The Extinct Scene

Late Modernism and Everyday Life

Thomas Davis

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231537889
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1935, the English writer Stephen Spender wrote that the historical pressures of his era should "turn the reader's and writer's attention outwards from himself to the world." Combining historical, formalist, and archival approaches, Thomas S. Davis examines late modernism's decisive turn toward everyday life, locating in the heightened scrutiny of details, textures, and experiences an intimate attempt to conceptualize geopolitical disorder.

The Extinct Scene reads a range of mid-century texts, films, and phenomena that reflect the decline of the British Empire and seismic shifts in the global political order. Davis follows the rise of documentary film culture and the British Documentary Film Movement, especially the work of John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright. He then considers the influence of late modernist periodical culture on social attitudes and customs, and presents original analyses of novels by Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Colin MacInnes; the interwar travel narratives of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell; the wartime gothic fiction of Elizabeth Bowen; the poetry of H. D.; the sketches of Henry Moore; and the postimperial Anglophone Caribbean works of Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming. By considering this group of writers and artists, Davis recasts late modernism as an art of scale: by detailing the particulars of everyday life, these figures could better project large-scale geopolitical events and crises.

1

THE LAST SNAPSHOT OF THE BRITISH INTELLIGENTSIA

DOCUMENTARY, MASS-OBSERVATION, AND THE FATE OF THE LIBERAL AVANT-GARDE

NEAR THE END of the July 1936 edition of World Film News, one of the key publications of the documentary film movement, the journal listed its supporters (figure 1.1). The names read like a who’s who of modernism and the avant-garde: S. M. Eisenstein, T. S. Eliot, André Gide, Fritz Lang, Henry Moore, László Moholy-Nagy, and G. W. Pabst all find their way into this rather distinguished cast. Directly above this list are two advertisements: one from the Imperial Institute Cinema announcing films to be shown in July and another plugging the “Double Surrealist Number” of the little magazine Contemporary Poetry and Prose, a special issue that coincided with the London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries. At first glance, this trio appears to make for odd company. But this assemblage is instructive. The journal wears its modernist and avant-garde credentials on its sleeve and finds little conflict with something as vulgar as state-sponsored films lauding the virtues of empire. This conjuncture of radical aesthetics and the political status quo captures much of what is initially counterintuitive about late modernism’s documentary culture but also singular in its approach to everyday life. Like the other late modernists this book examines, the documentary film units pioneered by John Grierson and the avant-garde sociological outfit Mass-Observation understood their approach to everyday life in aesthetic and political terms. The documentary film units hoped to create narratives of everyday life that would advance the interests of the British state by normalizing its policies and activities. Mass-Observation also aimed to align the desires, hopes, and fears of the population with the political institutions of the British state. Unlike any other late modernist phenomenon, this version of the outward turn was defined by an uneasy coexistence of radical aesthetics and a reformist politics that promoted liberal norms and values.

Figure 1.1 World Film News, July 1936.

Little else had the aesthetic novelty and the political charge of documentary in the 1930s. Grierson first used the word “documentary” in a 1926 New York Sun review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana.¹ In this instance, “documentary” was more or less a direct translation of the French documentaire, which typically refers to expedition films.² Later in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s Grierson would theorize documentary in a more pointed, precise way. He eventually called documentary “the creative treatment of actuality,” a phrase he tosses out parenthetically and with little elaboration in a 1933 piece in Cinema Quarterly.³ Although it now serves as a textbook definition in film studies, it is not entirely clear how widely known Grierson’s phrase was to other writers outside of his circle. However, the impulse to turn toward actuality, to find in the everyday signs and measures of contemporary problems, was a shared one. J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934) gave a panoramic view of English life during the slump. Photographer Bill Brandt’s photo-essay The English at Home (1936) and George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937) also tried to convey the intensifying economic desperation and inequality threatening any sense of a shared national cultural identity.

In 1937 Fact published a special issue calling for a “literary equivalent of the documentary film,” citing Orwell’s book (at the least the first half of it) as an example of literature attuned to “the factors of change and the rumour of the real world.”⁴ W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, and Benjamin Britten would all contribute to documentary films.⁵ With the exception of Brandt, a surrealist-influenced photographer with a keen eye for paradox and coincidence, the majority of these documentary efforts aim for accurate representation, fitting more within traditions of reportage or autoethnography than anything remotely modernist, experimental, or avant-garde. I focus on the film units pioneered by Grierson and the writings of Mass-Observation precisely because their projects develop out of and modify modernist and avant-garde techniques.

Recent reappraisals of documentary and its aesthetic lineages try to correct the misperceptions of documentary as some sort of regressive realism. Tyrus Miller and Bill Nichols both highlight the affinities between documentary and the European avant-garde. Miller finds formal homologies between the late modernist prose poem in Britain and documentary; if we follow Miller’s logic, pitting modernism against documentary conceals a great deal of literary and cinematic activity that developed from this conjuncture. Like Miller, Nichols suggests that critics and historians too easily “perpetuate a false division between the avant-garde and documentary that obscures their necessary proximity.”⁶ Nichols argues that documentary becomes possible only when it combines “three preexisting elements—photographic realism, narrative structure, and modernist fragmentation—along with a new emphasis on the rhetoric of social persuasion.”⁷ Both approaches restore the role of avant-garde aesthetics to the history of documentary. And yet the political valences of this relationship have been improperly contextualized. Nichols, for example, misreads the relationship of politics and aesthetics underwriting Grierson’s theories and practices. Grierson’s theories of documentary do not approximate “neoconservative political theory” nor do they resemble “more virulent forms of totalitarianism.”⁸ And, lastly, Grierson would be rather surprised to hear of his “affinity with the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury group.”⁹

Miller, Nichols, and others have been right to assert the modernist or avant-garde pedigrees of both the documentary film movement and Mass-Observation. What we now need to understand are the many ways the aesthetic was theorized, recoded, and put at the service of securing liberal norms. In other words, we should now ask how documentary prescribes a new social function for innovative art.¹⁰ The social function of art underwrites many avant-garde and modernist declarations and, to be sure, the philosophical debates that followed. We can roughly categorize art’s social function in three ways: emancipation, separation, and reconciliation.¹¹ Avant-garde manifestoes from the futurists to the situationists ascribe an emancipatory function to art. The works of these avant-gardistes are profoundly nonmimetic; in place of identifiable representations of everyday life, they produced cryptic images of worlds and lives that had yet to be realized. The artwork offers a utopic promise of another world where art and the everyday would be so revolutionized that neither would be recognizable. Emancipation, then, means collapsing art’s separation from everyday life but on terms established by the avant-gardes. In other sectors of modernist and avant-garde culture, the separation of art and daily life is vigorously maintained, even policed. This type of separation animates Stéphane Mallarmé and symbolist poetry, T. S. Eliot’s poetry through the 1920s, and, if one follows Theodor Adorno’s unsparing defense of modernism as separation, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. Art’s apartness, what Adorno calls its asociality, is the condition of possibility for any critique of society. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, the work of art can diagnose the malaise of modernity and model solutions, but, formally, it will bear “the scars of damage and disruption.”¹² In a dialectical way, “only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence.”¹³ Aesthetic separation, then, names artworks in which appearance negatively designates the poverty of everyday life; what appears in art, what is pleasurable and enticing, can never be realized.

Jacques Rancière sees these two roles as the definitive antipodes of modernism: “a contrast is thereby formed between a type of art that makes politics by eliminating itself as art and a type of art that is political on the proviso that it retains its purity, avoiding all forms of political intervention.”¹⁴ But there is a third role, one I call reconciliation, which designates the documentary’s liberal avant-garde project. In these works, appearance neither hearkens the yet-to-come nor is it a dark reminder of impoverished reality. Appearance is a reconfiguration of what is—it makes visible what has already been realized but reframes it, allowing us to see anew the practices of everyday life. Reconciliatory art deprives the aesthetic of its adversarial position. To borrow Rancière’s terms, reconciliation promotes consensus, not dissensus.¹⁵ Although his argument proceeds in a slightly different context, his remarks on the changed meanings of the avant-garde are more than apropos. In his estimation, art that shifts from dissensus to consensus makes art “responsible for the functions of archiving and bearing witness to a common world. This gathering, then, is part of an attitude to art that is stamped by the categories of consensus: restore lost meaning to a common world or repair the cracks in the social bond.”¹⁶ Establish consensus, merge the advances and potentiality of art with the social and political order, and remake art’s social function into one of compatibility, not antagonism: this is what drives the documentary aesthetic. As I argue throughout the rest of this chapter, this is how we should understand the adaptation of Soviet cinema techniques in Grierson’s film units as well as the rehabilitation and deployment of surrealism in Mass-Observation.

To begin looking at the documentary’s reformatting of the avant-garde, I turn to Walter Benjamin’s remarkable 1929 essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” Benjamin asks how the radical potentiality of the avant-garde might be recovered and mobilized to spur change in everyday life. Quite simply, he asks what social function might be ascribed to a form of art that is antagonistic and, in some instances, asocial. He opens with an extended metaphor of critical distance and appropriation. “Intellectual currents,” he writes, “can generate a sufficient head of water for the critic to install his power station on them. The necessary gradient, in the case of Surrealism, is produced by the difference in intellectual level between France and Germany.”¹⁷ This difference affords the German critic a privileged, detached perspective on surrealism that those caught up in its initial flourishing in France could not have had. Those critics, he suggests, squander their time bickering over the origins of the group or they simply are too close to surrealism to see the critical energies it might offer; they “are a little like a gathering of experts at a spring who, after lengthy deliberation, arrive at the conviction that this paltry stream will never drive turbines.”¹⁸ The German, however, sits not at the source but in the valley, and this particular position enables a wholly different engagement: “The German observer is not standing at the source of the stream. This is his opportunity. He is in the valley. He can gauge the energies of the movement.”¹⁹ Benjamin also believes surrealism in 1929 is at a pivotal moment: it can transform into an anarchic group locked in a struggle for power or petrify into an identifiable art form, a museum piece of sorts. Benjamin’s effort is not a reappraisal of surrealism but an interrogation into dormant potentialities that have yet to be actualized. How might surrealism serve as a source for critical thought, as an endless spring for other critical projects? Benjamin sought techniques to awaken class consciousness, to dissolve the phantasmagoria capitalism had cast over modern life; he would eventually, even if mistakenly, uphold film and Brecht’s theater as more satisfying models. While the documentary film movement and Mass-Observation do not share Benjamin’s political project, they do possess the national and critical distance from the avant-gardes they so admired.

Revolution and radical politics were anything but the endgame for Grierson’s documentary film movement or Mass-Observation. From their vantage point, the problem was not so much how to promote a revolution from the left but rather how one might use the avant-garde’s unique powers of aesthetic disclosure to affirm and promote a normative British liberalism domestically and inter nationally during a period of world systemic distress. Grierson’s documentary circle and Mass-Observation calculated that distress in a very particular way. In his 1935 book Documentary Film, Paul Rotha renders the historical moment as an accumulation of existing and potential economic and political catastrophes:

But conditions and events are such that we cannot continue in this way of thinking and living for long. With the constant repetition of strikes, assassinations, disasters, pogroms and every form of economic and political crisis that have crowded the social horizon of recent years, it is true to say that the individual is beginning to take a greater interest generally in public affairs and to enquire more into his relations with society than he has one previously in this so-called age of democracy.²⁰

Penning their inaugural pamphlet just two years later, Mass-Observation would also assemble an unnerving inventory: “The bringing of civilization to Abyssinia, the coming of civil war to Spain, the atavism of the new Germany and the revival of racial superstition have forced the issue home to many. We are all in danger of extinction from such outbursts of atavism.”²¹ For both the documentary film movement and Mass-Observation, these situations presented grave threats to liberal democratic societies; at this historical juncture, the extinction of liberal democracy was a very real possibility. Their answer was to sift through everyday life to find evidence of how the population’s wishes and fears, the psychological and affective shape of their daily lives, related to the state and its institutions. Grierson firmly believed that attending to the course of daily life would open the way for more robust political participation and a healthier relationship between the citizens and the state. Documentary cinema, in particular, offered a “new instrument of public influence, which might increase experience and bring the new world of our citizenship into the imagination.”²² Similarly, Mass-Observation set o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Late Modernism and the Outward Turn
• 1. The Last Snapshot of the British Intelligentsia: Documentary, Mass-Observation, and the Fate of the Liberal Avant-Garde
• 2. The Historical Novel at History’s End
• 3. Late Modernism’s Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones
• 4. War Gothic
• 5. “It is de age of colonial concern”: Vernacular Fictions and Political Belonging
• Epilogue: “Appointments to keep in the past”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index