 14):
‘Only the four rules of arithmetic are unalterable and everlasting. And
only that moral system built on the four rules will prevail as great,
unalterable, and everlasting’ (p. 111). A mathematically perfect life can
only be guaranteed by ‘a highly organized, collectivized, rationalistic,
scientific’ (Collins, 1973, p. 39) state whose absolute order entails a
loss of personal freedom: ‘when a man’s freedom is reduced to zero, he
commits no crimes’ (Zamyatin, 1924, p. 36). D-503 slowly realizes that,
with the sacrifice of freedom in favour of controlled order, a constitu-
tive aspect of the human being is denied. Consequently, he begins to
question the desirability of living under ‘the beneficial yoke of reason’
(p. 3), and comes to consider a ‘mathematically perfect life’ (p. 4) to
be a dystopian predicament. However, as I will demonstrate below, in
We mathematics is presented as containing irrational and imaginary
elements that undermine rational rule, making mathematics ‘a model
for the revolt to be effected’ (Cooke, 1988, p. 158) should an irreversibly
rationalized dystopia be prevented.
In Pynchon’s Against the Day, too, mathematics is first introduced in
its traditional role as a stable science leading to truths about nature.
The members of the theosophical group T.W.I.T. base their beliefs on
136 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

the teachings of the Ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, and thus

try to counteract feelings of growing instability in the world. Making
‘arrangements for seekers of certitude, of whom there seemed an ever-
increasing supply as the century had rushed to its end and through
some unthinkable zero and on out the other side, the T.W.I.T. had cho-
sen to follow a secret neo-Pythagorean way of knowledge’ (Pynchon,
2006, pp. 246–7). Yet, attaining unambiguousness through mathematics
can also have negative consequences, as the Chums of Chance learn
when watching the crowd at the 1893 World’s Fair: they ‘saw that
unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight
lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until
the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor’
(p. 11). The situation at the Fair illustrates the world’s future develop-
ment into the First World War: unshaped freedom becomes rationalized
according to national interests which determine choices until almost
all possibilities collapse, the final turn leading to war. Thus, while
members of the T.W.I.T. use mathematics to provide the certainty that
is increasingly missing from the twentieth century, rationalization also
threatens to erase the known world in war.
As happens in We, mathematics in Against the Day is presented
according to its more problematical development in the decades around
1900. As the old order comes to a close with the end of the nineteenth
century, and as the world is faced with the uncertainty of the time prior
to the First World War, mathematics enters its foundational crisis: ‘The
political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in mathematics’ (p. 668).
A psychiatrist in the novel notes that the discoveries of the real-life
mathematician Georg Cantor induce the inhabitants of Göttingen
to question the certainty of mathematics itself, thus unsettling their
fundamental beliefs and sense of security: ‘Cantor, the Beast of Halle,
who seeks to demolish the very foundations of mathematics, bring[s]
these Göttingen people paranoid and screaming to my door’ (p. 702).
While the reception of Cantor’s ideas demonstrates that world-views
can no longer be securely built on mathematics as it is itself in crisis,
Against the Day uses the example of imaginary numbers to illustrate that
the modernist understanding of mathematics might provide a more
fruitful perspective on reality. The imaginary value of a number is usu-
ally marked in relation to the perpendicular or y-axis of a coordinate
system, and, when the novel begins with the calls ‘Now single up all
lines!’ (p. 3) and ‘Hurrah! Up we go!’ (p. 3), the Chums of Chance in
their airship ascend on the imaginary axis and signal a flight of literary
fancy. Indeed, the Chums inhabit the ‘most imaginary’ domain in the
 Nina Engelhardt 137

novel, meaning that conditions in their airship differ from the earthly
laws of other plotlines, and even more from the reader’s reality. The
Chums’ elevated and far-sighted position ‘thousands of feet in the air
and far from any outpost of Reason’ (p. 138) also allows them to see
that rationalization leads to the killing-floor, and to make their airship
a refuge from the increasing rationality of the earthly world. Thus, the
modernist transformation of mathematics not only results in a loss of
certainty, but other aspects of mathematics, exemplified by imaginary
numbers, are opposed to rationalization and can be employed in the
ascent to better worlds with higher imaginary values.

Revolution: mathematics against dystopia – imaginary

numbers in We

D-503 writes his records (which constitute the text of We) so that they
can be included in the cargo of the INTEGRAL, a spaceship designed to
spread the ‘divinely rational and precise’ (Zamyatin, 1924, p. 68) order
of OneState. As a mathematician and ‘the Builder of the INTEGRAL’
(p. 205), D-503 thus is at the forefront of rationalization. Yet, D-503’s
ordered life changes when he meets I-330, a woman to whom he feels
attracted and who turns out to be a member of the Mephi, a revolu-
tionary group planning to undermine OneState by seizing the INTEGRAL.
I-330 eludes D-503’s rational analysis, as there is ‘something about
her eyes or brows, some kind of odd irritating X that I couldn’t get at
all, a thing I couldn’t express in numbers’ (p. 8). Confronted with the
mysterious I-330 and the irrational feelings she ignites, D-503 loses his
mathematical certainty: ‘This woman was just as irritating to me as an
irrational term that accidentally creeps into your equation and can’t be
factored out’ (p. 10). This experience affects D-503’s entire existence:
‘Irrational magnitudes are growing up through everything that is stable,
customary, three-dimensional’ (p. 98). Thus, D-503’s records, designed
as a celebration of ‘the mathematically perfect life of OneState’ (p. 4),
document how the irrational breaks into the life of the trusted builder
of the vehicle of rationalization.
Significantly, the mathematical imagery used to express the unknown
outside of reason – ‘X’ and ‘irrational magnitude’, for example –
immediately indicates that the disconcerting elements are themselves
part of mathematics. Moreover, when D-503 claims not to be ‘living
in our rational world’ (p. 76) any longer, he uses a mathematical con-
cept to describe the non-rational state he has entered: ‘I was in the
ancient delirious world, the world where minus one has roots’ (p. 76).
138 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

The square root of minus one (√−1) is an imaginary number, and thus
contradicts the rule in the commonly used system of real numbers
that a square cannot be negative: 12 ⫽ 1; (⫺1)2 ⫽ 1. Following its coin-
age by René Descartes in the seventeenth century, the term ‘imaginary
number’ led to claims that the square root of minus one did not exist
and that it was an invention without correlation in the real world, a
fiction created by mathematicians. Even in the nineteenth century,
the mathematician George Airy declared: ‘I have not the smallest
confidence in any result which is essentially obtained by the use of
imaginary symbols’ (Airy quoted in Nahin, 1998, p. 82). In 1831 the
mathematician Augustus De Morgan similarly argued against using
imaginary numbers: ‘We have shown the symbol √−1 to be void of
meaning, or rather self-contradictory and absurd’ (De Morgan quoted
in Nahin, 1998, p. 82). The problematical ‘existence’ of imaginary
numbers then contributed to the revolutionary change in considering
mathematics as an autonomous language without direct relation to
reality. If mathematical existence is not based on correspondence with
nature but defined in the system of mathematics itself, any mathemati-
cal construction that complies with the rules inherent in the system is
valid and ‘real’, and all numbers share the same state of mathematical
reality. Thus, although the concept of imaginary numbers was not new
in the nineteenth century, the concept’s uneasy relation to physical
reality continued to trouble mathematicians and helped to raise aware-
ness of questions regarding the nature of mathematics and to initiate its
modernist transformation.
In We, D-503’s equation of imaginary numbers and an irrational
‘delirious world’ (Zamyatin, 1924, p. 76) emphasizes that for him the
imaginary lies outside reason, a connection made explicit when D-503
incorrectly calls √−1 an irrational number (that is, a number that cannot
be expressed as a fraction). He recalls that ‘√−1 first happened to me’
(p. 39) when the teaching machine ‘told us about irrational numbers’
(p. 39). The young D-503 is upset by the discovery of an irrational
aspect of mathematics: ‘“I don’t want √−1! Take it out of me, this √−1!”
That irrational root grew in me like some alien thing, […] and you
couldn’t make any sense of it or neutralize it because it was completely
beyond ratio’ (p. 39). The connection of the irrational and the imaginary
is further emphasized when the proposed cure to D-503’s illness –
‘You’re in bad shape. It looks like you’re developing a soul’ (p. 86) – is
to ‘[e]xtirpate the imagination. Surgery’s the only answer …’ (p. 88).
The soul as the seat of the emotions is thus related to the imagination,
and D-503’s childhood wish to have √−1 taken out of him becomes real
 Nina Engelhardt 139

when he is forced to undergo the operation at the end of the novel.

However, in the course of writing his records D-503 becomes convinced
that imaginary numbers do have a correspondence in nature, and
that they ‘prove’ the reality of an irrational domain in life: ‘For every
equation, every formula in the superficial world, there is a corresponding
curve or solid. For irrational formulas, for my √−1, we know of no corre-
sponding solids […]. And if we don’t see these solids in our surface world,
there is for them, there inevitably must be, a whole immense world
there, beneath the surface’ (p. 98). D-503 learns that an irrational
world outside the ordinary indeed exists: wild people live in the uncon-
trolled nature beyond the glass dome of OneState, whose overthrowing
is also planned ‘from without’ by the revolutionary Mephi.
Since imaginary numbers are a sign of the irrational and the domain
outside the control of OneState, mathematics cannot be equated
with the rational but, rather, encompasses elements that threaten a
rationalized order. Accordingly, mathematics in We is not only a tool
of OneState, but is employed against the state’s rational control by
the Mephi. Moreover, as Leighton Brett Cooke points out, statements
by I-330 ‘demonstrate that those who oppose the state have a much
deeper understanding of mathematics and its empirical implications
than those who support the state’ (Cooke, 1988, p. 151). For example,
I-330 uses mathematical arguments to convince D-503 that OneState
is not developing towards the perfect final state as it claims to be: ‘you
are a mathematician. You’re even more, you’re a philosopher of math-
ematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number’ (Zamyatin, 1924,
p. 168). When D-503 is unable to do so, I-330 argues that a stable social
order is similarly impossible: ‘And how can there be a final revolution?
There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite’ (p. 168).
D-503 appropriates this mathematical explanation and later uses it
to dispel a fellow Number’s argument that OneState will turn the
universe into an order where ‘everything is done, everything is simple,
everything is calculable’ (p. 223). As a response, D-503 reiterates I-330’s
argument and asks: ‘There where your finite universe ends – what’s
there … beyond?’ (p. 223). Here, mathematics does not act as an exam-
ple of stability and certainty, as it does when employed by OneState, but
instead constitutes an argument for constant development and a need
to change the status quo through revolution.
Zamyatin explicitly stresses the transformative and revolutionary
potential of modernist mathematics in ‘On Literature, Revolution,
Entropy, and Other Matters’, in which he argues that nineteenth-century
mathematics breaks with received views: ‘this is revolution’ (Zamyatin,
140 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

1923, p. 107). As discussed above, Zamyatin then asks writers similarly

to abandon literary traditions and to initiate revolutions. Likewise, in
We, literature and mathematics are established as means with which to
introduce change. When D-503 looks over his records and encounters
‘that √−1 again’ (Zamyatin, 1924, p. 39), he refers to his irrational attrac-
tion to I-330. Yet, for readers of We, living in a less rationalized society,
the records are not irrational but fictional; therefore, they ‘correctly’
encounter ‘that √−1’ not as irrational but as imaginary. The relation
between the irrational and literature is strengthened when D-503 feels
a ‘very thin thread’ stretch between I-330 and the poet R-13: ‘What
kind of thread? I could feel the √−1 begin to stir in me again’ (p. 43).
As a poet of the state, R-13 composes such mathematical poems as the
sonnet ‘Happiness’:

Forever enamoured are two plus two,

Forever conjoined in blissful four.
The hottest lovers in all the world:
The permanent weld of two plus two. … (p. 65)

However cleansed of inspiration – the ‘unknown form of epilepsy’

(p. 18) – the sonnet might be, R-13 is the least rational of D-503’s
acquaintances, and disapproves of OneState’s practices. The fact that
D-503’s own records soon deviate from praising the state’s rational order
further suggests that writing – creating imaginary constructs – heightens
the irrational aspect of life: ‘instead of the elegant and strict mathematical
poem in honor of OneState, it’s turning out to be some kind of fantastic
adventure novel. Oh, if only this really were just a novel instead of my
actual life, filled with X’s, √−1, and degradations’ (p. 99). Setting out as a
realist recording of reality, a language of the book of nature, D-503
abandons his rational writing to take account of the irrational ‘immense
world there, beneath the surface’ (p. 98), to which imaginary numbers
point. By illustrating the reality of the irrational, the records oppose
the rational order of OneState. The reader who understands √−1 not as
an irrational but as an imaginary number then encounters the fiction
of We in a similar way as the irrational works for D-503 – as a means
to resist the totalitarian order of the governing power of reality. Of
course, with We Zamyatin himself makes use of the imaginary domain
to oppose developments towards totalitarianism; as We was rightly seen
as a critique of the Soviet Union, it could be published in Russia only
in 1988 (almost 65 years after its first publication in an English transla-
tion). Moreover, since D-503 abandons his realist recording in favour
 Nina Engelhardt 141

of taking account of ‘actual life, filled with X’s, √−1, and degradations’
(p. 99), We fulfils Zamyatin’s demand for a new, modernist litera-
ture which uses ‘displacement, distortion, curvature, nonobjectivity’
(Zamyatin, 1923, p. 112) as a way to imitate ‘the new mathematics’
(p. 112) and to come closer to reality.
The revolutionary Mephi in We might fail to bring the spaceship
INTEGRAL into their power, but OneState’s plan ‘to integrate completely
the colossal equation of the universe’ (Zamyatin, 1924, p. 4) is thwarted
nevertheless – precisely by the state’s last step towards a ‘mathemati-
cally perfect life’ (p. 4), the surgery removing the imagination. With
the INTEGRAL, OneState attempts to control and make graspable the
incalculable infinite universe, and, in particular, to integrate all life
into a homogenous society. The mathematical integral is thus used as
a metaphor for social unity. In mathematics, an integral of a function
can be visualized as the area under the graph of the function: the area
is divided into an infinite number of infinitely small quantities which
are then summed up. In this way integration renders manageable a
formerly incomputable area, a quality OneState intends to employ by
launching the INTEGRAL ‘to integrate completely the colossal equation
of the universe’ (p. 4). Yet, after the removal of the imagination, the
project of integration is condemned to failure, as the calculations
underlying the construction of the spaceship also defy the bounda-
ries of rational mathematics. At work building the INTEGRAL, D-503
notices the irrational and uncontrollable aspect of the mathematics he
employs: ‘Once more I mentally calculated the initial velocity needed
to tear the INTEGRAL away from earth. […] The equation is extremely
complex, the values transcendental’ (p. 34). D-503 notes that the equa-
tion incorporates transcendental values – that is, irrational values that
cannot be produced by a finite sequence of algebraic operations. So the
spaceship, and with it the act of integrating the limitless, relies on the
irrational, infinite, and supernatural. Without the imagination, the seat
of the irrational and non-natural, mathematicians and engineers will
not be able to build spaceships; without fancy there is no flight. Thus,
the possibility of universal integration always relies on the imaginary
which opposes states (and States) that deny infinite development and
alternatives to the status quo.
Having removed the imagination from its citizens, OneState will
no longer be able to use the mathematics necessary for constructing
a spaceship. Turning into a completely rationalized state, it becomes
impossible even to imagine other worlds and conditions that are to be
conquered: ‘Wings are for flying, but we have nowhere to fly to’ (p. 88).
142 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

In an essay titled ‘H. G. Wells’ (1922) Zamyatin further explains the

connection between imagined alternatives and flight: ‘The airplane,
daring what until now has been permitted only to angels, is, of course,
the symbol of the revolution taking place in man’ (Zamyatin, 1922,
p. 284). The aeroplane, whose construction is based on physical laws cal-
culated with irrational and imaginary numbers, thus signals revolution,
and can oppose dystopian orders – as can literature, the medium of the
imagination in which the age-old dream of flight has been kept alive,
and through which D-503 realizes the need for endless revolution.

Anarchism: mathematics towards utopia – imaginary

numbers in Against the Day

The 1893 World’s Fair, depicted at the beginning of Against the Day,
illustrates the prevailing optimism regarding scientific advances around
the turn of the twentieth century. In this time of scientific progress,
new ‘worlds’ emerge, much in the same way as during the scientific
revolution. In the novel, the mathematician Kit notes: ‘Seems every day
somebody’s discovering another new piece of the spectrum, out there
beyond visible light, or a new extension of the mind beyond conscious
thought’ (Pynchon, 2006, p. 753). Utopia again seems to be approach-
able by scientific invention, for example when the engineer Nikola
Tesla’s Magnifying Transmitter promises ‘free universal power for every-
body’ (p. 176). Tesla’s project would benefit everybody and be governed
by no one, and in this way it is an example of the potential of science
to bring the world closer to utopia through anarchism. Tesla’s intuitive
approach – ‘If I told them how far from conscious the procedure really
is, they would all drop me flat’ (p. 369) – and his scientific anarchism
are defeated by twentieth-century rationalization and by his capitalist
adversaries. Furthermore, the destructive consequences of scientific
progress become apparent in the First World War, towards which the
diverse plotlines of the novel inexorably develop. The pre-war time is
thus presented as a period of scientific discovery which bears the poten-
tial to develop into a utopian or dystopian future.
The diverse possibilities of future development towards anarchist uto-
pia, or rationalized and centrally governed dystopia, are also illustrated
by the mathematical ‘Quaternion Wars’ (p. 664), a conflict concerning
the priority of vectors or of Quaternions, two mathematical concepts
that can be used to calculate similar problems but are associated with
different political views in the novel. The Vectorists are described as
‘Bolsheviks’ (p. 599), not only because they are in the majority but
 Nina Engelhardt 143

because they adhere to a centralized order by always referring to the

origin of a coordinate system with the axes x, y, and z: They ‘grimly pur-
sued their aims, protected inside their belief that they are the inevitable
future, the xyz people, the part of a single Established Coördinate System,
present everywhere in the Universe, governing absolutely’ (p. 599).
Other than vectors that are rendered easily graspable by a stable point
of reference, Quaternions, which ‘broke bonds set by centuries of
mathematical thought’ (Crowe, 1994, p. 31), do not lead to one uni-
fied governing viewpoint. Instead, in Against the Day Quaternions are
introduced as working in a way corresponding to anarchism, which
propagates self-organization and the forming of self-sufficient groups
whose members interact among themselves rather than appeal to a
governing higher level. Accordingly, a Quaternionist complains: ‘Of
course we are lost. Anarchists always lose out […]. We were only […]
drifters who set up their working tents for as long as the problem
might demand, then struck camp again and moved on, always ad
hoc and local’ (Pynchon, 2006, p. 599). The mathematical concept of
Quaternions thus incorporates an anarchist ‘flavour’, and suggests a
related utopian potential.
In a similar way to the presentation of revolutionary mathematics in
We, imaginary numbers play a central part in Against the Day with regard
to the anarchist and utopian potential of Quaternions. A Quaternion
consists of four parts: one element is expressed in real numbers, while
the remaining three components each comprise an imaginary number. In
the novel, Pléiade asks: ‘“but what is a Quaternion?” Hilarity at the table
was general and prolonged’ (p. 604). A mathematician then explains that
Quaternions can be used to calculate a vector’s change in length and
rotation in space, and that ‘subjectively’ it can be considered as

‘an act of becoming longer or shorter, while at the same time turn-
ing, among axes whose unit vector is not the familiar and comforting
‘‘one’’ but the altogether disquieting square root of minus one. If you
were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the ‘‘real’’ world,
change your length, enter an ‘‘imaginary’’ reference system, rotate up
to three different ways, and return to ‘‘reality’’ a new person.’ (p. 605)

With their employment of three imaginary axes, Quaternions high-

lighted problems concerning the nature of mathematical ‘existence’.
Thus, the nineteenth-century mathematician John Graves explained
that there was ‘something in the system that gravels me. I have not yet
any clear views as to the extent to which we are at liberty arbitrarily to
144 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

create imaginaries’ (Graves quoted in Crowe, 1994, p. 34). Partly due

to the problematical status of imaginary numbers, the Quaternionists
lose the Quaternion Wars in Against the Day. When their ‘Kampf ums
Dasein [struggle for existence] is over’ (Pynchon, 2006, p. 598), the
Quaternionists leave reality to the Vectorists, and revert to an ‘exist-
ence’ in their mathematical system: ‘“Does that mean we only imagine
now that we exist?” “Imaginary axes, imaginary existence”’ (p. 599).
Cantor welcomed the modernist notion of mathematics which allows
for creating concepts with only ‘imaginary existence’, and famously
claimed that ‘[t]he essence of mathematics is its freedom’ (Cantor, 1883,
p. 564).2 Quaternions illustrate this freedom of mathematics, and the
anarchist potential that is located in it, but also point to the loss of
reality that is thereby entailed.
The ‘“imaginary” reference system’ (Pynchon, 2006, p. 603) with
which Quaternions operate is set ‘somewhere not on the surface of the
Earth so much as – “Perpendicular”’ (p. 1163); that is, on the perpen-
dicular y-axis that designates the imaginary value of a number. The
spiritual leader of the T.W.I.T. explains: ‘Lateral world-sets, other parts
of the Creation, lie all around us’ (p. 248). Quaternions, now used in
computer graphics, games programming, and virtual reality systems, and
thus in the creation of other worlds and spaces, were first employed in
‘aerospace applications and flight simulators’ (Mukundan, 2002, p. 97).
Their development from advancing flight to furthering virtual realities
is mirrored in the Chums of Chance’s airship: flying high on the perpen-
dicular axis, it sports conditions which differ from those of the earthly
reality below. The more rational the new century grows, the less able are
people on the ground to perceive the Chums in their imaginary reference
system. While at the World Fair people ‘looked up at the airship in
wonder’ (p. 11), the airship then becomes ‘more conjectural than literal’
(p. 287) until it is completely invisible (p. 1217). As the Chums achieve
a greater distance from the earthly world, they also attain the farsighted-
ness to draw different conclusions from its catastrophic events. In their
universe, the First World War does not completely annihilate anarchism,
but the Chums of Chance no longer feel bound to an order that conjured
up the horror of the war: ‘Among distant sounds of repeated explosion
could also be heard the strident massed buzzing of military aircraft. Below,
across the embattled countryside, the first searchlights of evening were
coming on. “We signed nothing that included any of this,” Randolph
reminded everyone’ (p. 1153). The Chums then begin to work for them-
selves, and, as with the local anarchist movements on earth which do
not need a centralized structure to ‘[c]oördinate […] efforts’ (p. 1047),
 Nina Engelhardt 145

the Chums of Chance just help ‘whatever populations below were in

need’ (p. 1151). Their indiscriminate spontaneous help is an ‘anarchis-
tic’ act, and the Chums discover that there are ‘very few limits on the
good it became possible to do’ (p. 1097). Bestowing ‘uncompensated
kindness, which’, so one character says, ‘I had never observed outside
the pages of fiction’ (p. 187), the Chums ascend on the imaginary
axis into the fictional heights of ideal behaviour.3 They have not yet
achieved perfect freedom, equality, and goodness, but by rejecting the
war in favour of giving ‘anarchistic’ aid, their airship transforms ‘into
its own destination’ (p. 1219). Hence the Chums come to stand for
‘human virtue’ (p. 621), and are close to realizing the idea that ‘[w]e can
do whatever we can imagine’ (p. 987). Flying ever higher into the imagi-
nary, the Chums of Chance are thus on their way towards utopia: ‘They
will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the
sky. They fly toward grace’ (p. 1220). A utopia of grace and glory might
thus lie in imaginary heights, and be reached through flights of literary
fancy or ascent on the mathematical axis of imaginary value.
Utopia in Against the Day is suggested to lie in the imaginary heights
reachable only by flight, but several characters come to understand that
a passage through the imaginary domain might at least lead to a better
reality. Kit arrives at his destiny after travelling through the imaginary
realms of Shambhala (the utopian land sought by several characters in
the novel), and he re-emerges into a reality that sees him and Dally as
a happy couple once again. The Chums of Chance similarly use the
power of an imaginary domain to regain their reality: unsettled by the
seduction of the Trespassers, they ‘chose lateral solutions, sidestepping
the crisis by passing into metaphorical identities’ (p. 471). Thus, mak-
ing use of the advantages of imaginary worlds, one can arrive at other,
lateral worlds that are different from, but no less real than, a given start-
ing point. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard described a similar
strategy in mathematics: ‘the shortest and best way between two truths
of the real domain often passes through the imaginary one’ (Hadamard,
1954, p. 123). Comprising three imaginary elements, Quaternions can
be employed to ‘enter an “imaginary” reference system […] and return
to “reality” a new person’ (Pynchon, 2006, p. 605), but, so Against the
Day implies, a Quaternion’s real component is equally necessary since
it constitutes the ‘spine of reality’ (p. 679) through which the earthly
and lateral worlds are connected. Only with an awareness of both the
real and the imaginary aspect can a person reach utopia. Rinpungpa,
‘who is a sort of fictional character, though at the same time real’
(p. 861), gives directions for journeying to Shambhala: ‘“remember one
146 Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day

thing – when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Easy for him to
say, of course being two people at once’ (p. 861). Demanding to take
account of the real as well as of the imaginary, Rinpungpa and the math-
ematical concept of Quaternions suggest that the way to utopia involves
contesting any claim for the existence of one governing system, and
accepting that fiction and plurality are constitutive parts of whatever
world there might be. Since Quaternions allow for the freedom to move
on imaginary axes, this mathematical concept counteracts the reduc-
tion of choices under earthly conditions. In this regard, mathematics
holds up the visions of anarchism and utopia that are being lost on the
level of politics as the world heads into the First World War.

Conclusion: convergence in the imaginary domain

From the first literary conceptions of utopia, the perfect society is

associated with the no-place of literary fiction. We and Against the Day
suggest mathematics constitutes a similar no-place apart from rational
reality, and these texts locate utopian potential not only in literature but
also in the mathematical imaginary. The novels show that mathematics
does not necessarily lead to the control of nature and its fashioning into
a ‘perfect’ utopian order, and, moreover, that it does not immediately
threaten to enslave man in dystopia. Instead, as We illustrates, irrational
and imaginary elements in mathematics can point to the reality
of irrational aspects of life, and Quaternions reveal alternatives to
governing reality in Against the Day. Zamyatin’s and Pynchon’s works
refer to the modernist notion of mathematics in particular, which breaks
with received views and is characterized by ‘its freedom’ (Cantor, 1883,
p. 564). These authors’ engagements with mathematics thus suggest that
when modernist literature and early literary dystopias revalue reason
and science, and when they highlight the threat of their dominating
nature and man, the critique is predominantly directed against the
classical notion of mathematics. The novels examined in this chapter
then contrast the negative picture of mathematics with modernist
mathematics’ potential to prevent a dystopian order by revealing the
irrational and imaginary aspects of even this most exact of sciences, or
to work towards a utopia set high on the ‘imaginary’ axis.
The prominent role of imaginary numbers in these two novels estab-
lishes the imaginary realm as a place in which modernist mathematics
and literature converge in their promotion of plurality and freedom in a
world rushing towards the dystopia of rationalization, totalitarianism,
and war. We and Against the Day themselves performatively create such
 Nina Engelhardt 147

spaces of imaginary freedom. We, for a long time not publishable in

Russia, was feared to encourage freedom, revolution, and plurality. This
novel thus fulfils Zamyatin’s own demand for ‘harmful literature [which]
is more useful than useful literature, for it […] is a means of combating
calcification, sclerosis, crust, moss, quiescence. It is utopian, absurd’
(Zamyatin, 1923, p. 109). Setting several, sometimes contradicting,
worlds next to and inside each other, Against the Day uses its imaginary
space to practise ‘narrative anarchy’: it prevents one single narrative sys-
tem from governing, but allows diverse storylines to coexist according
to their own respective rules. Illustrating the possibility of other worlds
or world-orders, We and Against the Day present the potential for change
that resides in the mathematical and literary imaginaries: conditions in
the ‘real’ world are no longer self-evident, but literary fiction and the
mathematical imaginary transcend the given, and break open govern-
ing frames of reference. These novels thus suggest that the world may be
changed by flights of fancy – be they literary or mathematical.

Notes
1. See Mehrtens (1990), who first explored the connections between mathemat-
ics and modernism, and Gray, who argues for applying ‘the term “mod-
ernism” to changes in mathematics’ (Gray, 2009, p. 664). See also Corry
(forthcoming), who provides a more critical discussion of the usefulness of
the term ‘modernism’ for understanding the history of mathematics.
2. Originally: ‘das Wesen der Mathematik liegt gerade in ihrer Freiheit’ (italics in
original).
3. The imaginary is not necessarily positive, but imaginary values are part of the
Quaternion Weapon that might cause the explosion of the Tunguska Event
(Pynchon, 2006, p. 880), which in turn is suggested to be a temporal conden-
sation of the First World War (p. 895).
8
The Two Hotels of Elizabeth
Bowen: Utopian Leisure in the
Age of Mechanized Hospitality
Shawna Ross

In his short manifesto, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological

Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1985; 2nd edition 2003), self-proclaimed
‘ontological anarchist’ Hakim Bey describes a mythological space that
enacts his peculiar brand of metaphysics – a brand of metaphysics that,
at first glance, seems wholly unrelated to the utopian politics of the
work of Elizabeth Bowen. Yet, in the following passage, Bey explains
the poetic and spatial origins of his political programme in a way that
recalls the care and beauty of Bowen’s prose:

Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of

cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes &
benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe
gardens on actual lawns – a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes –
a willow, a stream with watercress – a fountain crystalled underneath
with geometry – the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of
wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage – ‘water, green-
ery, beautiful faces’ […] all of them pretenders to the throne of an
Imaginal Egypt, an occult space/light continuum consumed by still-
unimagined liberties. (Bey, 2003, pp. 13–14)

In this passage, Bey’s system promises that if a person accepts the

fundamental and indestructible chaos of the universe an unbounded
fount of desire will follow, and, with it, freedom and a fulfilled life.
He argues that while a violent political revolution is both out of style
and out of the question in our modern world, we may still capture
utopia by giving up the dream of a radical and permanent break with
existing political structures, and instead look for utopian energy in tem-
porary moments embedded resolutely within the texture of everyday
148
 Shawna Ross 149

life. Chaos, the unplanned disorganization that can produce new (if
temporary) political or social forms, is everywhere, and need not be
manufactured or supported by violence or plotted very far in advance.
What one must do is tap into the chaotic energy always surrounding us.
The above quotation not only emphasizes the role of imagination and
aesthetics in this canalization of chaos, but also continues to spatialize
utopian action, showing that even imaginary forays into utopian
thought require spatial thinking. By imagining a garden, that liminal
space where nature and culture meet, Bey implies that utopian energy
flows effortlessly from images of a beautiful place apart from political
and behavioural norms.
Although this belief in the power of the space apart is an inheritance
that we can trace further and further back (moving backward, for exam-
ple, from Romantic poetry to seventeenth-century carpe diem poems,
and back still further into the Land of Cockaigne), it is during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that literary representations
of the place apart coalesce around what I call leisure spaces: the new,
highly capitalized and carefully homogenized institutions of relaxa-
tion, including seaside resorts, cruise ships, grand hotels, and tourist
towns. These spaces represent personal, temporary utopias because the
lure of leisure spaces – the seaside, the African savannah, the calmness
of a spa – promise that escape, however temporary, can result from a
mere change of place. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the commodification of leisure practices threatened the
possibility of such sites to offer temporary respite from modernity: a
fleeting glimpse of utopia. As modernists and quasi-modernists like
E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, and Katherine Mansfield became
fascinated by the figure of the modern hotel, they not only measured
the limitations of these spaces, but also discovered moments in which
these hyper-organized spaces could offer the potential to reorganize
social, political, and economic structures. At the same time that a self-
consciously avant-garde modernism emerged with the proliferation of
modernist manifestoes during the first two decades of the twentieth
century, the commodification of leisure reached a certain critical mass.
At this time, modernists began addressing a theme that would become
an abiding preoccupation for twentieth-century Anglophone writers
(including Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, D. M. Thomas, Anita Brookner,
and Aharon Appelfeld): the ability of leisure spaces like country houses,
hotels, spas, and cruise ships to offer a genuine respite from labour,
the domestic environment, or urban capitalist modernity; or to stimu-
late aesthetic perception or production, positive social or romantic
150 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

interactions, personal moral or philosophical growth, or physical or

psychological wellness.
Theodor Adorno argued that leisure spaces no longer had such capa-
bilities. He claimed in his 1957 essay ‘Free Time’ that, at the moment
of his writing, not only did capitalism determine what forms ‘leisure’
could inhabit, but also that the corporeal, spatial, and temporal
rhythms of capital had invaded leisure. Idleness had been replaced by
hobbies, which produce as much discipline and repetitive motion as
the factory in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Elizabeth Outka,
in her recent book Consuming Traditions (2009), argues that many late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts to escape urban capi-
talist space – such as model towns like Port Sunlight, garden cities like
Letchworth, and coterie enclaves like Vanessa Bell’s Charleston – merely
projected a fictional past onto the present, and thus mimicked capital-
ism’s ability to commodify difference into a compact set of symbols that
could be easily sold. For Adorno as for Outka, the potentially utopian
impulse towards newness is contained and neutralized as a product,
and even made regressive when it produces an impotent satisfaction
in nostalgia-simulation that appears to make political action irrelevant.
Similarly, in Solid Objects (1998) Douglas Mao characterizes this
dilemma as the modernists experimenting with the idea of aesthetic
production as unalienated labour (but ultimately finding it deeply
flawed). Edward Comentale takes this line of reasoning to its limit in
his Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde (2004), in
which he argues that the act of ‘making it new’ merely reproduced the
brutal imperatives of capital and, ultimately, fascism. In the context of
criticism on mid-century and post-Second World War literature, such
theorists of space as Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, and Henri Lefebvre
set a sceptical tone (echoed in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel [1981]
and Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939 [1978]) by regarding the libera-
tory possibilities of certain spaces as foreclosed by late capitalism.
Such pessimism is not entirely unwarranted, but risks reproducing
the error that Hakim Bey criticizes: of looking for that one, obvious,
permanent, unmistakeable revolution, of demanding lasting difference
while regarding the temporary – the guerrilla, the privately epiphanic –
as less than acceptable. Leisure studies scholars similarly rely, whether
explicitly or implicitly, on models of revolutionary change that trans-
form the leisure space into a ‘straw man’ quite easy to topple. To create a
different model rather than unmasking the leisure site as a covert repro-
duction of the same, I suggest adapting Bey’s theory of the temporary
autonomous zone, which will lead us to expect both less and more of
 Shawna Ross 151

these spaces. Less, because this model of leisure space as a temporary

autonomous zone will never promise total revolution, and more,
because this adjusted horizon of expectations will make whatever uto-
pianism that can inhere in this space much less easy to refute. In works
like Arnold Bennett’s Imperial Palace (1930), Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel
(1929), and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), then, ‘utopian’
refers to writers’ representations of temporary autonomous zones as a
means to render representable the social, economic, political, and psy-
chological implications inhering in modern spaces, particularly ‘places
apart’ like leisure spaces. In other words, I agree with Fredric Jameson’s
point, urged in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), that utopia is among
other things a genre, and in certain instances a literary form, that comes
into fruition for twentieth-century writers as they strive to criticize and
reinvent modern leisure spaces. Such narratives as Imperial Palace, Grand
Hotel, and A Room with a View disclose the immense cultural work done
by leisure spaces, and, by making use of the temporary autonomous
zone as a trope of plot development, suggest alternatives to the norma-
tive modes of being such spaces seem to uphold.
It is this process of creating new modes of representation in order to
criticize and to reinvent modes of being that I wish to deem a utopian
modernism. As Matei Calinescu argues in Five Faces of Modernity (1977),
‘modernism, excluding any predetermined unity of views among
its adherents, has, nevertheless, an identity, albeit an entirely nega-
tive one […] based on a rejection of or […] at least a questioning of
authority in both its theoretical and practical aspects’ (Calinescu, 1987,
p. 79). In this chapter, I will demonstrate the mutual reciprocity between
this utopian impulse in modernism and in leisure spaces by assessing
Elizabeth Bowen’s career-long interest in hotels – first, as a microcosm
of the ills of a post-First World War Europe lacking a sense of futurity
and collectivity, and later as an opportunity for both theorizing and
forging political self-determination and therapeutic, hospitable Irish
nationalism. After using Bey’s theory of the temporary autonomous
zone to read Bowen’s The Hotel (1927) as a highly self-reflexive medita-
tion on the utopian possibilities of such spaces, I will move to her late
non-fiction work, The Shelbourne Hotel (1951). Here, I will suggest how
modernist attitudes towards leisure space change during mid-century
to reflect the increasing tendency of leisure spaces like the luxury
hotel to be considered as microcosms of the culture that produces
them (rather than as departures from that culture). Whereas the most
well-known meditation on hotel utopianism – Jameson’s analysis of
the Bonaventure – suggests that hotels violently imposed utopian
152 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

space on a vernacular urban fabric, I will show how Bowen gives added
dimension to Jameson’s theory by criticizing the superficially utopian
rhetoric of the modern hotel in both its forms (first, as an escape from
normative culture, and second, as a symbol of it). As Bowen adapts the
leisure space of the hotel as a stage upon which characters could per-
form and create new forms of interpersonal relationships and national
identity, she recuperates the modern hotel’s utopian potential. Bowen’s
texts dramatize the commodification of hospitality to meditate on the
possibility of utopian thought and practice within a capitalism rapidly
absorbing spheres of human activity other than economic production,
thereby typifying the stakes behind ‘hotel modernism’: pursuing utopia
despite the pervasive territorialization of capitalism that is characteristic
of modernity.

The hotel as temporary autonomous zone

Elizabeth Bowen’s career is marked by hotels and by other institutions

of leisurely travel. To the North (1932) features a travel agency, while The
Death of the Heart (1938) depicts a seaside vacation. The Last September
(1929) dramatizes the end of a leisured class in Ireland. But it is in her
first novel, The Hotel (1927), that Bowen foregrounds the hotel itself as
a new social formation generative of the familiar modern narratives of
social anomie, psychological and political fragmentation, and uncer-
tainty in the face of constant change. Set in a small hotel on the Italian
Riviera soon after the First World War, this coming-of-age novel focuses
on a harried, apathetic, and lonely 22-year-old medical student, Sydney
Warren, who, overworked to the point of a nervous breakdown, is
forced by her family to take a holiday. Stocked with a cast similar to the
Pension Bertolini guests of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, Bowen’s
The Hotel nonetheless foregrounds the post-war limits of the comedy of
manners by tracing three failed courtships: the first involving Sydney’s
unrequited affection for a cool, sophisticated, and manipulative older
woman, Mrs Kerr; the second detailing Sydney’s rejection of Mrs Kerr’s
plan to marry Sydney off to Ronald Kerr, her son; and the third wit-
nessing Sydney’s hasty engagement to (and eventual splitting from) the
Reverend James Milton. Ronald blames the failure of their courtship on
Sydney, and yet complains: ‘There is nothing now preventing women
being different […] and they seem to go on being just the same. What
is the good of a new world if nobody can be got to come and live in it?’
(Bowen, 1927, p. 111). Bowen’s attentive and pointed emphasis on the
hotel environment itself as a powerful influence on social behaviour
 Shawna Ross 153

suggests that the problem is larger than Sydney. As Bettina Matthias

argues in The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and
Austrian Literature (2006), the hotel serves modern literature as a micro-
cosm through which detailed observations of modernization’s effects
on social relations can be produced.
Matthias’s vocabulary of the hotel as microcosm certainly makes
headway in explaining why hotel fiction deserves greater attention from
literary scholars. Bowen’s The Hotel in particular has suffered from a lack
of critical attention. Allen Austin has explained that this work is regarded
not only ‘as apprentice work and most interesting as a foretelling of
things to come’ (Austin, 1989, p. 88), but also as ‘the least […] dramatic
or radical stories’ set in ‘the most artificial milieu’ (p. 13). Austin’s analy-
sis becomes telling where he cites the hotel environment as the source of
the novel’s unpopularity with critics and readers alike. Claiming that the
hotel setting lacks ‘scenic force and control’, Austin argues:

Despite the seeming complexity created by a disparate collection

of individuals and by a temporary context, the reader suspects the
author of actually setting up an easy problem capable of dramatic
but ultimately of simple resolution […]. The youthful Elizabeth
Bowen, who was too ambitious and injudicious with this effort cre-
ated among others the problem of choreographing for an extensive
cast […]. [Later,] in due course, she accomplishes much more with
much less. (pp. 14–15)

Hermione Lee joins the chorus, calling The Hotel a ‘rather affected’ copy
of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Forster’s A Room with a
View, and describing Bowen’s text as one in which her ‘sense of herself
is largely missing’ and in which she is ‘over-anxious to display the right
influences’ (Lee, 1981, p. 58). In terms of Bowen’s stylistic ‘debt’ to
Woolf and to Forster, Lee and Austin do have a point. However, both
critics underestimate the degree to which Bowen self-reflexively plays
with the ‘hotel novel’ as a genre, and thereby manages to crystallize
the genre as an isolatable aesthetic phenomenon. Furthermore, when
Lee claims that ‘the hotel is an isolated microcosm of English social
life from which Sydney needs to withdraw in order to understand
herself’ (p. 59), she minimizes the hotel as a specialized environment
that generates, rather than passively reflects, both ‘English’ identity
and Sydney’s oppositional selfhood. Lee’s acknowledgement that the
few moments when ‘Bowen’s own voice emerges […] always have to
do with the oddities of life in the hotel’ (p. 60) moves towards a better
154 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

appreciation of the hotel as a peculiar narratological unit. However, like

other critics, Lee nevertheless focuses on Sydney’s eventual rejection of
James as the central focus of the novel.
Although critics have articulated divergent theories as to why Sydney
rejects her suitor – a negative reaction to visiting a cemetery, a conver-
sation with Ronald Kerr, general ennui – the more interesting question
is why Sydney, who is initially attracted to Mrs Kerr, must make such
a decision in the first place. If Forster and Woolf have indeed set the
agenda for The Hotel’s plot details, it is Bowen’s sophisticated recogni-
tion, and rejection, of the endlessly iterable tropes of the hotel genre
that provide a clue as to why Sydney becomes enmeshed in the bour-
geois comedy of manners and marriage plot she initially resists. So does
the drama of Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, life partners residing (it
seems permanently) in the hotel – two people for whom the ideological
promises of the hotel to provide a utopian escape from heteronorma-
tive scripts of sexuality and domesticity have been fulfilled. Sydney’s
frustrated attraction to Mrs Kerr parallels Bowen’s frustrated adaptation
of Edwardian fiction; both the hotel and hotel fiction seem to provide
a liberatory environment that welcomes experimentation, but which
can also prove treacherous. Heather Jordan has nicely identified what
Sydney and the other young characters in the novel want to escape
from: these ‘disoriented and wandering’ characters are ‘survivors of the
Great War making peace with themselves and with the situations they
encounter’, especially by seeking ‘the temporary haven of a winter at
an Italian hotel’ ( Jordan, 1992, pp. 24–5). Just as I would stress that
the characters have difficulty relaxing and finding pleasure in their
leisure activities, Jordan recognizes that even though the ‘soul-searching
that Bowen’s characters indulge in takes place in Italy, a place where
they feel severed from their personal pasts’, their ‘idyllic evenings’ are
‘agonizingly meaningless’ and only allow them to ‘exist in a suspended
state at the hotel’ (p. 41). Yet Bowen does not, as Lee and Austin imply,
simply inherit the hotel trope from Forster, Woolf, and James, but rather
makes its tropes uncomfortably obvious in order to test their utopian
limits. Therefore, when Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle identify
Bowen’s hotel as ‘the locus of a loss of movement’ and the novel itself
as ‘a dramatization of such stillness […] which centers [on] the character
of Sydney and her still lives’ (Bennett and Royle, 1995, pp. 4–5), their
emphasis on ‘interior quietness’ (p. 6) fails to recognize that both the
hotel as a social institution and the hotel novel as a set of narrative
tropes play a constitutive role in producing this quietness. This stillness
is therefore less a reflection of Sydney’s interiority than a meditation
 Shawna Ross 155

on how leisure institutions can influence, or actually help to produce,

‘interiority’.
The same holds true for Bowen’s relationship to her modernist fore-
bears. In other words, we can equally apply Jordan’s, Bennett’s, and
Royle’s diagnoses about the characters to Austin’s and Lee’s arguments
about Bowen’s struggle to develop a unique style. Of Bowen’s hotel
denizens, Jordan writes:

Life abroad dissolves into a series of disconnected moments; the

sheer transparency of relations in the hotel evokes an uncertain and
claustrophobic atmosphere. Sydney, who can detect the veneer, still
admires its sheen but worries that if the façade is removed nothing
important will remain underneath. When she breaks her engagement
with the clergyman she exposes the charade at the hotel for what
it is. ( Jordan, 1992, p. 44)

Although Jordan likewise emphasizes Sydney’s rejection of James, her

characterization of Sydney’s situation certainly sheds light on Bowen’s
aesthetic relation to Edwardian hotel fiction. Her self-reflexive play on
these narrative tropes allows the novel to transcend imitation and to
enact a critique not only of modern leisure but also of earlier hotel fic-
tion. Both Bowen’s literary forebears and the hotel provide a ‘cramped
space’ that allows writers and modern subjects like Sydney to conceptu-
alize modernity, criticize the inability of its institutions to make good on
the promises they hold out, and demonstrate what good can emerge –
in this case, Bowen’s caustic style (a highly self-conscious parody of
the comedy of manners) as a substitute for becoming the next Woolf,
Sydney’s regained psychological stability as a substitute for a fantasized
relationship with Mrs Kerr, and Miss Pym’s and Miss Fitzgerald’s part-
nership as a substitute for the heterosexual marriages that (due to the
debilitating effects of the First World War) will never totally succeed
for those in the war generation. We should not underestimate the
significance of the Misses Pym and Fitzgerald, whose experiences at
the beginning and the end of the novel provide a counter-narrative to
Sydney’s; they begin the novel fighting and end it making up, showing
that queer relations or homoerotic possibilities are not entirely foreclosed
by the hotel.
John Wilson Foster has minimized such moments, especially Miss
Pym’s reflection that ‘[f]riendship is such a wonderful basis on Life –
or has such a wonderful basis in Life; either, she thought, was true’
(Bowen, 1927, p. 174), as ‘ring[ing] hollow in the light of what has
156 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

befallen young Sydney Warren’ (Foster, 2008, p. 461). However, the

collapse of Sydney’s homosocial longings has less to do with the inher-
ent limitations of the hotel than it does with Mrs Kerr’s ability (which
mirrors Bowen’s own) to manipulate the hotel space to her own strategic
advantage. At first, it appears that the difference between the cold Mrs
Kerr and the fragile Sydney is the latter’s unwillingness to manipulate
the norms that both provide time for personal introspection, and gov-
ern social relations, in leisure spaces. Yet Sydney is well aware of the
spatial contingency of their relationship. Speaking to James, Sydney
speaks in a way that recalls Siegfried Kracauer’s famous comparison of
hotels and churches:

I have often thought it would be interesting if the front of any house,

but of an hotel especially, could be swung open on a hinge like the
front of a doll’s house. Imagine the hundreds of rooms with their
walls lit up and the real looking staircase and all the people surprised
doing appropriate things in appropriate attitudes as though they
had been put there to represent something and had never moved in
their lives. If one could see them like that […], one could see them so
clearly as living under the compulsion of their furniture […]. Though
it may have been an Idea in the first place that churches be built, it
was the churches already existing […] that made you into a parson.
(Bowen, 1927, pp. 68–9; see also Kracauer, 1927)

Early in her hotel experience, Sydney, ironically, uses her own hyper-
awareness of the hotel’s ability to influence her behaviour to achieve
the utopian goals associated with modern leisure spaces. She recovers
from her work-induced nervous breakdowns and regains her sense of
self, as she compares her behaviour to that of the other young women,
sociable and marriage-hungry, who populate the hotel. By interacting
with Mrs Kerr (rather than with the young men), she paradoxically
cultivates a sense of her own individuality, her exemption from hetero-
sexual romance, and her freedom to choose her leisure activities, while
nevertheless experiencing the same basic narrative of romance – the
desire, the anticipation, the intimate conversations, the eagerness to
please – that the other young women feel. Mrs Kerr’s betrayal of Sydney
(by reserving her for Ronald) is damaging to Sydney less because of the
latter’s love for Mrs Kerr than for how Sydney responds to it – by becom-
ing engaged. In the hotel, then, some characters find pleasure in acting
out the pre-written scripts of hotel life and hotel fiction, while others
find pleasure in subverting them. The perceived difference between the
 Shawna Ross 157

norms of hotel life and of home life, in other words, is what maintains
the utopian potential of the hotel; both following and subverting
the hotel norms can provide a sense of rest, pleasure, freedom, and
self-definition, so long as the principal actors reach a mutual under-
standing as to whether or not they will earnestly follow or consciously
manipulate the tropes. Sydney’s affection for Mrs Kerr, her one act of
faith in the hotel as a utopian environment, fails when she realizes that
Mrs Kerr was consciously manipulating these tropes – a mismatch that
Sydney replicates when she takes revenge by becoming engaged not to
Ronald, but to the earnest clergyman, James. The hotel fails to provide
a positive leisure experience for Sydney not when her engagement falls
apart, but rather when she becomes engaged. Her revenge not only
forces her into the comedy of manners she resisted, but also forces her
into the manipulative attitude that she had tried to escape by earnestly
cultivating intimacy with the older woman.
But we should not take the end of Sydney’s holiday romance as
Bowen’s last word on the hotel. The hotel’s momentary provision of
epiphanic moments for Sydney, its temporary glimpses of ideal friend-
ship and easy self-confidence, are nonetheless significant. We can agree
with Chris Rojek’s argument in Decentering Leisure (1995) that leisure
sites are not precisely the realm of freedom they claim to be, without
dismissing such spaces out of hand as merely another product of the
Enlightenment project that Adorno and Horkheimer find at work dur-
ing leisure hours in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Rather, I would
argue that Bowen’s representation of the hotel can be more appropri-
ately aligned with Hakim Bey’s theory of the temporary autonomous
zone. In The Temporary Autonomous Zone Bey writes that ontological
anarchy ‘has never returned from its last fishing trip’ (Bey, 2003, p. 6),
suggesting that, just like artists, vacationers are not merely dupes of
the capitalist system. Instead, Bey implies that leisure experiences can
still be politically suggestive and productive. To take the comparison
between aesthetics and leisure further, I note that Bey’s account of the
utopian impulse in temporary autonomous zones, in which the subject
cultivates non-ordinary awareness, closely resembles claims made for
leisure in such works of hotel fiction as Imperial Palace, Grand Hotel, and
A Room with a View. Bey’s theories easily combine with Deleuze’s and
Guattari’s description of the cramped space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1975,
p. 17), an intolerable situation that absolutely mandates the subject
finding a line of flight: a way out. Of course, the space one flies to will
eventually become another cramped space, and the movement outward
continues endlessly. For Bowen, the hotel is just such a cramped space,
158 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

presenting both the problem and the solution. Bey notes that even war
can present the opportunities for the creation of temporary autono-
mous zones (such as the Communes of the mid-nineteenth century),
and his most famous examples of temporary autonomous zones, the
pirate utopias (Madagascar, Nassau, Tortuga), themselves come out of
the strict and intolerable ‘spaces’ of slavery and the maritime discipline
of the British navy.
Not all temporary autonomous zones need be so dramatic. Making
a distinction that recalls Bloch’s concept of the ‘concrete utopia’, Bey
also invites the mundane utopias present in everyday spaces and events
like the picnic or (as in modernism) the intentional community of a
salon; not some fabled ‘non-place’ utopia, but rather ‘actually existing
utopias’. Though these spaces are not permanent and do not topple
governments, Bey argues that the time of effective revolution aimed
at the State had passed by the turn of the twentieth century, and that
we need not shun the temporary. Like Sydney’s epiphanies, utopian
‘peak experiences’ differ from ‘the standard of “ordinary” consciousness
and experience’ (Bey, 2003, p. 98), and thus as a rule ‘cannot happen
every day […]. The shaman returns […] but things have changed, shifts
and integrations have occurred – a difference is made’ (p. 98), less of a
revolution than a ‘“power surge”’ (p. 101). These temporary autono-
mous zones provide an ‘operation which liberates an area (of land, of
time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/
elsewhen’ (p. 99). Once named or identified, they are neutralized, dead,
because their existence relies on invisibility – the inability of the State,
or whatever powers that be, to recognize that the space exists. Literally,
temporary autonomous zones are not on the map. Bey historicizes
this movement by claiming that in 1899 the globe had all but been
named, that terra incognita was suddenly no more, with every territory
claimed by a government. In such a situation, moving to a New World
is rendered impossible, so temporary autonomous zones emerge from
everyday life. Spatially, temporary autonomous zones are ‘[h]idden
enfolded immensities’ (p. 101) created by the fractal deepening of
spaces – the carving out of freer spaces from within existing ones – or,
in Bey’s words, ‘the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open.
Metaphorically it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the
cartography of Control’ (p. 101).
It is this fractal creation of spaces that makes Elizabeth Bowen’s The
Hotel a self-reflexive study of the modern leisure space specifically
as a temporary autonomous zone. Bey urges us to ‘look for spaces
(geographic, social, cultural-imaginal) with the potential to flower as
 Shawna Ross 159

autonomous’ (p. 101). He calls this practice ‘psychotopology’, defined

as ‘dowsing for potential TAZs’ (p. 101), and, elsewhere, ‘a whole new
geography, a kind of pilgrimage-map in which holy sites are replaced
by peak experiences and TAZs’ (p. 132). Bowen’s representations of lei-
sure spaces are, I argue, exercises in psychotopography, and, as in the
case of Bowen’s The Hotel, twentieth-century representations of leisure
spaces often struggle with the demon of the temporary – perhaps, if
I can extrapolate Bey’s historical thesis, a product of the all-too-recent
closure of the map, which stimulates the spatial nostalgia diagnosed
in Outka’s Consuming Traditions. Both the triumphs and the failures
of the temporary autonomous zone are documented by Bowen in her
account of English holiday life in a fully modernized hotel. The space’s
hypermodernity and its commercialism do not merely restrict pleas-
ure, but instead simultaneously produce it. As I have already pointed
out, Bowen’s The Hotel opens and closes with dramatic accounts of the
ups and downs of a homosexual lifestyle afforded by the anonymity,
transience, and permissiveness of hotel life that Wayne Koestenbaum
describes in Hotel Theory (2007). Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald use
such specific architectural features of the hotel as the elevator, a glass
skeleton surrounded by a curved staircase and visible from the two-
storied lobby, to stage fights and reunions. Newcomers, loungers, and
employees alike can gaze at the slow progress of people in the lift, while
the staircase, built in a spiral shape that wraps around the lift, allows
guests on the staircase and in the lift to watch one another’s parallel
but separate progressions. The rapid alternation of public and private,
indoor and outdoor spaces in this style of hotel allows the two ladies
to make escapes that nonetheless allow continued contact during their
apparent separation. As memories of tiffs and reunions add up, the
ladies experience the hotel as a personal psychotopography:

The terrace for which they were making had been the scene of pro-
found discussions; there must be something about it, about the tilt of
the ground or the way the trees grew. It had not for some time been
revisited – in fact, they only seemed to have remembered about it
today. Miss Pym now thought that as they both sat down with their
faces towards the cool air and their backs against olive trees she would
say, ‘Life itself, I think, is very wonderful.’ (Bowen, 1927, p. 174)

Bowen’s careful layering of spaces, where the emotionally charged

atmosphere of the olive trees unfolds fractally, provides an opportunity
for a different social experience – in this case, the trees magically
160 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

reappear to repair one of the fights. Other characters manufacture

their own peak experiences by manipulating the hotel’s public spaces,
and, by extension, the social expectations encoded in them. The rigid
social calendar and spatial division of the hotel becomes an obstacle
through which temporary autonomous zones are created, and the
financial and philosophical control of space is contested. For example,
early in the novel Mrs and Miss Pinkerton bribe the hotel manage-
ment to arrange for themselves a private bathroom, as they try to skirt
the social nuisances of the shared bathing spaces typically available in
early twentieth-century European hotels. However, this purchased pri-
vacy explodes when a new arrival, who has not been informed of the
arrangement, waltzes in and casually draws himself a bath – whereupon
the discovery of him by Miss Pinkerton throws the hotel into chaos and
jolts the two women out of their antisocial habits.
This sudden change in the Pinkertons’ behaviour is, of course, another
example of the power surges that continually circulate throughout the
hotel space, and which can create discipline and order as often as it can
create leisure and freedom. The cruel Mrs Kerr uses this fundamental
instability of hotel space to manipulate others. It is with Mrs Kerr that
Sydney experiences the acceleration of romance often found in these
spaces – consider Bath in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) and
Persuasion (1817). But all that glitters is not gold: Mrs Kerr carefully
undermines the orderliness of certain spaces – the tennis courts, the
dining room, the ladies’ lounge – and creates temporary zones for
her own personal machinations, not for the sake of the spontaneous
reorganizations that modern vacationers are supposed to desire from
such spaces. Sydney learns, painfully, at the end that Mrs Kerr had not
only intended to seduce Sydney for the sake of her son, but also had
chosen her specifically because she believed her son could not cultivate
an intense attraction to Sydney that would overshadow the mother–son
relationship. The de-territorialization of hotel space is followed by
the re-territorialization of erotic energy around the traditional space of
the Oedipal family unit. Ironically, this disappointment propels Sydney
into the conservative discursive regime of an older pattern of romance.
Although she revokes her revenge-engagement, the damage has been
done, and Sydney discovers for herself that the temporary autonomous
zone can be appropriated for all types of purposes.
The question remains, was Sydney’s temporary romance enough?
Those breathless moments when Mrs Kerr fractally unfolded novel
private spaces in the public space of the hotel: were they worth it?
Does the fact that they were temporary make them undesirable?
 Shawna Ross 161

Bowen represents the modern hotel as featuring both the influences of

industrial modernity and the possibilities of the temporary autonomous
zone. The decided contrast between the habitual leisure-space denizens
(such as Mrs Kerr, Miss Pym, and Miss Fitzgerald) and the hard work-
ers seeking a short holiday (such as Sydney, Ronald, and James Milton)
suggests that Bowen believes the temporary autonomous zone gives
rise to utopian possibility when it is constantly available. Individuals
perpetually on holiday successfully manipulate those environments to
satisfy their desires, while individuals accustomed to the disciplines
and daily rhythms of urban capitalist modernity have considerable
difficulties in doing so. When they succeed, they do not satisfy their
desires so much as generate new visions of themselves. Sydney, Roger,
and James may not experience a superficial utopia in the form of
happiness or enjoyment, but they do experience, if temporarily, the
utopian freedom of self-determination, an escape from identifying
one’s labour as oneself. In the mid-century context of The Shelbourne
Hotel, we will see Bowen subordinating individual acts of perception to
the visualization of national identity, thereby making the temporary
autonomous zone serve as a field for establishing a national, rather
than a personal, identity.

The Shelbourne Hotel

Bowen’s 1951 work of history, The Shelbourne Hotel, extends the discus-
sion of utopian hospitality to the stage of global politics, and provides
a significant counter to her ‘Big House’ novels by providing a very
different portrait of Irish history and nationalism – one whose nostalgia
is lavished upon a diverse number of Irish groups, not just the landhold-
ing aristocracy. However, recent scholarly considerations of Bowen and
Irish national identity largely ignore The Shelbourne Hotel. For example,
Heather Ingman’s Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women (2007) and
Ellen Wolff’s An Anarchy in the Mind and in the Heart: Narrating Anglo-
Ireland (2006) rely instead on her other works of history, the essay ‘The
Big House’ (1940) and the memoir Bowen’s Court (1942). If, as Wolff
claims, in these works ‘frank criticism of Anglo-Ireland plays with frank
defence; cool judgments of Anglo Ireland’s moral blunders transform
themselves into apparently unself-conscious enactments of them; [and]
statements of ambivalence toward Anglo-Ireland and its Others, Ireland
and England, jostle professions of love and near hate’ (Wolff, 2006, p. 90),
then The Shelbourne Hotel represents a later stage in Bowen’s thinking that
privileges a home-grown Irish identity based on gracious cosmopolitan
162 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

hospitality, and that provides the basis for a patriotic Irish nationalism
that hosts foreigners on Ireland’s own terms. Bowen’s politicization of
the modern hotel suggests that, whereas Nancy Cunard, Jean Rhys, and
Katherine Mansfield stressed how the modern hotel could serve as an
instrument for enforcing class and race distinctions, we might interpret
the segregation of some early modern hotels as indications that some
modern subjects wanted the hotel to be an enclave or escape from
persons or events they thought they did not wish to encounter. Bowen
regards the hotel’s essential porousness – its participation in, and vul-
nerability to (not exclusion from), the major events or crises, cultural
shifts, migrations, and systemic inequalities of modernity – as providing
positive opportunities for disenfranchised modern subjects.
The Shelbourne Hotel traces over a century of the hotel’s participa-
tion in imperialism, capitalism, and Irish nationalism. When Bowen
cryptically remarks that ‘[t]he Shelbourne never looks anything but
opaque’ (Bowen, 1951, p. 6), her ostensible reason for saying so is a
description of the hotel’s façade, yet her rhetorical objective is clearly
to look beyond this superficial opacity. For example, she remarks (and
not without a hint of national pride) that ‘[e]verybody knows what
the Shelbourne is, where it is, and (more or less) why it is’, but then
immediately follows up this statement with a clarification: ‘I doubt if
the average Dubliner, asked point-blank, could tell you whether the
Shelbourne’s name is written on it, and if so where […]. Like other
sights of monuments of a city, it is significant and important, and at
the same time seldom looked at twice’ (p. 9). While her use of italics
suggests a certain overt sense of ownership and civic pride, it also sug-
gests a commitment to moving beyond common sense, beyond the
already-known leisure spaces, that galvanizes the rise of critical leisure
studies just 30 years after the appearance of The Shelbourne Hotel. Bowen
appears to be motivated by a wish to do for the Irish what she did for
her own family in Bowen’s Court a decade before. After lamenting that
‘[t]he nineteenth century in Dublin is, so far, an age without a name.
There would seem to exist no all-round study of the social and civic life
of the capital during those hundred years,’ Bowen continues by forging
a method for creating one; ‘It is necessary’, she explains, ‘to compose a
sort of mosaic patchwork or scrap-screen out of diverse and fragmentary
little pictures. Their effect, it is to be hoped, may convey something’
(p. 41). Here, Bowen mobilizes collage techniques as necessary for
writing the heretofore unwritten social history of Dublin, not only
because of the lack of historical sources and evidence, but also because of
the complexities of understanding Irish identity (particularly through a
 Shawna Ross 163

necessarily ‘international’ space like a metropolitan hotel in an historic

imperial centre). The patriotic impetus behind such a project is also
evident in the following passage, whose balance of romance and gritty
realism challenges stereotypes about the dreaminess of the Irish (includ-
ing, for example, Matthew Arnold’s ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’
[1867] lectures):

Since the day when Burke first opened his doors, the hotel’s conti-
nuity has been unbroken. Virtually unbroken, one ought to say – one
year (1865–6) had to be given over to rebuilding, under new own-
ership; later there were some weeks of paralysis due to strike. For a
century and a quarter the Shelbourne has been in being – with all
that that implies. It has welcomed the world and blazed out lights
of gaiety; equally, it has been girt by battle and withstood siege. It
is now an institution: what went to make it was a blend of genius
and realism, flair and devoted routine work. Thanks to many – some
whose names shall be written, some whose names are lost – it has
gone on. It has gone on, accumulating character, forging its own
tradition, writing its page of history, gathering a whole host of asso-
ciations around its name. The Shelbourne … (p. 8)

Three gaps interrupt the passage’s superficially fulsome nostalgia: the

years of strike and rebuilding, which highlight the hotel’s history as a
workplace and as a financial instrument; the unnamed workers, again
underscoring the hotel as a space of labour; and the terminal ellipsis,
which suggests that Bowen despairs of ever collecting every single
‘association around its name’. The Shelbourne’s history is dispersed
and communal, a never-ending project that humbles the powers of any
single author.
Bowen’s attitude of resigned but determined authorship, which pairs
an overriding tone of pride with occasional moments of irony, detach-
ment, or gentle teasing, does something slightly different, I argue, than
the tone Wolff has identified in Bowen’s oeuvre. Although the hotel’s
guests – particularly English soldiers and statesmen – might desire to
use the hotel to escape from political and economic troubles, Bowen
gently ridicules this desire: discussing Daniel O’Connell’s release from
jail and his funeral, she follows up dramatic descriptions of public
demonstrations with the ‘tense, ghostly, genteel quiet’ of ‘Burke’s most
apprehensive guests [who] could remain indoors, hurriedly draw their
curtains, and close their eyes’ (p. 70). Again, when discussing the first
rejection of Parnell’s proposals for Home Rule, she notes that ‘the hotel,
164 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

with its rubicund face and impassive routine, became a heartening

fortress; once inside it, everything seemed less bad’, yet the Anglo-Irish
gentry ‘had demons of worry crouched on their Shelbourne bedposts,
waiting to leer at them in the small hours’ (pp. 154–5). Notably, Bowen’s
descriptions suggest that only for the Anglo-Irish and the English does
the modern hotel’s oscillation between private and public, exclusive
preserve and plaything of history, become truly problematic. While
Bowen recounts with relish many political events in the Shelbourne’s
history that seem at times superfluously lurid – she ‘has heard it said’
that Hitler’s brother was a chef de commis for the Shelbourne (p. 176) –
she argues that the ‘national struggle in its succeeding phases’ (p. 41)
must be taken into consideration. ‘To attempt to write about Dublin –
even, indeed, about a hotel in Dublin – and ignore all that’, she
observes, in a critique of the ‘apprehensive guests’ who try to use the
Shelbourne as a fortress, ‘would amount to rendering Hamlet without
the Prince of Denmark’ (p. 41). Bowen’s attitude is therefore at first
ambivalent. The chapter in which she refreshes her readers’ knowledge
of the history of Irish independence is called ‘The Background’, suggest-
ing an old-historicist model of politics as a semi-detached ‘context’ for
reading a cultural object, and, she admits, ‘shelves and shelves of books
deal, already, with Ireland’s emergence as a nation. My own subject is
on a less grand scale’ (pp. 41–2).
But as Bowen’s history accumulates micro-histories of political events
that occur inside and at the doors of the Shelbourne – labour troubles,
the First and Second World Wars (during which times it acted as a hos-
pital and communications centre), the fight for independence, the Irish
Civil War (during which it was besieged), the drafting and ratification
of the Irish Constitution – the ‘grand scale’ of her hotel history becomes
apparent, despite Bowen’s not entirely ingenuous proviso. Ironically,
it is during the 1916 Easter Rising, when British troops occupied the
Shelbourne’s roof in order to get within shooting range of Countess
Markievicz’s troops on St Stephen’s Green, that Bowen describes the
only time in its history that ‘the Shelbourne was now cut off […] to
be regarded as sealed up’ (p. 195). That the Shelbourne should ‘cut off’
its guests ‘in a sort of ghostly shipboard existence’ (p. 196), that the
hotel should literally be enclosed at one of the very moments it most
closely influences Irish history, that the only object smuggled into the
hotel at the time was the machine gun that convinced Markievicz to
retreat – all of these points belie the conservatism and nostalgia with
which Bowen ends her history. After having given examples of the
hotel’s significance for Irish history, she writes that ‘[t]he hotel is in
 Shawna Ross 165

its functioning a self-contained unit, a world revolving upon itself’

containing ‘a comprehensive organic life’ (p. 236). Bowen’s invocation
of this robust leisure-space trope works rhetorically along the same lines
as the ‘genteel’ English guests whose need for a self-contained hotel
she ridicules. The ability of the figure of the hotel-as-world to fulfil the
need for symbolic and material proofs of safety, and of national pride
and political power, has been transferred from easing the anxieties of
the Anglo-Irish gentry to those of the divergent populations comprising
the modern Irish nation-state.
Though Bowen begins The Shelbourne Hotel by underplaying her
ability to tell the history of Irish nationalism, she ends the text with
an impressionistic description of the Shelbourne’s place in the Dublin
cityscape. Where the machine gun stood in 1916, Bowen narrates
herself standing:

Dublin spreads its humming plan, shading off into the empty hori-
zons. This vast, melting, and shining view has something timeless
about it, yet with every moment changes colour and light. In the
heart of this stands the Shelbourne, four-square, stout and surviving,
a scene of so many destinies which might seem to be transitory, yet
become immortal when one considers how they have left their mark.
Nothing goes for nothing. (p. 239)

It is difficult to think of a more literal illustration of Bowen’s implicit

thesis that the Shelbourne provides a perspective on Ireland (particu-
larly one that generates visions that, like the temporary autonomous
zone itself, seem fleeting and elusive). But there is an ambiguity here:
this marriage of Baudelaire’s two halves of the beautiful – the fleet-
ing and the eternal – is replicated both between Dublin and the hotel
(with the spatial mass of the hotel providing the eternal element), and
within the hotel itself (with its complex temporality, as a synecdoche for
both the ‘transitory’ and the ‘immortal’). This passage’s insistence on the
Shelbourne’s situation in a larger urban space, whose meaning it both
mediates and is mediated by, contradicts Bowen’s proclamation that the
hotel is a self-sufficient world, and suggests that the Shelbourne’s abil-
ity to stand in as the quintessentially Irish space is due at least in part
to its elusiveness. A few sentences later, the closing lines of the book
double back upon the self-conscious impressionism of this passage, yet
heighten its ambiguity in an entirely different way: by beginning an
open-ended narrative. Shifting into the narrative tone of fiction, Bowen
writes: ‘A car detaches itself, slows down, pulls up in front of the glass
166 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen

porch. The porter comes out – somebody is arriving. It is any hour you
like of a Shelbourne day …’ (p. 240). By ending with an ellipsis and
using the present tense, she supports her earlier claim that ‘the book
ends, but not the story’ (p. 239), and emphasizes the essential openness
of the modern hotel and of Irish national identity. At the same time, she
regards her act of writing history as closing that openness; by claiming
that the ‘Shelbourne cannot be completed until it is read’ (p. 11), she
attributes a power to text that she does not afford the actual space. By
having it both ways, by representing the hotel as both fluid and fixed,
political and insulated, dynamic and timeless, both national treasure
and luxurious resort, she simultaneously celebrates Irish independence
as an event that allows the Shelbourne to accumulate prestige and sig-
nificance and preserves a kind of Protestant Ascendancy in the hotel by
claiming that the hotel is ‘haunted’ by ‘the handsome, the hearty, the
happy, and the polite’ guests of the ‘Gay Days’ from the 1880s to the
outbreak of the First World War (p. 128).
In doing so, Bowen may look like yet another person in the long line
of colonizers seeking to wield power by redefining Ireland – the kind of
activity described by Seamus Deane:

The physical landscape of Ireland is regularly redefined throughout the

nineteenth century – administratively, cartographically, politically,
culturally, economically, constitutionally – by competing groups, all
of which seek to make it conform to a paradigm in terms of which
it can be successfully represented as a specific place, indeed, but
also as a locus for various forms of ideological investment. (Deane,
1994, p. 119)

The zest and passion that animate Bowen’s prose, as well as the range
of materials from which she quotes, suggest that she also uses the
Shelbourne as just such a ‘locus’ for ‘ideological investment’. But,
we might ask, for what purpose? It would be very difficult to argue from
this text that Bowen is either an unabashed patriot or a post-colonial
apologist. Bowen’s ambiguity results from the text’s participation
in the discursive over-determination of modern hotels. If this over-
determination makes it difficult to pin down what a modern hotel
really is, then the purpose of this chapter is not to force a definition
but to stress the significance of the fact that hotels are made to ‘mean’
in so many contexts. And if Bowen’s political views are, ultimately,
inaccessible in this text, The Shelbourne Hotel nonetheless creates a rela-
tively inclusive cultural history of Ireland’s colonial and post-colonial
 Shawna Ross 167

struggles through the over-determined figure of the modern hotel. The

Hotel serves as a vehicle for exploring utopian impulses that would
rewrite the relationship between work, leisure, and interiority, and find
new types of interpersonal relationships that would escape the stultify-
ing norms of everyday life and leisure. For twentieth-century writers like
Bowen, each leisure space as a temporary autonomous zone enacts a
private conception of utopia, not a universal plan intended unilaterally
to be expanded to everyone, but rather a provisional and local utopia –
allowing us to look past the failures of some permanent revolution, and
to look instead at the moments that do, if for only that moment, realize
the utopian impulse.
9
‘Seeing beneath the formlessness’:
James Baldwin, Toni Morrison,
and Restorative Urbanism
David James

‘Havens are high priced’, declares James Baldwin, introducing his

landmark collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, his 1961 follow-
up to Notes of a Native Son (1955). He continues:

The price exacted of the haven-dweller is that he contrive to delude

himself into believing that he has found a haven. It would seem,
unless one looks more deeply at the phenomenon, that most people
are able to delude themselves and get through their lives quite hap-
pily. But I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living:
and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what
small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is
himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can
summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are.
(Baldwin, 1961, p. 12)

To decide to address both the self and the world as they are, rather
than picturing what they might become, doesn’t immediately sound
like the stuff of utopian thinking. Baldwin was cautious about looking
ahead in a way that neglected the task of changing the present, and
he was never one to indulge in prospective alternatives as a form of
succour or compensation for immediate injustice. Writing on Faulkner
and desegregation, for instance, he insisted ‘[t]here is never time in the
future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the
moment, the time is always now’ (p. 107). This kind of urgency under-
scored Baldwin’s attitude to reforming what it means for the writer at
once to exist in the social world yet also imagine how that world might
otherwise be. As Cora Kaplan and Bill Schwarz have recently observed,
Baldwin evolved a multi-layered conception of his own agency as a
168
 David James 169

commentator on and participant in social struggle. While ‘investigating

the possibilities for the deracialization of his own self as the precon-
dition for his being in the world’, that same world also ‘signaled for
Baldwin a deep desire to embrace a consciousness that lifted him – the
modern being, the writer, Baldwin himself – out of his own region or
nation, out of his own parish’ (Kaplan and Schwarz, 2011, p. 10). Such
confrontations with that notion again of the world as it is, alongside,
indeed as a premise for, the contemplation of what it might become,
suggest that Baldwin implicitly engaged in the kind of intellectual
experiments in world-building that we associate with utopian thought.
In analysing this engagement here, I take my cue from recent reas-
sessments of the complicated articulation of utopian models by an
earlier generation of modernist writers to whom the formal textures of
Baldwin’s work implicitly pay tribute. To revisit modernism’s utopias,
as Nathan Waddell has convincingly shown, doesn’t mean ‘re-claiming
modernist fictions as offering narrative “havens” in response to the
psychologically deadening effects’ of modernity; rather, it entails an
alertness to ‘different kinds of literary and non-literary writing as hav-
ing a utopian “freight” or “implication”, especially in the sense of
providing their readers with a means of more effectively grasping (and
thereby perhaps in time resolving) the contradictions of the social
conditions by which they were […] encircled’ (Waddell, 2012, p. 6). In
this shrewd negotiation rather than unhesitating embrace of utopian
logics, modernism thus developed a means to express social possibilities
beyond – without denying or diluting – existing conflicts, a means of
apprehension that chimes with Baldwin’s depiction of urban encoun-
ters, with ‘the symbolic geographies he imagined moving back and
forth to produce a kaleidoscopic pattern of changing elements’ (Kaplan
and Schwarz, 2011, p. 11).
But to what extent can utopian dynamics emerge in the work of a
writer so watchful of ‘self-delusion’? To answer that question one might
begin with the portrait of a novelist whose self-scrutiny seemed to qualify
any temptation to be visionary. In Cheryl A. Wall’s terms, this attitude
meant that ‘unlike most black writers before him, Baldwin was as rig-
orous in judging his individual stance as a moral agent as he was the
morality of the nation-state’ (Wall, 2011, p. 39). Such a stance prompted
impatience with the more bohemian strain of utopianism Baldwin
encountered in Paris and New York alike, as he documented it as early
as Notes of a Native Son in 1955. In these nonconformists, he criticized
‘the inability to believe that time is real’, together with their conviction
that society is merely ‘a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed
170 Baldwin, Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism

by and for all the other people, and experience is nothing more than
sensation’. In contrast to the way some utopians ‘persist in believing
that their present shapelessness is freedom’, Baldwin harboured a more
exacting set of ideals (Baldwin, 1955, p. 135), critical as he seems to be
of his transatlantic character, Eric, from Another Country (1962), who
represents the passivity of unfocused speculation, since the ‘aim of the
dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested
by the world’ (Baldwin, 1962, p. 199).
How it is that Baldwin can turn towards ‘the teeth of the world’
(p. 199) without foregoing the utopian revisualization of its urban spaces
is a question to which this essay responds. It does so, in part, by relating
his fiction’s linguistic and perspectival innovations to his engagement
with the ‘concept of the environment’, in Ruth Eaton’s terms, ‘as a vital
extension of the citizen’s desires and actions’ (Eaton, 2002, p. 231).
Lending a more comparative dimension to this discussion, I also want
to take what many believe to be Baldwin’s most accomplished novel
and place it alongside one of the most formally inventive works by
his leading successor, Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), published 30 years
later. Putting Baldwin’s Another Country in dialogue with Morrison’s
text allows us to consider the way both writers engage with the dist-
inction David Harvey has influentially highlighted between utopias
of spatial form and utopias of social process, whereby the imaginative
re-articulation of urban spaces occurs in and through everyday interac-
tions (see Harvey, 2000, p. 160). My broader contention will be that,
given their focus on the transformation of the quotidian ‘now’, of
the world’s ordinary spaces ‘as they are’, Baldwin and Morrison aren’t
simply sceptical towards radical reconfigurations of the urban environ-
ment; they also confront, in Eaton’s terms, the utopian ‘doctrine that
preache[s] uniformity and universal applicability’ (Eaton, 2002, p. 217),
refracting it through the lens of racial exclusion and subjugation, while
performing with such refractions bold innovations in narrative register
and structure. In so doing, their work ‘identifies race as a productive
element’, as Urmila Seshagiri puts it, of ‘modernist form, a central organ-
izing aesthetic category instead of merely a social problem’ (Seshagiri,
2010, p. 6). Which is not to say that material questions of racial justice
forestall or preclude the more speculative activity of utopian conjec-
ture in Baldwin’s and Morrison’s fictions. They instead extend the
modernist novel’s preoccupation with the subjective apprehension of
everyday spatio-temporal perceptions, so as to find modes appropriate
to what Lyman Tower Sargent calls ‘critical utopia’, modes for narrating
accounts of the metropolis (for both writers, New York) as a terrain of
 David James 171

latent change whose social spaces are ‘open-ended, self-reflective, and

with identifiable problems yet to be resolved’ (Sargent, 2000, p. 13).
If anything like a utopian perception of the urban world can be
glimpsed in Baldwin and Morrison, therefore, it’s likely to be found
in how everyday scenes are themselves framed, sensed, and valued as
such. It’s what the city’s existing condition, its coexisting damage and
potentiality, promises to inspire that propels these writers’ experimental
representations of space.1 Centring thus on the seemingly unremarkable
more so than reaching for the unimaginable, Baldwin and Morrison
put into practice Bertrand de Jouvenal’s proposition that ‘pictures of
daily life’ are vital to ‘the mode of persuasion characteristic of and
essential to utopian writing’ (de Jouvenal, 1965, p. 221). As a second-
ary layer to the ensuing discussion, we’ll see how the operation of that
mode for Baldwin and Morrison extends the conversation between
modernist aesthetics and urban literary utopias into the post-war era.
Literary-historically speaking, that might seem inconsequential. But
if the assumption can still be rehearsed that ‘there is no Wells for the
second part of the century’ (Kumar, 2000, p. 259), then similar supposi-
tions can inform the debate about modernism’s supposed dissipation at
mid-century too. What follows, however, is not simply an attempt to
restate the case for measuring the thematic and rhetorical consequences
of modernism’s persistence and renewal, but also to gauge whether the
kind of ‘social dreaming’ we associate with utopian writing can itself be
regarded as a motivation for modernism’s post-war recrudescence.2
‘[T]he only real concern of the artist’, as Baldwin saw it in Notes of a
Native Son, is ‘to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is
art’ (Baldwin, 1955, p. 7). This reconstructive impulse might be con-
strued as betraying a tribute to high modernism’s perceived struggle, as
Leonard Wilcox has characterized it, to salvage ‘meaning from the flux
and fragments of an atomized contemporary world, to pierce the veil, to
reveal underlying truth’ (Wilcox, 2000, p. 198). While Baldwin paints a
portrait of the artist as courageous restorer of order, the impulse behind
it stems from a commitment not so much to any regressive shoring-up
of the world’s fragmentation as to the endorsement of fiction’s progres-
sive capacity to intervene in ‘the disorder of life’ – provoking readers
to imagine how it might otherwise be experienced. For him, the novel
could give critical shape to the urban realities of displacement and
disenfranchisement that motivated his own transnational existence,
and which also had become condensed – and most visibly distilled
as a creative resource – by the cosmopolitan population of New York.
‘[C]itizens of the world’s most bewildered city’ (Baldwin, 1962, p. 145),
172 Baldwin, Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism

he terms them, knowing that he’s one of them, even in periods when he’s
not physically among them. It’s this love–hate relationship to New York
that Baldwin carries over into Another Country from Giovanni’s Room
(1956), where his American protagonist had longed in Paris to return
to those ‘places, those people which I would always helplessly, and in
whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else’ (Baldwin, 1956, p. 54).
Such conflicting passions for the city strike to the heart of what James
Darsey sees as Baldwin’s ‘cosmopolitan loneliness’ (Darsey, 1999). But
they’re also integral to Baldwin’s understanding of identity itself, as he
envisaged a crucial dimension for the self forged by the physical and
intellectual detachment of exile, while at the same time ‘believ[ing] that
social reform could not occur through legislation alone but through a
reimagining of the private realm’ (Tóibín, 2011, p. 57). For novelists
engaged with that imaginative task, immediate ‘social affairs’, suggests
Baldwin, ‘are not generally speaking’ their ‘prime concern’; instead it
becomes ‘absolutely necessary’ that such a writer ‘establish between
himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity,
so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must
first be allowed to take a long look back’ (Baldwin, 1955, p. 6).
Yet if Baldwin always insisted he could grasp where he was only in
the knowledge of whence he came, he couldn’t always predict where
he wanted to be. After returning from Paris ‘in the summer of 1957’,
Baldwin had ‘intend[ed] to go south’, as he puts it, ‘as soon as [he] got
the bread together’ (Baldwin, 1972, p. 51). But instead he found himself
‘stuck in New York for a discouragingly long time’. Initially frustrated
at being waylaid by no other reason than finance, Baldwin admits
that soon he ‘had begun to arrive at some kind of modus vivendi’ with
his home city after nine years abroad, a renewed acquaintance that
restored a vision of what the metropolis could yet become, through the
unflinching lens of what it was:

I began to see New York in a different way, seeing beneath the

formlessness, in the detail of a cornice, the shape of a window, the
movement of stone steps […] something of that Europe which has
spawned it; and heard, beneath the nearly invincible and despair-
ing noise, the sound of many tongues, all struggling for dominance.
Since I was here to stay, I had to examine it, learn it all over again,
and try to find out if I had ever loved it. (p. 51)

Again we may be tempted to detect here an echo of T. S. Eliot’s

gesture of recuperation in the face of what The Waste Land (1922)
 David James 173

iconically considers to be the spiritual impoverishment and aggressive

mechanization wrought by urban modernity, for Baldwin entertains
the prospect of recovering what lies behind the onrush of metropolitan
advancement. By the same stroke, though, his restorative gesture here is
by no means regressive or forlorn. Baldwin’s pursuit of ‘a different way’
of ‘seeing beneath the formlessness’ of the present corresponds with
what Victor Shklovsky famously described as the power of defamiliar-
izing art, whose practitioner ‘removes objects from the automatism of
perception’ in order to reveal and value them anew but without losing
touch with those objects’ particularity (Shklovsky, 1917, p. 13). New
York, for Baldwin, is a place to be neither idealized nor mourned, but
rather a multi-culture of ‘many tongues’ awaiting the kind of observer
who is agile enough to grasp, however incompletely, something of their
diversity without seeking to press them into the service of a single,
instrumental vision of urban unity.
Seeing beneath the city’s collective formlessness is not necessarily
synonymous, then, with the utopian yet also potentially homogenizing,
assumption that the modern metropolis is immediately capable of accom-
modating differences. Baldwin’s implication, to frame it in Shklovsky’s
terms, is that writers who wish to ‘recover the sensation of life’ need to
assume that ‘[t]he purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known’ (p. 12). Such is the priori-
tization of perception over received assumptions that we encounter time
and again in Baldwin’s fiction, where the objective is not to counteract
the formlessness of urban experience but to find in everyday moments
the ‘mood of enchantment or that strange combination of delight and
disturbance’ that, as Jane Bennett has eloquently argued, might provide
the ‘motivational energy’ for converting ethical and political ‘principles’
into actual, liveable ‘behaviours’ (Bennett, 2010, p. xi).
While testing that conversion by dramatizing it in his work, Baldwin
used it also as a point of self-inquiry, posed in light of his own ‘combina-
tion of delight and disturbance’ on returning to New York. Whether he
‘had ever loved’ the city turned out to be a rhetorical question, because
it ‘contained’, as Baldwin ‘suspected’, ‘its own melancholy answer’, an
answer that sounds a far cry from any utopian prospect: ‘No, I didn’t
love it, at least not any more, but I was going to have to survive it. In
order to survive it, I would have to watch it’ (Baldwin, 1972, p. 51).
Once more we have that imperative: to look at urban worlds as they are,
rather than to superimpose upon them an idyllic remedy to whatever
despair the present holds.3 This impulse is part of a larger critical dimen-
sion to Baldwin’s work recently identified by George Shulman, whereby
174 Baldwin, Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism

‘redemption’ itself ‘for Baldwin is (generated by) “accepting” (wrestling

with rather than purifying) our incompletion and abiding need for
others’ (Shulman, 2008, p. 133). Processes of wrestling with the here-
and-now provoked, as we shall see, many of Baldwin’s most stylistically
audacious descriptions of urban experience, showcasing what Colm
Tóibín calls that ‘fascination’ in the warp and weft of Baldwin’s prose
‘with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the
sharp and glorious ring of a sentence’ (Tóibín, 2011, p. 54).
Another Country becomes his arena for such verbal virtuosity, when the
novel leads us into a ‘geo-psychical warp’, as Darsey describes it, ‘where
oppression and liberation overlap’ (Darsey, 1999, p. 188). Perhaps this
terrain of freedom and constraint was what The New York Times reviewer
of Another Country had in mind when comparing it to high modernism’s
most formidable depiction of metropolitan indolence and despair: ‘forty
years after T. S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in verse Mr. Baldwin
has given us a prose version of human desolation in a very different
manner and with far less obscure symbolism’ (quoted in Kenan, 2009,
p. 45). Certainly, this praise could be applied to the novel’s tragic open-
ing, which ends with the suicide of Baldwin’s bisexual jazz drummer,
Rufus, a death that unites the entire cast of characters, even if subse-
quent passions within this group put their loyalties to Rufus’s memory
to the test. Traumatic light shed by the novel’s distressing exposition is
certainly slow to disperse; but it wouldn’t do justice to Baldwin’s vision
to say that ‘desolation’ alone is the spur for that obligation (as Baldwin
himself expressed it) ‘to watch’ New York. For the watcher changes, and
it soon becomes clear, when Vivaldo takes the stage, that it won’t be the
black subject who serves as this novel’s central focalizing consciousness.
An American-Italian who falls in love with Rufus’s sister Ida, Vivaldo
displays a masculinism that not only shrouds his own bisexuality for
much of the novel, but also marks him out as a vivacious exploiter of
the very spheres of racial interaction from which Rufus had emerged
emotionally crippled. Baldwin turns Vivaldo into an aggressive adapta-
tion of the flâneur, insofar as he’s driven to immerse himself in, rather
than distance himself from, the spaces of necessity and opportunity he
navigates. As its racial outsider, Vivaldo sees that Harlem has become a
libidinal utopia for someone as willing as he is to take risks:

For several years it had been his fancy that he belonged in those dark
streets uptown precisely because the history written in the color of his
skin contested his right to be there. He enjoyed this, his right to be
being everywhere contested; uptown, his alienation had been made
 David James 175

visible and, therefore, almost bearable. It had been his fancy that
danger, there, was more real, more open, than danger was downtown
and that he, having chosen to run these dangers, was snatching his
manhood from the lukewarm waters of mediocrity and testing it in
the fire. He had felt more alive in Harlem, for he had moved in a blaze
of rage and self-congratulation and sexual excitement, with danger,
like a promise, waiting for him everywhere. (Baldwin, 1962, p. 132)

Andrew O’Hagan has noted that the ‘liturgical energy’ of Baldwin’s nar-
ration is part of the ‘remarkable unity of form and content’ across his
fiction. And we hear the results of that energy in this passage, as the
cumulative motion of Baldwin’s parataxis becomes a correlative to the
appetite with which Vivaldo contemplates his deliberate self-alienation
in Harlem. Baldwin’s affinity with James’s notion of fiction’s organic
cohesion, its mutual interpenetration of matter and expression, high-
lights the extent to which he considered that his ambitions as a stylist,
in O’Hagan’s words, began and ended in ‘a matter of straightforward
literary integrity’ (O’Hagan in Baldwin, 1956, p. xi).
That degree of integrity is all the more appropriate for a novel with
the expressive force and impulsiveness of jazz at its aesthetic core.
Morrison herself has recalled that in order to render the ‘[i]mprovisation,
originality, change’ akin to jazz, ‘[r]ather than [simply] be about those
characteristics’, her novel of that name ‘would seek to become them’
(Morrison, 1992, p. xviii). The same could be said for Another Country,
insofar as Baldwin models syntax on jazz improvisation to revivify the
depiction of ordinary urban spaces. Consider the following episode,
where Ida and Vivaldo ‘come up from the subway’, an ‘ascent from
darkness to day’, as Baldwin details it, ‘which made the streets so dazz-
ling’ (Baldwin, 1962, p. 143). Defamiliarizing the streetscape, Baldwin
re-illuminates architectural colour and texture by reaching for analo-
gies in melody and heat: ‘“I’ve never seen such a day,” [Vivaldo] said
to Ida, and it was true. Everything seemed to be swollen, thrusting
and shifting and changing, about to burst into music or into flame or
revelation’ (p. 143). Throughout the ensuing panorama, it’s as though
Baldwin takes up Shklovsky’s injunction that in order for art to
move beyond what is empirically known, ‘the process of perception’
should be rendered as ‘an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’
(Shklovsky, 1917, p. 12):

They were on Broadway at Seventy-second Street, walking uptown –

for Cass and Richard had moved, they were climbing that well-known
176 Baldwin, Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism

ladder, Cass said. The light seemed to fall with an increased hardness,
examining and inciting the city with an unsparing violence, like
the violence of love, and striking from the city’s grays and blacks a
splendor as of steel on steel. In the windows of tall buildings flame
wavered, alive, in ice. (Baldwin, 1962, p. 142)

Baldwin’s mobile couple participate in this prolongation of perception,

as their enchantment itself becomes something of an event, the scene’s
unexpected ‘splendor’ turning their observations into wonderment,
their attention into ecstasy. Stunned himself by Harlem musicians
a quarter of a century before the appearance of Baldwin’s Another
Country, Le Corbusier was led to describe jazz as ‘the melody of the soul
joined with the rhythm of the machine’ (Le Corbusier, 1937, p. 158).
He went on to observe that ‘[j]azz, like skyscapers, is [also] an event
and not a deliberately conceived creation’, such that ‘[i]f architecture
were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle’
(p. 161). In a phrase that anticipates Baldwin’s sibilant description, in
the passage above, of ‘steel on steel’ in skyscrapers with windowpanes
like ‘ice’, Le Corbusier returns to that musical analogy time and again
in When the Cathedrals Were White (1937). The city prompts a series of
thought-experiments in which Le Corbusier imagines himself witness-
ing melodies that assume built-form. ‘I repeat: Manhattan is hot jazz in
stone and steel’ (p. 161).
To think in such idealized – and, frankly, exoticizing – terms was
typical of Le Corbusier’s peripatetic focus in When the Cathedrals Were
White. In Robert Fishman’s account, Le Corbusier ‘believed that the
city existed for interchange’, a realm for cultivating ‘the most rapid
possible exchange of ideas, information, talents, joys’. In this vision,
notes Fishman, nothing but ‘the concentration of a metropolis could
provide the multitude of creative juxtapositions which is the special
joy of urban life’. A contemporary cityscape was an environment in
which ‘everything is in motion’; and, for Le Corbusier, in a place of
such flux ‘speed becomes the only constant’ (Fishman, 1977, p. 191).
This approach to the idea of the city-as-interchange led Le Corbusier to
alight on New York. Holding it up as a triumph of what he saw as
the ‘fundamental revolution in the plastic arts’ (Le Corbusier, 1937,
p. 162), he confronted the metropolis as a testimony to artistic trans-
formations exemplified in music and reciprocated by environmental
transformations in architecture. Such a vision of urban ‘reformation’
necessarily involved the yoking together of empirical witnessing and
 David James 177

entirely imagined correlations – such as those links Le Corbusier

aestheticized between music and stone.
But despite his tendency to romanticize the conflation of material
or musical domains in New York, Le Corbusier is most pertinent in his
reactions to style. ‘Style’ alone, he insisted in 1925, ‘is a state of mind’
(Le Corbusier, 1925, p. 34). And it wouldn’t be entirely anachronistic or
controversial to say that Toni Morrison would agree. She’s a writer who
remains, as she puts it, ‘very conscious […] of trying to blend that which
is contrived and artificial with improvisation’ (Schappell, 1992, p. 81).
Thus in her celebrated novel Jazz, she sought to ‘pull from’ the minds
of those in its Harlem setting what she saw as ‘the compositional drama
of the period, its unpredictability’ (Morrison, 1992, p. xviii). Indeed,
much of our interest in the urban terrain of this novel cannot be divorced
from this logic of improvisation that it manifests in thematic respects
that are also reflected on a stylistic level. It’s here that Morrison adheres
to Baldwin’s proviso about the inseparability of content and technique,
inspiring her commitment, as she calls it in a tribute to Baldwin, to
writing ‘at the top of my form’ (Morrison, 1987, p. 90). Morrison is far
from interested, though, in simply emulating what she most admires in
Baldwin’s fiction; in fact, her sense of the distinction of her own craft
is matched by the singular way in which she envisions the urban scene
that he found so formless and often dispiriting. In Keren Omry’s com-
parison, ‘[w]hile in Another Country Rufus seeks music as an escape from
the crushing power of the city, in Jazz the city becomes home precisely
through the music’ (Omry, 2006, p. 28). In this sense, Morrison does
not project a vision of an ideal city so much as she asks how jazz culture
relates to the process of ‘creating a spatial framework’, in Eaton’s phrase,
‘that is considered better adapted to the social, political, and economic
change that has already occurred’ (Eaton, 2000, p. 121) – transforma-
tions that cannot be redressed simply by performing architectural
thought-experiments in which the idyllic overtakes the actual.
What Morrison does share with Baldwin in this novel, however, is
the use of a deliberately imposing narrative voice, especially in scenes
of urban description. Her nimble commentator is so collusive when
addressing the novel’s audience as to flout the modernist tenet of
impersonality. Yet at the same time, this could be a way for Morrison
to reassert her own modified version of impersonality, preserving her
distance from this narrator’s reverie on Harlem. Indeed, it has become
common for critics to notice that Jazz stands out among Morrison’s
novels as the one text in which she remains most aloof. And it’s true.
178 Baldwin, Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism

From early on, Morrison moves back as her suave commentator steps in
to sweep across the novel’s opening setting:

I’m crazy about this City.

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the
top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people,
which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé
thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of
sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel
in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below
that does it. (Morrison, 1992, p. 7)

The fluid motion of the narrator’s descent from panoramic skyline to

populated street is complemented phonetically by the way prolifer-
ating sibilance connects present-tense statements across, or in spite
of, period breaks. Taken in by the blur of human subjects and stone,
the elevated perspective is quickly preoccupied by quotidian events.
Drawing something of an arc from (visual) omniscience to the (tactile)
knowledge of ‘feel[ing] in on things’, Toni Morrison’s telescopic narra-
tor stages the reconciliation of pictorial elegance with an attention to
where any ordinary ‘blasé thing takes place’ that the novel attempts as
a whole. Morrison thus remains aloof from a narrative voice that seems
to aspire to an imperious point of view, only then to be drawn back
to the textures of everyday life. Effacing her own role as the implied
author has allowed this narrator, ‘crazy about this City’, to break all
rules of perspective in order to set the reader before an urban scene that
invites one to ‘dream tall and feel in’. If the ‘Corbusian sublime’, as
Andrzej Ga˛siorek has argued, ‘unites monumentalism with efficiency’
(Ga˛siorek, 2005, p. 142), then it would appear that Morrison’s sublime
combines localism and wilful metaphoricity, as she indulges a way
of viewing ordinary buildings through unregulated perspectives and
distorted scales.
These manipulations of perspective not only reveal Morrison’s kin-
ship with modernism’s concern with the vagaries of sensation or the
challenges of bewilderment, in Paul Armstrong’s memorable phrase
(see Armstrong, 1987); they also alert us to the way material envi-
ronments might be inventively redescribed in fiction without being
entirely transfigured into something chimerical. To this extent, Jazz
pre-empts any confusion between the utopian and the fantastical,
while also reminding us of David Harvey’s insistence, mentioned
earlier, on distinguishing utopias of spatial form from those of social
 David James 179

process and belonging (Harvey, 2000, p. 160). What’s significant is that

Morrison articulates such distinctions between architectural dreaming
and quotidian feeling, between what’s imaginable and what’s liveable,
in ways that offer a rationale for innovations of a more stylistic order.
It’s as though she shares at least something of Le Corbusier’s belief
that ‘Style is the event itself ’, by finding in built-form certain ‘expressions
of the aspirations of a modern consciousness’. For ‘[t]hat’, claims
Le Corbusier, is precisely ‘where style is!’ (Le Corbusier, 1937, p. 35).
Stylization is certainly an event that’s worth witnessing in Morrison’s
novel, and we’d expect nothing less from her: urban rhythms become
a catalyst for experimenting with focalization, just as Another Country’s
migrations between Harlem and Manhattan initiate supple manipu-
lations of perspective. For Morrison and Baldwin alike, though,
these perceptual ingenuities aren’t mere embellishments; they imply
instead that even the most everyday happenings of the city should
themselves be watched expressively, from multiple points of view, in
order for such places to be understood anew. As Baldwin warned in
Another Country: ‘The occurrence of an event is not the same thing
as knowing what it is that one has lived through’ (Baldwin, 1962,
p. 128). And Morrison too is mindful in Jazz to expose the limits of
romanticizing the ‘occurrence’ of urban spectacles, so as not to dis-
connect what people have ‘lived through’ from the projection of a
city’s salvific potential.
Restoring to view an amplified vision of the world as it is, to echo
Baldwin’s phrase, Morrison aims not to turn Harlem into an ‘incred-
ible spectacle’, as Le Corbusier would have savoured it, so much as to
tell a story about what can make the sensory experience of everyday
habitation more incredible than it is. This very process of telling, in
turn, entails the reader’s participation: ‘To make a story appear oral’,
Morrison asserts in her famous essay ‘Rootedness’ (1984), is to make it
appear ‘meandering, effortless, spoken’. As she continues, this interac-
tive procedure not only means ‘hav[ing] the reader feel the narrator
without identifying that narrator, or hearing him or her knockabout’, but
thereby also ‘to have the reader work with the author in the construction
of the book’ (Morrison, 1984, p. 59). Insisting here upon the reader’s
co-implication with form, Morrison is doing something more than
defending the heritage of modernist – particularly Faulknerian –
difficulty with which her work has sometimes been aligned. Her plea
resonates instead beyond debates about what literary experiment is for,
or whom it might exclude. Ideas of interaction between audience and
design have also become important for urban theorists like Michael
180 Baldwin, Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism

Sorkin (director of urban design at City College, New York), who have
interrogated the practical, architectural, and ethical parameters of envi-
ronmental regeneration. The question arises, as Sorkin writes, ‘of the
terms of participation, of the means by which a user or inhabitant is
persuaded to take part, of the difference between coercion and consent.
Here is the central dilemma for utopia […], for any architecture’, in
Sorkin’s view, ‘that proposes to make things better: what exactly is
meant by “better”? and better for whom?’ (Sorkin, 2009, p. 168).
Baldwin and Morrison dramatize their own answers to such questions
of participation and improvability that motivate, if only to complicate,
visions of reform. Rather than call for a revolution of perception, their
fictions suggest, yet also test, an operative way of seeing that defa-
miliarizes as powerfully as it restores. Another Country and Jazz evince
the ambition to give form to what Baldwin called the ‘formlessness’
of New York, as Morrison inherits Baldwin’s acknowledgement, in
Kaplan’s and Schwarz’s account, that while novelistic form is itself ‘dic-
tated by […] brutalities’, it also ‘results in an expressive freedom that
offers politically imaginative mapping’ (Kaplan and Schwarz, 2011,
p. 23). As we’ve observed, both writers continue modernist imperatives
when encountering the city, without resorting to that Eliotic impulse
to marshal metaphysical and moral resources against the attritions of
metropolitan life. Rather, in framing them as post-war writers who bring
modernist aesthetics to the task of re-envisioning urban experience, we
can appreciate the way Baldwin and Morrison show ‘how to imagine
alternatives’, as David Pinder puts it, ‘from a position within the unsat-
isfactory conditions and value systems of the present that is itself to be
transformed’ (Pinder, 2005, p. 257). What they evoke is the demand
for a ‘transformation of urban consciousness’, in Pinder’s phrase, by
revealing how that ‘transformation’ needs to be achieved before we can
start to ‘re-imagine the city and think about how its geographies might
be […] reconstructed in line with different needs and desires’ (p. 2).
Neither Baldwin nor Morrison actualizes that level of reconstruction
within the diegetic world of their respective novels, precisely because
they uncover without altogether fulfilling the premises of change,
tracking individuals ‘as they are’ through their fractured responsibilit-
ies towards the social domain as it is. As the ordinary takes precedence
over wishful speculation or proleptic dreaming, Baldwin can be seen,
in his words, ‘work[ing] out our salvation’ amid the present – especially
in those ‘difficult’ spaces where life may be ‘liken[ed]’, as he puts it, ‘to
a furnace’. In that urban furnace there’s no place for illusory havens
as the basis for utopian thinking. Yet that’s only because ‘freedom’, as
 David James 181

Baldwin attested in a phrase that’s no less utopian than it is pragmatic,

‘is the fire which burns away illusion’ itself (Baldwin, 1961, p. 100).
In an essay entitled ‘The Discovery of What it Means to be an
American’, Baldwin claims that although ‘we do not wholly believe
it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the tangible dreams of people
have a tangible effect on the world’ (p. 23). It’s this prospect that unites
Morrison and Baldwin, the prospect of writing fiction that extends
the modernist evocation of interiority – what Colm Tóibín elegantly
calls Baldwin’s ‘sense of James’s interest in consciousness as something
glittering and also as something hidden and secretive’ (Tóibín, 2011,
p. 54) – while at the same time being committed to the novel’s capac-
ity to have a ‘tangible effect on the world’. Both writers nonetheless
refuse to instrumentalize literary fiction as a medium for imagining
metropolitan futures. The proleptic mission they assign the novel is
perhaps more modest and more immediate, a mission intimated by such
restorative moments we’ve examined here, which simulate alternative
apprehensions of the city, and which stage what it takes to perceive
with imaginative rigour the potential for discovering enchantment in
the everyday.

Notes
1. Tracing Baldwin’s adoption of the genre of prophecy in The Fire Next
Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), George Shulman notes how
‘[i]mperative assertions – about how we must see our situation and our his-
tory to bring ourselves out of it – take conditional form: you must stop doing
x and start doing y if you would flourish. We feel we cannot argue back, but
he is stating the price of the ticket, not commanding us to obey, and we are
free to ignore him, albeit at our peril’ (Shulman, 2011, p. 118).
2. For an elaboration of this generic characteristic of ‘social dreaming’, see
Sargent (2000, p. 15).
3. Baldwin here could be seen as standing, not without formal and ideological
complications, at the crossroads of two genres noted by Ruth Eaton: ‘Running
parallel to the utopian literary genre is that of the ideal city. In the former,
the social arrangement appears to be of primary concern and the urban of the
secondary; in the latter, this is usually reversed’ (Eaton, 2000, p. 121).
10
Uncovering the ‘gold-bearing
rubble’: Ernst Bloch’s Literary
Criticism
Caroline Edwards

Ungleichzeitigkeit and global modernisms

Over the past 25 years, the modernist canon has been significantly
revised as theoretical and empirical interventions have emphasized its
transnational and globalized patterns of connection through a range of
disciplinary approaches. As scholarship has moved beyond Europe and
the United States, the complex nature of modernism’s socio-cultural
matrices has become prominent, and a re-evaluation of the private and
public spaces through which modernist works were disseminated – from
the publishing house to the continuation of private patronage – has
developed alongside a reconsideration of the way in which we theorize
such activities (Brooker et al., 2010, pp. 1–4). In particular, the Marxist
notion of ‘uneven development’ has resurfaced in recent years as a
model capable of conceptualizing the overlapping simultaneities in dif-
ferent parts of the world of aesthetic practices, transnational dialogues,
publication and dissemination of texts, institutional engagements, and
the oppositional, counter-public spheres where various modernisms
emerged and were contested.
Patrick Williams, for instance, argues in Nigel Rigby and Howard J. Booth’s
collection Modernism and Empire (2000) that we need (in Johan Fornäs’s
words) to ‘delinearise history’ and consider, instead, the overlapping ten-
dencies at work in any one period. This critique of progressivist accounts
of modernist historiography is levelled through combining the theoretical
projects of Raymond Williams (epochal analysis), Elleke Boehmer (global
transculturation), and Ernst Bloch (dialectical temporality):

In this perspective, the related but different temporalities and tra-

jectories of modernism and modernity (and imperialism) would be
182
 Caroline Edwards 183

‘combined and uneven’ within the same social formation, but there
would also be simultaneous uncontemporaneities, in that while at a
particular moment modernism might be fully developed in Europe,
it might not yet exist at all in Africa, for example. (Williams,
2000, p. 31)

Williams’s tripartite intervention into the theorization of ‘combined

and uneven’ currents within comparative modernisms offers a useful
example of the significance of Ernst Bloch’s thinking in contempo-
rary modernist studies. Published in Zürich in 1935, Bloch’s powerful
analysis of fascism Erbschaft dieser Zeit (translated into English in 1991
as Heritage of Our Times) introduced the concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit
(Williams translates this as ‘simultaneous uncontemporaneities’, but
other translations include ‘non-simultaneity’ or ‘non-contemporaneity’).
Combining a series of essays Bloch had written throughout the 1920s
and early 1930s, Heritage of Our Times examines the Weimar Republic’s
‘Golden Twenties’ and the emergence of fascism through a range of
analyses spanning poetry, art, film, architecture, music, popular cul-
ture, and philosophy. Bloch’s prescient analysis of fascism extends into
a sustained critique of ‘vulgar’ Marxism and the German Communist
Party (KPD). Fascism, he argued, understood the importance of ana-
chronistic and irrational myths in German popular culture, and the
left’s rejection of the radical potential of large sections of the peasantry
and petit bourgeoisie was extremely dangerous.
Central to Germany’s conservative revolution after the First World
War were the classes that formed the German Mittelstand – encompassing
the professional middle classes, civil servants, small- and medium-
scale farmers, and shopkeepers – whose opposition to the Weimar
Republic’s political liberalism and cosmopolitan culture was matched
by their fear of large capital and the organized industrial working
class (Herf, 1984, p. 22). This class thus epitomized Bloch’s concept
of Ungleichzeitigkeit, composed as it was of modern, capitalist, as well
as traditional, pre-capitalist elements. As Jeffrey Herf argues, Bloch’s
analysis of German middle-class consciousness allows us to perceive
the complex relationship between its selective embrace of modernity
and its desire for a technological redemption in line with traditional
German nationalism. The Mittelstand ‘lived in the cities and worked
in modern industry, but the memories of small-town life and less
rationalized forms of production were still vivid in the Germany of
the 1920s’ (p. 22). Bloch thus identified these social groups within the
Mittelstand as offering resistant spaces to capitalism, since their distinctly
184 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

pre-industrial cultural heritage was not contemporaneous with advanced

industrial capitalism and their aversion to the urban working class qua
agent of revolutionary change was strongly articulated (Bloch, 1935,
pp. 142–3).
Rather than the ‘contemporaneous’ contradictions at work within
monopoly capitalism that Marxism championed – such as the alienated
proletarian worker or the unstable fetish of the commodity – Bloch saw
these residual sedimentations of anti-capitalist impulses left over from
earlier (and weaker) periods of capitalism as offering vital heritages for
resisting capitalist exploitation. In his notion of a ‘multi-temporal’ dia-
lectic, Bloch argues that the Hegelian dialectic becomes capable of being
umfunktioniert (reformulated or refunctioned) into an understanding of
historical time that cannot be synthesized and which ‘gains additional
revolutionary force precisely from the incomplete wealth of the past, when
it is less than ever “resolved” at the final stage’ (pp. 115–16, italics
in original). Rather than nostalgically recalling utopian ‘gilded pasts’
whose lost perfection precludes political mobilization in the here-and-
now, Bloch argues for an understanding of a non-contemporaneous
present whose ‘lastingly subversive and utopian contents’ are contained
within a past that lives on within the present, which is ‘non-past’ because
its utopian ambitions remain unachieved; as well as a present that is
suffused with Vor-schein, or anticipatory illuminations of the better
future. This wealth of the ‘never wholly become’ (non-)past is what
Bloch means when he refers to the ‘gold-bearing rubble’ of the past
(p. 116): aggregated out of the abandoned detritus of historical aesthetic
and cultural forms whose surface contours reveal no obvious trace of
avant-garde experimentation.
In his 2004 study of Weimar modernism, David C. Durst explicitly
invokes Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit in his ‘Introduction’ (it is
also given a more thorough treatment in his first chapter), arguing that:

Bloch’s dialectic of nonsimultaneity implies that it is difficult to

speak of a single dominant cultural formation during the Weimar
period. Instead […] the specificity of ‘Weimar modernism’ lies in
the successive displacement of one dominant cultural formation by
another. (Durst, 2004, pp. xxvi–xxvii)

In employing the critical framework of Bloch’s theory of Ungleichzeitigkeit

in his study of Weimar modernism, Durst demonstrates the theoretical
solecism of apprehending the impact of capitalist modernization in
inter-war Germany within a singularized or flattened-out understanding
 Caroline Edwards 185

of historical time that fails to account for the period’s deep

non-synchronicities. This, after all, was the period during which
Berlin became the hub of European avant-garde culture, the ‘golden
ages’ of towering architectural ambition, explosive mass entertain-
ment consumed by an emerging salariat, and a heady mobilization of
capital. Yet it was also a time of entrenched inequality at the hands of
a feudal bureaucratic system, the wholesale commodification of life
under monopoly capitalism, and the consolidation of anti-Semitism
as fascism strengthened its grip on popular German consciousness.1
While energetic debates concerning the new nation-state’s uncertainty
between restoring Prussian monarchical authority or advancing liberal
democracy had been carried out across universities in the early years
of the Republic, the deep recession that followed the 1929 Wall Street
Crash, with its resultant mass unemployment, augured violent public
clashes and ushered in a crisis of legitimacy for the Republic’s fragile
political system. As Bloch succinctly notes in the 1962 postscript to
Heritage of Our Times: ‘“The Golden twenties”: the Nazi horror germi-
nated in them’ (Bloch, 1935, p. 8).
In addition to Durst’s study, other recent investigations of global mod-
ernisms after the so-called ‘transnational turn’ have drawn on Bloch’s
concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit in their theorization of the ‘combined
and uneven’ temporalities of modernity. Interrogating the theoretical
challenge of historicizing a specifically Irish modernism – with its met-
ropolitan European and American zones of modernization – Joe Cleary
refers to Bloch’s concept in order to acknowledge the socio-historical
particularities of Irish literary and cultural production (Cleary, 2006,
pp. 80–1 and 92). Similarly, observing the uneven experience of moder-
nity in the early twentieth century in semi-imperial China, colonized
India, and rapidly industrializing Brazil, Harry Harootunian references
Ungleichzeitigkeit in his investigation of Japan’s ‘co-eval modernity’
(Harootunian, 2000, pp. xvi–xvii). Meanwhile, Tace Hedrick draws on
Bloch’s concept in her theorization of ‘mestizo modernism’, expanding
the disciplinary boundaries of the new modernist studies by reading
such Latin American artists and poets as César Vallejo, Frida Kahlo, Diego
Rivera, and Gabriela Mistral as modernist writers (Hedrick, 2003, p. 25).
Despite the obvious impact and theoretical usefulness of Bloch’s con-
cept of non-contemporaneous temporal experience for a transnational
approach to comparative modernisms – or what has been called, as above,
‘the new modernist studies’2 – there has been little written about either
Bloch’s notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit or his wide-ranging writings on
modernism.3 As Tim Armstrong notes, ‘the dynamization of temporality
186 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

is one of the defining features of modernism’ (Armstrong, 2005, p. 9,

italics in original), and as an ever-evolving and highly unstable category,
modernism – with its uneven temporalities – would benefit greatly from
a sustained engagement with Bloch’s thought. Moreover, Bloch’s writ-
ings furnish us with some provocative responses to Matei Calinescu’s
call for a reformulation of the philosophical category of utopia in order
to consider the complex modalities of time that emerge within (and
against) modernity:

To account for modernity’s complex and dramatically contradictory

time consciousness, however, the concept of utopia has to be broad-
ened to comprise its own negation. Born as a criticism of both Christian
eternity and the present (insofar as the present is the product of the
past, which it attempts to prolong), the utopian drive involves modern
man in the adventure of the future. (Calinescu, 1987, p. 66)

My argument in this chapter comprises two interrelated claims: firstly,

that an attention to modernist aesthetic practices can help us under-
stand Bloch’s philosophy more fully, since his dynamic engagement with
modernist forms shapes a crucial trajectory in Bloch’s thinking that is
often overlooked in secondary scholarship; and, secondly, that a more
in-depth reading of Bloch’s concept of utopian temporality, as developed
in his analysis of fascism, needs to be central to any comparative and/or
post-colonial reading of (geo-)modernisms concerned with the uneven,
contradictory, and even reactionary formal and political articulations
that effloresced during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Utopia: something’s missing

Central to Bloch’s analysis of the rise of National Socialism in Heritage

of Our Times is the notion of a ‘multi-temporal and multi-spatial dialec-
tic’ (Bloch, 1935, p. 115), which builds on his critique of philosophical
fixity through theorizing a processual understanding of utopia. Bloch’s
immense recalibration of utopia throughout his long career was begun
in Geist der Utopie (Spirit of Utopia) in 1918, a text which, as Adorno
observed in a public discussion with Bloch in 1964, was ‘responsible for
restoring honor to the word “utopia”’ (Adorno quoted in Bloch, 1988,
p. 1). Tracing Bloch’s conceptualization of utopia across some 18 dense
philosophical works presents scholars with a daunting task. As David
Gross comments in a review of Bloch’s monumental three-volume uto-
pian project Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) – written in exile
 Caroline Edwards 187

during the 1930s, published in East Germany between 1954 and 1959,
and translated into English between 1986 and 1995 – much of Bloch’s
subject matter is ‘highly arcane’:

It is unthinkable that anyone could now sustain, for 1400 pages, a liter-
ary style combining the enthusiasms of Romantic and Expressionistic
prose, with the rigor of Classical philosophical argumentation, the
convolutions of dialectical thought, and the intensities of medieval
eschatology. (Gross, 1988, p. 189)

Chief among those ‘convolutions of dialectical thought’ are Bloch’s

scattered (non-)definitions of utopia and his use of the philosophical
coinage of the Noch Nicht (Not Yet). Fascinated by Jewish mysticism and
Kabbalah, Bloch ‘discovered’ the concept of the Noch Nicht in 1907 at
the age of 22. This discovery formed the foundations for the philosophy
of anticipatory consciousness that he was to develop over the rest of
his long career until his death in Tübingen in 1977 (Traub and Wieser,
1975, p. 300; Hudson, 1982, p. 6). The Principle of Hope offers the full-
est demonstration of the ‘Not Yet’, elaborating in astonishing detail an
open process of utopian anticipatory consciousness strictly opposed to
any closed, lumbering philosophy of class struggle as system. Blending
German Idealism, Romanticism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Bloch
develops the ‘warm stream’ of Marxism’s human face of emancipatory
desire as opposed to its ‘cold stream’ of dialectical-materialist histori-
cal analysis (Bloch, 1986, p. 209). For Bloch, a Marxist understanding
of the utopian aspects of lived time rescues the rational element of
utopia from those nostalgic dreams of plenty that Romanticism, for
instance, privileged in its preoccupation with antiquarian, Medieval,
and Classicist mythographies. Bloch is not uncritical in his treatment of
utopia, however, and the traces of utopian possibility that glint between
the habitualized patterns of everyday life or through the wishful dreams
expressed in art and literature remain anticipatory and diffuse without
political organization, and can just as easily dissipate as contribute
towards a progressive social movement.
Meanwhile, the ‘Novum’, as Bloch writes, is usually resisted by the
petit bourgeoisie on account of its unknown qualities: ‘the New is most
easily, even most heartily mocked. Its bringers disturb, because suppos-
edly man gets used to everything, even to what is bad’ (p. 432). Contra
Freud, Bloch argues that models of the unconscious are thus historically
limited in their exclusive class focus on the bourgeoisie as well as in their
regressive orientation towards the past. Turning Freud’s conception on
188 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

its head, Bloch posits the model of a ‘preconscious’ that expresses the
nascent, embryonic complex of desires oriented towards the future and
straining to grasp the ‘Novum’, rather than considering an unconscious
web of emotional-psychological needs predicated on repressed child-
hood trauma. This Noch-nicht-bewusst (‘Not Yet Conscious’) character
of the daydream is therefore the birthplace of new or progressive social
tendencies, revealing a consciousness ‘which has not yet become wholly
manifest, and is still dawning from the future’ (p. 116). The ‘forward
dawning’ (p. 137) of the Noch-nicht-geworden (‘Not Yet Become’) thus
invokes a shift in temporal perspective. Rather than merely disclosing
itself as a residual manifestation of the still active, latent, or oppositional
reverberations from the past that can be conjured into fruition through
dedicated remembrance, Bloch insists that the ‘Not Yet’ reveals how
emancipatory futural possibilities are germinative within the present
through a utopian hermeneutics of longing, expectation, and hope. As
Bloch quotes his friend Bertolt Brecht, ‘something’s missing’:

This sentence, which is in Mahagonny, is one of the most profound

sentences that Brecht ever wrote, and it is in two words. What is this
‘something’? If it is not allowed to be cast in a picture, then I shall
portray it as in the process of being (seined). But one should not be
allowed to eliminate it as if it really did not exist. (Bloch, 1988, p. 15)

Bloch’s Auszugsgestalt (processual figure) of the ‘Not Yet’ is therefore

materially rooted in the present moment as a concrete wish or longing
‘that does not involve any transcendence’ but, rather, offers up a ‘spec-
tral givenness’ (Bloch, 1995b, pp. 1372–3). ‘The only interesting part of
ontology’, Bloch insists, is therefore ‘the ontology of the “not yet”’ (Bloch
quoted in Landmann, 1975, p. 175). As Wayne Hudson has shown, the
‘Not Yet’ conflates various temporalities (Noch Nicht translates both as
‘not yet’ and ‘still not’), and as a result of this slippage we are faced
with a plastic, processual model of time that elides any easy distinctions
between past, present, and future. The concept at once lays emphasis on
the present (‘not actual now’ or ‘present now in a problematic manner,
but still to come in its actual realization’); highlights past non-occurrence
(‘still not’); stresses the role of the future (‘not yet, but expected in the
future’); and focuses on the objective conditions which prevent the reali-
zation of the ‘Not Yet’ (‘conceivable now, but not yet possible’) (Hudson,
1982, pp. 19–20). Bloch’s ‘Not Yet’ is thus crucially grounded in a philo-
sophical notion of flexible, simultaneous utopian temporalities; at once
revealing latent, residual, and emergent potentialities that act within the
 Caroline Edwards 189

present. Expressed through individual daydreams and utopian ‘expectant’

emotions, this model of simultaneity thus offers a conceptual figure in
which both the past and the future become articulated in the present,
collapsing linear notions of chronology through an understanding of
time as subjective and suffused with hope.

Expressionismusdebatte

Between 1910 and 1918, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács developed a
close intellectual and personal friendship that would later define their
respective positions concerning modernist experimentation. The two
men were part of the Max Weber Circle, which centred on a Schiur
(private seminar) held every Sunday afternoon at Weber’s house in
Heidelberg. Bloch and Lukács shared a strong interest in Jewish mes-
sianism, with its gnostic utopian and apocalyptic dimensions, and their
radical Zivilisationskritik expressed a romantic anti-capitalism explicitly
directed against decadent, bourgeois Western civilization. Against the
Phantasiemord, or murder of the imagination by technological ‘coldness’
that Bloch and Lukács perceived as pervading modern human relations
(Löwy, 1997, p. 290), the ‘unlost heritage’ of utopia’s ‘cosmic function’
offered a secularized messianic phenomenology of everyday experience
capable of reversing the psychic damage wrought by advanced capitalist
industrialization (Bloch, 1923, pp. 2–3).
Their ‘mutual apprenticeship’ saw Lukács introducing Bloch to
Kierkegaard and German mysticism, while Bloch revealed the complexi-
ties of Hegel to Lukács. As Bloch recalled in 1974:

We quickly discovered that we had the same opinion on everything,

an identity of viewpoints so complete that we founded a ‘wildlife
preserve’ (Naturschutzpark) for our differences of opinion, so that we
wouldn’t always say the same things. (Bloch quoted in Löwy, 1987,
p. 36, italics in original)

It is extraordinary to recall the erstwhile closeness of these two

‘symphilosophers’ (Löwy, 1997, p. 288) in the context of their dis-
agreement concerning Expressionism; what has become known as the
Expressionismusdebatte. The first Expressionism debate took place in the
pages of Bloch’s Geist der Utopie (the 1918 version; the text was revised in
1923), and was continued with the second debate in 1938. Responding
to Lukács’s denunciation of Expressionism in an essay published in
International Literature, ‘Größe und Verfall des Expressionismus’ (1934)
190 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

(‘Greatness and Decline of Expressionism’) – as well as to Lukács’s

Stalinist colleague Alfred Kurella’s polemic against the Expressionist
poet and essayist Gottfried Benn in 1937 – Bloch criticized his former
friend’s insistence that the subjectivist techniques of Expressionist
writers revealed their bourgeois solipsism and inability to confront capi-
talism as a unified whole.4 For Bloch, reality could only be apprehended
through its protean discontinuity, and the so-called ‘fascist’ tendencies
of Expressionist writers and painters revealed their understanding of
the popularity of non-contemporaneous, archaic images for ordinary
people. ‘What’, he asks, ‘if authentic reality is also a discontinuity?’
(Bloch, 1938, p. 22).5
In ‘Discussions of Expressionism’ (1938), which was published in
Moscow in the German expatriate journal Das Wort (The Word) and
later revised for inclusion in Heritage of Our Times, Bloch argues that
Lukács’s position is derived from secondary material on Expressionism
and considers only a small selection of Expressionist novelists, poets,
and dramatists. Of those who are mentioned by Lukács – including
Franz Werfel, Albert Eisenstein, Walter Hasenclaver, and Ludwig
Rubiner – only their pacifism during the First World War is commented
on (Bloch, 1935, p. 243).6 Bloch also rejects Lukács’s criticism that
Expressionist writers were bourgeois bohemians, practising an escap-
ist ideology with what Lukács had called ‘fanfare-like arrogance’ and
‘tinny monomentality’ in the ‘impotent rebellion of the petit bourgeois’
against capitalism (Lukács quoted in Bloch, 1935, p. 244). While the
pacifism of the Expressionists rendered them obsolete after the First
World War had ended, during the War, Bloch argued, these writers were
‘thoroughly revolutionary’: their shared project was ‘partly composed of
archaic images, but partly also composed of revolutionary imagination,
of a critical and frequently concrete kind’ (Bloch, 1935, p. 245). Bloch
sees this revolutionary attitude as crucially oriented towards the Not
Yet of futurity, recasting reality as processual and incomplete, so that it
becomes shot through with anticipatory glimpses or ‘secret teleotrop-
isms’ (Bloch, 1923, p. 32), straining towards their final meaning. Thus,
as he writes, ‘[t]here is no realism worthy of the name if it abstracts from
this strongest element in reality, as an unfinished reality’ (Bloch, 1995a,
p. 624, italics in original).
Bloch’s ontology of the Not Yet thus leads him to view the confu-
sion and incomprehensibility of the Expressionists in a fundamentally
different light from Lukács’s denunciation of bourgeois decadence.
Rather than being symptomatic of a dying era of solipsistic bourgeois
privilege, Bloch considers the Expressionists to be gesturing towards
 Caroline Edwards 191

a new world of distorted aesthetic forms: simultaneously breaking

away from conservative neo-classicism whilst also retaining its magpie
inheritance of the visionary innovations of primitive art, the Baroque
and Goethe:

[Expressionism] definitely contained anti-capitalism, subjectively

unequivocal, objectively still unclear. It contained objectively archaic
shadows, revolutionary lights all mixed up, dark sides from a sub-
jectivistically unmastered underworld, light sides from the future,
wealth and undistractedness of human expression. […] The pictures
themselves were in fact fetched, hauled up with a mixture which
is only possible in Germany […] from archaic and utopian material
simultaneously, without one being able to say precisely where the primeval
dream stopped, the light of the future began. (Bloch, 1935, p. 236,
emphasis added)

Bloch’s defence of Expressionism thus sought to argue that the

distinctive, fragmentary experimentations with form characteristic of
Expressionist painters and writers succinctly articulated an epoch of
crisis and ruptural, social, political, and economic discontinuity – ‘archaic
shadows, [and] revolutionary lights all mixed up’. Lukács responded
that this identification of the Expressionist ‘state of mind directly and
unreservedly with reality itself’ failed to account, in its focus on the
subjective surface of social relationships, for ‘the deeper, hidden,
mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships’ that
construct what he considered to be an essentially coherent capitalist social
reality (Lukács, 1937, pp. 34 and 38). Bloch’s analysis, however, offers us
a clear example of the way in which we might identify ‘combined and
uneven’ impulses within modernist practices: noncontemporaneous not
only at the level of the uneven times of divergent socio-economic and
cultural particularities which were shaping different engagements with
modernism within different regions, nations, and continents, but also at
the level of form itself. Within Expressionism, then, Bloch instructs us
to read deeper non-synchronicities of aesthetic style, political will, and
historical influence, enacting in his literary criticism the ‘dynamization
of temporality’ that Tim Armstrong identifies as cardinal to modern-
ism. In this respect, Lukács’s analysis of Expressionism has not fared
so well in recent years and has been criticized for rejecting ‘the sort of
modernistic, avant-garde literature that allows the ruptures and gaps of
reality to show through in the fragmentary nature of the work itself’
( Jochen Schulte-Sasse quoted in Bürger, 1974, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv).
192 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

The literature of the disinherited

Bloch’s critique of Lukácsian realism serves as an early articulation

of his processual understanding of utopia. The utopian potential of
Expressionist avant-garde literature and painting was clear for Bloch:
with its trenchant critique of the bourgeois ideology of Wilhelmine
society, aesthetic rebellion, desire for spiritual renewal, ecstatic emo-
tional outpourings (or Ekstase), and impulse towards the stimulating
Lebenssteigerung (rush) of dangerous or destructive experience (Murphy,
1999, pp. 49–50). However, as R. S. Furness reminds us, Expressionism
(whether understood as an independent movement or merely as
modernism as it developed in Germany) was not quite so radically
new as it purported. Rather, it exhibited certain continuities with the
late eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang movement, the Baroque,
the Gothic, and Weimar classicism (Furness, 1973, p. 76). Similarly,
although his philosophy can accurately be described in its structure,
subject matter, and form as ‘the philosophy of Expressionism’ (Adorno,
1980, p. 58), Bloch also retained – as Jürgen Habermas complained – an
‘undoubted fondness for German idealist aesthetics’ (Geoghegan, 1996,
p. 62; Habermas, 1988, p. 241). Like many intellectuals of his generation,
Bloch was the embodiment of the Bildungsbürgertum: ‘the incarnation of
all the bourgeois liberal ideals of the nineteenth century, [in which] he
placed great stock’ (Zipes, 1988, p. xi).
In keeping with the vociferousness with which he defended his
connections with the proletariat (unlike Lukács who, as he sardonically
pointed out, ‘was born in a villa in the elegant upper middle class
district of Budapest’; Bloch quoted in Löwy, 1987, p. 40), Bloch
thus straddled the uneasy demarcation between communist politics,
lowbrow pulp fictions, Hegelian philosophy, medieval chiliastic lit-
eratures, and a passion for such canonical literary giants as Goethe
and Shakespeare. Bloch’s diverse literary tastes and analyses present us
with an arguably residual affinity for several texts that belong to the
stultifying bourgeois tradition that he so stringently denounced. For
instance, despite referring to them as ‘the bourgeois writers of decline’,
such novelists as Graham Greene, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce offer
Bloch representations of the ‘mixed darkness and bleakness’ of the age,
which the fastidious Marxist literary critic is able to refunction
(umfunktioniert) into a ‘crypto-dialectics’ capable of signalling the
germs of a revolutionary cultural politics (Bloch, 1988, pp. 157–8). As
Oskar Negt writes, Bloch challenges those socialist cultural critics who
cherish periods of revolutionary ascent as the only moments in which
 Caroline Edwards 193

an oppositional cultural surplus can usefully be extracted. Instead,

he defiantly asserts that utopian ciphers can be distinguished in the
unlikely periods of bourgeois decadence ( Joyce, Kafka, Proust), or even
in the calm and order of the Gothic ‘static great age of cathedrals’ (Negt,
1976, p. 60).
An understanding of his analysis of the processes of Ungleichzeitigkeit
at work within Weimar literary and cultural forms is therefore crucial
to understanding Bloch’s utopian literary criticism more generally.
Constructing a synopsis of his literary criticism is a formidable task,
however, since Bloch’s literary analyses stretch across the vast ambit
of the Western tradition (his primary, but by no means exclusive, field
of cultural material). In The Principle of Hope alone he offers frequently
nuanced interrogations of Edgar Allan Poe, Hans Christian Andersen,
the Arabian Nights, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Balzac, Edward Bellamy,
Brecht, Campanella, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, G. K. Chesterton, Cicero,
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Euripides, Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, Hebel,
E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Homer, Ibsen, Gottfried Keller, Lessing,
Christopher Marlowe, Molière, Thomas More, William Morris, Novalis,
Offenbach, Ovid, Alexander Pope, Rilke, Sartre, Shakespeare, George
Bernard Shaw, Shelley, Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Virgil, Horace Walpole, H.
G. Wells, and Walt Whitman.7
As the ‘philosopher of the utopian function of literature’ (Zipes, 1988,
p. xxxviii), Bloch investigated those genres and literary forms which
expressed for him the desire for a better mode of life and posed provoca-
tive questions concerning class and political action. ‘Stage and story’, he
once said in an interview, ‘can be either a protective park or a laboratory;
sometimes they console or appease, sometimes they incite; they can be
flight from or a prefiguring of the future’ (Bloch quoted in Landmann,
1975, pp. 184–5). Chief among those literary genres that both ‘con-
sole’ and ‘appease’, as well as ‘incite’, a qualitatively different future in
which exploitative class relations would be abolished, is ‘colportage’.
Etymologically combining the French verb comporter (‘to peddle’) with
a pun on the word col, derived from the Latin noun collum (‘neck’), col-
portage refers to the portmanteau that a travelling salesman of serialized
pulp stories, devotional literature, and religious tracts would carry, held
in place by a strap around his neck.8 Writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung
in March 1929 (reproduced in the chapter ‘On Fairytale, Colportage and
Legend’ in Heritage of Our Times), Bloch discusses the genre of colportage
in the work of the popular German writer Karl May, whose ‘Red Indian’
adventure novels, featuring the protagonists Winnetou, an Apache, and
his companion Old Shatterhand, initiated a German fascination with
194 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

native Americans and were produced in 11 successful films (Fixico,

2006, p. 220).9 Bloch reflects upon May’s lack of direct experience of
the American topography he only eventually visited after many of his
stories had already been published, writing that:

Although Karl May never did what he relates of himself, was never
at the place where he professes to know every bush, every boy still
finds him correct. So there must be something in the lie, namely the
genuine wish for distant lands which it fulfils. (Bloch, 1935, p. 154)

May’s ‘wish for distant lands’ thus speaks to the basic human
desire (‘preconscious’) for utopian fulfilment, while simultaneously
de-reifying bourgeois ideals of ‘good’ literature. May, Bloch writes, ‘is
one of the best German story-tellers’, and would perhaps be acknowl-
edged with a place in the German literary canon ‘if he had not been
a poor, confused proletarian’ (p. 155).10 Bloch’s investigation of the
impact of class relations on literary canonization contributes to
his analysis of fascism and his trenchant critique of those political
classes who contributed to its rise: from the conservative, nationalist
Mittelstand, to the KPD and Marxist orthodoxy. Thus, the ‘wild and
confused Irratio of freedom’ expressed in colportage could not have
been more favourable to National Socialism: ‘[t]he grim fantasy of
the Nazis has only become possible […] because the lastingly revo-
lutionary tensions and contents’ of proletarian struggle were denied
within bourgeois culture, which attempted to appropriate colportage
for its own sanitized ends (p. 163). Identified as dangerous trash – it
demanded, after all, the ‘justice of the lowly who were granted their
avenger and happiness’ (p. 162) – colportage became fashioned in the
late nineteenth century into the adventure of individualistic youth
in the world, and its communitarian and class aspects were elided.
In contradistinction to such conservative appropriations of the revo-
lutionary class allegories of colportage, Bloch’s analysis attempts to
reclaim the genre by asserting its place within a tradition that stretches
back to Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Sealsfield, Joseph Conrad, and
Robert Louis Stevenson:

the region in which colportage has its truly literary enclaves is not the
petit-bourgeois guardian literature in which it becomes trash […] if
colportage always dreams, it nevertheless ultimately dreams revolu-
tion and lustre behind it; and this is, if not actual reality, then the most
real thing in the world. (p. 164, emphases added)
 Caroline Edwards 195

This ‘literature of the disinherited’ (p. 164) thus proclaims, for Bloch,
the powers of the imagination in its call-to-justice for the ‘little man’.
Bloch’s championing of colportage reveals his project of rescuing
utopian surplus through the process of refunctioning (umfunktioniert)
cultural activities as well as philosophical traditions. As Jack Zipes notes,
many colportage works were of ‘dubious ideological character – often
sexist, militaristic, and sadistic’, but Bloch refused to ‘dismiss them as
reactionary because they addressed the hunger of the imagination of
people whose wants he felt must be respected’ (Zipes, 1988, p. xxxvii).
Rather, these popular texts offered Bloch ‘a serviceable refuge’ in which –
despite the hostility of Marxist theory at the time to genre literatures
whose populist adventure narratives were a far cry from revolutionary
avant-garde experimentation – their colourfulness and social tensions
‘can become troops’ (Bloch, 1935, p. 168). Bloch contradicted conven-
tional Marxist literary analysis, blithely ignoring the chasm in German
cultural production between E-Kunst (Ernst or serious, elite art) and
U-Kunst (Unterhaltung, or entertainment) (Ross, 2008, p. 100), extending
his critique of conventional canonical literary elegance in an essay
titled ‘Songs of Remoteness’. ‘[O]nly lyric poetry, epic poetry, and drama
are supposed to be literature,’ he complained:

not so the novel of ‘writers’; for only the gardens and forests of
lyric poetry hold ancient water, only epic rocks, dramatic flashes of
lightning from days of old are supposed to be above it. […] Is it for
this that language almost speaks like utopia – and is nevertheless
only one of escape, of self-enjoyed frenzy, of polemically ruffled,
of purely antithetical, and hence insubstantial demonism? (Bloch,
1935, pp. 181–2)

Bloch’s criticism here of epic ‘songs of remoteness’ (p. 181) draws our
attention to a central struggle over the meaning of utopia; abstract
utopian escapism, in this formulation, offers merely nostalgic dream-
ing for a prelapsarian past of plenty or empyrean ‘other world’ whose
hypostatized contours are definitively mapped according to the individ-
ual desires of the utopian writer. Such escapist utopias of ‘self-enjoyed
frenzy’ are completely divorced from concrete historical content in
the form of a collective utopian mobilization towards transformative
social change. These ‘South Sea quotations without a South Sea world’
(p. 182) thus exhibit the powerlessness of the utopian imagination
if it is not rooted within political struggle. However, Bloch’s insist-
ence that the human endeavour to achieve what he referred to as der
196 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

aufrechte Gang (the upright gait or upright carriage, which signifies the
subject’s goal of unshackling itself from exploitation) therefore returns
us to the centrality of literature within a concrete cultural politics in
which the innate utopian desire for change permeates every level of
human activity.

Venturers beyond the limits

Bloch’s endeavour to locate the ‘gold-bearing rubble’ contained within

the Hohlraum (hollow spaces) of bourgeois decadence therefore signals an
unorthodox commitment to unearthing utopian traces within each liter-
ary period and form, no matter how seemingly retrogressive. This makes
Bloch a distinct forerunner of cultural studies as well as a fascinating
figure in terms of genre criticism, who trained his penetrating philosophi-
cal gaze on some unlikely literary sources. As Jack Zipes writes, Bloch in
many ways prefigured Jacques Derrida in ignoring distinctions between
literature and philosophy: ‘He did not try to treat literature and art as
philosophy, but rather treated philosophy as a kind of “work” motivated
by the same principle as artistic creation’ (Zipes, 1988, p. xl).
In accordance with his lifelong passion for music, one literary
genre in particular that arouses Bloch’s interest is the subgenre of the
Bildungsroman known as the Künstlerroman (‘novel of the artist’ or
‘artist-novel’). In his 1965 essay ‘A Philosophical View of the Novel
of the Artist’ Bloch argues that readers’ sympathies for a protagonist
not only offer a vicarious substitute for their real lives, but ‘can also
jar [them] and prepare them for something’ through the use of certain
‘catalytic factors’ (Bloch, 1988, pp. 265 and 270). Bloch’s primary analy-
sis discusses those novels which feature fictional prodigies, including
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Johannes Kreisler novels (1815–22), Jakob Wassermann’s
Gänsemännchen [The Goose Man] (1915), as well as Henrik Ibsen’s plays
Rosmersholm (1886) and Hedda Gabler (1890) and Shelley’s lyrical drama
Prometheus Unbound (1820).11 Bloch’s discussion also considers novels
concerned with historical composers: Friedrich Huch’s Enzio (1911)
(a novel about Wagner), Franz Werfel’s Verdi, A Novel of the Opera (1924),
and Romain Rolland’s mammoth ten-volume Jean-Christophe (1903–12)
(featuring Beethoven). With characteristic humour, Bloch introduces
his argument in this essay with a rather generalizing piece of social com-
mentary: ‘In former times the wives of self-important industrialists liked
to read such books at holiday resorts, and they could read about tenors
who were like Apollonian gods’ (Bloch, 1988, p. 265). His astuteness,
 Caroline Edwards 197

however, lies in his delineation of the genre’s evolution. He asserts that

the figure of the artist has been neglected in numerous literary forms
prior to the early period of capitalism: from the Greek disdain for paint-
ers and sculptors to the Nibelungenlied’s unnamed poet-narrator, for
whom not even an invented name was deemed necessary. This omis-
sion, for Bloch, is addressed most fully with the emergence of the cult
of genius that crystallized in Romantic poetry and the Sturm und Drang
movement (in particular, the writings of Goethe). Writers like Shelley
signal a cultural shift, in which the ‘demonic aspect’ of such previously
absurd figures of fantasy as goblins, literary eccentrics, and ‘spooky
places’ becomes reformulated into an artistic Wunschgrauen (‘romantic
wish-terror’, a typically Blochian compound). With the advent of the
celebrity figure of the artist we find a legitimation of previously derided
modes of popular imagination into what Bloch gnomically refers to as
‘something volcanic deep underneath and into a light on top of the
mountain that could not be missed’ (pp. 267–8 and 269). For Bloch, the
artist-protagonists of the Künstlerroman are exemplary figures of an erotic
and poetic expression oriented towards the Not Yet of utopian futurity
in their ceaseless desire for creative expression. This is particularly true
of those Künstlerroman concerned with composers, since music, Bloch
argues, is the most utopian of all art forms, with its ‘deep historical
nonsynchronisms’ ringing like the language of ‘a vanished age’ (Bloch,
1923, p. 40). Unlike the structure of the detective novel (another of
Bloch’s favoured genres), which gathers evidence to illuminate crimes
that occurred in the past, the novel of the artist ‘brings out something
new’ in its straining towards the future (Bloch, 1988, p. 267).
The exemplary figure here is Thomas Mann, whose 1947 novel
Doktor Faustus transcribes the powerfully utopian desire to articulate
‘that which has never before been heard’. Mann’s relentlessly ambitious
composer Adrian Leverkühn thus exhibits the Vor-schein of the artist’s
imagination, whose totalizing will-to-form projects his ‘next existence
before [him]’ (Bloch, 1988, p. 275). As with earlier texts in the Faust
tradition – from the Faustbuchs of the 1580s and 1590s to Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus and, the ultimate Faustian text, Goethe’s two-part tragic
play Faust (1808)12 – Mann’s novel of the artist articulates the origi-
nary human desire ‘to break new ground, with knights, death, and the
devil, [and] to head for the envisioned utopian castle’ (p. 277). The
Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank identified this ceaseless impulse to
artistic creativity as expressing the ‘urge to eternalization’ (Rank quoted
in Beebe, 1964, p. 12). Similarly, Maurice Beebe outlines one of the
198 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

defining characteristics of the Künstlerroman as the defiant refusal of its

protagonists to be trapped within chronological (‘clock-’)time:

To escape death and become immortal, the artist-self would somehow

remove himself from the bonds of chronological time which drives
him relentlessly from cradle to grave. […] What the artist tries to do
is to capture lost time and imprison it in the form of his art-work.
The man must die, but the artist in him can achieve immortality in
his works. (Beebe, 1964, p. 11)

This subjective protest undertaken by the artist-protagonist against

linear temporality – or, to adapt Johan Fornäs’s formulation, this delin-
earization of time via creative subjectivity – finds its ultimate expression
for Bloch in what he refers to as ‘Venturers Beyond the Limits’. Goethe’s
Faust is one of two key examples here, in company with Cervantes’s
deluded knight, Don Quixote.
In The Principle of Hope, Vol. 3, Bloch devotes a lengthy discus-
sion to the question of utopian ‘venturing beyond’, identifying these
two literary archetypes as examples of the residual cultural surplus
of fictional-historical images that express the utopian ‘Novum’. The
unconditional dreams of literary characters like Don Quixote thus offer
their readers the ‘conviction that the given cannot be the illuminat-
ingly true’ (Bloch, 1995b, p. 1044), transcending the social protocols
of their time and defying, even, their own mortality. The simultaneous
utopian rejection of the given world and invocation of the ‘pre-world’
that these ‘Venturers Beyond the Limits’ archetypally express reveals an
attempt to think the temporal conjunction of the ‘this-world’ (p. 1044)
with its ‘other world of the wish’ (p. 1033). Despite his folly and his
comedic idealism, the utopian adventurer par excellence, Don Quixote, is
therefore ‘clearly the patron saint of honest-abstract social idealists’ such
as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen (pp. 1043–4, italics in original).
This ‘archaic-utopian’ element of Don Quixote’s utopian dream thus
articulates for Bloch ‘the anachronism of a future world’ in a double
sense: firstly, in the sense that Don Quixote’s archaic dream expresses
the Ungleichzeitigkeit of a ‘more noble and more colourful’ mode of
pre-capitalist chivalry; and secondly, in the sense that this dream also
strains towards a more egalitarian, better world of post-capitalist produc-
tion whose shimmering, spectral topography is anachronistic with the
disgraced present (p. 1038).
Intriguingly, Bloch’s analyses of those texts which have become
canonized as utopian literature reveal his critical attitude towards
 Caroline Edwards 199

utopian representations he considers to be abstract or false, without

connection to any genuine movements of revolutionary struggle
(specifically, for him, socialist or communist struggle). He argued that
William Morris’s ‘neo-Gothic Arcadia’ in News from Nowhere (1890),
for instance, constructs a ‘backward-looking’ utopia. He was scath-
ing, too, about the liberalism of H. G. Wells’s visions of the future,
denouncing Men Like Gods (1923) as ‘a frolicking life like that of naked
piano-teachers in Arcadia’ and asserting that ‘it would be totally
inconceivable to want to improve the economy in such a particu-
larly silly way’, through piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary
overhaul (Bloch, 1995a, p. 617).13 He was similarly disenchanted with
the ‘reactionary’ ending of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932),
in which Huxley’s ‘idiotic wishful image’ reveals the writer’s own
non-progressive class position and articulates the way in which ‘the
liberal bourgeoisie has become incapable of utopian humour’ (Bloch,
1986, p. 440).

Conclusion: Bloch’s narrative philosophy

Bloch’s harsh critique of those ‘utopian novels set in the future’ by

William Morris, H. G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley (Bloch is more charita-
ble in his reading of Bellamy) might seem surprising given his claim that
‘even the most rotten optimism can still be the stupefaction from which
there is an awakening’ (p. 446). What we witness in Bloch’s mordant
critique of utopian novelists contains, it seems to me, the strength and
the limitations of Bloch’s literary criticism. His commitment to exca-
vating the utopian surplus of previous historical periods, whose slowly
decaying half-lives dimly emit forgotten political alternatives through
their discrete literary and artistic forms, leads Bloch to denounce explic-
itly utopian literature as exemplifying the abstract escapism typical
of bourgeois liberals. Meanwhile, his championing of the processual,
active utopianism of the ‘bourgeois writers of decadence’, such as Joyce,
Proust, and Kafka, reveals ‘gold-bearing rubble’ in some improbable
places. In contradistinction to the ‘horror and stupidity’ he finds in
Huxley, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) offers Bloch ‘something clearly viewed’
amid the stream-of-consciousness ‘monkey chatter’:

The cellar of the unconscious discharges itself in Joyce into a transi-

tory Now, provides a mixture of prehistoric stammering, smut and
church music […]. Primeval caves, with babbling and speaking in
tongues inside them, are thus conjured up in day-fantasies and these
200 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

are then lowered down again; a continual merging of grotesque

night-faces and outlines develops. (Bloch, 1986, pp. 101–2)

In a manner comparable to the ‘time of collapse’ represented in

Surrealism and Expressionism, Ulysses offers its readers, argues Bloch,
an ‘overlap of the black and the blue hours’, or a concatenation of
the utopian desires secreted within night-dreams (unconscious) and
day-dreams (preconscious). Joyce’s seminal text stands firmly within
a utopian tradition of what we might call ‘fictions of the Not Yet’:
those literary works which offer up a spectral ontology of the ‘miss-
ing something’ that pulsates through human experience, and which
reveal to us the possibility of redeeming our past miscalculations in a
temporal ambit that is already alive with utopian futural alternatives.
Such ‘fictions of the not yet’ are, for Bloch, far more utopian than
self-proclaimed utopian narratives of future projection. Poetically, he
describes the manifestations of this ‘not yet’ ontology as shrouded – like
Ulysses’s whispers of the ‘blue hours’ – within the ‘colour of distance’,
designating in ‘a graphically symbolic way the future-laden aspect, the
Not-Yet-Become in reality’ (p. 127).
Perhaps Bloch’s tastes concerning those texts which he considers to
articulate the utopian desire for that which is missing within everyday
experience tells us something about his own practice of narrative phi-
losophy. Texts like Spuren (1930) (Traces) reveal Bloch’s sustained interest
in expressing philosophical ideas in narrative form and demonstrate his
indebtedness, in particular, to the Jewish Chassidic tradition of story-
telling. As Liliane Weissberg has observed, Bloch’s philosophical style
is heavily influenced by Johan Peter Hebel’s use of countryside dialect
in the Schatzkästlein, which related tales of Alltäglichkeit (everyday life)
within the German literary tradition of Erbauungsliteratur (devotional
literature) (Weissberg, 1992, pp. 37–8). More recently, Johan Siebers has
argued that this narrative style of philosophy is inherently utopian, and
Bloch’s indebtedness to Hebel’s model of the ‘calendar story’ expresses
a distinctly messianic time, or ‘double temporality of chronology and
redemption’ (Siebers, 2011, p. 63).14 This utopian mode of narrative
philosophy, however, leaves Bloch’s thinking vulnerable in the face of
criticism since, as Adorno notes, in Bloch’s writing ‘[s]pecific analyses
are few and far between’ (Adorno, 1980, p. 51). While Expressionism
left an indelible mark on Bloch’s writing style in terms of formal inno-
vation, aphoristic fragmentation, and the refusal to ignore those latent
mysteries that underpin our experience of reality-as-process, there is
also in Bloch, as Adorno suggests, a celebration of all that is subcultural
 Caroline Edwards 201

and ‘openly trashy’ (p. 51).15 Bloch’s protest against the reification
of artistic expression and social life under capitalism thus shapes his
understanding of utopia:

Because he does not conceive of utopia as a metaphysical absolute,

but in terms of that theological manoeuvre in which the hungry con-
sciousness of the living feels itself tricked by the consolidation of an
idea, he is forced to think of it as something which manifests itself. It
is neither true, nor is it non-existent. (Adorno, 1980, p. 56)

Like the Expressionists, Bloch could be read as privileging style over

content, since the indiscriminate search for utopian traces in all spheres
of human existence arguably empties out the distinctive content of the
utopian Not Yet. Imaginary forms in the realm of presubjectivity can be
neither proved nor disproved, and their process of becoming demands
a particular kind of philosophical faith.
Despite these criticisms, Bloch remains one of the first thinkers, in
Sándor Radnóti’s words, ‘to give a philosophical basis to avantgardism’
(Radnóti quoted in Geoghegan, 1996, p. 62). Moreover, Bloch’s own style
of writing – particularly in his 1918/23 text The Spirit of Utopia, which
is fragmentary, dialectical, and poetic, at times Gnostic and at others
resoundingly materialist – is a striking study in Expressionist thinking,
which remains an overlooked and under-historicized area of modernist
studies. While this continuity between the experimental forms central
to modernism’s literary avant-gardes and the genres of bourgeois literary
decadence or colportage might seem perhaps surprising, Bloch’s literary
analyses present us with different moments of a tantalizingly sketched,
but resolutely unsystematic and processual literary methodology. Read
alongside his theory of Ungleichzeitigkeit, Bloch’s literary criticism asserts
the importance of what Matei Calinescu refers to as ‘the struggle for
futurity’ (Calinescu, 1987, p. 95) that came to prominence in modernist
representations of the subjective encounter with a violently ruptured
and increasingly disjointed temporal world of globalized moderniza-
tion. Bloch’s lasting achievement, as his essays on literary form reveal,
was to rescue the centrality of utopia within literary and cultural life as
a crucial catalyst for political agency. Read in this way, literary texts can
be identified as shaping powerfully utopian interventions into a social
reality which Bloch insisted is fundamentally unfinished and therefore
capable of being recalibrated in a more egalitarian fashion. To find the
rational hope (Docta spes), as Bloch insisted, is our greatest undertaking;
the hope that is ‘surrounded by dangers’ (Bloch, 1988, p. 17).
202 Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism

Notes
1. Bloch considered Berlin ‘extraordinarily “contemporaneous”’: ‘a constantly
new city, built hollow, on which not even the lime becomes or is really set’
(Bloch, 1935, p. 195).
2. For discussions of the increasingly global nature of comparative modern-
ism and definitions of ‘the new modernist studies’, see Mao and Walkowitz
(2008); Huyssen (2005); Ross (2009); Tyler (2008); and James (2011).
3. Arno Münster observes this surprising lack of scholarship on Bloch’s writ-
ings about Expressionism, as well as his own Expressionist style of philo-
sophical writing: ‘Paradoxically […] Ernst Bloch’s name appears rarely, if
at all, in a variety of secondary literature on Expressionism and it is only
recent research – such as, for example, that of H. H. Holz and J. M. Palmer –
that has an apparent emphasis on the obvious affinity with the content
and style of Bloch’s early writings as directed towards the expressive con-
tent of the Expressionist movement’ [my translation] (Münster, 1982,
pp. 181–2).
4. For accounts of the Expressionismusdebatte, see Donahue (1980; 2005),
Schmitt (1973), Bronner and Kellner (1983), Anz and Stark (1982), and Sokel
(1959).
5. The translation by Neville and Stephen Plaice in Heritage of Our Times reads:
‘perhaps genuine reality is also – interruption’ (Bloch, 1935, p. 246).
6. This brief discussion of pacifism signified a particularly personal aspect to
the Bloch–Lukács Expressionismusdebatte. During the First World War Bloch
was a pacifist and fled to Switzerland to escape conscription, while Lukács
volunteered for military service in Budapest (see Löwy, 1987, p. 37).
7. Despite this, very little has been written on Bloch’s literary criticism, either
in German or in English. Exceptions include Wiegmann (1976), Dayton
(1997), Siebers (2011), Weissberg (1992), Zipes (1988, pp. xi–xliii), and
Geoghegan (1996, pp. 46–78).
8. In Germany, colportage distribution flourished after a series of reforms in the
1860s liberalized publishing (Ross, 2008, p. 12).
9. Indeed, Bloch borrows the title for his philosophical text Durch die Wüste
(1923) from Karl May’s 1892 travel story.
10. However, we should note that although he uncovers glimpses of proletar-
ian struggle within even decadent bourgeois periods of literary production,
Bloch has been accused of neglecting specifically proletarian literature in his
analysis (Hudson, 1982, p. 182).
11. Kreisleriana (1813), Johannes Kreisler, des Kapellmeisters Musikalische Leiden
[The Musical Sufferings of Johannes Kreisler, Music Director] (1815), and the
satirical Lebensansichten des Katers Murr nebst Fragmentarische Biographie des
Kapellmesters Johannes Kreisler in Zufälligen Makulaturblättern [The Life and
Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Together with a Fragmentary Biography of Johannes
Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper] (1822).
12. For a good introduction to the Faust tradition in Germany, see Palmer and
More (1966).
13. Bloch considered Wells’s 1895 novella The Time Machine to be ‘much more
effective as a story than [his] later lemonade-like liberal fairytales of an ideal
state’ (Bloch, 1986, p. 439).
 Caroline Edwards 203

14. The ‘calendar story’ refers to the style of instructional tale that Hebel
wrote for the Lutheran almanac for Baden, Der Rheinländische Hausfreund,
which he edited between 1808 and 1811 and which every household was
obliged to buy. The edited almanac of these stories that Hebel published
as Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes (The Treasure Chest of the
Rhinelander Family Friend) (1811) was, even beyond Baden, often the only
reading material available in ordinary German households besides the Bible
and Hymn or Prayer Book (Hibberd, 1995, pp. xvii–xviii).
15. For a useful discussion of Bloch’s Expressionist style, see Jörg Drews’s discus-
sion of ‘the beginning of a new metaphysics’ in Bloch’s thinking: ‘Geist der
Utopie’, writes Drews, ‘is a manifesto against the emptiness, incredulity and
hollowness of its time’ (Drews, 1975, p. 25, my translation).
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Index

Adorno, T. W., 36, 37, 150, 157, 186, and Another Country, 15, 170, 172,
200 174–6, 179, 180
and ‘Free Time’, 150 and ‘The Discovery of What it
Aeschylus, 43 Means to be an American’, 181
and the Oresteia, 49 and Giovanni’s Room, 172
Airy, George, 138 and Nobody Knows My Name, 168
Aldiss, Brian and Notes of a Native Son, 169–70,
and White Mars, 5 171
American Civil War, 56 Balzac, Honoré de, 193
Anand, Mulk Raj, 75 Barnes, Djuna, 96
anarchism, 14, 28, 133–4, 142–6 Baudelaire, Charles, 165
Andersen, Hans Christian, 193 Baudrillard, Jean, 150
Anderson, Perry, 112 Baum, Vicki
and Considerations on Western and Grand Hotel, 151, 157
Marxism, 112 Beebe, Maurice, 197
anti-utopia, 9, 19, 25, 28, 35, 38 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 196
Appelfeld, Aharon Bell, Vanessa, 150
and Badenheim, 150 Bellamy, Edward, 193, 199
The Arabian Nights, 193 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 120
Aragon, Louis, 114 and ‘The Storyteller’, 82
Aristotle, 39 Benn, Gottfried, 190
Armstrong, Paul, 178 Bennett, Andrew, 154, 155
Armstrong, Tim, 185, 191 Bennett, Arnold
Arnold, Matthew and Imperial Palace, 151, 157
and ‘On the Study of Celtic Bennett, Jane, 173
Literature’, 163 Benson, Stella, 85
astronomy, 130 Bey, Hakim, 14, 150–1
Atwood, Margaret and The Temporary Autonomous
and The Handmaid’s Tale, 5 Zone, 148–9, 157–8
Auden, W. H., 35, 72, 76, 112 Bloch, Ernst, 1, 2–3, 6, 8, 15–16, 36,
and ‘Danse Macabre’, 120 158, 182–201
Austen, Jane and colportage, 193–5
and Northanger Abbey, 160 and Heritage of Our Times, 183, 184,
and Persuasion, 160 185, 186, 193–6
Austin, Allen, 153, 154 and ‘A Philosophical View of the
Novel of the Artist’, 196
Babbitt, Irving, 30 and The Principle of Hope, 186–8,
Bacon, Francis 193, 198–9
and New Atlantis, 131, 193 and The Spirit of Utopia, 189, 201
Baker, William, 41 and Traces, 200
Baldwin, James, 1, 6, 8, 15, 168–76, and Ungleichzeitigkeit, concept of,
179–81 183–6, 193, 198, 201

219
220 Index

Bloomsbury Group, 34 Chaplin, Charlie

Bluemel, Kristin, 8, 75–6 and Modern Times, 150
blueprint rationalism, 2 Chartism, 113
Boehmer, Elleke, 182 Chesterton, G. K., 193
Booth, Howard J., 182 Cicero, 193
Bounds, Philip, 113 Clark, Katerina, 116, 117
Bowen, Elizabeth, 1, 6, 8, 14–15, Cleary, Joe, 185
148–67 Clifford, Sir Hugh, 63
and ‘The Big House’, 161 Clute, John, 84–5
and Bowen’s Court, 161, 162 Cobbett, William, 118
and The Death of the Heart, 152 Cockaigne, Land of, 149
and The Hotel, 14, 151, 152–7, Cole, G. D. H., 91
158–61 Columbus, Christopher, 130
and The Last September, 152 Comentale, Edward, 150
and The Shelbourne Hotel, 14, 151, Communist Party of Great Britain, 113
161–7 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 131
and To the North, 152 Conrad, Joseph, 40–1, 63, 194
Boym, Svetlana, 123 and Heart of Darkness, 46, 47
Brecht, Bertolt, 112, 193 Cooke, Leighton Brett, 139
Britzolakis, Christina, 36 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 130
Brookner, Anita, 149 Cross, Victoria
Brothers Grimm, the, 193 and Martha Brown, M.P., 108
Bryce, James, 61 Crossley, Robert, 33
Bryher, 93, 94, 96, 109 Cunard, Nancy, 162
Buber, Martin, 36 Cunningham, Valentine, 112
Bunyan, John
and The Pilgrim’s Progress, 122 Daily Worker, 114
Burdekin, Katharine, 1, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, Dante Alighieri, 193
93–109 and The Inferno, 34
and Anna Colquhoun, 94 Darsey, James, 172
and The End of This Day’s Business, Davis, J. C., 131
94, 96, 98, 101–3, 105, 106 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 114
and Proud Man, 94, 95, 96, 98–101, De Morgan, Augustus, 138
104–5, 107 Deane, Seamus, 166
and The Rebel Passion, 96, 106–7 Deleuze, Gilles, 157
and Swastika Night, 94, 101 Derrida, Jacques, 196
Descartes, René, 138
Calder, Angus, 128 Dickens, Charles, 51
Calinescu, Matei, 151, 186, 201 Doan, Laura, 98
Cambridge Utopians, 33 Donskis, Leonidas, 17
Campanella, Tommaso, 193 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
and The City of the Sun, 131 and Notes from the Underground, 46
Cantor, Georg, 143 Dryden, John, 43
Carpenter, Edward, 104, 105, 106, 107 Durst, David C., 184
and The Intermediate Sex, 105 dystopia, 5, 10, 13, 19, 29, 31, 34, 39,
Certeau, Michel de, 36 48, 52, 83, 94, 100, 101, 103, 112,
Cervantes, Miguel de 114, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126,
and Don Quixote, 193, 198 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137,
Chamberlain, Neville, 69 142, 146
 Index 221

Eagleton, Terry, 112, 114 and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, 41

Eaton, Ruth, 170, 177 and Mr. Apollo, 41
Eco, Umberto, 150 and ‘On Heaven’, 41
Edwards, Caroline, 7, 8, 9, 15–16 and Portraits from Life, 40
Eggebrecht, Axel, 126 and The Simple Life Limited, 41
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 114 Fornäs, Johan, 182, 198
Eisenstein, Albert, 190 Forster, E. M., 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 19–38,
Eliot, T. S., 8, 34, 43 149, 154
and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred and ‘The Challenge of Our Time’,
Prufrock’, 34 30, 32, 33
and The Waste Land, 12, 34, 172–3, and The Eternal Moment and Other
174 Stories, 19, 23
Ellis, Edith Lees, 107 and Howards End, 23, 26, 27, 50,
Ellis, Havelock, 93, 94–5, 96, 107, 108 51, 52
and Studies in the Psychology of Sex, and The Longest Journey, 23
97 and ‘The Machine Stops’, 9, 19–23,
Engelhardt, Nina, 9, 14, 15 25, 26–7, 28, 29, 31–2, 33, 34, 38
English, Elizabeth, 12 and ‘The Point of It’, 9, 23–7, 28,
English Revolution, 113 29, 30–1, 32, 34, 38
Erasmus, Desiderius, 3 and A Room with a View, 27, 151,
Esty, Jed, 118 152, 153, 157
Euripides, 43, 193 and ‘The Story of a Panic’, 23
Expressionism, 112, 120, 126, 189–91, and ‘Tolerance’, 34
200, 201 and ‘What I Believe’, 33
Foster, John Wilson, 155
Facebook, 20, 22 Fourier, Charles, 198
fairy tale, 119–20 Fox, Ralph, 113
fascism, 3, 12, 13, 32, 63, 64, 82, 89, Freedman, Carl, 82
94, 101, 102, 113, 114, 115, 118, Freud, Sigmund, 43
119, 126, 127, 128, 150, 183, 185, Furness, R. S., 192
186, 190, 194
Fielding, Henry Galilei, Galileo, 131
and Tom Jones, 114, 115 Ga˛siorek, Andrzej, 178
Firchow, Peter, 29 General Strike (1926), 65
First World War, 30, 34, 40, 46, 50, Geoghegan, Vincent, 5
52, 56, 57, 59, 60–5, 66, 67, 69, German Communist Party, 183, 194
71, 73, 84, 98, 133, 136, 142, 144, German Mittelstand, 15, 183–4, 194
146, 151, 152, 154, 155, 166, 183, Gladkov, Fyodor, 111
190 and Cement, 123–4, 125
Fishman, Robert, 176 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 192,
Flaubert, Gustave, 40 193, 197
Ford, Ford Madox, 1, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and Faust, 197, 198
39–53 Gorky, Maxim, 111
and England and the English, 53 and Mother, 117–18
and The Good Soldier, 7, 10, 39–40, Graves, John, 143
41–6, 48, 49–50, 51, 52–3 Gray, Jeremy, 130
and The Heart of the Country, 41 Gray, John, 4, 5
and ‘High Germany – II. Utopia’, 41 Greene, Graham, 192
and The Inheritors, 10, 46–50, 51 Greenwood, Walter, 76
222 Index
Gresswell, Elise Kay
and When Yvonne Was Dictator, 108
Griffin, Michael J., 3
Gross, David, 186–7
Guattari, Félix, 157
Habermas, Jürgen, 192
Haldane, Charlotte,
and Man’s World, 108
Hall, Radclyffe, 95, 96
and The Well of Loneliness, 98
Harootunian, Harry, 185
Harvey, David, 15, 170, 178–9
Hasenclaver, Walter, 190
Hayek, Friedrich, 1
Hayles, N. Katherine, 134
H.D., 93–5, 108–9
Hebel, Johann Peter, 193, 200
Hedrick, Tace, 185
Herf, Jeffrey, 183
Hitler, Adolf, 5, 69, 101, 164
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 193
and Johannes Kreisler novels, 196
Holden, Inez, 76
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 193
Holtby, Winifred, 108
Homer, 193
Horkheimer, Max, 157
Hubble, Nick, 8, 11
Huch, Friedrich
and Enzio, 196
Hudson, Wayne, 188
Huxley, Aldous, 61, 76, 85, 131, 199
and Brave New World, 5, 19, 199
Ibsen, Henrik, 193
and Hedda Gabler, 196
and Rosmersholm, 196
Ingman, Heather, 161
intermodernism, 11, 75–6, 85
International Literature, 113, 114
invasion literature, 60
Irish Civil War, 164
Isherwood, Christopher, 111
and Berlin Stories, 112
Ishiguro, Kazuo, 149
Jacoby, Russell, 4, 17, 31, 36
James, David, 8, 15
James, Henry, 41, 154
and ‘The Great Good Place’, 41
James, William
and ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’,
28
Jameson, Fredric, 1, 4, 5, 11, 35, 82,
83, 151–2
and Archaeologies of the Future, 36,
37, 74–5, 79, 151
and ‘Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam’, 84
and The Seeds of Time, 36
Jameson, Margaret Storm, 108
Jones, Lewis, 111
Jordan, Heather, 154, 155
Jouvenal, Bertrand de, 171
Joyce, James, 8, 9, 35, 43, 95, 192, 193
and Ulysses, 12, 35, 85, 199–200
Kafka, Franz, 112, 114, 119, 122, 193
and The Castle, 120, 121, 122
Kahlo, Frida, 185
Kaplan, Cora, 168, 180
Kateb, George, 19, 27–8, 29–30, 35
Keen, Suzanne, 51–2
Keller, Gottfried, 193
Kepler, Johannes, 130
Kierkegaard, Søren, 189
Klein, Scott W., 7, 10
Knight, Holford, 62
Koestenbaum, Wayne, 159
Kohlmann, Benjamin, 3, 35–6
Kracauer, Siegfried, 156
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 96
and Psychopathia Sexualis, 97–8
Kubin, Alfred, 114, 119
and The Other Side, 120–1, 125–6
Kumar, Krishan, 131
Kurella, Alfred, 190
Landauer, Gustav, 36
Lang, Fritz
and Metropolis, 112, 114, 126
Lawrence, D. H., 95
and Women in Love, 50–1, 52
Le Corbusier, 176–7, 178, 179
and When the Cathedrals Were
White, 176
Le Guin, Ursula K.
and The Dispossessed, 5, 28

League of Nations, 57, 61–2, 63, 64
Lee, Hermione, 153, 154
Lefebvre, Henri, 36, 150
Left Review, 113, 114
Lehmann, John, 111
leisure space, theories of, 149–51
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 119
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 193
Letchworth (garden city), 150
Levitas, Ruth, 4, 5
Lewis, Wyndham, 1, 6, 8, 10–11, 12,
16, 56–73, 76, 90, 149
and The Apes of God, 8, 58, 65, 66, 86
and ‘Art in a Machine Age’, 69
and The Art of Being Ruled, 59, 63, 64
and BLAST, 58, 62, 66
and The Childermass, 11, 58, 66
and ‘The Children of the New
Epoch’, 62
and Count Your Dead: They Are
Alive!, 69
and ‘“Detachment” and the
Fictionist’, 58, 72
and Filibusters in Barbary, 65
and Hitler, 72
and Left Wings Over Europe, 64, 65,
69–70, 72
and Men Without Art, 58, 59, 66, 67,
68, 70
and The Mysterious Mr Bull, 60, 69,
70–3
and Paleface, 59, 67
and The Revenge for Love, 66
and Snooty Baronet, 58, 66
and Time and Western Man, 59
liberalism, 9, 15, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31–2,
33, 34, 35, 59, 114, 183, 185, 192,
199
Lindsay, Jack, 122
and England, My England, 113
Lloyd George, David, 70
Locarno Treaties, 64
Lukács, Georg, 75, 189–92
and The Historical Novel, 79
MacNeice, Louis, 72
Mann, Thomas,
and Doktor Faustus, 197
Mannheim, Karl, 1, 2–3
Index 223
Mansfield, Katherine, 149, 162
Mao, Douglas, 9, 15, 150
Marcuse, Herbert, 1
Marlowe, Christopher, 193
and Doctor Faustus, 197
mathematics, 14, 130–47
and imaginary numbers, 14, 132,
133, 134, 135, 136, 137–42, 143–6
Matthias, Bettina, 153
May, Karl, 193–4
Medalie, David, 6
meliorism, 9
Miéville, China, 75, 82–3
Mirrlees, Hope, 85
Mistral, Gabriela, 185
Mitchison, Naomi, 1, 6, 8, 11, 12,
74–91, 108
and Beyond This Limit, 11, 76, 85–8
and The Blood of the Martyrs, 76,
88–90, 91
and The Bull Calves, 74
and The Conquered, 11–12, 74, 75,
80–1, 82, 88, 90
and Memoirs of a Spacewoman, 11,
74, 75, 76–9, 80, 81, 82
and The Moral Basis of Politics, 89, 90
and Not By Bread Alone, 74
and Solution Three, 74
modernist studies, 1, 6–7, 12–13, 201
and globalization of, 15, 182–3,
185–6
and intermodernism, 75–6, 85
Molière, 193
More, Sir Thomas, 3–4, 28, 39, 131,
193
and Utopia, 3, 130, 131
Morris, William, 193, 199
and News from Nowhere, 28, 199
Morrison, Toni, 1, 6, 8, 15, 16, 171,
177–9, 180, 181
and Jazz, 15, 170, 177–9
Moylan, Tom, 3, 5, 19, 34
Munich Agreement, 69
Murray, Charles, 33
Nairn, Tom, 112
National Socialism, 89, 112, 114, 120,
122, 127, 129, 185, 186, 194
Needham, Joseph, 122
224 Index

Negt, Oskar, 192 Rhys, Jean, 162

New Left Review, 112 Richardson, Dorothy, 96
Novalis, 193 Rickword, Edgell, 122
Riding, Laura, 95
O’Connell, Daniel, 163 Rigby, Nigel, 182
Offenbach, Jacques, 193 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 193
O’Hagan, Andrew, 175 Rivera, Diego, 185
Omry, Keren, 177 Rojek, Chris, 157
Orwell, George, 76, 113, 128, 131 Rolland, Romain
and Nineteen Eighty-Four, 5 and Jean-Christophe novels, 196
Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 111 Ross, Shawna, 14
Outka, Elizabeth, 150, 159 Royle, Nicholas, 154, 155
Ovid, 193 Rubiner, Ludwig, 190
Owen, Robert, 198 Russell, Bertrand, 60–1

Parnell, Charles Stuart, 163 Sackville-West, Vita, 96

Patai, Daphne, 94, 108 Salton-Cox, Glyn, 8, 13
Pater, Walter, 35 Sargent, Lyman Tower, 5, 170
Peasants’ Revolt, 113, 118 Sargisson, Lucy, 2
perfection, ideas of, 1, 4, 6, 10, 17, 28, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 193
32, 33, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, satire, 8, 10–11, 41, 46, 57–60, 65–9,
52, 58, 67, 76, 78, 79, 96, 103, 70–3
104, 108, 122, 132, 135, 137, 139, Schwarz, Bill, 168, 180
141, 145, 146, 184 Sealsfield, Charles, 194
Pinder, David, 180 Second World War, 57, 69, 70, 91,
Plato, 4, 28 101, 127, 128, 150, 164
Poe, Edgar Allan, 193, 194 Seghers, Anna, 120
Pol Pot, 5 Seshagiri, Urmila, 170
Pope, Alexander, 193 sexology, 11–12, 93, 95, 96–8, 99,
Popper, Karl, 1, 2 104, 105, 107, 108
Popular Front, 88, 111, 113, 114, 119, Shakespeare, William, 48, 192, 193
122, 127, 128, 129 and Hamlet, 49
Port Sunlight, 150 Shaw, George Bernard, 193
post-modernism, 14, 133 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 193, 197
Pound, Ezra, 8 and Prometheus Unbound, 196
Principe, Lawrence, 130 Shiach, Morag, 65
Proust, Marcel, 192, 193 Shklar, Judith, 131
Pynchon, Thomas, 1, 6, 14 Shklovsky, Victor, 173, 175
and Against the Day, 14, 132–4, Sholokov, Mikhail, 111
135–7, 142–7 Shulman, George, 173
Pythagoras, 136 Siebers, Johan, 200
Sinyavsky, Andrei, 123
Radnóti, Sándor, 201 Skype, 20
Raitt, Suzanne, 107 Smith, Ali, 149
Rank, Otto, 197 Smith, Stevie, 76
rationalization, 9, 14, 49, 132, 134–7, socialist realism, 13, 111, 112, 114,
139–40, 141, 142, 146, 183 115, 117, 119, 123, 125, 126,
Reeve, N. H., 13, 122 128
Reeves, Amber, 33 Sophocles, 43

Sorel, Georges, 1
Sorkin, Michael, 179–80
Soviet Union, 13, 64, 111–12, 114,
115–16, 117, 119, 120, 123, 126,
127, 129
Spanish Civil War, 111, 128
Spender, Stephen, 114
Squier, Susan, 85
Stalin, Joseph, 5, 117
Stapledon, Olaf, 76
Stevens, Wallace, 9, 35
and ‘The Idea of Order at Key
West’, 35
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 194
Sullivan, J. W. N., 57
Surrealism, 200
Suvin, Darko, 5
and Metamorphoses of Science Fiction,
82
Swift, Jonathan, 33
and Gulliver’s Travels, 49
Taruskin, Richard, 4, 6
Tesla, Nikola, 142
Thomas, D. M., 149
and The White Hotel, 150
Time and Tide, 86
Tóibín, Colm, 174, 181
Tolkien, J. R. R., 84
Tolstoy, Leo, 193
totalitarianism, 3, 16, 17, 37, 135,
140, 146
Treaty of Versailles, 57, 62
Tretiakov, Sergei, 112
Turgenev, Ivan, 40
Twitter, 20
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 96
Upward, Edward, 111
utopian studies, 1–6, 7, 17, 83
Vallejo, César, 185
Verne, Jules, 75, 193
Vertov, Dziga
and Three Songs of Lenin, 112
Virgil, 193
Waddell, Nathan, 8, 9, 10–11, 169
Wagstaff, Peter, 16
Index 225
Wall, Cheryl A., 169
Wallace, Jo-Ann, 107
Wall Street Crash (1929), 185
Walpole, Horace, 193
Warner, Rex, 1, 6, 8, 12–13, 111–29
and The Aerodrome, 127–8
and ‘The Uses of Allegory’, 122
and The Wild Goose Chase, 13,
114–19, 120, 121, 122–7
Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 85
‘war-to-end-wars’ rhetoric, 8, 10–11,
56–73
Wassermann, Jakob
and The Goose Man, 196
Weber, Max, 9, 132, 189
Weininger, Otto, 96
Weir, David, 133
Weissberg, Liliane, 200
Wells, H. G., 33, 40, 41, 53, 56–7, 62,
63, 75, 82, 193, 199
and The Autocracy of Mr. Parham,
56
and In the Fourth Year, 63
and Kipps, 40
and Men Like Gods, 199
and A Modern Utopia, 5, 29, 33
and The Salvaging of Civilization,
63
and The War That Will End War, 56,
60, 63
Werfel, Franz, 190
and Verdi, A Novel of the Opera,
196
West, Rebecca, 108
Whitman, Walt, 193
Wilcox, Leonard, 171
Williams, Patrick, 182
Williams, Raymond, 111, 182
Williams, William Carlos, 9, 35
and ‘Danse Russe’, 35
Wilson, Woodrow, 61–2
Winning, Joanne, 96
Wolff, Ellen, 161, 163
Womack, Kenneth, 41
Woolf, Virginia, 8, 9, 35, 85, 154,
155
and Jacob’s Room, 36
and Mrs Dalloway, 12, 35, 36, 85
and The Voyage Out, 153
226 Index

Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 1, 6, 8, 13–14 and We, 5, 7, 13–14, 19, 132–3,

and ‘H. G. Wells’, 142 134, 135, 136, 137, 138–9, 140–2,
and ‘On Literature, Revolution, 146–7
Entropy, and Other Matters’, 133, Zhdanov, Andrei, 123
139–40 Zipes, Jack, 120, 195, 196