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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