The model of the nervous system exemplified by James's psychology, thus, has dual implications. In the first instance it provides a physiological ground for the formation of moral character and the production of individual subjects. In the second instance, it differentiates individuals from one another through the maintenance of a rigid social structure that extends from the narrowly communal to the global. The nerves and the forms of habit they facilitate provide the key to understanding both the mechanical formation and functioning of individual subjects and the ways in which such individuals are integrated as distinct constitutive components into the machinery of larger-scale social bodies.
It is precisely these twofold ramifications of the neuroscientific body that The Waves interrogates. For if Bernard's individualizing encounter with Mrs. Constable is initially represented as the source of a vaguely pleasurable ambivalence, as the narrative proceeds, its rememoration and rearticulation increasingly cast it in a different light. By Bernard's summation in the final chapter, he revisits that event and its myriad subsequent analogues and is led to conclude that "Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cottage with a light in the window where a child has been born, I could implore them not to squeeze the sponge over that new body" (W, 200). This desire to protect the infant is indicative of Woolf's analysis of the bodily regime in which Mrs. Constable's sponge is only the first step. The end of the process inaugurated by Mrs. Constable, in contrast, is articulated by Neville. "Change is no longer possible," he laments, "We are committed. Before, when we met in a restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could have been anything. We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us--a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre" (W, 178). Or, as Bernard suggests in a similar vein:
It was different once. . . . Once we could break the current as we chose. How many telephone calls, how many post cards, are now needed to cut this hole through which we come together, united, at Hampton Court? . . . We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade . . . and in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leap like fish, high in the air, to catch the train from Waterloo. And however high we leap we fall back again into the stream [W, 180].
In both these cases, Woolf articulates the threat posed by Mrs. Constable's sponge with direct reference to the language of neuroscience. Both Neville and Bernard represent the consequences of a deterministic bodily mode. For Neville change and choice are no longer possible because he has been pinched between the shoulders, taken the print of life on the fibres of his nervous system, and Bernard feels at the mercy of the unassailable torrent of the familiar, the habitual. Drawing on the commonplace neuroscientific trope of the nerves as riverbeds whose channels are progressively deepened by currents of nervous energy, Bernard describes a freedom that is not of choice, but rather a freedom from choice produced by habit. Moreover, Bernard's statement makes manifest an antagonistic relationship between this model of embodiment and the possibility of community. Aligning the habitualized body with forces of individuation and differentiation, he suggests that only to the extent that the frictionless flow of the familiar can be resisted is community possible, can the characters "come together, united."
It is, however, precisely this possibility of coming together that Woolf seeks to explore. She is not content merely to replicate positivist science's mechanical model of the body, a body in which, as Bernard puts it, "Muscles, nerves, intestines, blood-vessels . . . make the coil and spring of our being, the unconscious hum of the engine . . . [that] function[s] superbly. Opening, shutting; shutting, opening; eating, drinking; sometimes speaking--the whole mechanism seem[s] to expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock" (W, 217-8). Throughout the text, she is equally at pains to articulate an alternate model of embodied subjectivity that is most clearly represented in her characterization of Jinny. Early in the text we are given an account of Jinny's participation in a tennis match, after which she states:
I must throw myself on the ground and pant. I am out of breath with running, with triumph. Everything in my body seems thinned out with running and triumph. My blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs.  I see every blade of grass very clear. But the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my eyes, that everything dances--the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the trees seem to jump up and down. There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph [W, 31].
Reveling in the connective force of her pulsing blood, Jinny resides triumphantly in her body. Standing in stark contrast to both the rigidifying and ordering effects of Jamesian habit and Bernard's clockwork body, Jinny's subjective mode is defined by her body's vitalistic capacity for spontaneity. Both her self-perception and her perception of the world around her are shaped by the dance of her blood: "there is," as she says, "nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe." By countering the neuroscientific body in this way, Woolf's representation of Jinny's form of embodiment is consonant with a well-established tradition of vitalistic reaction to the deterministic effects of positivist science--a tradition that, among Woolf's contemporaries, prominently includes Edward Carpenter, Henri Bergson, and D. H. Lawrence.
Consistently represented through this metaphorics of dance, Jinny's vitalistic mode of embodiment is extended to articulate a structure of collectivity. For Jinny there is "a great society of bodies" that, when they come into contact, call out to one another (W, 49). "Our bodies communicate," she claims, and the form of this communication finds its example in dance:
We yield to this slow flood. . . . In and out, we are swept now into this large re; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together in its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on [W, 82-3].
The form of community predicated upon Jinny's embodied subjectivity is, thus, less a form of relation between fixedly discrete individuals than a process of merging in a dynamic flow of a corporate body.
If the type of flow exemplified by both Jinny's blood and the dance stand in contrast to the ever more strictly and efficiently channelled flows of nervous energy in the habitualized body, Woolf's challenge to the individualizing and deterministic discourses of neuroscience becomes overt during the two dinner party scenes in which the six characters literally come together in a community. Explicitly appropriating the language of neuroscience, Woolf has Jinny respond to Rhoda's observation that "one thing melts into another": "Yes . . . our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of nerve that lay white and limp, have filled and spread themselves and float round us like filaments, making the air tangible and catching in them far-away sounds unheard before" (W, 110). No longer limited to their role as long-fixed relays between sensation and action, the nerves, in this articulation, become an extensive web that structures the melting of one thing into another and makes new forms of sensory experience possible. Extending this reration of the nervous system, Neville supports Louis's claim "that these attempts to say, 'I am this, I am that,' which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false" by representing the nerves as the basis of an encompassing communal architecture (W, 112). Shifting abruptly from his sense that "change is no longer possible" because he has taken "the print of life . . . upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre," he declares, "I am merely 'Neville' to you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales--huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering" (W, 178). No longer functioning to individualize and separate, the nerves as Neville imagines them mark a collective space not dissimilar to what we have seen Jinny describe as the "perfectly encircling walls" of the dance. Within this space, the lines that divide one character from another, or the characters from the world that surrounds them, are no longer distinct.
It is important to note the extent to which Woolf predicates this possibility of collectivity upon a mode of vital, affective embodiment. Whereas the novel consistently associates forces of individualization and differentiation with taxonomic and traditionally narrative linguistic modes, the affective body remains unassimilable to the ordering regimes of such representational projects and as such provides a basis for community. Louis presents perhaps the most obvious example of the taxonomic language of the individual. Armed with his businessman's red pen and ledger book, he is driven to locate all aspects of life on their proper line and column, literally to account for the world in which he finds himself. Even the trivialities of day-to-day existence are submitted to this drive, and he insists that "With my Australian accent I have sat in eating-shops and tried to make the clerks accept me, yet never forgotten my solemn and severe convictions and the discrepancies and incoherences that must be resolved" (W, 167). His use of language aims at classifying and fixing that which is both without and within; perceptual processes, for instance, become the occasion for representational ordering, as when he announces, "This I see for a second, and shall try tonight to fix in words, to forge a ring of steel" (W, 30). Insistently differentiating him from and situating him in relation to what surrounds him, Louis's endless taxonomies culminate in the moment at which he tells us, "on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I" (W, 141). In so doing he exemplifies the process through which "All the furled and close-packed leaves of [his] many-folded life are now summed up in [his] name; incised cleanly and barely on the sheet" (W, 138).
The text suggests that this reiterative solidification of the "I" through which incoherences, negations, and multiplicities are compressed and unified within the subject-- a sort of linguistic analogue to the habitualizing and individualizing force of repeated patterns of nervous discharge-- must be overcome if the possibility of community is to be realized. The two dinner party scenes once again provide the clearest instances of such an overcoming. On the occasion of the first dinner, Louis himself is led to claim that:
It is Percival . . . sitting silent as he sat among the tickling grasses when the breeze parted the clouds and they formed again, who makes us aware that these attempts to say, "I am this, I am that," which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences. From the desire to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults, and what is particular to us. But there is a chain whirling round, round, in a steel-blue circle beneath [W, 112].
In the face of the individuating and qualifying force of language--the insistently compelling claims of "I am this, I am that"--Louis posits the possibility of an underlying state of unifying commonality, beyond all particularity, red by the perfect symmetry of a "whirling . . . circle." If Louis can only posit this form of collectivity, Neville reminds us of its grounding in the affective body.  Speech is false.But I eat. I gradually lose all knowledge of particulars as I eat. I am becoming weighed down with food. These delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fitly piled with vegetables, following each other in exquisite rotation of warmth, weight, sweet and bitter, past my palate, down my gullet, into my stomach, have stabilized my body. I feel quiet, gravity, control. All is solid now. Instinctively my palate now requires and anticipates sweetness and lightness, something sugared and evanescent; and cool wine, fitting glovelike over those finer nerves that seem to tremble from the roof of my mouth and make it spread (as I drink) into a domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented, purple with grapes. Now I can look steadily into the mill-race that foams beneath [W, 113].
Another instance in which the nerves come to re an encompassing, organic, communal architecture, this passage makes explicit the embodied basis of community. Describing the sequence of events through which he is gradually drawn from the realm of reason, language, and identity to that of affective embodiment, it is only with the complete abandonment of the former that Neville can access the dynamic collective source of stability that subtends his existence. Eschewing language and its primary function of individuation and particularization, he loses a sense of individuality as he sinks into a gastronomically induced affective state in which he "gradually lose[s] all knowledge of particulars." Positing this tension between language, reason, and particularity on the one hand, and affect, embodiment, and unity on the other, the text is once again consistent with a tradition of vitalistic thought. To reinvoke Bergson, Carpenter, and Lawrence, it is worth noting that despite significant differences that are especially apparent in terms of their communitarian implications, their projects all articulate an understanding, shared by this aspect of Woolf's text, of the vital order as a fundamental unity in relation to which supposedly discrete units or identities are viewed as the distorting, if necessary, effects of intellectual operations. 10
If, then, Woolf turns the language of neuroscience against itself in an attempt to think and write of community, the question remains, How are we to assess the vitalistic form of community her text articulates? In order to approach this question it will be necessary to reframe slightly Woolf's engagement of the neuroscientific body and to distinguish more sharply the modes of community the novel presents. One such mode, as Jane Marcus has argued, is the patriotic English nationalism and its supporting "myth of individualism and selfhood" that The Waves criticizes ("BR," 137). Michael Tratner makes a similar point when he draws on Leonard Woolf's understanding of imperialism as the principle of individualism transposed into the geopolitical realm to argue that Virginia Woolf's critique of individualism goes hand in hand with her critique of nationalism and imperialism. Given this alignment of individualism with a particular form of nationalist community, Woolf's interrogation of the individualizing function of the neuroscientific body would seem to support the line of argument advanced by Marcus and Tratner. 11 By extension, then, the turn to the affective body and the form of community that becomes its predicate (a community not grounded in the individual) can be seen as an attempt to imagine a more desirable structure of collectivity.
When, however, we return to the scene of the first dinner party as the fullest articulation of this alternate communal mode--and in so doing, it will be necessary to differentiate more carefully between the two dinner parties than I have so far--it becomes clear that this affective community is itself not unproblematic. If the text's reration of the nervous system is attractive insofar as it provides the basis for a communitarian project that ostensibly stands in opposition to nationalist community and its cult of the great individual, the model of community at which it arrives remains dangerously close to what Jean-Luc Nancy has described as "organic community." Suppressing social difference and leaving no place for an experience of being-together in which the enclosed totalities of individual subjects are exposed at the limit of an unshareable alterity, this form of community is corporatist and manifests itself either in the subsumption of individual members under the re of a leader whose body signifies the unity of all those in whose place it stands, or in the sacrifice of individual subjectivity in an act of fusion that forms the higher-level totality of the community as Subject. 12 Organic community is, for Nancy, "not only intimate communication between its members, but also its organic communion with its own essence. . . . [I]t is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation of an identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only through the supplementary mediation of his identification with the living body of the community." 13 Perhaps his most succinct definition of this communal form is one governed by "the goal of achieving a community of beings producing in essence their own essence as their work, and furthermore of producing precisely this essence as community" (IC, 20). Important here is the polyvocal sense of "work," for if organic community is the product of its members' labor, the form of that product is a work of art, understood as the self-enclosed, remainderless totality of the oeuvre. 14 The imperative of the work governs the form of community that the first dinner party works to produce, an imperative encapsulated in the characters' projective creation of Percival, the absent center around which the text revolves. Absent from the text except in the memories and thoughts of the other characters, Percival exists only as the product of his friends' imaginative and identificatory labor; in working to fashion the social space enabled by the proper name "Percival," the characters produce him as the essential embodiment of their being-in-common. Percival, as Louis reminds us, "makes [the characters] aware that these attempts to say, 'I am this, I am that,' which [they] make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false" (W, 112). And if Louis declares the realized work of community with his announcement, "Something is made," Jinny gives form to this vague "something" when she implores, "Let us hold it for one moment . . . this globe whose walls are made of Percival" (W, 118-9). The communal space that has hitherto been articulated with recourse to the language of the affective body is, in this instance, substantially embodied by "Percival," a mythic production of the characters in which they initially recognize idealized versions of themselves and that ultimately constitutes the collective identity to which their individual selves are sacrificed. To return, in this context, to Tratner's linking of individualism and imperialist nationalism, it will be important to distance ourselves from his somewhat too hasty valorization of collectivism as a sufficient countermeasure. For in sacrificing their particularity as individual subjects to merge in a form of collective consciousness, the form of collectivity the characters fashion remains subjective. 15 Though the community achieved in the first dinner party counteracts atomistic individualism, it does not escape the logic of the Subject, a logic all too compatible with both nation and empire.
If the mythic fashioning of Percival is initially emblematic of the problems inherent in the structure of collectivity to which the novel turns, by the occasion of the second dinner party he, or more precisely, his death, will have become central to Woolf's response to these problems. Percival's death is, of course, literally central to the progression of The Waves; occurring midway through the text, it is announced by the short shocking statement, "He is dead" (W, 124).  Notwithstanding the irony of having Percival, knight errant and imperial champion, meet his end in an accidental fall from the back of a flea-bitten mare, his death initiates a critical reconsideration of both the affective body and the structure of collectivity it enables. Following quickly on the heels of the first dinner party, Percival's death calls the characters to ask what is at stake in the representational schema that fashions him. Having produced the myth of Percival as the myth of community, they must now reflect upon the ramifications of their labor and its product.
In speaking of Percival's "mythic" status, it will be important to recall Nancy's understanding of "myth" or "fiction" as those linguistic modes that do the work of organic community and produce the community as their work:
Absolute community--myth--is not so much the total fusion of individuals, but the will of community: the desire to operate, through the power of myth, the communion that myth represents and that it represents as a communion or communication of wills. Fusion ensues: myth represents multiple existences as immanent to its own unique fiction, which gathers them together and gives them their common re in its speech and as this speech [IC, 57].
Myth is, thus, distinguished not primarily by its referential status but by the extent to which it operates to produce community. Rather than representing community to a group of individuals or communicating some information about community that its members then hold in common, mythic speech is itself the operation of community--it is through the very act of mythic speech that community takes place. Given this tautological loop in which myth and community are locked--whereby myth can be said to communicate only itself as the taking place of community--it becomes impossible to think of community without myth or blithely to pursue a project of demythologization. If, in Nancy's formulation, all community necessarily takes place through the operation of myth and that operation is independent of myth's referential function, efforts to establish an unmythic form of collectivity through the exposure of a given myth's suspect referential status will gain no social purchase and will only perpetuate the operation of an adversarial mythic community. In this context the limitations of a reading that understands The Waves as simply engaged in satirizing imperialist, nationalist community--what Marcus characterizes as Woolf's "merciless parody" of the "myth of individualism and selfhood" and of the re of the imperial hero that is its manifestation--become evident because the force of satire or parody lies in its ability to ridicule, or demythologize, its object ("BR," 137).
Woolf's text undoubtedly engages in this sort of satire, the height of which is the circumstances of Percival's death, and in so doing critiques the ideological ramifications of the historically particular form of community he represents. It does not, however, limit itself to this critique, and the sheer event of Percival's death allows it to pursue the logic of mythic community to the point of what Nancy calls its "interruption." 16 Beyond her demythologizing tactics, Woolf develops a mode of writing that gives voice to this interruption and re-marks a limit at which the work of community--its individual member subjects, and the logic of the Subject itself--is opened up and exposed by the interactions of singular beings that cannot be put to work in the operations of myth. This "voice of interruption" is most audible in the characters' reactions to Percival's death. Uninterested in what the myth of Percival represents and unable to find language adequate to the fact of Percival's death, Rhoda, for example, is led to ask, "'Like' and 'like' and 'like'--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? . . . Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing" (W, 134). No longer the "something [that] is made" in the work of mythic community, he is, in death, merely "the thing" to which myth is inadequate and that constitutes its interruption (W, 118).
 She decides instead to go to a music hall, and her description of the vocal performance she witnesses is extraordinary:
swollen but contained in slippery satin, the seagreen woman comes to our rescue. She sucks in her lip, assumes an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurls herself precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple and her voice was the arrow into the note, "Ah!"An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers within the bark. "Ah!" cried a woman to her lover, leaning from her window in Venice. "Ah, ah!" she cried, and again she cries "Ah!" She has provided us with a cry. But only a cry. And what is a cry? [W, 133]
Unwilling to "smooth out" Percival's death in the process of representation, narration, or mythologization, Rhoda recognizes, nonetheless, her obligation to bear witness to the "thing" he has manifested to her, and in the moment of the vocal performance, she finds a means of understanding her obligation. Instead of the "'like' and 'like' and 'like'" of representation, she is confronted with the "'Ah!' and 'Ah!' and 'Ah!'" of the vocalist's "cry," an utterance that returns Rhoda to the affective body without allowing that mode of embodiment to become the basis of a communitarian myth. The affective charge of the singer's cry is pregnant with a significance that it cannot signify, and as such it allows Percival's death to open onto an alternate communal mode. The language of the cry refuses to qualify his death, to make it comprehensible through the memorializing production of a communal fiction; it does, however, inarticulately indicate the sheer fact of his death, a fact that the characters share even as they are confronted by the painful insistence that they can neither properly make Percival's death their own nor make it the ground of a shared subjective space.
In a parallel moment, Bernard responds to Percival's death with a visit to the National Gallery. Equally scornful of Louis's desire to "smooth things out," he insists:
but I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept the sequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the rhythm of my mind by stopping, by looking; I will walk. I will go up these steps into the gallery and submit myself to the influence of minds like mine outside the sequence. There is little time left to answer the question; my powers flag; I become torpid. Here are pictures. Here are cold madonnas among the pillars. Let them lay to rest the incessant activity of the mind's eye, the bandaged head, the men with ropes, so that I may find something unvisual beneath. Here are the gardens; and Venus among her flowers; here are saints and blue madonnas. Mercifully these pictures make no reference; they do not nudge; they do not point. Thus they expand my consciousness of him and bring him back to me differently [W, 104-5].
Rejecting the sequentializing effect of the phrases he constantly produces, Bernard finds solace in the affective quality of the pictures he views. The paintings make no appeal to the representational faculty of his "mind's eye" but present him with something "unvisual." Antireferential and nonindexical, the images do not inscribe Percival within a fiction of unity and foundational stability but "bring him back to [Bernard] differently." This difference produced by Bernard's affective experience pertains not only to Percival but to Bernard himself. If Bernard's experience in the gallery brings Percival back differently by manifesting the persistent necessity of remembering him before and beyond the work of memorializing fiction, it also installs a difference within the subject, the "me," to whom Percival returns. Exposing the individual to the singularity of an otherness that it can neither incorporate within the closure of the subject nor render the basis of a higher subjective mode (a "We") to which it can sacrifice itself, the demands of remembrance thematized by Bernard's experience are also the demands of an impossible community. This community is based not in the undifferentiating fusion of its individual members in a transcendental whole but precisely in their common exposure to, their sharing of, that which properly can be neither communicated nor shared.
Turning from the affective body as a vital principle of integration and organic unity to an understanding of the affective body as manifesting the limit re-marked by the singularly unrepresentable "thing" that the characters hold in common but can never properly share, by the second dinner party, The Waves insists that the desire for community must be negotiated in a very different register, and in a different language, from that of the characters' first "coming together." Closing in Bernard's voice, Woolf refuses the mythologizing narrative of the "summing up" that would be proper to an organic notion of community (W, 199). Instead, she has him articulate a series of questions: "What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death?" (W, 199) Bernard responds:
I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases [W, 246].
Forcing us to conceive of community in terms of the demands of the "broken words, inarticulate words" (W, 161), of a "howl" or a "cry," Woolf rejects the totalizing fiction of organic community and is able to exclaim with Bernard, "Heaven be praised . . . we need not whip this prose into poetry. The little language is enough" (W, 219).
Craig Gordon is a Ph.D. candidate in York University's Graduate Program in English. Currently he is working on a study of the relations between Anglo-American literary modernism and turn-of-the-century medical and bioscientific discourses.
1. See Michael Tratner, "Ideology and Literary Form in The Waves," in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 217-40, for a genealogy of this critical trend.
2. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3; hereafter abbreviated W.
3. Other important considerations of the communitarian aspects of Woolf's writing, and of The Waves in particular, include Jane Marcus, "Britannia Rules The Waves," in Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of the Twentieth-Century British Literary Canons, ed. Karen Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 136-62, hereafter abbreviated "BR"; and Gillian Beer, "The Body of the People in Virginia Woolf," in Women Reading Women's Writing, ed. Sue Roe (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 85-114.
4. My somewhat anachronistic use of "neuroscience" is intended to encompass a group of disciplines in relation to which psychologists understood their work at the turn of the century. The texts that I approach as examples of "neuroscience" could more properly be described as psychological but represent a form of psychology that develops out of late-nineteenth-century experimental psychology and therefore draws heavily upon neurological and neurophysiological research. As such the psychological categories they mobilize are heavily implicated in the positivist presuppositions and procedures of a scientific approach to the human body.
5. To say that different discursive domains are "ostensibly discrete" is not to suggest that there are no distinctions at all (and thereby posit a smooth surface of culture on which all discursive production becomes equalized as a sort of sociological fact) but to insist that it is crucial to attend to the ways in which the boundaries between domains are maintained or breached.
6. Beer, "The Body of the People," 85, 87.
7. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorder (New York: Appleton, 1886), 14.
8. Project for a Scientific Psychology, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 1:295.
9. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18; hereafter abbreviated PP.
10. For fairly programmatic articulations of this problematic see Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998); idem, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Edward Carpenter, The Art of Creation: Essays on the Self and Its Powers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1904); and D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (New York: Penguin, 1977). Of particular interest in this context is Carpenter's articulation of this tension in his understanding of the relationship between individual selves and what he calls the universal Self of the vital universe. In Carpenter's view humanity resides predominantly in a state of consciousness (closely associated with the operations of the intellect and a scientific temperament) that emphasizes identity and distinction and thereby renders inaccessible the realization of a vast, vital connectedness that underlies such distinctions. In a passage whose similarity to Neville's ration of the nerves as a web that subtends and unifies all of existence makes it difficult not to read it as Woolf's source, Carpenter imagines the overcoming of this intellectual state of consciousness:
This body, in fact, is the expression and grows out of those great creative feelings of which I have just spoken. Through Love it becomes a body built into the lives of others, and positively sharing their organic life and vitality. Since Faith and Courage inspire it, it is well based, firm to stand the shocks of Time and Accident; extending its domain over the elements; incorporating in itself the sea and the wild creatures, and so unafraid of them; surrounding Chance and taking it captive. Its consciousness of immense Extension in time and space indicates its ethereal character; its consciousness of Power indicates its strongly material composition; its consciousness of Knowledge, the penetrating subtle quality of it. And so we forebode, beside and within the very local body which we know best (and which is expressive of our more local selves), another body expressive of our more universal nature--a body built of swift, far-extending ethereal elements, subtle and penetrating, yet powerfully massive and material; closely knit in itself, not easily disturbed or dislocated, enduring for æons; yet sensitive in the highest degree, and twining its nerves and fibres through all Creation--sharing the life of all creatures [Carpenter, The Art of Creation, 232-3].
11. Beyond articulating the individualizing function of the habitualized body, neuroscientific discourse itself makes the link between individualism and an explicitly conservative, communitarian project. In James, the habitualized body preserves both class distinctions between "the children of fortune" and the "envious . . . poor," and racialized distinctions between a presumably civilized white readership and the hostile "natives of the desert and frozen zone" (PP, 125). Unsurprisingly, Maudsley's project supports, indeed presupposes, a similar social model. In outlining his "inductive" approach to the "investigation of mind," he contends that "we ought certainly to begin our inquiry with the observation of the simplest instances--with its physiological manifestations in animals, in children, in idiots, in savages, mounting by degrees to the highest and most recondite facts of consciousness" (Maudsley, Body and Mind, 148).
12. Writing of an alternate model of community, Nancy suggests that:
Community is the community of others, which does not mean that several individuals possess some common nature in spite of their differences, but rather that they partake only of their otherness. Otherness, at each moment, is the otherness of each "myself," which is "myself" only as an other. Otherness is not a common substance, but it is on the contrary the nonsubstantiality of each "self" and of its relationship with the others. All the selves are related through their otherness, which means that they are not "related"; in any case, not in any determinable sense of relationship. They are together, but togetherness is otherness [Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 155].
13. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 9; hereafter abbreviated IC. In describing this form of community, Nancy also suggests that it is "what we have called 'totalitarianism,' but it might be better named 'immanentism,' as long as we do not restrict the term to designating certain types of societies or regimes but rather see in it the general horizon of our time, encompassing both democracies and their fragile judicial parapets" .
14. Glossing this definition, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 70, writes that "In immanentism it [organic community] is the community itself, the people or the nation, that is the work [oeuvre] following the conception acknowledged by Romanticism of the work as subject and the subject as work: the 'living artwork' indeed, though this in no way prevents it from working lethally."
15. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) captures some of this tension. Distinguishing between the citizen and the subject, he writes, "The citizen is, first of all, one, someone, everyone, while the subject is, first of all, self, that is, the circling back through which a one raises its unicity to the power of unity. The citizenship comprises numerous unicities, subjecthood comprises an identificatory unity" . The sacrifice of individuality to the community formed through the first dinner party can be understood, in this context, as the conversion of a number of unicities into the essential unity of a communal subjecthood.
16. Nancy introduces the notion of "interruption" in "Myth Interrupted," in IC, 43-70.
Modernist literary and cultural criticism has dominated the study of English literature throughout the greater part of the twentieth century. Only in the last ten or fifteen years have literary critics developed an alternative set of tools to probe the ideological underpinnings of modernist criticism itself. With these tools, a number of scholars have suggested that modernist criticism defined itself and the art it championed in opposition to mass culture. 1 In the wake of such proclamations, a few scholars have attempted to show that critics such as T. S. Eliot were in fact profoundly influenced by mass-cultural forms like jazz or the music hall. 2 Clearly the relationship between mass culture and modernist criticism was more fluid and more complicated than we have yet to recognize. As I will show, modernist critics I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and T. S. Eliot appropriated the very techniques attributed to mass-cultural consumption--shock and sensation--into their lexicon of high-cultural, aesthetic values while simultaneously decrying the effects of the "sensational" media. In doing so, their modernist critique reversed the central project of Kantian aesthetics, the dominant aesthetic practice of the late nineteenth century, to validate as fine arts only those arts that invoke disinterested contemplation rather than a sensuous interest on the part of the reader. Interestingly, however, modernist criticism furthered one aspect of the Kantian project--to bring the body and its senses more overtly into the ethical and social realm, what the early-twentieth-century critics called "cultural health." The modernist criticism of Richards, Leavis, and Eliot advocates an aesthetic practice that made way for the representation of bodies in art in addition to a mode of aesthetic reception that included the body as integral to forming aesthetic judgments. While making room for the body, modernist critics continued to promote the Kantian aesthetic's effort to objectify, rationalize, and make intelligible the body and its irrational sensuousness. Ironically, they did so by appropriating the very consumption strategies that they accused mass culture of creating.
Modernist criticism emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century as the first practical criticism of English literature produced from its new institutionalized status in the university. 3 The individual aims of Leavis, Richards, and Eliot, the three critics I will focus on in this essay, were part of a larger project not only of making English literature a subject of serious study at university but also of making it the moral focus of a public debate about individual sensibility and the "health" of culture at large. The "problem" or "decline" of culture, as they saw it, was imputed not just to the abundance of poor-quality, mass-media entertainment that purportedly numbed its audiences into automatic response but more importantly to the subsequent inability detected in the majority of the population to respond to the "real" works of culture. 4 If mass culture was an encroaching illness that fostered "cheap mechanical responses" 5 and transformed its participants into senseless automatons, then "real" or "elite" or "minority" culture, as it was variously labeled by its champions, was mass culture's antidote. Through the "direct shock of poetic intensity," in T. S. Eliot's words, "real" culture would revitalize not only the individual but eventually the entire culture. 6 Eliot's language here is an important clue to the nature of the modernist critical agenda with regard to the mass-culture debate. It reveals a rhetorical sleight of hand that makes possible the incorporation of certain mass-cultural forms into high art. By championing the "shock" to "sensibility" that could only be experienced by "true" or "high" culture, modernist critics appropriated the very labels that had been reserved previously for mass-cultural practices. Modernist criticism not only made a place for the body of the reader of cultural works in its notion of sensibility, by which it meant the connection between sensations, emotions, and cognitions, but, in its use of the "invigorating shock" of real culture, it made a place for the very kind of aesthetic reception that had previously been attributed to readers of sensational thrillers or pornography. 7 Sensation and feeling, once the province of mass culture, became its antidote. While in Kantian practice bodily sensation had no place in the "true" aesthetic interaction, modernist criticism championed "organic sensation" as one of the most positive virtues of the sensitive reader, a new sign of the authentic.
This acceptance of sensation under the rubric of the aesthetic opens the way for a positive revision of the place of a number of mass-cultural practices in art, most notably written and visual pornography. Throughout this essay I stress the importance of the incorporation of the pornographic in twentieth-century art and its acceptance by the critical establishment because they provide dramatic examples of the shift in dominant aesthetic practices. The pornographic brings with it a set of assumptions about its own consumption that always involves an engagement or incitation of the reader's or viewer's body, thus explicitly acknowledging the mind-body connection that modernist critics championed through their notion of sensibility. Within dominant aesthetic practices, the shift from a disinterested intellection, which rested on the removal of the body from the aesthetic interaction, to an aesthetic consumption that included the body as an integral, indeed foundational, part of the interaction not only made way for pornographic representations in works that aspired to high-art status but equally informed how those works would come to be read. Modernist critical reading practices began to incorporate mass-cultural patterns of response just as modernist works themselves had appropriated the tropes and images of mass culture.
For Leavis, Richards, and even Eliot, the critical project of valuing and responding to "culture" was one that promoted unity among citizens not on the basis of certain class affiliations or external coincidences but rather on the understanding of their most intimate subjectivity, the emotions and thoughts produced in response to aesthetic objects. To understand how these critics went about trying to create this "unified sensibility" on the basis of appropriate responses to cultural phenomena and how this in turn led to an accommodation of the pornographic in literature, I want to examine their thoughts on mass culture and aesthetic reception.
The defining impetus behind modernist criticism is that mass-produced forms of cultural entertainment, such as fiction, radio, and films, are destructive to the quality of individual lives and hence the fabric of society as a whole. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold's claims for the civilizing and spiritualizing effects of culture, the criticism of Richards, Eliot, and especially that of Leavis, attempts to define a rationale for concretizing and preserving, as Pamela McCallum has phrased it, "the ethical efficacy of cultural phenomena" (LM, 3-4). But in order to claim that a specific body of cultural artifacts (what we have come to call "the canon") is central to the social whole, an argument has to be made against the forces that appear to threaten or work in opposition to this cultural body. Modernist criticism thus mounts a defense of ethical culture. Ethical culture is threatened in terms of production, where the masses of printed media threaten to relegate "classic" English poetry and literature to the margins of social interest, and in terms of consumption, where mass-cultural consumers demonstrate passive consumption strategies based on certain horizons of expectation that have to be defeated in order for high-cultural phenomena to be prioritized. Literary criticism of the 1920s and 1930s attempts to identify and attack mass-cultural incursions into the realm of culture through a rhetoric of high-cultural hysteria, punctuated quite clearly in the now famous Scrutiny manifesto of 1932, which not only declares that "the age is illiterate with periodicals" and that "the general dissolution of standards is commonplace," but indeed notes, "Many profess to believe (though fewer seem to care) that the end of Western civilization is in sight." 8
Part of this the-sky-is-falling frenzy is provoked by Eliot's influential notion of the "dissociation of sensibility" as expressed in his 1921 essay, "The Metaphysical Poets." Eliot's idea that "in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered" creates a truly potent myth of the divided personality of both "the mind of England" and the individuals within it. 9 F. R. Leavis forms his own view of English literary and cultural history on Eliot's foundation, and he furthers Eliot's idea with his own notion that the Shakespearean era represents the last "organic community" England has known. 10 Since then, according to Leavis, industrialized capitalism has begun to make irrevocable and regrettable changes to the previously-whole fabric of English culture. A striking factor in Eliot's chronology of the idea that thought and feeling, mind and body, are rent asunder is, as other critics have noted, that he places the origin of this so-called modern crisis in the English Civil War period, thus associating it with the first articulations of opposed class-interests by popular revolt. 11 Part of the project of modernist criticism--to reintegrate the body with the mind into one unified sensibility--should be read analogously, then, as a desire for the reintegration of divided class sensibilities. Modernist works such as Ulysses or Lady Chatterly's Lover, which introduce sexually explicit bodies into their larger, multiperspectived frameworks, enact this reintegration by setting the pornographic, or bodily representations/incitations, into a dialogue with the other discourses that enter the text. By allowing what is perceived as a lower-class discourse into high art, a social reintegration of representational types occurs on the page whether this bodily discourse is controlled by the "high-cultural" aesthetic techniques that deploy it, is subversive of the aesthetic it joins, or enacts a pluralist model of representation.
Eliot makes the political function of this reintegration quite overt in his 1920 essay "Philip Massinger," where he writes, "The Elizabethan morality was an important convention; important because it was not consciously of one social class alone, because it provided a framework for emotions to which all classes could respond, and it hindered no feeling. It was not hypocritical and it did not suppress." 12 The Elizabethan era provides a social and psychological model of "wholeness" and "integrated sensibility" for Eliot and Leavis, as well as for Q. D. Leavis, whose published thesis, Fiction and the Reading Public , contributed to the hyperbolic tone of the mass-culture debate. Rhetorically maintaining the strict class boundaries that he seems to want to overcome, F. R. Leavis remarks in an essay on Joyce that Shakespeare belonged "to a genuinely national culture, to a community in which it was possible for the theatre to appeal to the cultivated and the populace at the same time." 13 Though Eliot's association of this prelapsarian state of culture with the body is only implicit, Leavis makes his association explicit through an appeal to philological authority. Describing the "popular basis of [Elizabethan] culture" as "agricultural," Leavis says that the philologist "Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith shows how much of the strength and subtlety of English idiom derives from an agricultural way of life." Quoting Smith, he concludes that "when we examine these phrasal verbs, we find that by far the greater number of them also render their meanings in terms of bodily sensation. They are formed from simple verbs which express the act, notions, and attitudes of the body and its members." 14 Thus to Leavis's mind a "whole" or "organic" society is one that expresses and represents bodily sensation in language, or where language, body, and thought are so close as to be identical expressions of one another. Leavis equates language with culture, and therefore this ideal compression of body and language demonstrates a desire primarily to integrate the stratified people of the social body into one culture but also to experience one's own body more fully. Of course the primary influence on Leavis's work is the author he championed throughout his life, D. H. Lawrence. Leavis advocates an aesthetic that validates Lawrence's writing and ought to be recognized as having originated there. Both on a physical level in terms of experiencing the body through culture (the bodily sensations you receive as a reader) and on a political level in terms of representing the body politic, the myths of unified sensibility and the organic society help create a mode of aesthetic understanding that supports the works of modernist artists who incorporate mass-cultural tropes and images, most notably those of pornography, into their topoi. Though critical assessment of Eliot's and Leavis's concepts of a lost unity have tended to follow Raymond Williams's pronouncement of Leavis's version of history as "myth in the sense of conjecture . . . a surrender to a characteristically industrialist, or urban, nostalgia," these ideologies powerfully shaped a unified sense of loss and subsequently a purpose for culture, especially for English literature studies. 15
If the notion of a lost wholeness rallies belief in the purpose and power of literature and culture to restore the loss, the degradations of mass culture are an even more potent galvanizing tool. Mass culture can be framed as a contemporary enemy that cannot be defeated, but it must be countered by a subject whose sophisticated reading and viewing practices serve as a defense against its cheapening or deadening effects. Teaching readers how to respond appropriately to cultural material, or, in the context of the study of English literature, how to "read" poetry and novels, works to ensure that a specific kind of response toward the text in question is formulated. The problem of mass-cultural media as identified by modernist critics is the low level of sensitivity and responsiveness required from their audience. In Principles of Literary Criticism , Richards suggests that "At present, bad literature, bad art, the cinema, etc. are an influence of first importance in fixing immature and actually inapplicable attitudes to most things. . . . Against these stock-responses the artist's internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer's triumphs are made." 16 Q. D. Leavis, a pupil of Richards's at Cambridge who uses the ideas above as the foundational concepts of her own work, extends his argument with the idea that writers of cheap, mass-produced fiction "work upon and solidify herd prejudice and . . . debase the emotional currency by touching grossly on fine issues." Further, they foster "cheap mechanical responses" to circumstances that ought, in her opinion, to be more finely discerned because "The training of the reader who spends his leisure in cinemas, looking through magazines and newspapers, listening to jazz music, does not merely fail to help him, it prevents him from normal development partly by providing him with a set of habits inimical to mental effort" (FRP, 67, 74, 224). These sentiments are echoed relentlessly throughout F. R. Leavis's work, as, for example, in his pamphlet "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture" where he suggests that "When we consider, for instance, the processes of mass-production and standardisation in the form represented by the Press, it becomes obviously of sinister significance that they should be accompanied by a process of leveling-down." The concepts of mass-production and standardization apply "more disastrously" to films because their influence is more potent; "they provide now the main form of recreation in the civilised world; and they involve surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional appeals, appeals the more insidious because they are associated with a compellingly vivid illusion of actual life." 17 One gathers from the characterizations above that the typical mass-culture consumer in the 1920s and 1930s is assumed to be an emotionally stunted, passive receptacle with an endless capacity to be filled with cheap, standardized media that reproduce in its readers and viewers (in a mode assumed to be nondialogical) standardized or stock responses. The mass-culture consumer is essentially the imprint of all he or she consumes.
The class location of the mass-culture consumer appears at this time to be in flux, sometimes attributed by modernist critics to the middle class, often to the working or lower classes. The fact is that mass culture in its various forms was reaching into pockets of all classes. Eliot, in an essay on the music hall entertainer Marie Lloyd, definitively places the passive consumption strategies within the middle class, which he sees as slowly absorbing all classes of society:
With the decay of the music-hall, with the encroachment of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema, the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie. The working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with artist which is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art. He will now go to the cinema, where his mind is lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and will receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art. He will also have lost some of his interest in life. 18
What this essay and this passage show is that Eliot's notion of culture, unlike Leavis's and Richards's, is inclusive of a broad variety of social practices at every level of society. Indeed, his later works, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of Culture, suggest that by culture he means the spiritual fabric that pervades and motivates all social practices. Eliot's sentimentalizing of the working man's interactive aesthetic receptivity as shown above corroborates Richards's and the Leavises' notion that mass culture tends to pacify its audience into a state of pure receptivity. Significantly, he suggests that all art is a necessary collaboration between audience and artist requiring mental effort. Q. D. Leavis supports his notion even though her language codes a class bias that locates passive, mass-cultural consumption practices within the lower classes. Her concept of culture is more closely circumscribed by literary culture, and she romanticizes a time when the majority of the population was illiterate and uneducated and therefore "did not complicate matters by creating a separate semi-literate public to interfere with the book market." The advantage of such a time was that "the rate of absorption of the lowest class into the middle class was slow enough to prevent any lowering of standards" (FRP, 146). Not surprisingly, her ideal era for literary culture is the eighteenth century, before, she believes, capitalist industrialism thoroughly penetrated subject formation and when the bourgeois sector of the public assimilated itself to the dominant aristocratic culture by adopting and mimicking aristocratic antimaterialist ideals. The coded language of the following assertion reveals her class biases: "The difference between the popular novels of the eighteenth century and of the nineteenth is that the new fiction instead of requiring its readers to co-operate in a sophisticated entertainment discovers 'the great heart of the public.' Whereas Sterne's successors at any rate represent a cultivation of the emotions founded on a gentle code, Dickens stands primarily for a set of crude emotional exercises" (FRP, 156). The "gentle" or gentrified code that is "cultivated" in the organic cultural style of the eighteenth century is replaced, in her mythology, by "crude," i.e. lower-class, exploitation of the labile emotions through repetitive "exercises."
More than the other modernist critics, Q. D. Leavis fulfills Andreas Huyssen's suggestion that "to reduce all cultural criticism to the problem of quality is a symptom of the anxiety of contamination." 19 Q. D. Leavis demonstrates this anxiety when discussing the circulation of cheap fiction. Acknowledging that the current taste is for "thrillers," she says, "the reading habit is now often a form of drug habit. In suburban side-streets and even village shops it is common to find a stock of worn and greasy novels let out at 2d or 3d a volume; and it is surprising that a clientele drawn from the poorest class can afford to change the books several times a week, or even daily; but so strong is the reading habit that they do" (FRP, 7). Q. D. Leavis's anxiety focuses on circulation, and specifically the circulation of pleasure (for whatever the outcome of taking drugs, the impetus is always the pursuit of pleasure), amongst the lower classes, and it is continuous with a fear of contamination (note the description of the novels as "greasy") by the lower classes. The suburban location is significant in that it indicates a rising lower-middle class. However, while it is true that modernist criticism demonstrates a high level of anxiety with regard to the potential evils of mass-cultural contamination, both of society at large and of high-cultural products, it is also true that no prior period of English literary criticism was as influenced by such a force. With various forms of mass culture such as newspapers, penny novels, and pornography gaining great momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, their identification as mass culture is an effect of the attempt to segregate what had already begun to penetrate the sphere of dominant high culture. Works typically labeled high modernism, such as Joyce's Ulysses or Eliot's The Waste Land, give us clear evidence of this fact in their incorporation of popular music, sentimental fiction, and pornography within frameworks that, as modernist critics would have us believe, are larger than the sum of their individual parts.
Eliot's and Q. D. Leavis's differing placement of mass-cultural consumption practices aside, their terminology of reception agrees. Mass cultural consumers are "lulled" into "listless apathy" by a "set of crude emotional exercises" that take the form of a "drug habit." Conversely, consumers of "real" culture "co-operate" on a level with the artist; they engage in a "collaboration of the audience with artist" that participates in their "interest." Strikingly, receptivity is reinscribed into an active role. Where prior to modernist criticism apprehension of cultural objects was described by "stasis" as opposed to motion and interest, here such modes are positively described. Continuous with post-Kantian aesthetic practices, motion and interest were behavioral patterns negatively associated with lower-class or mass-cultural patterns of cultural consumption and especially with pornography. What appears to have occurred is a reversal of tropes by which modernist criticism effects an appropriation of mass-cultural consumption strategies. The effect of such an appropriation dramatically reshapes notions not simply of proper modes of cultural consumption but, in concert with this, of what constitutes an artistic experience consonant with provoking the correct mode of receptivity. To phrase the transition in Kantian terminology, if the nineteenth century was the century of the beautiful, a time that favored an aesthetic mode of receptivity that set the mind into "restful contemplation," the twentieth century is the century, as Jean-François Lyotard has told us, of the sublime, favoring an aesthetic mode of receptivity that "sets the mind into motion." 20 Training for this specific mode of receptivity is the project of modernist criticism.
The training of sensibility, or responsiveness, was I. A. Richards's primary project, and his work in this area deeply informs the Leavises' work. Richards took a moral stand with regard to aesthetic reception by declaring, "Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are disorganised and confused" (PLC, 62). Richards here provides the other side to the mass-culture debate. If the crude and vulgar are defined by their dulled consumption of mass culture, so the refined, indeed the morally superior, are given shape through a keen receptivity and organized response to the conflicting impulses of genuine art. Art possesses the capability of raising and organizing the level of response. If, through the onslaught of mass culture, art should disappear, Richards claims "a biological calamity of the first order will have occurred . . . the raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which it may be raised or lowered" (PLC, 234, emphasis in original). Seven years later, the Scrutiny manifesto echoes Richards's sentiments and, in a characteristically shrill tone, declares that "there is a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual's response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence," humane in this instance working tautologically in cooperation with the quality of response as a way of redefining the socially elite, "polite," or "humane" studies. 21 In the same issue of Scrutiny F. R. Leavis makes his homage to Richards's teaching overt by stating that, with regard to the literary mind, "the defect of intelligence is a default on the part of sensibility; a failure to keep closely enough in touch with responses to particular arrangements of words." In order to avoid this defect "Everything must start from and be related to the training of sensibility, the kind of training of which Mr. Richards has been a pioneer." 22
For Eliot, this sensibility is mostly psychological. Poetry, he remarks in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, "may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world." 23 This "self-realizing" capacity in accessing high-cultural products is central to modernist criticism's ability to persuade a generation of readers of a specific mode of "close" reading. The irony of course is that the cultural distinction earned through applying specific reading practices to literature enacts the very same subject formation supposedly gained through reading specific works. The process, not the product, informs the subject. Reading oneself into distinction is a circular and self-confirming process. While the readerly stance masquerades as a form of complete receptivity, a personal void awaiting cultural fulfillment, its proactive stance toward that form of receptivity belies the nature of reading as an already-formed performance of self that is a set of attitudes brought to the text under the name of "receptivity." When Leavis declares that "The education of sensibility implied in my phrase, 'English' as a discipline of thought', aims at fostering the completest receptivity that can be attained," his concept of receptive openness is not in fact a specular emptiness, as consumers of mass culture are conceived, but rather a "disciplined" vessel of sensibility, the twentieth-century reconration of Kantian "taste." "Sensibility," Leavis says, "is more complex in its ambiguity than 'taste'." 24 Conceived as a reader's full mental and sensual dialogic relation with a text, sensibility is supposedly "more complex" because it allows not only a fuller reciprocity between subject and object but also a more complete subject, whose aesthetic judgment is not confined to the cognitive faculties but rather to a more complete "sensibility." This theory, however, enforces an absolute moral distinction between works of high and low literature and puts a premium on originality as that which can "shock," rather than "lull," a reader into fresh reception.
Modernist critics perceive a dialogic relation between text and reader, and in turn they begin to incorporate shock and invigoration, the senses, into the consumption practices of highbrow literature. Q. D. Leavis, for example, differentiates high from low by suggesting that readers of best-sellers "mistake the relief of meeting the expected, and being given the desired picture of life, for the exhilarating shock that a novel coming from the first-class fully aware mind gives." Further she notes, "The peculiar property of a good novel . . . is the series of shocks it gives the reader's preconceptions . . . a conration of special instances which serve as a test for our mental habits and show us the necessity of revising them" (FRP, 74, 256). Shock here is conred as a positive experience, as that which sets the reader into dialogic engagement with the text. It is thus curious to note that shock in the sensation-literature debate of the 1860s, or shock in the mass-culture debate of the 1920s and 1930s, is seen as the simple tool of emotional exploitation, as that which provokes a nonintellectual response. Yet in high culture this invigoration of mental and emotional lassitude is a common rallying point in modernist critiques of the cultural dilemma; only "real" cultural phenomena can arouse the mental acuity that accompanies shock. Robert Graves and Laura Riding corroborate the Leavises' ideas in their assessment of modernist poetry that seems to their "plain reader," or middle- and lowbrow consumer, "to be only part of the game of high-brow baiting low-brow." 25 In their pseudoempirical survey of the difficulty of modernist poetry, Graves and Riding conclude that if they are able to find value in the difficult and abstruse poetry of the modern day, then their beleaguered reader "must admit that what is called our common intelligence is the mind in its least active state: that poetry obviously demands more vigorous imaginative effort than the plain reader has been willing to apply to it." 26 As is the message throughout modernist criticism, superior and "true" cultural media demand an interactive response from their audience. "Real" culture demands a full sensibility in all of its disciplined ambiguity. Interestingly, the approach to cultural texts advocated by modernist critics differs little from the approach to pornographic texts taken by readers of pornography who engage their "bodily consciousness" or sensibility in a "disciplined" dialogue with the text in order to receive a specific, sexual form of invigoration from it.
In stressing the idea of sensibility, the modernists were resolutely making a place for the body in cultural consumption and as such were specifically going against the Kantian aesthetic ideal and the trend of more than one hundred years of literary criticism. Kant tried to remove the body from the pure, aesthetic interaction, separating the agreeable, which could provoke a pleasurable sensation, from the beautiful, which was a product of mind as opposed to body. In his third Critique Kant notes that "The universal communicability of a pleasure involves in its very concept that the pleasure is not one of enjoyment arising out of mere sensation, but must be one of reflection. Hence aesthetic art, as art which is beautiful, is one having for its standard the reflective judgement and not organic sensation" (CJ, 166). Richards's project is to a large extent a reversal of this notion, specifically in his insistence that "the Mind-Body problem is strictly speaking no problem," that mind and body react to stimuli in concert, and that a purely mental reaction is an impossibility. Directly speaking to this issue, Richards says:
The identification of the mind with a part of the working of the nervous system, need involve, theology apart, no disturbance of anyone's attitude to the world, his fellow-men, or to himself. . . . The nervous system is the means by which stimuli from the environment or from the body, result in appropriate behaviour. All mental events occur in the course of processes of adaptation, somewhere between a stimulus and a response [PLC, 85].
Richards's psychological training introduces into literary criticism the idea that the mind and body form one sensibility and that the experience of literature is the experience of the sensibility in dialogue with the text. Much in line with D. H. Lawrence's thinking as exemplified in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Richards suggests that consciousness is formed in part by a bodily consciousness. "The effects in the body of almost all stimuli of whatever nature are extraordinarily numerous and varied," Richards claims. "A lump in the throat, a yearning in the bowels, horripilation, breathlessness, these are their coarser and more obvious forms. Usually they are less salient and fuse with the whole mass of internal sensations to form the coenesthesia, the whole bodily consciousness" (PLC, 85). Eliot's thinking accords with this (and simultaneously alludes to Joyce's elaborate bodily scheme for the chapters of Ulysses) in his notion that a writer of the modern age is without Sir Philip Sidney's prerogative simply to look into his heart and write. Rather, "One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts." 27 Allowing the body to enter the reading (or writing) process is a technique already begun by pornographic texts; indeed, pornography played a key role in the formation of the idea of a bodily consciousness in that it encouraged a reciprocity and cooperation between body and mind within the reading framework. Its incorporation via the field of psychology into high-cultural reading practices makes way for the introduction of the pornographic into high art.
Richards goes further toward positioning a reading practice in opposition to Kantian principles. He notes that with regard to a Kantian judgment of taste and "the special form as it is usually described--in terms of disinterestedness, detachment, distance, impersonality, subjective universality, and so forth--this form, I shall try to show later, is sometimes no more than a consequence of the incidence of experience, a condition or an effect of communication" (PLC, 15). Richards rejects here the notion that a peculiar aesthetic attitude leads to a peculiar aesthetic value or a pure art value. Instead, he emphasizes that the value is to be found in the experience of aesthetic apprehension itself. Richards, as John Needham has suggested, wants to defeat those who go to poetry looking for a message. 28 Instead his work implies that the "meaning" of a poem is what one goes through in reading it. The realization produced by a complex use of language plays a moral part in the production of the reading experience, for what one is realizing in the end is, just as Eliot's criticism implies, oneself.
Through the self-realizing or subject-forming capacities of culture, modernist criticism further veers away from a Kantian heritage. Instead of focusing on the "subjective universality" (to use Richards's characterization of the Kantian stance) of the aesthetic experience, Eliot, Richards, and Leavis each stress the individual particularity of every aesthetic interaction. Where seeking a universal consensus was an important part of the Kantian project, indeed one of the foundational reasons for his aesthetic critique, universality in the modernist era comes to be associated with mass culture and, as such, is seen as a negative. In fact, for Eliot, good poetry evokes feelings or a response that cannot be universally communicated. This is an absolute reversal of Kantian aesthetic philosophy whose very grounds of judgment rely on the communicability of such experiences in order to promote community. The response of modernist criticism to the seemingly universal appeal of mass culture is to stress the particular and the individual. Paradoxically, these critics use the individualist, capitalist ethic to t what they see as capitalist incursions into the soul. Leavis is a fierce defender of particularity and sees in D. H. Lawrence a model for both writer and critic. "Without a sustained, tense and living relation with the concrete, with the particulars of experience," Leavis says, "the respectability and the erudition are barren. D. H. Lawrence had a genius for it, and his importance as a 'thinker' is that he could command the concrete by creative art" ("LM," 28). The critical assessment, like the creative production, should lead to the particular, not to the universal. If the critical act of assessing art is to be instrumental to self-realization, it will need to lead to sensuous and material particularity in order to fall into accord with the individualist ethic of consumer capitalism. Reading becomes as constitutive of individual identity as buying a car (and not so different). "Judgement" is reconred from the Kantian norm as "not a matter of abstraction," but "involv[ing] particular immediate acts of choice," and this choice is dependent on the "free and delicate receptivity to fresh experience" that forms one's sensibility. 29
Sensibility is then apotheosized into a replacement for the famous Kantian concept of genuine aesthetic interaction leading to the "free play of reason" (CJ, 39, 58, 88, 107). Leavis declares instead that aesthetic apprehension should lead to "the free play of sensibility." 30 The free play of sensibility is in turn a concept that accommodates, perhaps even mimics, the kind of bodily incitation/interrogation provoked by the pornographic. This mode of aesthetic apprehension is indeed a consumption practice, epitomized in Leavis's quite famous notion that the critic's task "is to enter into possession of the given poem (let us say) in its concrete fullness, and his constant concern is never to lose his completeness of possession, but rather to increase it. In making value-judgements (and judgements as to significance), implicitly or explicitly, he does so out of that completeness of possession and with that fullness of response." 31 Here Leavis's critical approach, a model of appropriation and consumption that like Richards's is a "reductive hermeneutic wherein human consciousness moves towards its own completion through the mere possession of a cultural object," demonstrates not just its complicity in accommodating the acquisitive practices of modernist literature in its appropriation of pornographic tropes and images but indeed a mirror image of that impulse (LM, 182). The appropriative impulse is one of the defining characteristics of both modernist literature, in its incorporation of mass-cultural works including pornography into an aesthetico-moral framework, and of modernist criticism, in its notion that the reader literally incorporates his reading into his morally evaluative person. The pornographic or bodily impulse of the mass-cultural consumer is acknowledged by modernist criticism only to be subsumed into its larger, ethical scheme.
Modernist criticism quite significantly evokes, and/or mimics, the forms it evaluates in Eliot's and Richards's similar concepts of irony and complexity. Richards's theory of irony and disinterest is one of the centerpieces of his literary theory and is evocative of the very techniques used by James Joyce and Aubrey Beardsley in incorporating an explicit sexual aesthetic into their works. Richards's theory begins with the concept that every reader is the subject of certain impulses triggered in response to the stimuli generated by whatever he or she is reading. 32 Irony is a favored mode because it orders impulses in such a way that they provide their own system of checks and balances. "Irony," Richards says, "consists in the bringing in of the opposite, the complementary impulses" (PLC, 250). In poetry of the highest order, says Richards, "the most obvious feature is the heterogeneity of the distinguishable impulses," which are "more than heterogeneous, they are opposed" (PLC, 250). This opposition is necessary to a moral and physical sense of balance, which is described by Richards as disinterest, a response brought about most effectively through the oppositional impulses of irony:
The equilibrium of opposed impulses, which we suspect to be the ground-plan of the most valuable aesthetic responses, brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of a more defined emotion. We cease to be oriented in one direction; more facets of the mind are exposed and, what is the same thing, more aspects of things are able to affect us. To respond, not through one narrow channel of interest, but simultaneously and coherently through many, is to be disinterested in the only sense of the word which concerns us here. A state of mind which is not disinterested is one which sees things only from one standpoint or under one aspect. At the same time since more of our personality is engaged the independence and individuality of other things becomes greater. We seem to see "all round them," to see them as they really are; we see them apart from any one particular interest which they may have for us. Of course without some interest we should not see them at all, but the less any one particular interest is indispensable, the more detached our attitude becomes. And to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way of saying that our personality is more completely involved [PLC, 252-3].
Here Richards helps to articulate more fully the self-actuating principles behind Arnold's impulse to "see the object as in itself it really is." 33 Interestingly, Richards's desired outcome for the reader is that any impulse toward action be stifled by the competing impulses so that the reader remain in a state of engaged but static detachment. As he, C. K. Ogden, and James Wood state in The Foundations of Aesthetics , the superabundance of expression "produces an equilibrium of impulses, which prevents the fundamental tendency from breaking forth into overt action." 34 In that most of his work appears between the two world wars, Richards's concern for preventing the canalization of interest and any subsequent selfish action can be seen to enact a political analogy. Richards himself makes that analogy clear in references throughout his works to the political events of the time. Thus the need for an ironic equilibration of impulses is given stronger impetus by the reminder that "The extent to which reference is interfered with by needs and desires is underestimated even by those who, not having yet forgotten the events of 1914-1918, are most skeptical as to the independence of opinions and desires. Even the most ordinary and familiar objects are perceived as it pleases us to perceive them rather than as they are" (PLC, 263-4). And so he suggests:
Our impulses must have some order, some organization, or we do not live ten minutes without disaster. In the past, Tradition, a kind of Treaty of Versailles assigning frontiers and spheres of influence to the different interests, and based chiefly upon conquests, ordered our lives in a moderately satisfactory manner. But Tradition is weakening. Moral authorities are not as well backed by the beliefs as they were; their sanctions are declining in force. We are in need of something to take the place of the old order. Not in need of a new balance of power, a new arrangement of conquests, but of a League of Nations for the moral ordering of impulses; a new order based on conciliation, not on attempted suppression. 35
Like many of the eighteenth-century philosophies of taste or the aesthetic, this model is alert to the dangers of one's self-controlling or self-starting impulses. Art offers a neutralization of these impulses by putting them into a complex network of competitive relationships so that any selfish, impulsive action that might endanger the whole is preempted. Richards clearly reveals here the social and political ideals at stake in his notion of irony and complexity. His stress on the ironic equilibrium of contending forces provides a model, as Steven Connor has noted, "not only of the well-adjusted person, but also of the well-balanced liberal state." 36 The balancing of pluralistic impulses creates an irony that Linda Hutcheon describes as used to set up "an egalitarian, indeed, democratizing tension between emotions and even meanings." 37
In contrast with Eliot and Richards, F. R. Leavis does not favor irony. As Schwartz claims, he distrusts it on the basis that it "suggests a lack of seriousness or intensity towards oneself or one's subject matter." 38 Instead of seeking an equilibrium based on complex and competing impulses as arranged by the author, Leavis looks for a unity based on the consciousness of the reader. Thus in his critique of The Waste Land he approves of the "rich disorganization" of the poem on the basis that "The unity the poem aims at is that of an inclusive consciousness." 39 That consciousness, Leavis admits, is an elite one. "The poem in any case exists," Leavis says, "and can exist, only for an extremely limited public equipped with special knowledge." The limited audience of The Waste Land is a symptom, Leavis argues, "of the state of culture that produced the poem. Works expressing the finest consciousness of the age in which the word 'high-brow' has become current are almost inevitably such as to appeal only to a tiny minority." 40 This minority is, however, central to Leavis's solution to what he sees as the social problems of his day. They have a duty to work toward "controlling the machine." 41 The minority, as he conceives it, will be cultivated in the universities and upon them will depend "the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age." 42
Demonstrating the will to order that he shares with Eliot, Leavis outlines the university as the center of the "unified sensibility" against "the machine" that will in turn provide an ordering center to society as a whole:
There can be no control [of the machine] without (to revert to the metaphors of "organism" and "mind") a higher coordination. An urgent necessary work, consequently, is to explore the means of bringing the various kinds of specialist knowledge and training into effective relation with informed general intelligence, humane culture, social conscience and political will. Indicated here we have the function that is pre-eminently the university's. 43
In his notion of controlling centers, whether the human psyche controlling or integrating sensible consciousness or the university acting as the controlling center of the sensibility of a civilization (two allegorical models of the mind-body paradigm), Leavis reverts to championing writers whose works demonstrate the complexity of the modern situation in a resolute order. This is perhaps one of the major reasons why Leavis so fervently endorses D. H. Lawrence's work throughout his career. Lawrence's work, according to Leavis, "is an immense body of living creation in which a supreme vital intelligence is the creative spirit--a spirit informed by an almost infallible sense for health and sanity." 44 One can see in the language here the political paradigm set up in his philosophy of the university's role in society. The vital intelligence, or the minority, university-educated culture, is responsible for ordering or giving shape to the "immense body of living creation" that is the masses. In Leavis's model the entire organism, or social body, is represented but only under the ordering force of the "supreme vital intelligence," minority culture. Leavis's metaphysic is fully informed by Lawrence's, and each distrusts the abstractions of intelligence. Thus by "vital" Leavis means to imply intelligence's debt to the entire organism, their interconnectedness.
Leavis's sensuously empirical approach to literature (what Terry Eagleton has famously called "Scrutiny's naive sensuous empiricism" 45 ), his idea that criticism is a matter of "sensibility, of responding sensitively and with precise discrimination to the words on the page," accords with Lawrence's work in that this sensuous empiricism is given ontological status. 46 Through his work with Lawrence, Leavis comes to privilege being over knowing, and from this springs his zealously antitheoretical attitude. Stressing the empirically concrete, Leavis praises Lawrence, "His gift lay, not in thinking, but in experiencing, and in fixing and evoking in words the feelings and perceptions that seemed to him the most significant. Lawrence's commentary on experience, his doctrine, must be approached by way of the concrete, the successful art" ("LM," 26). Leavis, too, shies away from the abstract or ideological in favor of the concrete. Yet as Terry Eagleton has noted, "To combat 'ideology,' Scrutiny pointed to 'experience'--as though that, precisely, were not ideology's homeland." 47 Leavis attempted to avoid the ideological by focusing on the particular and the concrete. He nevertheless supported these incursions with the notions of health and vitality that were eventually to become as self-confirming as any ideology. Leavis's approach, then, like Richards's, is a synthesized amalgam of idealism and empiricism in which "The inherent contradictions converge in the difficulty of comprehending a living interrelatedness through a hybrid form which is polarized, on the one side, towards the observation of crude facticity or the content of empirical reality and, on the other side, towards the atemporal conceptualisation of human capacities" (LM, 7). This contradiction is borne throughout Leavis's work and is in many ways indicative of the powerful hold over his thinking that Lawrence's work exercised. The "vital" and "organic" originality of Lawrence's work is contrasted by Leavis to "the contrivances of Joyce," whose "insistent will and ingenuity" 48 create a literature in which "the spurious, mechanical manipulation is pervasive," and the "cosmopolitan" (i.e., not agriculturally based and therefore corrupt) project is "so far from promising a revival of cultural health, [it] is (it does not need Lawrence's nostril to detect) a characteristic symptom of dissolution." 49 Leavis consistently chooses Lawrence's work over Joyce's as an example of moral and social health that he sees as the critic's duty to safeguard.
All three critics take the concept of cultural health quite seriously, and the definition of "health" enables each to develop his literary theory. To Richards, "The critic is as closely occupied with the health of the mind as the doctor with the health of the body. . . . the healthiest mind is that capable of securing the greatest amount of value" (PLC, 35). His concern is rooted in his psychological training, and his method is to keep the mind so actively engaged through disparate impulses that it brings into play all of the bodily consciousness. It is at once a personal and yet deeply social prescription, as his use of irony made clear.
Eliot's notion of cultural health, as displayed most prominently in his concept of the "dissociation of sensibility," has a good deal to do with divided class sensibilities. In Notes towards the Definition of Culture he says that "class itself possesses a function, that of maintaining that part of the total culture of the society which pertains to that class. We have only to keep in mind, that in a healthy society this maintenance of a particular level of culture is to the benefit not merely of the class which maintains it, but of the society as a whole." 50 Under what might be called the "separate but equal" policy, Eliot confirms that each class has its own individual culture that contributes to the "healthy society." This separateness is the result of a split Eliot places in the beginning of the middle-class rise to dominance after the English Civil War. He notes:
What I see, in the history of English poetry, is not so much daemonic possession as the splitting up of personality. If we say that one of these partial personalities which may develop in the national mind is that which manifested itself in the period between Dryden and Johnson, then what we have to do is to re-integrate it: otherwise we are likely to get only successive alternations of personality. 51
The reintegration, Eliot's criticism intimates, must be brought about through the amalgamation of disparate physical, intellectual, and social experience through which a "unified sensibility" can be reconciled. Part of this reintegration, then, is in reconciling disparate class aesthetics. The modernist aesthetic, with its integration of low-cultural, pornographic representations into higher-cultural discourses of varying intellectual, social, and moral import, enacts this very process. It allows the mythologized, "whole," social personality/body to be represented. One aspect of Eliot's approval and lifelong critical endorsement of Joyce is the high profile given to order in Ulysses. Eliot's strong advocacy of sensibility in reading, i.e., of the part played by the body and emotions in the reading process, is a signal of the effect that pornographic and mass-cultural reading practices were having on high-cultural practices. It is also a determining factor in the continuing validation of the modern reading experience's consonance with those practices.
As with other modernist critics, Eliot both participated in creating and was created by a platform for the subsumption of the pornographic into the aesthetic. The circular process of literary criticism gained particular momentum in the first half of the twentieth century, however, as university study of English became not just a standard but a strong part of the university and, hence, the middle-class establishment. Just as literature itself received a central place in the university, even as it was being marginalized by culture at large, so criticism began to enjoy a powerful, if imaginary, relationship with the literature it critiqued. By the 1950s and 1960s, the education of aesthetic reception was so widespread that the medical and legal regulation of obscenity that dominated the century from the 1850s to the 1950s began to be dismantled in favor of trusting a reader's own ability to judge and handle an explicit sexual representation. The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 revised English obscenity law to say that "publication of the article in question is justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern." 52 The admissibility of literary merit as one of the criteria for obscenity marks a revolutionary shift in the boundaries between pornography and art in the United Kingdom, a shift quickly mirrored in the United States. This is in large part due to the successes of university literary critics and literature programs in making reading practices that include the body part of an ethical exploration as opposed to a simple, sexual, physical exploration.
F. R. Leavis played a large part in identifying a reader's sensibility, or bodily consciousness, with ethical exploration. "Literary criticism," Leavis says, "enters overtly into questions of emotional hygiene and moral value--more generally (there seems no adequate phrase) of spiritual health." 53 Leavis's concern for cultural health, as his attitude towards mass culture indicates, has a good deal to do with the ability of individuals to respond keenly and fully to the representations of literature. A reader's receptivity, as opposed to the Kantian model of aesthetic interaction in which the body is marginalized, ought to include, according to Leavis, a "full-bodied response." The reader must embody, or take into the body, the text: "Words in poetry invite us, not to 'think about' and judge but to 'feel into' or 'become'--to realize a complex experience that is given in words. They demand, not merely a fuller-bodied response, but a completer responsiveness." 54 This technique, which incorporates the body into the reader's imaginative reflections, I would argue, is little different from the bodily interrogation/incitation that is the technique of the reader of pornography. The body, and a bodily response, is a necessary constituent of the modern reading practice. To avoid a purely pornographic reading, then, the body must be attached to a greater ethical project, and that project is both the equation of sex with health (a project that Leavis overtly rejects, but in which he nevertheless participates) and the reconciliation of the body with the intellectual, moral, and social aspects of existence. 55 The body is incorporated in a way that diminishes its power while increasing its visibility through the other faculties.
The creation of a "unified sensibility" touted by modernist critics is both this integration of faculties and a greater project of educating the sensibilities of as many members of society as possible in order to create a cultural consensus among people on the basis of their own intimate subjectivity. The project works against class on the idea that all members of society have a right to claim and develop their sensible faculties, and indeed occasionally in his work Leavis speaks out against class discrimination. In fact, Leavis's role in the establishment of institutionalized literary studies and the increasingly prevalent view of him as the century has progressed as a conservative elitist has tended to blur the fact that his stance was, in the early decades of this century, quite liberating. As Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith have commented, "To, for example, the university-educated grammar school product of mid-century Britain Leavis meant the possibility of participation in authority through a route which seemed dependent on mind and sensibility rather than class, inheritance or institutional background." 56 Leavis was involved in the development of a mode of cultural distinction separate from the traditional routes of the nineteenth century, and again, part of that cultural distinction was based on the ability of individuals to organize a new relation to themselves, one that required them to identify, differentiate, intensify, and harmonize the sensuous and the moral/reflective faculties. 57
Late-twentieth-century readers have unknowingly adopted reading strategies that in the nineteenth and even the beginning of this century were attributed to mass-cultural and pornographic reading practices: they have learned to read with their bodies. This is in part the work of the omnipresent but subterranean pornographic discourse since its mass-cultural emergence in the eighteenth century. Readers of pornography were the first to expose their bodies to a personal interrogation/incitation, a dialogue with their own bodily consciousness, even as Kant was writing against the admissibility of the body into any "true" or "pure" aesthetic interaction. That pornographic reading and representational practices made their way into high-cultural modernist literature and criticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is a tribute both to pornography's (as one example of a mass-cultural medium) ability to exert pressure on high-cultural aesthetic practices, and to modernist writers' and critics' ability to appropriate such practices in a way that subsumed them within, or at least reconciled them to, high culture. Just as the lines between the pornographic and the aesthetic have been softened and redistributed in this century, collapsing many of the distinctions set up between them in the eighteenth century, so the lines between mass and high culture have become blurred. Due in part to the efforts of modernist criticism and the project of English literature studies in general, the site of social accountability has been transferred from the realm of production to the realm of consumption, from book to reader, from canvas to viewer. The project of literary studies in our century is rooted in the ironic belief that if we know how to read, then what we read cannot affect us. Obscenity, in a paradox that asserts a complicated victory for Kantian aesthetics in its effort to translate sensations into cognitions, is regarded as merely a state of mind, a reading practice.
Allison Pease is Assistant Professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York. "Readers with Bodies" is part of her forthcoming book, Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, to be published by Cambridge University Press in summer 2000.
1. The most notorious of such scholars is John Carey; his The Intellectuals and the Masses (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992) claims that the project of modernism in general is one of distinguishing between the masses and the elite. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) does not see the divide between mass and elite culture as simply as Carey but does focus on the tensions created between different cultural practices associated with high and low culture.
2. David Chinitz, "T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide," PMLA 110 (March 1995): 236-47, has written persuasively of Eliot's collaborations with and uses of mass-cultural practices.
3. While the tradition of belles-lettres has been a long one and literary history advanced quickly both in the United States and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the professionalization of literary criticism as a discipline and its enfranchisement in the university are relatively new developments. Beginning in the late nineteenth century at Cambridge University (the central theoretical force of English literature studies through the middle years of this century), these developments did not truly gain momentum until after World War I. I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and William Empson, together with T. S. Eliot, established the intellectual basis of English teaching in England throughout much of this century. Among these prominent critics, Leavis is generally recognized as the re who formed the standards of university teaching in English; see Barry Cullen, "'I Thought I Had Provided Something Better'--F. R. Leavis, Literary Criticism and Anti-Philosophy," in The British Critical Tradition, ed. Gary Day (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 188. Eliot, an honorary fellow of Magdalene College, was the only member of the group not to teach at Cambridge, having declined an offer from Richards to do so. He was, nevertheless, a celebrated force there, delivering the Clark lectures in 1926, and his poetry and criticism were studied seriously with all the zeal that Leavis's teaching could bring to them; see Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 43-4. Leavis himself enjoyed a tenuous relationship with Cambridge, which for many years placed him on its fringes; while he characterized his own work as in opposition to the academic establishment, it is important to remember that by the 1950s, if not before, he was "the new establishment" (Pamela McCallum, Literature and Method: Towards a Critique of I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis [Dublin: Gill and MacMillan Humanities Press, 1983], 155, hereafter abbreviated LM). One measure of Leavis's impact on reading in this century can be found in Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, ed. Susan M. Loyd (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 266, where the word "Leavisite" is listed as a synonym for "interpreter."
4. By the word "culture" in this context I am referring to both society at large as well as the body of cultural artifacts viewed as valuable to that social body by a specific group of individuals concerned with its maintenance.
5. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932; New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 74; hereafter abbreviated FRP.
6. T. S. Eliot, "Dante," in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 200.
7. Modernist critics are responsible for augmenting the meaning of sensibility in this century. Whereas before sensibility had primarily meant the power of sensation or emotion as distinguished from cognition and will, Eliot's reconration of the term in his phrase "dissociation of sensibility" implied the conjunction of thought and feeling. In Eliot, Richards, and Leavis the term almost always implies an organic relationship between the body's senses and the mind's faculties.
8. The Editors [L. C. Knight and Donald Colver], "Manifesto," Scrutiny 1 (May 1932): 2.
9. T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," in Selected Essays, 247.
10. F. R. Leavis, "Under Which King, Bezonian?" Scrutiny 3 (December 1932): 208
11. Christopher Norris, preface to F. R. Leavis, by Michael Bell (New York: Routledge, 1988), ix, makes this observation; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Books, 1983), 39, makes a similar claim, i.e., that by locating the dissociation of sensibility in the seventeenth century, "Eliot was in fact assaulting . . . the whole ideology of middle-class liberalism, the official ruling ideology of industrial capitalist society."
12. T. S. Eliot, "Philip Massinger," in Selected Essays, 189.
13. F. R. Leavis, "Joyce and the Revolution of the Word," Scrutiny 2 (September 1933): 199.
14. Ibid.
15. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 252. An important parallel should be drawn here between the work of the British modernist critics and the work of the American New Critics. In the United States, English literature studies were deeply influenced by the work of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, whose work, contemporaneous with Leavis's involvement with Scrutiny, originated out of a recognition that the American South needed to develop forms of cultural production that would combat the dominance of the northern, capitalist culture. Their work offered an Agrarian critique of industrial capitalism as is described by Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
16. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1925), 202-3; hereafter abbreviated PLC.
17. F. R. Leavis, "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture," in For Continuity (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1933), 18, 20-1.
18. T. S. Eliot, "Marie Lloyd," in Selected Essays, 407.
19. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, ix.
20. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 94; hereafter abbreviated CJ.
21. "Manifesto," Scrutiny 1 (May 1932): 5.
22. F. R. Leavis, "The Literary Mind," Scrutiny 1 (May 1932): 25, 31; hereafter abbreviated "LM."
23. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), 149.
24. F. R. Leavis, "Valuation in Criticism," in Valuation in Criticism, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 286, 285.
25. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: William Heinemann, Limited, 1927), 10.
26. Ibid.
27. T. S. Eliot, "Metaphysical Poets," 250.
28. See John Needham, The Completest Mod: I. A. Richards and the Continuity of English Literary Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 29.
29. F. R. Leavis, "Restatement for Critics," Scrutiny 1 (March 1933): 316.
30. Leavis, "Restatement," 316.
31. F. R. Leavis, "Literary Criticism and Philosophy," Scrutiny 6 (June 1937): 61.
32. Richards explains impulses in Principles of Literary Criticism as follows:
The process in the course of which a mental event may occur, a process apparently beginning in a stimulus and ending in an act, is what we have called an impulse. In actual experience single impulses of course never occur. Even the simplest human reflexes are very intricate bundles of mutually dependent impulses, and in any actual human behaviour the number of simultaneous and connected impulses occurring is beyond estimation [PLC, 86].
For Richards a stimulus
must not be conceived as an alien intruder which thrusts itself upon us and, after worming a devious way through our organism as through a piece of cheese, emerges at the other end as an act. Stimuli are only received if they serve some need of the organism and the form which the response to them takes depends only in part upon the nature of the stimulus, and much more upon what the organism "wants," i.e. the state of equilibrium of its multifarious activities [PLC, 87].
33. Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan and Company, 1865), 1.
34. I. A. Richards, C. K. Ogden, and James Wood, The Foundations of Aesthetics (New York: Lear Publishers, 1925), 90.
35. I. A. Richards, Sciences and Poetries: A Reissue of Science and Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970), 40.
36. Steven Connor, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Books, 1992), 37.
37. Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1994), 38.
38. Daniel R. Schwarz, The Humanistic Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 70.
39. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 103.
40. Ibid., 103-4.
41. F. R. Leavis, "Why Universities?" Scrutiny 3 (September 1934): 120.
42. F. R. Leavis, "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture," 15.
43. Leavis, "Why Universities?" 120.
44. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 73.
45. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), 15.
46. F. R. Leavis, "Towards Standards of Criticism," in Towards Standards of Criticism: A Selection from "The Calendar of Modern Letters" (London: Wishart and Company, 1933), 17
47. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 15.
48. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, 17.
49. Leavis, "Joyce and the Revolution of the Word," 198.
50. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), 107.
51. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 77.
52. Quoted in Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), note 430.
53. F. R. Leavis, "Thought and Emotional Quality," Scrutiny 13 (spring 1945): 55.
54. F. R. Leavis, "Literary Criticism and Philosophy: A Reply," 60-1.
55. Leavis differentiates himself from Eliot on this point when, accused of rejecting Eliot when he turned to orthodox Christianity, he says, "if it means the kind of rejection of life implicit in Mr. Eliot's attitude towards sex, then we do certainly dissociate ourselves at that point" ("Restatement," 318). For explorations of the equation of sex with health, see Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson, On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law (London: Macmillan, 1993); and Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (New York: Longman, 1981).
56. Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith, Cinema, Literature, and Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), 90.
57. The idea of harmonizing the sensuous and moral reflective faculties is developed quite effectively in Ian Hunter, David Saunders, Dugald Williamson, On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law.
Hart Crane had an infuriating way of writing a poem. Typically, after drinking copiously, he would put a 78 on a hand-cranked Victrola and play it "a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times" while alternately banging away on a typewriter and loudly declaiming the same line of verse repeatedly. 1 To his friends' horror, the Victrola was indispensable--Crane claimed it gave him "intimacy with la Muse"--and he peremptorily refused every polite request to change his habits or at least to confine his cacophonous writing sessions to daylight hours (V, 173). Quite the contrary. He forced those around him to adapt. While a house guest of Harry Crosby's in France, for instance, he one day greeted his reluctant patron with an ukase. "Columbia, loud! ! !" he snapped, presuming that the millionaire Crosby would instantly go fetch him new phonograph needles (V, 584).
Hart Crane's phonograph fetish has received only passing attention from his many critics. 2 This oversight is unsurprising. In his day, Crane was infamous for such antisocial eccentricities as throwing typewriters out of windows and brawling with taxi drivers. 3 The anecdotes about Crane and his Victrola that appear in such places as Harry Crosby's diaries may be vivid, but they vie for a reader's attention with a host of other memorable incidents featuring Crane's wild, dissipated antics. 4 Indeed, Crane's self-destructive behavior (he ultimately committed suicide in 1932 at the age of thirty-two) has secured him the popular reputation of an American poète maudit, as notable for his biography as for the quality of his verse. R. W. B. Lewis long ago pointed out that this reputation has tempted unwary critics to misconstrue Crane's intent and accomplishments; since Lewis's magisterial 1967 monograph on Crane, scholars have been loath to dwell upon the details of Crane's life without carefully justifying their introduction of such material. 5 Lewis's cautions would seem apropos in the case of Crane's Victrola. Why should Crane's gramophone obsession matter any more than his other striking but ultimately rather trivial habits, such as cossack dancing at parties or cruising waterfront gay bars under the name Christopher Marlowe?
Over the last decade, thanks in large part to a number of influential scholarly works dating from the early 1990s, academics have become increasingly aware of the complex relationship between innovative acoustic technologies--such as radio, the telephone, and the phonograph--and gradual but profound shifts in sound's role in modern literature. 6 Specialists in twentieth-century poetry have displayed particular interest in this emergent branch of scholarship since it offers an appealing, historically grounded alternative to the many, aridly formalist treatments of sound in poetry currently available. Several recent studies have gone so far as to posit that the "aurality" of a poem is not an ahistorical characteristic that can be adequately or exhaustively described by traditional schemes for scanning verse. Instead, aurality ought to be understood as an attribute that undergoes constant modification in its nature and function from period to period and from writer to writer. 7 In other words, such stock-in-trade formulas as "anapestic," "alliteration," and "slant rhyme" should be seen as revealing little about a given poem unless one has first established the precise place that sound occupies in its author's poetics.
When viewed in the light of these developments in the study of poetry, the fact that Hart Crane, a self-styled "Pindar of our machine age," 8 invariably wrote to the accompaniment of a "machine that sings" 9 suddenly appears much more significant than heretofore appreciated. Indeed, I will be arguing that Crane's singing machine, the Victrola, left a profound mark on all aspects of his poetry, that is, on everything from the microtexture of his verse to its transcendental aspirations. Moreover, insofar as most secondary literature treating the links between literary experimentation and innovations in acoustic technology has concentrated on the impact of radio, 10 this article, by singling out Crane's writing ritual for commentary, will demonstrate the need to consider the influence of all aural media if we are ever fully to understand modernism, that curious interlude in American letters that occurs after the invention of the phonograph but prior to the widespread availability of television and the LP. 11
Hart Crane did not write poems in a linear fashion. He wrote them piecemeal, "pell-mell" (V, 363). While "intimate with la Muse" he composed individual phrases that, only afterwards, when sober, would he slowly, with great difficulty, begin to assemble into discrete lyrics. Malcolm Cowley recalls a moment during the gestation period for what would eventually become the opening lines of Crane's lyric "Passage." During a Fourth of July party at his friend Slater Brown's, Crane
sat by the lilacs in the dooryard, meditatively pouring a box of salt on the phonograph. . . . One of the wives, pregnant and stark sober, heard him repeating time and time again: "Where the cedar leaf divides the sky . . . I was promised an improved infancy." 12
Crane would sometimes hang on to a gem of a phrase for months before finding a home for it, or multiple homes, as in the case of a phrase like "The everlasting eyes of Pierrot, / Or, of Gargantua the laughter," which appears in both "The Bridge of Estador" (CP, 175) and "Praise for an Urn" (CP, 8). Although these particular phrases may have transparently literary origins, Emerson and Rabelais respectively, more often than not, according to Crane's biographer John Unterecker, the inspiration was the very music Crane listened to while writing. 13 Sometimes critics have been alert to this fact, as in the case of Crane's poem "Virginia," which reworks the 1920s hit "What Do You Do Sunday, Mary?" from the musical Poppy, but no one has systematically tried to unearth possible connections between Crane's known favorite recordings and his published verse. 14
What would such an investigation teach us? We would have a better sense of Crane's indebtedness to particular sources as well as an improved sense of how Crane went about transforming such source material into lyric poetry. Kenneth Rexroth, for instance, reports that while living in the basement at 45 Grove Street, in an apartment immediately below Crane's, the poet drove him nearly to distraction by playing Bert Williams's campy Prohibition satire "The Moon Shines on the Moonshine" nonstop. 15 The song contrasts a dusty, abandoned brewery to the industrious activity of moonshiners outside of town:
How sad and still tonight,
By the old distillery!
And how the cobwebs cob
In the old machinery!
But in the mountaintops,
Far from the eyes of cops,
Oh! how the moon shines on the moonshine so merrily! 16
While listening to "The Moon Shines on the Moonshine," Rexroth informs us, Crane wrote the opening lines of his poem "Lachrymae Christi": 17
Whitely, while benzine
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
(Inside the sure machinery
Is still
[CP, 19]
Crane has reproduced the distillery scene from the song's chorus, albeit oddly inflected. Knowing that he has reworked Bert Williams's tune, we have a valuable opportunity, through a close comparison, to reconstruct Crane's involuted thought process much more fully than usually possible. (Such opportunities are rare because of Crane's characteristic compression, intensity, and obliquity. Although Crane once claimed that his poetry operated by a consistent "logic of metaphor," Lee Edelman has shown that this "logic" in practice results in a thicket of poetic tropes so snarled, so dense that one can despair of ever comprehensively analyzing its purpose and function. 18 )
While listening to Williams, Crane seems to have fixated upon the words "the moon shines on the moonshine." That line's wordplay hinges upon breaking one word, "moonshine," back down into its components, "moon" and "shine." Alternatively, one could say that a compound word "dissolves" into its constituent elements--an especially apt metaphor, given that "moonshine," or distilled alcohol, is itself a solvent (like "benzine"). In his poem Crane reflects this notion thematically by describing the world outside the "mills" as a world "dissolved" by moonlight. He further pursues this train of thought by mimicking the linguistic process of "dissolution" evident in the song. That is, taking his cue from the line "the cobwebs cob" in his source text, he juxtaposes words so as to suggest that the larger ones are decaying into smaller ones: "whitely" loses the t and y to become "while"; "dissolve" drops its fore and aft phonemes leaving simply the word "all"; "machinery" is distilled down to the word "sure."
One might say that the shining, liquid moonlight that opens "Lachrymae Christi" signals a poetic process of decreation in which words lose their integrity and begin to operate otherwise than as "sure machinery." Words are thereby restored to a kind of virginal purity (a "whiteness"), or rather, an uncontaminated, raw materiality subject to the poet's artful rearrangements or reconstitution. 19 This poetic fantasy of escape from conventional restrictions on language use, red as standing outside industrial "mills" in a nighttime landscape of word-magic, finds its license and inspiration in Bert Williams's song. That is, while listening to "Moon Shines on the Moonshine," Crane discovered a bundle of age-old poetic topoi deployed in a thought-provoking fashion: inebriation, metamorphosis, escape from regulation ("far from . . . cops"), and the dream of the blank slate. He then elaborated, baroquely, upon these implicit ideas. Much like Joyce throughout the Sirens episode of Ulysses, Crane seizes upon an ephemeral product of mass culture and, sensing beneath its glossy surface a wealth of expressive possibilities, lovingly transforms it to suit his own ends.
This example suggests that if one knew when Crane listened to which 78s and if one could then match that playlist with a detailed chronology of when he was writing which lyrics, the result would undoubtedly be a much better explanation of why he wrote what he did. Would such a large-scale project be feasible, however? We do have a general sense of his musical preferences for his all-night writing frenzies. On the one hand, he favored grand, even bombastic, classical music: excerpts from Richard Wagner, César Franck's Variations symphoniques, and Antonin Dvor ák's New World Symphony. 20 On the other hand, he listened to popular songs from musicals like Hit the Deck or by stars like Sophie Tucker. 21 He was particularly fond of "torch songs." 22 His supreme vamp-goddess was Marlene Dietrich, whom he thought had a voice "straight from Tutankhamen's tomb." 23 Apparently, much of the final draft of his long poem and masterpiece The Bridge was prepared while listening to her music, and in his last, most dissolute days in Mexico City, he would play individual records of hers over and over at such volume that visitors were unable to carry on conversations. 24
Unfortunately, we lack the necessary, precise timelines to link these various artists, composers, and pieces with particular Crane poems. Hard evidence, as in Rexroth's account, is scarce. Moreover, since Crane wrote only disconnected verses while listening to his Victrola, not entire poems, the prodigious archival work required would likely yield only scattered insights and further, local close readings. There would be cumulative benefits, of course, insofar as we would learn more about the various ways in which Crane's verse operates, but there is no guarantee that we would be able to arrive at global interpretations of complete Crane lyrics, let alone of his poetry in toto. "Lachrymae Christi," for instance, after the lines that I have been analyzing, veers into a macabre description of flowers on a hillside that bears little or no obvious relation to "The Moon Shines on the Moonshine":
swart
Thorns freshen on the year's
First blood. From flanks unfended,
Twanged red perfidies of spring
Are trillion on the hill
[CP, 19]
One can detect hints here of a musical subtext. The adjective "Twanged" and the possible pun on "trilling" in the awkward phrase "Are trillion" might indicate that Crane is attempting a synaesthetic experiment in which the image of a profusion of red flowers represents a visual equivalent to a vivid, brassy passage in a musical piece. What that piece might be, though, is anyone's guess. Even if we knew what it was, we would be only a small step closer to understanding one of Crane's most recondite poems. Thirty further lines remain, including such inscrutable statements as "Let sphinxes from the ripe / Borage of death have cleared my tongue" (CP, 19). However fascinating the direct connections between Crane's poems and the specific songs or compositions to which he listened while writing them, a different starting point than the purely inductive is necessary if we are to understand why recorded music mattered so much to Crane and, in turn, how it affected all, not some, of his verse. Absent the raw data necessary for genetic criticism of the kind that has proved so informative in the study of Finnegans Wake, we will have to take a more roundabout approach. 25
What does Hart Crane himself have to say on the subject of music and poetry? He not only frequently expressed a desire to model his poetry on the most advanced music of his day, he was also given to describing his verse in musical terms. 26 For instance, he labels his early lyric "The Marriage of Faustus and Helen" a "pseudo-symphonic construction toward an absolute beauty" (OM, 93), his long poem The Bridge "a symphony with an epic theme" (CPSL, 254), "Harbor Dawn" "a legato" (CPSL, 249), and "Cutty Sark" a "fugue" (CPSL, 252). Such tags had real force and knowledge behind them--as Samuel Delany and Michael Sharp have shown, Crane was not merely using them to pay lip service to the Paterian tenet that all poetry aspires to the condition of music. 27 We even know where and when he first involved himself seriously in study of the art form. While living in Cleveland after his first stint in New York (1920-23), Crane's chief connection to the international avant-garde was via the Cleveland Orchestra, then under the direction of the world-famous conductor Ernest Bloch. From Bloch, Crane learned to relish the latest in European music. 28 He became an ardent admirer of such composers as Vincent d'Indy, Erik Satie, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Igor Stravinsky. Later in life, wherever he traveled, Crane continued to seek out innovative music of whatever kind, whether it be Times Square jazz or the microtonal, percussive compositions of Edgar Varèse. 29 From his Cleveland days onward--that is, during his poetic maturity, during the years in which he wrote the bulk of the poetry for which he is remembered--modern music remained a constant touchstone for Crane's achievements in his own medium, verse.
Given this background, one can conclude that Crane had definite reasons for insisting upon writing with a Victrola's accompaniment. Moreover, those reasons are likely to be found by looking beyond his usual playlist. In the 1920s, recordings of avant-garde music were difficult to purchase commercially. Despite his intense admiration for contemporary experimental composers, when Crane sat down to write poetry, he usually had to settle for less esoteric fare. The repetitive playing of a 78, any 78, seems to have been the sine qua non of his writing ritual. If he had to forego the delights of, say, Varèse's Ionisation in favor of "Moon Shines on the Moonshine," so be it. (This does not mean, of course, that Crane chose 78s indiscriminately. As we have already seen, he displayed a marked preference for certain genres. Rather, he simply selected the most promising 78s from the pool of available options at a given location.)