_ANARCHISM_
is not enough
Laura Riding
JONATHAN CAPE
London
FIRST PUBLISHED MCMXXVIII
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME
CONTENTS
THE MYTH Page 9
LANGUAGE AND LAZINESS 13
THIS PHILOSOPHY 15
WHAT IS A POEM? 16
A COMPLICATED PROBLEM 19
ALL LITERATURE 20
MR. DOODLE-DOODLE-DOO 22
AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION 25
THE CORPUS 27
POETRY AND MUSIC 32
POETRY AND PAINTING 37
POETRY AND DREAMS 39
JOCASTA 41
HOW CAME IT ABOUT? 133
HUNGRY TO HEAR 136
IN A CAFÉ 138
FRAGMENT OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL 142
WILLIAM AND DAISY: FRAGMENT OF A FINISHED NOVEL 150
AN ANONYMOUS BOOK 152
THE DAMNED THING 187
LETTER OF ABDICATION 209
ANARCHISM IS NOT ENOUGH
THE MYTH
When the baby is born there is no place to put it: it is born, it will
in time die, therefore there is no sense in enlarging the world by so
many miles and minutes for its accommodation. A temporary scaffolding
is set up for it, an altar to ephemerality--a permanent altar to
ephemerality. This altar is the Myth. The object of the Myth is to
give happiness: to help the baby pretend that what is ephemeral is
permanent. It does not matter if in the course of time he discovers
that all is ephemeral: so long as he can go on pretending that it is
permanent he is happy.
As it is not one baby but all babies which are laid upon this altar, it
becomes the religious duty of each to keep on pretending for the sake
of all the others, not for himself. Gradually, when the baby grows and
learns why he has been placed on the altar, he finds that he is not
particularly interested in carrying on the pretence, that happiness and
unhappiness are merely an irregular succession and grouping of moments
in him between his birth and his death. Yet he continues to support
the Myth for others’ sake, and others continue to support it for his.
The stronger grows the inward conviction of the futility of the Myth,
the stronger grows the outward unity and form of the Myth. It becomes
the universal sense of duty, the ethics of abstract neighbourliness.
It is the repository for whatever one does without knowing why; it
makes itself the why. Once given this function through universal
misunderstanding, it persists in its reality with the perseverance of a
ghost and continues to demand sacrifices. It is indifferent what form
or system is given to it from this period to that, so long as it be
given _a_ form and _a_ system by which it may absorb and digest every
possible activity; and the grown-up babies satisfy it by presenting
their offerings as systematized parts of a systematized whole.
The Myth may collapse as a social whole; yet it continues by its own
memory of itself to impose itself as an æsthetic whole. Even in this
day, when the social and historical collapse of the Myth is commonly
recognised, we find poets and critics with an acute sense of time
devoting pious ceremonies to the æsthetic vitality of the Myth, from a
haunting sense of duty which they call classicism. So this antiquated
belief in truth goes on, and we continue to live. The Myth is the art
of living. Plato’s censorship of poets in the interests of the young
sprang from a realization of the fact that poetry is in opposition to
the truth of the Myth: I do not think he objected to poetry for the
old, since they were nearly through with living.
Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, religion, philosophy, history
and science--these are essentially of the Myth. They have technique,
growth, tradition, universal significance (truth); and there is also
a poetry of the Myth, made by analogy into a mythological activity.
Mythological activities glorify the sense of duty, force on the
individual a mathematical exaggeration of his responsibilities.
Poetry (praise be to babyhood) is essentially not of the Myth. It is
all the truth it knows, that is, it knows nothing. It is the art of not
living. It has no system, harmony, form, public significance or sense
of duty. It is what happens when the baby crawls off the altar and
is ‘Resolv’d to be a very contrary fellow’--resolved not to pretend,
learn to talk or versify. Whatever language it uses it makes up as it
goes and immediately forgets. Every time it opens its mouth it has to
start all over again. This is why it remains a baby and dies (praise be
to babyhood) a baby. In the art of not living one is not ephemerally
permanent but permanently ephemeral.
* * * * *
Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they
run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in
various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations,
which have all to do with making things already made, is the
making of people: it is called the art of friendship. So one finds
oneself surrounded with numbers of artificial selves contesting
the authenticity of the original self; which, forced to become a
competitive self, ceases to be the original self, is, like all the
others, a creation. The person, too, becomes a friend of himself. _He_
no longer exists.
* * * * *
Words have three historical levels. They may be true words, that is, of
an intrinsic sense; they may be logical words, that is, of an applied
sense; or they may be poetical words, of a misapplied sense, untrue and
illogical in themselves, but of supposed suggestive power. The most the
poet can now do is to take every word he uses through each of these
levels, giving it the combined depth of all three, forcing it beyond
itself to a death of sense where it is at least safe from the perjuries
either of society or poetry.
LANGUAGE AND LAZINESS
Language is a form of laziness; the word is a compromise between what
it is possible to express and what it is not possible to express.
That is, expression itself is a form of laziness. The cause of
expression is incomplete powers of understanding and communication:
unevenly distributed intelligence. Language does not attempt to affect
this distribution; it accepts the inequality and makes possible a
mathematical intercourse between the degrees of intelligence occurring
in an average range. The degrees of intelligence at each extreme are
thus naturally neglected: and yet they are obviously the most important.
Prose is the mathematics of expression. The word is a numerical
convenience in which the known and the unknown are brought together to
act as the meeting-place of the one who knows and the one who does not
know. The prose word accomplishes no redistribution of intelligence;
it merely declares the inequality, and so even as expression it has no
reality, it is an empty cipher.
Poetry is an attempt to make language do more than express; to make it
work; to redistribute intelligence by means of the word. If it succeeds
in this the problem of communication disappears. It does not treat
this problem as a matter of mathematical distribution of intelligence
between an abstract known and unknown represented in a concrete knower
and not-knower. The distribution must take place, if at all, within
the intelligence itself. Prose evades this problem by making slovenly
equations which always seem successful because, being inexact, they
conceal inexactness. Poetry always faces, and generally meets with,
failure. But even if it fails, it is at least at the heart of the
difficulty, which it treats not as a difficulty of minds but of mind.
THIS PHILOSOPHY
This philosophy, this merchant-mindedness: how much have we here?
what sum? And of what profit? Somewhere, in the factories of reality,
all this has been produced which now floods the market of wisdom,
awaiting its price-ticket. What is science? yard-measure and scale to
philosophy, expert-accountant, bank clerk. What is poetry? miserable,
ill-fed, underpaid, ununionized labourer, pleased to oblige, grateful
for work, flattering himself that poverty makes him an aristocrat.
* * * * *
Only what is comic is perfect: it is outside of reality, which is
a self-defeating, serious striving to be outside of reality, to be
perfect. Reality cannot escape from reality because it is made of
belief, and capable only of belief. Perfection is what is unbelievable,
the joke.
WHAT IS A POEM?
In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common
experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in
this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being
overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism
began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the
end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader.
The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental
to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was
replaced by science; inspiration by psychology. In the first the poet
flattered himself and was flattered by others because he had singular
reactions to experience; in the second the object of flattery makes
himself expert in the art of flattery.
What is a poem? A poem is nothing. By persistence the poem can be made
something; but then it is something, not a poem. Why is it nothing?
Because it cannot be looked at, heard, touched or read (what can be
read is prose). It is not an effect (common or uncommon) of experience;
it is the result of an ability to create a vacuum in experience--it is
a vacuum and therefore nothing. It cannot be looked at, heard, touched
or read because it is a vacuum. Since it is a vacuum it is nothing for
which the poet can flatter himself or receive flattery. Since it is a
vacuum it cannot be reproduced in an audience. A vacuum is unalterably
and untransferably a vacuum--the only thing that can happen to it is
destruction. If it were possible to reproduce it in an audience the
result would be the destruction of the audience.
The confusion between the poem as effect and the poem as vacuum is
easily explained. It is obvious that all is either effect or it is
nothing. What the old romanticism meant by an uncommon effect was a
something that was not an effect, an over-and-above of experience.
Although it was really not an effect, it was classified as an effect
because it was impossible to imagine something that was not an effect.
It did not occur to anyone to imagine nothing, the vacuum; or, if it
did, only with abhorrence. The new romanticism remedied this inaccuracy
by classifying the poem as the cause of an effect--as both cause and
effect. But as both cause and effect the poem counts itself out of
experience: proves itself to be nothing masquerading as something. As
something it is all that the detractors of poetry say it is; it is
false experience. As nothing--well, as nothing it is everything in an
existence where everything, being effect of effect and without cause,
is nothing.
Whenever this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides
to destroy it, to convert it into something. The conversion of nothing
into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse
of these rescued somethings. In discussing literature one has to
use, unfortunately, the same language that one uses in discussing
experience. But even so, literature is preferable to experience, since
it is for the most part the closest one can get to nothing.
* * * * *
The only productive design is designed waste. Designed creation results
in nothing but the destruction of the designer: it is impossible to
add to what is; all is and is made. Energy that attempts to make in
the sense of making a numerical increase in the sum of made things
is spitefully returned to itself unused. It is a would-be-happy-ness
ending in unanticipated and disordered unhappiness. Energy that is
aware of the impossibility of positive construction devotes itself to
an ordered using-up and waste of itself: to an anticipated unhappiness
which, because it has design, foreknowledge, is the nearest approach
to happiness. Undesigned unhappiness and designed happiness both mean
anarchism. _Anarchism is not enough._
A COMPLICATED PROBLEM
A complicated problem is only further complicated by being simplified.
A state of confusion is never made comprehensible by being given a
plot. Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them. The truth
is always laid out in an infinite number of circles tending to become,
but never becoming, concentric--except occasionally in poetry.
ALL LITERATURE
All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express
themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the
old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally
precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents. How not
to write literature, how not to be precocious: cultivate inattention,
do not learn how to express yourself, make no distinction between
thoughts and emotions, since precocity comes of making one vie with
the other, mistrust whatever seems superior and be partial to whatever
seems inferior--whatever is not literature. And then, if you must
write yourself, write _writing-matter_, not _reading-matter_. People
will think you brilliant only if you tell them what they know. To
avoid being thought brilliant, avoid knowing what they know. Write to
discover to yourself what you know. People will think you brilliant
if you seem to be enjoying yourself, since they are not enjoying
themselves. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid pretending to be
enjoying yourself. Make it clear that you know that they know that
nothing is really enjoyable except pretending to be enjoying yourself.
* * * * *
People may treat themselves as extraneous phenomena or as fundamental
phenomena--it does not matter which. It does not matter, so long as
they behave consistently as one or the other. What discredits character
is not self-importance or self-unimportance, but the adjustment of
personal importance according to expediency.
MR. DOODLE-DOODLE-DOO
Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo, the great mathematician and lexicographer, then
put aside his work and said: ‘_adultery_ and _adulteration_ can wait
until I return.’
For Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Do was at one thing or the other by turns, and
this particular morning he felt his mathematical genius complaining: it
was undoubtedly true that it was a long time since he had been out to
get Numbers. So, leaving _adultery_ and _adulteration_ to take care of
themselves, he walked out into the Square, and from the Square into the
Gardens; and in the Gardens he sat down on a bench near the rockery and
began to think with the mathematical half of his brain.
‘Let me see. I left off with _honey_ last time. Now the problem will
be to show that honey as a purely mathematical symbol is equivalent
to honey as a philological integer. If I can do this I have once more
proved that 2 × 2 = 4 is the equivalent of “two times two is four.” For
it’s not enough to show a thing is true: you must also show that true
is true. By being a mathematical lexicographer and a lexicographical
mathematician, I am therefore able to check the truth with the truth.
My last words are never “that’s true” but “that’s correct,” which
explains how I can be a philosopher and a gentleman at the same time.’
With this Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo crowed three times: once for
lexicography (Doodle), once for mathematics (Doodle), and once for
himself (Doo), wherein the truth was checked by itself and found
correct. The immediate matter in hand, however, was honey. So he left
off crowing and proceeded with his calculations, which went so quickly
that it is very difficult to record them. But they were something like
this:--
H O N E Y = HONE + Y
G O N E + Y = GONEY (sailors’ term for albatross)
L O N E + Y = LONE(L)Y
B O N E + Y = BONEY
O N E + Y + M = MONEY
BONEY GONEY HONEY LONE(L)Y MONEY
1 2 3 4 5
H O N E Y
1 2 3 4 5
At this point he stopped following him. But that his researches must
have reached some happy conclusion was obvious from the enthusiasm with
which he later returned to his lexicography. His calculations then ran
something like this:--
1 2 3 4 5
H O N E Y
1 2 3 4 5
A D U L T [ E R Y
1 2 3 4 5
H O N E Y
1 2 3 4 5
A D U L T [ E R A T I O N
∴ H O N E Y E R Y ∵ H O N E Y E R A T I O N
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
But H O N E Y = S W E E T
5 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2 1
∴ S W E E T E R Y ∵ S W E E T E R A T I O N
Which went far enough to persuade him that in lexicography he was, if
anything, even more skilled than in mathematics.
AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION
The important (but infrequently drawn) distinction between what is
gentlemanly and what is dull in poetry. Most people read poetry
because it makes them feel upper-class, and most poetry is written
by people who feel upper-class; at least by people who take pleasure
in describing themselves as upper-class; for instance, by men who
make themselves feel upper-class by holding gentlemanly feelings
toward woman, and by women who make themselves feel upper-class by
acknowledging these feelings. This poetry is idealistic poetry: it
dramatizes a non-existent emotional life and seems real because it is
not real. It also seems ‘interesting’ because it is not real.
Practical poetry is written by people who do not feel upper-class:
who do not feel anything. It describes themselves, but not as
upper-class, not, in fact, as anything. It is real and therefore not
dramatic and therefore seems unreal. It therefore seems (and is) dull.
The only reason that people ever read dull poetry (such as some of
Shakespeare’s) is that they mistake it for gentlemanly poetry (such
as all of Browning’s). For few people are really interested in anyone
else’s description of himself except as it makes them feel upper-class.
They mistake it for gentlemanly poetry because of their inability to
distinguish between the interestingness of dull poetry and the dullness
of ‘interesting’ poetry.
THE CORPUS
The first condition was chaos. The logical consequence of chaos was
order. In so far as it derived from chaos it was non-conscious, but
in so far as it was order, it had an increasing tendency to become
conscious. It therefore may be said to have had a mind of which it
was unconscious and of which it remained unconscious in its various
evolutionary forms until the mind developed to a point where it in turn
separated from order and invented the self. The occasion of the self
was a stage in the most anarchic evolutionary form, man, coeval with
the general transformation of chaos into a universe. A consciousness
of consciousness arose and at the same time divided between order, in
which mind was the spirit of cohesion, and the individual, in whom
mind was the spirit of separation. In the ensuing opposition between
these two, order yielded to the individual by allowing him to call it
a universe, but triumphed over him since, by naming it, the individual
made the universe his society and therefore his religion. Order was the
natural enemy of the individual mind. To conciliate it order appealed
to the individual mind for sanction. This sanction, the original
social contract, was not between man and man, but between man and the
universe as men, or society. Although the sanction was given on the
basis of natural instinct, or the non-conscious identity of man and the
universe, society has always claimed authority over conscious thought
and purpose. In incorporating the man it attempts to incorporate the
mind and in turn to give the mind its sanction through the sanction
which it first had from the man: it constitutes itself the parent past
and the mind present memory of it.
The social corpus is tyrannically founded on the principle of origin.
It admits nothing new: all is revision, memory, confirmation. The
individual cosmos must submit itself to the generalized cosmos
of history, it must become part of its growing encyclopædia of
authorities. Such a generalized cosmos, however, must have been
formulated more by the desire of people to define themselves as a
group than to account for the origin of their personal existence.
Origin, indeed, is properly the preoccupation of the individual and
not a communal interest. The group is only interested in the formal
publishing of individuals for the purpose of establishing their social
solidarity. Art, for example, is record not creation. The question
of origin is only emphasized in so far as it proves the individual a
member of the group, as having a common pedigree with the other members
of the group. Thus God, the branding-iron of the group idea, does not
appear in societies where as yet there is imperfect differentiation
between the individual and the type; where as yet there is no need
for branding. Once the distinction between the group mind and the
individual mind could be made the group mind really ceased to exist.
The distinction, however, could only be made by minds complete in
themselves, and as such minds have always been extremely rare, the
fiction of a group mind has been maintained to impose the will of the
weak-minded upon the strong-minded, the myth of common origin being
used as the charter of the majority. The tyranny by which this majority
can enforce its will may be either democratic or oligarchic. The only
difference is that in the first case, provided that the democracy
is a true democracy (which it very rarely is), the group mind is so
efficient that it acts despotically as one man; in the second case the
group mind is less efficient and, by a process of blind selection, the
most characteristic of the weak-minded become the perverse instruments
of unity.
Both the individual mind and the group mind are engaged in a pursuit
which may be described as mind-making or, simply, truth. The object of
group truth is group-confirmation and perpetuation; while individual
truth has no object other than discovering itself and involves neither
proofs nor priests. In order, however, to win any acceptance it must
translate itself into group truth, it must accommodate itself to
the fact-curriculum of the group. But not only is such truth forced
to submit to group terminology and order, but the group conscience
demands that the individual mind serve it by working with the purposes
of the group. The group, indeed, tries to preclude all idiosyncratic
thought-activity and to use what intelligence it can control against
it. This civic intelligence is found simplified in the catechism
instructing children ‘to order themselves lowly and reverently before
their betters and to do their duty in that state of life unto which it
has pleased God to call them.’
The confirmation of the candidate as a member of the group establishes
the superiority of group opinion over individual opinion and the
authority of the group to define this relationship as one governed by
civic duties. It is the nature of these duties which determines the
categories into which civic intelligence falls. The group can never
be anything more than a superstition, but the categories assemble
all available material into a textual Corpus. There being no real
functional group surviving, this Corpus of group texts is used as the
rallying point of the group, the counterpart of the primitive clan
totem, the outward and visible sign of a long-extinct grace.
The Corpus, in making categorical demands upon the individual, thus
limits the ways in which works may be conceived and presented. These
demands become the only ‘inspiration’ countenanced, and theoretically
all creative supply has its source in them. This seems a fairly
plausible view of the status of the arts and sciences in human
society. The occurrence of a supply independent of Corpus demands, its
possibility or presence, is a question that the social limitations of
our critical language prevent us from raising with any degree of humane
intelligibility.
* * * * *
We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the
circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of
criticism.
POETRY AND MUSIC
There is a weakling music and a weakling poetry which flatter each
other by making critical comparisons with each other: there is a
literary criticism of music in which words like ‘wit’ and ‘rhetoric’
excuse musical flabbiness, and a musical criticism of poetry in which
words like ‘symphonic’ and ‘overtone’ excuse poetic flabbiness. This
mutual tenderness leads to false creative as well as false critical
analogies between poetry and music; to the deliberate effort to use the
creative method of one art in the other.
I am not distressed by the poeticization of music because I do not
much care what happens to music; it is a nervous and ostentatious
performance, and little damage remains to be done to it. I am, on the
other hand, distressed by the musicification of poetry because poetry
is perhaps the only human pursuit left still capable of developing
antisocially. Musicified or pictorialized it is the propagandist tribal
expression of a society without any real tribal sense. We get a ‘pure’
poetry, metaphysically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet
for a civilized tribal sense and for poetry as an art intellectually
coördinating group sympathies: and we get a sort of jazz poetry,
politically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet for a primitive
tribal sense and for poetry as an art emotionally coördinating group
sympathies.
Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social
utility of creative acts. Poetry I consider to be an art only when the
poet consciously attempts to capture social prestige: when it is an art
of public flattery. In this sense Beaumont and Fletcher were greater
artists than Shakespeare--better musicians. Shakespeare alternated
between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of
poetic remorse.
To explain more precisely what I mean by this distinction between what
I believe to be poetry and what I believe to be art I shall set down a
number of contrasts between poetry and music.
1. All real musicians are physically misshapen as a result of platform
cozening of their audience. They need never have stood upon a platform:
there is a kind of ingratiating ‘come, come, dear puss’ in the musical
brain that distorts the face and puckers up the limbs. All real
poets are physically upright and even beautiful from indifference to
community hearings.
2. The end of a poem is the poem. The poem is the only admissible test
of the poem; the reader gets poetry, not flattery. The end of a musical
work is an ear, criticism, that is, flattery.
3. A musical work has a composer; it is an invention with
professionally available material and properties. A poem is made out
of nothing by a nobody--made out of a socially non-existent element in
language. If this element were socially existent in language it would
be isolated, professionalized, handed over to a trained craft. Rhyme
and rhythm are not professional properties; they are fundamentally
idiosyncratic, unavailable, unsystematizable; any formalization of
them is an attempted imitation of music by poets jealous of the public
success of music.
4. Music is an instrument for arousing emotions; it varies only
according to the emotions it is intended to arouse and according to the
precision with which these emotions are anticipated in the invention
of the music. Emotions represent persons; not persons in particular
but persons in general. Music is directed toward the greatest number
of persons musically conceivable. It is a mass-marshalling of the
senses by means of sound. Poetry is not an instrument and is not
written with the intention of arousing emotions--unless it is of a
hybrid musico-poetical breed. The end of poetry is not to create a
physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind. It appeals
to an energy in which no distinction exists between physical and
mental conditions. It does not massage, soothe, excite or entertain
this energy in any way. It _is_ this energy in a form of extraordinary
strength and intactness. Poetry is therefore not concentrated on an
audience but on itself and only produces satisfaction in the sense that
wherever this energy exists in a sufficient degree of strength and
intactness it will be encouraged by poetry in further concentration on
itself. Poetry appeals only to poetry and begets nothing but poetry.
Music appeals to the intellectual disorganization and weakness of
people in numbers and begets, by flattering this weakness (which is
sentimentality), gratifying after-effects of destructive sociality.
The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory
of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence
on itself; indeed, it has no end. It isolates energies in themselves
rather than socially dissolving one in another.
5. Music provides the hearer with an ideal experience, a prepared
episode. Poetry is not idealistic; it is not experience in this episode
or programme sense. There is an entertaining short-story variety in
music; a repellent, austere monotony in poetry. Poetry brings all
possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness
beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go. Poetry is defeat, the
end which is not an end but a stopping-short because it is impossible
to go further; it makes mad; it is the absolutism of dissatisfaction.
Music brings not the consciousness but the _material_ of experience
to a certain degree, always to different degrees. It makes pleasantly
happy or unhappy. It is the vulgarity of satisfaction.
6. Music disintegrates and therefore seems active, fruitful, extensive,
enlarging. Poetry isolates all loose independencies and then integrates
them into one close independency which, when complete, has nothing to
do but confront itself. Poetry therefore seems idle, sterile, narrow,
destroying. And it is. This is what recommends it.
POETRY AND PAINTING
Painters no longer paint with paint except in the sense that
poets write with ink. Paint is now only a more expensive, elegant
ink. What do painters paint with, then? They paint with poetry. A
picture is a poem in which the sense has been absorbed by the medium
of communication of sense. It is not an intelligible series of
hieroglyphics, but the poem itself forced into a kind of outrageous,
unnatural visibility: as if suddenly the thing mind were caught in
the hand and made to appear painfully and horribly as a creature. The
development of painting is toward this poetic quality; the better (the
more literal, the less realistic) it gets, the more horrible. So much
for the so-called abstractness of painting: the sense is made identical
with the medium by forcibly marrying it to the medium. Medium and sense
are a legally fictitious One in which the medium, the masculine factor,
forces the sense, the feminine factor, to bear his name and do honour
to his bed and table. _She_ is all meek, hopeless amicability, _he_ is
all blustering, good-humoured cynicism.
This poetic progress of painting influences the pictorial progress of
poetry. There is a great response in modern poetry to the demand by
painters that it should be more poetic. See for yourself how many of
the newest poems have not their names lettered in aluminium on their
doors, with a knocker designed by the latest French abstract sculptor
(master also of golf), humanly visible furniture within (all primary
colours), and nobody home.
POETRY AND DREAMS
I do not believe there is any more relation between poem-making and
dream-making than between poem-making and child-making. The making
of poems, dreams and children is difficult to explain because they
all somehow happen and go on until the poem comes to an end and the
sleeper wakes up and the child comes out into the air. As for children,
there are so many other ways of looking at the matter that poetry is
generally not asked to provide a creative parallel. As for dreams,
they are the dregs of the mind, anxious to elevate themselves by
flattering comparisons. As for poems, they are frequently (more often
than not) concocted in the dregs of the mind and therefore happy in an
understanding of mutual support between themselves and dreams.
The only real resemblance between poetry and dreams is that they are
both on the other side of waking--on opposite sides. Waking is the
mind in its mediocrity. Mediocrity is of such large extent that it
pushes off into obscurity the mental degree _beyond_ mediocrity, in
a direction _away from_ sleep. The mental degree _before_ mediocrity,
_toward_ sleep, is the dream. So the stage before the lowest degree
of mediocrity and the stage beyond the highest degree of mediocrity
are bracketed together by mediocrity because they are both outside of
mediocrity--the mind at its canniest intelligence and the mind at its
canniest imbecility.
JOCASTA
§1
The pathetic differences between wrong and right are well illustrated
in the persons of Otto Spengler and Wyndham Lewis. Herr Spengler is a
pessimist who has succeeded in cheering himself up with a romantic view
of Decline. Mr. Lewis is an optimist because he is right, forced into
pessimism by the general prevalence of wrong. He sees wrong (rightly)
as Time, Romance, Advertisement (forced optimism), Righteousness,
Action, Popular Art (Time, Romance, Advertisement, Righteousness,
Action, united in an inferiority complex). Since he is right his
right quarrels with the various manifestations of wrong he is able to
distinguish: the more he is able to distinguish the more corroborations
he has of his rightness. Herr Spengler, being wrong, has this advantage
therefore over Mr. Lewis: whereas Mr. Lewis’s success must be confined
to seeing wrong in the most unorganized (that is, various) manner
possible, _his_ success depends on his being wrong in the most
organized manner possible--the more organized he seems, the more right
he seems. Unfortunately this situation brings about a competition
between Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis: Mr. Lewis feels obliged to
organize his unorganized view of wrong, which cancels the potency of
his rightness, which is only valid so long as it is unorganized (that
is, commentarial instead of systematic). So he becomes a colleague of
Herr Spengler in righteousness, the advocate of a vocabulary. We find
him, as he himself admits, trying to give ‘compendious’ names to what
is wrong: which places him immediately in Herr Spengler’s class.[1]
To be right is to be incorruptibly individual. To be wrong is to be
righteously collective. Herr Spengler is a collectivist: he believes in
the absorption of the unreal (right) individual in a collective reality
(History or Romance)--by which the individual becomes functionally (as
opposed to morphologically) really-real. Mr. Lewis is an individualist
in so far as he is opposed to organized functional reality. But
he is unable to face the final conclusion of individualism: that
the individual is morphologically as well as functionally unreal,
and that herein alone (in this double withdrawal from both nature
and human society, or history) can he be right. How does Mr. Lewis
come to believe in the morphological reality of the individual? By
devoting himself so violently to revealing the sham of historical
action in art--the unreality of functional reality--that he creates by
implication a real which, since it cannot exist in historical romance
(society), which is all sham, must exist in non-historical romance
(nature). Further, both Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis think through the
same machinery--the machinery of knowledge. Indeed it appears as if
they thought because they possessed this machinery and had to use it:
this is the constant impression made by Herr Spengler, the frequent
impression made by Mr. Lewis. I do not think that Mr. Lewis really
thinks because of and by means of knowledge. I am convinced that he
thinks. But I see also that he is unable to face uncompromisingly the
problem of individualism. He is not content with being right; he is
stung by his irritation with what is wrong into the desire to be real
as well as right. He therefore organizes the same material that Herr
Spengler organizes--to prove that it is sham, as Herr Spengler to
prove that it is real. He even uses the same false organizing system
as Herr Spengler--analogy. Herr Spengler, by proving the analogical
consistency of his views, merely proves that wrong is wrong. Mr. Lewis,
by overstudying the analogical consistency of wrong, establishes his
right by the same system that Herr Spengler uses in establishing his
wrong. He is making of his right a competitive Romance to argue with
Herr Spengler’s Romance. With both Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis I feel
in the presence of realists. Herr Spengler, I feel, is happy in being a
realist, Mr. Lewis, I feel, is not. He is not, I think, because he is
fundamentally right, but afraid of facing the unreality of rightness.
It is difficult to explain this because it is a difficult situation;
and I wish if possible to avoid compendious names. It would perhaps be
simplest to say that Mr. Lewis is timid (as he has himself privately
admitted).
Mr. Lewis attacks the principle which is to Herr Spengler the right of
his wrong. He attacks the reality of the collective-real. But in doing
so he opposes to it an individual-real. The collective-real is man in
touch with man. The individual-real is man in touch with the natural in
him, in touch with nature. Neither Herr Spengler nor Mr. Lewis dares
face the individual-unreal: both believe in unity and integration, Herr
Spengler in the unity and integration of history, Mr. Lewis in the
unity and integration of natural as opposed to historical existence. ‘I
am for the physical world,’ Mr. Lewis says. One of the reasons he is
for the physical world is, apparently, that the historical world, in
keeping up with itself, not only worships the fetich of Romance, but
the fetich of childishness as well. In pointing this out Mr. Lewis is
both wise and courageous; but he reveals at the same time an important
fetich of the individual-real, adultishness. Nor, maddened by the
vulgar success of the historical world with itself, can he see that the
fetich of childishness in only a half-clue to the story of Gertrude
Stein, that Miss Stein has one foot in the collective real and one foot
in the individual-unreal--which is more than can be said of Mr. Lewis,
who has both feet planted in the individual-real.[2]
I must next give an illustration of the individual-real in contemporary
literature. This will perhaps not please Wyndham Lewis and will
certainly not please its author, Virginia Woolf. I can only say
that I do not mean to attack either of them but merely to explain
the individual-real. And Mrs. Woolf’s most recent book, _To the
Lighthouse_, seems to me a perfect example of the individual-real.
In the first place, it is individual: not in the sense that it
is personal, warm, alive to itself, indifferent to effect or
appreciation, vividly unreal, but in the sense that it individualizes
the simple reality of nature, gives it distinction--shade, tone,
personal subtlety. In the second place it is real--meticulously,
mathematically like life: not historical time-life, which is an easy
approximation, but natural flesh-life, which must be laboriously,
exquisitely, irritatingly, painfully rendered. To do this language
must be strained, supersensitized, loaded with comparisons, suggestive
images, emotional analogies: used, that is, in a poetic way to write
something that is not poetry--used to argue, prove, prick the cuticle
of sense, so to speak, in a way that is extravagant, unpleasant,
insincere (since it purports to be pleasant). The method, in fact, has
no creative justification: it merely drives home the individual-real,
which is physical emphasis of self-individual because it is physically
self, real because as physical it shares in the simple reality of
nature. All this delicacy of style, it appears, is the expression of
an academic but nevertheless vulgar indelicacy of thought, a sort
of Royal Academy nudeness, a squeamish, fine-writing lifting of the
curtains of privacy. In the third place, it (the individual-real as
illustrated in this novel) is adultish--advanced but conservative: it
does not belong to childish, democratic mass-art, but neither does it
belong to the individual, non-physical, non-collective unreal. It is
over-earnest constrained, suppressedly hysterical, unhappy, could give
no one pleasure. Pleasure is doing as one pleases. In works like this
neither the author, who is obsessed by the necessity of emphasizing the
individual-real, nor the reader, who is forced to follow the author
painfully (word for word) in this obsession, may do as he pleases.
There is only one novel-writer who really did as he pleased, let his
characters do as they pleased and his reader to do as he pleased, and
that was Defoe. He could do this because he was, as Pope said, ‘the
unabashed Defoe,’ and he was unabashed because he was unreal, vividly
unreal--personal, warm, indifferent to effect (consistency). Mrs.
Woolf defends herself from any such analysis of her work as I have
made here by declaring that there is no such thing as a novel. If _To
The Lighthouse_ is not to be treated as a novel, then it must, by its
language-habits, be treated as a poem. Analyse it then as a poem:
what then? It proves itself to be merely a novel; and an insincere
novel--the use of the material of the collective-real to insinuate
dogmatically the individual-real. Defoe used the material of the
collective-real as it could only be used sincerely--to insinuate the
individual-unreal: and so Defoe, if you like, did turn the novel into
poetry.
I once discussed this point with E. M. Forster and we found that we
had each read _Roxana_ in entirely opposite senses. Mr. Forster was
certain that Defoe followed Roxana in every word he wrote of her, and
that Roxana likewise followed Defoe, that there was no do-as-you-please
break between her and Defoe or between her and the reader or between
Defoe and the reader; that all was one intense, physically compact
and consistent exposition of the individual-real. I pointed out the
striking division in, for example, Roxana’s long feminist declamation
against marriage to her Dutch lover--a division in which all the
_dramatis personæ_, including author and reader, are released to accept
the declamation with whatever bias they please. In this division I
find Defoe’s sincerity. Mr. Forster, on the other hand, understands
the declamation as a remarkably unified, _innocent_, three-dimensional
slice of that individual-real which is the story. If I thought that
Defoe had written that passage innocently, with realistic consistency,
I should catalogue him as a fine writer and skilful hypocrite. But
I am persuaded he was neither of these. I am sure that the feminist
recital was wilfully unreal, inconsistent, many-dimensional; that it
was delicate common sense for the Dutch lover, frank but sentimental
expediency for Roxana, sound doctrine for Defoe and undisguised
storifying for the reader present in the story; and that none of these
was deceived in his bias, but could if he wished change it for any
other without damaging the consistency of the piece, since there was
none. _The Tempest_ has the same sort of inconsistency as a Defoe
novel; it is the most unreal of the plays and to me preferable to
the more realistic plays. Others are more poetic, as Mrs. Woolf’s
_To The Lighthouse_ is more poetic than _Roxana_. But they do not
contain so many poems, as there is no passage in _To The Lighthouse_
with the dimensions (the contradictions) of Roxana’s recital to her
Dutch lover. In _The Tempest_ there is not only a continuous chain
of such inconsistencies (poems); the characters themselves have the
same many-dimensional inconsistency--the unreal Caliban, the unreal
Prospero, interchangeable in their inconsistency.
Before leaving this question and returning to Herr Spengler, whose
wrong has not in my opinion been sufficiently disorganized, I must
come back to the suffocating, nearly sickening physical quality
of what I call the individual-real--not a strong, fresh, casual
frankness of flesh, but a self-scented, sensuous, unbearably curious
self-smelling of flesh. The collective-real is crude, symbolic, sham;
the individual-real is exquisite, more than symbolic--literally,
intrinsically metaphorical. I have in mind, in connection with _To The
Lighthouse_, a book of E. M. Forster’s, _A Room With a View_. Before
reading this book I had met Mr. Forster and found him charming; the
book was recommended to me by my friends as a charming book. I read it.
I could not deny that it was charming. Yet it was to me unpleasantly
painful to read. It was too charming. I do not mean to be flippant,
or to disgust, or to alter my original conviction of Mr. Forster’s
personal charm, which I have had an opportunity of confirming since
reading this book. But the truth is that it affected me in the same
way as would the sight of a tenderly and exquisitely ripe pimple. I
longed to squeeze it and have done with it. At the time I could only
reproach myself with this rather shameful morbidity and admit that my
reaction seemed preposterous. It was a simple, exquisitely written
story about simple, unexciting people; and the unpleasant excitement it
gave me was unnatural. Since then I have come to be able to identify
and understand a little the individual-real, and it is now perfectly
clear to me why Mr. Forster’s book affected me in that way, although
then I could only feel a vague physical reaction to its metaphorical
realism. That I recognized it as an essay in metaphorical realism is
proved by the persistent image of the pimple with which the book came
to be associated in my mind. And indeed, if I had thought a little more
closely about metaphorical realism at the time, I might have arrived
very soon at the same conclusion that I have here arrived at, _via_
Otto Spengler, Wyndham Lewis, and so forth.
In the ordinary time-world or art-world of the collective-real,
symbolism, however romantically it may be used, never denies that it
is symbolism. Its very effectiveness depends on its being recognized
as such. Further, since symbolism is here collective rather than
individual, since the symbol, that is, is _chosen_ to collectivize
individual emotions which would otherwise have separate and presumably
weaker communication with the thing for which the symbol stands, it is
clear that the symbolic method of the collective-real is selective:
it implies a graded choice of the things which it seems necessary and
important to symbolize. This method, whose psychology Herr Spengler
attempts to discover, is all that Mr. Lewis says it is (it is really
the symbolic method of the time-world that he attacks). In the
literature and art of the collective-real it is easy to recognize
because they are frankly symbolical: it is part of their technique to
insist on the symbolic quality of the symbol. This means that symbolic
art is generally bad art, full of double meanings, vulgar obviousness,
facile concessions to sentimentality, flattery of the mass-emotions
which confirm the relation of the symbol with the thing it represents.
Yet there is a proficiency, a vulgar good in this bad art that gives
great and pure pleasure--great because it has the strength of what
is purposively, defiantly bad, pure because it makes no attempt to
conceal its badness. And there is one further virtue in the symbolism
of the collective-real, that, being a selective symbolism, it does not
symbolize everything--if it symbolized everything it would destroy the
time-world, the organ of communication and author of symbols. Instead,
it lets pass much which it realizes would be proof against symbolism
and thus threaten its prestige: it admits that there is much that is
unreal and, in so far as is consistent with its authority, leaves it
alone. Poetry, therefore, in the world of the collective-real, is given
a little chance.