Modernist Myth: Studies in H.D., D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf

By Nanette Norris

The writers in this study were living at the edge of change, in a world severely rocked by world conflict – a 'maelstrom' of upheaval of values, of community standards, and of philosophical visions. Their task was to "give [themselves and others] the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own." Their response was not to embrace the chaos, but to move through it and re-establish limits in the broader beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781008955325

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PREFACE

It has been said that the average piece of academic writing is read by 8 people, which may include the copyeditor and the paid reviewer. This book was my first―it was my doctoral thesis― and it was very nearly stillborn, given the caprices of life, the difficulty of attaining a full-time academic berth, and the shifting tides of the publishing industry. It has never been reviewed, nor has it been marketed to libraries; formal publishers refuse it because it first saw the light of day through self-publishing, ten years after its conception and a year before I landed a professorship. Nonetheless, I present it to the world in this new edition because it has had a life and may continue to do so. For a book whose sales can be counted on fingers and toes, it nonetheless has spoken to those scholars well enough that they have cited it and acknowledged its influence. What more can a scholar ask of their work?

Nanette Norris

Associate Professor (Ret’d)

Royal Military College Saint-Jean

Past-President, D.H. Lawrence Society of North America

INTRODUCTION

We are in the midst of a reconsideration of modernism that is fueled in part by the centenary of World War I, and in part by exciting, global, post-colonial considerations of literature which respond to the same dynamics, the same traumatic responses, the same desire for change and renewal, evidenced in the Anglo-American canonical modernist period. Nonetheless, if ten scholars were asked to define modernism, there would be multiple answers. As Paul Poplawski writes in his Preface to the Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism, the field of modernism is a highly complex and hotly contested one, and there is no universal consensus on precisely what constitutes modernism. The name itself remains radically unstable, shifting in meaning according to who uses it, when, where and in what context —to the extent that several critics now prefer to talk of discrete and disparate ‘modernisms’ rather than of one overarching ‘modernism.’¹ Indeed, is anything essential to modernism? What does it take for a writer to be considered a Modernist? Virginia Woolf, H.D., and D.H. Lawrence are, all agree, modernists, and yet the reconsideration leaves us asking why, precisely. What is it that they do, as writers, as thinkers, that is unusual, unique, different, and specific to the time in which they wrote? This volume pinpoints a shared concern, mysticism and the occult, and finds the writers to be conservative and essentialist in their mystic explorations, which suggests that they are building upon traditions adjacent to their own highly disturbed time. It is sometimes assumed that their inheritance from their nineteenth century predecessors would be a sense of progression through science. If this were so, their non-scientific and metaphysical ways of thinking would be revolutionary for their time. I argue that this is not so: specific conditions of their time caused these three canonical writers to move in the direction of mysticism. In this aspect of modernism, at least, no other period in history could have produced these specific examples of literary modernism.² The purpose of this introduction is to address this question; the purpose of the rest of the chapters is to read specific works of these three writers through the lens of mysticism and the occult.

Nowadays, there is a tendency to conflate modernism and modernity. This is, of course, the essence of the present expansion of literary modernism. As Susan Friedman argues,

Declaring the end of modernism by 1950 is like trying to hear one hand clapping. The modernisms of emergent modernities are that other hand that enables us to hear any clapping at all. As Walter Mignolo argues […], colonialism is constitutive of Western modernity, essential to its formation from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. As a consequence, we must not close the curtain on modernism before the creative agencies in the colonies and newly emergent nations have their chance to perform. Their nationalist movements and liberations from the political dimensions of colonial rule are central to the story of their modernities. Therefore, the creative forces within those modernities—the writers, the artists, the musicians, the dancers, the philosophers, the critics, and so forth—are engaged in producing modernisms that accompany their own particular modernities.To call their postliberation arts postmodern—as they often are—is to miss the point entirely. Multiple modernities create multiple modernisms. Multiple modernisms require respatializing and thus reperiodizing modernism.³

While I celebrate the inclusive agenda of this expansionist project, I would argue that it threatens to throw the baby out with the bathwater of revisionism of the (Anglo-American) modernist experience, whose boundaries remain much as described by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930.⁴ Perhaps it would be more appropriate to call the literature of the expanded modernist project ‘literature of modernity.’ Raymond William reminds us, in When Was Modernism, that ‘modernism’, as a title for a whole cultural movement and moment, has been retrospective as a general term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of ‘modern’ or even ‘absolute modern’ between, say 1890 and 1940.⁵ He feels that [t]hese are indeed the theoretic contours and specific authors of ‘modernism’, a highly selected version of the modern which then offers to appropriate the whole of modernity.⁶ One would not want to appropriate the whole of modernity, and modernity (notice the conflation, again) is, of course, part of what constitutes or troubles the work of the canonical modernists, just as colonialism is part of what troubles the work of non-canonical writers who are now being called modernist. The term ‘modernism’ is in danger of losing its ability to signify.

The way we view the modernist ouevre has changed over time. As Leon Surette points out, in the mid-1970s the conventional view held that "mythological and Eleusinian elements of such representative modernist works as The Waste Land and The Cantos were considered to be factitious formal and thematic devices and that this aestheticization of the apparently mystical or noumenal content of literary modernism was achieved through the tactic of Joyce’s so-called mythological method."⁷ Since then, we have begun to realize that the apparently mystical or noumenal content is far more central to the literature of this period than we had previously conceded. Quinones divides the modernist output into three phases, the first being a response to the social and historical conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the second phase, the modernists gave expression to the ‘given’ of their time and experience. The third phase, with which this discussion is mainly concerned, is that of recovery and renewal.⁸

One can certainly sympathize with the conflation of modernity and modernism as both evidence great change and uncertainty. Modernity, as opposed to the literary movement of modernism, is a cultural movement which is seen as stretching over two to three hundred years. It is generally understood as the condition in which society must legitimate itself by its own self-generated principles, without appeal to external verities, deities, authorities, or traditions.⁹ As John McGowan points out, a general consensus about the occurrence of some drastic change has emerged, no matter how we continue to argue details and dates.¹⁰ Marx has expressed his sense of the human fallout of this change when he said, All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face... the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.¹¹ Literary modernism would certainly be a sub-set of this overarching movement—and yet, a specific sub-set which addressed specific conditions of modernity. (The confusion comes when modernist writers address conditions of modernity in general, rather than their age in specific.)

Nonetheless, I contend that some authors who lived in a geographical/cultural milieu during the years 1890 to, say, 1930 (and there are good reasons to extend this date, as we see with Helen in Egypt, without affecting the integrity or the intertextuality or thematic interplay of the works in question), exhibit recognizable artistic responses to definable historical, political, and ideological circumstances. Notably, these circumstances include, very specifically, a strong Judaeo-Christian heritage, emergent individualism, and war trauma.¹²

The Judaeo-Christian heritage made specific concepts and rhetorical devices available to the modernists. The Bible has been the main transmitter, to the culture of the British Isles as well as that of America, of rhetorical devices and the ideology to which they give form. H.D., Woolf, and Lawrence make use of figurative language that was available to them in the twentieth century because of the transmission of the Bible. Lawrence’s use of Cabala operates beneath the surface of the text, as metaphoric magic. The rhetorical devices of metaphor, metonymy, the language of myth, pseudepigraphy, coded language, and irony were available to the modernists through their acquaintance with the Bible.

The history of the writing of the Bible¹³ reveals the ways in which disparate cultures have come together in the development of the Christian West.¹⁴ The melding of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin was not always smooth. There were numerous ways for meaning to change from one version of a book of the Bible to another. As G.B. Caird points out, The history of the Old Testament [priesthood] is a complex story in which many influences, social, ideological and technological combined to produce semantic change.¹⁵

Frequently, one metaphor would supersede another in the process of translation, thus subtly altering the text. Caird mentions that the Greek Job introduces allusion to Greek mythology: in 41:22, where the Hebrew has a most obscure description of the crocodile, the Greek calls it a dragon ‘with all the gold of the sea beneath it.’ The Greek Proverbs makes allusion to Greek poetry and sometimes substitutes Greek maxims for those of the original.¹⁶

The Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures, "known popularly as the King James Bible,"¹⁷ was first published in 1611, translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. Translators since then have relied upon a variety of ancient versions of the Hebrew Scriptures,¹⁸ as well as the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Old Testament and the Latin Vulgate. The King James New Testament was based on the traditional text of the Greek-speaking churches, first published in 1516, and later called the Textus Receptus or Received Text.¹⁹ The Bible in Greek,²⁰ called the Septuagint (LXX), consisted of translations of the Hebrew books made at Alexandria at different dates beginning from the middle of the 3rd century B.C. Originating thus before the Jewish canon was finally fixed [the Ben Asher text became the only recognized form of the Hebrew Scriptures in the twelfth century], it had admitted of books—those we call the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical—some of them translations from the Hebrew or Aramaic, and some of them originally Greek.²¹

This necessarily brief overview of the complex history of the Bible serves to remind us of the importance of the Hebraic idiom in biblical language. The principle mark . . . of Hebrew and especially of classical Hebrew style is that it is what the Greeks called lexis eiromene ‘speech strung together’ like a row of beads.²² This is the mark of parataxis, which is the ‘placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by connecting words the relation between them.’²³ Caird mentions the classical Greek and Latin are severely hypotactical languages, which make the logical connections clear, whereas biblical Hebrew is paratactical.²⁴ Paratactical thinking allows two different and even contradictory ideas to be set in close proximity to one another. Parataxis can be seen as the essential contained by a single word or phrase, which is how it operates in the language of all three of the writers in this study. Both H.D. and Lawrence created an ironic space that could contain an entire subtext of thought—the subtext being Gnosticism for H.D. and Cabala for Lawrence— in such close proximity with another, separate idea—the classical myth of Helen for H.D. and the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl for Lawrence—as to be almost undetectable. The Judaic origins of the Bible have led to much of its language being vivid and poetic: imagistic, allegorical, allusive, and metaphoric, to name but a few. The process of translating the Hebrew books into Greek resulted in the translators finding the nearest equivalents to the Hebrew figurative language in the Greek language, which often meant drawing upon the mythic and metaphoric traditions of ancient Greece as opposed to the logical, philosophical traditions. In later years, Christian schools supported the teaching of ‘pagan’ literature because they recognized that a familiarity with the language and imagery of Greco-Roman literature enabled a clearer understanding of the language and imagery of the Bible.

A distinctive feature of the Judaic use of figurative language is the extent to which it employs tropes—‘figures of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it’ (OED). Rather than embellishment, the figurative language is used ironically, to say one thing and mean another. For the Jews facing systematic persecution, tropism enabled the communication of a will to resist the persecutors. Caird mentions that the Book of Daniel was a tract for the encouragement of the resistance movement against Antiochus Epiphanes, who at the time of writing (c. 167 B.C.) was attempting to eradicate the Jewish religion by systematic persecution.²⁵

Resistance is a value system, a way of looking at the world. It performs as a cultural stance, a frame of reference, and the initiator of distinct values that govern behaviour. The attitude expresses itself as resistance to an overwhelmingly dominant cultural stance, resistance to bullying by some powerful force, resistance to silencing mechanisms in society, resistance to being the butt of prejudice,