Rhythmic Modernism

Mimesis and the Short Story

Helen Rydstrand

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501343421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contrary to the common view that cultural modernism is a broadly anti-mimetic movement, one which turned away from traditional artistic goals of representing the world, Rhythmic Modernism argues that rhythm and mimesis are central to modernist aesthetics. Through detailed close readings of non-fiction and short stories, Helen Rydstrand shows that textual rhythms comprised the substance of modernist mimesis. Rhythmic Modernism demonstrates how many modernist writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, were profoundly invested in mimicking a substratum of existence that was conceived as rhythmic, each displaying a fascination with rhythm, both as a formal device and as a vital, protean concept that helped to make sense of the complex modern world.

1

Rhythm and Mimesis in Modernist Literary Culture

This chapter aims to establish an intellectual and aesthetic context for the strategies of rhythmic mimesis explored by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf. It sets out the ways of thinking rhythmically about the universe, people and literature in some of the milieux that surrounded these three writers during their careers. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the importance of romanticism to modernist culture particularly regarding how the role of literature was conceived. It also uncovers a little-discussed current of interest in the function of rhythm in prose and repositions the modernist short story against the broader context of the renovation of attitudes towards poetry and prose in the early twentieth century.

The motivation for rhythmic mimesis arises from a still under-acknowledged thread of romanticism in modernist culture. This thread is closely aligned with the heightened sense of novelty and dynamic intellectual and social development that are the driving energies of modernism. In the first section of this chapter, I outline the key themes of this philosophical context, traced largely through the critical writing of John Middleton Murry, as Britain’s most prominent exponent of romantic modernism. This romantic modernist position is defined most broadly by, first, a conviction of the progressive destiny of humanity and of art’s essential role in that destiny and, second, by the uniting of mundane and numinous dimensions of experience. These include an affirmation of the ethos of scientific discovery, which views the mysteries of the universe as puzzles to be solved rather than fundamentally unknowable. This way of thinking shifts those less empirically verifiable aspects of life from the domain of religious faith into the secular realm and enshrines intuition as a reliable way of registering such intangible aspects of experience. Rhythm emerges as a protean concept able to encompass the complex but spontaneous organization of the universe previously attributed to a divine power or the ineffable qualities of a human being once called a soul or spirit.

The second half of the chapter turns from this consideration of broader aesthetic and metaphysical concepts to examine how such ideas about rhythm and reality influenced rhythmic experimentation in literary form. In the 1910s and 1920s, there was much discussion of the distinctions between poetry and prose that arose with the explosion of interest in free verse and prose poetry. I recontextualize these debates in light of the romantic melding of the spiritual and the mundane or the heart and mind and a pervasive but little acknowledged desire to represent this unity. To these discussions I link a slightly later burgeoning of interest in prose rhythms, and finally in the particular mimetic possibilities of the short story, the central focus of this study. Across all three areas of discourse (as well as in the non-fiction writing by Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf), I find recurring assumptions of an innate link between literary rhythm and the ‘real’ rhythms of life itself. In modernist literature, rhythmic mimesis is like an echo, enacting a vital connection between a subject and its representation.

Romantic modernism and the rhythms of life

Questions about both art’s claims to represent the world and its claims to shape it are central to modernist aesthetics. Though it has been powerfully challenged in recent years, the view of the movement as classically informed, concerned foremost with form on its own terms rather than its relation to the world, remains dominant. This view is frequently associated with T. S. Eliot’s avowedly classicist position and Bloomsbury formalism, and particularly Clive Bell’s notion of ‘significant form’, which still loom large in most accounts of critical modernism. Eliot was far from alone in his espousal of a classicist viewpoint, and modernism’s attention to the potentialities of form is undoubtedly one of its most important features. However, the later prominence of Eliot in particular has obscured a competing strand of modernist thought and culture that saw the arts as having both a broader and deeper role in society.

This alternative attitude was sometimes explicitly aligned with romanticism during the period, particularly in connection with the editor and critic John Middleton Murry.¹ From about 1923, Murry and Eliot maintained a roughly five-year-long debate over the respective values of romantic and classicist philosophies via their editorial essays in Murry’s Adelphi (1923–55) and Eliot’s Criterion (1922–39) magazines. Murry can also be seen to have a pivotal role in an intellectual history of rhythmic modernism. He began his career as an editor while still an undergraduate at Oxford University, by launching with his friend Michael Sadleir the little magazine Rhythm: Art, Music, Literature (1911–13). In his autobiography, Between Two Worlds (1935), Murry explains that the publication arose in part from discussions with the Scottish colourist painter J. D. Fergusson, in which rhythm was a recurring theme. Murry describes how Fergusson, who later became the magazine’s art editor, introduced him to the idea that rhythm ‘was the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of “this modern movement” […] was to reassert the pre-eminence of rhythm’. Fergusson designated Murry’s role in this movement as being to ‘carry the new doctrine of rhythm into literature’.² Anna Snaith has observed that in the context of this magazine, this rhythmic modern aesthetics is ‘clearly allied with primitivism, a futurity which evokes return’. With its ‘primitivist drawings […] beside articles that utilize a discourse of conquest to describe new aesthetic terrain’,³ it is easy to see both Rhythm’s ‘entanglement in colonial reality’ and its yearning for ‘self-transformation toward the primitive’, as Ben Etherington describes the primitivist aesthetic project.⁴ Such aesthetics recur throughout the modernism explored in this book and have affiliations with the romanticism and the progressive politics discussed below.

Especially given this early direction, Murry’s perspective is of added interest to this book because of his important professional and personal connections with all three authors under study, especially Mansfield and Lawrence, who he met primarily through Rhythm. Mansfield acted as a contributor and eventually co-editor and financial supporter of the magazine from spring 1912, and she and Murry married in 1918, maintaining a difficult but important romantic connection until her death. Rhythm was also the foundation of an often-fraught friendship between the editorial couple and the Lawrences, when Mansfield, in her editorial role, approached Lawrence to contribute writing to the journal. Late in his life and long after their deaths, Murry wrote that he always considered himself the ‘critical counterpart’ to Mansfield and Lawrence, and he was certainly a tireless promoter of their work throughout his life.⁵ As editor of Rhythm, its immediate reincarnation in the Blue Review (1913), the short-lived and idiosyncratic collaboration between the three, the Signature (1914), the prestigious Athenaeum (which he edited from 1919–21), and thereafter the idealistic Adelphi (1923–48), he published their work often.

Murry’s influence was not limited to this small circle. While his contribution to the modernist critical legacy has been overshadowed by that of Eliot, during the two years of his modernizing crusade at the Athenaeum and the early stages of the Adelphi, Murry was a highly respected editor and literary critic.⁶ As editor for the Athenaeum, he also published work by Woolf, as well as by other significant modernist figures, including Eliot, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and Ezra Pound. Beyond this important editorial role in modernist literary history, Murry’s own non-fiction writing, notably his editorials from Rhythm and the Adelphi, is pivotal to understanding the historical moment that this chapter describes. Taken together, his editorials articulate a nexus between a rhythmic metaphysics and romanticist aesthetic philosophy, showing one way to the formal and conceptual innovations of modernist literature.

The romanticist tendencies championed by Murry – most fundamentally, the sense of an intrinsic and necessary connection between art and life – pervade modernist writing and thinking, including that of Lawrence, Mansfield and Woolf. Those contemporaries who declared their classicist allegiances are not immune to the influence of romantic thought, either. Indeed, when the critic and poet T. E. Hulme predicted a classical revival in the modern arts, he also acknowledged that the preceding romantic age would have left its mark, and traces of this influence are present in his own polemic against the values and aesthetics of romanticism.⁷ Some ideal of mimesis in art is a motivation among members of both camps. Instead, classical and romantic modernisms are divided on two central and related questions: what role art plays in social and spiritual life, and what dimensions of experience may or should be represented in art.

Generally, the classicist position maintains while art may represent the world, its role is restricted to the aesthetic realm, rather than performing a spiritual or social function. For example, in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (ca 1911–12), Hulme argues that in poetry the ‘great aim is accurate, precise and definite description’ and sees creating aesthetic pleasure as the central purpose of this description. Furthermore, he argues that ‘the root of aesthetic pleasure’ is located in the rarity of a ‘real communication’ of the artist’s ‘actual physical state’; that is, he links aesthetic pleasure directly to mimesis.⁸ Similarly, Eliot emphasizes a near-autotelic conception of art, arguing in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), perhaps his best-known interjection on the side of classicism, that ‘art may be affirmed to serve ends beyond itself; but art is not required to be aware of those ends, and indeed performs its function, whatever that may be, according to various theories of value, much better by indifference to them’.⁹ Eliot’s own values for artistic endeavour are implied by his attacks on romanticism in this essay: romantics, he laments, ‘are not, in fact, concerned with literary perfection at all’ which for him means that they are actually ‘not in fact interested in art’. This definition of art as the product of technical mastery, and valuable primarily for its formal or aesthetic qualities, is frequently taken to typify modernism itself.

Eliot’s standpoint has much in common with Bloomsbury formalism, as propounded by the painter and critic Roger Fry and the critic Clive Bell (also Woolf’s brother-in-law). Fry and Bell argue, like Eliot, for the essential independence of the work of art from the world. For them, art’s highest purpose is to stir ‘aesthetic emotion’, a pure and impersonal response, in the receiver.¹⁰ In his landmark essay, Art (1913), Bell proposes the influential concept of ‘significant form’, the idea that the essential quality of a work of art is inherent to its material form and independent of any mimetic reference.¹¹ This anti-mimetic formalism was also propounded by Bell’s Bloomsbury affiliate Roger Fry. In his 1911 essay on ‘Post Impressionism’, Fry conceives of ‘rhythm’ as a purely formal quality, asserting that ‘representation is secondary’ to rhythm, which ‘is the fundamental and vital quality of painting, as of all the arts’.¹² His 1917 Fabian Society lecture ‘Art and Life’ concluded that modern art ‘cuts out all the romantic overtones of life which are the usual bait by which men are induced to accept a work of art’.¹³ Political, social, spiritual or everyday aspects of the work, or ‘echoes of the emotions of life’, are considered auxiliary rather than integral to its value.¹⁴ Thus, Fry values works of art almost exclusively as aesthetic objects or rather for the aesthetic emotion that they can provoke. Importantly for my concerns in this book, Fry’s review of Bell’s book, first published in The Nation in March 1914, extends the scope of ‘significant form’ to include not only the visual arts but also literary rhythm.¹⁵ However, while formal aspects of the work of art are emphasized over its relationships to the outside world, in some respects, Fry’s and Bell’s ideals of ‘significant form’ and aesthetic emotion relate to romantic ideals of art, in that they refer to a deeper register of mimesis. Fry explains that Bell holds ‘a pious belief […] that the aesthetic emotion is indeed an emotion about ultimate reality, that it has, therefore, a claim as absolute as the religious emotion has upon those who feel it’.¹⁶ This conception of artistic form having a near-spiritual significance because of its relation to an abstract register of reality marks, I suggest, a notable departure from Eliot’s classicist modernism. It is a feature that Fry’s and Bell’s formalism shares with Murry’s brand of romanticist modernism.

The question of the proper place of religious feeling in art is a defining one. Both Hulme and Eliot emphasize the properness of the separation of these spheres of human experience and indeed profess moral qualms about ideology that integrates the spiritual with the mundane. For instance, one of Hulme’s criticisms of romanticism is based on a quasi-scientific argument that religious belief is a natural instinct that is thwarted by the denial of the existence of god or heaven. This gives rise to the hubristic beliefs ‘that man is a god’ and ‘in heaven on earth’. This leads to his famous description of romanticism as ‘spilt religion’.¹⁷ Almost identically, Eliot describes those who believe in the importance of the ‘inner voice’ as ‘palpitating Narcissi’, who ‘believe that God and [themselves are] identical’.¹⁸ Hulme claims that the mixture of religion with other aspects of life will ‘mess up, falsify and blur the clear lines of human experience’.¹⁹ For both critics, religious beliefs also have a bearing on aesthetics. Eliot attributes what he perceives as a lack of interest in pursuing formal ‘perfection’ to the romantic’s denial of ‘the existence of an unquestioned spiritual authority outside himself’.²⁰ Hulme’s conviction that the religious does not belong in art, however, evolves not from the quest for formal perfection. Instead, it depends on a particular conception of mimesis as ‘accurate description’, which, he tells us, ‘is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to [the romantics] always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite’.²¹ This complaint about romanticism’s emphasis on emotion and ‘the infinite’, or numinous, suggests that Hulme does not consider these categories as the legitimate object of accurate description. For Hulme, then, romanticism is guilty of abandoning the proper goal of mimesis, the representation of what he sees as the real – the material every day.

For the writers whose work is investigated in this book, the close nature of the relationship between the self and world is an issue of deep importance. Murry himself repeatedly explained his idea of this relationship in his essays throughout the 1920s, consistently placing enormous emphasis on the continuity of the self with the outside world. In ‘More about Romanticism’ (1923), Murry distinguishes between ‘primary’ romantics who deny the existence of outer reality or authorities and the ‘secondary’ type that he endorses, who recognize the existence of the out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introducing Rhythmic Mimesis
• 1. Rhythm and Mimesis in Modernist Literary Culture
• 2. D. H. Lawrence’s Cosmic Rhythms
• 3. Katherine Mansfield and the Rhythms of Habit
• 4. Virginia Woolf, Rhythm and the World as Work of Art
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint