STRUCTURE AND DISSOLUTION IN ENGLISH WRITING, 1910-1920 Also by Stuart Sillars ART AND SURVIVAL IN FIRST WORLD WAR BRITAIN BRITISH ROMANTIC ART AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR VISUALISATION IN ENGLISH POPULAR FICTION 1860-1960 Graphic Narratives, Fictional Images Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910-1920 Stuart Sillars First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-27666-0 ISBN 978-1-349-27664-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27664-6 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-22449-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sillars, Stuart, 1951- Structure and dissolution in English writing, 1910-1920 / Stuart Sillars. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-22449-3 (cloth) 1. English literature-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970. Howards End. 3. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930. Rainbow. 4. English language-20th century-Rhetoric. 5. Sassoon, Siegfried, 1886-1967- -Technique. 6. Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917-Technique. 7. Owen, Wilfred, 1893-1918-Technique. 8. Literary form. I. Title. PR471.S55 1999 820.9'00912-dc21 99-22464 CIP © Stuart Sillars 1999 Sotlcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlP 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 2 1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 For Marina Cara, carissima mia Contents Acknowledgements viii 1 Language, Tradition and Silence 1 2 Howards End and the Dislocation of Narrative 31 3 Wilfred Owen and the Subjugation of the Poetic 62 4 The Rainbow: Language Against Itself 93 5 'The singing will never be done': Siegfried Sassoon and the Exile of Language 125 6 Language Beneath Words: Edward Thomas 155 7 An Epilogue on Modernism 190 Notes 196 Select Bibliography 202 Index 209 vii Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to thank the many people who have contributed to the writing of this book. The staff of Cambridge University Library were endlessly patient in sorting out queries, minor and major. The Burford weekly class, administered by the Oxford University Depart ment for Continuing Education and the Workers' Educational Asso ciation, contributed with generosity to the formation of my ideas of Edward Thomas. Basil Aivaliotis, Ray Cross, Dr Mara Kalnins, Mendell D. Morgan Jr., Dr Jem Poster, Dr Matthias Schubnell and Clive Wilmer read pas sages in draft or made valuable comments and suggestions. My stu dents in Cambridge, Texas and elsewhere unwittingly aided in the process of gestation with questions and comments of all kinds. Charmian Hearne, of the Macmillan Press, was patiently supportive: Christina Zaba edited the text with precision and tact. With such a plethora of assistance, error should be unlikely: how ever, for that which remains I claim unshared responsibility. Stuart Sillars March, Cambridgeshire, 1998 viii 1 Language, Tradition and Silence The profound kinship of language with the world was dissolved. The primacy of the written word went into abeyance. And that uniform layer, in which the seen and the read, the visible and the expressible, were endlessly interwoven, vanished too. Things and words were to be separated from one another. The eye was thenceforth destined to see and only see, the ear to hear and only hear. Discourse was still to have the task of speaking that which is, but it was no longer to be anything more than what is said. (Fou cault 43) Foucault is here speaking of the rift in epistemology which occurred in the seventeenth century when the mystical links between words and things were severed. His concern is with the development of a new system of signification, and thus of hermeneutics, that de veloped in what he calls the Classical episteme, that replaces the miraculous unity of being that both orders and is ordered by Renais sance Neoplatonism. Before the rift, all names were in mysteriously variable ways part of what they denoted; after it, a relation of mere rational parallelism obtained. At the close of his account of this schism, Foucault talks of the subsequent reclaiming of its 'own being' (44) that language achieved in the nineteenth century, but he does so with regret: 'henceforth, language was to grow with no point of departure, no end, and no promise' (44). In this concluding para graph, Foucault allows himself almost a moment of nostalgic regret at the passing of the interconnectedness of things and words. These reflections, even though concerned with a much earlier fis sure between language and object, are a fitting point of departure for the present study, for they suggest two key elements that are fundamental to the view of English writing in the second decade of the twentieth century that I shall propose in this book. The first is that a profound shift in the relation between words and things took place in literary epistemology; the second is that, ever since, we 1 2 Structure and Dissolution have been approaching the period with a sense of dispossession and nostalgic longing. These are, however, no simple parallels: they need careful definition. The shift is not one which is immediately apparent as the result of religious or political changes. Indeed, it is one that is often completely overlooked by critics who are anxious to rush on to that more celebrated epistemic swerve, the eruption of International Modernism, preferring to leave most or all of the writers considered here bracketed within a loose parenthesis of liter ary history as figures concerned with continuing 'The English Line' .1 A concomitant irony of this, indeed, is that the works discussed are very often regarded in the light of social or political turmoil but without any explicit concern for what this does to them as linguistic constructs, as if the shift were one that could be measured only in terms of narrative content and thematic burden. None the less, I will argue that, despite a lack of critical awareness, a shift there most palpably was. That this comes close to the famous claim of Virginia Woolf, that something profound happened to the human conscious ness around December 1910, is far from coincidental, but it is a rela tionship that is not as immediate as it may appear: what I am talking about is not a notional, linear emergence of high Modernism, but a move that may or may not be part of the shifts that are generally seen to constitute that notoriously centreless movement. The second key element, that of nostalgia, is most evident in populist readings not only of the texts of this age but of the whole period, the Edwardian long weekend in which the idle hill of sum mer reaches its peak, from which we look back with gentle despair at the sunlit lowlands of the past and forward with horror at the depredations of the new century. The view is, however, compounded, in that the period itself, in which the linguistic schism is most pro foundly apparent, is regarded with the same yearning as that which preceded it, suggesting another feature of this schism: however pro found it may be, it is not instantly apparent to many readers, includ ing some of the most sophisticated. There is a further irony in that Foucault's implied yearning, suggested in the markedly postlapsarian tone of his concluding sentence, echoes the sadness felt by Walter Benjamin for the lost 'aura' (221) of the work of art when mechanic ally reproduced, and this too is a fitting link, since writing of the years 1910 to 1920 was reproduced by an extremely sophisticated network of mechanical reproduction, that made it available to an unprecedented number of readers and which may in some ways have influenced its aesthetic nature.