Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty

Andrew John Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781135024697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book describes how three of the most significant Anglophone writers of the first half of the twentieth century – Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf – wrestled with a geopolitical situation in which national boundaries had come to seem increasingly permeable at the same time as war among (and within) individual nation-states had come to seem virtually inescapable. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard's analysis of the elements of performativity in J.L. Austin's speech act theory, and making critical use of Carl Schmitt's writings on sovereignty and world order, Miller situates the writings of Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf in the context of what Lyotard describes as a "civil war of language." By virtue of its dissolution of any clear boundary between "interiority" and "exteriority, " as well as by virtue of its resistance to any decisive form of resolution or regulation, this "civil war of language" takes on dimensions that are ultimately global in scope.

Miller examines the emergence of modernism as bound up with a crisis of personal, political, and aesthetic sovereignty that undermined traditional distinctions between the public and private. In the process, he directly engages with the theoretical discourse surrounding the geopolitical impact of globalization and biopolitics: a discourse that is central to the influential and widely-debated work of such varied figures as Carl Schmitt, Hardt and Negri, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned not only with twentieth-century literature but also with questions of nationalism and globalization.

1
Crisis of Sovereignty

Global Civil War in Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf

By virtue of his sustained commitment to Irish nationalism, Yeats might appear to be a figure who adheres closely to conventional models of state sovereignty. But although Yeats exhibits a persistent fascination with the varieties of national experience, he also exhibits a consistent disdain for all actually existing manifestations of the nation-state ideal. This geopolitical form is, in his view, tied to distasteful strains of Enlightenment rationalism: strains that he regards as having achieved a particularly unfortunate apotheosis in the universalistic style of abstract modernity that, like his Anglo-Irish hero, Edmund Burke, he associates with the French Revolution. As becomes apparent during the closing years of his life, when he revives his recurrent obsession with the figure of King Cuchulain—a figure who serves as the subject matter for The Death of Cuchulain, the last play that he would write—his interest in sovereignty takes the form of a nostalgia for a style of rule that bears no resemblance to modern forms of administrative or legislative order. This style of rule is not national in the way that modern nation-states are national, but is instead organized around an impersonal process of gnosis that finds a particularly vivid symbolic embodiment in the circumstances of Cuchulain’s death. In a manner that denies any geopolitical grandeur to this death at the same time as it draws a sharp antithesis between material greed and autonomous sovereignty, Cuchulain is, as Terence Brown concisely puts it, “given the coup de grace not by an enemy hand but by a fumbling Blind Man, who kills for the pathetic reward of twelve pence.”¹ To the extent that Cuchulain nevertheless preserves his dignity, he does so as a result of his acceptance of the fact that, in the modern context in which Yeats frames the play, his form of embodied sovereignty no longer carries with it any meaningful public resonance.

There is no place in this vision for the concept of national belonging in the modern sense: that is, for the concept of the nation-state as a secular model for personal and collective development. There is also no place in this vision for a strict territorialization of mythic order. Instead, Yeats’s final play provides us with an illustration of the paradoxical manner in which, as Michael North observes, “all of Yeats’s attempts to connect the Irish folk tales and habits to a worldwide mystical tradition serve only to lessen the national character of Irish folklore.”² Contrary to what Richard Kearney has suggested, it is misleading to posit a clear, binary division between a Yeats who is hopelessly tied to “the nationalist idea of myth” and a Joyce who belongs to the postnational company of “other cosmopolitan modern-ists such as Beckett, Flann O’Brien and McGreevy.”³ As Kearney himself acknowledges, there is a universalistic dimension to Yeats’s appropriations of Irish mythology, a dimension that is based on ambitions that bear only a contingent relation to the quotidian affairs of Ireland.⁴

Addressing the challenges that have come to affect the situation of “Irish writing, and Irish culture at large, at the outset of the twenty-first century,” R. F. Foster observes that “Irish fiction, poetry and drama need to be placed in contexts of economic prosperity, postnationalism, our own brand of postmodernism, the globalization of communications and the self-perpetuating idea of another Irish literary renaissance.”⁵ The advice is salutary. Foster, however, draws too sharp a line of demarcation between our own time and Yeats’s time. Even in his earliest work—work that is deeply informed by the displacements brought about by the Irish diaspora—Yeats was attuned to the potential impact of such factors as the emergence of postnationalism and globalization. Although the material manifestations of these developments were still relatively limited, it was apparent to many observers—Yeats included—-that the notion of a rigidly impermeable nation-state was lacking in long-term viability. Yeats’s perception of the weaknesses in the nation-state model does not prevent him, of course, from supporting the project of establishing an Irish nation-state. But his attitude toward that project is consistently informed by skepticism and by a strong degree of ironic distance. The paradoxical dynamic that is involved has been eloquently summed up by Paul Peppis. Although Peppis does not engage, in any sustained way, with the work of Yeats—or, for that matter, of Eliot or Woolf—he does share my sense that modernist writers, “far from being either flat-footed essentialists or heroic self-liberators… are better described as at once, or alternately, totalizers and atomizers, essen-tialists and constructionists, collaborators and resistants.”⁶ By juxtaposing Yeats with Woolf and Eliot in a manner that stresses this ambivalent relation between integrating ideals of homogeneity and autonomizing ideals of heterogeneity, we are able to get a fuller sense of the degree to which the emergence of modernism is informed by a postnational sensibility that represents part of a complex response to the widespread perception that sovereignty had been thrown into crisis.

Eliot’s attitude toward the nation-state is informed by an even greater degree of suspicion than Yeats’s, though Eliot, too, is sometimes willing to make strategic use of the sentiments associated with the nation-state and its “invented traditions.”⁷ This approach receives a particularly clear articulation in Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” a poem to which I will return later in this chapter. With the help of the Dantean figure of the “familiar compound ghost,” Eliot, in that crucial section of Four Quartets, does two things that bear directly on the comparative reading that I am undertaking. First, he reveals that he is haunted by Yeats to a degree that, in retrospect, can be seen to signal an underlying sense of commonality. Second, he indicates that he perceives both himself and Yeats to be, in the final analysis, post-national poets whose work needs to be understood within a pan-European framework in which the nation-state is no longer accorded hegemonic status. The poetic and religious differences that had often divided the two men prove, in the end, to be less important than the geopoetic sensibility that unites them.

Of these three writers, it is Woolf, however, who most overtly manifests the postnational impulse. Her work is pervaded by what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a recognition that “[t]he only way to get outside the dualisms is to be in-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.”⁸ Woolf writes from a perspective in which nationalistic narratives of territorial closure are emphatically rejected in favor of an openness to liminal modes of imagining and becoming. It is on this basis that, as early as 1905, we find Woolf expressing an affinity for deterritorialized geographies: “A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar.”⁹ Woolf, it is true, would never carry her suspicion of mimetic constraints as far as Yeats does in such poems as “Sailing to Byzantium,” where the expressed aim is to get entirely “out of nature.”¹⁰ And she would never give voice to the extreme horror of the material body—especially the female body—that is evident in many of Eliot’s early poems. Woolf is consistently inclined, however, to reject both bodily and institutional boundaries in ways that place her at odds with the sovereign claims to authority that underwrite nationalistic conceptions of territorial autonomy.

For example, in the posthumously published “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” a short story written in 1906, well before the events of World War I would dramatically illustrate the violent possibilities latent in the exclusionary, sovereign claims of state power, we find Woolf exploring the idea of narrating the process of England’s national development in ways that would circumvent the authority of the state. Employing the institutionally unaffiliated historian Rosamond Merridew as the medium through which the fictional Joan Martyn’s diary of fifteenth-century life emerges from obscurity, Woolf grapples with the link between national narratives and the centralized form of sovereign authority that provides the state with its aura of legitimacy. Early in the story, Merridew, commenting on her scholarly interest in acquiring “old papers,” complains about the manner in which the market for antiquities has driven up the cost of such documents, while “the state moreover with its Commissions has put an end for the most part to the enterprise of individuals.”¹¹ Merridew goes on to observe that such forms of state intervention directly interfere with her efforts to conduct historical research in ways that do not benefit from government support: “Some official, I am often told, has promised to come down and inspect their documents; and the favour of the ‘State’ which such a promise carries with it, robs my poor private voice of all its persuasion” (CSFVW, 33). In the contrast that is established between the limited effectiveness of requests made using Merridew’s “poor private voice” and the coercively persuasive force of promises made in the name of the state, Woolf implicitly touches on the contradictions posed by her own position as a writer who, in the act of lending an air of verisimilitude to a fictional version of history, is seeking to persuade the reader of her sovereign right to manipulate words and images, and to invent facts and characters, from a position of private autonomy. This artistic assertion of mastery is not, however, directly analogous to the state’s assertion of sovereignty, for it entails an attempt to assert the free play of the “poor private voice” rather than an attempt to make a binding, legislative decision in the name of some larger collectivity. In a manner that suggests an affinity for the pacifist wing of the anarchist tradition, and that establishes a conceptual pattern that will recur in her subsequent work, Woolf depicts the state not as the legitimate representative of consensually derived normativity but, rather, as a veiled force of violence.¹²

Unlike her husband Leonard, who was a prominent critic of national sovereignty, Woolf never formally adopted the discourse of political theory. Nevertheless, in her persistent concern with the malevolent effects of sovereign power, she pursues lines of inquiry that closely intersect with the concerns of major political theorists. Articulating a sentiment that would almost certainly have met with Woolf’s approval, Hannah Arendt, for instance, remarks that “[t]he famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence, that is, with essentially nonpolitical means.”¹³ In Woolf’s confrontations with conventional notions of sovereignty, there is almost always an implicit desire to expose the violence and hypocrisy that she sees as informing the very foundations of the state. In “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” this rejection of state practices is apparent in Woolf’s glaring refusal to engage with the events of what has come to be regarded as official history. As part of this rejection of the widely accepted metanarratives that validate the triumphalist discourse of the British nation-state, Woolf more or less ignores the historical significance of the Wars of the Roses, a struggle for state sovereignty waged between Yorkists and Lancastrians in a way that set the stage for an assertion of state sovereignty that would eventually assume a decisive form with Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Although Martyn openly alludes, in her fictional diary, to the fact that she is writing “in Norfolk, at the time of the Civil Wars” (CSFVW, 59), the focus remains primarily on the private, domestic sphere, not on the public sphere in which the competition for state power is being staged. The point is not that the public realm of state power does not matter, but, rather, that the struggles for power that occur in the private realm themselves participate—albeit less visibly—in a broader struggle to exertsovereign control over the constraints of necessity. The daily labor carried on in the household is openly celebrated by Martyn, who speaks of her mother in terms that suggest that real power lies in this private, domestic domain, rather than in the public domain in which wars are fought, and in which monarchs hold sway: “It is a great thing to be the daughter of such a woman, and to hope that one day the same power may be mine. She rules us all” (CSFVW, 46).

In this celebration of the autonomous power of the household sphere, we catch an early glimpse of Woolf’s emerging interest in exploring—and also in questioning—the classical opposition between the claims of the family and the claims of the state. Woolf tends to approach this version of the public/private binarism in ways that reflect an acute recognition that, under modern conditions, the gap between these two domains has been so thoroughly eroded that, as Arendt observes, “housekeeping and all matters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have become a ‘collective’ concern.”¹⁴ Crucial to this transition is the eclipse of fully embodied forms of state sovereignty. Arendt argues that the “one-man, monarchical rule… is transformed in society—as we know it today, when the peak of the social order is no longer formed by the royal household of an absolute ruler—into a kind of no-man rule.” But, as I noted in my Preface, Arendt, like Woolf, recognizes the degree to which this form of post-sovereign neutrality carries dangers of its own: “the rule of nobody is not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its cruelest and most tyrannical versions” (Arendt 1958, 40).

In an essay written in 1937, near the end of his life, Yeats, anticipating the postnational demystifications of The Death of Cuchulain, makes it clear that, for him, the nation is at best a highly contingent means of generating a transient and ultimately inadequate sense of collective unity: “I am no Nationalist,” he declares, “except in Ireland for passing reasons.”¹⁵ This passage provides an unusually explicit sense of Yeats’s ambivalence regarding the Irish nationalist project. As he suggests by means of his choice of the ambiguous word “passing,” he considers Irish nationalism, on the one hand, to be something fleetingly contingent, and, on the other hand, to be something that, in the interest of “passing” for an authentically Irish poet, he has chosen, at times, to wear as a convenient mask. Vicki Mahaffey concisely captures the performative aspect of Yeats’s nationalism when she discerns in Yeats an “experimental desire” that, in its relation to Ireland, stresses the multiplicity of becoming over the finitude of achieved identity.¹⁶

It is because of this nominalistic, antinomian interest in permanent becoming that, throughout his long period of involvement with the Irish Literary Revival, Yeats would do his best to remain vague about the concretely institutional and political consequences that might eventually result from the pursuit of his particular brand of cultural nationalism. When he asserts that he is “no Nationalist except in Ireland for passing reasons,” he is not engaging in a retroactive revision of his career. Instead, he is signaling the degree to which he has always regarded his involvement in Irish nationalism as something contingent and strategic rather than as something essential or permanent. Though Hazard Adams overestimates the depth of Yeats’s nationalist commitment, he is certainly right to discern in Yeats’s rhetoric a form of “antithetical nationalism” in which the aim is “to provide a necessary antithesis rather than any consistency of doctrine or political position.”¹⁷ In the realm of mysticism, by contrast, Yeats does maintain a remarkable degree of consistency. In an 1892 letter to the nationalist John O’Leary, for instance, Yeats insists that all of his activities are animated by his commitment to mystical activities: “The mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write.”¹⁸ Stressing the ambiguities that stem from Yeats’s status as an Anglo-Irish Protestant Theosophist, R. F. Foster pertinently suggests that Yeats is a writer “whose occult preoccupations surely mirror a sense of displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat of a takeover by the Catholic middle classes.”¹⁹

Foster’s description, though sociologically perceptive, fails, however, to take sufficient account of the degree to which Yeats’s mystical commitments are as much the cause as they are the effect of his sense of displacement. By aligning himself with a distinctly transnational form of theosophical mysticism—one that has more in c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface: Conceptualizing Modernism and Sovereignty
• Contents
• 1 Crisis of Sovereignty: Global Civil War in Yeats, Eliot, and Woolf
• 2 Civil Wars of Language: Irish Performativity in Yeats
• 3 “Social Welfare Dream”: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and Biopolitics in Yeats
• 4 “Compassing Material Ends”: Sovereignty, Pluralism, and Professionalism in Eliot
• 5 Between Nation and Profession: Aesthetic Sovereignty in Woolf’s Between the Acts
• 6 “Traditions of the Private House”: Sovereignty, Civility, and Ownership
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index