THE RHETORIC OF THE ORDINARY: MODERNISM AND THE LIMITS OF LITERATURE

Microsoft Word - THESIS FINAL.docxLITERATURE
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ABSTRACT
This thesis contributes to the recent turn towards ordinary events, objects, and practices in scholarship on modernist literature. While modernism is typically characterized by formal experimentation and the aesthetics of shock, scholars are beginning to consider that many of the most potent energies animating modernism arise from its fascination with the ordinary. While this new approach has been productive, its tendency to minimise the rhetorical dimension of literature in favour of questions about content (what do modernist texts say about the ordinary?) and context (what ideas about the ordinary circulated in the period?) remains problematic.
That is because these approaches neglect a potent contradiction: if literature uses figurative language to depict the ordinary, does it not thereby transfigure what it represents by bringing it within the “charmed circle” of art? Whatever else modernism is, it is clearly concerned with putting pressure on the means by which likenesses and illusions are produced. Modernist texts, I argue, are drawn to elaborate means to declaim their status as representations: a “rhetoric of not having rhetoric” is integral to modernist representations of the quotidian. Out of this generative paradox arises the succession of rhetorical strategies that this dissertation identifies in the works of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce.
Recent scholarship has set the terms for a comprehensive reassessment of literary modernism, which this thesis pursues through explorations of modernism’s relationship with realism, the avant-garde, mass culture, space and place, and the nature of modernity. My argument has specific ramifications for these ongoing debates in modernist studies, the relationship between rhetorical and historicist paradigms of literary criticism, and, above all, the fate of modernism: its legacies in twentieth century literature and its ongoing place in our public culture.
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Dedicated to my parents, J. D. and D. K. Madden.
I’d like to acknowledge the staff of the University of York Library, the Borthwick Institute for Archives, the Archives of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Archives
of Trinity College, Cambridge.
My thanks to all the friends and colleagues who have read and commented upon my work. Natalie Pollard, Benjamin
Poore, and Stef Lambert in particular have been sources of endless support and stimulation, while Bryan Radley’s
extraordinary guidance as a friend and colleague on Modernism/modernity has been vital. Prof. Derek Attridge has been a genial, patient, and incisive guide. Prof. David Attwell has made the Department of English and
Related Literature a welcoming and supportive environment to study in. Prof. Jason Edwards has been an invaluable friend and mentor, as well as a passionate supporter in his role as Director of the Centre for Modern Studies. Above all, Prof. Lawrence Rainey’s supervision, and his generosity as an interlocutor, have made my studies a
more enriching experience than I could have expected or anticipated.
This work could not have happened without the generous support of the Holbeck Trust, Johns Hopkins University
Press, and the Gavron Trust.
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations 5 List of Abbreviations 7 Author’s Declaration 8 Introduction 9 Chapter 1: Gertrude Stein’s Queer Ordinary 68 I. William James, Gertrude Stein, and the Rhetoric of the Ordinary 77 II. The Making of Americans and Loving Repeating 94 III. “Tender Buttons” and the Queer Ordinary 119 Chapter 2: James Joyce and the Text of the
Ordinary 151
I. Transubstantiation of the Commonplace 188 II. “Cyclops” and the Two Economies of the
Ordinary 214
Chapter 3: T. S. Eliot’s Ordinary Ambivalence 231 I. Sweeney Agonistes and Melodramatic Modernity 232 II. The Four Quartets and Nostalgia for the Ordinary 268 Chapter 4: Wallace Stevens and the Ordinary Imagination I. What’s So Ordinary about “The Ordinary Women”? 314 II. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and the Modernist Grid 339 Coda: Don DeLillo and the Half-Life of Modernism 381 References 405
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Pg. 56: Fig. 1.: Baiocchi (on the far right) rehearses
his performers. Vittorio de Sica, "Ladri Di Biciclette,"
93 min. Italy: Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche,
1948.
Pg. 57: Fig. 2.: Antonio and Bruno shelter with a group
of German-speaking clergymen. de Sica, "Ladri Di
Biciclette."
Pg. 60: Fig. 3.: Bruno breaks off the pursuit to relieve
himself. de Sica, "Ladri Di Biciclette."
Pg. 264: Fig. 4.: Advertisement for Lysol Limited. The
Times (22 April 1920): 7, Col. F.
Pg. 321: Fig. 5.: Oriental Theatre (1926), Chicago.
Courtesy of the Chicago Architectural Photographing Co.
Collection, Theatre Historical Society, Elmhurst,
Illinois, U.S.A.
Courtesy of the Terry Helgesen Collection, Theatre
Historical Society, Elmhurst, Illinois, U.S.A.
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Dictionnaire raisonné de physique (Paris: A la Libraire
éonomique, 1800), n.p.
Pg. 359: Fig. 8.: Cover of Wallace Stevens, Notes toward
a Supreme Fiction (Cummington, MA: The Cummington Press,
1942).
Pg. 375: Fig. 9.: New Haven, detail from 1806 engraving
by William L. Lyon based on a 1748 drawing by James
Wadsworth, in
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CPP: T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot.
MoA: Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans.
SCPP: Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose of
Wallace Stevens.
U: James Joyce, Ulysses.
“Arnold Bennett and the Making of Sweeney Agonistes,”
Notes and Queries 58.1 (2011): 106–10. Material appearing
in chapter 4 has been published as “What’s So Ordinary
about Stevens’ ‘The Ordinary Women?’” The Wallace Stevens
Journal 36.1 (Spring 2012): 9–22.
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INTRODUCTION
I remember Yeats: “I have spent the whole of my life
trying to get rid of rhetoric and have merely set up
another.”
though that particular peace is an illusion, is it
any less an illusion than a good many other things…
Isn’t a freshening of life a thing of consequence?
—Wallace Stevens2
Ordinariness, the ubiquitous condition in which we
are immersed for most of our lives, is, from one point of
view, the implicit subject of a great deal of twentieth
century literature and thought, though it has only
recently begun to be recognized as such. The ordinary as
1 Ezra Pound, Make It New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934),
245.
Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 293.
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a topic of enquiry is by nature capacious, and any
attempt to limit it to a manageable scope will run the
risk of arbitrariness. This introduction will delimit as
much as possible what I mean by the ordinary, before
showing that the ordinary presents itself as a special
problem in the context of modernity. The rapidly shifting
horizons of historical and social possibility that
characterize our historical condition make the ordinary a
site of continuous change. The ordinary in modernist
writing is thus paradoxical: it is both a refuge from
history and the strongest index of its relentless
movement. Indeed, it may be that the social upheaval of
modernity is necessary to bring the ordinary into view at
all, by providing a standpoint outside of the immersion
in custom and tradition that characterizes pre-modern
societies.3
of ethnographic theory from the Bronislaw Malinowski’s
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which identifies
the object of ethnography as “the imponderabilia of
actual life,” to Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of
Cultures (1973), which insists on the paradoxical
necessity and impossibility of value-neutral description
of culture as a precursor to theory. Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973),
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into nostalgia that characterize one strain amongst
modernist writers and their critics. “Modernism,”
declared Louis Menand, “is a reaction against the modern,”
but this, I think, accounts for only one of a variety of
competing impulses among most modernist writers, and,
indeed, within most modernist works.4 The challenge for
the critic is to weigh these competing impulses in a way
that avoids what Theodor Adorno would call a false
reconciliation. “A thing final in itself and, therefore,
good,” as Stevens put it in “Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction,” will necessarily elude us; in the condition of
modernity, “It must change.”5 This study emphasizes the
strain of modernism that Menand’s aperçu neglects: the
playful, often irreverent side that turns the ordinary
stuff of modernity into materia poetica. This is not to
3–30; Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An
Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the
Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge,
1922), 18.
4 Louis Menand, “T. S. Eliot and Modernity,” New England
Quarterly 69.4 (1996): 554.
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anxiety about modernization and its repercussions. But
the revival of modernist studies since the 1990s has
generally endorsed the view that “rather than being a
reaction against or an escape from the forces of
modernity, cultural Modernism is implicated in numerous
ways with the scientific, technological, and political
shifts which characterize the modern era.”6
Throughout this study I use the term “ordinary” to
denote objects, practices, and modes of attention that do
not usually call attention to themselves, that seem to
most of us, most of the time, unworthy of reflection. I
choose “ordinary” in part as a reflection of its Latin
etymology, from the noun ordo, arrangement, which also
gives us the English “order,” to express the conviction
that when we turn our attention on ordinary phenomena,
what we discover there is not inchoate psychological
sensation, insensate materiality, or the traumatic
capital-R real. Rather, the ordinary is a, perhaps the,
locus of social and material meaning, a vivid
6 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A
Cultural Study (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 4.
processes of historical change and development. That said,
in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “Le quotidien: ce qu’il
y a de plus difficile à découvrir.”7 That is to say, the
ordinary has a habit of frustrating our attempts to
analyze it or theorize about it; for, once the heavy
machinery of empirical inquiry or speculative thought is
brought to bear, the ordinariness of the ordinary seems
to evaporate: “Le quotidien a ce trait essential: il ne
se laisse pas saisir. Il échappe.”8
7 Maurice Blanchot, L'entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard,
1969), 355. “The quotidian: the most difficult thing to
discover.” Cf. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” trans.
Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies 73, Everyday Life
(1987): 12–20.
this essential trait: it doesn’t allow itself to be
caught. It escapes.” Blanchot, like Michel de Certeau,
uses the term le quotidien, as opposed to Lefebvre’s la
vie quotidienne, which, while it still connotes the daily,
also encompasses a more capacious sense akin to “ordinary”
in English. This is the sense in which I use the term
“ordinary,” and why in the course of my argument I allow
some slippage between it and the term “everyday life.”
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representation seems to turn a transfiguring gaze upon
its objects. Literary works are necessarily limited in
size and scope, and as a result they presuppose an
economy of attention: the text itself can only offer a
finite amount of detail, leaving the appurtenances of
ordinary life—from the furnishings of a room to
characters’ bodily cycles and everything in between—
merely implied. We tend to assume that everything
presented explicitly by the literary text signifies. This
convention applies even more forcefully to lyric poetry
than to realist narration: lyric poems are characterized
by their almost hyperbolic attention to their subjects,
which, through the inherent ambiguity of lyric form,
become amenable to any number of metaphorical
transformations or symbolic recuperations.9 The power
that this convention holds over readers is exemplified in
poems that resist it, like Stevens’s “Anecdote of the
Jar”:
And round it was, upon a hill.
9 I am indebted to Jonathan Culler on this point; See
Culler, Theory of the Lyric [forthcoming].
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Surround that hill.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
(SCPP, 60–1)
When lyric attention is directed toward an object so
banal as a mason jar, and so deracinated as to be placed
on a hill in Tennessee, the effect is, so to speak,
jarring. The jar is “tall of a port in air,” that is,
empty; the most it signifies is a refusal to signify. The
term “anecdote” in the poem’s title says much: in its
original meaning, “anecdote” referred to “secret, private,
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a category obviously apt for the ordinary.10
That there is a modernist fascination with the mute
object world and its resistance to literary
representation is well attested in recent criticism.11 But
this line of thinking has frequently veered towards what
Victoria Coulson memorably describes as “Heidegger’s
melancholy idealism,” registering a “profound distrust of
language’s postlapsarian disconnection from the real.”12
As such, by using the term “ordinary,” I also intend to
evoke the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, J.
L. Austin, et al. In any deployment of the term
10 “anecdote, n.” OED Online. September 2013. Oxford
University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/7367
11 See Douglas Mao, Solid Objects : Modernism and the Test
of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998); Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter
of American Literature (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2003); Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in
Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
ed. David Bruce McWhirter (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 323.
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what?” For Wittgenstein, the answer was “metaphysics,”
and indeed, the whole philosophical and scientistic
jargon that it brings to bear on the problems of
philosophy. Wittgenstein and his successors, by contrast,
stress the sufficiency of ordinary language to formulate
and to resolve philosophical issues:
“problems are solved, not by coming up with new
discoveries, but by assembling what we have long
been familiar with. Philosophy is a struggle against
the bewitchment of our understanding by the
resources of our language.”13
This is the sense of the ordinary set out at length by
Stanley Cavell, as a force that wards off the threat of
13 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen =
Philosophical Investigations, Rev. 4th ed. trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe et al. (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), 52.
communicative failure.14
Wittgenstein’s sense of the ordinary has been a spur
to much of the tradition known as everyday life theory,
most obviously in the case of Michel de Certeau, who sees
in Wittgenstein’s work “a philosophical blueprint for a
contemporary science of the ordinary.”15 A similar sense
of the ordinary’s potential clearly lies at the heart of
Henry Lefebvre’s project, too:
All we need do is simply to open our eyes, to leave
the dark world of metaphysics and the false depths
of the “inner life” behind, and we will discover the
14 Stanley Cavell, “The Uncaniness of the Ordinary,” in In
Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
Romanticism (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press,
1988), 154.
15 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.
Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1984), 14.
everyday life contain.16
theory. Whereas Bryony Randall and Lorraine Sim situate
their work as specific responses to this tradition,
Siobhan Philips and Liesl Olson either elide it or
explicitly deny its relevance.17 For Olson, “the everyday
life described by Lefebvre differs historically from the
everyday of literary modernism,” in part due to the
former’s preoccupation with consumer culture, a social
16 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. I,
Introduction, trans. John Moore (London and New York:
Verso, 1991), 132.
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2008); Lorraine Sim, Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of
Ordinary Experience (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2010); Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Siobhan
Phillips, Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in
Modern American Verse (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010).
configuration that according to Olson emerged only after
the Second World War, at least in France.18 As both an
historical and a philosophical claim, this study
disagrees firmly: the development of consumer culture and
its impact on ordinary life is one of its recurrent
preoccupations.19 As Lefebvre himself puts it, “modernity
and everydayness constitute a deep structure.”20 Recent
contributions to cultural studies and the history of
18 Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 13.
19 “Thing theorists” are not the only critics to focus
attention on commodities and consumer culture in
modernism; this has been a topic of lively debate in
Joyce studies, with notable contributions from Thomas
Richards, who offers an almost Althusserian attack on the
consumerist ideology represented in “Nausicaa,” prompting
a powerful rejoinder inflected with the outlook of Michel
de Certeau from Garry Leonard. Cf. Thomas Richards, The
Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and
Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990), 205–48; Garry Martin Leonard, Advertising and
Commodity Culture in Joyce (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 1998), 98–141.
20 Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” trans.
Christine Levich, Yale French Studies 73, Everyday Life
(1987): 11.
only elaborated a canon of thought on the everyday, but
stressed its shared intellectual horizons with aspects of
modernist literature.21 Rita Felski has identified
everyday life as an urgent topic for feminist
intervention, and this argument has been taken up by
Bryony Randall, in a compelling account of the everyday
in modernist literature as specifically bound up with
daily temporality, canvassing issues of work, leisure,
and so on.22 Randall also holds that everyday life theory
and the criticism instigated by it have neglected the
temporality of the everyday for an excessive focus on
space; in my discussions of Eliot and Stevens, however, I
will show that even spatial accounts of the everyday have
neglected modernity’s more subtle dialectic of place and
space.
Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002);
Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices
from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
Everyday Life (Autumn 2002): 612. Randall, Modernism,
Daily Time and Everyday Life, 10–20.
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twentieth century is deeply bound up in the debates over
ideology, political praxis, and the relationship between
individual and society that convulsed Western Marxism
during the early twentieth century, and which, in large
part, gave rise to critical theory. There are any number
of ways to recount this history; my own preference is to
situate the question of the ordinary in relation to the
concept of social totality that animated much of this
debate. As Martin Jay argues,
“Totality” has indeed enjoyed a privileged place in
the discourse of Western culture. Resonating with
affirmative connotations, it has generally been
associated with other positively charged words, such
as coherence, order, fulfillment, harmony, plenitude,
meaningfulness, consensus and community. And
concomitantly, it has been contrasted with such
negatively valenced concepts as alienation,
fragmentation, disorder, conflict, contradiction,
serialization, atomization and estrangement.23
23 Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality : The Adventures of a
Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 21.
and alienated state, so the everyday is invoked either as
the victim of this process or its remedy. What Jay calls
“the holistic impulse in Western Marxism” arises from the
humanism that gained ground amongst Marxist theoreticians
outside the Soviet Union beginning roughly in the 1920s,
inaugurated by György Lukács’s History and Class
Consciousness. In that work, Lukács devoted considerable
space to developing the concept of “reification,” the
putative power of the commodity form to disguise the
social character of human relations behind a façade of
objectivity.24 Reification is an effect of the division of
labor, which Marx identifies in The German Ideology as a
state wherein “man’s own deed becomes an alien power
opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being
controlled by him.” Implicit in the idea is a holistic
view of human endeavor that sees specialization of any
kind as a sacrifice of human potential.
While the concept of reification appears in Capital,
the new centrality accorded to it and, in particular, to
the related concept of “alienation” in Western Marxism
24 Ibid., 244.…