Individuality and the Critique of Empathy:

The Fiction of Laura Riding and Wyndham Lewis

A thesis submitted to the Department of English in conformify with the requirements for

the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Queen's University

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

September 2001

Copyright O Eila Zohar Ophir, 2001

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A B S T R A C T

Laura Riding's and Wyndham Lewis's careers were shaped by three convictions: that the

value of art (restricted by Riding to poetry) to human Me is supreme; that art is the product

of an uncommon individuality in the creator; and that modeniity threatens the existence of

individuaiity, and therefore of art. They departed h m modernist writers who shared their

sense of besieged individuality and endangered art in that they saw literary modemism as

deeply complicit with the inimical forces of modernity, not as a countervailing force. This

study traces the logic by which each goes from a relatively common modernist perception of

the condition of the arts to some of the most provocative criticism of modernist literature on

record, and to the development of singular, anti-psychologicai fictions which display human

figures devoid of intenority and which aim to foreclose empathetic response.

Chapter 1 contrasts Lewis's and Riding's divergent interpretations of literary

modemism as subse~ient to modem irrationalism on the one hand, and to empiricism on

the other. Chapter 2 situates their oppositional aesthetics within the context of the pan-

European critique of the role of empathy in the arts, an anxious response to the increasing

power of "the masses." Lewis conceives his anti-empathetic fiction as heralding a new

"anti-humanistl' era; Chapter 3 argues that the motivations for The Wild Body have more to

do with his oiigarchic politicai i&d thrüi with a Nietzschean revaluation of al1 values.

Chapter 4 finds the origins of Riding's radical conception of individuality in her early

poetics; Chapter 5 shows its transmutation in Progress ofStories into the wiü to overcome

individual distinctions in the name of supra-individual uuîh. In this respect, 1 argue, her

critique of empathy is tnily anti-humanist. The conceptual complexes and social and

spiritual aspirations that formed the matrix of Riding's and Lewis's antiempathetic fictions,

I conclude, are best left behind, but their aftempts to reconst~~t the very premises of

twentieth cenniry fiction remain an important legacy. The Wiul Body and Progress of

Stories are significant exampies of alternative modes in an era dorninated by psychological

fiction.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

My debts are many. Jed Rasula has been the genius loci of my graduate career. My fatefd

first encounter with Laura Riding was in his modernist fiction seminar. In an early crisis of

doubt he advised with understanding and support, and was throughout generous with his

tirne and erudition. His far-ranging, agile mind and verbal inventiveness wiii rernain

inspirations. Glenn W i o t t , as second reader, offered guidance at key points in the writing

process; the final draft had the benefit of his careful attention and commentary. Pat Rae's

graduate courses enriched my understanding of modernism, and from her interest and loyal

support 1 have aiways taken hem.

1 am grcitefui to the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada for supporting

the longest stretch of work on this dissertation; Queen's University and the Ontario

Graduate Scholarship Program also provided crucial funds. In research and writing our

computers virtuaiiy become prostheses; Laura Murray's generous gift made the final rnonths of intensive writing far more cornfortable and efficient than they would otherwise

have ken.

My filends have been the great blessing of these years. For the companionship and

soIidacity that made everything possible, as weli as for lively inteLiectual engagement, I have

severai to thank. Sam Durrant's unshakable faith in me was a bewiidering grace. Alice

Petersen's imagination and wit brightened a diffîcult the. Morgan LeDeiiiou bore much of

the worst of me with patience and good humour. The inimitable Jane Forsey and the

indornitabie Antje Rauwerda were constant sources of strength and wisdom as welI as partners in iiberating frivolities and celebrations. Jane also Listened and debated as the ideas in this thesis struggled towards clarity; both this work and my mind are the better for it.

Special recognition goes to someone little known to those who have been close me in these years, my older sister Martha. 1 thank her here, at the end of this di&ult stretch of the road I've chosen, for her love, and for her example.

C O N T E N T S

Chapter One. The Sovereign Mind

Modemists against Modemism: Laura Riding and wndham Lewis 1

"Ideologic borrowingsn: Modemism and Modem Thought 10

Chapter Two. The Aesthetics of Distinction

Crowd Control 31

The Modem Tendency: Classicism, Dehumankation, and the Critique of Empathy 36

Ernpathy and Modernist Fiction 50

Chapter Three. No "Mysterious Wthin? me MId Body

Metaphysical Satire and the Umvertung alle Werte 64

"Tractable Machines" and the Physical Grotesque 73

Empathy and the "Showman" û4

Chapter Four. Poetry Is Not Enough

The Independent Mind, Authonty, and Truth 100

The Autonomous Poem 1 O6

The Autonomous Individual 1 13

Chapter Five. The Aesthetics of Inclusion: Progress of Stones

Prose and the Egalitarian Tum 124

Modemist Fiction: Style and Human Significanœ 131

Stones of Lives 136

Stones Wïthout Lives 142

Narrative Hedonism 150

Conclusion 163

Works Cited 177

A B B R E V I A T I O N S

Woiks by Wyndharn Lewis

ABR The Art of Being Ruled

f3VB The Complete Wild Body

DPDS The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator

MWA Men Without Art

P Paleface

RA Rude Assignmenr

RL The Revenge for Love

SC Self Condemned

T Tarr

TWM Time and Western Man

Works by L a m Riding

A Anarchism 1s Nor Enough

CLM Covenant of Literal Morality

CS Contemporaries and Snobs

FA First Awakenings : The Early Poems of Laura Riding

PLR The Poems of Laura Riding: A New Edition of the 1938 Collection

T The Telling

TE A Trojan Ending

TG Though Gently

WW The Word Woman and Other Related Wn'tings

C H A P T E R O N E

The Sovereign Mind

I am an artist and my muid, nt least, ii entirelyfiee. (Lewis, DPDS 37)

My thought differs in the wholefrorn that of any other contribrctor to the record of human thinking. (Riding, T 72)

Modemists Against Modemism: Laura Riding and Wyndham Lewis

Modernity has long been characterized in conflictiag terms. Its heterogeneous

characteristics have been marshaled onto one or the other side of a niling bifurcation

between order and chaos: modemity as the rationaikation, standardizrition, and

rnechanization of life; modemity as the hgmentation and disintegration of old cultural

orders. in the fmt scenario, the individual subject is a fugitive figure, protecting a faint

human iight against e n m g rnechanization. In the second scen;tno the subject, deprived of

the transpersonai order from which individual definition is derived, vanishes into the maw of

unbounded subjectivity within which the extemal world is ceduced to a ghostiy outüne. The

soçiological iiterature of the latenineteenth and early twentieth century, as Anthony Giddens

notes, is doxninated by these two opposing accounts of modemity, the fmt image

exernplified by Weber, the second by M m . According to Weber "the bonds of rationality

are drawn tighter and tighter, imprisoning us in a featuteless cage of bureaucratic routine";

according to M m , modeniity is a destructive "monster," the impact of which is

"shattering" and "irreversible" (Giddeas 137-38).

it is the project of Giddens and other coatemporary sociologists to demonstrate the

inadequacy of these accounts and to offer in their place analyses of the unique f o m of

both stabiTity and instability that constitute modernity. The dualistic tendency of accounts of

modernity, however, is a part of the Estory of the twentieth century, and figures prominently

in the cultural commentaries of modernist writers and artists at least up to the mid-cenhq.

Whether the particular aesthetic practices gathered under the term "rnodernism" represent a

&fiant subversion of rnodernity-as-order or a rear-guard action against modemity-as-chaos

is not a question that can be posed with much coherence or answered satisfactorily with

generalizations. 'The central pmdox of modernist studies," as Astradur Eysteinnson has

argued, is that while modernism "is often accused of king a cult of fom it is also . . . anacked for formlessness and for distorted and anarchic representation of sociecy, [and]

disintegration of outer reality" (15-16). These opposing readings of modemism rely on the

sanie sort of aesthetic essentialism-the m m p t to correlate specific ;testhetic practices with

specific philosopbical or politicai positioas-that was so prevalent among the modeniists

themselves, and, like the opposing readings of modem@ they reffect, they break d o m

under scmtiny, as Eysteinnson proficientiy demonsüates. From !he numerous essays,

polemics, and manifestos -en by the modemists, however, it is clear that, with exceptions

such as T.S. Eliot and T E Huime, they saw modernity dong the Iines of the first scenario

outiined above, and understood themselves to be defending tbe claims of the individuai

against the ever more rationalid reality of the world at large.

Laura Riding and Wyndham Lewis are undoubtedly modemism's most tenacious

defenders of individuality. Theu critiques of modernity, as weiI as theu visions for social

and h u m renewd, are in many respects contrary; on two key points, however, they are

steadiiy aligned. Each hdds !he she qua non of art to be the individuality of the artist, and

each understands "individuality" as primarüy a matter of intektual independence, Thus

the relation of artists to the inteilectual and ideologicai environment in which they work is

the focal point of their critiques of modernity. Secondly, their critiques of rnodemity are

distinguished decisively from those of other modeniist writers in that they see iiterary

modemism itself as deeply compiicit with the homogenizing forces of modemity, not as a

countervailing movement. Reed Way Dasenbrock has cailed the body of Lewis's critical

works "at once an exemplar of modernism and the k t and still perhaps most penetrating

critique from within of [sic] the entire modemist enterprise" (ABR 432)' echoing Fredric

Jarneson's statement that Lewis was "at one and the same tirne the exemplary practitioner

of one of the most powerful modemistic styles and an aggressive ideological critic and

adversary of modernism itself in al1 its €omis" (3). When Riding's work becomes better

known, she wiil be permanently aligned wiîh Lewis in this respect.

Lewis's role in the art world of pre-war London bas k e n well docurnented. He won

the de Acated advocacy of Ezra Pound and the admiration of T.S. Eliot; his early stories and

essays were published in Ford Madox Ford's English Review, Margaret Anderson's Little

Review, and Harriet Weaver's Egoist. Between 19 1 1 and 19 14 he exhiited widely and

received many commissions. He is probably best known for his assembling of a smdi

group of artists under the banner of "Vorticism," a media-sawy "movement" and vehicle

for his aggressive promotion of the most dynamic aspects of Post-hpressionism, Cubism,

and Futurism in an England largely untouched by the continental avant-gardes. in Iune

19 14 he published the first issue of Blast, in which his own work appeared with that of

Ford, Pound, Rebecca West, Edward Wadsworth, and drawings by Gaudier-Brzeska and

Jacob Epstein. This "Review of the Great English Vortex," which included the Vorticist

manifestos, brought Lewis a spell of considerable notoriety. The promise of Vorticism,

however, was terminated abruptIy by the outbreak of the war.'

Riding's place in the social nexus of modemism was never as secure as Lewis's

had k e n before the war. Having left Corneil without taking a degree, sure of her poetic

vocation, between 1923 and 1925 she published a number of her poems in Tlte Fugitive,

which had in its £irst year won praise h m Eliot, Hart Crane' H L Mencken, and, from over

in England, Robert Graves. For rhree m o n h in 1925, before taking up Graves's admiring

invitation to London, she made her mark on the Greenwich Viage literary scene, which

included Men Tate (who had promoted her poey to the other Fugitives), E. E. Cummings,

Eugene O'Neill, Malcolm Cowley, and Edmund Wilson, and formed a particularly close

fnendship with Hart Crane. The extraordinariiy strong-willed daughter of a working-class

Jewish socialist, Riding was more at home in Village circles than she had been among the

Fugitives, among whom, by background and by temperament, she could only be an outsider.

But even in the Viage she found herseif somewhat alienated by what she felt was an

endemic pretentiousness (a sense she expressed in the poem 'The Quids," which was to

capture Graves's attention), and at any nie, her place, as a woman, was rnargid2 When the

offer came h m Graves, she did not hesitate to leave.

In London circles, however, Riding found only a peripheral place. Through Graves,

Riding met Eliot, Pound, Yeats-and Lewis. For a t h e she and Lewis appear to have

recognized in each other something of a common spirit. Lewis wrote to her in 1927

requesting an xcount of her "career" (a term she mats with uony in her response), and

their correspondence shows that they read, or at least exchanged, a nurnber of each other's

works. Lewis requested poems fiom Riding for publication in The Enemy; Riding and

Graves solicited work fiom Lewis for publication by their Seizin Press? The Seizin Press

won some attention for its publication of An Acquaintance With Descrtption (1929), which

Riding had solicited fiom Gertrude Stein, but Riding's own work did not find much

recognition. Even with the help of Graves's agent, Eric Pinker, her critical pieces were

rejected by the major English and Amencan monthlies. The more radical îransition

pubiished a number of her essays, poems, and stories, but after her thorough castigation of

Eugene lolas, at their fint meeting in L928, for his support of surreaiism and German

expressionism, her work did not appear in the journal again. The seminal Muence of

Riding's and Graves's Survey of Modemist Poetry on the New Critics has been

recognizecL4 and among the pets who have acknowledged the influence of her poetry are

W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery. According to Deborah

Baker, however, in the twenties and thiaies Riding published oniy by means of the S e m

Press and through Graves, who let his own publishers know that her work came with

For a tirne Riding and Lewis formed a significant, though not cenîrai, presence on

the modernist scene, but their retreat to the fringes, where they stand today in modernism's

afterlife in the academy, began in their own tirne. Riding's output between 1925 and 1939

was prodigious-it included seven volumes of poetry and the extensively rewritten and

rearranged Collected Poems of 1938, six criticai works, and four works of fiction. Many of

these received pcaise from reviewers, but she did not gain popuiar recognition, nor did she

enter the circle of mutuai recognition fomed by the now canonicai modemist pets!

During the same period, Lewis found himseif in something of a similac position. Like

Riding, he produced a massive arnount of work: six works of fiction, thirteen volumes of

aesthetic and social criticism, two issues of The Enemy, and his biographical Blasring and

Bombardiering. He was, however, at this tirne (as for most of the rest of his life) trapped in

an increasingly degrading catch-22. As Jeffiey Meyers notes, he was the oniy one among

his peers never to find a secure source of income: much of his nonfiction, written at least in

part because it was easier to seii than fiction or paintings, was compromised by the haste

and dire financiai need under which it was produced, and it diverted and drained the energy

that rnight have gone into works of enduring value. While his literacy and his artistic talent

was recognized throughout his life by many, including Pound, Eliot, aad Joyce, he was

never able to secure the sort of reputation they did.

The reasons for Riding's and Lewis's failure to receive decisive criticai recognition

in their own tirne are many and complex. There were, no doubt, social factors: both could be

extremely clifficuit personaïiy, and Lewis's social troubles began even before the war, with

his bitter dispute with the inîiuential Roger Fry over an important commission and his

subsequent break from the Omega Workshop and the Bloomsbury circle? His publication

of Paleface (1929), which dended contemporary ideaüzations of the primitive in t em

kequently as insuiting to North Amencan Indians and Blacks as to D.H. Lawrence and

Shenvoad Anderson, gave him a reputation for racism (Meyers 146). and his uninformed

and naïvely sympathetic Hitler (193 1) certainly aggravated his social ostracism. But sacial,

and in Lewis's case, political, factors do not fully explain the absence of Lewis and Riding

from university Engiish anthologies and curricula-pdcularly not that of Riding, who

might have been rediscovered, dong with other half-forgotten women writers, by feminist

scholars. Nor is their marginaIity a function of their dificulty-which bas pmved, as is well

recognized in histories of the profession, to be rather an incitement to canonization.

Riding and Lewis stood, and still stand, on the edges of modernisrn for two reasons

primarily: the fust has to do with the quaiity of their work; the second is that both, for

aesthetic and pMosophica1 reasons, deliberately removed thernselves h m what they

perceiveci to be the common ground of their contemporaxies. They were antagonistic

towards iiterary modedsm as represented by the works of the most prominent of their

peers, and tbis antagonisa lies at the very foundation of their works.

The reasons for Riding's continuing obsçurity are more cornplex than those for

Lewis's, as they involve her hostility towards the academic literary establishment and its

brand of feminism as weli as her refusal, as So-Ann Waiiace puts it, "to rehquish critical

authority over her writing" (1201, an authority she defended with vigilance, and ofien

rancour, until her death at the age of 90 in 199 1.8 Her present status, however, does have

largely to do with the variable quality of her work She was a prolific poet and essayist, but

an uneven one, and she produced no single opm that captured her briiiiance without her

fadts. Lewis at least produced Tarr and, later, the weU-received noveis me Revengefor

Love and SelflCondemned As in the case of Riding, however, bis reputation has suffered

because his brilliance is scattered. Even his contemporary admirers fecognized that the

aesthetic and inteilectuai d u e of the majority of bis wocks was heaviiy compromiseci, as

Meyers concIudes, by "his dissipated energy, his lack of fom and inccnsistent style, his

offensive tone, [and] his negativity" (146). It is not, however, the shortcomings of Riding

and Lewis that interest me in this study, but the grounds on which they disringuished

themselves from the now-canonical modemists. My aim is to demonstrate the substance and

enduring interest of their oppositional aesthetics.

This study will trace the logic by which Riding and Lewis go fiorn a relatively

comrnon modemist perception of the condition of the arts in the modem world to some of

the most provocative and suggestive criticism of modernist literature on record, and to the

development of singular fictional aesthetics that de@ assimilation into the general patterns

of Anglo-American literary modemism. The relation of inteliectual stance to aesthetic

practice is in the cases of Riding and Lewis a cucious one. hpassioned defenders of

individuality, they take up fiction-the art form most closely bound to the representation of

individual human beings, and one increasingly developed, in their tirne, for exploration of

subjective experience-and divorce it frorn precisely those uses, developing an oppositionai

fiction which displays human figures as virtually devoid of interiority and volition. in

Lewis's The Wild Body (1927) individuals are not just governed, but constituted, by

ritualized enactments of instinctual drives or internalized ideologies; in Riding's Progress

ofStonés (1935)' they are driven dong by randorn vectors of accident and chance before

k ing dismissed altogether as subject matter insuEciently important for the purposes of

fiction.

The comrnon starting point of Ridimg's and Lewis's anti-psychological fiction is

their vigilant interrogation of literary modemism for signs of uncritical absorption of the

anti-individualist elements of contemporary thought. Both fmd modernist fiction's most

characteristic practice-the portraya1 of the complex psychology and unique sensibility of

ordinary individuals-an exemplq instance of complicity with modern anti-individualism.

Modernist fiction's devotion to rendering the inner worlds of individual consciousnesses,

they suggest, is a direct development of the romantic-humanist afnrmation of the value and

siguifïcance of the ordinary human lifvrecisely the romantic humanhm that undecwrote

the political and cultural enfranchisement of the masses, the very situation that appeared to

have produced the threat to the individual and to the arts in the füst place. To make fiction a

mems of imaginative access to the experience of undisthguished min& is to &km the

conception of common human ~ i g ~ c a n c e and solidarïty rhat le& to the oppressive

enforcement of common culturd standards in modern soçieties.

Riding and Lewis undertake to write fiction that wiü not irnmerse readers in the

experience of other lives, but will, on the contrary, reinforce the boundaries behHeen

individuais. Their anti-psychological fictions are means of training readers not to empathize

with other subjectivities, but, in different ways, to master then Both The Wild Body and

Progress ofSmries aim to reach a select audience, presenting themselves as initiations into

srnaIl circles of understanding. The narrator of The Wild Body, a kind of tour guide of other

rninds, instnicts readers in discerning the crude psychological mechanisms that underlie the

appeamce of self-conscious agency in the rnajority of their feUow human beings. Progress

of Stories does not deny signifiant subjectivity in the majority of human beings; it attempts,

mther, to train its readers to think beyond the category of subjectivity altogether, in such a

way that the claim for the significance of individual experience is rnastered by king

ovemdden. Lewis's Fiction of L927 to L9324esignated by Hugh Kenner as the "puppet

fiction" ( I l b a n d the inaugural The Wild Body in particular, is not considered his best, but

it is certainly his most aestheticaiiy ambitious, as he takes the form that would seem to

demand the imagining of the experience and sensibility of other minds and rnakes it a

drmatic and expIicit exercise in refuskg to do so. Riding's Progress of Stories is a

comparable expriment in un-imagining individual human particulririty and significance, che

process of which, as in The Wild Body, is dramatized in the structure of the book.

Both Riding's and Lewis's careers are built on sets of axiorns: that individuaüty is a

condition that cm be guaranteed by inteilectuai independence; tbat the individuality of the

creator is the guarantee of aa; that modernity is inimicd to both; for Lewis, that the intellect

must oppose the phenorneniil and sensual; for Riding, that individuafity m u t oppose the

social world. These intemlated axioms formed hots in their thinking that neither, even after

recognizhg th& limitations, was able to completely undo. The conceptual compIexes and

the social and spirituai aspirations that formed the matnx of Riding's and Lewis's anti-

psychologicai fictions belong to the histocy of modernism, but their attempts to reconsauct

the very premises of twentieth centucy fiction remain a legacy that still seems to hold

promise for an alternative fiction that they did not themselves succeed in establishing.

b

This chapter will outline Lewis's and Ridiig's opposing interpretations of modemity as the

triumph of inationalism on one hand, and of empincism on the other, and their respective

readings of literary modernism's subordination to it, Chapter 2 wiii situate their

oppositionai aesthetics within the context of the pan-European critique of the role of

empathy in the arts, an expression of anxiety about the increasing politicai and cultural

power of "the masses." This critique, as Vincent Sherry has demonstrated, was advanced

primady in t e m of the promotion of the individuation and detachment of the visual arts

over against the empathetic bonding encouraged by music: 1 argue that Lewis and Riding

extend that critique, aiigning psychologicai fiction with the incitement to empathetic self-

forgetting with which music had been charged. Both conceive themselves as inaugucating

fictional practices that anticipate a new human era; Lewis defines his antiempathetic fiction,

as well as the fundamental philosophicai shift it heraids, as "anti-humanist." My anaiysis

in Chapter 3 of his critiques of rnodemist fiction and the aitemative "metaphysical satire"

he envisions wili form the basis for the argument that his satirical mode issues ftom a

thomughly humanist ideai of intellectual ernancipation and selfdetermination. His

motivations for antkmpathetic fiction, 1 argue, have more to do with his oligarckic politicai

ideai than with a Nietzschean revaiuation of a i i values. Progress of Stories represents both

the culmination and the breakdowu of the ideas on which Riding's decade-long poetic

career was based. Chapter 4 demonstrates how her concem with inteiiectual independence

Leads her to conceive of the self, as weU as poetry, as radicaiiy autonomous. Her devotion to

poetry as the exclusive mode of the expression of self and of tmth breaks down in part

because she comes to see poetry, as a professionalized craft, as disenfranchizing non-poets

just as the professionalized disciplines of knowledge diseafranchized poetry. Riding

repudiates poetry, but the radical autonomy of the self rerm?ins the bais of the anti-

empathetic fiction to which 1 tum in Chapter 5. There I argue that although Riding offers a

mode1 of universaüy accessible "storyteiiing" over against the exclusive practices of the

"literary," she nonetheiess contains the threat posed by such enfranchisement by

oveniding the signincance of individuai subjectivity. License is granted to readers not to

d e h e and a f i h their individuality, but to overcome it in the name of supra-individual truth.

in this respect she writes from a tnily anti-humanist perspective, and, in exempliQing and

encouraging radicd inteiiecniai independence, refusing to recognize obligations to litemry

conventions or collectiveiy established reality, she produces a singular, faastic fiction both

ludic and profound.

"Ideologic borrowingsn: Modernism and Modem Thought

Like ail cornmentators, sociologicai and literary, who read modernity as a homogenizing

force, Riding and Lewis acknowledge the ubiquitous signs of social and culturai

fragmentation and the increasing insistence on individual freedoms, but consme these as

superficial effects of a more Fundamental consolidation of order. Throughout his criticai

works, and particularly in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Wesrern Man

(1923, Lewis anaiyses at length the evidence of instability in the social and philosophicai

trends of the day, but his point is aiways to reveai the uniformity consolidating itself beneath

the chaotic surface. Thus he characterizes his society by its "religion of impermanence"

(ABR 25), its "revo~utionary" ethos, its warring special interest factions, the absence of

centra1 authority, its anti-intektual disposition, its fiantic individuaiism, and the "fbgitive"

nature even of the %ats of the laboratory" (ABR 26). But behind every appearance of

disintegration he fmds regimentation: " revo lu t ion~ thought is "dogma daily

manufactured in tons by the swarming staffs speciaüy trained for that worK' (ABR 25);

"liberatory" anti-inteiiectuaiism leads to blind and mechanistic action; spurious

individuality is clairned through group identification.

Eüding makes her critiques of modernity largely through what she sees as its

manifestations in the literary culture of her age. Modernity for Lewis began with the

Reformation, when "Luther appealed for the individual soui direct to God, and the power of

aü rnediating authority was definitely broken" (ABR 27).' Riding's periodization follows,

roughly, that posited by T.S. Eliot in his account of the "dissociation of sensibility . , . from

which we have never recovered" (64). Eliot marks a break at some point in the seventeenth

century, by means of the fundamental difference between Dome, Marvell, and Herbert on

one hand and Milton and Dryden on the other. Riding's periodization does not coincide

exactly; she sees Donne, for instance, "stand[ing] like a Janus between these two periods"

(CS 13), rather than exemplary of the earlier one. But the nature of the shift each is trying to

identify is more or tess the same. Riding writes that the eighteenth century "demandeci a

formal inhurnanity of the poet . . . . instead of passion, there was intelligence" (CS 13-14);

EIiot writes thiit Milton and Dryden %unph with a dazzling disregard of the soul" (66).

In Contemporuries and Snobs (1928) she identifies in the EIizabethan poets heaithy signs

of natural idiosyncrasy: 'The Elizabethan üterary sense was capncious and eccentric. It

contradicted itself . . . . There are uniform eccenuicities in Elizabethan poetry because

Eiizabethan poets were personaiiy dive in an eccentric age, not because, as a rnass, they

obeyed a contemporary programme" (CS 12). The eighteenth century marks the point at

which humanity objectified itseIf hto a subject for formai study and standards of

impersonality Mtrated poetry. Between the Elizabethan period and the eighieenth cenniry,

she mites, '%as bom the natural man, the cornmon-sense antithesis to the emtic person. . .

. The sole provision left the creative genius was an impersonal intelligence which, not guided

by feelings, had to be guided by good manners" (CS 13).1°

Given bat Riding's social diagnoses are generally made by reference to

art-typicaily literature, and primdy poetry-and that modemist poetty is nothing if not

"eccentric," one may weU ask how she drew the conclusion that the individuals in the

modern world were king forced into ever greater conformity. In A Survey ofModemist

Poetry (1927), written in collaboration with Robert Graves, she argues tfiat there is so much

"eccentric variety" within modemist poetry precisely because it is trying to formaüze and

regulate itself by creating a "classicism":

the poetic faculty itself is caiied upon to invent the rituals by which it is to become

formaüzed; to do the impossible, in other words . . . . Modemism in the early

twentieth century . . . [set] itself the impossible task of individuaüy but not

individualisticaiiy creating a new classicism--a classicisrn founded on a

philosophicai theory which each p e t was bound to interpret differently because he

was not, so to speak, classically bom. (S 270)

Thus modemist criticism becomes "more dogmatic and unreai, poetry more eccentric and

chaotic" (S 277). As an explanatory account of rnodernist poeuy, this is obviously deficient,

but what is sigdlcant is that Riding links the insistent idiosyncrasy of modemist

poetry-symptomatic to so many cultural critics of the disintegraiion of a shared

culture-to a more fundamental trend towards inteliecrual unifonnity.

While Riding and Lewis have a common anxiety about the threat of intellectual

uniformity to independent thought, their analyses of the nature of that unifomiity diverge:

Lewis fin& the threat to the individual coming primarily kom the irrationalist phiiosopbies

of the era, which would discredit inteiiectuai independence both as an ideal and as a

possibility; Riding Gnds independent thought devaiued and discouraged by the ascendance

of the scientitic mode1 of howledge." Their analysis of modemism's complicity with the

hornogenizing trends of modernity, then, while tuming on the question of intellectmi

authority, diverge accordingly . Lewis oppsed modemist fiction because he oppsed what he calleci '"rime-

philosophy," and he opposed the Ti-philosophy in the name of art and the individual.12

En his afterword to Black Spanow's 1993 edition of Time and Western Man, Paul Edwards

offers an admirable summay of the ideas that Lewis designates by this temi, wotth quoting

here at length:

Lewis is concemed with groupings of ideas that deny creative power to man, or hand

creativity over to a Larger pwer of which man is oniy an instrument; or simiiarly

deny that history results from men's conscious decisions, attributhg a fatality to it

instead; that disparage the reality and individuaiity of consciousness by depicting it

as a peripheral surfaceeffect of a more real, undifferentiated and irrational

unconscious; tbat exait those forms of social life which have not traditionally

exercised conscious, W e d and decisive behaviour (associated in Western cultures

with masculine gender) but have uaditionaily been characterized by passivity and

inesponsibility, such as children and the insane [Edwards evidently cannot bring

himseif to write women herej; that deny power to the human intellect by claiming

that the materiai world it perceives is a false constmction of reality, so that the

inteiiect's deliverances bave oniy a relative, inferior validity; that assert that the

freeing of "deeper" unconscious forces in ourselves wiii put us in touch with a We-

force perceived only dimly, at bat, by the intellect; that deny the capacity of the

intellect to fornulate any tmth or vision that is not predetermined by

ideology-groups of ideas that yet present this vision of life as if it represented for

the human race a libention ffom the oppression of outrnoded systems of thought

that had enslaved humanity in the chains of a dead, mechanical rationalism. (7'KM

466)

in short, Lewis, in the era of Bergson and Freud (not to mention theosophy), was invested in

the Enlightenrnent conception of the human mind as, in its highest maNfestations,

crystalline, powerful, free, and transcendent of its animal ongins. AU critiques of rationai

selfdetermination raise troublesome questions about individuai agency, a concept no one

will relinquish entirely; Lewis's response to twentieth century antirationalism is not obtuse,

oniy exaggerated. Indeed, in his critical works he does himseif occasionaiiy address the

instability of the Enlightenment conception of individual iaentity.13 If he defends the

rational muid beyond reason most of the tirne, it is not just because he was convinced that

art and inteUectua1 independence were inseparable, but because he felt that Tirne-philosophy

exacerbated the intellectuai passivity that bolstered the capitalkt plutwracy and the rnüitary

industrial cornplex. "Bergson's philosophy of movement and chcinge makes hirn the best

spokesman of the iife lived by the average american business man," he wams, and, should it

suit the purposes of the brokers of power, "Within ten years England would be at war with

Scotiand . . . if the propaganda and educational ctiannels received orders to that end" (ABR

334, 106). In dernoçratic societies, he argues, people are governed by ideas, not force; thus a

man "must be prepared to sink to the level of chronic tutelage and slavery, dependent for aU

he is to live by upon a world of ideas and its manipulators, about which be knows nothing:

or he must get hold as best he cm of the abstract principles involved in the very

"intelIectuai" machinery set up to control and change him (TWM xi). Lewis appears

honestly to believe that if modemist writers reaIiy understoud the affiliations and

consequences of the The-philosophy their works were absorbing they wouid stop writing

as they did, it k ing conuary to their tme interests as individuals and as artists.

Lewis did, unquestionably, recognize the modemist fiction he arraigned as the best

fiction of his age, and he does cmfully distiaguisb his ideological dissections h m

evaluative Literary criticism. In Paleface he forewams the reader that "these essays do not

corne under the head of 'Iiterary criticism.' They are Witten purely as investigations into

contemporary States of mind" (P 97). Likewise, Men Without Art is intduced as "uot . . . about the craft of writing w painting, except incidentalIy" (MiVA 14), and the opening

essay on Hemingway is prefaced with the understateci acknowiedgment tbat "set[ing] out to

demonstrate the political signifcance of this artist's work is not the best way . . . io bring

out the beauties of the Gnistied product" (MWA 19). But his opposition to Time-

phdosophy means that his praise always cornes packed in ambivalence. Thus while "the art

produced in conjunction with this great movement rime-philosophy] is actualIy becter

. . . than former European art," its contamination by the destructive politics of that

philosophy rneans that it is "spoilt": "Its speculativt integrity, its detachment [is]

sacrificed. It ail seems to acquire a mad, evii, or hysterical twist. But also it fkquently

reaches a beauty that is new in Europe" (ABR 345).

Lewis's assaults on the luminaries of modemist literature-Joyce, Stein, Pound,

Lawrence, Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolf, and Eliot-issue h m the fundrurienta1

contention that they embody and purvey the erroneous notions of the philosophers of

modem irrationalism which they have absorbed uawittingly or taken up un~ritically.'~

While he did uphold an ideal of a purely disinierested art, Lewis is to be credited for his

perspicuous recognition of the ideoIogical nature of high culhuai products, a truism of our

own tirne but not of his, As a result of îhis recognition-which, as we shall see, he was in

fact more inciined to exploit than to ûanscend-lewis tends to view fiction as Little more

than the sensuous embodiment of ideas issuing h m the various disciplines of howledge.

He puts this at tirnes in t e m truly hereticai to the sacred modemist fusion of "form" and

"content," prefacing, for instance, his anaiyses of Sherwood Anderson and Lawrence with

the explanation that "it is my intention to squeeze out al1 the essentiai meaning that there is

in the works 1 select, and to leave onIy the purely Litenry or artistic sheils" (P 11 1).

T h e fictionist," he writes, "is the middleman conveying philosophic notions to

the mincis of people not accessible to ideas in anything but a sensuous and immediate

form" (P 166); the same statement, in only siightiy varying terms, appears in each of Es

major critical works. The "iictionist," however, is not an intelpreter of philosophical ideas,

nor a pedagogue, but something closer to a robot on an ideological assembly iine, receiving

ideas by "automatic processes" and unreflectiveIy "applying" them (P 98). Thus like Su

Phillip Sydney who offered up paetq as "food for the tenderest stomachs," Lewis offers

his analyses of fictionai works as ways of easing iiis ''phin reader" fiom sensual pablum

to the roughage of abstract thought. Tnne mid Western Man begins with analyses of fiction

as a means of presenting his argument "in the plainest manner" possible ( W M xk); Men

Without Art offers to kgin with "a little foothold in mere personality for those who prefer

persons to ideas," "progressing by easy stages from the particuiar to the general" (MWA

11).

Lewis virtuaily aiways speaks of fiction as having this subordhate role vis a vis

abstract thought, but does not consider this a problem with the nature of fiction itself. The

relationship of fiction to phdosophicd ideas is oniy problematic in the absence of cohesive

social authority, Fonneriy guîded by the "central authority" of a coherent society, he saw

writers in bis time as left at the mercy of the wily impresarios of modern homogenization:

"It would not be easy to exaggerate," he writes, "the naïverd with which the average artist

or writer to-day, deprived of ail central authority, body of knowIedge, tradition, or commoniy

accepted system of nature, accepts what he receives in place of those things"

(P 104). in ages of social coherence, the subject matter of an artist "is given to him by his

age. . . . . He is tied hand and foot . . . to the values of his patrons. Their mords are his

mords; it is the Weltanschauung that perforce he holds in common with them that is his

subject-matter" ( M A 157). in modemity the best minds of Europe are "outlaws,"

because "there is no law to which we can appeal, upon which we can rely, or that it is worth

our while any Longer to interpret, even if we could" (P 83).

It is due to the absence of my such Iaw that Lewis urges that good writers will

scmpuiously Fiiter ideas out of their fiction, a stance he takes over and over again in his

critical books. In Paleface (1929) he claims that neutrai "observation must be the only

guarantee of the [fictionist's] usefulness, as much as of his independence" (P 98), and in

The Diabolical Principle (193 1) that "to mot politics out of art is a highly necessary

undenaking: for the hedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely u p n its objectivity

and non-practical, non-partisan passion" (DPDS 40). Objective and non-partisan are

among the adjectives least suited to descni the fiction Lewis wrote up to 1932-Tav, The

Wiid Body, The Apes of God, The Chiidermass, and Snooty Baronet, and even the later The

Revenge for Love. hdeed, both The Wiid Body and Snoory Baronet are explicitly p-nted

as iIIustrations of abstract principles, and with the same tone of condescension with which

he presents his analyses of fiction to the "plain readers" of Time and Western M m and

Men Without Art, Having outlined his theory of humour, Ker-Orr explains that he wiii teii

us the stocks of ùis travels rather than elaborate the theory, because "most men do not

easiiy detach the p ~ c i p l e fiom the Living thing . . . and so when handed the abstraction

alone do not know what to do with it, or they apply it wrongly" (CWB 19). Keii-Imrie the

"snooty Baronet" displays the same almost compulsive need to assert that he is capable of

striding through abstract realms but must needs stoop a little for more earth-bound minds:

1 should prefer to make it clear at once at ali events that I occupy myself oniy with

scientific research. Such clairn as 1 may have to be a man-of-letters, reposes only

upon the fact that my investigations into the nature of the human king have led me

to employ the arts of the myth-maker, in order the better to present (for the purposes

of popular study) my human specirnens. (SB 3)

As in Paleface and The Diabolical Principle, in Time and Western Man Lewis writes that

the author rnust not only understand the sources and implications of his ideas, but that "it is

equaily his business . . . to take steps to keep these ideas out" (IWM 136). Here, however,

the claim is qualified by the ensuing clause, "except sucli as he may require for his worK'

(TWM L36, my itaiicsFa compressed acknowledgment and defense of his own "noveis of

ideas." This obtrusive contradiction with his insistence on disinterestedness is a seif-

exemption. While Lewis maintained as an ideal an art pristinely k e of ideology, it is cIear

that at least when it came to his own fiction, he was ready to opt instead to exploit the

potential of the medium to nanipulate thought and behaviour towards what he considered

the best interests of the individual and of art.

Riding's critique of modernist poetry coincides with Lewis's critique of modernist fiction

in its centrai contention: modernist poets, she claims, have lost their independence and have

begun to write in subordination to the p~va i ihg anti-individuaiistic ideologies of modemity.

The detaiis of her accounts of the nature of modernity and the nature of literary modernism,

however, are substantially different h m Lewis's. She has two accounts, not quite

commensurable, of the premodern relationship of poetry to the intellectuai authority of its

age. The fmt is that poetry was once the highest articulation of the thought of its society;

the poet endowed the prevailing ideology the seai and force of authority (this is roughly

analogous to Lewis's conception of the society with a "central authority" which the artist

couid "illustrate and interpret"). The second is that poets always gave expression to their

idiosyncratic perceptions and senses of Me, but that these were at one tirne received as in

some way authoritative-as having general relevance and some purchase on "tmth." (Bab

Perelman refers to this imagined time as "the originary, paradisal space where genius

creates value" (IO).) In both these accounts, however, modeniity-identitied with the rise of

empiricism-is seen as revoking the poet's clairn to any sort of authority. Riding sees

modernist poets as complying obediently with this revocation in various ways, but primariIy

by relinquishing their individual "senses of life," or "personal tmth," and accepting the

externai and system-based authority of empiricism in its place.

Riding's most extensive consideration of specific modemist poets appears in A

Survey of Modemist Poetry. The book is addressed to the "plain reader," ostensibly

offering an explanation of the more bewildering aspects of modernist poetry. Riding and

Graves are unquestionably defending the formai innovations of modernist poetry-for the

most part in positive terms, but at the very least as "a deterrent against the production of old

fashioned trash" (S 110). However, she and Graves cautiously and only implicitly idenm

themselves as "modernists," being at al i times concemed to distinguish a true h m a fdse

modernism: 'There is . . . a genuine modernism, which is not a part of a 'modeniist'

probymme but a natural personal manner and attitude in the poet to his wodr, and which

accepts the denomination 'modernist' because it prefers this to other denominations" (S

156). They defend modemist poetry fiom criticism they consider inappropriate to it, but

advance their own critique, h m quite another angle.

In a chapter titled "Modeniist Poetry and Civilization" Riding and Graves detail a

number of the characteristics that distinguish modemist from conventional poetry. The

principal characteristics, and the authors associated with them, are as foIiows: 1. "Sympathy

for low life and the use of the vocabulary of low Me" as an "earnest romantic

progressiveness" (curnmings); 2. "close juxtaposition of elegance and vuigarity," "the

poet's low-brow satire of his own elegance" (T.S. Eliot); 3, "cultivation of fine-writing,"

outdoing the Fast in eIegance (Sachevereu Sitwell and Eliot); 4. "utterly hopeless and

unpurposed pessirnism" (Cunard); 5. the incorporation of "learned vanities and

sophistications" from the fields of psychology (Read, Macleish, Lawrence), philosophy

(Aiken and Eliot) and encyclopedic leaming in general (Moore and Eliot); 6. (ce1ated to 5)

"abnormal cultivation of the classics, especially of the more remote classics" and "literary

intemationalism" in the form of "the incorporation of foreign tongues and atmospheres"

(Pound and Eliot); and fin4!y 7. "fivolousness" (Stevens) (S 165-174).

Riding and Graves recognize, and with l e s ambivalence than Lewis does, that the

poetry they are anatomizing in such unflattering terms is the best of their age: "one thing at

least is clear, that in modemist poetry . . . is to be found the best and undoubtedly the most

enduring contemporary poetry" (S 178).'' But just as Lewis found modemist fiction

"spoilt" by its entanglement with Time-philosophy, so Riding and Graves find the poetry

"weakened or perverted by its race with civilization" (S 178). Heterogeneous as their study

Ends the tendencies of modemist poetry to be, they identify them d, with a synthesizing

Lewisian sweep, as symptoms of "strain"-strain produced by poetry's attempt to "justify

itself to civilization" (S 174). The comection between the characteristics detaiied above and

a "race with civilization" is by no means self-evident. It relies on the account Riding and

Graves give of society's Wtional use of poetry as the "high polish of civilization" (S

161). This, they argue, was a misuse of poetry, the consequence of which was that it became

"a constantly expanding institution, embodying h m pend to period aii the rapidy

developing specialized forms of knowledge" (S 162). This condition, in late modemity,

leads to a reductio ad absurdwn, and "civilization" tells "poetry that it cannot keep up

with it, that it must disappear in the oId sense of an Uiterpretation and mirror of Iife" (S

167).

The idea that poetry once had its social place as the embodiment of the knowledge

of a period goes undeveloped in Suwey; Riding and Graves's t e m are vague and

irnpressionistic But what their account points to is a keen sense that the disciplines of

knowledge had come to constitute a challenge to poetry, and that this chaiienge was the

tectonic force beknd modernism in paetry. Thus tiiey see modernist pcetry as essentiaüy

reactive: it subrnits to the pressure of the disciplines of knowledge either by abandoning al1

seriousness of purpose, or by suuggling to "keep up" by incorporating into itself more

and more of those disciplines, growing ever more erudite and encyclopedic. Riding and

Graves's is, like Lewis's, a capacious explanatory net, No matter what modemism does, it is

caught. Whether modemism is Hemingway or modeniism is Joyce, it is for Lewis a

manifestation of Tie-phiiosophy; whether it is Wiams or Eliot, it is for Riding and

Graves a reaction to the challenge of the contemporary disciplines of knowledge.

The challenge of contemporary knowIedge to poetry, Survey suggests, is the

challenge of authority. The demonstration of modemist poetry's various modes of reaction

to contemporary knowledge does not make up the greatest part of Survey; much more space

is devoted to the argument that modernist poets-this is Riding's and Graves's chief

grîevanc+write as a group and not as individuals. This abdication of individual singularity

they see as directly related to the mander of authority in modemity from the disthguished

individual (monarch, prophet, priest, or genius) to the impersonal, collectively established

bodies of empiricai or quasi-empirical knowledge. The argument goes like this: poetry in

modecnity has been narrowed dom into a specialized branch of culture. Unwilling to accept

so marginal a place, poetry attempts to "provide itseif with artificiai dignity and Tace

[through] historical depth": "if [poetry's] significance in a particular period is not greater

than the size of a dot on the period's tirnechart, then to make itseif an authoritative

expression of this pend, it must extend this dot into the past .. . . Poetty becomes the

tradition of poetry," and the tradition of p u y becomes little more than an institution which

"the modemist poet k d s himself serving as an affiliated member" [S 261).

Riding and Graves base this argument about the state of modemist poetry as much

on the natute of modemist criticism as on poerns themselves. They see modemist criticism

as routinely ireating the hecerogeneous practices of poeay over the ages as a coherent

tradition, and p m s themselves as expressions not of individual min& but of the great

social overmind, the Zeitgeist. This modernist criticism, which they c d '?he new

classicism," is a blend of Eliot (though in this context he goes unnamed) and T.E. Hulme.

Eliotic criticism digns the poet with a 'tradition": "It invents a communal poetic mind

which sits over the p e t whenever he writes" (S 2a); it "force[s] poetry to hide its

personai criminalities behind the pnvilege-walis of literary tradition" (CS 16). Hulmean

criticism aligns the pet with the Zeitgeist. In Huhe's historicai schema individual creative

productions are treated as "incidental to the age and a corroboration of it" (CS 152):

[Tl he appearance of inevitabIe coordination is forced upon puy and . . . it seems

to Iose authority unless it imposes cosrdination. Poetry cannot be left to its fate

with the pet , whose proportionate authority is now as infinitesimai as the

constituents of the atom. The ody way to give poetry formai authority is through

some phifosophicai system iike the one Hulme roughiy suggested. (CS 153)16

Both the Eliotic and the Hulmean ways of talking about poetry elide the singular and

independent creative persondity. Modemkt criticism, then, k e the various tendencies of

modernist poetq, is itsdf anothercapitulation to the pressure of the knowiedge disciphes,

and acts to encourage, if not compel, the continuauce of poehy's capit~lation.'~

The objection to the elision of the creative mind in cntical accounts of poetic

creation, present in Suney, is pronounced in Contemporuries and Snobs: the k t section of

the book is titled "Shame of the Person," and the opening premise is that poetry is a

"sense of üfe so real that it becomes the sense of sometbing more than He," and that this

sense can only be "personai" (CS 9). In the contempo- world, however, the p e t is

"less and less . . . permitted to rely on personai authority":

The very word genius . . . has k e n boycoaed by criticism . . . because professional

Litenture develops a shame of the person, a snobbism against the personal self-

reiiance wfüch is the nature of genius. What is all current literary modernism but the

will to extract the Literary sense of the age h m the Zeitgeist at any cost to creative

independence? The readiness to tesort to any contemporary fetish rather than to the

poetic person? (CS 10).

The rest of Conremporaries and Snobs, as weil as Anarchism 1s Not Enough (1928), which

followed it, is Iargely devoted to fonnulating, against a i l manifestations of human

colIectivity, a radical conception of individuai and of poetic autonomy; this stage of Riding's

thought, and its culmination in Progress ofstories, will be traced in Chapter 4 of this study.

0

The crucial agreement between Lewis's and Riding's criticisms of literaty modernism is

that both see in it a subordination of the individual creator to extemai inteiiectuai authority:

in Lewis's scenario the modernist is a purveyor of ideas he or she barely understands; in

Riding's scenario the modemist has gone bowing to the authority of the knowledge

disciplines, incorporating their materials on the one hand, constricthg itself into a

"discipline" on the other.

It is not the case, 1 wish to stress, that Riding and Lewis were insensitive to, or, for

that matter, uninfiuenced by, the achievements of their contempocaries. Their trouble was, at

Ieast in part, that they were hypersensitive to the problem that the speciaiization of

knowledge in modemity poses for individual inteiiectual independence-which is a real, not

an imagined problem. Tmt in expert systems, as Giddens has argued, is a constitutive

feature of modemity, and expert systems in the twentieth centuxy have corne to have

authority over more and more aspects of everyday life. Giddens's analysis concentrates on

trust in technoIogica1 knowledge and the professions (doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers), but

the same conditions apply to the relationship between the individual and the increasingly

specialized and scientized humanities, particuiarly psychology and sociology, but aiso

politicai studies and economics. Individual understanding of humanity and society, if it is to

be inteilectualiy responsible, involves, more and more, the obligation to suspend general

conclusions drawn from persona1 observation and experience and to defer to the more

authoritative conclusions of expert system.

This is the problem not just of the artist in modemity, but of everyone. "No, one,"

Giddens, writes, '%an completely opt out of the abstract systerns involved in modern

institutions" :

This is most obviously the case in respect of such phenomena as the risk of nuclear

war or of ecologicd catastrophe. But it is tme in a more thoroughgoing way of large

tracts of &y-to-day iife, as it is lived by most of the population. Individuais in

premodem settings, in principIe and in practice, could ignore the pronouncements of

priests, sages, and sorcerers and get on with the routines of daiiy activity. But this is

not the case in the modern worid, in respect of expert knowledge. (84)

Independence becomes for Riding and Lewis a particularly consurning problem because it

was for them an axiom beyond interrogation that art was a product of the individual mind.

Anything that encouraged intellecnial dependency, therefore, posed a threat to the future of

art, and the total demise of art was something botfi Riding and Lewis were able to senously

entertain. "If criticism of this son [the "new classicism"] persists there is no doubt that . . . poetry will disappeai' (A 115), writes Riding; and Lewis, at the concIusion of his study of

modemist fiction, defmes his aim in the book as having been to direct the reader's attention

'?O a question of great moment-uamely, whether the society of the immediate future

should be composed for the k t time in civilized history, of Men without art" (MWA 234).

The idea that art is dependent on individuality was of course an axiom of the early

twentieth century, as much for maay the modecnists Riding and Lewis attacked as it was for

them. Pessirnism about the fate of individuality and of art was ais0 pervasive, pdcularly in

the twenties and thirties, superseding utopian pre-war hopes for an age of unprecedented

artis tic floucishing and prominence. For Eüding and Lewis, however, this apprehension was

exceptionaüy acute, and their analyses of the evidence for it often seem paranoid in their

extrema and obsessive in their length and continuity. Riding and Lewis are, to be sure,

exaggerated figures, but as such they are instructive. in their works we can see magnified

the central and very reai problematics to which aü of modernism is a response: the status of

the arts in modernity, and the place of the artist in mass society, which is the subject of the

following chapter.

Notes

' For a detded account of Lewis's years in pre-war London, see Jeffrey Meyers's

biography The Enemy, chapters 3 to 5.

There was in the ViUage circles, according to Deborah Baker, Riding's (unofficial)

biographer, an invidious "distinction between those who attended iiterary dimers and those

who did not . . . literary ladies were the last invited. in fact Riding met Cowley and Wilson

only once, although they were both close fiends of Tate's" (73).

' Their relationship seerns to have been one of signiticant but relatively short-lived interest.

Jeffiey Meyers's biography of Lewis makes no mention of Riding; Baker's biography

mentions only the Ietters h m Graves to Lewis after Riding's much gossiped-about leap

fiom the window of their London apartment in 1929. In additions to poems considered for

The Enemy, Riding sent Lewis sections of Contemporaries and Snobs, and in January

1930, a few months after she and Graves had moved to Maiiorca, Riding wrote Lewis

requesting a copy of The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Specraror, the

publication of which had been recently announced. In the finai section of that book, Lewis

acknowledges in passing Riding's fairly lengthy consideration of him in Anurchism 1s Nor

Enough, which bad appexed shortiy after Contempomries and Snobs in 1928. Riding had,

essentiaily, praised Lewis's individualkm but cr i t icki bis undertaking to couvert the world

to his way of thinking tfirough Iengthy argumentation. Lewis remarks that "Miss Riding is

not so bad as some 'admirers,' k ing on the honest side" (DPDS 155). A letter of 1934,

however, shows Riding to have decided that Lewis, like most writers, "seem[s] to be

interested, exdusively, in [his] own iiterary advancement." "And as for Torr," she adds,

'Yornpared with Wyndham Lewis's tater work it's not so bad" (Letter to Mr. Abramson,

Feb. 1934, rns. 32-6, Corneii University Libnry, Ithaca, New York).

' The iridebtedness of the New Criticism's analytic technique to Riding and Graves, via

Wiiiiam Empson, has been fairly widely acknowledged, though the issue is mired in the

controversy over the collaborative authorstiip of Sutvey. In his preface to the fint edition of

Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Empson acknowledged his debt to the anaiysis of the

Shakespeare sonnet in Survey, but cited Graves atone as the author. Frompted by Riding's

protest. the second edition acknowledged the CO-authorship; Empson rescinded the credit,

however, in the 1947 edition, writing that "[Grave4 is, so far as 1 know, the inventor of the

method of analysis 1 am using here." Though Survey had appeared with the statement that

the book was a "word-by-word" coilaboration, in 1966 Graves claimed Eull credit for the

analytic method worked out in Suwey. Riding publicly tetaliateci in The Modem Languuge

Quarterly in 197 1 and in The Denver Quarterfy in 1974. As early as 1964, however, she

had supplied a commentary on Survey to be included with the CorneU Library's copy of the

bwk, in which she stated that "it is appropriate to record that 1 am the originator of the

technique of linguistic examination-tbe pressing upon each word in its place in its relation

to the others-appiied in the book to the Shakespeare sonnet (and evident elsewhere in it),

and adopted by Wiam Empson for his Melong use as his critical meththodogy (a

methodology that distorted the technique into speculative improvisations)" (''Commentary

by Laura Riding on A Suniey of Modemisr Poetry," ts. 95-23, Corneii University Library,

Ithaca, New York). Joyce Piell Wexler notes that some critics trace the origin of New

Critical method to the Fugitives; Riding, however, clairns that she influenced them, not vice

versa. See Baker, 139-144, Barbara Adams, 25-26; Joyce Piell Wexler, 14-15.

My information about Riding's life and the details of her publishing activity come fiom

the only biographical source available to date, Baker's In Ertremis: The Lifte of Laura

Riding.

1 have found no mention of Riding in the writings of Pound, who would Likely have read

her poetry. K.K. Ruthven notes that Eliot rejected the poems and essays that Riding

submitted to Crirerion (and that the fiiendship of Eliot and Graves broke d o m over their

disagreement about the quality of Riding's poetry) (248). Yeats, however, wanted to include

some of her poems (and Graves's) in his 1936 OMord Book of Modern Verse, but was

refused permission, as he notes at the close of his introduction. When preparing her papers

for Comeii, Riding attached a typescript to a review of her poetry which mentions her

exclusion from Yeats's anthology. She refused permission, she explains (and Graves,

presumably, followed suit), "because he would not include among the younger choices

some of the work of James Reeves, which 1 considered at least as worthy of inclusion as

certain other choices . . . indeed, of superior quaiity, in workmanship and feeling" (n.d., ts.

LOOd, Corneli University Library, Ithaca, New York).

' Jeffiey Meyers tells the story in detail in Chapter 4 of his biography, The Enemy.

On the matter of Riding's vigilant control over the use and intetpretation of her works,

see aiso K.K. Ruthven's "How to Avoid Being Canonized: Laura Riding."

Although Lewis speaks of modernity, he sees his world, more precisely, as a "transitional

society" (ABR 25) or "interregnum" (P 83-e destructive phase between the coUapse of

one civilization and the establishment of another, between the modern world of European

domination and some post-modern global culture which had yet to take shape. The

Bergsonian world of the "Time phüosophy" that he inveighs against so inexhaustibly is

the last stage of the modem world. Thus Lewis presents his analysis of the T ï e

phiiosophy in Men Without An as "a sort of ark, or dwelling for the mind, designed to float

and navigate , . , for a very complete and profound inundation is at hand" (MWA 26), and

his proposais for social reorganization are generally presented as "the principles that are to

govern the building, the other side of the pulling down" (MWA 19 1). For the sake of

convenience, however, 1 will speak of Lewis's "transitional society" as modemity,

understood to be modemity breathing its last.

'O Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" refers of course to the difference between pets

who "[felt] their thought as irnmediately as the odour of a rose," whose minds "constantly

amalgamat[ed] disparate experience" to form "new wholes" and those poets in whose

works language and feeling are discemibly separate, the language growing more refined, the

feeling cruder, and the whole given over more and more to ratiocinative and descriptive

modes (Eliot 64-65). That Eliot was not advocating the revitalization of contempocary poetry

by the infusion of personal emotion is weli known; that Riding was not advocating any such

thing either wiil becorne clear in Chapter 4 of this study.

Riding's remarks follow Eliot's farnous review of Grierson's anthology by about

seven years. When Eliot's review appeared in the Times Lirerary Supplement in October

192 I , Riding was 20 years old and living in the Arnerican mid-west with Louis Gottschalk,

ber husband of less than a year. It is not impossible that she read the piece at that time, and

very likely that she did so some tirne later. Riding thought highly of Eliot's p u y , and

though she attacks some of his cnticai principles (primarily, as did Lewis, the idea of

"impersonality"), Baker notes that in a 1925 M t of Contemporaries and Snobs Riding

had "express[ed] debts" to Eliot (161).

Throughout this snidy 1 use the term "scientific mode1 of howIedge7' interchangeably

with "empiricism" to denote the epistemology that holds that tnie knowledge is the product

of unbiased observation and experimentation, and that only propositions that c m be

disproven cm be judged to be me.

In his preface to Time and Western Man Lewis uses-in the space of two

paragraphs-'Time-cult," 'Time-mind," and Time-view" interchangeably with 'Time-

philosophy"; these variations, as well as 'Tirne-school," appear throughout the work. This

study wiil use the term 'The-philosophy" for the sake of consistency.

The "'self' or 'personality,'" writes Lewis in Men Without Art, "is merely a living

adequately at any given momenty' ( M A 62). For a brief review of Lewis's reflections on

the instabiiity of the self, particularly in relation to the creative process, see Paul Edwards's

afterword to Time and Western Man, 46 1-63. The vision of the self as a combination of

primitive instinct and ideologicai interpeiiation-the image of the automaton-is boih the

muse of Lewis's fiction and the spectre it tries to exorcise.

'' The degree of conscious awareness attributed to the petpetrators is ambiguous in Lewis's

work and in Riding's. On the whole, Lewis attributes the modernists' aüiance with the

homogenizing forces of modemity to a cenain inteiiectual insuficiency and consequent

ideological susceptibility on the part of the authors. There is a suggestion in Lewis that the

more capabIe the rnind of the author, the more culpable he or is. Shemood Anderson, for

instance, is assessed as "far from realizing . . . where Ws] ideologic borrowings would Iead

him had he the curiosity to trace them back to their true sources" (P 220); his judgment of

James Joyce is much the same ( M A 73-109). D.H. Lawrence receives a Little more credit:

'4 daresay . . . [he] knows to an extent" where his ideas are coming h m , but "probably is

not over clear as to whither they are bound, or what their affiliations are" (P 249). The most

concIusive thing we can Say is that Riding and Lewis do not hold modernist writers culpable

for insufficient inteliectuai vigour and critical capacity per se, but for continuing to write in

spite of it.

l5 Riding and Graves are far more expticit and generous with their praise for some

modernist poetry than Lewis is, but actually harsher in their condemnaiions. They dismiss,

for instance, ail of hagism (with special acerbity for H.D. as its figurehead), and Pound in

several different modes. In the case of Imagism the hostility appears to be provoked

pmicularly by its "massed organization as a Literary party" (S f 17); "no genuine poet or

artist," they write, "ever cded himseiiafter a theory or invented a name for a theory" (S

46), dismisshg with that smke most of the major figures in AnglcAmican and

continental modemism.

l6 This passage appears in Part 2 of Contemporaries and Snobs. Entitled 'TE Hulme, the

New Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein," it incorporaies parts of the concluding chapter of

Survey, which Riding m t e without Graves. Wrinen and arranged in overlapping stages,

Survey of Modernist Poetry was published in November 1927, Contemporaries and Snobs

in February 1928, and harchism 1s Na Enough in May 1928 (Baker 160). An earIier

version of the material fiom the essay on Stein and HuIme appeared in transition in June

1927 with the note that it w u "Part iV of an essay entitled 'T.E. Hulme, The New

Barbarism, and Gertrude Stein"; published as Part 2 of Contemporaries and Snobs, the

essay has only three parts,

l7 The quasi-Hegetian approach chat Riding perceives in modernist criticism is of course

much older than modemism. The nineteenrh century, according to David Hoeveter, brought

into prominence the use of literahue as "a measure of the historicaliy developing national

spirit" (Hoeveler 68). This histoncal emphasis encoutaged "a kind of scientinc study of art

by using works as historicd documents"; the praçtitioner of îhe histoncal methad "tumed

from the spirit of the author to the spirit of the age as their primaq consideration"

(HoeveIer 68-69). The American New Humanists Irving Babbitt and Paui Elmer More, the

subjects of Hoeveler's discussion, dso opposed this use of Literature on the grounds of its

subordination of the individuai creator. This consideration of p t r y as a feaiure of history

is of course related to the emergence of what J.P. Ward has calied "the soçioiogical mode

of thought" that "cornes into the world as a result of the materializing or secularizing of the

descriptions of ali other phenornena-" "We are subject, in this en," Ward argues, '?O the

sociological idea perhaps above di other modes of cognition," and "[iiterary] criticism has

moved rnassively across into accepting cfiat doUminanceW (in RasuIa, Amencan Poerry 427-

28).

C H A P T E R T W O

The Aesthetics of Distinction

Crowd Control

in their accounts of the threats tbat modern wciety poses to individuality, Riding and Lewis,

as we have seen, single out different, indeed contnry, aspects of modem thought. Lewis's

focus is on the fundamentai irrationalism of the philosophicai trends he IabeIs Tirne-

philosophy; Riding h d s everywhere evidence of the dominering logic of empiricism.

Though their analyses diverge, their agreement about the hornogenizing current of

modemity leads, in both cases, to an anxiety about the modern mass.

In the Iate nineteenth and eariy twentieth century, the mass (or crowd), became the

subject of analysis in the worlrs not just of psychologists and sociologists, but of thinkers

concerned with broad cultutal issues. As Michael T m e r writes in Modernism and Mms

Politics, "a whoIe sub-genre of sociologicd-plitical treatises purporcing to anaiyze the

mass mind emerged ai i over Europe, panicuiarly in England" (1); most of these were

indebted to The Crowd, a study of the psychology of masses by the doctor a d some-tirne

anthropologist Gustave LeBon, which was published in Fmce in 1895 and reached

England in translation two years later. The crowd minci, LeBon argued, is charactehd by

unanimity and emotionality, and he singIed out emparhy, or emotional identification, as the

psychological function by which people rehquish their individual distinction and merge

into a group. LeBon was interested in hding ways in which the irrationality of the crowd

mind could be exploited for politicai advantage; many of those inûuenced by his work,

however, took the inationality of the mas as grounds for its poiitical suppression. As

Vincent Sherry demonstrates in detail in Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical

Modemism the understanding of the mas mind as a function of individuai empathetic self-

forgetting appears in numerous English and European cultural and political works fiom the

turu of the century to the late nineteen-Mes. Among the most infiuential writers to take up

this theme were, for the English modeniists, Julien Benda and Rémy de Gourmont.

Seeking politicai significance in aesthetic experience, Benda and Gourmont

identified an "essential connection between musical sensation and populist coliectivism";

music, they found, "joins aü members of the audience in a spurious but formidable unity"

(Sherry 4).' in Belphégor (19 18), Benda identifies empathy "almost entirely as a musical

and aura1 experience," arguing that the "aura1 ernpathy that binds tisteners to music-and

to other listeners-leads to feelings of demotic gigantism" and that the "art of the lyric is

heard to work ever in the service of collective, populist themes" (Sherry 16-17).~

Sherry's study concentrates specifically on the subsequent promotion of visuai over

acoustic aesthetics in modernist criticism and, in particuiar, in the works of Pound and

Lewis. in his analysis of the Canto& he traces the narrative of ascent h m the clamour of

demotic voices to the vantage point of silent isolation, the encoding of "opticai separation"

in imagery and prosody, and the presiding "plan of spatial order and architectural

proportion" (163, 146), noting a h Pound's inabiity, in his music criticism, to relinquish

the values and the language of visuai and plastic fom? He demonstrates Lewis's attempt, in

The Childennuss (1 928) and The Apes of Gad (1930) to make literature over in the image

of painting by substituthg "opticd rules for normal lexicai Iaws" (103). The struggle is

against cadence as weii as continuity; the resulting concatenations of exûeme and disruptive

metaphors result in a style he caüs 'iinmusicai to a fauItl' (106):

Sherry's carefd analyses attend to the thematic and formai denigration of empathetic

musicality and the enshrinement of visual detachment; his work does not, however, consider

how political and philosophical opposition to empathy may Iead to attempts to inhiibit the

empathetic immersion of readers in iiterary works. Listening to music, ualike teading, is (or

was, at that time) primdy a collective activity; it was particularly suspect because it brought

listeners not just into empathetic union with the music, but with each other. But l i t e w , and

particulariy fiction, aIso promotes empathetic seif--forgetting; indeed, the extent to which it

transports the reader into its "world," and induces the reader to expenence that world

through the emotions and sensibilities of certain characters, remains one of the standard

cnteria of a work of fiction's success. Riding and Lewis, as we have seen, identify a variety

of ways in which their contemporaries succumb to the forces of modem anti-individualisni.

In their specific criticisms of moâernist fiction, they fmd the coiiusion of modernists with the

homogenizing forces of modernity not only in subject rnatter (celebrations of the primitive or

the epistemological ghetto of private emotion) and in technique (stream-of-conscious

narration), but in the inciternent of ernpathetic response.

The mass for Riding is a more abstract thing than it is for Lewis, or for Pound or

Eliot. Throughout Contemporuries and Snobs and Anarchism 1s Not Enough, she speaks

dismissively of "the demwratic mass," and in Though Gently, a slirn volume of poerns and

short prose pieces issued in 1930, she expresses a contempt as damning as that of Nietzsche.

In the piece entitled 'The Crowd" she deciares almost messianically that the historicai

purpose of the mass has been fulfied and that it must now sink itseif into the material

satisfactions that are fmally avaiiable to it:

But hear, O crowd. You have existed always in the absence of the necessary

characters. It has been your honored function to appmximate the complete cycIe of

personalities, to cultivate, O crowci, the scene, in order that the required action may

not seem to emerge too frivolously frorn nothing. Very good. But this could not go

on forever. , . . My dear crowd, be persuaded that whatever your services in the past

nothing more is wanted of you now. . . . Hitheno you have had LittIe bread though

much priviiege. Now that the strain is over you may have bread; but,. , do not

pretend to lead. (TG 8-9)'

But Riding's antagonism towards the mass is never articuiated in tenns of national politics

or translated into a social vision, as in the cases of Lewis, Pound, and Eliot, nor does it lead

to daiiiance with fascism6

It was not until the civil war finaüy forced her and Graves and their circle of fiends

out of Spain in 1938 that Riding began to formulate anything resembling a political vision.

The vision she did develop that year, typicaliy modernist in ambition, entailed a complete

reorganization and transformation of society dong the lines of a morality of her own

devising. Her political units, however, were not the higher and the lower sort of human

beings, but the Manichean forces of good and evil. Rejecting politicai solutions to political

problerns, Riding undertook to form a "Councii of the Inside People" whose concerted

moral wili would avert the impending war and eliminate its instigators. The charter of the

council was issued by the Seizin Press in 1938 as a small booklet titled Covenant of

Literary Morality. "We institute," the Covenant declares, "a plenary action of judgment

against evil. The action starts within us, in the minci; and, as it spreads personaily from one

to the other of us, our individual condemations of evii wili becorne acompact power to

incapacitate the eviiiy disposed" (CLM 11).

Because the instrument of the Councii's power is the signatories' personal moral

discipline and mord wi., the Covenanr is not, practicaiiy speaking, a politicaiiy menacing

document. It is disturbing, however, in its moral absolutism, and it displays the paranoid

fanaticism now so familiar to us h m the very toialitarian regimes that the Convenant aimed

to disable:

With the instigators of evil politics mut be counted al whom they excite to

partisanship in action and thought . . . . The instruments of wtongdoing cannot be

judged innocent. There is now mch a clear demarcation to be made between good

and evii activity that we cannot afford to compromise our values by counting on the

side of good those who offend by helpiessness rather than evil wïli. . . . The task

that devolves upon us in this extreme moral climax of life is too solemn a one to

permit of lenient niceties . . . . ( C M 9)

The "wholiy evil," the Covenant ominously foretells, "wiii not survive their humbüng"

(CLM 9). The totalitarian declarations were at least short-lived. Riding and Graves left for

America later the same year and the Council soon dissolved under the domestic tensions

that led, within a year, to Riding's break with Graves and her rnarriage to Schuyler Jackson.

Aiter 1940 thece were no more plam for political intervention, though Riding did not give

up, as we shaii see in Chapter 5, on the cause of humanity.

Lewis's attitude towards the mas borders at times on phobic. His vicious attack on

"the small rnann+onceived as ?he smaii retailer and middleman"-in The Art of Being

Ruled is an example of this:

His hurnanity is of the sort that could be spared. . . . What is it that has always

brought to nothing the work of the creative mind, and made history an interminable

obstacle race for the mind which would otherwise be kee? Precisely the cornpetitive

jealousy of this famous "small man" . . . . He is not only the enemy of a unification

of the intelligent forces of the world; he is the symbol of what has always held back

our race . . . . The human race, anxious to be free to create, has had enough of this

precious "smaii man" and his s m d ways forever! ( U R 103-04)

And so forth, ad nauseum. But Lewis's strenuous insistence throughout his works that he

is defending individuality in the name of art hardly conceais the fact that he is also

defending the individuai in the name of anxiety about his own social distinction. As we have

seen in Chapter 1, he denounces philosophicai trends that attenuate the boundaries between

min& in part because he sees them as nanualizing the reduction of aii populations, by a

handfui of military-industrial plutocrats, to one vast m a s to be manipulated for profit. The

pacticular harshness of Lewis's contempt for the mass betrays an anxiety about his own

indistinction, in the eyes of contemporary power brokers, from those multitudes of srnail

men. Promising young artists and inteliectuals, after dl, bad been sent off to war to die with

the rest .

Siightly M e r on in The Art of Being Rule4 apparently having forgotten the

outburst quoted above, he denounces the "rage, disgust, misanthropy, and scom" thai have

been flung at the lower from the higher man. Human beings are by nature of two orders, his

argument goes, and the inteliectuais' "despairing abuse . . , is a mistake arising h m the

'democratic standards' from which the subject is approached" (ABR 127). Polemic is futile,

he suggests, and proposes instead a "scientific" solution: "the differentiation of mankind

into two rigorously separated worlds," a divide which would be "like a deep racial

difference, not a superficiai 'class' difference." With such a divide in place all animosity

would dissolve: "There is no 'upper' and 'lower' between a cat and a dog. So it would be

with the new species of man" (ABR 127). Lewis's ideal society, sketched in The An of

Being Ruled, is a creative-intellectual oiigarchy in which the mass of the popuIation is

permanently queiied in a deep waking slumber. Though he modifies this vision in

subsequent books, his initial impulse is not to contest the basic aim of the war-mongers and

capitalists, but to appropriate it, dreaming of dissolving hem into a stupefied mass before

they can dissolve him into one?

The Modem Tendency: Classicism, Dehumanuation, and the Critique of Empathy

Riding writes as though she stands utterly aione in her defense of individuality against the

homogenizing forces of modernity. It is extremely rare that she wiii acknowledge in p ~ t

the infiuence of writers past or present or identify actual or potential alliance with aspects of

contemporary thought! Lewis's anxiety about the mas, however, like that of TE. Hulme,

Pound, and Eliot, found definition, soiidatity, and impetus in the works of the French anti-

romantics? The infiuence of the French anti-romantic thinkers such as Charles Maurras,

Pierre Lasserre, Ernest Seillière, Gourmont, and Benda on the English modernists has been

weii-documented, particdariy in studies of individual authors; a brief overview of the

features of that movement wiii be of service hem.

Early twentieth-century French ami-romanticisrn was gdvanized by the Dreyfus

affair, which had polarized the nation's political right and lefi and producd the notorious

Action Française, a movement of militant myalisr Led by Maurras, and which was later to

collabonte with the Na&. Anti-romantic thinkers (not al1 of whom were associated with the

Action Française) blamed the fragmentation and conflict within French society on the

poiitical mrnanticism of the Revolution. They were of couse anti-dernocratic, but political

organization was only one cornponent of their sweeping critique of the enduring

romanticism in contemprary philosophy, culture, literature, and religion. The premise of ail

rornanticisrn was identified as the Rousseauist claim that human fiourishing is corrupted by

the unnatural impositions of traditional suciai structures; h m thai doctrine, they allege,

issues the moral and inteiiectuai laxity that results in contemporary social strife and cuitural

degradation. The prünary targets of the fmt anti-romantic books were Rousseau and Henri

ergso on"; the opposition to romanticism was also a vehicle for misogyny and a d -

Semitism. In the works of Maurras, Lasserre, and Benda particuiarly, romanticism is

identified with the feminine-with weakness, instability, sensuality, and emotion (Wagner

51-52), and "Jewish psychology" is routineiy discovered to be 'Teminine and close to that

of the child" (Wagner 77). It is this broad orientation that made the anu-romantics

congenial to the English writers, and enabled writers like Lewis and Pound, and, for that

matter, uving Babbiit, who did not s h m the religious sensibilities of Hulme and Eliot, to

absorb the French opposition to mrnanticisrn and democracy, but to dispense with the

monarchism and Catholicism.

The aesthetic counterpiut of phiiosophical ami-romanticism was hailed on both sides

of the Channel, as weii as in America, under the notoriously mublesome krm chsicim.

While the association of iiterary classicism with antidemocratic politics (whether

monarchist, fascist, or more vaguely authontarian or oligarchie) was clear, what it meant in

terms of contemporary aesthetic practice was much less so. In "Romanticism and

Classicism," a lechue pmbably delivered in London in 1912, Hulme writes that in French

Literary circles classicism had become, through the writings of Maurras, Lasserre, and the

Action Française "a political catchword" and a " p a q symboi": "If you asked a man of a

certain set whether he preferred the classics or the mmantics, you could deduce from that

what his poiitics were" (60). While past rnodels of literary cIassicism could be identified

without dificulty (Horace, Racine, the English Augustans) adjectives ("accurate," "dry,"

"hard") cacher than pmper names, had to serve Hulme's illustration of the new classicism

(68-69).11

Eiiot presented the term classicism to the readers of Criterion in 1926, supplying, in

the absence of a definition for this "modem tendency," a list of books which "exempiify

it," in addition to Hulme's Speculations, the iist include titles by Maurras, Benda, Babbitt,

and the Thornist theologian Jacques Maritain. The common factor among these authors, as

Wiiiam Chace argues, is not asthetic but ideologicai: "Eliot has redefined 'classical' to

mean 'anti-democratic' " (131). As Renato PoggioIi has noted, Eliot generally qualified his

use of the term when applying it to specific literary works. In "UIysses, Order and Myth"

(1923), for instance, Eliot acknowledges that "it is much easier to be a classicist in literary

criticism than in creative art," and in his essay on Baudelaire (1930) he cautions that "It

must not be forgotten that a poet in a romantic age . . . cannot be a 'classicai' poet except in

tendency" (Poggioii 222).

Lewis is reiuctant to part with the tenn classical, as with its antithesis ronzunhc

because of the potent dudïsm of their associations: 'The 'classical,' " he affirms in Time

and Western Man, effortiesdy biencihg the aesthetic and the political, "is the rationai,

aloof, and arist~cratical; the 'romantic' is the ppular, sensatiooa1, and 'cosmicaily'

confused. That is the permanent polirical reference in these tenns9' (TFYM 9, my emphasis).

Three years Iater, writing Puiejiuce, he is still artached to the term classicism, dthough

obviously uncomfortable with some of his bedfellows:

Extreme concreteness and extreme defintion are for me a necessity. Hence 1 hnd

myself naturally aligned today, to some extent, with the philosophers of the catholic

[sic] revival. . . . My position, inasmuch as it causes me to oppose on al1 issues 'the

romantic,' comes under the heading 'classical.' . . . To solidifi, to make concrete, to

give defnition to-that is my profession. . . to concentrate the diffuse, to nini to ice

that which is liquid and mercurial . . .. That is why 1 range myself, in some sense,

with the modem scholastic teachers" (P 253-255, original emphase^).'^

Lewis directly proceeds to quaiify both this cIassicism and this alliance virtuaiiy out of

existence: "This does not, however, at aü mean ttiat 1 share the scholastics' historical

prejudices, any more than it means that I share their dogmas" (P 255). One does weU to ask

what is left, " bClassical,' " he continues, "is for me anything which is nobly defmed and

exact, as opposed to that which is fiuid-of the Flux-without outline, romanticaiiy 'dark,'

vague, 'mysterious,' stormy, uncertain" (P 255). Classicism is reduced to little more than a

set of stylistic quaiities.

Lewis recognizes this, and by the time he is writing Men Without Art he has decided

that the terms ''classical" and "romantic" are "strictly unusable" (MWA 164). He has

another go at articulating the stylistic associations of the two terms-"solid" on one side,

"disheveled, ethueai and misty" on the other, and aligns himself decisively with the former

(MWA 153). Yet, citing Huime's c l a h that "After a hundred Yeats, we are in for a classicai

revivai," he says: "Well, 1 suppose we have had it, or are having it. By its works it is none

too easy to tell it for such. By the word of its critical and apologetic ucerances we know it is

'classicai,' certainly, but not by what it does by way of illustration" ( M A 165). What

Hulme detects in modem art, concludes Lewis, is not classicism, but "the qualities genedy

aiieged to belong to that type of arti-stic expression" ( M A l65)."

José Ortega y Gasset's Iong essay 'The Dehumanization of Art," published in

Madrid in 1925, was a concurrent attempt to formuiate the trend of the new generation of

European and English artists. 'There unquestionably exists in the world a new aaistic

sensibility," Ortega declares, and, like Eliot attempting to grasp "the new attitude of mind,"

or the "modem tendency," with the term classici~m,'~ he seeks to define not the work of

specific artists or various groups but "the generic fact and source, as it were, from which the

former spring" (20). The stylistic trends Ortega bas in mind are much the same as those

that Eliot did. His first stipdation is that new artistic sensibility is the antithesis of

romanticism, defrned as an essentidy popuiist aesthetic: "Romanticism was the prototype

of a popular style. Fist-bom of democracy, it was coddled by the masses. Modem art, on

the other hand, will always have the masses against it. It is essentially unpopular; moreover

it is anti-popular" (5).

To his credit, Ortega leaves the term "classicai" to refer to the "ancien régime in

poetry" against which romanticism rebelled (5); for modem art he adopts the term

dehumanization: "the most generai and most characteristic feature of modem artistic

production is the tendency to dehumanize art" (20). The clearest explanation of

dehumanization he offers is a quasi-scientific or philosophical detachment. Ortega

illustrates the tenn by setting up a polarity between reality as it is "lived" and reality as it is

"observed." When we are involved in our ordinary doings and thoughts we are fully

irnmersed in "lived" or "human" reaiity: "the human point of view is that in which we

'live' situations, people, things" (18); the inhuman view, on the other hand, is marked by "a

maximum of distance and minimum of feeling intervention" (17). A painter standing at the

scene of man's death, Ortega proposes by way of example, does not grieve like the wife, or

atttend Mie the doctor, but studies the composition of the scene, the fom, the colour, the

Light. This stance, which Ortega calls "inhuman," can be assumed towards ideas as well:

Thinking of Napoleon, for example, we are n o d y concemed with the great man

of that name. A psychoIogist, on the other han4 adopts an unusual, "inhuman"

attitude when he forgets about Napoleon and . . . tries to analyze his idea of

Napoleon . . . . The idea, instead of hctioning as the means to think an object with,

is itself made the object and the aim of thlliking. We shall soon see the unexpected

use w k h the new art has made of this "inhuman" inversion, (19)

Ortega offers this example in order to demonstrate the merence between king immersed

in life and king detached from it; it is his argument chat modemist art forces its audience

into a state of detachment comparable to that of the working painter or the psychologist.

in The Theoty of the Avant-Garde (1962), Poggiuli objects that the detachment that

Ortega heralds as inhuman is Lttie more than an "avoidance of the personai" deriving fÏom

the impulse "to repudiate the more obvious and popular tendencies of nineteenth century

art. such as lyrical subjectivism and the cuit of sentimenti* (182). The modemist "poetics of

impersondity," he argues, is in this sense "antiromantic," but it is "an antirornanticism

more relative than absolute, aimed especially at bourgeois realism and late-romantic pathos"

(182). Poggioli is right to be skepticai about both Ortega's rather dramatic term

bbdehurnanization," and about the daim that the geometrical tendency necessariiy expresses

a particular view of the world. The same objection is made by Colin Lyas in his anaIysis of

Ortega's essay: "Picasso may or mriy not distort reality in some way, but in these

distortions we still fmd articulations of human feeling and response. Indeed because of the

distortion we may experience hem more keenly" (Lyas 379). Similady, the undertaking to

make the idea of the object, rather than the object itseIf, the subject of scmtiny, is an

intellechlalist tendency. Such intellectualism rnay be anti-popdar in motivation, but it is not

inhuman. Ortega brandishes the term dehumanization, it seems, to épater le bourgeois.

But Ortega does, in the course of 'The Dehumanization of Art," make an important

distinction that Poggioli misses: he identifies a difference between art that aims to evoke

empathetic response and art that aims to prevent it. From 1905 to 1907, Ortega studied

phiiosophy in Leipzig, BerIin, and Marburg, arriving in Gennany the year before the

compIetion of WilheIm Worringer's dissertation Abstraction and Empathy and deparring

the year More tfie enthusiam and insistence of "peopIe with atistic and culturai interests"

persuaded Woninger to have it published (so, at any rate, Wtkrhger tells the story) (a). It

is not cIear if Ortega directly encountered Worringer's ideas while in Gennany, lS but it was

during those years that Worringer's own distinction between empathetic and anti-

empathetic art was becoming inauential.

Modestiy subtitied "A Contribution to the Psychology of Style," Abstraction and

Empathy is also an attempt, like those of Eliot and Ortega, to defme and defend the

fundamental shift underlying the various trends in modernist art. Taking up a h e of

thought that begins in Germany with Herder, Worringer writes in opposition to the aesthetic

universalism of the ~nlightenment.'~ Western aesthetics, wbich he terms, inte~hangeably,

"classical" or "naturalist," do not represent an absolute standard, but are the, product of a

particular psychologicai disposition, namely the urge for Einfirhlmg, or empathy.

Womnger accepts h m Theodor Lipps the premise that the essence of afi aesthetic

experience is "the need for self-dienation" (23), a need to move beyond the boundaries of

one's individud being. The naturaiistic, organic f o m of Western aesthetics make the

viewer's experience of self-aiienation one of continued, even heightened, enjoyment of his

own organic and vitai being. This "objectified self-enjoyment" is what Worringer defines

as empathy. Empathetic self-enjoyment, he argues, becomes a standard of beauty only in a

culture defrned by "a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the

phenomena of the externd world" (15). Non-naturaiistic art is not, as was supposed by

eighteenth-cenniry aesthetics and nineteenth-century materialist art historians, a product of

underdevetoped technique and inadequate means, but of a different "aesthetic volitiony*

(12). The non-natudistic art (which he caiis "abstract" or llgeometncai") characteristic of

primitive and "OrienW societies rnakes the viewer's exprience of seif-ahenation one of

fwty mher than vitalistic flux" It answers to the psychological need for transcendeme:

"regular abstract f o m are . . . the ody ones in which man can rest in the face of the vast

confusion of the wodd picture" (19).

Abstraction and empathy are not styiistic absolutes, Worringer cautions, but the two

poles of the continuum of style, and "the history of art presents an unceasing disputation

between the two" (45). His own valuation, however, is clear. The "anthropomorphic

pantheism or polytheism" of naturalisrn, is "naive" (45); the tendency towards abstraction

represents a mind "unceasingly conscious of the paluiness of rationalistic-sensuous

cognition" (46). Compared to "the grandeur of Egyptian monumental art" Greco-Roman

sculpture appem L4childlike"; Likewise "the philosopher wbo opposes his Aristotelian-

scholastic W n g to the wisdom of the East" will find b e i f dwarfed (4647).

Most of the problems with Wominger's argument are self-evident, and this is not

the place to rehearse them. It is enough for our purposes to note that his argument about the

nature of geometricai style is subject to the same basic objection that Ortega's was: he

attributes to al1 georneûical styles a single motivation and a single effect. According to

Ortega the geometrical tendency aims to proâuce "a maximum of distance and minimum of

feeling intervention" (17); for WiSmnger, it issues from the desire to iranscend organic flux

and airns to produce a sensation of fixity. The basic distinction that both Ortega and

Worringer make, however, between art that encourages empathetic response and art th^

aims to arrest it, remains a valid and useful one. A considerable portion of 'The

Dehumanization of Art" is concemed more with the effect of anti-empathetic art than with

the specific styiistic features allegedy bringing about that effect, and in these sections

Ortega intetrogates at sorne length the nature of what W6rringer caüs "objectified self-

enjoyment." Worringer was an art historian; he works out his theory of abstraction and

empathy not with reference to hterature, or even representational paintiag, but to line and

fom in ornament and architecture, The psychological experience of "empathy" in these

cases is a "feeling-with" the movement of lines. Had he attempted to extend his aoalysis to

litetanire or representational painting, however, he might have produced socnethhg similar to

Ortega's account.

Ortega cl;iims h t in the majority of cases works of art are experienced by thek

viewers as virtual reahty, which bey engage as they do their own lives:

To the majority of people aesthetic pleitsure means a state of mind which is

essentidiy indistinguishable from their ordinary behaviour . . . the object towards

which their attention . . . is directed is the same as in daiiy life: people and passions.

By art they understand a means through which they are brought in contact with

interesting human affairs . . . . (9) Art is, for most people, "the perception of human f o m and fates"; it is, over and over,

"the story of John and Mary" (9). Onega's reasons for denigrating art that enables such

response, bowever, are cruciaiiy different from WGninger's. Womnger contrasts historical

eras and cultures; Ortega contrasts individuai capacities, opposing the mas to the

inteliectud and cultural elite." Ortega's initiai objection to ernpathetic art is a formalist one:

"preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with

aesthetic enjoyment proper"; "a work of art vanishes from sight for a beholder who seeks

in it nothing but the moving fate of John and Maty or Tristan and Isolde and adjusts his

vision to this" (10). But his other objections are of quite a different sort. F i t of dl,

empathetic response is declared to be sub-rational, and art that incites therefore "unfair":

it takes advantage of a noble weakness inherent in man which exposes him to

infection h m his neighbor's joys and sorrows. Such an infection is no mental

phenomenon; it works like a reflex in the same way as the grating of a M e upon

glass sets the teeth on edge. It is an automatic effect, nothing else. . . . Art must not

proceed by psychic contagion, for psychic contagion is an unconscious

phenomenon, and art ought to be full clarity, hi& noon of the (26-27)

The pIeasure afforded by such art is thus associated with intemperance: empathetic self-

enjoyment is like the '%iind" pIeasure of aicohol; it is compared to "the drunken man's

merriment," which is "hermeticaiiy enclosed in itseif, he does not know why he is happy"

(27).

T h e Dehumanization of Art" was published in a single volume with a second

essay, "Notes on the NoveII' In that essay the piot-driven novel is heId up as the analogue

to the representationai painting, and it too is assoçiated with both mechanistic response and

moral Iaxity: the adventure novel appeals only to "the chiid that, as a somewhat barbarous

residue, we a i l carry inside. The rest of our person is not suscepuile to the mechanical t hd i

of. . . a dime novel; and so we feel after having finished reading such products, a bad taste

in ow mouth as though we had indulged in a base pleasure" (65). Empathetic art is sub-

rationai, childish, mechanistic, barbarous, dninken: in short, it is of the mas,

Womnger, as 1 have said, contrasts culhuai-historicai eras, not contemporaneous

elites and masses. Abstraction and Empathy is not an antidemotic work, but it is an anti-

hrunanist one, in the sense that it runs contrary to the basic principles of the Enlightenrnent:

philosophicaliy, Woccinger is anti-rationalist; he insists on the rupture rather than the

continuity between humanity and the naturai world; and he a f f i the good of

transcendence over the good of ordinary and earthly human flourishing." Hutme,

Worringer's most influentiai Engiish interpreter, placed particular emphasis on this

essentially religious, anti-humanist aspect of his thought. Before becorning familiar with

Worringer's work sornetime between 1912 and 1913, Hulrne had argued against

"rornanticism" and for "classicism"; after coming under the influence of Worringer, he

merged "dassicism" and "rornanticism" as the fmt and the second stages of

"humankm" and argued against them and for the geometricai, antiempathetic art typicai of

"the religious attitude." In "A Notebook" (19 15-16), he foliows W6rringer in finding

Western art characterized by its incitement of empathetic response, an aim issuing h m the

assumption that humanity is at home in the world, that nature below it and the heavens above

it are co-extensive with its spirit. This assumption, he maintaius, is cacegoncally wrong?'

The prominence of Worringer, Huime, and Ortega as theorists and advocates of

antiempathetic art would appear to suggest that the philosophical motivation for such art is

either ami-humanist or anti-demotic-two positions that shouid not be identified with one

another, though they may combine comfortably. It is important, however, that we do not

absorb the predilection of modemist artists and critics for aesthetic essentidim. The

attempt to fmd essential relations between particular aesthetic styles or practices and specific

philosophical or political positions is one of modeniism's constitutive features; it is part of

the bid to overcome the separzttion of the aesthetic, politicai, philosophical, and religious

aspects of society, and thereby invest art with the power to effect social transformation. The

opposition to empathy in aesthetic practice is anti-romantic in the relative sense of which

Poggioli speaks, but it is not inherentiy anti-burnanist or anti-demotic. The prevention of

empathetic response is an effect that can be achieved by a variety of techniques, and can be

empioyed to a number of different ends. The example of Bertolt Brecht, whose rhetoric is

remackably sirnilar to Ortega's, should make this abundantly clear. Brecht links the

empathetic response to art with the sensual and the appetitive, dismisshg existing opera

(including his own Mahagonny) with the felicitous adjective "culinary" (35). Any

technique in opera that is "intended to produce hypnosis, or is iikely to induce sordid

intoxication, or creates fog," he declares, "has goot to be given up" (38). He insists that epic

theatre must not take the human behg for granted, but make it "the object of the enquiry,"

and turning to film, he denounces the " 'human interest' " so beloved of critics as

"vulgar" (37,49). But the point of Brecht's epic theatre was of course not to drive a wedge

between the intellectual elite and the sensual masses but, in a spirit both humanist and

demotic, to induce critical engagement on the part of ail audiences.

Lewis, however, does oppose empathetic aesthetics in the name of what he identifies

as anti-humanism. In Men Wirhour Arr, he foiiows Hulme's transmission of Worringer,

and identifies naturalism in the visual arts with humanism (and with rornanticism, which he

construes, also fouowing Huime, as decadent bumanism). From Huime Lewis takes the idea

that naturalism promotes vitaiistic, empatttetic selfenjoyment; thus he associates geometric

style with an opposition to self-celebratory humanism. As we shaU see in Chapter 3, Lewis

takes satire to be the equivalent in fiction of the geometrical tendency in the visual m.

"Satire," he declares, is "the non-human outlook which m u t be there (beneath the fluff

and puip which is aii that is seen by the majority) to correct our soft conceit" ( M A 99).

As 1 wiU argue, however, Lewis's polemical invocation of anti-humanism is beiied by the

essentialiy humanist ide& motivahg his satire. Like Ortega's critique of empathy, Lewis's

is intellectualist and antidemotic,

In the poetic stage of her career, Riding opposes empathy for simiiar reasons. As 1

have noted at the beginning of this chapter, V i e n t Sherry demonstrates in detail the exknt

to which anxiety about the mass is figured in modemkt cultuai and literary criticism, and in

the works of Lewis and Pound, in t e m of the denigration of acoustic sensation, particdarly

music. Empathy turns individuds into a mas, and it is "in the response to music" that

"empathy finds its likeliest opportunity" (Sherry 1 1). Riding's anxieîy about the m a s ,

given Iess volubk and explicit expression than Lewis's, cm be traced partly through the

denunciations of music and sub-rationai emotionality that appesir in her writings on poetry.

In Survey she and Graves denounce musicaiity in poetty specificaiiy for its ability to

circumvent the inteiiect. Riding and Graves suspect that

the a h of such poetry as VaIéry 's is to cast a musical enchananent unallied with the

meaning of a poem The meaning becomes merely a historical setting for the music,

which the reader need or need not ûe aware of. We are made to feel that the poer

would not object to his reader's adopting the sarne attitude to his poems as his

Mme. Teste to Iofty and abstract questions: instead of king bored by them, she was

musicdly entertained by them. (S 38)

Music does not itseif mean; it is a distraction h m meaning. In a section of Anarchism Is

Nor Enough called "Poetry and Music," Riding expiicitly relates music to the promotion of

empaihetic mass-feeling:

1 am . . . distressed by the musicifidon of poetry because poetry is perhaps the

ody human pwsuit ieft s i d i capable of developing anti-sociaüy. . . . We get a sort of

jazz poeûy, politicaily musical, that reveais a desire in the pœt for a primitive triial

sense and for poetry as an art emotionally c&rdinating group sympathies. . . .

Music is an instrument for acousing emotions. . . . It is directed toward the greatest

number of persons musicaiiy conceivable. It is a mas-marshahg of the senses by

means of sound. . . . Music appeals to the intelletuai disorganization and weakness

of people in numbers and begets, by flattering this weakness (which is

sentimentality), gratifying after-effects of destructive sociality. (A 34-35)

With the lack of restraint typical of harchism, Riding adds a note on musicians

thernselves: "Al1 real musicians are physically misshapen as a result of platform cozening

of their audience. They need never bave stood upon a platform: there is a kind of

ingratiating 'corne, corn, dear puss' in the musical brain thar distorts the face and puckers

up the limbs" (A 33).22

Riding, iike Benda, Gourmont, and others associates music with inaional rnass-

bonding, but in the original preface to her Collected Poems, she goes on to treat the

empathetic effect of üterature as fundamentaiiy the same as the empatfietic effect of music.

Music is emotionaliy manipulative, but so, she objets, is much poetry: "readers become

mere instruments on whom the poet plays his fine [emotional] mes" (PLR 41 1).* When

readers, unacquaùited with the "right reasons for going to poetry" (that is, to exercise their

faculties for apprehending tnith), tum to it rather to have theiremotions played üke

instruments, then the reasons for reading poetry at a i i are reduced to "the reasons of

drama" :

Most people read p r n s in order to be inspired with emotions which ciiffer h m

their ordinary ernotions oniy in king more exaggerated or to enjoy Uusions which

their ordinary life does not permit. . . . This is to read poems for the wrong reasons;

and poems that can be so read have been written for the wrong reasons. (PLR 41 1)

Part of Riding's agenda here is to defend the speciai status of poetry over against the other

arts, to ident* for poetry a function that cannot be fulfilled by any other sort of human

activity. If one goes to poems to be brought into contact with "people and passions," as

Ortega puts it, one rnight as weil go to a newspaper. This is tbe suggestion of 'Tt Has Been

Read B y AU":

It has ken reâd by aiI

Thac a p l e m p a r t y met deaih

At high speed, and that a child

Before its mother's eyes a corpse reappeared

instantly foliowing the crash,

And that such a one, held venerable,

Went, iike a commoner, mad in a money-rout,

And that the daughter of an earl, consumptive,

Lives by ber own labour, a parlour-rnaid.

A public pain distresses the public epidermis,

A tremor passes as if thmugh the one body-

The ont body, cumbersorne fond Titaness.

But instantiy following the tremor,

The reading hem r e m s to toast,

Having fluttered in seif-pity

And felt its k a t with curiosity. ( P U Lûû)

Where has the "it" been r d ? Newspaper, newsreel, song, novel, Cari Sandburg p~tern?'~

The point is that the whete, or the w h of genre, not to mention the how of form and styIe is

rendered inconsequentid. Given predominance, the empathetic respouse to the text renders

the media indistinguishable. But we see in "It Ris Been Read By Aii" not just poetic

protectionism, but the association of empathy, again, with the mas, and with sub-rational,

involuntary action. "A p u b k pain distresses the public epidermis": individual distinction is

elided. Empattiy renders aii readers one mammoth W y , significantiy femhhd

"cumbersome fond Titaness."

in her critical works, Riding's antipathy towards the mass is similar to Lewis's and

Pound's: it is an expression of cultural anxiety, a fear of the ascendance of the values of the

majocity. Progress of Stones, preceding Riding's break with poetry by a few years, marks

the transition between her early and Iate thought. In her late thought, which W U be examined

in Chapter 5, she dissolves tfie threat of the mas, not by aitempting to render it sub-human,

but by embracing it, albeit on very specific cerms. Her cesolution is a fantasy not just of

consensus, but of a fundamentai human unity, achieved by devotion to a supra-individual

cruth. From this position Riding does not undertake to disable empathetic response in the

name of inteiiectualist individualismor oügarchic politics, as Lewis does; she airns, rather,

to dislocate the myopic coilective attention out of its inveterate, self-absorbed preoccupation

with human passions and fates, and towards the p a t e r mth in which individuai strivings,

conflicts, and distinctions are transcended.

Ernpathy and Modemist Fiction

Womnger works out bis theories of empathy and abstraction with ceference to ornment

and architecture; the role of empathy in titerary works does not enter his discussion. When

Hulme was defining the new direction in art as "Classicism," he used examples from both

literanue and the visual arts; after absorbing Wocringer's ideas, however, and denning the

new aesthetic trend as the geomeirical tendency of "the religious attitude" he cestricts his

examples to the visual arts-primarily Lewis, Epstein, and Bomberg. Ortega, on the other

hand, tried to apply the distinction between empathetic and anti-empathetic aesthetics to

literatm, and embroiled himself in a diniculty ttiat H u h e had avoided.

ït is not difficult to see how the possibility of "sentimental intervention" (17) can

be foreclosed in painting or scdpture, or even in poetry (Ortega's example is Mallarmé:

Ianguage becomes the protagonist; there is "no cue for emotion*' (32)). But Ortega has

more trouble when he tums to fiction. In 'The Dehumanization of Act" he introduces his

brief discussion of fiction by disposing of the role of geornetncal abstraction: 'To satisfy

the desire for dehurnanization one need nat alter the inberent nature of things. It is enough

to upset the vdue pattern and to produce an art in which the small events of Me appear in the

foreground with monumental dimensions" (35). By means of this "diving beneath the Ievel

marked by the naturai perspective," he argues, an author cm "overcom realisrn by mrely

putting too fine a point on it and discovering, Lens in band, the mjcro-stni~nire of Life" (35).

Ortega presents this practice, which he fin& exemplif?ed by Proust, Ramon G6mez de la

Serna, and Joyce, as an exhibition of "contempt for the old monumental f o m of the sou1

and an unhuman attention io the micro-structure of sentiments, social relations, characters"

(36).

We can grant Ortega that realism given "too fine a point" crosses over into a mode

different enough from realism to warrant another narne. But it makes more sense to cd the

Iiterature of "the micro-structure of sentiments, social telations, characters"

hyperhumanized than dehumanized. And it is not at ai l obvious that such microscopic

attention deters empaihetic response. The microscopic attention io the human that Ortega

finds in the modemist noveI and the attempt to eiiminate the human aspect of things itiat he

fmds in the visual arts may be aligneci insofar as they are both departures h m realism, but

they depart in ciBecent directions, and ought to be disthguished.

The predominant tendency of the modemist novel is to depart from the realist mode

in the direction opposite h m that attniuted to the visual arts by Worringer, Ortega, and

Hulme. In "Noies on the Novei" Ortega tries to align the modemist novel with the

geomemcd iendency by virtue of its diminishing of plot. By slowing narrative movement to

a near halt, he suggests, the novel may be in accord with the contemporary reaction against

process philosophy (aiso known as "event ontology"), which hoIds that "dl King is

becoming, or that what is uitirnately consists in change" (Ptiest 721); it may represent a

comparable renewai of interest in "substance" rather than "function" (Ortega 67)? But

this attenuation of plot is not, it tums out, a movement towds matters inbuman; it is a shift

of attention from action to person. The greater part of "Notes on the Novel" is devoted to

the praise of psychological depth as the greatest vime of modernist fiction. Plot is of little

interest: "We want the novelist to linger and to gant us good long looks at his personages,

their king, and their environment till we . . . feel that they are close fnends whom we know

thoroughly in ai i the wealth of their iives" (66); 'The great novelist, contempmous of the

surface features of his personages, dives down into their souls and retucns, clutching in his

hand the deep sea pead" (98). The sense in which "oui' activity here is qualitatively

different fiom that of the bourgeois oaf who delights in paintings "if he fin& on them

figures of men or women whom it would be interesting to meet" (9) is not clear at ali.

Ortega's about-face when moving fiom consideration of the arts in general to fiction

in particular reflects the division that Ford Madox Hueffer pointed out in 19 14. in A

Genealogy of Modemism Michael Levenson cites Ford's observation that "whilst al1 the

iiterary, aii the verbal manifestations of [modemism] are representational . . . ali the plastic-

aesthetic products of the new movements are becoming more and more geometric, mystic,

non-matecial, or what you wili" (Levenson 129). The "verbal manifestations" in question,

Levenson notes, probably include Imagism, but the primary reference is to Ford's and

Conrad's hpressionist fiction-which aimed to portray not the noumenal, the ding an sich,

as Ortega tried to suggest, but the phenomenal, life as registered by the senses and the

psyche. in Men Wirhour AH, h w i s himseIf reflects on the difierence between the trends in

rnodemist literature and those in the other arts:

The literary art is n a only on the whole Iess expenmentai than pictorial and plastic

art, but it is also, in the nature of things, possessed of different canons-canons that

are inherent both in the nature of the material, and in the fact that the literary art is far

more directly involved in life than pictorial art, 1 do not myself believe that anything

in the literary field can be done that wiii correspond with what has been caiied

"abstract design." ( W A 95)

This passage appears in Lewis's preamble to his exposition of his theory of satire. 1 will

argue that in The Wld Body he undertakes to do just what he c l a h hem he doubts can be

done. He does this in part, as Sherry and others have shown, by arresting movement on the

sententiai and the narrative levels, but he also does it by attempting to arrest empathetic

engagement on the level of character.

The most weli-known application of Worringer's theory of geometrical abstraction

to fiction is of course Joseph Frank's "Spatial Form in Modem Literature" (1945).

"Abstraction" for Womnger has two components: geometrical shape and the elhination

of depih. Such abstraction, he argues, produces in the viewer a sense of f ~ t u d e and fixity,

as opposed to the sense of fiee, exuberant movement which is evoked by organic or

"naturaiist" forms. Frank takes up only one of the two components of abstraction-the

elimination of depth-and fmds its analogue in nodernist fiction in the juxtaposition of

scenes and the use of mythologicai prototypes. These techniques, he argues, work to

eliminate temporal or historical depth; they arrest the flux by presenting past and present in

spatial simultaneity. This is not the place to interrogate Frank's argument, an enterprise now

thoroughly accomplished, as Frank himself acknowledges dryly in his preface to the 199 1

republication of the essay. For our purposes it is enough to note that if we accept that ttiere

is a s t n i n of modernism that aspires to afford the reader or viewer a psychologid escape

from the tumult of the flux, the kind of "rest" of which WOrringer wrote, any account of

this strain in fiction has to take into account character as weli as form and style.

Sherry has studied the modernist opposition to empathy as it is coded in the

denigntion of music and voice and the promotion of visuaiiy-onented aesthetics, but his

account does not attempt to address strategies used to prevent empathetic immersion on the

part of readers, the "objectified self-enjoyment" that issues h m emotional identification

with what Ortega caiis "human forms and fates." The WiId Body and Progress of Stones

are attempts to foreciose precisely that sort of empathetic engagement, Lewis h m an anti-

demotic position, Riding fiom an anti-humanist one. Their respective criticisms of Anglo-

Arnerican modernist fiction rest, to a considerable extent, on its encouragement of

empathetic immersion.

One does not turn to Riding's and Lewis's criticisms of modeniist fiction for

nuanced appreciations of the variousness of its forms and virtues: their statements are

polemical, and so selective and frequently distortive, as a i i polernics are. But in their anempts

to imagine and create a radicaiiy new fiction, they articulate forcefully the extent to which

Anglo-American modemist fiction relies on two prernises of romanticized humanism: the

solidarïty of al individuals by Wtue of theircommon humanity, and the intrinsic interest

and immanent signif~cance of ordinary human life. These premises can be illustrated here

by the foiiowing three examples:

1) lames's argument in 'The Art of Fiction" that the mind of the great fiction writer

"takes to itself the faintest hints of life . . . converts the very pulses of the air into

revelations"; his consequent disposal of the "distinction between the novel of character and

the novel of incident," and his claim that "it sounds alrnost puerile to Say that some

incidents are intrinsicaliy much more important that others." (194-97)

2) Conrad's testimonial in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus that the work of the

noveiist is to hold up a "rescued fragment of life before ail eyes" and "through its

movement, its form, and its colour, revealing the substance of its tmth . . . the stress and

passion within the core of each convincing moment," and the idea that this performance is

to "awaken in the hearts of the beholders . . . the solidacity in mysterious ongin, in toil, in

joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and ali mankind to the visible

world." (5)

3) Wmif's enjoinder in A Room of One's Own to her hypothetical novelist Mary

Chartnichael to attend to "aii the infinitely obscure iives that remain to be recorded," and

her suggestion that the novel ought to respond to "the pressure of dumbness, the

accumulation of unrecorded life." (134-35)

Such statements are the product of a compassionate belief that in the minutiae of individual

Lives a common humanity is discoverable and that every Life, even every passing moment of

every Me, is therefore signif~cant-a belief that issues in the desire to provide imaginative

access to the hidden interior worlds of the multitudes of undisthguished individuals.

As we shaii see in Chapter 3, Lewis is profoundly invested in the humanist ideal of

the free and rational man, but is simdtaneously captivated and dismssed by the behaviourist

view of the human mind as a manipdable set of mechanisms. Iust as he wanted, in The Art

of Being Ruled, to dissolve the power brokers into a passive mass before they dissolved him

into one, so he seeks, in his fiction, not to contest the claims of behaviourism, but to

appropriate them. Attracted to the inteliemal mastery behaviourism seemed to promise, he

attempts to wield its explanatory power over the mass of humanity whiie trying to hold

himself exempt from it. He counters the premises of modemkt fiction by positing not a

cornmon human essence, but a sharp division between the free and the mechanistic mind.

Riding, on the other hand, wiIi reject fiction that offers imaginative entry into what

she calls the "significant insignificance" of the ordinary mind not on the grounds that the

solidarity of humanity is a sentimental fdacy, but on the bais of her belief that such fiction

looks for solidarity and significance in the wrong place. M a t binds individuals to each

other is not, in her account, the minutiae of subjective experience, but their relationship to

tmth, a relationship that can only be realized by transcendence of both the individuai

personality and of the social world.

Notes

' W quotations from Sherry are from Eva Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Rndical

Modemism unless othemise iudicated,

Sherry finds the origins of the practice of identifling physiologicai bases for

psychological phenornena in the work of a group of liberal Uitellectuals in ps t -

revohtionary Paris who undertook to derive principles of good govemment frorn

"empirical enquiry into human physiology." The progressive aims of this group, who

hoped to provide an empiricd foundation for egalitarian ideas, were twisted around in the

nineteenth century by Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. Saint-Simon and Comte

begm to stress not the "cornmon physiology" of a i i people, but "variable human nature"

as a basis for goverment, and SU began elahrathg "an ideaiiy hiermhicai, organic social

order: a natural dite. Heirs to this double tradition, the modern critics of literanue and

painting aligned their sensations with various sociai creeds, opposite pitical testaments"

(Sherry 9- 10).

Sherry notes that Pound dues at times explicitly disavow efforts to understand musical

structure spatiaiiy, but argues that Pound's own music criticism relies heavily on the values

and vocabulary of the "pictorial imaginationy' (18 1): "the eye provides the vantage for

perceiving the spatial-pictoriai 'design' of the music, and its characteristic act of severance

works within tbe musical composition itseif as a principIe of division, the shaper of

durations" ( L 83).

' The opposition behveen ihe visuai arts and music el;iborated in the ami-romantic and

modernist critiques of empathy is anticipated by Nietzsche in The Birrh ofTrageùy. In the

opening section of that work he contrasts "the ApolIinian art of sculpture" to "the

nonimagistic, Dionysian art of musicy' (33). Apolio is "the gIonous divine image of the

principiuni indivcduan'onis" (36); music expresses the opposite, Dionysian, principle, in

which "everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfdness . . . each one feels

himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with bis neighbor, but as one with him" (36-

37). Nietzsche, however, is not in this case a partisan of one tendency or the othet; he

celebntes the synthesis of the two in pre-Euripidian tragedy.

The passage closely echoes the assessrnent of the historical role of the masses offered by

Ortega y Gasset in The Dehumanizution ofArt:

For a century and a haif the masses have clairned to be the whole of society.

Stravinski's music or Pirandello's drama have the sociological effect of competling

the people to recognize itself for what it is: a cornponent among othen of the sociai

structure, inert matter of the histocical process, a secondary factor in the cosmos of

spirituai life. (7)

Riding did take a stand aguinst communisrn in Tlie Lefi Heresy in Literature and Lqe

(1939), CO-written with Harry Kemp, whose narne appears first on the title page. in this

work, according to Baker, Riding's "dissections of leftist hypocrisies nvaied those of

Wyndham Lewis" (352). Riding and Kemp do not, however, suggest fascism as a

reasonable aiternative.

in his appendix to Book 1 of Time and Wesrem Man, Lewis notes with somewhat

disingenuous dismay that The Art of Being Ruled ' k a s described in one quarter as a 'BiU

of Hate' against mankind" (TWM 1 17). Though claiming humanitarian motives for The

Art of Being Ruled, he concedes that he has "sornewhat modified" his position: "1 now

believe . . . that people should be compelled to be iker and more 'individualistic' than they

naturaüy desire to be, rather than that their native unfreedom and instinct towards slavery

should be encouraged and optimized" (TWM 1 18). He had prefaced The Arr of Being

Ruled with the staternent that the book "must of necessity make its own audience, for it

aims at no audience aIready there wiih which 1 am acquainted" (ABR 13); by contrast, his

introduction to Time and Western Mm presents t ! ~ volume as an inteiiectual seif-defense

manud aiming to empower the average "hurried man" ( W M mi). His sense of audience,

however, remains confiicted. In The Wiid Body we find the same tension between the desire

to raise up the common man and the impulse to cast him dom.

B Riding once dismissed a reviewer's query regarding her reading with a single sentence:

"You ask me what books 1 am reading. I read prxticaiiy every book that cornes my way"

(Letter to Arthur Baii, June 1934, ts. 32-6, Corneil University Library, Ithaca, New York).

Baker suggests that Riding's unwillingness to acknowledge inteilectual and creative

influences and alliances haç to do with her increasing hstmion over the idifference of the

London iiterati to her work. She notes that expressions of debt to T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry

(as well as to Aristotle's Metaphysics and Poetics ) in an earl y draft of Contemporuries and

Snobs were Iater rernoved, as was a generous cribute to her friend and supporter Gertrude

Stein in the poem "Celebration of Failure" (Baker 185). Riding's caginess on this account,

however, is undersiandabte in light of her marnent at the han& of severai reviewers, who

unfairly charactetized her work as denvative, particularly of her male peers. Criterion

detivered the verdict that The Close Chapiet (1926) was whoily derivative of Moore, Graves,

Ransom, and Stein (Baker 158); she was later patronizingly descriid in the New York Sun

as "an admirer and irnitator of John Crowe Ransom" (Letter to the Editor, New York Sun,

May 1933, ts. 32-5, Corneli University Libriq).

The thinkers 1 wiil be discussing under the nibric mti-romantic were generally caiied by

the English modemists, and cded tfiemselves, not anti-romantic but classicist. The term

classicisrn, however, is for many reasons, some of which 1 discuss below, more trouble than

it is worth, anti-cornantic is also more precise, as the various thllikers can be seen as a group

more by v h e of what they oppose than by wbat tbey promote. The faimess of their

representation of rornanticism is of course another question.

'O Pierre Laserre's 1907 Le Romuntime~çais contained a seminal attack on

Rousseau, and was joined by Emest SeiiIiére's Le Mal romunri@ue in 1908. Mantain began

attacking Bergson in 191 1; Julien Benda joined him enthusiasticaily in 1912. See Wagner,

9-10.

" Patricia Rae has recentiy argued that the philosophical context of Hulme's "cIassicistY'

poetics was, primarily, the pragmatism of William lames and Jules de Gaultier. Hulrne's

own poems (dating to 1909 at the latest), she argues convincingly, are "epistemologicaily

modest" (72), as they neither assert nor deny dogmatically the analogies between the

earthly and the transcendent that they present; they are hypotheses rather than visions. Most

critics have accepted the argument (ma& most influentially by Michael Levenson and Karen

Csengeri) that Hulme's work falls into an early Bergsonian phase (compatible with

pragmatism), and a second, d o p t i c d i y religious and politicaily conservative phase,

beginning somewhere between 191 1 and 1913 (Rae 2 19). Rae argues that Hulme's later,

apparently absolutist declarations, are in fact advanced from a position stili fundarnentally

pragmatic. She demonstrates that in writings as late as 1915 Hulme still considers ali truth-

daims provisional and influenced by emotions and practical considerations, and that in the

important essay "A Notebook" (1915-16) he explicitiy "frames his defense of absolutist

ethics in an argument about their usefulness" in an age of war (Rae 220). While Rae's

argument is compeiling, Hulme did littie in essays like "A Notebook" and "Modem Art

and Its Phiiosophy" to keep readers aware of the difference between his "judicious choice

of illusions" (Rae 68) and dogmatic faith. In "Romanticism and Classicism," he chooses

the term b'classicism" to designate the ncw trend in poetry explicitly in order to "conform

to the practice of the group of polemicd writers who make most use of them at the present

day . . . Maurras, Lasserre and ail the group connected with L'Action Français" (60).

"mhe church," he daims, "has always taken the classical view"; the classical view is

"absolutely identical with the religious attitude" (61). Lewis and Eliot understood Huirne to

be upholding a religious view untempered by a pragmatist epistemology.

'' The "modem scholastic teacher" named in this discussion is one Piire Pierre Rousselot,

whose recent book L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas Lewis quotes; Lewis probably also

has Maritain in mind.

l3 Foliowing Herbert Grierson's argument in Classical and Romantic (1934), Lewis

ultimately decides that the idea of the classical in art, if it is going to do more than designate

a set of stylistic qualities, designates the primacy of a common sensibility and aesthetic over

the mind of the individual artist and that the Weltanschauung of the classicai artist is

therefore "given to him by his age" ( M A 157). This rnakes classicism in contemporary

art an unwholesome prospect, as the good twentieth-century artist reaiizes that he is

"accomplishing a better work by imposing a few of his own values upon [his audience],

cather than by tcanslating into a delectable art-fom their pemicious and unsatisfactory

principles of conduct" (MWA 157). For a detailed discussion of Lewis's engagement with

the modemist debates about classicism, see Wagner, 189-201.

I4 Criterion 7 (April 1924); Criferion 4 (Jan. 1926) (cited in Chase 114,126).

l5 II1 The Imperative of Modemiq (19891, Rockweil Gray, Ortega's English biographer,

makes no mention of Womnger.

l6 Enlightenment asethetics saw Grec~Roman and Renaissance natutalism as the standard

of excelience to which the arts of aii cultures were making their groping, evolutionary way.

Anticipated by Giarnbattista Vico in Italy and iafluenced by J.G. Hamann, Herder argued

for the uniqueness and integrity of every culture, which had to be understood h m within,

by imaginative entry into the "unique conditions of its life." See Berlin, 102-06.

Enlightenment aesthetics underwrote the matenaiist art history of the nineteenth century, in

which, according to Worringer, "the history of art was, in the last analysis, a history of

ability" (9, originai emphasis).

'7 Wiinkger's use of the term "abstraction" is confuskg, as non-representational fonns

can be organic as easily as geometricai; W-ger intends to denote only the latter.

IR Ortega was a "liberal" reformer under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera

(1923-30), but he was no democrat. In The Revolt of the Musses (1929) he distinguishes

"select man," who should lead, from "mass man," who should be led. Rockweli Gray

writes that "Ideally, elite taste would define the center of the reordered society Ortega

envisioned for the future of Europe" (155).

19 The capacity to empathize is characterized one moment as "noble" (even if weak), and

the next as merely mechanistic, "an automatic effect," but this inconsistency is not simply

carelessness. "The Dehumanization of Art" is frequently and incorrectly treated as an

unequivocal endotsement of the new aethetics. While Ortega clearly approves of what he

sees as the anti-populist qualities of the trends he is discussing, the essay displays at several

points deep ambivalence about what he caiis their inhumanity.

'O Anti-humanism in this sense is thus sometimes referred to as cornter-enlightenment,

rather than anti-humanist, thought. We can think of Enlightenment thought as a specific

form of humanism. Humanism in its most general sense refers to philosophical movements

in which human affairs and powers become the centre of attention; the Enlightenment, or

Eniightenment humanism, can be characterized by its nexus of paaicular assumptions about

human affairs and powers. Primary among these are the universality of human nature and

the hman good; the status of reason as the highest human facdty; the equality of men in

respect of their rationality; and the ability of reason to establish moral laws and social

institutions by which individuals and human soçiety can progress towards wisdom,

happiness and justice. See hwood 236 and Berlin 102. For the sake of clarity, 1 foiiow the

writers under discussion in using the terms humanisdanti-humanism cather than

EnlightementICounter-enlightenment.

'' "A Notebook" appeared as a series of seven pieces in New Age between December

1915 and Febmary 1916. In The Collecred Wiitings of TE. Hulnie, Karen Csengeri places

them under that title; Herbert Read had placed an abridged version of the series, under the

title LLHumanism and Religious Attitude," as the first piece in Speculations (1924). Cf.

Patricia Rae's argument that the Huime's absolutist claims are framed by a pragmatist

understanding of the necessity and efficacy of faith, particularly in times of crisis.

22 This comment is matched in outrageousness by Lewis's not-so-oblique suggestion that

the increasing infantilization of Western culture is manifest in the bodies of a number of

contemporary artists, including Chariie Chaplin, Anita Loos, and Picasso: "Even in physicai

stature it is mange how many have spcung u p o r have not sptung up. . . . Picasso, then, is

very srnall as weli [as Chaplin and Loos] , . . . He is built on strictly infantile iines. 1 could

name many more less-known people who answer to this description. . . . What is Nature

about? Why is she specializing in this manner? That is a question for the professional

physiologist and psychologist. Those are, however, the facts; which anyone, with a few

hours to spare, can observe for themselves" (TWM 66). No doubt Lewis imagined he knew

what Nature was about when she framed his own fearful symmetry at weU over six feet.

23 Riding's Collected Poems was pubiished in 1938; it was republished, with new prefatory

material and supplementary notes by Riding in 1980 under the title The Poems of Lawa

Riding. My references are to that edition, abbreviated PLR

'' in Survey Riding and Graves sccutinize Sandburg's abMamie," in which the eponymous

young woman has fled "a little indian tom" in semh of romance in Chicago, only to be

disiiiusioned and dream of a yet "bigger place" where there wiii be "romance / and big

things / and real dreams / that never go smash." "This poem WU show," they conclude,

"why the plain reader prefers bad contemporary poetry to good contempotary poeuy: the

former can give him as much innocent enjoyment as a good short story or his newspaper"

(S 101).

zs Onega does not use the temprocess philosophy or event ontology. He attriiutes the

idea that "the king of a thhg is nothing else than the sum total of its actions and

hctions" to philosophy from "Kant to about 1900" (67). This charactetization of that

150 years, however, is problematic at best, The process phiiosophy of AN. Whitehead,

Bergson, and William James (aii primary subjects of lewis's attacks in Time and Western

Man) fits Ortega's description much better.

C H A P T E R T H R E E

No 'Mysterious Wthinn: The WId Body

Metaphysical Satire and the Umvertung aller Werte

"The Pole," a series of wry observations on the relations between Breton innkeepers and a

particular species of unpaying guest, appeared in Ford Madox Ford's The English Review

in May 1909. It was Lewis's fust published piece of writing, based on his own experiences

in the preceding year as a somewhat impecunious young artist and traveler in Brittany and

Spain. In the next two years, six more sketches and short nanatives would appear in The

English Review and in Douglas Goldring's The Tramp. With pians underway to revise and

coliect the pieces in 1917, Lewis wrote the manifesta-essay "Merior Religions" to serve as

an introduction. The essay was published alone, however, in The Little Revi' accompanied

by note by Ezra Pound explaining dryly that the last member of the fm that was to pubiish

the volume had been killed in action. It was nearly a decade later, during the two years that

saw the publication of The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man, that Lewis

tmed back to the sketches, revised and augmented them, and tbreaded them together with a

narraior, the huiking, tcathy, itinerant Ker-Orr-

Pubiished in 1927, The Wild Body is the frst work of what Hugh Kenner has

identified as the period of Lewis's "puppt fictions9 ("loosely brilliant and replete with

snags") which includes The Childennass (1928), The Apes of G d (1930), and Snooty

Baronet (1932) (91). These works display characters devoid of inteliectual autonomy, and

so of agency-controiied either by the subtermean forces of the primitive stratum of the

mind or by the ideology that has corne to constitute their "selves." They are also

characterized by the extremity of theù style-the dense and discordant metaphoncd

heterogeneity that Kenner has memorably descnkd as "a species of verbal impasto" (92)

-and by the virulence with which Lewis uses that style in order to fracture the human

semblance of the characters.

Lewis had, of course, published Tarr in 19 18, and in that work metaphoricd

discordance is ahady in effect, prefiguring, but less extreme than, the style of the works of

1927-32. The absence of agency is also already a central theme in Tarr. Bertha and Kreisler

cm in seen as "puppets" of German romanticism (a degraded Lotte and a Werther who

ends his life over a financial, rather than a romantic, impasse); Kreisler, as Paul Edwards and

others have shown, can also be seen as stepping Crom one Oedipd fix into another, as weU

as driven to masochistic selfdestruction by the trauma, since repressed, of having witnessed

an act of schwlboy bmtality.' Tarr is distinct from The Wild Body and the three novels to

follow, however, in the psychological detd with which Lewis renders the "puppets,"

particularly Bertha and Kreisler. Both are frequenrly described as operathg like machines

(as is, on occasion, Tarr hirnself), and it couid be argued that KreisIer goes to his death

much as the blind beggar Ludo in n e WiId Body goes, by the force of superstition, to his.

But Kreisler and Bertha are fuliy reaiized characters: Lewis renders Kreisler's interna1

stniggles, knotted motives, and tomirous social impotence with unflinching Dostoevskian

accuncy,2 just as in some of the scenes between T m and Bertha he records the micro-

maneuvers of the power struggle underlying their conversation with insight worthy of

Henry lames. This is not to suggest that Tamis strictly the psychological novel that Lewis

frrst conceived it as. (7 have just finished an 'andytic' novel about a German student," he

wrote to Augustus John in 1910, "any beauty it may possess depend[s] upon the justness

of the psychology-as is the case in the Russian novels, 1 suppose" (T 379).) Lewis's

revisions added polemicai and satincal dimensions to the story about the ill-fated art student

and as Edwards argues, in its portrayai of the ideological constitution of subjectivity, the

novel is more radical than ~l~sses. ' Nonethelless, the psychologicai intensity of the portrait

of Kreisler dominates the novel, and is IargeIy responsible for the high cntical standing it

has held, and continues to hold, among Lewis's works. By the same token, the extent to

which Lewis succeeds in abandonhg psychologicd interest in The Wild Body in order to

pursue other grounds of appeal and other aesthetic effects is at least partly responsible for

its relatively poor Feception.

Published just two years after 'The Dehumanization of Art," The Wild Body would

have funiished much stronger support for the a r p e n t of that essay than the literary

examples Ortega had to hand. Witten in deliberate opposition to fiction that lends itself as a

venue for the exercise of the reader's interest in "human forms and fates" and desire for

vicarious experience of "the story of John and Mary," The Wild Body undertakes to induce

in the reader the "maximum of distance and minimum of feeling intervention" that Ortega

stipulated (17). Descnbing his eady ambitions for Tarr, Lewis noted that he had wanted

"to do a piece of writing worthy of the hand of an abstract innovator" (in Kenner, 32);

when he began to write a novel, however, he realized that "words and syntax were not

susceptible of transformation into abstract terms, to which process the visuai arts lent

themselves quite readily" (RA 129): Given îhe radicai and widely recognized achievement

of his prose style, Lewis's dismissal of the potential of verbal abstraction is somewhat

bernusing, as is the scarcity in his writing of specific comments on his stylistic technique.

He seems to have preferred to think of his style as a devotion of attention "to the outside"

of people and things ( W A 97) rather than as a means towards abstraction. it is an

inaccurate formulation, since he does not produce a world of "resistant surfaces" ( W A

99) in the manner, for instance, of Alain Robbe-Grillet. It is at least me, however, that the

fragmenting effect of his style does its part to destroy what Robbe-Grillet cails the "old

myths of depth" (23), or Roland Barthes %e romantic heart of thing~."~

Lewis is explicit, however, about his intent to produce through fiction the

psychological effect that visual abstraction, according to Wiirringer and Hulme, was to

produce: the arrest of the selkelebratory empathetic plaswe that is the heart of Western

aesthetics. Empathy in the visual arts is a feeling-with fom, and in music, with sound;

empathy in fiction is, primarily, emotionai identification with specific characters, and it is

this process of identification that Lewis aims to inhibit. Satire is perhaps the most anti-

empathetic of literary modes (empathetic identification with the objects of ridicule would of

course defeat the satiricai point), and Lewis's predilection for satire is evident in Tarr, as

weil as in his relatively short-lived '"ïyro" pr~ject.~ in Men Without Art, in which Lewis

offers the most extensive commentary on his fiction, he introduces the term "metaphysical

satire" to characterize his aixns. Men Without Art, Lewis teUs us, "derived in the fust

instance, from the notes written in defence of my satire, The Apes of God" (MWA 97). The

Wild Body, nearly seven years in the past by the time Men Without Art was published, is not

mentioned, nor are the two other puppet fictions that appeared in the intervening years, The

C h i l d e m s and Snooty Baronet. But metrtphysicai satire-the radicaily new fiction he

presents as the counterpart of the geometricai tenkncy in the visuai arts-is a direct

development of the anti-empathetic pinciples and theory of the comic that Lewis f i t

estabiished in The Wild Body.

By the qualifier "metaphysical" Lewis aims to distinguish his brand of satire

decisively from moralist ridicule of the vices of an age and place; his target, he claims, is the

unfreedom to which humanity is universally prone. Lewis's sense of satire is, as Fredric

Jarneson has noted, "idiosyncraticalIy conceived" (52), and the extent to which the puppet

fictions are satires is certainly open to argument? Underlying aü these works, however, is

the preoccupation with inteiiectuai autonomy that fueled The Art of Being Ruled and Erne

and Western Man: the sense that to be l e s than inteiiectuaüy free is to be l a s than M y

human; that the primary interest of the capitalist miliîiuy-industriai complex is to reduce the

vast majority of the population to a sub-human level of mental automatism; and that the

mass of peopIe are by nature not far removed h m this state. The Wiid Body is the first and

most expiicit of Lewis's attempts to render this vision of the masses as bearing the

sembtance of hurnanity wiiile controlled in fact by the basic mechanisrm of unconscious

impulse and ideological conditioniag.

Like Tarr, The W;ld Body is a product of severai stages of composition and

revision.' Traveling in Spain and Briitany in 1908, Lewis shared, as Lafourcade notes, the

interest of bis age in anthropotogy and sociology, aimost certauily knew the work of

Durkheim and Frazer, and likely knew that of Evy-Bmhl and Van Gennep (CM? 236).

The 1927 Wild Body retains some of the atmosphere of early-twentieth century

mthropology; 'Ynferior Religions" expücitiy appeds to atavistic ritualisrn as an

expianation of human behaviour. "These. . . are studies in a savage worship and

attraction," Lewis explains; 'The inn-keeper roUs between his tables ten million times in a

redistic rhythm that is as intense and superstitious as are the figures of a wardance" (CWB

149). Grafted on to the early stories, however, is the extreme anti-dernotic Wught of The

Art of Being Ruled, which equates any such semi-conscious behaviour with a Iack of

humanity: "their mechanisrn is a logicd structure and they are nothing but chat" (CWB

150). The wüî to mate an anti-empathetic fiction is put in the service of the vision of the

mas as essentiaüy mechimistic. This vision gives The Wild B e its vident edge, but also

its experimentai one: Lewis, who believed that fiction has the power '70 pass off as me

aimost anything" (P log), subrnits his literary art to the task of rendering experientiaiiy

plausible the idea the mass of people are little more than risible mechanisms.

As we have seen, Lewis imagines himseif to be holding a lonely watch over the

interregnum of civilization, sbaring Hulme's conviction that the West, if not the entire world,

is on the threshold of a new era4onceived as "anti-humanist"4e spirit of which is

foretotd in the geometrical turn in the arts. '"The new art," writes HuIme, "differs not in

degree, but in h d , h m the art we are accustomed to," and ''the ce-emergence of

geometrical art may be the precmr of the reemergence of ihe corresponding [anti-

humanist] anitude towards the world, and so, of the break up of the Renaissana humanistic

attitude" (76,78). Lewis takes the tum in t!~e arts to be as portentous as HuIme does-

"Immense and critical revaiutions are takixig place," he writes in Men Without Art, "an

Umvertung aller Werte [revaluation of al1 values]. It is the passing of a world, as it were, not

of an empire or of single nations. . . . These facts are of capital importance for literature"

(MWA 102). It is on the aiieged anti-hwnanism of his fiction that Lewis stakes his claim to

be genuinely revolutionary; bis charge that the claims of English literary modemism to

revolutionary status are spurious rests on what he aiieges is their continuity with the

humanist tradition of Western aesthetics.

Arnong the conternporary figures who stand for Enghh literary modernism in Men

Without Art are Henry James, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. In Puleface (1929),

Lewis had pifioried D.H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson for tbeir romantic primitivism

His analyses of James, Joyce, and Hemingway in Men Without Art are more general; they

aim to demonstrate that the apparent newness of these authors' works is in fact only a

modulation of traditionai Western aesthetics, wùich he terms, foiiowing Hulme's adoption

of Worringer's sense of the term, "naturalism." Naturalism in Lewis's sense is the iife-

celebrating spirit ehat Worringer saw as originating in the art of ancient Greece, that Hulme

saw as culminating in rornanticism, and that he hirnself identifies with di the anti-inteiiectual,

anti-individualist trends bringing night down on Western civilization. Thus he speaks of

Greek "naturalist canons":

Aii our instinctive aesthetic reactions are, in the West of Europe, based upon Greek

naturalist canons. Of the intenial method of approach in iiterature, Joyce or James

are highiy representative. Their art (consisting in 'telhg Erom the inside' as it is

described) has for its backgrounds the naturalism (the flowing lines, the absence of

linear organization, and aiso the inveterate humanism) of the Helienic pictorial

culture. . . . if you consider the naniralism of the Greek plastic as a phenornenon of

decadence (contrasted with the masculine formalism of the Egyptian or the Chinese)

then you wiil regard NeWise the method of 'intemal monologue' (or the romantic

snapshotting of the wandering strearn of the Unconscious) as a pknornenon of

decadence. (MWA 104)

ln opposition to the aesthetic sensibility that underlies the fiction of interionty, Lewis's

rnetaphysical satire aims to execute in fiction the equivaient of geometrical, Asiatic art-a

fiction whose caliber could be tested by its translation into visual art:

if Henry James or James Joyce were to paint pictures, it would be, you feel, a very

literary sort of picture that would result. But aiso, in their details, these p i c m

would be lineai descendants of the Heiienic natwalism. Only, such details, al1

jurnbled up and piled one against the other, would appear, at first sight, dfierent,

and, for the Western Hellenic culture, exotic. -Nevertheles . . . ai i the plastic units

would be suffused with a romantic coloration . . . their psyche would have got the

better of their Gestalt-the result a sentiment, rather than an expressive form. (MWA

104)~

The translation of Engiish iiterary modemism into painting, argues Lewis, wodd prove its

essentid continuity with the natutalistic f o m and "romantic coloration" that have

characterized ail of Western art, and against this superannuated Hellenism he poses his own

new fiction, metaphysicai satire.

Lewis's comments about the "intemal method of approach" and "teilîng From the

inside" can be misleading, suggesting that rnetaphysical satire is identical with what he d s ,

in the same discussion, "the Externai approach" (MWA 95). The distinction he pmudly

claims for The Apes of Cod, for instance, is that "no book has ever been written that has

paid more attention to the outside of people. in it their shells or pelts, or the language of

their bodily movements, corne first, not last" (MWA 97)." But satire is actuaiiy descnhed

only as making use of, or being conducive to an extemai approach: 'mat it must deal with

the outside, that is one of the capital advantages of this fom of literary art" ( W A 9 3 ,

Lewis wrïtes; 'Tt is easier to achieve those polished and mistant surfaces of a F a t

extentalist art in Satire" ( M A 99). The particular aesthetic virtue of metaphysicai satire

may lie in its external approach, but its philosophical substance lies in its conception of the

human condition as potentially free but proue to lapsing into automatism.

The human unfreedom that is to be the object of satire is of two principal

kinds-physical and mental. In Men Wiihout Art Lewis fmt illustrates for his readers the

"painhl effect of m e satire" by quoting at some length Lemuel Gulliver's account of the

monstrously magnified hairs, blemishes, and bodily functions he is privy to in the

apartments of the Brobdingnagian mai& of honour. "Perfect laughter," he mites, would be

elicited as much by "the antics dependent upon pathological maladjustment, injury, or

disease" as by the endemic bodily imperfections of the hedthy, '?he glaring mechanical

imperfections, the nervous tics, the prodigality of objectless movement . . . offensive smells,

disagreeable moistures-the involuntary grimace, the lurch, roll, trot or stagger which we

call our walic" (MWA 92-93). Lewis does not present the relevance of the body to

metaphysicai satire explicitly in t e m of unfreedom, but the clear implication is that the

conditions of physicai embodiment are involuntary, uncontrollable, and inescapable. The

object of ridicule is the condition that Yeats so graphicaliy expressed as king "iastened to

a dying animal.""

The discussion of metaphysicd satire, continued in the foilowing chapter, nuns to

mentai unfkedom:

"Fl]en" are undoubtedly to a greater or less extent, machines. . - . Men are

sometirnes so paipably machines, theü machination is so transparen*, that they are

comic, as we Say. . . . [O]w consciousness is pitched up to the very moderate

altitude of relative independence at which we live-at which we have the Uusion of

begin autonomous and 'free.' . . . Freedom is certainly our human goal, in the sense

that di effort is directed to chat end, and it is a dictate of nature that we should laugh,

and laugh loudly, at those who have fden into sIavery, and still more, those who

batten on it- ( M A 95)

There is an echo of Hulme's religious anti-humanism in Lewis's comment on the disparity

between our sense of ourseives as autonomous beings and the actual state of affairs (citing

Spinoza, HuIme remarked that "if [a stone] had a consciou mind it would . . . think it was

going to the ground because it wanted ton (64)), as there is in his comment in the same

discussion that satire, "the non-human outiook" is needed '?O correct our soft conceit"

(MWA 99). But Lewis is no religious ascetic, and did not, like Huime and the Catholic anti-

romantics, brandish the doctrine of original sin at the hubns of modernity. The outlook

which is to correct our conceit is not non-human; it is-as shodd be clear h m his

statement that "freedom is certainly our human goal'-a profoundly humanist one.

Lewis's insistence on the non-moral nature of his satire is a further distraction fiom the

essentid humanism of his position. The objects of Lewis's ridicule are not the vices of

Christian morality-avarice, vanity, lechery-staged by Ben Jonson (to whose "puppets"

he pays tribute), but his satire is not without an anchoring existentid, if not morai, value,

however tacit it remains. The blast of the satire issues h m the humanïst ideai of

intellectuaily emancipated self-determination.

The question of Lewis's hurnanism or anti-hurnanism has been addressed by critics

pnmarily in terms of whether he takes his theory of laughter stcaight from Bergson or

inverts it. For Bergson the pandigrnatic comic moment-tiie man slipping on the banana

peel-aises h m the sudden revelation of the physical thinghood of the person. Laughter

"rebukes the automaton, and purges the nonperson, the ihing, from proper society"; it is

"redemptive," and reflects "a profoundly humanist nom . . . for it measures and celebrates

human superïority to the lower, animai-mechanicd cbaracter" (Sherry, "Anatomy" 123).

Arguments that Lewis cmcialiy inverts Bergson's formula into what Lafourcade calls

"black Cartesianism" (79), are generaily based on the statement in ''The Meaning of the

Wild Body" that 'The rwt of the Co& is to be sought in the sensation resulting from the

observations of a thing behaving like a person" (rather than a person behaving as a thing)

and that aii men are thus comic, "for they are ai i things, or physicai bodies, behaving as

persons" (CWB 158). As I shaü show below, however, the Bergsonian hierarchy is

subsequently restored in that essay, and the laughter of Ker-OH is essentially self-

redeeming. The corrective nature of the comedy of automatism is made clear in Men

Without Art: continuhg the passage cited above, Lewis elaborates that "if one of us

exposes too much his 'works' and we start seeing him as a thing, then-in subconsciously

teferring this back to ourselves-we are astonished and shoçked, and we bark at him-we

laugh-in order to relieve our emotion" (95). Laughter repels the spectre of our own

potentiai automatism, which it is "our human goal" to transcend. The humanist Werfe are

not so umgevertet after aii.

"Tractable Machinesn and the Physical Grotesque

The account of physicai and mentai unfreedom in Men Without An seems to appiy to aii

humanity. The unfreedom of the body, it goes without saying, is the condition of aii, and in

the discussion of the mind Lewis's laquage is scrupuiously inclusive: "we" share the goal

of freedom; "we" share the illusion of autonomy; any one of "us" may slip and expose

our cogs-the line berneen freedom and automatism runs withiu each of us. But the

account of metaphysical satire in Men Without Art is a later development of the principles

Lewis began to develop in The Wild Body, and its inclusiveness reflects Lewis's withdrawai

from the hostility to the mass that we fmd in his earlier thought. In The Wild B d y the line

behveen freedom and automatism runs between, not within people, sepacating the

autonomous few h m the automatic many.

Lewis's preoccupation with automatism, as 1 have argued, issues to a considerab1e

extent h m his sense of the active and concerted interests of the military, industrial, and

commercial powers in reducing people to a passive mass to be rnanipuiated for profit.

Convinced, and reasonably so, of the inevitability of power hietarchies in human societies,

his fint response, represented in The AH of Being Rule4 was not to contest the airn of the

power brokers, but to appropriate it in the name of the one value he was sure of, the value of

art. He combines what is a fairly typical intellectual pessimisrn about the average human

mental capacity with realpolitik if power is to be kept away h m those who wouid use it

for purposes himical to art (which incIudes the likes of the contemporary power brokers), it

is to be kept away from the masses, and the way to do this is to remove them from the

politicai arena altogether by making their natural tendency towards automatism complete.

The modem world's social a s , Lewis argues in Tlre Art of Being Ruled, are located

in the confusion of "naturd men and mechical men" brought about by "democratic

enlightenrnent" (ABR 125,28). Since "by far the greater part of people ask nothing better

than to be 'performing rnice,' " he calls for the establishment of a socio-politicai order that

would respect this fact by "differentiat[ing] . . . mankind into two rigourously separated

worlds" (ABR 127). Here and there he makes the case, evidentiy quite sincerely, that this

proposal is a humanitarian one, on the grounds that only such a division couid avert another

convulsion of violence and bloodshed and d o w the mass of hurnanity to be "left aione and

aiiowed to lead a peaceful, industrious, and pleasant life"-even adding here the

uncharacteristicaiiy cosy sentiment that this ought to be done ''for we aii as men belong to

each other" (ABR 367). But such moments, for what they are worth, are overshadowed by

his refusai throughout most of this work to try to imagine the uniqueness and integrity of

every individuai life. He repeatediy portrays the psychology of the mass of people as

uniformty mechanistic:

People ask nothing better than to be types--ciccupational types, social types,

fünctionai types of any sort. if you force them not to be, they are miserable, just as

the savage grew miserable when the white man came and prevented hirn from living

a life devoted to the f o m and rituais he had made.. . . For in the mass people wish

to be automata: they wish to be conventiomI: they hate you teaching them or

forcing them into ''fkedom": they wish to be obedient, hard-working machines, as

near dead as possible-as near dead (feelingless and thoughtiess) as they cm get,

without actuaiiy dying. (ABR 15 1)

The Wild Body undertakes to give this vision of the m s s of humanity concrete and

convincing form. In Time and Western Man Lewis imagines an audience-"the general

educated man or woman" (IWM x i b w h i c h he hopes to transform by teaching it to see the

features of its world as the products of poiiticai i&ologies, rather than of the essenu'aily

mysterious operations of the Zeirgeisr. He sets The Wild Body in a similarly didactic hune,

presenting it as ainiing to find an audience of potenrial uidividuals, w hich he wiii teach to see

the simple mechanisrns underlying what appears to be "open and untrammeles' human iife

(CWB 149).

The new art, Ortega cIaims in 'The Dehumankation of Art," "acrs like a social

agent which segregaies from the shapeless mas of the many two different castes of men"

(5); in its opening pages The Wild Body declares its intention to do just thai by eliminating

libidinal appeal. "In these accounts of my adventures," wams Ker-Orr, "there is no sex

interest at di" (CWB 18 ), and he welcomes the sorting effect he expects this Iack of sexual

tension will have on his readership: 'T boldly pit my major intetests against the sex-appeal,

wfüch will ratrict me to a masculine audience, but I shall not cornplain" (CWB 18). (This is

misogyny , to be sure, but not exrtctly masculine chauvinism: "masculine" and "ferninine"

in Lewis's thought are the nrbrics under which he heaps a i i the phiiosophical and cultural

trends that he advocates and denounces, respectively: the statement does not assume the

sexless rationaüty of aii male readers so much as it casts as ferninine di men whose

interests can be demonstrated to be primarily sexual.) Lewis's antidemotic inteiiectualism

is clear here, as it is in his namtor's subsequent disclaimer that he WU teli bis stones, d e r

than expound their p~ciples, since most men, uniike hunseif, L'wwh hnded [an]

abstraction aione do not know what to do with it, or bey apply it wrongly" (CWB 19).

But the inteiiectualist opposition to empathy impIicit in this preamble is

compounded by an opposition to empathy on the gtounds that the teader should no&

becorne empathetically involved with the stones' characters because the common run of

peopIe are, in fact, rnechanized to the extent that they are something less than p e m s . This

is made explicit in one of the most frequently quoted passages h m the essay "Iderior

Religions":

The wheel at Carisbrooke imposes a set of rnovements upon the donkey insi& it, in

drawing water from the weil, that it is easy to grasp. But in the case of a hotel or a

fishing boat, for instance, the cumplexity of the rhythmic scene is so great that it

passes as open and untrammeled life. . . . Yet we have in most lives the spectacle ofa

pattern as circumscribed and complete as a theorem of Euclid. So these are essays in

a new human mathematic. . . . You cm be as exterior to [the characters], and iive

their Life as hie , as the showman grasping h m beneath and working ahut a

Polinchinelie. They are only shadows of energy, not living beings. Their mechanism

is a logicai stnicture and they are nothing but that. (CWB 149-150)

The WiId Body undertakes to demonstrate to its readership the inappropriateness of

emotional pieties regarding the mas of their fellow hurnan beings. Tbough the work itself

draws no political conclusions, such understanding is a precondition, certainly, of the

reorganization of society dong the lines proposed in The Art cf Being Ruled. The Wild

Body bem the mark of the t h e at which Lewis was entertaining, appmntly quite seriously,

the idea that the mass of humanity was rather less than human, and that aU pretenses about

its kedom ought to be abandoned.

We are of course fiee to speculaie on the extent to which the mechanistic nature of

other human beings was for Lewis personaiiy a psychologicai reality; we shouId not do so,

however, without considering that fascination with tôe mechanistic aspects of human

behaviour extends ai Ieast as fa. back as the eighteenth century and tfiat the manipulability

and predictability of human behaviour was the subject of intense study in early twentieth

century sociobgy and psychology, as weii as the basis of the increasingly powerful mass

media and the "educationalist statel'-aii of which Lewis anatomizes and denounces in The

Ar? of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man.'' The latter contains a sustained attack on

JB, Watson and the authors of other Behaviourist treatises dating fiom 1907 to the 1920s,

and one cannot read Lewis's indignant summary of their views without recognizing his own

formulation in "Menor Religions" of the nature of his "puppets." According to the

behaviourist, Lewis writes,

Everythmg about a human king is d k t l y and peripherally observable: and ail the

fa ts about the human machine c m be stated 'in terms of stimulus and response,' or

'habit-formation.' . . . The human personality is a 'reaction-mass* . . . . An

observer, at its periphery, noting the stimulus going into this 'mass,' c m confidentiy

await . . . the response. Somewhere in the circuit-in no 'mysterious within,' but at

a quite unimportant point in the materiai circuit traversed-a thing may or may not

occw which we cal1 'thinking' or 'consciousness.' (TWM 324)

Though clearfy affronted by the premises of these studies, Lewis is not able to deny the

potentiai efficacy of their resuits with any confidence. On the contrary, his polemics

simuitaneously express his apprehension about the fact that the results of such

investigations are turned directly over to the "captains of industry," to ''the educationalist

department of health . . . the employer of labour, and, generally speaking, [to] anyone who

may be interested to leam how to train human beings, and transfom them into tractable

machines" (TWM 323,322). (It is no coincidence that JB. Watson went into advertising

after Ieaving his position at Johns Hopkins in 1920.) Even in The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis

acknowledges that "naturai men," those with the capacity for genuine fieedom, are not

invulnerable to the mechanizing forces of the modem world: "owing to the development of

machinery," he writes, "[wle are al1 siipping back into machinery" (ABR 125). His

intermittent acknowledgment of the dtirnate vulnerability to mechankation of even the most

intelligent suggests that his insistence at other times on the mechanistic nature of the

majority of other people is at least to some extent an anxious projection- In The Wild Body

he grafts the Behaviourist vision onto the eariier anthropological one, as though by

subjecting others to it he could guarantee that it could not be used against him.13

Explorations of the boundary between the human king and the puppet, automaton,

or machine were in fact pervasive in modernism, though predorninantly on the stage; it is

largely in European experimental theatre that we find the extended farnily of Lewis's

"intricately rnoving bobbins" (CWB 149). Modemist theatricai experiment with the

interrelation of the human and the automatic or mechanicd can be divided roughly into three

branches: formaiist, celebratory, and satirical; Lewis's own practice is something of a hybrid

of the anti-empathetic tendency of the fmt and the critical intent of the latter. Heinrich von

Kleist's essay "Über das Marionettentheatre" (1810) envisioned the marionette as sublime,

transcending not only the limits and flaws of the human body, but of the weight of self-

consciousness. Howard Segel documents the developments of this view by Gordon Craig

and Yeats as weli as in the Bauhaus theatre. Craig famously irnagined the ideal actor as a

wiil-less "Übermarionette"; guided by an ideai of "passionless remoteness," however,

these starkly staged productions with their s t y l i d human actors, according to Christopher

Innes, were "designed to investigate the phenomena of form and space" (132), rather than

the mechanistic nature of human psychology.

The celebratory and satirical uses of puppet and automaton figures in modernist

theatre are to some extent coextensive with attitudes towards industriaiization and

technology, which run the garnut from the zeaious to the paranoid. T i Armstrong has

described the tension between utopian visions of the improvement and extension of the

body through prostheses and machines and the countervailing fear of the "systernic

subordination" of both body and mind to machines and the machine-like regimentation of

modem societies (101). Futurïst dramatists, for instaace, put marionettes on stage alongside

human actors to show up the lunitations of the latter, but did theû most impressive work in

the "plastic theatre," which did away with the human Iiability of actors and dancers

altogether in favour of productions using complex "mechanistic and geometrized puppets

and marionettes" (Segel 269). The Lewis of Voaicisrn and Blust I, st i l l innocent of war,

ernbraces the angular, inorganic forms and the exemplary energy of the machiae

environment, but he was even then quick to distinguish the useful examples of Marinetti's

promotional theatrics h m the Futurist embrace of speed and technology (which he saw as

the naïve enthusiasm of a straggling agrarian land), and after the War his thought is

dominated by the threatening prospect of the systemic subordination of the individuai. It is

from this apprehension that the satirical and grotesque use of puppets and automatons ip the

European theatre issues, and it is with these that Lewis's puppets have the greatest affinity.

Playwrights of the Teatro Grotiesco used the mechical grotesque to indict both the failure

of human self-control and self-determination and the dehumanizing effects of modem

mechanization. In Massimo Bontempelli's Hedge to the Northwest (1 9 lg), for instance, a

marionette drama is staged paralle1 with one perfomied by human actors, in ironic

condemnation of the likeness (Segel 286-289). What distinguishes Lewis's exploration of

the vanishing line between the human and the Puppet fiom that of the Teatro Gronesco is

the bravado and quasi-scieniific detachment with which, whde remaining in an essentiaiiy

reaüst mode, he projects mechanization onto the primitivized mass. Lewis presents

characters reaiistic enough that readers trained to the conventions of psychologicai fiction

wili assume their intrinsic human interest, integrity, and agency; he delikrately invokes this

response in order to correct it.

0

The conception of metaphysicai satire in Men Without Art developed, as 1 have noted, out of

the anti-empathetic principles and the theory of the comic of The Wild Bady. In the two

essays appended CO The Wild Body, '"lnferïor ReIigions" and 'The Meaniug of the Wild

Body," we frnd, as in Mm Without Ar?, that the root of ihe comic is identified as human

unfreedom, and that that unfieedom is of two kinds, the physical and the mental. Mental

unEreedom as it is outlined in "Inferior Religions," which we will consider shortly, is

prcnted not as the potenria1 condition of ail, as in Men Wirhuut Art, but as the essentiaiiy

Gxed condition of the mass of humanity. Whiie the conception of bodily unfreedom laid out

in 'The Meaning of the Wild Body" seems inclusive, we 6nd that in the stocks it is

actually used to reinforce the division between Ker-Orr and those whose mental automatism

he reveals.

In 'The Meaning of the Wid Body" Lewis illustrates the b o d y comic with the

foilowing anecdote:

The other day in the underground, as the train was moving out of the station, 1 and

those around me saw a fat but active man mn dong, and deftly project himself

between the sliding doors . . . . His eye 1 decided was the key to the absurdity of the

effect. It was its detacfiment that was responsible for this. It seemed to Say, as he

propelled his sack of potatoes-that is himself-dong the platfom, and as he

successfully Ianded the sack in the carriage:-'I've not much "power," 1 may just

manage it:-yes, just!" Then in response to our gazing eyes, 'Yes, that's me! . . . When you run a line of potatoes like ME, you get the knack of them: but they take a

bit of moving.' (CWB 159-160)

Most critics have taken this anecdote as the key to the representation of the body in the

stories of The Wild Body. Jeffiey Meyers, for instance, claims that the theory of comedy

outlined in 'The Meaning of the Wïd Body" is "related to [Lewis's] political idea that

most men are non-thinking puppets" (Meyers 142). But this theory of the bodiiy comic is

in fact based on precisely the opposite premise-the assertion of the presence of inteiiigent

inteciocity within the flesh: "if was his detachment that was responsible" for the effect;

"the man's body was not him" (CWB 159, my emphasis). No one has acknowledged that

in the context of the stories themselves this theory of the bodily comic applies in fact only to

Ker-Orr.

In his preamble, Ker-On teils the reader as much about his body as he does about

his family, but bis emphasis is on his detachment from it. In distinction fiom his physical

being, there is "mother hostile me, that does not like the smelI of mine, probably nnds my

large teeth, height and so forth abominable. . . . This forked, strange-scented, blond-skinned

gut-bag, with its two bright rolling marbles with which it sees . . . is my stalking horse. 1

hang somewhere in its midst operathg it with detachment" (CWB 18). According to 'The

Meaning of the Wild Body," the disjunction between Ker-On's massive %si-gothic"

body and the intekgence only just able to control it should be the source of much comedy,

but it is not. What is implicitiy or explicitiy presented as comic in the stories is not Ker-Orr

himseif, but the mental automatism of the people he encounters. Inteiiectual detachment is

not a feature of any the other figures in the stories, and their bodies are not comic but

grotesque.

AU the bodies in the stories are in some way distorted or compted, and rendered

with keen Swiftian attention to effluvia Zoborov the shiftless "Pole" of the pension Beau

Séjour has "the smell of a tropical plant": "the vegetation of his body was probably strong

and rank. . . , He had bow-legs and protniding ears and infonned me that he suffered from

hemorrhoids. His breath stank" (CWB 50). In a number of the portraits the density of the

physical description occludes evidence of consciousness altogether. The celebratory

engagement waitz of Mademoiselle Peronnette and Car1 does not dramatize what 'The

Meaning of the Wid Body" caiis the "anornaly" of mind in matter (CWB 159):

When ~ademoiselle P6romettel got up to dance she held herseif foovard, bare

arms hanging on either side, two big meaty handles, and she undulated her nuque

and back . . . . what she suggested to me was something iike a mad butcher, who had

put a piece of bright material over a carcase of pork or mutton, and then started to

ogle his customers, owing to a sudden shuMing in his mind of the respective

appetites. Car1 .. . behaved Like the haiiucinated customer . . . [who] pmeeded to

waitz with this sex-promoted food . . . N e jolted uncouthIy hither and thither,

whiIe ~ademoiseiie Péromette] unduiated and crackled in complete independence,

heId roughly in place by his two tentacles. (CWB 62)

The only indication of "min&' hem is Cari's desire, which in Lewis's terms has no mental

purchase whatsoever. Mademoiselle Péronnette's body is not propelled by a mind

''operathg . . . from within"; it is in fact not even rendered as Living flesh, but as meut, its

animation deriving from some force outside itsdf. The frequently-quoted descriptions of

Bestre follow the same pcinciple:

His very large eyeballs, the small s a h n oceiiation in theù centre, the tiny spot

through which light entered the obese wilderness of his body; his bronzed bovine

ml swoiien handles for a viuiety of indolent ingenuities; his inflated digestive case

. . . . His tongue stuck out, his lips eructated with the incredible indeconun that

appears to be the rnonopoly of liquids, his brown arms were for the moment

genitds, snakes in one massive twist beneath his mamiiiary slabs, gently nding on a

pancreatic swell, each hair on his oii bearing s h contributhg its message of

porcine affront. (CWB 78-79)

The innkeeper is animate as a pit of heaving voicanic mud is animate; light entering through

his pupils does not reach a mind, but vanishes into an intecior 'kiidemess." Anne Quéma

has recently dealt with the body in Lewis's fiction by arguing that "a satiricai physicai

portmit will . . . serve as an degory of a particuiar [ideobgicai] cult. And conversely, an

diegory of a particuiar cult will open up ont0 [a] . . . satire of hurnan nature" (64). The

physical portraits in The Apes ofGod, Snoofy Baronet, and The Revenge for Love satirize

the "cults" of romanticism, behaviourism, and communism of both the bourgeois and the

militant varieties, but in The WiId Body there is very Little in the way of ideologicai satire to

absorb the shock of the satire directed simply at ordinary lives. Ideology plays a role in the

The Wild Body oaiy in the case of the old François, whose seif, according to Ker-On, is

constituted by nothing but the sentimental pamotism he absorbed through popuiar lyrics in

his youth, and tenuously, perhaps, in the case of Monsieur de Valmore, whose obsession

with presenting himself as an American may be taken as a wholesale cwption of the

Amencan ideology of national superiority. If this is the point of the portrait of Valmore,

however, it is left implicit, and in the other stories there are no ideological cults, only patterns

of behaviour fixed around aspects of ordinary Me: for Zoborov and Mademoiselle

Péronnene, the pension Beau Séjour; for Brotocotnaz, his wife Julie; for the Cornac, the

groups of peasants from whom he makes his living. These individual figures cannot be read

allegoricaliy. Ridicule is not conducted through them to an idea; it is airned at them or, more

precisely, at the mechanistic nature of their behaviour, which is taken to constitute them

wholly.

The distinction between Lewis's cornic (produced by the anomaiy of mind in

matter) and his grotesque (the human body as animate but mindless) is ovemdden by the

use of the ternis "comical grotesque" (Timothy Materer) and "comic grotesque'' van

Duncan). The comic or comicai grotesque in Materer and Duncan is a taxonomie rather

than an explanatory term. Like Kenner before him, Materer does not attempt to pursue

Lewis's treatment of the body, but stops with the objection that the hostility of the physical

descriptions in The Wild Body is far out of proportion to the figures upon which they are

unieashed. Duncan, anticipating Qudma, sees the descriptions as having had quasi-

diegorical sisnif~cance in the early versions of the stories. The eariy stories, he writes,

belong to "the world of Gogol and (early) Dostoevsky, where the monad-grotesque is

symptomatic of a stagnant, decaying social order, fragmented into patody-worlds and

'underground' ad-worlds" (79). But the effect of 1927 revisions and the incorporation of

the supercilious Ker-Orr, he argues, is that the characters become " 'odious' simply

because they are other than the narrator"; they become "mere abjects," "pretexts for

[Lewis's] purely linguistic adventures" (84). He concludes that the narrative "impresses

the reader more with its basic hostiiity than with any attendant aesthetic or rationalization"

(81).

This is, more or las , the "misanthropic" reading to which the nineteenth century

subjected Swift, though without the attendant moral indignation. It is a h , more or less,

D.H. Lawrence's conclusion, which Meyers recounts in his biography: 'Wyndharn Lewis

gives a display of the utterly repulsive effect people have on him, but he retreats h o the

intellect to make his display. . . . The effect is the same. It is the sarne exclamation: They

stink! My God, they stink!" (Meyers 145). But the body in The Wild Body is comic, not

grotesque insofar as it is transcended by the mind; possessed of inteiiigence, in fact, it may

even be beautiful. In "The Cornac and His Wife," the young boy who is stmck with the

vision of the Cornac as "an old and despondent moutebank," breaks out of the automatistic

submission of the crowd, and begins to jeer, is described as having "one of the handsome

and visionary Breton faces" (CWB 103). The grotesque body signifies the absence of

conscious intelligence, distinguishing it from the body that, by virtue of the mind within it, is

at worst only comic. "The Meaning of the Wild Body" frames the stones in tems of a

theory of a b o d y comic, "Inferior Religions" in terms of a theory of a mental comic.

Laughter is actually dramatized only twice in The Wild Body, the fmt tirne when Ker-Orr

triumphs over Monsieur de Vaimore in "A Solider of Humour," the second in the

revelatory jeering of the boy in 'The Cornac and His Wife." In both of these stories and in

the episodes of the others, which we c m assume to have been intended as comic, laughter

aises from spectacles of mental, not physicai unfreedom.

Empathy and the "Showman"

In his foreword to The Wild Body, as weii as in "Inferior Religions," Lewis refers to Ker-

Orr (unabashediy and without M e r comment) as "the showman." Before proceeding to

the stories themselves, it is necessary to consider the crucial role of Ker-Orr, who was

introduced, as 1 have noted, in the 1927 revisions. The behavioural patterns of the characters

of The Wild Body are not exhiiited without comment for the reader's scrutiny, but

presented by him, and the dogrnatic new tone he imparts to the stories has been generally

resented by critics. This ebuiiient Teuton, however, is a solution to the tension between

Lewis's desk to create an anti-empathetic fiction and his understanding of the persuasive

power of empathy in fiction.

For al1 bis pessimism about the status of the arts in modem society, Lewis remains

convinced that fiction has enormous culturai and politicai influence. "Art can effect more,"

he contends, "even politicaiiy, than any pure propaganda or popular sociological moraiîst

religion" (DPDS 15 1); al1 fonns of fictional narrative, in fact, have this power.

[Tlhe most harmless pieces of literary entertainment-the common crime story, for

instance, or the schoolboy epic . . . is at al1 events politically and m o d y influentid.

. . . And the influence upon îbe mind of the whole nation, adult and juvenile, of the

Hollywood film factory is terrifie: for 'shaping lives' it is obviously an engine

comparable to the Society of Jesus. . . . [A] whole barbarous system of conduct, and

judgments to match, is implied in every flick of the kinetiç novelettes. (MWA 12)

In the course of denouncing the anti-individuaikt ideology of Lawrence and Anderson in

Paleface, Lewis warns the rea&r that "imaginative writers [pretend] to give us a picture of

current life 'as it is lived,' but . . . in fact give us much more a picture of Me as, according to

thern, it should be iived" (P 97). "Fiction, in its very nature," he cautions, "takes with it the

authority of life . . . [and] so it is able to pass off as truc almost anything" (P L09). The

persuasive effect of fiction depends on the immersion of the d e r into its world, which in

Iargely, in tewis's acccount, a product of empthetic identification with the chiuacters that

inhabit it.

Rather than repudiate fiction as an underhanded means of popular persuasion,

however, Lewis aims to exploit it. Fiction, like politicai power, canna be dimina@ only put

in the han& of those who will use it to the least destructive ends. Lewis does exhiiit a

certain disdain for the susceph'bility of ihe average reader to the emotional orchestrations of

works of fiction; as we have seen in Chapter 1, Ker-ûrr, like his successor the S m r y

Barmer, voices this in his preamble, explaining that he op& to teli a story rather than mite a

treatise, as through the former he is "more likely to be understuad" (CWB 19). The WiEd

Body, sandwiched between the hertiest of lewis's philosophicai polemics, is an attempt to

reach an audience wider than The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man could

hope to. Lewis avails himseif of the means to pass off his own ideology as m e by

presenting it as "plausible 'life' " (P 109).

The particularly obtrusive nature of Ker-ûrr needs to be understood in the context

of Lewis's second objection to the empathetic naniralism of modemist fiction. We have

seen that in Men Without Art he objects to "the method of 'internai monologue' (or the

romantic snapshotting of the wandering stream of the Unconscious)" (MCVA 104) in James

and Joyce on the grounds of its contintuity with the self-celebratory humanist aesthetic

tradition. But his sustained analyses of Joyce in Time and Western Man and of

Hemingway in Men Without An are not devoted to the rendering of interiority per se; what

unites Joyce and Hemingway in naiunlism for Lewis is the absence of organizing

perspective. In his analysis of Ulysses, Lewis's conception of modernist naturalism as the

photographie recording of consciousness merges into a conception of naturalisrn as

excessive preoccupation with the material environment-with "the dates of various

toothpastes, the brewery and laundry receipts, the growing pile of punched 'bus-tickets, the

growing holes in the baby's socks" (TWM 89). '"The detail," objects Lewis, "assumes an

exaggerated importance" (TWM 87), and the result is an oppressive materialism,

unleavened by dramatic movement and unillumined by intelligent consciousness. He objects

to "an Aiadciin's cave of incrediile bric-h-brac, in which a dense m a s of dead stuff is

collecteci" and "a suffocating moeotic expanse of objects, al of them lifeless" (TWM 89).

"Much as you may cherish the merely physicd enthusiasm that expresses itseifin this

stupendous outpuring of matter," he writes, " you wish . . . to be transported to some

more abstract region for a tirne" (TWM 89-90),

Lewis praises Hemingway's art, on ihe other hand, as "aimost purely an art of

action" ( m A 20), but he fin& an objectionable "naturalism" in Hemingway as weii.

Lewis actuaily holds Hemingway in great esteem (though for the t e m of that esteem

Hemingway never forgave him): 'There is no serious writer who stands higher in Anglo-

Saxony today than does Ernest Hemingway," he declares (MWA 36), and the compliments

he intersperses in his criticisms are in effect apologies for the ideological scrutiny to which

he feels obliged to subject the work. Lewis descnis Hemingway's typical narrator as a

"duii-witted, bovine, monosyiiabic simpleton, [a] lethargic and stuttering dumrny [that

Hemingway] conducis, or pushes fiom behind," a "wooden-headed, Ieaden-witted, heavy-

fooied, loutish and oafish marionette" (MWA 28). Whiie this is not a perceptive account of

Hemingway's characters, it is not a bad description of some of Lewis's own, and he

certainly does not object to them in the name of more charitable view of the average human

rnind. (His principal criticism of Henry lames, in fact, is that he insists on having fiction

popdated by characters of a grace and intelligence that Lewis aiieges is untnie to life.")

Lewis's problem with Hemingway, w hose characters are satisfac torily obtuse and

mechanical, is that the works offer no distinguished, discrimhating perspective on them, and

that consequentiy it is these characters that readers will identify with.

Lewis is convinced that, for lack of criticd faculties, "people iive, as it were, as they

read" (P log), and that even the author, if insufficiently critical, rnay Cali under the

empathetic sway of his own works. With respect to The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell tu

Anns, he writes that the "loutish and oafish manonette . . . is, as a cornpanion, infectious.

His author has perhaps not k e n quite immune. Seen for ever through his nursery

spectacles, the values of life accommodate themseives, even in the mind of bis author, to the

Limitations and pecuiiar requirements of this highly idiosyncratic puppet" (MIKA 28).

Without a perspective h m which to criticaiiy ident* a puppet as jus? t h t Lewis fears that

the reader, if not the author as weii, wïii undergo an empathetic acculturation to the

character's mind, coming to accept its imphcit ternis and standards-''the vaIues of Me wiii

accommodate themseIves" to it. The crucial diffe~ience between Hemingway's marionettes

and those of The WiId B d y is that in the latter Ker-Orr provides, over against them, a mind

more iilumined, an intelligence more active, and it is with that mind that the reader is induced

to empathize.

Empathetic response to fiction relies on sustained access to a character's inner Me;

without such access, there can be ody pathos not empathy, ody feehg about, not feeling

with. in many, if not most, cases empathy is strengthened by the sympathetic nature or

temperarnental appeai of the character. But sustained access to a character's mind,

movements, and sensations produces empathy regardless of the personai quaIities of the

character; readers may be induced to keep emotionai and psychologicai pace with a

character they wodd nonetheless judge reprehensible or repelient-participating, for

instance, in Humbert Humbert's illicit desire, or in the homocidai cerebrations of

Raskolnikov. Whatever we may feel about Ker-Orr, we are fmed in the camera of his min&

which does not aiiow access to the experience of the other characters. He is installed in The

WiId Body to y to ensure that the reader perceives not human beings, but so many wound-

up toys, inscribing the same circles over and over till they expire, and, furthemore, to try to

ensure that the reader experiences this vision as either comic or intelfectuaiiy interesthg

rather than as poignant, pitiable, or tragic. Lewis, as we have seen fiom his discussion of

Hemingway, does not trust readers not to empathize with fictional characters. He constructs,

therefore, one sustained articulate consciousness to which to anchor empathy, and by means

of whicti to disable al1 further empathetic response.

in "ïnferior Religions" Lewis descnis his characters as k ing "subject to a set of

objects or to one object ia particular" (c'WB 149)- and he details for the reader a few of

these: Brotocotnaz is fmated on Julie; Zoborov and Mademoiselle P6mnnette are both

fixated on control of the pension Beau Séjour; the Cornac is enthralled by b pubIic he

both loathes and entertains. h the stories Ker-On does present the people he encounters as

locked into behaviourai patterns they will apparently never transcend, and these patterns

have, to the credit of the stories, a range and nuance beyond the object fixation descri i in

"fnferior Religions." Brotocotnaz's "religious fascination" (CWB 149) for Julie is not so

striking as the deadlocked internecine antagonism of the pair, a bilateral fixation of the sort

first displayed in the relationship of Car1 and Mademoiselle Péronnette in "Beau Séjour."

In these instances the antagonists are united in a single dynamic of provocation and

retaliation that transcends and contains them both.

A second instance of automatisrn presented by Ker-Orr is subjection to a cuiing

delusion. Monsieur de Valmore in "A Soldier of Humour" is a southem Frenchman and

propnetor of a Spanish inn who has Lived some part of his life in America, acquired

citizenship, and speaks English with a pronounced American accent. The man has corne to

stake his identity and dignity on the pretense that he is Arnerican, oblivious to the fact that

his American-style suits are obviously cut by a Gascon taiior and his French accent renders

his Amencan English incornprehensible. Ker-Orr in this case takes an active role in

demonstrating the sirnplicity of Valmore's psychological mechanism, exposing it by

breaking it, ''The south of France! the South of France! The bloody Midi, your home-land,

you poor bum!" (CWB 28), he bawls when Valmore's pretension becomes insuiferable.

The result? "1 had laid him out quite fiat The situation was totally outside his compass";

'The original and more imposing man had disappeared. 1 had slain him" (CWB 30). The

slavery of delusion is displayed also in "Beau Sejour." The skulking Zoborov has

unconsciously assumed the mannerisms of his fiend in the Foreign Legion: '"This man

was exceedingly independent: he was also prodigiously smng; far stronger than Zoborov.

This person's qualities he regarded as his own, however, and he used them as such. The

shadowy figure of this gigantic fiiend seemed indeed superimposed upon Zoborov's own

f om and spirit" (CWB 51). "A comic type is a faiIure of a considerable energy, an

imitation and standardizing of seIf: writes Lewis in "Inferior Religions" (CWB 150).

Instead of achieving selfhood, becorning, as Lewis pub it in "Menor Religions," "one

synthetic and various ego" (CWB 150), Valmore and Zoborov fabricate themselves after

extemal pattern: Valmore has becorne a poor imitation of the absuaction '6American,"

which he attempts to incarnate by an accent and a suit; Zoborov's sense of independence

derives from his imitation of independence.

The destitute vagabond père François of "Franciscan Adventures" is a more

extrerne example of this "imitation and standardiig of self." Ker-On presents François

as a vacant space subsequently colonized and d e d by the degraded emotion of "the bad,

late, topical sentimental songs of Republican France":

You could get no closer answer than that, and it accounted completely for him. He

had become their disreputable embodiment. In his youth the chlorotic heroine of the

popular lyrical fancy must have been his phantom mate. He became her ideai,

according to the indications provided by the lying ballad. So he would lose touch

more and more with unlyricized reality, which would in due course vomit him into

the outcast void. (CWB 12 1)

François is clearly somewhat deranged: his behaviow is erratic, his conversation is

disconnected, he has lost a certain arnount of the ordinary restraint that govems social

interaction. He is in this respect puppet-like because subject to the promptings and impulses

of a disordered rnind, but the point Ker-On makes is that the automatism of his current

mental derangement is not signifcantly different from the unfreedom of his younger, sane,

condition, in which he was manipulated by the most facile and mendacious representatioas

of reaiity.

A third variety of automatism Ker-Orr reveais in his specirnens is the subjection to

superstition and fatalism. The showpiece of this category of unfieedom is the blind beggar

Ludo. At the opening of ''The Death of the Ankou," Ker-Orr leanis about the "Ankou,"

the b h d death-god of ancient Armorica, b m a guidebook. A bmsh with the Ankou

sentenced a man to death; his cemaining span of t h e on eaah was determined by the hou

of the encounter. "lt was easy to imagine," Ker-Orr tells the reader,

ail the caicdations induiged in by the distracted man after bis evil meeting. 1 codd

hear his screaming voice . . . when he has crawled into the large, carved cupboard

that served him for a bed, beside his wife, and how she would weigh this living,

screaming man, in the mies of time provided by superstition, and how the death

damp would hang about hirn tiü he expired, (CWB 109)

Ker-On's immersion in the guidebook is abruptly intempted by the advance of biind and

imperious beggar Ludo, whom Ker-Orr momentarily imagines to be the god himeif.

Pursuhg hirn out of curiosity, Ker-On mentions the M o u to him. Ludo f d s silent,

groans, cries "Merde!" and disappears into his cave. Some months later Ker-Orr lems

that Ludo is dead. "The Death of the Ankou" is the most understated and ambiguous of

the Wild Body stories. Like Vaimore and François, Ludo is an initiaiiy enigrnatic figure

whom Ker-Orr selects for analysis. In the case of Ludo, however, there is no triumphant

production of the interpretive key. To Ludo's abrupt withdrawal, Ker-On responds not with

laughter or inteiiectuai satisfaction as in the cases of Valmore and François, but with

apparently unfeigned bemusement: "1 connected the change from cordiality to dislike on

the part of Ludo with the mention of the Ankou. There seemed no other explanation. But

why would that have upset hirn so much?" (CtYB 1 15). Still, as Paul Edwards shows in his

anaiysis of the evolution of the story, 'The Death of the Ankou" is govemed to a

considerable extent by the opposition of the peasant mind's "subservience to sign-

systems" and the inteliectual's mastery of them ("Narrative" 25). And the superstition of

Ludo, as Edwards also points out, reinforces what Ker-Orr presents as the slavish fatalism

of the uneducated peasant in general in "The Cornac and His Wie," which precedes 'The

Death of the Ankoul' 'The member of the peasant cornrnunity," declares Ker-Orr in the

former, "is trained by Fate, and his law is to accept its manifestations . . . . The educated

man, iike the ttue mial tevolutionary, does not accept iife in this way. He is in revolt, and it

is the laws of Fate that he sets out to break" (CWB 102).

Finaily, in "The Cornac and his Wie," Ker-Orr also presents to the reader the

collective automatism of the group. On one band the relationship between the Cornac and

%e Public" is like that of the antagonistic pairs Zoborov and Péromette, Péro~ette and

Carl, and Brotocotnaz and Julie: 'To some extent PubIic and Showman understood each

other. There was this amount of give and take, that they both snarled over the money that

passed between hem.. . . There was a unanimity of brutal h m d about that" (CWB 92).

But the public is also an independent charmer. As an aggregate it replicates the fatalism,

passivity, and mechanical nature of its units. The imagination of the crowd, Ker-On tells the

reader, "is awakened by the sight of the flags, the cent, the drums, and the bedizened people.

Thenceforth [the show] dominates hem, controlling their senses. They enter the tent with a

rnild awe, in a suggestive m c e . Then a joke is made that requires a burst of merriment, or

when a tum is finished, they aii begin moving themselves, as though they had just woken up,

changing their attitude, shaking off the magnetic sleep" (CWB 97).

It is on the display of these types of automatism, curated by Ker-Otr, that Lewis

rests his case that these representatives of the mass of human lives are mechanized to the

extent ihat they are not petsons but "[men]-of-bubbles" which we "may blow away with a

burgundian p s t of laughter" (CWB 153). Empathy is, as 1 have argued, a product of

sustained mess to interiority, and empathy with Ker-Om's specimens is foreclosed as rhis

access is denied. In the absence of empathy, pathos rernains a possibility, though the

assumption of the book seem to be that pathos will be eliminated dong with the ilIusion of

autonomous life: "their mechanism is a logical stmcture and they are nothing but that"

(CWB 150).

In two of the seven stories-"A Sulider of Humour" and "Bestre"-kwis is

successful in foreclosing pathos as weii as empathy. "A Soldier of Humour" is the story

of the destruction of Monsieur's de Valmore's self-delusion in two parts. In the h t part,

after a bug but restrained conversational battie, Ker-Ondevastates the man by hwling at

him the narne of his bhhplace; in the second part of the sfory VaImore, resuscitated üke a

cartoon villain, attempts to exact revenge when the two cross paths in another tom, After

near defeat, Ker-Orr vanquishes h i . again by revealing himseif to te the esteemed fiiend of

a group of Americans with whom Valmore has been sIavishly trying to ingratiate hirnself.

Upon this revelation, Valmore's "personal mortification assume[s] the proportions of a

national calamity" (CWB 45) and the following day he has vanished. The Life of the

innkeeper Bestre revolves mund the batties he wages against a succession of townspeople

and toucisis against whom he conceives some dislike. "His quarrels," says Ker-On,

"tumed up as reguiarly as work for a good shoemaker or dentist. Antagonism after

antagonism flashed forth. . . then wore itself out" (CWB 83). The quarrel reiated in the

story is with a visiting painter's wife; like aii Bestre's batties, it is conducted by glases and

stares, outrageous wordless affronts communicated by the eyes. hsofar as the story bas a

dénouement, it is Ker-On's revelation that Bestre in this case fmdy resorts to quithg his

opponent by confronting her "with another engine than the eye" (CWB 834m short, by

exposing himself. Few critics have failed to point out the extraordinary triviality of subject

in these two stories, and many have dismissed them on account of it. One should at least

consider, however, that the flimsiness of Valmore's deIusion and the pointlessness of

Bestre's battles stand as emblems of the vacuity of these creatures' existences, and of the

arbitnriness and vanity of the things that the uncreative human rnind will adopt to structure

its inner void.

in a "A Soldier of Humour'' and "Bestre" Lewis succeeds in foreclosing pathos

as weii as empathy, but this success is, undeniably, largely a function of the sheer aiviality

of the personalities and circumstances, rather than of what Ker-Orr presents to us as the

mechanistic nanue of their behaviour. This becomes evident when these two stories are

compared to the other five, in which the characters and events are significantiy more

substantiai. Lewis sbould probably be credited for the boldness with which k subjects his

vision of psychological automatism to the most demanding test, that of human suffering.

Evidence of pain, after aii, caused even Descartes to pause over his theory of animal

automatisn~'~ In each of the other five stories the spectacle of automatism is also a sp tac le

of suffering. Mademoiseiie Péromette is both emotiondy tomenteci and mutinely,

viciously, beaten by Cd. The Cornac is aging, iii, physicaily decrepit; his performances

t o m e him. Ludo, though impenous, has his life confined by biindness, destitution, and

dependence on a child. François is homeless, hungry, ridiculed, and outcast. Julie is

dependent on a husband who has squandered her money and is regularly beaten more

thoroughly even than Mademoiselle Piromette.

After Ker-Orr's f i t triumphant exposure of Valmore he has a moment of

repentance. He confesses that after retuming to his rwm, "as usually happened to me, 1

began sentimentaily pitying my victim. Poor little chap! My conduct had been

unpardonable! 1 had a movement to go down and apologize to him, a tear of laughter st i i i

hanging from a moumiui lash" (CWB 29). But Ker-On does not go down, and that is the

1 s t spasm of compunction he exhibits. Pathos, by definition sentimental, is ovemdden. But

the vision of automatism is undone by the instances of more substantial suffering in the

other stories. The reader does not care that Valmore's delusion is not restored like a

cathedra1 after a bombing, but we cannot comply with Ker-Orr's response-a passing

philological observation-to the physicai violence of the dynarnic that d e s the relationship

of Car1 and Péronnette. "1 entered the kitchen of the Pension," Ker-Orr relates,

but noticing that Car1 was holding Mademoiselle Péromette by the throat, and was

banging her head on the kitchen table, 1 withdrew. As 1 closed the door 1 heard

Mademoiselle Péro~ette, as 1 supposed, crash upon the kitchen floor. Duil sounds

that were probably kicks foiiowed, and 1 could hear Car1 roaring, 'Gourte! Zale

gourte!' . . . It was, 1 think, a corruption of the fiench word gourde, which means

caiabash. (CWB 54)

Likewise, the pathos of François's condition is more forcehl than Ker-Orr's declaration

that "the emotions provoked by the bad, late, topical sentimental songs of Republican

France . . . accounted completely for him" (CWB 121), and the callousness of Ker-On's

exposure of the beatings and the drinking that Julie tries to keep hidden is more forcehi

than the inteiiectuai penettation that it is intended to exhibit.

The Wild Body is an expriment in eliminating empathetic response to fiction, and in

this Lewis partly succeeds: stnicturally locked into the mind of Ker-Orr, the reader has no

access to the interiors of the people he encounters. But this precIusion of empathetic

immersion is also an attempt to make compelling a particular view, and in this the book

falters. The characters of The Wild Body dispiay a number of traits that few wodd deny are

conunon enough in human lives: selfdefeating fatalism, irrational tenacity, trivial

obsessions, ritualistic routines, and the inability to recognize these things for what they are.

What Lewis nies to do is make exprientially convincing the idea that such behaviour

reveals the essentially mechanistic nature of the average human min4 to demonstrate that the

"soul" is not a mystery, that most individual lives are not unique in any profound or

interesting sense, that moving declarations of human freedom ovemde the hard facts of the

matter. There is sorne truth in Lewis's c l a h that fiction "is able to pass off as m e aimost

anything" ( P 109) (at least until the reader puts down the book), but he does not succeed in

"passing off' the vision of The Wild Body.

The Wild Body's lack of cogency is largely a result of the fact that Ker-On, who is

put in place to secure the vision, is underdeveloped and underdramatized: our experience of

his mind is not complex or detailed enough to make either his sense of humour or his

psychologicai analyses convincing. Lewis relies too much on the logic of his almost

hystericaiiy exaggerated hurnanism-that to be Iess then fully consicous and self-

determinhg is to be less than human-and tw Littie on creating a psychologicaily

cornmancikg or seductive narrator. Given the dexterous and vivid psychological creations of

Tan and, later, of The Revenge for Love and Self-Cortdemned the imperfedy realized

Ker-Orr appears to be a symptom of the ambivalence of Lewis's aims. This "showman,"

as I have suggested, is Lewis's means of mediating between his desire to create a purely

antiempathetic fiction and his desire to exploit the persuasive power of empathetic fiction,

but it is an imperfect one. Ker-Orr was to anchor and control empathetic response in The

Wild Body, but at the same time he was to ground the work's apped in rational

demonstration and analysis rather than in emotional seduction. But the view that Lewis

wants to demonstrate does not "pass" or persuade rationaüy, and in forgoing

psychological development of Ker-OK as a ctiaracter he gave up the aesthetic means by

which it might have been made to persuade emotionaliy.

Notes

' See Edwards (Painter and Writer 48) and Paul O'Keeffe's afterword to the Black

Sparrow edition of Tarr (337-38). O'Keeffe notes it was unlikely that Lewis had read

Freud at the time he was writing Tarr. Following Edwards, he suggests that "a more likely

mode1 of Kreisler's psychology" cm be found in Schopenhauer's On the Freedom ofthe

Will.

' Several accounts of the direct infiuence of Dostoevsky on Tarr have been written. For a

brief overview of these, see O'Keeffe's aftenvurd to the Black Sparrow edition (380-382).

In brief, Edwards argues that "theories and representations" in Tarr "are not simple

plans and schemas to be corrected after painîul experience shows their inaccutacy, but are

an integral part of personal identity"; Bloom and Dedalus, on the other hand, "sit in

Bloom's kitchen drinking cocoa unaffectea in their consciousness or their relationship with

each other by the fantastic rigow of the rhetoric through which we discem them. They are

not affected by the fact that thein is a sign world; the characters of Tamare*' (Painter and

Wiiier 44-45).

4 It is not clear what, for Lewis, wodd bave counted as successfui lexical or syntactic

abstraction, given his inability or unwillingness to recognize in Gertrude Stein's work

anything more than willfiil childishness, "exploitation of the processes of the demented"

(7WM 102). or experimentation in the directionof music, which he fin& unsatisfactory: "it

is only doing what the musician has been doing for centunes, but doing it poorly, because

the insirument of speech on the one hand, and the verbal syrnboiism on the other, wiii not, in

the case of words, yield such a purity of effect" (TWM 1 11)-

Cited in Robbe-Grillet, 21.

See Edwards, Painter and Writer 253-63 for an account of Lewis's exhibition 'Tyros

and Portraits" at the Leicester Galleries in 1921 and the sirnultaneous publication of his

magazine The Tyro. The figure of the Tyro, of which Ker-Orr is a descendent, is a

gleaming, grinning, puppet-like caricature of the sharp-dressed modem urban man.

7 The Apes of God is the most straighrforwardly satirical of the four, but given its exclusive

concentration on Bloomsbury, it is hardly "rnetaphysicai" in the sense Lewis proposes.

The Childemass is probably better classified as a drama of ideas (Jarneson offers

"theologicai science-fiction" (6)); Snoocy Baroner is ostensibly a satire of Behavioutism,

but the point of view of the Behaviourist is adopted so seamlessly that the satirical angle is

virtuaily indiscemile.

' See Bernard Lafourcade's essay 'The Taming of the Wild Body" for a detailed account

of the composition and arrangement of the Wid Body texts, and for one interpretation of

the effect of the revisions. For other interpretations of the revisions see Ian Duncan, David

Corbett, and Sherry's "Anatomy of Foiiy." Lafourcade argues that the major shift is fiom

a lingering vitalism to a proto-existentialist vision of the absurd. Duncan, Corbett, and

Sherry have argued against this, each pointhg out, in a different way, a shift towards

in terpretive mastery.

Lewis adds, "We know what sort of picture DH. Lawrence wouid paint . . . . For he did

so luckily, and even held exhibitions. As one might have expected, it turned out to be

incompetent Gaugin!" ( W A 104).

'O Hugh Kemer notes the incongniity of this claim: "Tt is with his ear, oddly enough, that

Lewis has composed the best parts of the book. . . probably half the text is dialogue, and

half the remainder is transacted inside the characters' heads, a method that Lewis has always

noisily disowned" (Kenner 103). To be fair, in Men Withocct Art, Lewis does recommend

"the internat method" for use with "(1) the extremely aged; (2) young children; (3) half-

wits; and (4) animals" (MWA 98).

" In "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928).

l 2 One rnay be inched to agree witb Hugh Kenner's concIusion thar up to the mid-thirties

"the wodd mwis] was observing . . . dways seemed to him Little more reai than a Punch

and Judy show," and that just as the antiSemitism he had equanimously observed in

Munich in 1906 "impressed him . . . as a relatively harmiess knockabout farce engaged in

by people who on both sides had cheerfully tmed themselves into racial stereotypes," so

"people susceptible to worry, pain, and frustration didn't exist in the universe to which he

was amned" (Kenner 83). David Trotter has recently offered an exposition ofLewisls life

and work in tems of "anti-pathos," which he wavers between calling "strategic" and

"mildly psychotic." Biographies of Lewis document bo th shoc kingly callous be haviuur in

his persona1 relationships as well as testimonials to bis gened amiability.

Geoffrey Wagner discusses the Cartesian elements of the man-machine so

ubiquitous in Lewis's thought and fiction: "in the Cartesian metaphysic sou1 is identified

with reason. The author of cogito, ergo sum meant that we exist insrnuch as we reason

consciously"; so in Lewis's thought '?he kss 'mentai,' or in the Lewisian sense 'visual' a

man is, the more primitive he is; and the more primitive, and lower on the chah of being, the

more mechanical." Wagner suggests, however, that in bis exuemes Lewis more closeiy

resembles "the eighteenth-century French materialkt . . . Julien ûffay de La Metuie, author

of L'Homme Machine (1 FM), which eliminated nearty ai l nonmechanical elements in the

corporeal universe and accused man of being as much a machine as was the Cartesian

animd" (227-28).

l3 1 shouId acknowledge at this point tbat The Wila Body constmcts, in effect, two Ker-

Orrs (undoubtediy a result of the stages of composition and revision) which 1 do not believe

can be synthesized, and that my account of the stones is baxd on the second, which

dominates the stories. The first Ker-Orr appears oniy in the opening preamble and "A

Soldier of Humour," and reappears in a pder form only in "Bestre." This Ker-Orr

presents himself as essentiaiiy primitive in body and rnind; he relishes the intimidating size

and mhalicy of bis body (T experience no embarrassrnent in following the promptings of

my fine physique"); his primitive lusts for war and sex, however, he bas sublimated and

refined into a lut for batîies of humour ("'where fomerly 1 would fly at throats, 1 now how1

with laughter") (CWB 17-18). This Ker-Orr the fmt, however, soon settles into Ker-Orr

the second, the master of abstract thought and Europeaa languages (CWB 19), whose

social-scientific detac hment prevds throughout the rest of the stories.

'" 'There is so ver- Iittle true intelligence or perfect g m e in the world (people grossly

ovetestirnate the amunt) that it & impossible to be tme, for what that is worth, and satisQ

the requirements of the 'idealist* Bostonian, who insists upon seeing what is not there*'

(MWA 119).

l5 Wagner writes that "there are hints in the Discours de la méthode that a machine in the

shape of an animal was no different, in Descartes' eyes, h m the animai itseif . . . . What

womed him, and other mechanists . . . was thai beasts evidently felt pain." He ad& that

"Descartes met this dimculty by proposing that dogs feIt a pain that was different Ui kind

from human pain, king merely corporeal and therefote mechanistic" (227-28). Some

such rationaie appears to iic behind Lewis's depictions of human suffering in The Wild

Body.

C H A P T E R F O U R

Poetry Is Not Enough

The Independent Minci, Authority, and Tmih

Laura Riding was above di a poet, not a fiction writer: although it is on Progress of Sronés

that this study concentrates, the ideas of that work developed out of the compIex poecics she

began formulating in the early twenties. It is to these poetics-implicated in A Survey of

Modemist Poehy, and worked out at length in Conternpomries and Snobs and Anarchism

1s Nor Enough-that we wili tum here.

The continuity between Riding's poetics and the vision of Progress of Stories lies in

her enduring conviction that tmth cm be apprehended, incamated, lived (her sense of truth

shifts somewhat) oniy through the accurate use of language. in her devotion as a poet to

eiiminating vague suggestiveness and metricaiiy convenient approximations in pursuit of an

ided of spareness, directness, and precision, she was of course in good Company, deveIoping

the pre-war practices that Ied to Pound's fonnuIation of linagime, and which wouId be

taken up in tm, at least pady through her example, by the p t s of the thiaies.' In

Conremporaries and Snobs and Anarchism, however, her attention shifts fiom the way

poetry shdd be written to the nature of the huth in the name of which it should be Wntten,

and "poetry" dtimately cornes to designate a mode of existence, in which the role of the

linguistic craft of that name grows rather obscure. With the sense, perhaps, that she and

Graves had saib-and shown, by a series of often b f i an t demonstrsttions-wbat needed to

be said about poetic technique in Swey and in their second coiiaboration, A Pamphlet

Against Anthologies (1928). Riding returns in Contemporaries and Anarchisrn to the

premise of her earlier essay "A Prophecy or a Plea" (1925). The question of the direction

of contemporary poetry, she proposed in that piece, "is not a question of proving another

[poetic] method more legitimate.. . [Tlhe quanel must be made not with the way we write

but the way we live" (275). in what foUows, then, 1 will be outlining a poetics that bas more

to do with Riding's development of a conception of the individuai self than with poetry per

se. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Riding wilI have more specinc things to Say about the

relation of truth to the practice of poetry d e r she has tumed away fiom it.

Riding and Lewis both take it as axiomatic that art-specifically, for Riding,

poetry4erives from the individuality, or inteiiectud independence, of the creator, and that

the modern world is inimicd to such individuality. The instrument of modem homogeneity

is, for Lewis, the irrationalism that overrides the discriminating powers of the intellect and

sweeps away the inteiiectual and creative distinctions between people; for Riding the

primary threat to individuality cornes from the opposite direction, the ascendancy of the

scientific model of truth. Science, Riding allows, has its legitimacy as "a smaii though

authoritative corner of human knowledge" (CS 84). Her argument with its empiricai

standard is that as a model of knowledge it precludes a i i others, and so a i i other conceptions

of truth. The empirical model of knowledge is, as Giddens has put it, "inherently

globaiizing" (63); the predictive power of science gives it a universai force by which

traditional and alternative conceptions of knowIedge cannot go uacompromised. It is to this

situation that Riding refers when she says ttiat "knowledge, mad with its own modemity,

declared itseif the sole source of tmth" (CS 62). She sees science, and al1 the quasi-

scientific fields of knowledge that issue fiom it, as revoking the poet's claim to authocity.

The only thing science leaves for pe t s to speak of with independent authority is their own

psychological experience. This is "the deprivation of the universe which science has forced

on fiterature" (CS 70): "if the puet shows independence, is, indeed, not a mere mouthpiece

of the contemporary miad, it is assumed.. . that he cannot have an informai muid; and

everything he writes is taken with a grain of scientific salt" (CS 58). Eveqhing the poet in

a scientific age writes is going to be categorized, that is, as impression or emotion, rather

than mth.

W e most of the modemist p e t s felt compelied to Say something about the value

of poetry, few wouid insist that it had to be truth value. Williams, for instance, was bardly

modest in his aspirations for poetry, and frequently as hostile to scientific (and

philosophical) thought as Riding was: His appeal, however, was not to poetq's specid

access to truth but to the power he saw in it to create and recreate human perception of the

world, and therefore the only "reality" that is hurnanly relevant: 'The value of the

imagination to the writer consists in its ability to make words," and "Mc becomes actual

only when it is identified with ourselves. When we narne it, life exists" (Imaginations 120,

115). No less retiring than Williams in his claims for the power and relevance of poetry,

Stevens counseled nonetheless that ''We have been a littie insane about the tmth. We have

had an obsession" (33), and saw the value of poeûy in its construction of hypotheticai but

efficacious "supreme fictions." Neither did Lewis, who was as preoccupied as Ricihg with

the sources and nature of intellectual authority, share her fuation on truth. Though deeply

invested in the idea of rationality as the power of discriminating analysis and of imperious

abstraction from the teerning world of phenornena, truth is a word he uses rarely and with

circumspection. A student of Nietzsche, he tries to win the world for art not through truth but

through power. He interrogates contemporary philosophies not in order to pass judgment on

how t . e their accounts of the world appear to be, but to detennine the extent to which they

would buiwark or undermine the order he believes is best for art: "act I Say to the artist, as

the perfect opportunist," he declares in Men Without Arr, "and let tnith take care of itseif'

(MWA 188).

Lewis is primarily concemed with bringing about the social conditions most

favourable for inteliectud independence and so for the fiourishing of art, the conditions we

h d in his sketchy and intermittentiy articulateci utopian vision for society on the far side of

modemity: a benevolent leadership of artists, inteilectuals, and scientists who, "possessing

no concerted and lawless power, coming indifferently from di cIasses, [will live] simply

among other people" (ABR 374), leaving the masses '?O Iead a peaceful, industrious, and

pleasant Iife" (ABR 367). in this world, it appears, artists wodd be equai to scientists and

other inteiiectuals in the sense that their work and their discoveries would be equaiiy vaiued,

but Lewis never suggests that artists compte with scientists in the sense of making equal

claims to tnith. The arts, it appears, would create revolutions in sensibility, not issue truths.

Sirnilarly, standing, as he sees it, in the rnidst of the finai stages of modernity, he does not

make claims for the speciai authority of art qua art. Recogniwng art's potentiai for

disseminating ideas, rather, he sets out to counter tbe tide of anti-individualism equaiiy by

rneans of his metaphysicai satires as by means of his critical books.

Riding is centrally concerned not just with the priservation of individuality, but with

the c i a h of the independent rnind-paradigmatically, the poet-to tnith, and so to authority.

The tmth apprehended by pets, she argues, trumps the tmth claimed by science and the

scientized disciplines of knowledge in chat it is the tnith of fundamental and universal

conditions of human existence and experience. Such tnrth, furthermore, is accessible oniy by

and through poets, as it is inseparable h m its articulation in the distilled, measured, and

crafted words of poems. The recognition of tiw vdue of poetry, ii seemed to Riding,

depended specifically on its inteiiectual authority, which depended in tum on its claim to

truth. In binding poetry to mth, she was attempting to cornniand recognition and secure

celevance for it.

Next to Wiams, Stevens, and Lewis, Riding's desire to anchor poetry to auth as

though truth were a value as absolute in her own tirne as it was to PIato may seem faintly

absurd. But she was not altogether mistaken: she was not railing, after di, agahst a society

that had blithely ceased to concem itseifwith the concept of tmth as the accurate account of

the real (whatever the pragmatists were saying), but against one that honoured a particular

conception-the scientiüc+f what counts as an accurate accmt, and whiçh was organized

largely around that. In light of the prestige of science, no vaiue other than tmh could secure

for poetry the authority Riding wanted for it: anything else would render poetry instrumental

or ornamentai, subservient or inessential, rather than authoritative and sovereign.

Throughout her work, Riding treats science and the mass as aspects of a single force.

The mass, as she sees it, is apotheosized in the scientific epistemology: truth loses its relation

to a distinctive speaker; the decisive critenon for a true statement is that it is impersonal, its

proof being (at least in principle) replicable by anyone and everyone, Riding did not retaliate

with a notion of a "personai'' truth: 'There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the

sense of something more reai than life," opens Contemporanés and Snobs; "it is, at its

clearest, poetry" and "can in its origins be only a personal one" (CS 9). Though in its

origins personai, the tmth of poetry, she will claim, is the truth, true for everyone. Like Lewis,

who did not contest the modus operandi of the contemporary power brokers so much as

appropriate it, Riding declares that the tnith uncovered in a poem is not "a kind of truth,

since in truth there are no kinds" (PLR 407, my emphasis). The tmth Riding initiaüy wants

to claini for poehy is, furthemore, one apprehended cognitively, not intuitively? Survey

Iargely avoids vatic vocabulary in favour of the solid and sublunary; the emphasis on thought

and fact is an attempt to present poetry as a cognitive activity--~ognitive like science but

autonomous in the sense of not subject to evaiuation by science.

The steadfastness with which Riding pursues this idea, however, ultimately leads her

away from poetry altogether. In the course of the three books, poeûy cornes to be identified

with individuality, and the defense of poetry cornes to be a defense of the autonomous

authority of the individual mind as against the impersonal, scientific (or scientistic) authority

that prevails in society. In this way, it is not just poetry that is conceiveci as radicdy

separated fiom the social world, but the individual as well. Riding forges a conception of

poetic autonomy that holds poetry and the poet beyond the dominion of society as weii as

science. Her idea of an autonomous tmth leads her to a conception of an autonomous life:

she pursues the idea of an autonomously authoritative poetry to the point at which it

transmutes into a vision of radical existentid isolation. Rather than reestablishing the

authonty of poets in society, her logic ultimateiy drives her to declare that îhe condition of

the m e individual, the poet, is a "social disappemce" (A 76):

One of the most singular features of Riding's poetry is the noumenai quaüty she

acichieves by eiiminating vïrtuaiIy ail indications of tirne and place and references to particular

objects and events, This abstraction is at least partly a product of her attempt to establish the

sovereign authority of the poet by scmpulously cejecting the products and trappings of

"specialized fields of expIoration and discovery" in favour of "fundamentai and general"

tmth (PLR 407)-a rejection which, taken to extrernes, results in what she c d s social

disappearance. Whiie Riding's poetry did receive some recognition in the twenties and

thirties, its extreme abstraction is one of tbe reasons it was ais0 routineIy charged with

"obscurity." 1 wouId not contend that Riding eventually w e d away from poetry because

of the criticd incomprehension with which her work was met, but it may have been a

contributhg factor. As she would write in the preface to her Collected Poems, before

mounting yet another spirited expianation of the selfexplanatory nature of her poems, "no

poet genuinely moved by the reasons of poetry cm be indilferent to the accusation that his

poems make inaccessible what it is their function to uncover" ( P U 406). Riding's primary

reason for renouncing poetry, which we shali consider in Chapter 5, was that though poetry

a h to articulate the fundamental and general rniths of hurnanity, the abiiity to write it-part

gift, part craft4ivides the majority of human beings h m tfie tnith that, she decided, was as

much theirs to speak as it was the poet's. She never accepts, however, the claims of extemal,

system-based authority over the daims of the individual m i n H e pursuit of seif into social

disappearance, a siate of being which she will cal1 inAnan:him the "meal," remains, as we

shaii see, central to Prugress of Stories. In th WO& however, her fratnework wîll have

begun to shift. Social disappearance is conceived as the necessary step between the false

collectivity of social existence and the genuine union of individuals in 'e existence, or

tnrth. In the development of this vision, poetry is left behind for an ideal of hurnanly naiurai,

artless writing and speech. Riding seems to have foiiowed the logic that poeûy could make

itself universal only by stripping itseifof social and temporal trappings, but in doing so

could oniy deliver itself into a hermetic obscurity that defeated its universal aspirations.

Unable to solve this dilemma fiom within, she wouid attempt to transcend it by projecting a

world in which what had begun as 'Wie reasons of poetry" (PLR 406) would become the

reasons of life.

The Autonomous Poem

Ostensibly an explanation and analysis of modernist poetry undettaken for the sake of the

"plain reader," whose "rights" the frtst chapter addresses, A Survey of Modemist Poetry

offers to provide an account of the creation of poems which are "not only difficult in

constmction and reference," but which (in a further affront to the public) are "pnnted

queerly on the page" (S 59): We find in the work, however, two distinct conceptions of the

n a m of poetry in general. In parts of the work Riding and Graves attempt to establish that

poey is a cognitive activity resernbling psychology, which airns to formulate tniths about

the human rnind, and that modernist p û y in particuiar is not an exercise in obfuscation, but

a refinement of that activity. But in the course of kir explication of modemist poetics, they

come to work with a second conception of poetry, according to which the nature of cognition

in poetry is difietent irom cognition as ordioariiy conceived. These conceptions CO-exist in

the book without obmive incompatibility, but the premises of the second logicaiiy ovemde

the ht, and in those premises are the origins of the radical conception of poetic autonomy

Riding wiii develop in Contemporaries und Snobs and Anarchism 1s Not Enough.

The mode1 of poeq implied by Riding's and Graves' analyses of the mechanics of

some representative modemist poems is one which had general currency among the

modemists, and which remains in use as a serviceable rhumbnail conception of the modernist

revolution in the arts. According to this model, modernist poeay (and modernism in the arts

in general) is a force of perceptual and psychological renewal. By implication, art is

understood as the encoding of cultural perception, an encoding that can, however, ossifj what

should be a continual and dynamic process of cdtural change. The upheavai of modemist

poetics is seen as a necessary effort to demonstrate to the contemporary mind its

unconscious and restrictive habits and to encode in its productions what is genuinely

contemporary in the life and thought of the culture.

Thus in parts of Survey we h d Riding md Graves stresshg that the techniques of

modemist poetry have been contrived in the service of greater accuracy of expression:

ordinary modern life is full of the stock-feelings and situations with which traditional

poetry has continudy fed popular senhents . . . . To appreciate this fully it must be

realized that it is always the pets who are the reai psychologists, that it is they who

break down antiquated Lterary definitions of people's feelings and make them or try

to make them self-conscious about formerly ignored or obscure mental processes . . . . wodemist poetry] is not try ing to Say ''Things often felt [sic] but ne'er so well

expressed" but to discover what it is we are realiy feeling. (S 90)

Similady, Riding and Graves write tbat Hopkins was "one of the f i t modernist pets to

feel the need of a cleamess and accuracy in feelings and their expression so minute, so more

than scientific, as to make of poetry a higher sort of psychology" (S 90): This is an

essentiaiiy humanistic conception of the sphere and value of poetry: critical in spirit, it aims

to Liberate the mind from unconscious and automatic habits, promising, implicitly, M e r Me

in heightened seif-understanding.

The second conception of p t r y Riding and Graves develop is much less accepting

of a place for poetry in the general inteiiectual life of the culture. It postulates "poetic

thought" as an activity of the mind distinct and independent from "thought" in the ordinary

sense, and in this conception is the germ of the radical version of poetic autonomy that

Riding will go on to develop. Empincism's implicit challenge to poetry is the question W h t

dues poetry give us hwledge of? The concept of poetic thought appears to have been

produced under a sense of compulsion to answer that question, but it manages to do so only

by relating poetry to a rather inscrutable form of cognition-one thaî has nothing to do with

knowledge in the ordinary sense. The concept of poetic thought is first introduced in Survey

in the course of a denunciation of the Symbolist aspiration to merge poetry with music:

"musicalness . . . means . . . the treating of word-sounds as musical notes in which the

meaning itseif is to be found" (S 31). This practice is said to be "destructive of poetic

thought" because it is a compromise "between ideas and typography" (S 32). The idea of

poetic thought, here used in passing, reappears, sometimes in slightly adjusted tenns, in later

chapters. In a similar context-a denunciation of the (aiieged) imagist practice of using

"images 'to render particulan exactiy* " (S 1 18)-Riding and Graves wnte that "the poem

does not give a rendering of a poetical p i c m or idea existing outside tiie poem, but preseats

the iiteral substance of poetry, a newly created thought-activity" (S 118) (my emphasis). The

"rictivity" of the poem is conceived as intemal to the poem as an entity: the poem is not a

record of the thought-activity of the poet; it is itself "a thought activity."

This is a conception of poetic autonomy related to those that assert that the poem is

autonomous in the sense that its primary significance is not its existence in the mind of the

poet or the reader but in its status as an artifact or created thing.' We come across this

conception, for instance, in Williams. "Works of art," he writes, "must be real, not

'reaiism' but reality itseif . . . . It is not a matter of 'representation' . . , but of separate

existence" (Imaginations L 17). Riding and Graves's conception here is distinct from

Wiams's, however, in that it is not primarily ontological: it does not posit the poem as an

independentiy existing thing, but as an independently existing field of cognitive activity-a

contention, surely, that strains the boundaries of sense. The idea is Iater reforrndated in

aitemative terms. The poet, we are told, "discover[s] things which are made by his discovery

of them (his results are not statements about things aiready knowu to exist, or knowledge,

but tniths, tbings which existed before only as potential truth)" (S 126-27). The key word

shifts Erom "thought" to "truths," and tmths are neatiy severed h m things known. This

shift of terms is reinforced with the subsequent statement that the poet "is declaring with

each new poem a ûuth, a complete truth, even a contradictory ûuth" (S 154). The sense in

which "tmth" is king used here is immediately obscured in a defiant flourish: "[the poet]

is allowing two times two (or tmth) to h o m e al1 it is possible for it to be, since mth cannot

be reduced to a fuced mathematical law any more than poetry to a fmed litecary method: two

t h e s two, like poetry, may be everything and anything" (S 154).

Tmth is a concept Riding and Graves evidently wish to question, but will not

relinquish: the cachet of the term is one they are resolved to wrest back fiom science. Their

emphasis remains on the tmth value of the poem, but the cognition uivolved in the creation

and reception of poetry ceases to be considered continuous with thought and statement as

ordinarily conceived. What Riding and Graves arrive at in Survey is an early formulation of

the heresy of paraphrase: to the plain reader's demand of the modernjst poem, " 'What, in

so many words . . . is this al1 about?' " they answer that "if it were possible to give the

complete force of a poem in a prose summary, then k r e wouid be no excuse for writing the

poem: the 'so many words' are, to the last punctuation mark, the poem itself' (S 139): The

m e poem is not just sernanticaiiy ineducibIe, but semanticaüy inexpanciable:

If, as such, without the addition of any associations not provided in the poem, or of

collateral interpretations, [a poem] codd reveal an internai consistency strengthened

at every point in its development and fiee of the necessity of extemal application, that

is, complete without criticism-if it couId do this, it wouid have estabiished an

insurnountable difference between prose ideas and poetic ideas, prose facts and

poetic facts. The ciifference wouId mean the independence of poetic facts, as real

facts, fiom any prose or poetical explmation in the terms of practicai workaday

reality which wouid make them seem unreai, or poeticai facts. (S 146)

We shouid not understand "paetical fact" iKre to mean the brute existence of the poem, as,

for instance, Wiarns fiequently seems to, or as Rilke does when he writes that "only a

person able to acknowledge [Chinne's paintiags] in their actuaiity, quietly, without

experiencing them otherwise than as plain facts . . . could do hem justice" (155). Ridiig

and Graves's use of the word "fact" is inextricably mixed with "idea" (indeed in this

passage the two appear synonymous), and in this way they retain both the claim to the

cognitive nature of poeûy and to its tmth value, though these are now presented as

discontinuous with thought and knowledge as ordinarily conceived. They are Ied to this

position by their need to demonstrate to their "plain readef' that a mudernist poem is not a

perverse distortion of a proper poem, but a poem that couId not be written in any other way;

they arrive, however, at a conception of an autonomous poetic cognition that WU in Riding's

work grow steadiy more enmnched and uncompromising.

Beginning in A Survey of Modemist Poehy, and developed in Contemporaries and

Snobs, we End a Iine of argument about poetic autonomy that marks a sbift away fiorn

concern with the independent existence of the individual poem (as either "thing" or

'thought") ruid towards an argument about the independence of poetry as a practice or

phenornenon from otfier cultumi practices and phenornena. In both Survey and

Contemporaries Riding criticizes the EIiotic hypostasis of the l i t e q tradition as a secies of

"monuments [which] fom an ideal or&r among thernselves," and the complementary

image of the poet writing with the feeling that "the wwhole of the literatuce of Europe fiorn

Homer. . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (S 38). But

Riding devetops her own conception of the history of poetry, and it is one chat denies the

relevance of social history to poetry in a mannez more radical than anything Eüot meant to

suggest. ït is part of her own argument about modernist poetry that poetry partaices ody in

an incidenta1 way of history, which is rnereIy its vehicle-necessary, but in a i l significant

respexls extraneous.

Riding's account of the history of poetry is both a nauative of decline and a narrative

of liberation. It is one of the axioms oiSurvey chat the place of poetry in the geueral life of

contemporary society is negligibte: "poetry, which was once an aii-embracing human

activity, has ben nmwed dom by the speciaiization of oiher generd activities, such as

religion and the arts and sciences, into a technical branch of culture of the most limited kind.

It has changed from a 'humanity' into an 'art' " (S 260). It is this situation that Riding and

Graves see as responsible for the hypertrophy of literary criticism in their day, the acute

critical self-consciousness of modernist poets, and the heightened sense of the poetic

tradition as a poetic mind which sits over the individual poet whenever he

writes" (S 264). Because "society allows less and less space for poetry in its organization,"

they write, poetry has contracted to a mere "dot on the period's time chart" (S 261):

The only way that this dot. . . can provide itself with artif?cial dignity and space is

through histoncal depth . . . . mt must extend this dot into the p s t , it must make a

histoncal straight line of it. Poetry becomes the tradition of poetry .

The tradition of poetry, or rather of the art of poetry, then, is the formal

organisation which the modernkt poet fmds himself serving as an itffdiated member.

(S 26 1)

This would appear to be an objection to the abstraction of poetry from history, but it is not.

The principal fault of Eliot's conception of the poetic tradition, as Riding and Graves see it,

is not that it is ahhorical, but that it is professiondized-that it is not sufficiently asocial as

well. It anchors the p e t to a consçiousness and obligatory consideration of "di the poets

who have ever written or may be writing or rnay ever write . . . it binds him with the necessity

of wnting correctiy in extension of the tradition" (S 264).

As Riding imagines it, poetry "in the old sense" was fully engaged and integrated

with contemporary affairs; it was "an interpretation and mirrot of iife" (S 167) which in

"the tirne of the baiiadists or in primitive societies . . . went hand in hand with magicai

religion" (S 260), and which in impenal and religious societies "met certain demands that

were laid upon [it] by an environment in which [it was] generously included" (CS 126).

While this account bears a trace of nostalgia, Riding aimost excIusiveIy portrays the old

interpreting and rnirroring role of poetry as a set of shackles h m which it has recently been

released. One of her most stringent criticisms of modernist poetry is precisely its

preoccupation with contemporary social iüe and thought, and conternporary criticism is

repeatedly arraigned for "return[ing] poetry to its primitive ritualistic function of community

revelation" by treating it as "the generalized voice of social sentiment" rather than as "an

independent personal attribute" (CS 83).

Riding and Graves's argument that poetry is essentiaiiy independent of history stems

in part fiom their desire to dissociate change in poetics from any facile, bourgeois idea of

progress. The danger of the new practices of poetry is the danger of "appeaiing to the

progressiveness of [the bourgeois] middle population" who might be inciined to view poetry

as a "historicai" and therefore advancing "branch of civiiization" (S 158). In "a world of

phin readers hungering for up-to-date poetry" rather than good poetry, poetry L'would tum

. . . into one of the gross industries" (S 188). But above dl, Riding and Graves want to

dissociate poetry fiom histoiy because they cannot find a way around seeing a historical

poehy as a servile poetry:

A strong distinction must be drawn between poetry as something developing through

civilization and as something developing organically by itself . . . . It is therefore

always important to distinguish between what is historicaüy new in poetry because

the poet is contempomy with a civilization of a certain kind, and what is intrinsicaily

new in poetry because the p e t is a new and original individual, something more than

a mere servant and interpreter of civilization. (S 163)

As an "interpreter of civilization," poetry is no more than an "inspired dmdgeil to "the

corpus of knowledge" (CS 61) or "a graceful uibute to the tciumph of the concrete

intelligence" (CS 20), which "regards everything as potentiaiiy comprehensible and

knowable" (CS 19). Thus Riding will construe poetry's former social functions as

"pseudo-poetic occupations" and its Ioss of them as its arriva1 at the condition which has

k e n its "unconscious desire . . . since its begïnnings as a community handmaiden of tribal

success" (CS 12,24). In its scientific vanity, twentieth-çentwy civilization tells poetry "that

it canmt keep up with it, that it must disappeai' (S 167), but this rude dismissal is in fact

"the Iiberation of the poetic intelligence from its indenture" (CS 24). If twentiethcentury

society liberated poetry fiom its service, however, what did it hirate poetry hto? Riding's

answer is the articulation of purer tnith, unaiîoyed with the self-important convictions of

ephemeral ages-the truth accessible to the M y independent individual mind.

The Autonomous Individual

There is some ground for suggesting that if Riding cannot see a way for poetry to co-exist

with the empiricai mode1 of knowledge, it is because her perception of science and its

ramifications tends to be sirnplistic, following largely the commonpIaces of the anti-scientinc

rhetoric of the day. At times her critique amounts to little more than the rhetorical

appropriation of the contested terms of value. Thus "poetry is the science of reality, so-

cded science is itself the myth" (CS 86). and the knowledge of the "concrete intelligence"

is only "the illusion of knowledge" (CS 19). She does not distinguish between pure

experimentd science and depraved applications and distorted populanZations of science

("modem warfare is . . . [one] aspect of the decay of science, ' s ~ i e n ~ c ' spiritualism

another" (CS 831, nor does she evince awareness of the self-criticism and seif-

understanding then taking place within the sciences.

The interesthg thing, however, is not the way in which Riding irnpugns science and

the systematization of knowledge, but the position she is in once she has taken herseif to that

point. Rather than constmcting an aitemative fiamework of reaiity with its own interna1

truths, such as the personai mythologies of Blake or Yeats, she undertalces to legitimate what

she calls "personai authority" (CS 10) by declaring aii fiameworks invalid. KnowIedge

systematized, she argues, is knowledge faisified: "any system of knowIedge

. . . has as much inconsistency as there is inconsistency in humanity at that moment; which is

just why a sysrem of knowledge is a philosophical tyranny and a historicd falsehood" (CS

118). Knowledge cannot be any more systematic than its source, which is "erratic humanity

and the perceptive inteiiigence" (CS 119).

As we have seen, however, though the tmth of poetry is to be in its origins personal, it

is not to be merely personal; it is the tmth, m e for everyone. Riding rejected

"psychoiogicai" poehy, which she saw as a defeatist reaction to empincism-the acceptance

of the restriction of the authonty, and thus the subject matter, of the poet to

phenomenological accounts of his or her inner life: "poets who stand in fear of the

knowledge-hierarchy . . . profess only the single reality of the poetic mind . . . the resuIt is

poetry whose only subject is the psychology of the poet" (CS 58). She will drive a wedge

between the "personal" and the "psychologicai" in an attempt to free the subjective irom

its forced conjunction with the impressionistic and the unreliable (in a scientific society, she

argues, poetry "is obliged to forswear aii personal reality (unless it can be classified as

'psychologicai')" (CS 95)). How was she to do this? At times Riding tries to e x p h the

poet's personai access to tnith by recourse to the vatic language of paradox: the "poetic

inteiiigence" is "an inspired comprehension of the unknowable," "an illuminating

ignorance" (CS 19). But these paradoxes are connected to a broader and more

cornprehensive way of formulating the reality over which poetry is to have authority, which is

based on an inversion of the terms "reai" and "unreai."

As early as Suwey Riding had linked the social devaluation of poetry to the

denigration of the individuai, identifjing both as results of the implacable logic of science

and its fusion of mth with objectivity. In Contemporaries and Snobs and Anarchism 1s Nor

Enough, she cornes to ident* poetry and individuality with each other and with what she

wiii caii the "unceai": "the unreai to me is poetry," and "the unreal is not a position but the

individual himeif" (A 69). She attempts to retain the identitication ofpoetry and the

individuai without reducing poetry to the expression of psychologicaI expenence by locating

both in an ''unreaiityy*-a space or dimension incommensurable with reality-not

apprehensible through the conceptuai categories of the concate intelligence, and only

irnperfectly expnssible through the language that intelligence has compted.

In Anarchism Riding begins to defme poetry in opposition to aii that is knowable (in

the ordinary sense), socio-historical, shareable, communicable-in opposition to everything,

in one of her central terms, that is something: "A poem," she finally declares, "is nothing":

"By persistence the poem can be made something, but then it is something, not a poem" (A

16). We should not, however, be misled by this verbai strategy. It is not a telinquishg of

claims to reaiity (and with reality to authority and tnith). As noted above, Riding sometimes

argues by appropriating the terms of value (calling poetry "science" and science "myth,"

for instance). But here she is rejecting the term of value-bLsomething"as a debased

linguistic counter, no longer capable of signming its tme object, and so adopting its opposite

tenn-"nothing"-to serve that purpose. She uses the same strategy to retum to "reai"

and "reality" what she claims is their original, their me, meaning:

It is painful . . . to be forced to leave 'poetry' to the ad self and to c d the poetry of

the unreal self unreality. Poetry is a stolen word, and in using it one must remain

conscious of its perverted sense in the sentice of realism; and this is equaiiy paùiful.

But if poetry is a stolen word, so is reality: reaiity is stolen h m the self, which is

thus in its integrïty forced to c d itself unreal. (A 20)~

Ming wants to secure for the poet, or for poetry as a mode of language (she does not

distinguish clearly between these), the autonornous authority to make statements about, or in

some way access or apprehend reaiity. But reality how conceived? How can reality be "seif'

and yet be more than the experientiai "reality" of a &en seif?-for Riding even attempts to

sever the term "self' fiom any particuIar self: a tnie poem is "self' "discharged fiom the

individual, it is self; not his self, but seif' (A 97). Whether she is conscious of it or not, her

conception of the relationship of poetry to reaiity and truth undergoes a distinct shift at this

point. The truth that she begins to associate with poetry comes to have Iess to do with correct

apprehension of reaiity and more to do with the conduct of life.

The essay "Jocasta," the centerpiece of Amrchism, culminates in the claim tbat h m

the point at which human groups distinguished themselves Çorn rowig animal packs, the

idea of the social group has been a lie imposed by force, and the essentiai nature of every

human king has k e n a radical individuality, a not-belonging to anything but itself. The

argument of Anarchism is not principally about the autonorny of poetry, as was the case in

Survey; an argument about the autonorny of the individuai has taken over. The "individual"

in Riding's work up to this point had ken, as in Lewis's work, a term of high distinction,

designating the person of original creative power as against the member of the common herd.

But the more her arguments about poetry give themselves over to arguments about human

nature, the more the undistinguished individual begins to find a place. Although Ming

s p e h with contempt of the "dernacratic mass" throughout "Jacasta," she aiso allows that

it is at least possible for every human king to live in accord with the radical individuaiity that

is their true nature. She does imply an unequal distribution of existentid potential: the

"sense of unreality" which is the recognition of the human's tme condition, "varies in

individuals: it is weakest in the weakest individuals" (A 64). But, in principle, there is in

every person "the possibility of a smaii, pure, new, umal portion which is, without reference

to personality in the popular, social sense, self' (A 96), and unreaiity "is every one's to the

extent to which he is able to exmcate himself h m quantitative reaiity"

(A 84). This aiiowance foreshadows the fundamentai shift that wiU take place in Riding's

Iater thought.

Here and there in Anarchism, particularly in the sections preceding the essay

"Jocasta," Riding still retains "knowledge" as a term of value to be secured on behaif of

poetry, though only (as was the case in Suntey) after divorcing it h m its empiricai

comotations. But when, in the opening paragraphs of "Jocasta," she daims that "to be

right is to be incomrptïïly individuai. To be wrong is to be righteously collective" (A 42)

she has shifted her ground. "Right" in this context does not mean "correct"; it means

something doser to "just" or "authentic"-as does, ultimately, her term "unreal." For

rnost of the essay, the word "tmth" does not make an appearance; the key words Ci their

inve~ed senses) are "reality" and "unreality." Truth becornes existentid; it means living in

cognizant and faithful accord with one's essential nanue. The systernatization of knowledge

and the orientation towards k ing that it results in belie the mie human condition-a

fundamental and unbridgeable individuaiity. Collectivity or communaiity, she argues, is a trait

not of human, but of animal life, a trait that humanity shared oniy in the transitory stage of its

earliest beginnings. Al1 systems of knowledge represent to her a cuipably nostalgie wüi-to-

coliectivity in the form of an idea of "the collective mind":

But what is the collective mind? A herd of deer clinging together may be said to have

unanimity, but it can scarcely be said to have a rnind: it has unanimity because to the

extent to which it clings together it is brutish, naturai reality, And the same is me of

primitive man up to the point where individual works of art occur . . . . (A L 11)

individual works of art mark the point at which "the distinction between the group mind and

the individual mind could be made," and thereafter "the group mind reaiiy ceased to exist"

(A 29). The hurnan loss of coiiectivity in this sense is, for Riding, the radical separation of

hurnanity from nature: "Man, , he becomes more man, becomes l e s nature. . . . He lives

unto hirnseif not as a species but as an individuai" (A 64). And, insofar as man lives as an

individual, he lives in 'ûnreaiity," denying the collective constructions of bistory and society

and, a fortiori, thinking outside of the discursive modes by which those constnictions are

perpetuated.

It is on the basis of tbis radicdy individualist contention that Ridiag distinguishes

her thought unequivocally from Lewis's. The essay "Jocasta" opens and closes with a

consideration of iewis's exhaustive denunciations of anti-individualist trends and tireless

carnpaigning in the name of individuaiity. 'To be right is to be incomptibly individuai,"

Eüding announces at the opening of the essay, but Lewis's individuality, she finds, is

decidedly compted by his devotion to reasoned argumentation. Though Lewis's works are

by no means as systematic as Riding suggests, it is certainly true that however pessirnistic

Lewis might have k e n about his potentid audience, the ration& in him made him

committed at least in theory to the promise of reasoned public disco~rse.'~ Survey had

posited an audience of "plain readers," and obviously aimed to reach poets amenable to

re fom as weii; Contemporuries and Snobs and Anarchism, however, retreat h m that

work's retatively accommodating mode. Riding's increasingly cryptic, paratactic, style rnay

have k e n enabled, as Baker suggests, by the fact that the publication of the two works w u

guaranteed in a contract Graves had signed with Jonathan Cape for a rather more

comrnerciaiiy promising account of TE. Lawrence's ad~entutes-~~the giddy &dom to

write as she chose," writes Baker, "obviated mundane questions of readership" (160). But

Riding does provide a rationale for her style, which is integraiiy related to her radical

individualism. "Rightness," she writes, "is only valid so Iong as it is unorganized (that is,

commentarial instead of systernatic)" (A 42); "cornmentarÏai" wciting, furthemore, involves

only a minimal amount of "specific ceference and subsiantiation" as it is an "attempt to

think purely, without the rnachinery of learning" (A 82). '"ïhough 1 admire Mr. Lewis

because he is right," she continues, "1 restrict my admiration in so far as he is systematic . . . . 1 regret to see Mr. Lewis decorating his right with the trappings of argument. . . sending

out his right to instruct the democratic mass" (A 61-62). By the end of the essay her

judgment is harsher, though accurate enough. Lewis is not inteilectuafiy bold enough, she

argues, to foiiow his devotion to individuaüty to iis bard conciusion, which wouid be "to

separate the fact of individuaiity h m the fact of sociality and reveal how they iaaintain

themselves in one person through a contradiction, not through 'ceason' " (A 124): ' This

leaves him pursuing not individuality, but aiming ratfier "to assure the more astute members

of the social group of a few ready individualistic pnvileges," while "sneer~iag] d o m with

aristocratie scorn the political idealism of the mob" (A 124). Lewis, stme concludes, is (in ber

idiosyncratic sense of the term) mere1y an anarchist, pursuing individuaüty within society,

rather than beyond it, This is social thwgbt, and as such, as we know by now, it is not

enough." The individual self is for Riding fundamentaiiy divided h m its histoncai and

social existence: it becomes "unreai" and "its just conclusion is a sort of social

disappeataace" (A 75).

O

It had never k e n Riding's ambition to instdl the p e t in a splendid and socialiy invisible

isolation. She had wanted, on the contrary, to reinstate poetry's authority and thecefore its

centnlity to its society. It was on this account that, beginning with Survey, she was reluctant

to relinquish the vocabuiary of cognition (%ought9') and of authority ("truth"), even

though this meant having to separate "truth" from "knowledge" so as not to bind poetry

to science and the modem juggernaut of information-a move which culrninated in the

vision of the individual as an existentid isolate whose existence in a socid world is an

embattled paradox. This was not, however, the end of Riding's pcetry but the beginning.

When Anarchism 1s Nor Enough went into print in 1928, she had pubiished only one

volume of poerns, The Close Chaplet (1926). Four more would foUow in the next five years,

and 1938 would see her extensively revised Collected Poem, which also included new

work Her exacerbated sense of the antagonism between the individuai mind and the social

coîiective represented by science was, then, extremely productive. Out of the struggle she

forged her singular, noumenai poetry, undertaking to discover and to demonstrate what

could be known without knowledge, independently of the codified reality of the collective

that would deny the "sense of life" of the individual. In the cntical works that stand at the

beginning of the poetry, however, we find the strain that would ultunateIy b&g about its

end, Progress of Stones marks the beginning of Riding's reconciliation to human

coiiectivity; it is the point at which she transfers "unreality" out of the individuai and into

the collective hurnan future. Just a few years later, she wiii renounce poetry. Her conception

of "self" as the means of apprehending truth endures, but the pristinely asocial self of

every individual cornes to be conceived as a hgment of a single reality that will ody be

articuiated and lived when every part is brought through language into a union of minci-

Notes

It appears that many of the Englih pets of the thùties got their anti-Victorian impetative

and "specifications for technical hygiene" (as Kenner puts it) not from Pound but fiom

Riding. Baker cites both Geoffrey Gcigson's and Julian Symons's testirnonials to Riding's

influence (and to Graves's, but Graves hirnseif was one of her beneficiacies). Grigson

aaested that among the aspiring poets and cntics at Oxford Pamphlet Against Anthologies

"made for scepticism and caution and dismissal of poerns about lambs, and of poetical

lachrymosity. Gardens were out." Symons recaiied that in addition to Auden, on whom

Riding's influence was "obvious and profound." "many other poets benefited, some of

them indkctly, from . . . her utter eiimination of what she caiied in one letter to me

'marzipan' and in another 'the luxury-stab we are taught to look for at schwl' " (Baker

350-5 1).

' "It is taken for granted in this thesis that the acquirement and possession of knowledge

has an inhuman phase. It is called Science or Philosophy" (Embodiment 41).

' 1 use the term cognitive here in the sense of "pertaining to the mental processes of

perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasied with emotional and volitional

processes" (Random House Webster's College Dictionary).

' This "social disappearance" is in some sense a retreat or a defeat, but by another

measure it rnay be a constructive action. As Lisa Sarnuels notes in her introduction to

Anarchism Is Not Enough, Riding's poetics urges the reader towards a different

relationship to society as weii as to puy, Insofar as Riding's "version of individual

authonty is an absolute spiritual imperative," she argues, "'social disappearance' most

certainiy has social consequences" (xxxi).

Riding and Graves, it shouid be noted, do not offet an unqualified justification of

modernist practice. Throughout the book they are concemed to distinguish a genuine from a

faise modernism, and the final chapter of the book shifts from explanatory defense to,

roughly, the "season of failwes and fragments" Line Virginia Woolf takes in "Mr. Bennett

and Mrs. Brown." In their conclusion they cast modernist poetics as an aesthetically

necessq but tempocary convulsion, a period of dificuit historical adjustment the

contortions of which wiil subside and give way to a less conflicted verbal art: "The next

stage is not clear. But it is not impossible that there wiil be resumption of less eccentric, less

stcained, more critically unconscious poetry, purified however by this experience of

historical effort" (S 264-65).

6 The stance is comparable to that of the early Pound, who considered the sphere of

poetry's authocity to be "human nature," a subject oniy crudely handled by the new,

insufficiently scientific, social sciences. As he wrote in "The Serious Artist" (1913), "The

arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science. Their subject is man,

mankind and the individuai"; the "data" furnished by the arts "are sound and the data of

generalizing psychologists and social theoreticians are usuaiiy unsound, for the senous

arzist is scientific and the theorist is usually empiric in the medieval fashion" (42,46).

' Conceptions of poetic autonomy in the writings of the modernists generally originate. as

does Riding's and Graves's, in a desire to secure poetry fcom king explained reductively

(as an expression of a psyche or a society) or justified instnimentally (as rnorally uplifting

or socially consolidating); thus they may c l a h that poetry is independent of one or IWO of a

variety of practices or phenomena-prinçipally, discursive thought, instrumental purpose,

historicai processes, or the personality of the pet. They never claim, as Riding uitimately

WU, that poetry is autonomous tout court. Ortega expresses an idea simiIar to Wiams's:

''The poet aggrandizes the world by adding to reality, which is there by itseif, the continents

of his imagination. Author derives h m auctor, he who augments" (3 1).

As 1 have noted in Chapter 1, the indebtedness of New Criticai method to A Survey of

Modemisr Poetry has k e n recognized; that Riding and Graves anticipate the heresy of

paraphrase in that book, however, has not ken.

9 By the same logic, Riding uses the words "literature" and "Literary" as pejorative terms.

In one of the short pieces preceding the essay "Jocasta," she offers a bnef guide to "How

not to write literature" (A 20); in "Jocasta" she elaborates: "iiterature is everything but the

unreal self, it is the society of realiry; it is History, it is Nature, it is Philosophy, it is Reason,

it is Criticism, it is Art" (A 80-8 1).

1 O Lewis, as 1 have noted, does not, for the rnost part, engage in philosophical debate in

pursuit of truth but-and he is perfectly open about i t - to demonstrate which Lines of

thought will undermine, and which advance, his preconceived notion of the good. He is not,

however, entirely consistent in this. A great admirer of Plato (whose politics he aiso found

congeniai) he was aiso prone to declmtions such as the foiiowing: "In order to be hurnane

and universaiiy utiiizable, philosophy must be abstracted from . . . special modes and private

visions. There must be an abstract man, as it were, ifthere is to be a philosopher" (TWM

3 11, original emphasis). Addressing the breakdown of shared values in Men Wirhout Art,

he writes that while we are aU conseqeuntiy "'romantic"' today, nonetheless "some of us

are . . . fitted for public utterance, rather than condemned to the obscurities of a private and

personai jargon: some of us possess such humility as to enable us to sacrifice ourselves to

what we regard as the public good" (MWA 157-58).

" Lewis does not speak of individuality and sociality as existing in contradiction exactiy,

but he does speak of them as existing in fierce tension: "We live a conscious and

magnificent life of the 'rnind' at the expense of [the] community . . . . But in symparhy with

the political movements today, the tendency of scientitic thought (in which is included

philosophic thought) is to hand back to this vast community of ceiis this stolen,

aristocraticai monopoly of personality which we caii the 'mind' " (TWM299).

l2 For Lewis's amused and bemused response to Riding's conclusions about hùn, which

wind up with a crypticaiiy worded prediction that his brand of "anarchism" will lead to

something closer to "F30lshevism," see The Diabolical Principle a d the Dithyrambic

Spectator 153-55.

C H A P T E R F l V E

The Aesthetics of Inclusion: Progress of Stones

Prose and the Egaiitarian Tum

Riding's poetics is premised upon the autonomy of the individual rnind, demmdhg a

radicai separation not just fiom system-based knowledge, but fiom the social world as weii.

In A Suwey of Modemist Poetry, she and Graves distinguished between the socio- historical

and the intrinsic development of poetry; in her development of this principle, the individual

self gets wrenched uncomfortably between the social world and the non-social space of

"unreality" identified with poetry. It is this identification of poetry with non-social

existence that allows Riding to avoid the conclusion that Anarchism would otheNvise seem

to point to-a iife of monastic silence. "Poetry," she wrote in Anarchism, "is perhaps the

only human pursuit left stiii capable of developing anti-sociaiiy" (CS 32), and she pursued

it for another decade.

Riding did not, however, stop writing prose either. Beginning in the early M e s , her

main project aside h m her poetry was Epilogue. Published annually in hardcover between

1935 and 1937, the journal, according to Joyce Wexler, aimed to reach a larger audience

than poetry could! Comprised of essays on a vast range of subjects and written with

relative lucidity by Riding and her closest associates at Dey& Epilogue, Baker remarks, was

"as fulI of portentous ambition as any eighteenth-century rationalist" (283). in her old age

Riding expIained that the project had issued fiom her "thesis" that "the determination of

the tnith as CO any subject involved a viewing of it h m a point h m which ail subjects

could be seen by a light of common corre1ationy' (WCV 12). While totalizing in ambition,

like the systematization of knowledge denounced so strenuously in the critical books, the

method of Epilogue was nonetheless poetic: the authonty of the def~tions and

pronouncements of the journal lay, Riding claimed, in the integcity of her king as a poet, in

her personal sincenty and Linguistic exactitude, rather than in scholarly or philosophical

meth~dology.~

Riding does not, then, oppose the idea of order per se; she distinguishes, rather,

between the nanval order of mith and such order as may be constmcted by science or

philosophy. As she wrote in Epilogue, 'Tnith has order: permanent, intrinsic coherence.

Phiiosophy has logic: temporary, 'cceated' ~oherence."~ Riding rejects reasoned

argumentation and, a fortiori (as her response to the political pressures of the thhies makes

clear), the idea that the good society cm be planned and brought about by the application of

reason to social and political affairs. She distinguishes herself from Lewis because she sees

him as comrnitted to just that essentiaiiy Enlightenment-humanjst project, accepting the

social world as reality itself, and working within it to secure the best conditions for

individuaiity. Riding herself is obviously deeply committed to, even fkated upon, the idea of

universal human nature, a single human good, and a narrative of individual liberation h m

illusion-ail tenets of Enlightenment hmanism-but her radical rejection of science and

philosophy and her denial of the reality of the social world divides her unequivocaüy fiom

the humanist tradition.

Her early work, however, like Lewis's, holds that to be M y human is to be M y

and consciously self-possessed, individual because intektually independent. Lewis argued

that at least if the plutocracy could be prevented h m controlling education and the media

completely, inteliectual independence could be achieved by the highly critical and creative

mind. Defining such autonomy as the condition of fitlI humanity, Lewis renders "human"

an honorific and therefore exclusionary km, and in bis early thought the protection of the

human necessitates the subordination of the vast majority of hominids. At least up until

1930, Riding too maintained an exclusionary standard for full hurnanity, based on the rifi

between collective reality and the 'iuireai" space of self, poetry, and tmth. Though her later

thought aims to include everyone in the ckle of human fulfillment in tmth, Riding retains to

the end a degree of vigilance over its boundary.

Riding's hostility to "the democratic mus" shows a sign of easing, as 1 have noted

in Chapter 4, when she dows in Anarchism that there is in every human being, at least "the

possibility of a smaii, pure, new, unseal portion which is, without reference to personality in

the popular, socid sense, self' (A 96). Anarchism, was not, however, a reai turning point;

Tliough Gently, the collection of poems and short prose pieces pubiished two years later, in

1930, contains the most expiicit and hostile expression of contempt for the rnass to be

found in her work. To the supercilious dismissal of "the cmwd" from the new human era,

Riding sdds a condemation of the "humanist" as would-be "mediatoc":

There are two kinds of humanists. A humanist is neither of the crowd nor of the

centre. If he is the f ~ s t kind he is a pedagogue demanding on behalf of the crowd

something to teach it-vulgarizable values. If he is the second kind be is a

pedagogue demanding on behaif of the centre a superior intelligence €rom the

crowd. Neither the cmwd nor the centre wants these middiemen. (TG 9)

Wexler argues that the Epilogue project, casting for a wider audience, developed because

"although Riding still believed onIy a poem could make a final statement of tnith, her belief

that the abiiity to discover and articulate tmth made man human engendered a moral need to

allow nonpoets to cal1 themselves human tw. . . . Her goal in Epilogue was to teach the

public how to be like poets" (97). Riding's nun towards the "crowd" she dismissed as

superfiuous in Though Gently was not as complete as Wexler suggests, but Wexler is right

that the widening of the circle of aith-tellers to include non-pets is at least partly a product

of the internai logic of her thought: the hermeticism of Contemporaries and Snobs and

Anarchism Is Nor Enough was in tension with the universaiking ambition of her conception

of tmth. It is &O the case, however, that Riding's inclusive tum issues h m the fact that the

mass was a much vaguer an entity for her than it was for Lewis; her antidemotic stance was

not, therefore, as deeply entrenched.

In Anarchism Riding associates "people in nurnbers" (A 35) with the weakness of

sentirnentality, and derides the mass of readers who tum to works of art in or&r to have

their ordinary range of emotions manipulated by vicarious experience of events othenvise

beyond the scope of their iives. But aside irom its association with emotionality and lack of

aesthetic and inteiiectual sophistication, the mass in Riding's thought is never securely

defmed by any quality except, tautologically, its collectivity. Her antidemotic stance, Iike

Lewis's, had nothing to do with class-Lewis had little to distinguish k i f by in that

department, and Riding nothing at A. But for Lewis the division between the few and the

many was solidly defmed by intellectual and creative power, inbom and so more or Iess

absolute? intelieci in Lewis's sense of the word is a capability by which Riding was

decidedly unimpressed, just as she is unimpressed by achievement in arts other than poetry

(at least, she does not recognize either in structure of values built up in her work). "The

machinery of knowledge" (A 43) has, for her, littie to do with the pursuit of ûuth. She

distinguishes pe t s from the mass by Wnie of the luiguistic sensitivity and proficiency that

gives them access to tmth, but the only distinction she makes arnong non-pets is the degree

to which they accept the t e m of collective reality. Given that she posits no intrinsic quality

predetermining this acceptance, the distinction reduces quite easily irom a permanent b h e r

to a rnatter of WU.

Riding's withdnwai h m the invidious logic of crowd and centre uitimately leads to

her renunciation of poetry in the early 1940s; before that renunciation, however, came

Progress of Stones. She did pubiish her Collected Poems in 1938, t h e years after

Progress, her faith in poetry apparentIy still unshaken-"existence in poetry is more real

than existence in time," she declared in the preface, "more reai because more good, more

good because more mey' (PLR 412). But Progress of Stories had already marked the

beginning of the path her thought would take h m the 1940s until her death, one that rejects

poetry as linguisticaiiy and humanly exclusive. Riding's preface to Progress departs

signüicantly fiom her poetics in two ways. In the preface to the Collected Poem the

apprehension of tmth is irnagined as a solitary experience, undergone either in the writing or

the reading of poey. In Progress, the mode1 is altered dramaticaiiy: the articulation of tnith

is repcesented by the sustained metaphor of group conversation. SecondIy, the preface to

Collecred Poems relies on an essentiaiiy hieratic conception of the poet. The serious pet,

taking on "a large share of the work of the world," provides for serious readers the unique

opportunity ta "explore reality as a whole" and attain "that level of existence which is

poetry" (PLR 409). The poet, in short, mediates the reader's experience of tmth. In the

preface to Progress however, Riding attempts to abdicate from that role. She casts herself

not as priestess but as "hostess" (PS xiv), one merely providing the venue for group

conversation, and is evasive about accepting even that distinction. Describing the flow of

conversation at a hypotheticai house Party, she pauses to note: "You wiii notice that 1 speak

of 'our' minds, not saying which one of these is mine. For at this stage we are mereIy a

mVred Company; 1 have no right to affhm that my mind is necessarily purer than yours, or

that 1 am necessarily the hostess" (PS xiv). Author and reader are on the same level in

reiation to truth, which speaks to each alike: '%th is trying to talk, and each of us

overhears something of what it is trying to Say, and we teil what we hear to the others. And

what we hear is not hearsay, because we hear it in ourselves, not in others" (PS xviii).

The disavowai of the distinction of authorship in Progress ofStonés anticipates

Riding's renunciation of poetry on the grounds that in the pride of its artistry it establishes

a linguistic hierarchy, installing itself at the top and disenftanchising the speech of non-

poets. According to Baker, it was shortly after Riding's maniage to Schuyler Jackson in

1941 that she resolved to stop writing poetry; certainiy, it was weli before 1948, when she

repiied to a poet interested in her poems "that she regarded poetry as a reiic h m another

the , too much at the mercy of the poet's personal needs" (Baker 416). The main public

statement Riding herself made on the matter was her introduction to a reading (not by

herself) of a few of her poems on BBC radio in 1962, which was printed later the same year

in Chelsea as "introduction for a Broadcast" with a brief elaboration titled "Continued for

Chelsea." Relying on a conception of the "nahuai" use of language: she explained that

poets "mut function as if they were people who were on the inside track of Linguistic

expression, people endowed with the highest laquage-jmwers." They convince themselves

and others that in opposition to poetry "ordinary speech, and its iiterary counterpart, prose,

are sunk in their essential monotony and unaspiringness," and "in functioning so, they . . .

block the discovery bat everyone is on this inside track" ("introduction" 4-5). The special

access of poets to truth had aiways ban, for Riding, guaranteed by their intimate relation to

language: truth was not apprehended pre-linguisticaiiy, in inspired vision, and then

"expressed" in poetry: in perfect poeiry, which she believed was achievable, no "Shadow"

fell, as Eliot lamented, "Between the ideal And the reality . . . Between the conception 1 And

the ~reation."~ The selection and arrangement of words was the tnith, and the tmth was the

words. This conception remains in place after her break with poerry. She does not question

the identity of language and tnith, only the kind of linguistic arrangement that is the tnith.'

The egaiitarian principles underlying Progress of Stones and leading to Riding's

break with poetry would fmd their most complete expression in The Telling, the "personai

evangei" Riding published in Chelsea in the spring of 1967. In this vision human beings in

al1 their multifariousness are fragments of an original unity of being; "truth" is this unity

of being. Hurnanity's will-to-truth (the existence of which Riding takes as axiomatic) is

conceived, in a vagueiy Hegelian way, as "being" coming into NI and articulate

consciousness of itseif. Through individual devotion to the speaking of king (tnith)

individual human beings will eventuaüy converge in their essential m*ty with each other and

with being. The nature of human existence after this point Riding does not presume to

foreteii, but it appears to be somethg iike a timeless beatitude of existential tnith! As 1

have suggested, in Progress of Stories (and later The Teüing) the existential integrity that

Riding sought in poetry and in "self," is projected out of that isolation and into the

collective human future.

This ethic of inclusiveness in both Progress of Stories and The Telling, however, is

complicated by two factors. In the preface to Progress, ûrst of aii, Riding does not sirnply

step d o m from the authorial pedestai to mingle undistinguished among the crowd of

readers: rather, author and reader are made equal by Wtue of theù subordination to a

purpose greater than either-the tmth that is "trying to taik." Riding, as we have seen,

insisted that though poets apprehended a truth that was more than personal, they did so by

vime of an inviolate individuaiity. In her later vision, individuai autonomy remains a

necessity, but is reconceived as a means to the end of self-transcendence. She discards "the

concept of self as the animate essence of individuality" for that of "the self as the spirit of

responsibility , . . dwelling in individuai king and making it act with supra-individual

reference" ("Continued" 9). The egalitarianism of Progress of Stories, therefore, does not

entail a recognition of the inmnsic value of the individuai rnind and experience. It renders

individuals equai not in theù si@cance, but in the insignif?cance of their "numbered lone

identities of the hour" (T 53); it leads not to p a t e r compassion but to the creation of an

anti-empathetic fiction.

Secondly, aithough Riding disavows authorial distinction, she cannot bring herseif

to relinquish the role of gatekeeper. The ethic of inclusion in Progress of Stories is

countered by a principle of selection. Though the preface presents tnith-telling as a

conversation among equals, those equ ais are distilleci out from a larger group: it is not until

the majority of the large "mixed company" (xiv) has drifted away and there are left "not so

many of us" that "what we Say to one another is almost the txuth" (xvii). Progress of

Stories issues from Riding's desire to write stories that are not "iiterature," that do not bear

the mark of a professionaüzed "art," the desire to produce a kind of writing in which

author and reader, in their common humanity, are equai participants. But the simultaneous

persistence of the aspiration to authority that marked her poetics reveals itseif in the limits

she uitimately imposes on that participation,

Modemist Fiction: Style and Hurnan Significanœ

Critics attempting to estabiish a literary-historical context for Progress of Stories bave

tenuously iikened it to the stories of Kafka and a handfd of works of the European avant-

garde; it is impossibIe, however, to situate it within the general trends of the Engiish

modernist fiction of its tirne? Though Riding's motivations differed from those of Lewis's

puppet fiction, in Progress of Stories she did, like Lewis, undertake to estabiish a new

practice of fiction, one which wouid repudiate what she too saw as the romantic-humanist

basis of English literary modemism. In the menties and thirties Riding never made a

sustained critique of modemist fiction; there is nothing in her work comparable, for

instance, to the criticai essays Lewis compiled in Men Without ~rt." Progress of Stories,

however, constitutes a critique of Engiish modernist fiction while exemplifihg an alternative

prrictice. In pursuit of linguistic and human inclusiveness, Riding rejects two principai

aspects of modernist fiction: the styiization of langage and the centraiity of chamter.

Riding's objection to rnodemist style can be divided into two stages, that of the

critical works up to 1930, and that represented by Progress of Stories and articuiated in her

Iater essays on fiction. The objection is essentidy the same before and after the nus away

from poetry: that idiosyncratic stylization saturates prose with authonal personality. The

initial opposition, however, issues primariiy fiom her desire to defend the speciai statu of

poetry as the articdation of self; the later one is made on the ground that, as Charles

Bernstein has put it, styiization is motivated by the w i W "self-satisfaction of carving out"

h m the common langage of humanity "a voice that is distinct, actualized by its

difference" (341). Fredric Iameson has argued that "the most influentid formal impulses

of canonicai modernism have been strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate

an alienated universe by transfonning it into personai styles and private languages" (2). in

Conremporaries and Anarchism, Riding diagnoses the personal styles of modernisrn as

precisely the reverse: the alienation of inwardness, or "self," by discharging it into the

essentially socid and bisioncal fom of ptose, rather than incarnathg it in poetry.

Riding has great respect for fiction so long as it dues not presume h v e its nature

by aspiring to be poetic. The role of the novel is to be "criticai rather than creative, historicai

cother than poetic":

Wherever the novel tries to create poetic vaiues, it becomes false art, as with Proust,

Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and such American poetic novelists as Waldo Frank and

S h e n v d Anderson. For, whiie the novel m y suggest them or describe hem, it

needs to be emphasized dopaticaiIy that there are no me credve values but petic

vaiues-values which c m be Gnd withouc nference to their contemporary setting.

(CS 68)

in Anarchism Riding adopts the tenn "individuai-real" for the "false art" of modernist

fiction. The "collective reai" (the social world) is opposed to the "individud unreai" (the

trinit. of seIf, puetry, and tnith). The individuai-reai, then, is an objectionable infusion of the

world with "self." Idiosyncratic, a&, poetic prose, she argues, is inimical to the self and

to poetry: "To make everything red, no matter how u n d . . . is to syrnbolize it for the

democratic mass" (A 59). And, once poeticized, prose fiction forces poetry to distinguish

itself by ever more conspicuous artfulness. 'To put it sirnply," Riding writes, ''the unred

is to me poetry":

The Îndividuai-red is a sensmus enactment uf the unreal . . . a plagiarizing of the

unreai . . . . The resuIt in literature is a reaiistic poeticizing of prose (Virginia Woolf

or any 'good' h t e r ) that comptes with poetry, forcing it to make itseif more poetic

if it would count at di. Thus both the 'best' prose ad the 'best' poeay are the most

'poetic' and make the unreal, mere poetry, lookobscure and shabby.

(A 69-70)

At this stage, Riding objects to stylistic individuality in fictionai prose on the grounds that

individuality can only be articulateci without corruption in poetry.

By the tirne she is writing Progress, however, Riding is moviag towards her linai

position, which is that language should not be made an instrument of individual self-

definition at aii. in renouncing poetry, as 1 have noted above, she does not renounce the idea

of the identity of language and truth; she only monceives the language of ûuth as the

naturd speech available to dl, rather than a product of the poetic c d . This ceconception,

fmt worked out in Progress ofStones, produces an honourable place for fictional narrative,

or "story," in the space between the present striving and the ultimate speaking of tmth.

Stones are, as Riding puts it in her preface to the second edition of Progress, "littie, mortai,

interirns of solace in the undying triai of mind for the teiiing of king" (xxvi). As such, they

are to exernpliQ natural, unstrained speech; they stiouid not be used as vehicles for the

cultivation of the distinctions of artistry in virtuoso performances of personai style. Writers

of the twentieth cenhuy, Riding would Say h m the vantage of 1976, "have not been so

much concemed with writing stories as with writing something . . . of their own. There are

styles. . . . The story is . . . a literary image of the personality of the writer. . . an authoriai

experiment with the resources of authorid personality" ("Story" 150). Progress of Stones

repudiates style in the sense that we associate with modernist fiction-the complex,

cadenced, atmosphenc, and idiosyncratic verbal styks that are the signahues of James,

Forster, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner. Riding's non-fictionai prose style-convoluted,

hypotactic, lexically and synta~ticaüy demanding-is as singular as any found in modemkt

fiction; in Progress, however, she submits herseif to styhtic selfeffacement, takuig up the

steadily matter-of-fact, impersonal tone and locution of the fairytaie, tuming to short, clear

sentences and confining herself to vocabulary that couid be read to a child

Individuai autonomy remains an imperative in Riding's later thought, in that the

ukimate collective human articdation of tmth relies on independent individuai devotion to it:

such ûuth as we may bring to the coiiective conversation, as she puts it in the preface to

Progress ofstories, we hear "in ourselves, not in others" (PS xviü). But this resolute

independence is to lead to a unified existence in enith in which individual selves are

subordinate to the whole. In this way individuality becomes necessary but provisional, a

means not an end. The idea that the individuality of the self is something to be overcome is

the premise of Riding's second major criticism of modemist fiction: "ail iives, as such,"

she declares in the preface to Progress, "are unimportant" (PS xi),

Lewis did not object specificdy to the primacy of the individual as the subject

matter of fiction; he criticized, rather, the standard treatment of the individual-"from the

inside"-primdy because he wanted to deny the existence of signifcant inner iife in the

mass of humanity. It is not Riding's aim to deny interiority as Lewis does, but to remove

subjectivity from the heights of significance on which modemist fiction had set it. Her

reaction against modernist fiction goes m e r than Lewis's; she objects not just to the

portraya1 of psychological experience, but to the individual tout court as the subject matter

of fiction.

However bewildering Riding's refusal to acknowledge (at least in print) the

achievements of modernist fiction, her opposition to it, Like Lewis's, does make visible the

extent to which its devotion to psychological experience relies on two romantic-humanist

premises: that solidarity between individuals can be fostered by means of their capacity for

empathetic understanding, and that there is an intrinsic interest and immanent signifcance in

ordinary human Me that makes that understanding valuable. Riding's non-fictional prose

can be dizzying in its circumiocutions, but in the preface to Progress of Stones she delivers

in a single blunt sentence her unforgettable judgment of rnodemist fiction: "It is very

difficult," she writes, "to let the unimportant rernain unimportant, almost impossible for

people who write stories, because it would sadden them to feel that their work on the

material did not make it mote important" (PS xi). This statement identifies modemist

fiction's devotion to the minutiae of lives that are by standard measures socially and

historically insignincant, its desire to brhg to the eye of the world the complexity and

~ i g ~ c a n c e of what is nortnally passed over. Progress ofStories will undertake to

demonstrate that empathetic immersion in the experience ofother selves is not the means by

which hwnanity is to recognize its common nature: what binds individuals to each other is

their ~Iationship to king (truth), which will have its fMüment beyond the individual

persondity and outside of the social worM.

Bound into Riding's judgmem of modernist fiction is also a second contention: that

the devotion to individual lives is in fact a M e r manifestation of the self-aggrandizing

impulse that gives rise to modernist style. If it is by the litetary attentions of writers, she

suggests, that the signXcmce of the undistinguished üfe is made apparent, the author

essentiaiiy assumes the position of besiowing that significance-if not üke the redeeming

eye of god, then at Ieast like a kind of existentid alchemist transfonning the base metal of

the obscure iife. Riding objects to this on the same grounds ttiat she wiil soon object to

p u y : it nuns a literary skiU into a human (spirituai) distinction, a guiid of artisans into a

priesthood.

Modeniist fiction's immersion in subjective experience is not, after dl, an

expression of nihiiism: having given up both transcendent and historical meaning it tned to

search out immanent, purely human meaning. In the preface to Progress, Riding goes on to

denounce contemporary works of fiction which she describes as "pompous little fragments

in whose very triviality, obscurity, and shabbiness some si@cmt principle of king is

meant to be read" (PS xvi). What she is getting at is what f i c h Auerbach would later

identify as a "transfer of confîdence" in modernist fiction:

the great exterior tuniing points and bhws of fate are granted less importance; they

are credited with less power of yielding decisive information concerning tfie subject;

on the other hand there is confidence that in any random fragment plucked h m the

course of a He at any t h e the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed.

(547)

if the "random fragment" does not exactly signify "the totality of fate," it is given a

resonant, symboiic portentousness, as are ordinary and naturai features of the material world

of the novel-golden bowls, for instance, iighthouses, unfinished stockings, and Marabar

caves. Jed Rasula notes that the romantic association of the everyday with art

introduced a paradox into aesthetic thought, which was to render the everyday

poignant and in doing so to exait the nomial by means of the exceptional, to render

the nomai abnomaiiy fme. The distance from the Romantic declaration of faith in

the everyday and its actual integration into artistic praxis is nothing less thm the

history of modernism. ("Strategizing" 719)

Engiish iiterary modernism had not gotten so far as to incorporate the orduiary life

unaesthetisized, without, that is, bestowing on it significance in the form of implied

metonymic relation to some p a t e r tmth about human nature or hurnan affairs. Riding

rejected this diffuse, almost submerged, symbolism as iiterary ski11 mistaking itself for

revelation. Believing that meaning in human Me derives fiom its bringing king into

articulate consciousness of itself, she held that it was not for writers of fiction, employing

the tricks of poetry, to constnict out of the materials of ordinary life "significant principles

of being."

Stories of Lives

Progress of Stones is divided into five sections, Stories of Lives, Stories of Ideas, Nearly

Tme Stories, an essay caiied A Crown for Hans Andetsen, and More Stories. The seven

stories of the h t of section, Stories of Lives, constitute Riding's most specific critique of

the subject of modernist fiction. In her preface Riding claims to take up "lives" as material

for this fmt group of stories only in order io estabiish to begin with a comfortable

atmosphere for the reader. On the "very obscure, or irrelevant, matenai" of human lives she

claims to have done "a minimum amount of work . . . no more than was enough to establish

it decentiy in its irrelevance" (PS xii). There is in fact nothing sketchy about the Stones or

Lives; what is Iacking in t h e M e depth of characterization and portraya1 of interiority that

would convey human experience and accommodate empathetic idenrification-has been

deiiberately omitted.

The Stones of Lives are comparable to the stories of The Wild Body in that Riding

aims to foreclose empathetic response by presenting characiers osknsibly human but

psychologically void. in the case of Lewis, the absence of interiority is a principle of

realism-he believes, or is at least trying to convince both himself and the reader, that in the

majonty of cases consciousness is more mechanisrn than mind, and that empathetic

response is therefore rnisguided. Riding does not deny interiority; the Stones of Lives are

constructed to demonstrate, within the context of the Progress as a whole, that to pay minute

artention to individual subjectivity is to look for human solidarity and significance in the

wrong place. She eviscerates her hurnan figures in order to divert interest away from

individuai bves and towards the greater future iife of aii.

The Stories of Lives are exactiy that: each relates the course of life and the

relationships of one or two principal charactea. The basic scenarios of a number of the

stories are perfectly plausible; one can easiiy imagine, for instance, the material of "Socialist

PIeasures" or "Schoolgirls" being treated by Woolf or Mansfield. in "Sociaiist

PIeasuresyy a woman with an emotionally repressed childhood has a serious iliness in her

late twenties. Afîer a long convalescence she becornes a dance teacher rather than resuming

her previous sober life, but she winds up a soiitacy and rather tawdry figure, never free of

the strict moral code of her overbearing parents, in "Schwlgirls" a precocious but

neglected young giri marries, before graduating, the math teacher at her exclusive private

school. The story relates the difficulties of their maniage and the teackr's love for another

woman, producing a potentiaily Jarnesian tangle of romantic and legal ckumstauces and

responsibibties. in both stories a bright and promishg young girI ages into insignincance,

uitimately fashioning for herseif an obscure social niche which substitutes for genuine self-

reaiization or self-understanding. In these two stories, as in each of the others in tbis group,

there is in the characters an inability to come to decisive or meaningfûl self-realizaiion; a

sense of frustrated possibity hangs about their iives, a vague desolation. In the han& of

Woolf, Mansfield, the early Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, or D.H. Lawrence, there wouid

have been something poignant about the obscurity of these lives, something slightly

wrenching about the hoiiowness; the sense of fnistrated possibüity wouid be felt to portend

some truth about everybody's lives. It is just this sort of emotional atmosphere that Eüding

prevents h m gatheruig by eliminating interiority.

The narrator of the stories reports the internai states of the characters-emotion,

motivation, reaction-without comment or colour, making no tonal discrimination between

interior states and the routine succession of events. After the death of the mathematics

master, Judith's emotional condition warrants no more narrative attention than the

subsequent practicai arrangements: "Judith could not help crying a lot, thinking about how

much Mary would miss him"; "Mary took her aunt's post at the school as fiterature

mistress" (PS 24). in "Socialist Pleasures" Fanny's secret relief and pleasure in her

illness is not taken as an opportunity for exploratory representation of emotional welter and

reverie; it is treated with economical dispatch: "Fanny was secretly gIad it had happened to

her, It had a weakening effect on the whole constitution. . . . It was quite me chat aithough

the poisonous lizard's bite itself swn healed she didn't want to get up or think about doing

anything. Fmdy she had to go because her bed was needed" (PS 6).

It is not the case that the narrator refrains from delving into emotional depths that the

reader can assume to exist. The narrator is omniscient, and in many instances makes it cleiu

that the characters under surveillance are in fact as devoid of inner iüe as the narntive style

implies. Riding does not aim to demonstrate mechanistic predictabiIity; she renders simply a

general vacuity marked by randorn incident. Thus we are told, authoritativeIy, tIiat the

indistinct, nameless math teacher in "SchooIgirls" is "reaiiy a simple, uninteresthg

person" (PS 18). Affectless Daisy of "Daisy and Venison" 'kas not pretty, she was not

ciever, she had no fiiends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was

happy when she was reaiiy miserable"; she is "guided only by a desire" to keep her life

"steady and calm and not distracted" (PS 52,6 1). Lotus of 'TThree Times Round" never

devetops into "a definite kind of person"; she "hardens into a piece of statuary" instead

(PS 82).

The characters are as void inteliectually as they are emotionally. Daisy's father, for

instance, "didn't mind stealing in itseif, but he minded problems and discussions and

attitudes and in general al1 brain-activity," in short, "anything that made people different

From animais" (PS 53). What intellectuai inclination there is arnong the characters is

decidedly superficial. In "The Incurable Virtue" Emile's fiïends "ate and Iistened and

gathered in phrases and argurnentative points and were thus able, in their turn to talk to

people sophisticatedly, gliding inteiiigently from one prejudice to another" (PS 41).

None of the characters in the stories have strong or multi-dimensionai personaiities,

and even the more definite ones are flattened by an absence of wiii and votition. Thus the

indistinct math teacher manies Judith because their iives have by accident fallen into

conjunction and "he could not think of any other way of arranging things" (PS 21).

Daisy's effortless and eventless life so satisfies her that "if there was a stiii easier way to

Iive, she was not prepared to take the trouble to look for it" (PS 60). The characters of

Stories of Lives do not inquire into causes or request explanations; at times they appear to

be anthropomorphic projectiles rather than human beings, proceeding by the sheer inertia of

the force that threw them into the world.

The traits of the characters of Stories of Lives are almost exclusively of the order of

ineffectuality, pettiness, self-absorption, heartlessness, and vacuity. But just as Riding does

not convey a sense of wasted possibility, she does not imply any criticism of the characters

for their lack of fervour, imagination, for their faiIure to understand themselves, to Ike. Nor

is it possibte to read the stones as sociaiiy cntical, representing the alienated modern subject,

or the degradation of the bourgeois soul. The Stories of Lives are not The Dubliners or

Winesburg. Ohio. Riding mats the moral and existentid failings of her characters with the

same nonchalance that she treats their various dismai fates and ignorninious deaths.

1 have argued that in The Wild Body Lewis makes empathy possible only with Ker-

Orr, who refuses to imagine the interiority of the other characters, and that although

empathetic identification is controiied in this way, the characters nonetheless evoke pathos.

The suffering of the characters is ultimately registered more acutefy by the reader than the

patterns of behavior that Ker-Orr is tryùig to demonstrate, and his inteiiectualism becornes

offensive. Rather than attaining the standing of a wholly new, non-empathetic fiction, The

Wild Body reads for the most part as merely mean-spirited. Riding succeeds where Lewis

fails, in that she manages to foreclose pathos as weil as empathetic engagement. Admittediy,

she does not attempt to treat human suffering to the extent that Lewis did, and so does not

submit her technique to demands as difficult. She does, however, treat with camai

indifference self-estrangement, failure, isolation, psychopathy, mutilation, suicide, and

murder. Her success in foreclosing pathos as weii as empathy is largely due to the fact that

her nonchalance towards the failings and misfortunes of her characters is of a piece with her

nonchalance towards the conventions of reaüsm as whole. She does not abandon the

principles of realism entirely, just as she does not altogether abandon psychological

plausibility, but she indulges, rather than obeys them.

Riding intersperses among her characters, for instance, names odd enough to disturb

the surface of reaiist illusion without breaking it- "Venison," "Archibald Root," "Etnile

St.Blauge," and "Lotus." The names do not take us out of realism and into another mode;

they are pointediy obtnisive and comic, not aiiegoncal or symboiic. In the case of

"Venison," she even offers a reaiist account of its origin, but one which compounds the

comedy rather than explainhg it away: "This was her reai name, given her by her mother

because when she was born she had a freakish, gamey look, and her father had said, 'She'd

have an odd taste, not like ordinary meat' " (PS 52).

In the same spirit she intersperses the basicaliy realistic circurnstances and events

with moments of farce and fantasy. In 'The Friendiy One," Hermann Vogel's infatuation

with his iriends' servant girl ends when he accidentally creates a furor in the house during

which she is toppled into the Gre "with the spirit cm a-pour" and is, with the three

household dogs, "blown to death" (PS E)." In the bizarre but not wholly implausible

world of the petty criminais and assorted rnisfits of 'The Secret," Beamce the medium

iiteraüy "ethereaiizes": "She walked blindly round and round the rom, seeming to grow

lighter and lighter. Her feet left the floor. She dissolved into a mist at the ceiling and slowly

drifted down to the floor again, like a mass of inert silk" (PS 34). Daisy is the daughter of a

successful crirninai who, before getting himsetf killed, hides for her in the mountains a

lifetime's worth of gold pieces. Riding's smiiing irreverence towards conventions of

reaiism is a way not of abandoning reality, but of refusing to ailow it ail-consuming

importance. Her casud indifference to the moral statu and fates of her charaeters is not

offensive or disturbing in the way Lewis's is, as it appears in the context of a general refusai

to treat any aspect of reality with sober respect,

''The human mind's innate aiiveness to the general," Ridig would write decades

lacer, "has been transfened to processes of self-preoccupation, which are incapable of

employing it to ends of tr~th." '~ The elimination of intetiority, anti-pathetic narration, and

irreverence toward the conventions of realism in the Stories of Lives are a means of forcibly

1 cance dislocating the coiiective attention out of its misguided pmccupation with the signti:

of the psychological experience of the individual. Seing modernist fiction as the most

exacecbated fonn of that preoccupation, Riding hijacks the story of the individual life in

order to deliver its passengers to an alternative destination. After this section, Progress of

Srories moves into the ailegoricd stories, which begin to demonstrate that the si@cance

and cornmon bond of human Me lies not in the d e p h of subjectivity but in iis assimilation

to the whole of being.

Stories Without Lives

in 'The Dehumanization of Art" Ortega writes that "the young ûrtist cases l e s for the

'terminus ad quem, ' the startling fauna at which he arrives, than for the 'terminus a quo, '

the human aspect which he destroys" (22). The aim of the new art, he claims, is not "to

paint something aitogether different fiom a man. . . but to paint a man who cesembles a

man as Little as possible . . . . For the modem artist aesthetic pleasure derives from such a

triumph over human matter. That is why he has to drive home the victory by presenting in

e u h case the strangled victim" (22-23). Both The Wild Body and the Stories of Lives

display such "strangled vi~tims'~-characters realistic enough to begin to invite empathetic

response, but gutted enough to anest it. But The Wild Body is, as 1 have argued, not just an

act of negation; Lewis attempts to write "metaphysicai satire1'4e anti-empathetic fiction

of the new era-although, not trusthg to find an audience quite ready to understand the

work, he instails Ker-On to control and train the readers' response. The Stones of Lives

are, at least if we accept the place Riding gives them in the Progress of Stones, more pwly

acts of negation, in that the amputated humanity of the characters is intended to prepare the

reader for stones which do away with character aitogether. In Ortega's tenns, The Stories of

Lives face the terminus a quo, the fiction of modemist humanism, whereas the Stones of

Ideas, Nearly True Stones, and More Stories embody the new fiction, the terminus ad

quem-a fiction that abandons "lives, as such" for what Riding calls in "Reaiity as Poa

Huntiady" the "reaiiy important things." The realiy important thing is, of course, trurh, and

the fiction that moves towards tnith moves beyond the individuai life. There can be no

fiction without agents of some sort, but the protagonists in these s tone~nt i t i es to varying

degrees anthropomorphic or zoomorphic-are not in any sense subjects.

The stories that foiiow the Stories of Lives foiiow two basic principles: the fkst that

ideas repIace [ives as the primary subject matter, the narrative mode shifting from irrevencnt

realism to something close to aiiegory, These ideas are related to Riding's nascent

metaphysics, the premise of which is the essential unity of al1 being. But the stories, as we

shaii see, are not fully recoverable by allegoricd explanation. The second principle on which

they are based is narrative hedonirm: the indulgence of the free play of fancy, which argues

by example that the telhg of stories is not an exclusive practice, an art, but the nahuai

product of the independent mind's self-exploration, which abides the mies of neiîher

craftsmen nor "history-men" (PS 257).

There is a degree of dficuley in caüing the Stones of Ideas, Nearly True Stories.

and More Stories allegories, in that an allegory presupposes what Maureen Quilligan has

called a "pretext," the text that the allegory cite^."'^ Progress of Stories does not have a

pretext so much as a post-text: The Telling was published thirty-two years later. Progress

appeared with no commentary other than the original preface, the better part of which is

itself a parable. The preface illustrates the nature of the stories' "progress" by way of a

story about the gradua1 shrinking of a circle of guests at a house party and the graduai

concentration of their conversation. It provides the reader with an indirect explanation of the

arrangement of the stories, the relation of one group to the next, but offers nothing by which

to understand the elements of the individuai stories thernselves. The only indication it gives

the reader as to the meaning of the stories is that each rnoves closer to the articulation of

"tnith," the sense of that troublesome term going unexplained.

Nonetheless it is clear-and wouid have been clear at least to attentive readers in

1935-that the stories that foiiow the Stories of Lives illustrate what Riding c d s in the

preface (though ironicalîy, with reference to modemist fiction) "some signifïcant principle

of being" (PS xvi). It is difficult to make generaiizations that apply equaIly weii to each of

the stories, but there are thtee phiples that recur with reguiarity throughout: the h t , the

necessity of the independence of every individual; the second, tbe originai and the dtimate

unity of aii individuais; the third, that the nature of that ultimate and imminent unity is, for

the tirne beiig, beyond human apprehension. Had we been not just attentive readen in 1935,

but aiso weii-acqwhted with Riding's criticai wotks, we would have seen that this inevitabIe

but indefinitely postponed uni@ was a tentative solution to the predicament of the seK

strung between the travesty of social-histoncal existence on one hand and the radical

isolation of the "unreal" self on the other.

Progress of Stories stands by the imperative of intellectuai independence laid dowu

in Riding's critical works, independence that means not "originality," but a release from a i i

obligation to what she cailed in those works the "concrete intelligence" and the

"knowledge materiai" of the day, Thus there is in the stocks an antagonism towards the

collective reality of the social world f d a r from Contemporanes and Snobs and

Anarchism Is Not Enough. Both Miss Banquett and Frances Cat are emblems of the defiant

pursuit of individuai autonomy. Miss Banquett sets out to confirm the reality of her king

(her "beauty") by making herseif known to more people-seeking reality, that is, in public

consensus. The story of the shipwreck of this particular emblem of selfhood ont0 an

uninhabited island is not one of solipsistic delusion, but of reality secured by and within the

self rather than thcough the social world. Miss Banquett's fmt act as she assumes deistic

dimensions is to separate a "here" from a "there," "self" from the social world: "There

was the world of knowledge, which out of hearsay, or uncertainty, made facts-gossip

reported in the language of tmth . . . Here was the world of self-that is, the world of Miss

Banquett, wbich she made out of fear of uncertainty" (PS 135, my emphases). Riding

continues:

And this was the ciifference between the world of self and the world of knowledge:

that the world of knowledge was only an endless prolongation of uncertainty, whiie

the world of self was a protongation of fear of uncertainty. On this hinges the whole

story. For in the world of knowledge nothing true couId happen because of the

uncertainty which was the knowledge. But in Miss Banquett's world, fear of

uncertainty, on which it is founded, could tum into a consciousness of unceaainty,

which could tum into a desire for certainty, which could tum into order. (PS 136)

This passage continues in the same vein for another dozen or so lines; it is not surprising

that Progress ofStories tried the patience of readers of both editions, forty-sevea years

ripart.'' A degree of familidty with Riding's argument with modernity in general and

ernpiricism in pûrticular, tiowever, renders passages like these reasonably lucid. The

"knowIedge" of the "world" is empiricism, which, as she says in Contemporuries and

Snobs, "mad with its own modernity, decIared itself the sole source of tmth" (CS 62). Such

knowledge ovemns its limited bounds; it cannot produce the certainties about hurnan

existence to which it pretends. It is, then, "continual uncenaintyt' The alternative to what

the social world serves up as tmth is the independent searcb for tnith: the refusal to accept

(the "few of') the world's uncertainty. Recognition and rejection of the world's

uncertainty-masked-as-tnrth is the fmt step towards rd certainty, the natural order of tnith.

"A Faj. Tale for Older People" follows a s i d a pattern. Frances Cat, the "long,

black, sulky" protagonist who may or rnay not be a hominid or a feline, fmds herself

transported into an unfamiliar worid. She discovers, in what turns out to be "the Forest of

Transformation," a book explahhg her new surroundings. As in "Miss Banquett," the

progress of Frances entails the repudiation of social reality familiar irom Contempuraries

and Snobs and Anarchism Is Nor Enough. Frances Cat, now an enticy of indeterminate

shape and name, reflects on her entfiusiami for the book:

when I was Frances Cat 1 always made a point of knowing as iittle as possible about

the world 1 Lived in . . . . But this is a diffennt world altogether, and it won't hurt me

to know more about it, since it is, after d, my own world. KnowIedge in th world

merely meant leaming about 0 t h people, and how to pkase tfiem, and so it was

necessary ro lmow as M e as possible if one wanted to avoid nrining one's life for

other people. For once you knew how to please hem it was dülicult not to piease

them, knowledge beùig a t b g that cannot resist showing itseifoff. (PS 208)

Accepting knowkdge in the sociai world is a distraction h m s e l f ("'meant learning about

other people"); it draws one into a web of sociai relations inidcal to self and thatening to

overwheh. In the course of king mforrned into her reai self, Fnaces must also fiee

herself from the burden of history. History appears in the fonn "of battles and mange

crowds and goings and comings" tluough which she rides on a horse, and in the form of

dozens of scraps of paper inscribed with the names of important people: 'mat was history,

and how absurd it al1 was-names on paper" (PS 222). As the papes fade away, Frances

(like Ker-Orr reflecihg on the devastated Monsieur de Valmore) has but a spam of

compunction: "Yes. it was me; she had been feeling just a littie @ty in her own good

forme. Yes, she had felt just a Little responsibility towards the worid Yes, she was perhaps

just a Iittie sorry that things could not be otherwise. But equally, she was extrernely pleased

that things couid not be otherwise" (PS 223).

This insistence on the radicai separation of the self h m the social world is

countered, however, by a second principle of king, which has no precedent in the critical

works-the idea hat aü king was origiaally one, and will ultimately r e m to its unity.

These stories are in no way orderly expositions of ideas; individual elemenîs generally

assume multiple and shifting degorical dimensions. Miss Banquett is, to begin with, a seif

of sorts who lems to break away from collective ceaiity, but as she assumes her deistic

aspect she becomes a figuration also of the onginal and ultirnate unity of aii king. She

brings into k ing a worId of diversity by &g manifest in multiple races of beings the

various aspects of her single self. Ultimarely dïssatisfied with multifariousness, she

swalIows (in the banquet, perhaps, from wtiich she denves her name) the cosmos she

created, absorbing it back into ber single self: "And now the air med with countless images

of Miss Banquett; a i i like and yet aii Merent. And the ükeness between them gradudly

faded. And the ciifferenmess between hem graduaiiy took a single f o m it became that

strange, so s m g e Miss Banquett who was to be so excIusively and so inclusiveiy hhemlf'

(PS 159). The dedication to seeking ceaainty or redity in "seIf' st i i i remaius the route to

truth, but in these stories self is, ultimateiy, nota radical isolation but an absorption into the

whoIe.

Both "A Last Lesson in Geography," the last of the Nearly True Stories, and "In

the End," the finai story of the 1935 edition, allegorize the ultimate unity of a i i king. In "A

Last Lesson in Geography" humanity is cast as the parts of a body which assemble and

move towards "sheW-their single spirit.'' It is a mark of how far the stories have departed

from the Stones of Lives that the protagonist in this 1st of the Nearly True Stories is

blithely narned Tooth. Tooth kgins progressing towards the narneless fernale spirit, and the

other parts of the body join him:

the knitting of the body was accomplished by Flesh, which was not a particular part

of the body but the feeling which each part had of king as much the body as any

other part. And as they became one body, the body, it grew as big as the woman who

was a spirit. And she was now not only a spirit but the spirit. She was the spirit of

the body" (PS 248).

"In the End" displays the same pattern by different emblerns. Thirty-two men inhabit the

thirty-two rwms of a single house; the men are both distinct from each other and the sarne:

each "was like only to himself . . . and each kind was al1 the same person" (PS 296). The

house belongs to one woman who is both constituted by and yet transcendent of the

individuated men: "She was distinct from a i l the kinds; and yet she was not a separate

kind. . . . She was the whole" (PS 296).

While individual autonomy and the unity of king are füred principles in Progress

of Stories, the third principle of beiig aiiegorized Un the stones is a negative one: that the

nature of this ultimate unity of king is something that cannot be apprehended or

articulated-yet. insofar as Riding's later thought avoids dogmatism, it is by v h e of the

open-endedness in her teleology. in The Telling, she WU state repeatedly that it is not just

that the ultimate unity of humanity in the speakhg of üuth cannot be brought about yet, but

she cannot arrive at mie speech alone; the wock is in fact a sustained plea for others to join

in an enterprise whose success relies on tbir parti~ipation.'~ This principle appears in

Progress of Stories both in the introductory parable of the bouse Party, and in Riding's

refusai to bring the allegoncal stones to coherent endings.

"Miss Banquett," as we have seen, reabsorbs the manifestations of her k ing back

into herself-all the Lccountless images" of Miss Banquett "gradually took a single fom,"

the form of Miss Banquett, "so exclusively and so inclusively herseIf' (PS 159). The

priuciple of unity is made clear, but not the substance of that unity. In the last five pages of

the story, Riding rnakes not an ending but an elaborate withdrawal in a fugue of denials and

paradoxes. Miss Banquett, like p o e y and the self in Anarchism Is Nor Enough, becomes

"nothing": "She is nothing, she has nothing, she has herself" (PS 160). The reader is

discouraged from even trying to understand: "However you may plot her," we are told,

"she is otherwise. She is not anything you think" (PS 163). This is not, however, an

expulsion of the reader; when Riding demands "What, then, of the story? What, then, of

Miss Banquett? What, then, of fiction? What, then, of tnith?" (PS 163), she is attesting to

the limits of her own knowledge.

"A Faîry Tale for Older People" follows the same pattern. The story fol& into

itself; at its close we have an entity which is an indeterminate amalgarn of Frances Cat, the

hdescribable Witch who presided over the Forest of Transformation, and an old woman

iiving humbly and alone. The three entities and an attendant and self-multiplyuig cat merge

and divide for severai pages in what is more a spatial performance than a narrative, until

Riding finally declares, "Perhaps you can't make head or tail out of all this. Weli, you're

not supposed to . . . . The trouble is that you insisted on foUowing the story" (PS 234). "A

Fajr Tale for Olàer People," according to Baker, is "a very meny piece of teasing

whimsy," until Riding ''tums on the readers at the end in a rage, sudàeniy contemptuous of

their desire to know what happeus next" (296). It is a sign of the personal antagonism chat

Riding provoked in so many that this passage could be read as an outbmt of rage and

contempt. (Presumably Baker was not amused either when at the end of "Miss Banqueît"

the reader was told "Miss Banquett is not. So away with your cup of tea and away with

your saliva and your sympathy" (PS 162).) When instead of furnishuig an ending Riding

needles the reader with questio-"You insist on knowing the end, do you? WeU, why

don't you know? Does anyone stop you? Haven't you followed the story as far as you

liked?" (PS 234bshe is insisting, simply, on h e necessity of individual initiative in

bringing about the real human "end," or ûuth, which is not bers to pronounce dune.

As a provision, perhaps, though evidentiy hadequate, against misunderstandings

such as Baker's, Riding makes her own ignorance of the human end explicit in "A Last

Lesson in Geography." Just as Miss Banquett's apocalyptic banquet was not itself an end,

the unification of the parts of the body and the spirit in this story is not one either. ln its

s e d e s s integration with itseff and the spirit, 'The body was not only beautiful and strong,

it was true: there was nothing else besides it" (PS 248). But there is more to corne: "One

sense had the body now, and one knowledge: tu speak, and to know that the words it spoke

were only broken meanings of the word that she spoke. . . . You ask me, 'Whrit is this

word?' " We arrive again at the question of the substance of unity-of what happened to

Miss Banquett after she swaliowed Cosmania, of where Frances Cat, or whoever she is,

goes after she goes through a door "in the darkest comr of her cella? and attempts to

leave the reader behind with a "Gd-bye, and thank you for you interest" (PS 230).

Riding's non-answer-"It is a word that as a number is one in its nth muItiple of oneness,

or none in its oneth multiple of everythhgness" (PS 251)-is not an obfùscation but an

expression once again of ignorance, this thne explicit: "And here," she says, "wwe must

admit, we have gone a Cttte tw far in our Iesson. But not because we are interferhg with the

natural course of histoty. Rather because we have finshed with history, tiaving let it take its

naturd course, and the rest is nota subject th can be taught" (PS 252).

Narrative Hedonism

Riding's use of non-human figures and the aiiegoricai mode dows her to convey the major

principles of her nascent cosmology without immersing the reader in the distracthg t r a c

of individual iives and events. But there are, as 1 have indicated above, as many elements in

the stories that ehde the aliegorical trawler as there are those caught by it. The readings 1

have given verge on mvesty insofa as they fail to convey the pervasive subtle humour of

the stories and the brilliant features of the narratives into which the principles of king are

woven. Aiiegoricai readings cannot contain the mariage of the tawny-faced women and the

polar bears, the "weather grains" in the Forest of Transformation, the superbly rendered

oneiric logic of the mutating surroundings in "A Fajr Tale for Older People," or the

turning inside-out of the hollow earth in "in the End." The playful, comic, and fantastic

elements of the stories issue from an ethic of narrative hedonism directiy related to Riding's

developing cosmology. Extending to fiction the principle of inreliectual independence-the

release of individuals from aii obligation to the established knowledge of their day-Riding

undertakes to release the author fiom obligation to tealism: the imaginative free play of

"storyteiiïng" is to repIace the arduous craft of "fiction."

"You see," declares Riding, in "A Last Lesson in Geography," after declining to

teii us the word spoken by the spirit, "how it is a i i a matter of the humour of the thingr (PS

251). With this she permits the reader, who had perhaps been restrained, perplexed, or

annoyed by the story's apparently sober, perhaps portentous tone, to laugh at Tooth, Naiis,

Hais, and the ciifficulty of Stornach, "who was ody a hoiiow" (PS 247). But this is not the

first indication in the book that the analogy between storytehg and truth-telling does not

mean an obligation to high seriousness. "Reality as Port Huntlady," îhe Fust of the two

Stories of Ideas which foilow the Stones of Lives, is, at least in one of its aiiegorical

dimensions, about fiction. It insists that people take fiction senously, but that fiction shouId

not be serious, and thai reaiism is a fonn of sobriety that c m only defeat it.

Port Huntlady is very small town on an unspecified sea, originaliy founded as "an

experimentai pleasurecolony'* (PS 87) and populated for the most part by "temporariiy

permanent residents9*-people who have corne "to live-reaiiy live," but always end up

going "away again, to be busy and die" (PS 85). The t o m is, in one of its dimensions, a

briiliantly mundane emblem of the life of the mhd; it is also a symbol of fiction, the kind of

fiction to which serious readers turn in search of "certain undefmed reaiiy important

things" (PS 87). There is, we leam, sorne sort of business arrangement in Port Huntlady

between the "reaiiy permanent resident" Lady Port-Huntlady and the property manager

Cards, and this obscure business, it becomes clear, stands for realism. The narrator breaks

off the story to explain:

Exactly what the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady was, then, is a

matter standing in the way of your ultimate enjoyment ofthis story as a thing of

your own. It is-how shaii we say-the pious tediousness of the author who, in

teliing a story, must always observe the tiction that to teli a story is to persuade

people of something entirely me, or publicly actual; this side of a story is caiied its

verisimilitude. (PS 96)

We recognize here Riding's old opposition to the social world-the term "publicly actuai"

echoes the "collective reai" of Anarchim 1s Not Enough-the mode of living opposed to

individuai unreai, the social world as opposed to self. Verisimilitude is its counterpart in

fiction, and now Riding rejects it not on the grounds that it is inimical to self, but because it

stands between author and reader as "a substitute for any more profound experience of

each other" (PS 98).

"Reality as Port Huntlady" induiges, for a while, the readers who do not realiy

wunt "my more profound experience," who go CO fiction like temporarily permanent

residents to Port Huntlady, '70 pay then respects to the really important thbgs without

getting actuaiiy involved, so to speak, in their family life' (PS 97). Riding dutifuiiy alIots a

certain amount of tirne at the beginning of the story to examining the petsonalities and

relationships among one set of temporariiy permanent residents. Initiaiiy oâd but not

implausible, these Lives, however, gradudy go h m odd to bizarre, bizarre to comical, and

finaiiy break into farce: at dinner onii evening Barney kiüs Tomatoes with one of his

wdking sticks (PS 113); at a midnight party in the graveyard, Miss Man is accidentally

buried dive and deserted (PS 124). At this point the namative shifts h m the indicative to

the conditional, offenng in the end mem speculations on the fates of the characters,

including alternative fates for the already-âead: "If Miss Man would not have disappeared

from Port Huntiady in the manner already described, it is certain that she would have

disappeared one day at Foolish Island during a picnic" (PS 128). ReturtiUig to the tongue-

inçheek realism of Stones of Ijves, Riding refuses to recognize the law of verisirnilitude.

This time, however, afkr abandonhg the story in a bail of suppositions, she offers an

explmation.

Verisimüitude, she argues, is our way of pmving "to ourselves that a story is not

very different from the things that, in the ordinary way, make up Iife"; realism is, in other

words, an attempt to provide fiction with some unimpeachable legitimacy, so that we do not

feel, if we are serious people, that "we have been trifling with time a little too reckiessly"

(PS 132). Mameling at the amount of tirne people spend reading "unsupported and

unguaranteed history," Henry James remarks in 'The Future of the Novel" that "this is

the side of the whole business of fiction on which it can always be challengeci, and to that

degree that if the general venture had not becorne in such a manner the admiration of the

world it rnight t w easiiy have becorne the derision" (337). But the writer of fiction, James

resolves, can rest secure in the knowledge of two things: that "man's general appetite for a

picture" is a "prirnary need of the mind" (337); and that fiction feeds man's "etemal

desire for more experienceF'-'The vivid fable, more thau anythuig else . . . gives him

knowledge abundant yet vicariuus" (338). James is probably nght, but Riding does not

share his confidence.

It is Riding's implication in the closing passages of "Reality as Port Huntlady"

that if fiction relies on the value James settles on for it, serious rea&rs will inevitably be iike

the people who corne to settle in Port Huntiady: sitting in rocking chairs, on verandas, at

twiiight, they "laughed and thought, 'What couid be prenier than Port Huntiady?' and tried

hard not to ask themselves the question: what were they doing in Port Huntlady?" [PS 90).

Like the iemporarily permanent residents, serious readers, she feels, WU inevitabiy decide

sooner or later that ?he world was the world, and the things that happened in that world

were the realities. And there was no outside to that world, nowhere where the

illumination-the understanding-was better" (PS 92). They wiU tum away h m fiction

because it cornes to seem unred, for "after di . . . no amount of ingenuity can save a story

from seeming, in the end, just a story-just a piece of verbal Iuggage" (PS 132). The

attempt to make the vaiue of fiction coextensive with the vaiue of lived experience is, by

Ridingy s logic, to parantee for it the same dubious and diministiing status for which poetry

was slated: if fiction accepts the t e m of the "collective ml," it cm never be more than a

poor shadow of it.

if, on the 0 t h hand, we agree to do away with verisimilitude-"ttie morai pretence

of the story created by our joint vanity in king conscientious, orderly, and enithfuI

creaturesy'-and instead "give ourselves up to [a story's] gentle idiocy, hypnotized by our

physicd susceptibüity to less exacting notions of what is worthy of our interest" (PS 97),

fiction can secure its own ground in a space between social reality and anotber. We may

fmd that it is, as the final lines of the story suggest, "our good fortune to be in a position to

distriiute our interest without prejudice and deceive our sincerity as we p1ease-h the

confidence that at the appropriate moment we stiall tire and hm away, leaving the door of

mth open behind us" (PS 133).

The narrative hedonism of Progress of Stones is a kind of narrative primitivism.

EnitiaiIy conceived as a book of fairy tdes, it semains a tribute to that form, as the inclusion

of the essay "A Crown for Ham Andersen" iestifies." M a t Riding œlebrates in that

essay, and in the stories themselves, is the insouciant free play of fancy and the absence of

seif-conscious portentousness. It is one of her axioms, in Progress of Stones and in The

Telling, that dedication to tmth does not demand asceticism or sobriety, but patience and

good humour. "It al1 comes down to the humour of the thing," as she says in "A Last

Lesson in Geography," to the question of whether we can, "in these circumstances, go on

smiling" (PS 25 1,253). Frances Cat "had been such a suilcy creature aii her me" only

because "she disapproved of other people's extreme seriousness" (PS 200). Reflecting on

what to do in her new circurnstances, she declam, "1 want to enjoy myseIf and be quite free

of responsibility and the opinions of other people. The problem is, how not to be serious

like other people and yet how not to be siiiy" (PS 214). The solution, on the level of fiction,

Riding suggests in "A Crown for Ham Andersen," is to take a cue from the fairy taie,

whose unabashed foolishness she regards as a wise humiiity: "Fairy tales are to be stupid

and yet to be as wise as possible, king siupiil"; they Say, "1s not everything nonsense that

cannot be spoken of intelligently? So why should we be afraid to talk nonsense?" (PS 255,

256). Fiction is to be, once again, "an experimental pleasure colony!'

Riding's shmgging off of obligations to verisimilitude in "Reality as Port

Huntlady" and the spirit of unrestricted fancy that infom the ensuing stories is, like her

rejection of modernist style, a rejection of literariness, a rejection of art, in a gesture of

egalitarian inclusion. It dramatizes the i&a that storytehg belongs, at least potentiaiiy, to

everyone. It does not require, contrary to what one migl~t conclude fiom a s w e y of

modemist fiction, the sesources of a historian, psychologist, philosopher, philologist, social

critic-or pet: what Progress ofStones tries to suggest is that everyone need only relax

into a sincere but good-humoured mood and simply begin to speok. "You may give," as

Riding says in "ln the End," "as many accounts as you please, so Iong as each account

has the fullness of its ignorance" (PS 301). Who cm prove, afier all, "that Lady Nonsense

is not Lady Understanding, and chat Lady Undentanhg is not Lady Nonsense?" (PS 97).

in her preface to the second edition of Progress of Stories, Riding d e s c n i the

stories as king "the gift not of my authoriai giving, but what it is given a telling of stories

to be when nothing but the teiiing of them, at least no ulterior purpose of a telling, is aiiowed

to lead the way, swreptitiously or otherwise" (PS xxi). The stories, she claims, unlike the

contrived and self-important "products of art," are spontaneous "products of nature, that

come naturally to the mind for teliing" (PS xxii). Forty-six years later she is maintainhg

(bas, perhaps, corne to believe) the fiction of artlessness that began with her c l a h in the

original preface that on the materiai of Stones of Lives she had done "a certain amount of

work, but no more than was enough to establish it decently in its unimportance" (PS xii).

The second preface misrepresents the book in more than one way, but prirnarily in its

preposterous disavowal of the book's conceptuai h e w o r k and intricate design, its

ailegorical dimensions and repeating motifs, and its ovecarchhg and interwoven

commentary on fiction itself. The evident sincerity of the protestations, however, is indicative

of the older Riding's devotion to the ideai of linguistic and human inclusiveness expressed

in The Telling.

a

And yet this is not a story of Riding's progress fiom a defensive, hennetic poetics to an ail-

embracing egalitarianism in which invidious "literature*' becomes at once a happy anarchy

of human imagination and a practice integrai to the most important of human concems,

tmth. As 1 indicated at the openhg of this chapter, aithough Riding deciines to assume

either authoriai or spirituai leadership in the preface to Progress of Stories or later in The

Telling, the commuaity of equals she envisions has, in both instances, agate, and she stands

by it,

Two of the stories in Progress clearly figure the progress towards the '"full

possession of the human inheritance" (T 15) as the destiny not of ail, but of the few. In "A

Last Lesson in Geography," the parts of the body, led forward by Twth, knit themselves

together in the spirit of tmth. In one passage Riding pauses to insist that, in spite of the

obvious precedence of Tooth, "among strong people there cm be no inferiors." The parts

of the body choose Tooth to be a ''First One," but this is strictly "a matter of expediency,"

resulting from the fact that, without king supior, one person may be most "capable" due

to "accidental advantages of position," and in such maners of expediency, "there are no

petty personal considerations, only the general good" (PS 238). However playful the story

may be, with its whimsical ratiocinations and odd and surprishg wit, it is grounded on a

Nietzschean divide between the strong few and the weak many. As the strong are inherently

strong, so the weak are by nature weak, and they excuse themselves of their weakness by

humbling themselves ùefore an idea of an absolute strength, Gd. "By 'God' they meant

the strong people," though at the same rime %ey refused to recognize any difference

between the strong people and themselves" (PS 241). The strong have built a bridge

between the nowhere of the past and the somewhere of the future, and Tooth sees that his

work is to "destroy the bridge and yet Save aiI the other strong people" (PS 244). The self-

abasing weak who worship the strong in the image of God simpIy disappear: "The weak

people, though they caiied themselves poor confused creatures, had no object. They no

sooner came into king than out they went. It was ail a joke" (PS 246).

"In the End" constmcts a similar division, linking a pure human few with a true

world signified by moon and earth, and opposing these to a mass of "mixed nature," linked

with a false world of sky and Sun. As in "A Last Lesson," which proposes that "there was

an infinite number of weak peopIe, but the strong people were numbered" (PS 243), so hem

those of "mixed nature" are of an bîmcountable number," while those who te l only the

vuth are but thirty-two. The "false world" begins to end "when [those of mixed name]

began to let themselves fali into the emptiness" of the sky, towatds the sun, which is "the

vanity of the earth." In a great apocalyptic immolation, "the sky and the further degrees of

empty outemess destroyed the sun and were destroyed by the sun. The vain were destroyed

by their vanity." A better fate awaits those few who "could not fly," who "could teil oniy

the ûuthV*: they become the inhabitants of the "nue world, the new world which came after

an old world that had never enily been" (PS 298-299).

The absolute distinction in these stories between the few and the many recails

Tho~gh Gently's abrupt and dictatorial banishment of "the crowd" into historical

irrelevance. Their uncornpromising duaiism is to some extent tempered, though certainly not

overridden, by the more negotiable terms of the parable of the house party that opens the

book. Those who remain in the group pursuing the conversation-towards-truth seem to have

sorted themselves out from the crowd by virtue of good faith and participatory wili rather

than intrinsic nature; those who fdl away are the irivolous or quedous, disgnmtled by the

difficulty of aniving at "the same conversation" rather than spwred on by it. Nonetheless,

Riding presents Progress of Stories itself, as Lewis does The Wild Body, as a work that will

self-select its audience by repeUing to begin with those whose natures are contrary to its

own. Indeed, suspecting the presence of readers so contrary in nature they will read on for

the pleasure of contradiction, Riding pauses in her preface to shake them off: "and wiii

those of you who are incapable of [pursuing the same conversation] please, please go away

now, if you have not already gone away" (PS xix).

In Progress of Stories, then, we still see some of the defensiveness of Riding's

poetics, a defensiveness that leads, in the latter half of the thirties, to the cultish Council of

the Inside People and the vaguely murdemus ethic of the Covenant of fiteral Morality. in

this stage of its development, Riding's vision of the tnithful human future belongs to the

long line of utopian visions that like the Christian heaven cast a shadow caiied heu. Her

vagueness about the fate of al1 those human beings who are, by the standards she heralds as

absolute, cavïiing, weak, mendacious, or (in the t e m of the Covenrmt) evii, ultimately makes

her vision seem more, rather than less menacing than Lewis's proposal for peace by mass

stupefaction. For however fmtastic, incorporeal, and whirnsical her absrnt fables of people

who, in the course of the human reaiization of uuth, mystenously cease to exist, or fly off

the face of the earth into the Sun, they are not without redolence of other fantastic twentieth-

century stories of disappearance, of gulags, and of ovens.

The Telling, while remackably consistent with the i&as formuiated so many years

earlier, belongs to a different stage of Riding's thought. It bears no trace of the invidious,

perhaps orninous, divisions between the many and the few that mark Progress ofStories.

Progress, as 1 have noted, was initially conceived as a "perfectly readable" work. Though

on the level of syntax and diction it is, for the most part, unimpeachably lucid, Riding was

simply not prepared at that point to produce a work generically and conceptualiy

straightforward enough to fmd the audience she had promised the reluctant Jonathan Cape

that she wodd. Though The Telling is a testimonial not an argument, and far h m

pedestrian in style, it is the product of the older Riding's couunitment to relatively direct and

discursive communication. The human fihue of living in uuth is presented, as in the preface

to Progress of Stones, as an articulate consensus, but this is not a metaphor: the most

d e f ~ t e feature we can detect in her vision is that the future human Living in tmth wiii consist

in speaking of being, and al1 in accord with one another.

The means to this end is also speaking-individuaiiy, autonomously, without

deference or reference to authority. hdividuals are to pursue, as she herser did, beginning

with her poetry, the movements of their own mincis in order to discover what they know

without knowledge: "Do you speak, and you," she urges, "making our subject less mine,

more yours . . . Iess yours, more ours" (T 43). In her confidence that resolutely individual,

independent speaking WU ultimateiy converge in the consensus of tnith, she welcomes in

closing opposition and contradiction: "Shouid my names and descriptions of things not

draw for you or you the circle of entirety, draw you or you that circle, as you know entiret.;

if each different circle contains ai i ourselves, an in f i t e coincidence of ûuth wiii ring us ever

round" (T 54).

But dissent remains the threat that it was in Progress ofstories. Riding ends î l e

Tellrng ('Wow 1 leave off ') only to resume it in the next breath with four afterthoughts that

class* and dissolve in advance any substanu'al opposition. The Telling is not a dogmatic

work; it lays down a spiritual orientation, not a series of laws. But however vaguely

irnagined the substance of the projected human "speaking" may be, it is nonetheless

definite enough to Riding to induce her to preserve a distinction between "true differences

of understanding" and false ones "made jeaiously" by those "overfed with drearns of

prevailing in the art of catching the ears of others" (T 55). The control she retains in Tize

Telling does differ from that of Progress, however, in that it is ideas she checks at the gate,

rather than people. Falsity, she daims, wili defeat itself given the: "It wiii be repeated to the

extinction of its capability of seeming new, me"; consensus will then be attained without

violence; and in the end "none will be missing h m the count of [selves]: it will tally

perfectly with ONE (T 55-56).

Notes

' For a detailed account of the Epilogue project, see Wexler 96- 109.

' See Wexler 102-03.

Quoted in Wexler, 100.

' As against Eliot, and in solidarity with Pound, Lewis's ideal society would be led by an

elite of ability nota hereditary elite: "the artificiai barriers that an aristocratie caste are

forced to observe are upheld to e n h c e a diference that is not a reality. It is because they

are of the same stuff as their servants that they require the disciplines of exclusiveness"

(IWM 374).

LLP~etry is iinguisticaliy freakish; and it is wit, in its freakishness, the naturai spiritual

speech of human beings" ("Continued" 6).

'The Holiow Men" (1925).

' For a detailed consideration of Riding's renunciatioa of poetry, see McGann 124-29.

It is clear, however, that the new age of truth does not involve a transcendence of earthly,

ernbodied life: "We shaii live as souls, and endure as mincis; and our bodies will perpetuate

us as ourselves, in the new being. Everything WU be taken dong, except what belies it" (T

37).

Edwin Muir reviewed Progress of Stories enthusiastically for The Listener in 1936.

"Miss Riding," he wrote, "is not in the least l i e Kafka, has obviously never been

infiuenced by him, and may not even have read him; but she often gives us the same feeling

as Kafka does, that we are making discoveries which we cannot put a ptecise name to, and

which can be expressed only in terms of degory or of fantasy" (64). Harry Matthews,

reviewing the second edition for the New York Review of Book in 1982, suggests that

Progress of Stories belongs to "what might be calied initiatory literature," a genre

exceedingly rare in English prose, but less so in European. As works at least comparable to

it, he offers Hofmannsthal's Letter o f h r d Chandos, René Daumal's La grande beuverie,

and Raymond Roussel's Locus solus. Kafka, he suggests is comparable "in methods or

ideas . . . in his grandiose reading of the whole world as metaphor" (37).

'O Riding's most extensive reflections on fiction would appear in Chelsea 35 in 1976,

alongside reprintings of some of her stories.

" Barbara Adams's account of this story strikes far from the mark precisely because she

does not acknowledge its farcical elemenis. She describes 'The Friendly One" as "a

simple narrative about a lonely German living in a foreign country. He has written a

children's book. . . but is unable to communicate with anyone, and is too shy to let anyone

read it. He is patronized by a superciiious Amencan family, whose servant girl he loves. The

girl dies as a result of his zeaI and clumsiness, and so he renirns to Germany and opens a

toy shop" (Adams 1 12-13)

12 Quoted in Samuels, Ixiv. The passage appears in atticle Riding wrote for Poetry Nation

in 1987.

" See Maureen Quilligan, The Languuge ofAlZegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Corneii

University Press, 1979), cited in Qu~ma, 65.

'' Richard Vaughn, reviewing the h t edition for The New Republic, conciuded that "It is

aimost impossible to follow the tums and twists of the mental gymnastics . . . except in one

or two stories, generai obscurity speaks the last word" (250). Kathleen Nott remarked in

her 1982 review that the activity Riding refers to as "Story-tefling" "is an 'ongoing' myth

and the most industrious exegesis even by her feiiow-American scholars isn't going to

translate it" (29). In kt, none of her feilow-Americans have tried.

'' A nurnber of femde deity figures appear in Riding's short narratives, some of them

thinly disguised representations of herseif. There are two Iegends about Riding's ferninism,

the fmt that Ricihg had the words "God is a Woman" inscribed in gold on her bedroom

waii, the second that she suffered fmm religious delusions, thinking God was in fact Lam

Riding. Both of these tales have been debunked (see Samuels Ixxiii-iv and Baker 285-86).

Riding was keenly attuned to gender issues and the relations between the sexes, and began

addressing the subject in The Word Womm in the early thirties. The unfraished

manuscript, however, was leit behind in Dey& in 1936 and was not retumed to her until

1974. It was published only in 1993 in Friedmann and Clark's The Word Woman and

Orher Relared Writings. Riding professed the necessity of overcoming sexual difference,

not retrenching it in an inverted hierarchy. She did consider women, however, spiritually

superior to men, not i ~ a t e l y or absoIutely, but because of their long history of what

Samuels calis "the privilege of alienation"-"kcause their relatively nonpublic,

unempowered statu has given them unique access to the realms of the individual unreai"

(xirxiv-v).

115 Throughout The Teiling, Kding takes pains to avoid seeming to preach, even expressing

regret for saying as much as she does: "I do not üke it that 1 caution and counsel so

much," she wntes (T 43); "Wbatever 1 say cannot itself sufnce: that which 1 Say wiU soon

be clouded over, unless my saying is multiplied by oiher and other saying . . . is joined by

other and other telling to the point of perfect interreference, the sufficient mutuality" (T 31).

" Accordhg to Baker, Riding wrote 'The Playground" for Tom Matthews and his family,

who were staying with her and Robert Graves in Dey& Matthews was delighted with the

story, and Riding began to pian more: "In August 193 1 Riding had written Jonathan Cape

that since he did not absoluteIy refuse to print her, she was working on a collection of fairy

taies for him. The collection was to be entitied after one of the stories, 'The Story Pig,' and

ihe book itseif was to be perfectly redable" (Baker 29 1).

C O N C L U S I O N

It is better to have suffered the humiliation of misbelief. . . than to have opinionated on what was and is and is to be with . . . irnaginationfiowned down and reason stiffened to an incapability of being reasonable. (The Telling 45)

Everyone who does not fight openly and bear his share of the common burden of ignominy in life, is a sneak . . . . (Tarr 33)

Laura Riding's and Wyndham Lewis's long careers began under the constellation of three

convictions: that the value of art (restricted by Riding to poetry) to human life is supreme;

that art is the product of an uncommonly high degree of individuality in the creator; and that

rnodernity is a concert of homogenizing forces threatening the existence of individuality,

and therefore of art. We find elements of al1 of these convictions, though generally in more

tempered f o m , in most modemist writers. What particularly distinguishes Riding and

Lewis from those who shared their sense of besieged individuaüty and endangered art is

that they did not assume that the work of the literary and artistic avant-gardes was free of

compticity, conscious or unconscious, with the inimical forces of rnodernity: they

interrogated "the ideology of modemism" from the inside, as contemporary

experimentaiists thernselves.

In the early stages of their careers-Lewis in pre-war London, Riding as contributor

to The Fugitive, Hogarth Ress pet, and CO-author of A Sumey of Modemisr Poe-ey

saw thernselves as important coatriiutors to the creation of a aew era in the arts, but both

swn began to dissociate themselves h m most of the other participants in that effort. if the

common project of modernism was the transformation of aesthetic principles and the re-

entrenchment of the value and power of art, Riding and Lewis, driven by genuine scrupIe, an

excess, perhaps, of passion, and, we must allow, some infusion of ressentintent, subjected

Angio-American literary modemism to a stringeut critique by its own standards, charging it

with harbouring traditional aesthetic elements that belied its claim to newness (such as

humanist natwalism) and with fostering tendencies bound to vitiate art itseif (such as anti-

individuaiism), and posed against it their own creations of the really new. Theirs was, in this

sense, a redoubled effort to reaiize the ideals of modemism: their critiques did not take hem

out of its compass, but entrenched them within it. Lewis is reasonably weii known as a

modemist party of one, "forcing his readership," as Jarneson has observed, "to choose

between himself and virtuaiiy everything else" (4). 1 have proposed that there was on the

scene a second such singular Party, both complementary and contrary to Lewis's, made up

of one woman.

Ridiig's response to Lewis's initial inquiry about her work in the spring of 1927

seems to reflect some recognition of the affmity of their convictions regarding individuality,

art, and the suspect practices of their contemporaries. Though on good terms with Leonard

and Virginia Woolf, Riding confessed to Lewis, "to me nevertheless there is about the

Hogarth Press an air of Iast-generation London-groupishness." "1 belong (most decidedly)

to no group," she takes c m to state in the same letter; later she wouid write that, in spite of

Eugene Jolas's interest in her work, she did not think her poems fit weU into zransitiun

because "you see, 1 am not an aesthete!"' Though their correspondence was fnendy,

whatever &gree of alliance they felt was, as we have seen, relatively short-lived, as they twk

their leaves of Bloomsbury and transition in fundamentaüy different ways. By the early

thirties, if they were stiU reading each other at aii, they wouid have M y realized their

diffecences. Both had identified the problem of art in the early twentieth century as the

problem of individuaIity, and that of individudit. as the problem of preseMng intellectual

independence. But weli before Riding's ship drew into London fiom New York, Lewis had

begun the work of trying to prove and to preserve the sovereignty of his mind by mastering

what Riding wouid soon dismiss as "the rnachinery of knowIedge"-consumiogI

anaiyzing, and discourshg upon masses of material from disparate disciplines, considering

anything produced in the medium of language within the sphere of his comprehension and

judgment, refusing to hait even at the border of contemporary physics.'

Though Riding does engage directly with contemporary thinkers in her critical

works, she presents such critical negotiations more as a compromise of the independent

mind than as proof of it, disinclined to own up to the amount of debate and demonstration

that there is in Anarchh Is Not Enough. The stage of intellectual independence for Riding

in the twenties and thirties was not in any case prose, argumentative, "commentanal," or

otherwise, but poetry: it was there she enacted her vision of the autonomous mind, forgoing

not oniy the non-linguistic impurities of musical cadence and image, but stripping away

dmost di indications of location and embodirnent as just so much scaifolding, presenting a

mind done, tracing its paths over and over the elementai features of the experience of being

it confronts-identity, love, sex, death, memory, and language and thought themselves.

Nor did Riding's and Lewis's ideas reconnect after Riding's egalitarian turn,

marked by Progress of Stories in 1935, although every study of Lewis locates a comparable

turn in his thought, heraided by The Revenge for Love in 1937 and entaiiing the two 1939

recantations, the crudely titled The Jews, Are They Human? and the subsequent The Hitler

Cuir. Progress of Stories and The Revenge for Love do mark teevaluations of the

opposition between creators and ordinary, sensual, gregarious, creanues undistinguished by

artistic or htellectuai achievements, but these reevaluations take Riding and Lewis, once

again, in divergent directions.

The tum in Lewis's thought is weil documenteci; it may be illustrated here very

briefly by the two novels that are the bat, or at least the most often read, expressions of it,

The Revenge for Love and Self-Condemned In these works the dualism of the creative

inteilecniai and the average sensual person, particularIy the fernale variety, relaxes. Whiie

Margot Stamp and Hester Harding are decidedly the intellectual ideriors of their male

partners, who are the novels' principal subjects, the reader is given access to their interior

worlds, and these, though lacking inteliectual heights, are nonetheless given substance.

Indeed, in The Revenge for Love, it is the sentimental, "mid-Victorian" Margot, rather than

her partrier, the painter Victor Stamp, who observes most keenly that the bourgeois

communists are "not so much 'human persons' . . . as big portentous wax-dolis,

mystenously doped with some impenetrable nonsense" (RL 147), and who f i t

comprehends their nithlessness. Margot speaks Lewis's lines about communist

racketeering to Percy Hardcaster while Victor dozes, and it is the violent and unscrupulous

communist Percy who dismisses the reaiity of Margot's life and experience.

As the lives of the intellectuaiiy featureless women gain degrees of definition and

vaiue from other capacities and other kinds of awareness, the figures of the creative

intellectual are heavily compromised. For aii his integrity and devotion to art, Victor Stamp

cannot purge his paintings of romantic colouring-an "ineradicable prertiness" and

"chromatic sweetness" (RL 76) persists, and his artist's eye is blind to the use the

communist gun-ninners mean to make of him. The irnperious rationality of the more

dramatic absolutist René Harding of SelfCondemned is shown to be secured by bis brutal

suppression of his emotionai attachrnents. His rigid detachment issues in violence, as he

drives his wife to suicide, and in refusing the emotional burdens of guilt and memory, he

Cinaily does himseif such internai violence he is reduced to the state of automatism h m

which his intellect was to have secured him.

These novels complicate Lewis's old duaiism of higher and lower beings and

faculties, but they certainiy do not transcend it. The men are compromised or mine& but

Lewis cannot M y aRhn the dignity and integrity of the women. Percy Hardcaster, retumed

to prison at the end of The Revenge for Love, is pierced by Margot's reproaches for the

casuaiiy expended life of Victor, but the cIaim of that voice is qualifieci by some of Lewis's

most loaded adjectives: though "tender," "passionate," and "penetrating," it is also

"strained and hollow . . . part of a sham-culture outfit," "aaificial," and '&ai'* (RI;

34041). Self Codemned gives the reader some appreciation of Hester's expience, largely

through Renk's eyes in the years of hardship during which he accepts the intimacy of his

comection to her, but the last word on her character, as dehed and seaied by her suicide, is

his pitiless conclusion that she was selfish, vindictive, and demented. Whüe this conclusion

is clearly presented as the outcorne of the fierce internai struggle of a disintegrating man, the

surnmary of René's descent, offered in closing by the narrator, absorbs nonetheless the

husband's judgrnent of his wife. Fully withdrawn from René's mind, the narrator tells us

that René had been deeply "shaken by the unceasing psychologicai pressure of the

obsessed Hester," weakened by his long resistance to "the gathering instability and

hysteria," and finally broken by the blow of her suicide (SC 406). "The 'new humanity' "

in the work, as Paul Edwards puts it, "has to stmggle against an older voice that wiii not

accept what the imagination is demonstrating" (525). Though the figure of the creative

intel1ectuaI is in these novels heavily compromised, no fom of real agency or creativity is

imagined other than that which issues in great works of art and momentous books. The

principiwn individuationis is iinked to the violence it was supposed to transcend, but no

other standard of vaiue is clearly confirmed.

Lewis had never had anything much on which to base his suprerne valuation of the

creative intellecrual. The Art ofBeing Ruled and Time and Western Man maintain that the

society led by creative intellectuals would be the best for everyone, but bis only explanation

of this, aside from assertions that such miers would not send the populace to war, is that

such mincis create the only mie "revolutions" in society. He defines nowhere, however,

what the substance or value of such revolutions is, and in the mid-Depression pessimism of

Men Without Arr he iiankiy confesses that the vaiue of art cannot be demonstrated: "1 am

taking [the arts'] vaiues for granted in this essay," he writes, "1 am not proceeding to their

proof' (MWA 233): The simple insistence of that book that "the valuing of our arts is

bound up with the valuing of our Me, and vice versa" ( W A 234) declines by 1954 into the

statement that "talking about the alacming outlook for the fine arts appears so trivial a

matter when one has finished writing about it. It is infected with the uiviality of everything

else."'

Nonetheless Lewis devoted the sîiil considerable energy of his fmai years, in bad

health and in living conditions shockingly adverse, to art. Deprived by blindness of painting,

he devoted hirnself to writing, finishing by 1955 Monstre Gai, Malign Fiesta, and revisions

to The Childennass to complete the trilogy The Human Age, working longer on thai book,

according to Meyers, than on any of his others, convinced it was his most important, Before

his death in 1957 he would begin a fourth volume of The Human Age, complete another

novel, The Red Priest (1956). and bring s u another, Twentieth Centuv Palette, close to

completion, It is hardly imaginable, therefore, that Lewis would have been able to look with

sympathy, or even with much comprehension, on Riding's late thought. Undoubtedly it

would have appeared to him another manifestation, however outwsudly singular, of the

hydra-headed twentieth centuty anti-individualism that he had battled throughout the

twenties and thirties. While he had, to some extent, opened his imagination to the average

sensud person in his later novels, he had not reconciled or transcendeci his duahtic

categories; he had arrived, riither, at a stdemate, far removed h m Riding's faith in a human

unity in which individuai distinction is retained only in a shadowy way, and which,

moreover, appears to make no place for art.

Lewis from Riding's later perspective could only appear to be arnong those still

unready or unwilling to depart "from the edge of insuff?ciency," those clinging stil to their

"numbered lone identities of the hour," "whi&ng] away" the years "dancing the dance of

the seif" (T 54) while truth waits to be spoken, and huma. unity to be realized. The value of

poetry, and later, in a different way, the value of fiction, had for Riding always been

anchored to the vaiue of truth. The value of creative achievement for Lewis was anchored to

nothing, defhed only against a field of valuelessness caîied Ive. When what he held to be

the conditions of art tumed out to be perilously close to the conditions of individual and

social ruin, the demands of art and of life reached an intractable stakmate. When Riding

made her own discovery that there was something ia the nature of poetry that made

impossible the reaiization of the value she had dehed for it-tnith-she could dispense

with poetry, for tmth remained, and couid be reaiized by other means. The mystery of her

career is that her conception of tmth did withstitnd the twentieth century unscathed. She

evidentiy read but refused to cede ground to anti-foundationai philosophy and linguistics

("the new finality of unfinality that is propounded in our doctrines of the latest fashion"

(T 16)) and insisted to the end on the essential gwdness of hurnan iife and the imminence

of a new stage of its existence: "we have reached the end of the possibiüty of self-

ignorance," she testifies; "We, human, are Iife, an enthusiasm, being's own love-of-king

outiasting Failure-an interminable fdth in itseif of the One-And-AU" (T 15,27).

The most substantiai convergence of Lewis's and Riding's careers lies in their

respective atternpts to redirect twentieth-century fiction away from its preoccupation with the

experience of subjectivity and its reiiance on empathetic engagement. Though neither did

alter the course of fiction, their works remain significant for having given definition to what

the fiction ascendant in their age silently negated. Ortega wrote that "Tt is in reporting the

wonders of the simple, unhaloed hour, not in expatiating on the extraordinaty, that the novel

displays its specific graces," that "buman vitality is so exuberant that in the somest desert

it stiü fmds a pretext for glowing and irembling" (88,89); James urged novelists to push

further into the "sources of interest neglected" by fiction-"whole categories of manners,

whole corpuscular classes and provinces, museurns of character and condition" (343), to

explore the " 'Subjects' and situations, character and history, the tragedy and comedy of

life . . . of which the cornmon air. . . seems pungentiy to taste" (496). The Wild Body and

Progress of Stories issue h m the counter-cecognition that fascination can tum into

fatigue, that the "infinite diversity," as Riding puts it, of hurnan pacticularity is h m another

perspective an "uitimate monotony" (T U3), a recognition that Lewis drarnatizes in Self-

Condemned when he puts Middlemrch in the hands of René Harding. Not far into the

book, reviewing to himself the charackrs, circumstances, and likely fates of the assortment

of men and wornen, René concludes that " 'The historic illusion, the scenes depicted, and

the hand depicting them, could be preserved in some suitable archive; but should not be

handed down as living document. It is a part of hisrory'. . . swinging his arm back [he]

hurled the heavy book out to sea" (SC 156).

It is perhaps because René is a historian that Lewis has him cast Middlemarch to the

depths, rather than his old bête noir Ulysses, but the dissident professor's argument with

Eliot's "Study of Provinciai Life" (which accords with his argument about historiography

in general) recalls Lewis's charges against what he calls the "unorganized brute materiai"

of Joyce's novel: Ulysses as Lewis read it was after al1 not a departure fiom naturalism but

its "obsessional application," the "very nightmare" of it: "it lands the reader inside an

Aladdine's cave of incredible bric-à-brac in which a dense mas of dead stuff is coliected

. . . . It is a suffocating moeotic expanse of objects, ail of them lifeless . . . you wish, on the

spot, to be transported to some more abstracr region for a time . . ." (TWM 89). The vast

scene of human particuiars, the micro-histories of innumerable selves and circumstances,

Say Lewis and Riding, demand some order, and an more secure than the symbolic structures

modernist writers embed in their fictional worlds while reiisserting on the level of style the

c l a h of their own selves to irreducible, inimitable particuiarity.

Lewis and Riding were campaigners for individuality against what they perceived to

be a malignantly homogenizing inteiiectuai and social order, but, clearly, both possess a

"rage for order" of their own-Lewis for an order of power based on the order of

valuation of mind over body, Riding for the order of consensus in tmth. Their objections to

empathetic fiction issue fiom the sense that empathetic experience of individuai lives leads

to the recognition of potentiaiiy innumerable perspectives without providing the means to

order them or make them cohere. Their defenses of individuûlity against the consolidation

of order were never defenses of the legitimacy of al1 individual visions and claims: they

attended with aimost qua i energy to definhg the entrauce requirements for individuaIity,

and those requirements still structure Lewis's later fiction.

The invidious division of human beings into kinds is absent from Ridimg's thought

d e r Progress ofStories; one of the most prominent themes of her later work is the defense

of human dignity against what she c d s "the hell of human self-weariness" (T 77) that is

twentietû centwy thought. She insists on a conception of the human being as "in archetype

more angel of a universal mystery than risen animal playing a &ana of social evolution"

(T 20). Riding, it seems to me, did genuinely want to love humanity. In reviewing some of

the religious thought apparently comparable to the vision of The Telling, she rejects Buddha

on the grounds that "he prophesied a perfection of human nature that was but the loss of

it" (T 34). But it is difficult to see how her own thought does not do just that, as the love of

human life she writes of, often very movingly, aiways turns out to be love of it as it exists in

her own vision of what it could be, a vision that ovemdes individual persons in the oniy

fonn most of us can conceive hem-inseparable from the matrices of tirne, place, and

circumstance. "1 stress the self," she writes, "as I have from the beginning of rny writing

life, but 1 recommend . . . a fmal, irrevocable, ridding of the self of aii with which it is

substanced as a center of social identity . . . [a] reduction to king a representative of that

One, a speaker of the whole tmth, tmth rescued from the unintegratable, diverse narratives of

being sounding within each human locale" (7'104-05).

There are in Riding's work, however, as there are in Lewis's, moments of self-recognition

more penetnting than the judgments of her critics. A gnomic the-line p e m in Though

Gentty intimates the fate both poetry and humanity would corne to in her mind:

Forgive me, giver, if 1 destroy the gift

It is so nearly what would please me,

1 cannot but perfect it. (TG 29)

Lewis hirnself did not pursue long the antiempathetic fictional path he began with

The Wild Body, and Riding did not pursue the principles of Progress of Stories at aii.

Lewis's experiments with anti-empathetic "metaphysical satire," biiied with such gusto as

the fiction of the new age in Men Without Art, ended with his realization of what his anti-

empathetic principles led him to both in personal and political iife, and he renuned to

psychological fiction beginning with The Revenge for Love. Though the main themes of bis

thought-individuality and interdependence, intellect and flesh, art and life- dominate that

and every subsequent novel, they are compiicated, appearing as elements in the perspectives

of characters M y realized enough to operate in the old empathetic mode. Riding designed

Progress of Stories to alter readers' expectations of fiction, but she never pubiished

anything Like those stories again.' The histoncal novels A Trojan Ending and Lives of

Wives are the only other fictional works she wrote; after those she turned from the "little,

mortal, interims of solace" (PS xxvi) of storyteliiig to the work on which the telling of

actual tmth reiied, the purification of the English language, word by word. With her new

husband Schuyler Jackson, she continued work, begun with Graves, on a dictionacy that

would define authoritatively the accurate and single meanings of words, the outcome of

which was a weighty treatise on language and semantics published posthumously as

Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words.

Like Lewis's later fiction, Ming's two historical novels are imprinted with her

familiar themes-the opposition of spiritual integrity and the traffic of the social world, the

spirituai development of women by vime of their long domestic confinement-but they are

psychologicd and empathetic in mode. In her preface to A Trojan Enàing she writes "1 take

tfiis age-the people who are dive now-so seriously that 1 regard it as a h a 1 age of tirne"

(xvi-ii), but otherwise makes no reference to the frarnework of Progress of Stones. She

explains her interest in the ancient Greek world by situating it as the Alpha to het own age's

Omega-"they had the burden of inaugurahg the intelligent world, while we have the

burden of &ng at intelligent conclusions" (TE xvi)-but the apocaiyptic sensibility

ostensibly informing her choice of subject matter does not radicalize the novei's mode.

Louis MacNiece lauded her for not fashioning the subject matter into "a faixy story but a

phiiosophic and serious dmm," praising her characterization and the way Hector and

AcWes are "üansmuted by the touch of modem psychology."

The Wild Body and Progress of Stories stand nonetheless as significant examples

of alternative mcdes in an era dorninated by psychological fiction, modes whkh are

separable from those works* humanly invidious ideas, and which, as such, remain replete

with possibility. The Wild Body, 1 have argued, does not succeed on the rems it set for

itself, as Lewis fails to secure anti-empathetic perspectival control through his narrator Ker-

On. Because that work's specific grounds for denying empathetic access to the objects of

Ker-On's scrutiny is rationdiy unconvincing, such control, as 1 have suggested, could only

have k e n secured by a development and intensification of the psychology of Ker-On. Such

development might have produced a fascinating, even enthrailhg psychological portrait, but

uitimately a pathological and cepellent one, and it would have returned the work to the

psychologicai-empathetic mode, But independent of invidious rationales such as Lewis's,

the anti-empathetic depiction of ordinary human life, including human suffering, can be both

critical and cathartic. It has possibiities for successful realization in ludic, satirical, and

dystopian modes, although because of the necessary avoidance of interiority, these are more

likely to succeed on stage or in fila Beckett's drama, combining the ludic and the

dystopian with the absud, is perhaps the most prominent example. Contemporary film

abounds in exarnples of lewis's imperfectly realized vision of empty vitalities banging up

against each other. Much of the cactoonish violence doubtless reflects contemporary

desensitization to violence more than controiled aesthetic vision, but there are more

ambiguous and compelling instances that cannot be so easily judged, most notably the films

of Quentin Tarautino. In other instances comparable foreclosures of empathetic response to

wretchedness have a more distinctiy critical edge, such as in Todd Solondz's blackly comic

depiction of Arnecican upper-middle class me, Happiness (1998).

Riding's Stories of Lives are enduringly curious and entertaining, but their

substance cesides in their excision of signincant intenority, in the cnticai role they play in

the development of Progress of Stories as a whoIe. If their tongue-in-cheek reaiism and

emphaticdy blithe treatments of individuai lives constitute a mode at aii, it is an

unrepeatable one. The fabuiac stories of the subsequent sections of Progress, however,

open towards fictionai possibilities Iater exempiifïed not so much by the abandonment of

realism and human agents, but by narratives premised upon idea rather than character,

dramatic event, or historical milieu-the drarnatized thought experiments of Borges, for

instance, and the graphic theological revelations of Flannery OIConnnor.

Riding's and Lewis's anti-empathetic fictions bear the mark of modemism in the

distinctions they make between the few and the many, but a h , and not less so, in the world-

transforrning ambitions to which they bound their aesthetic strategies. Whatever anti-

empaihetic strategies wüi appear in future fictional narratives, literary or dramatic, it seerns

assured that their authors will not conceive thernselves, as Lewis described bis generation, as

"making the blueprints for. . . a new civilisation.'" 1 have done Little in this study to put

Riding's and Lewis's utopianism in a good light, &pichg it primarily in ternis of thek

desires to secure the ascendence of their own values and their slight consideration for the

confiicting clairns and values ovemdden in the process. Lewis's new c ivh t i on entailed the

disenfianchisement and stupefaction of the majority of his feiiow human beings; in

Riding's Linguistic and spirituai utopia "the ordeai of Difference called the 'universe' "

(T 26) is not negotiated but imagined away. But the intellectuai independence and the sense

of empowered and creative agency that were so much a part of what they sought to preserve

are, though in less radical f o m , essential conditions of the democracy they cared so Little

for, and rernain, as ever, in need of active defense. The quotations that appear as the

epipphs to this chapter are spurs to such action from two min& exemplary not in al1

aspects of their thought, but in their extraordinary vitaiity and indomitable independence,

and in their endurance of the risks and consequences of persevering in that independence.

As such exernplars, they may serve well in their afterlives as furies of the cornplacent.

Notes

' Letter to Wyndham Lewis, Apr. 1927, ts. 32-1, Corneli University Library, Ithaca, New

York.

' Anticipating the charge of the age of specialization that he is not, as an artist, weii

quaiified to pass judgment on the activities of other fields, Lewis remarks: "1 do not feel at

aU impeiied to explain rnyseIf when 1 am exarnining a mere philosopher: he speaks my

Ianguage, usually with las skill, but othemise much the sarne as 1 do." Though he never

does delve into contemporary physics as such, he defends bis right to do so: 'There is an

enormous Relativity Literature from which anyone wbo cares can acquaint himseif with the

main bearings of these theories. Of course, the more ignorant people are with regard to the

points at issue, the more likely they are to Say that you mut be a mathernatician to discuss

them at ail. . . . It is a superstition to suppose that the instruments of research, as today

developed, have excluded h m participation in the general cntical work of inteiiectual

advance, the independent criticai mind, for chat rnind is still the supreme instrument of

research" (TWM 136-37).

"A good dinner," Lewis writes sardonicalIy, "accompanied by as good wine as we can

get hold of; a pleasant spin . . . in as satisfactory a petrol wagon as we can afford; a nice

digestive round of go* a %tion accompanied by the rhythmical movements prompted by

a nigger d m , purging us of the secretions of sex-a nice detective volume, which purges

us pleasantly of the secretions proper to us in our capacity of 'killers' . . . di these things

are Far more impurtunt &an anythhg that can be described as 'art' "(M'KA 233, original

emphasis).

'' From The Demon of Progress in the A m (1954), cited in Wagner, 304.

The single exception is the short, parabolic "Christmastirne" of 1966 appended to the

reissue of Progress of Stones in 1982. It was, Ming notes, ''written for informa1

Christmasthe presenting to &ends," and included in the volume with the intention that its

unambiguous portraya! of human h o p would help dispel the impression that her stories are

characterized by an "icy inteiiectuality" (PS 361).

From Rude hsignment, cited in Matera, 166.

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