James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture

"The Einstein of English Fiction"

Jeffrey S. Drouin

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317541493
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Ciencias físicas
• Categoria: Relatividad en física

This book makes an important intervention in the ongoing debates about modernism, science, and the divisions of early Twentieth-Century print culture. In order to establish Joyce's place in the nexus of modernism and scientific thought, Drouin uses the methods of periodical studies and textual criticism to examine the impact of Einstein's relativity theories on the development of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Looking at experiments with space, time, motion, and perspective, it rigorously surveys discourse of science and the novel in the print culture networks connected to Joyce, with concrete analysis of avant-garde magazines, newspapers, popular science books, BBC pamphlets, and radio broadcasts between 1914 and 1939. These sources elucidate changes that Joyce made to the manuscripts, typescripts, and page proofs of certain episodes of his final two novels. The new evidence establishes for the first time the nature of the material link between Joyce and non-technical science, and the manner in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake owe their structure and meaning to the humanistic issues associated with science during the wartime and inter-war years. In examining the relationships between Joyce's later work and the popular science industry, the book elucidates the often conflicting attitudes toward science in inter-war British print culture, filling in a piece of the puzzle that is modernism's relationship to the new physics and, simultaneously, the history of the novel.

1 Science and the Novel in the Wartime Avant-Garde, 1914–1918

DOI: 10.4324/9781315727967-3

Now that the novel is wider and deeper, now that it begins to be the serious, passionate, living great-form of literary study and of social research, now that it has become, by analysis and psychological inquiry, the history of contemporary ethics-in-action (how shall one render accurately the phrase “l’histoire morale contemporaine”?), now that the novel has imposed upon itself the studies and duties of science, one may again make a stand for its liberties and its privileges.

—Ezra Pound quoting Edmond de Goncourt, “Meditatio,” The Egoist (March 1916)

James Joyce’s contemporaries considered him to be the apotheosis of theories of the new novel as his works were serializing in The Egoist (London, 1914–1919) and The Little Review (Chicago, New York, Paris, 1914–1929). Much of that esteem was due to Ezra Pound’s influence in advancing Imagist and Vorticist aesthetics while he held editorial positions on the two magazines. Pound took Joyce under his wing as The Egoist began its run, placing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in its pages while hashing out his theory of the novel. Other writers, through Pound’s goading or their own natural interest, began to uphold Joyce as the gold standard for what the novel should become, with its combination of abstract structure and lucid sense impression that exposed truth. More importantly, these discussions influenced Joyce as he began work upon Ulysses, which seemed to fulfill many of the pronouncements that hinged upon poetics, narrative, and the importance of a metaphysical underpinning. By the time Ulysses began serializing in The Little Review of March 1918, it emerged in conversation with a slew of critics and novelists seeking the ultimate combination of realism and abstraction. In that way, Joyce was an active contributor to discourse on the novel’s role in a social revolution cum postwar reconstruction based on individualist anarchism, much of which saw science, or rather new science, as a key to the innovative aesthetic that would make it happen.

In The Egoist and The Little Review, an emphasis on the Flaubertian realist novel merged with a trenchant critique of modern science and individualism. However, what was at first a sustained engagement with the problems of materialism and free will quickly became an urgent consideration of the moral role of art in light of the unconscionable realities of World War I and postwar reconstruction. Across the two magazines, the persistent connection of realist prose with science affected the conception of the novel’s purpose in light of the disillusionment brought on by the war. For contributors of these two magazines, the problem of the literary tradition was at the forefront in dealing with the political and cultural crises that led to the war. The need for innovation was seen as a problem of clear language and clear thought in the general culture, which were tantamount to good governance in the eyes of many language theorists. Science does not impose a preconceived structure upon the world, and for that reason was considered to be one mode of thought that could attune readers to what is real in the face of illusions propagated by mass media. In the wake of the war’s atrocities, the avant-garde exhibited a split response, seeking either a return to classical stability or a complete break from traditional genres no longer relevant to the utterly baffling facts of modernity. In that way, a work like A Portrait is not only about Stephen Dedalus’s escape from the oppression of Irish nationalism and Victorian imperialism, but about the novel’s escape from genres like the Bildungsroman in order to show a person’s life and environment as they are.

In avant-garde culture, the need for literary form to mirror its content was paramount in developing works that were long lasting and autonomous. Science came to be seen as a guiding principle of realism for allowing the novel to embody the “true” forms of life, which were often unexpected and unforeseen. Thus, the stylistic shifting within A Portrait to match the stages of Stephen’s development was considered by Joyce’s contemporaries in The Egoist and other magazines as just that kind of quasi-scientific technique. A growing consensus held that art and science worked toward the same truth, with a strong preference for “new” sciences as models for literary innovation.

The problematic yoking of literature and science can be traced in the voluminous discourse of the novel in the pre-war and wartime numbers of The Egoist and The Little Review. Among the primary themes are that the novel must constitute a new blend of emotional vitality and realism alongside an interest in “new” sciences that are perceived to be less materialistic—meaning less deterministic—than the “old” sciences of Newton and the Victorians. The psychological theories of Henri Bergson are a well-known example used by literary types to advocate a scientifically grounded understanding of human individuality that is both free and stable. However, magazine contributors drew upon a much wider variety of scientific disciplines to make sense of modern culture. Science was grafted into a number of subject areas, including long-standing discussions of materialism, free will, and determinism; realism and the truth-value of language; Imagism and the necessity for clear language in politics; Vorticism and the need for a new vitality and raw truth; the end of the novel; the inadequacy of traditional genres to deal with the uncanny realities of the Great War; and the need for social renewal through artistic innovation. Though these areas seem disparate at a glance, they bear a striking amount of unity over time through the editorial practices of the two magazines, which sought to build conversations cumulatively across issues.

Aside from newspapers, Joyce did not read many literary magazines until his work was placed in The Egoist by Pound during 1914. Once that relationship began, Joyce regularly read The Egoist and, starting with the serialization of Ulysses in 1918, The Little Review. He also received isolated issues of other periodicals containing reviews of his own work plus that of his new correspondents T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. From that point onward, Joyce was in the life-long habit of checking newspapers and magazines, where he no doubt came in contact with their broad spectrum of topics. So, not only was Joyce well acquainted with Pound’s writings, but he was embedded in the wider discursive context in which they were published. A survey of how science and the novel are represented in The Egoist and The Little Review, with glances at some other periodicals he read, will give a clear picture of the material culture in which Ulysses emerged.

Evidence of Joyce’s reading comes from his letters, notes, drafts, and the various catalogs of his personal libraries. We see in these materials an author who religiously checked newspapers and other periodicals in order to monitor responses to his work, as well as to keep current with what others were producing. The contents of Joyce’s home libraries in Trieste (1905–1915, 1919), Zurich (1915–1919), and Paris (1920–1940) were constantly in shift. Beginning in 1914, Pound sent Joyce many issues of The Egoist and The Little Review until the winter of 1919. Joyce wrote John Rodker from Paris on September 29, 1920, asking for all copies to date of The Little Review containing the serialized Ulysses (beginning March 1918), as his own copies were sent in a trunk from Trieste that had been lost (Letters III 23). In that letter, he also asked whether any issues had come out since the May–June 1920 number. In a letter of November 10, 1920, Joyce asked Rodker for the number of September–October 1919 (Letters III 29). Upon leaving Paris in late 1940, Joyce possessed all numbers from at least March 1918 to September-December 1920, which constitute all the issues containing the serialized Ulysses, ending with episode 14 (Gheerbrant no. 260). ¹ At that time, he also had the February 2, 1914 to September 1, 1915 numbers of The Egoist, which contained twenty-five installments of the Portrait with several interruptions (Gheerbrant, no. 213). From his letters and the biographies, we know that Joyce also read the January 15, 1914 ² ; March 1, 1916 ³ ; April 1916 ⁴ ; and March ⁵ , April ⁶ , May ⁷ , and June ⁸ 1917 numbers of The Egoist. It is also evident that he received the rest of The Egoist as it published isolated episodes of Ulysses from January–February 1919 until its closure in December 1919. Since the holdings of Joyce’s abandoned Paris flat were incomplete at the time Gheerbrant made his catalog, and since the letters show that Joyce actively acquired and sent many later numbers of both these magazines, it is very likely that he read the complete run of The Egoist, most of The Little Review from early 1918 to the end of 1920, plus sporadic numbers from Winter and Autumn 1921.

The Egoist began on January 1, 1914, in London, as the reincarnation of two feminist magazines edited by Dora Marsden, The Freewoman (1911–1912) and The New Freewoman (1913). Marsden edited the first few issues of The Egoist but soon turned over managerial responsibilities to Harriet Shaw Weaver in order to focus on her own essay series. Bearing the subtitle “An Individualist Review,” The Egoist contained articles, reviews, poems, and serialized fiction asserting the liberty of the individual over what it deemed the oppressive influences of modernity. Egoism was an idea much in circulation at the time, taking its name and anarchist politics from Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. In that way, the magazine’s encyclopedic scope matched its polemical and iconoclastic tone. It sought to destroy all enervating influences in the arts, sciences, and social institutions for the purpose of bringing about greater agency for the individual.

Science was a prominent interest for the Egoist community. In the earlier part of the run, the magazine examined ways in which science gave credence to or mitigated free will. These questions later gave rise to theories of language and truth that placed literature front and center. Many conflicting voices were heard on this subject. The editors culled differing points of view from a variety of contributors who responded to each other vigorously, in some cases over the course of several years. Marsden’s essay series, which went under various names such as “Lingual Psychology” and “The Science of Signs,” examined the ways in which the language of science permitted the individual to partake in the universal while retaining uniqueness. Huntly Carter’s autobiographical essays critique his intellectual upbringing in a way that paints science as a dehumanizing cultural influence. Pound’s modernist aesthetic combined realist novels with Imagist poetics and science to alter fundamentally the politics of mass print culture. However, Pound’s theory of the novel was echoed and taken further by Muriel Ciolkowska, whose regular column on French fiction developed theories of narrative that were ahead of their time. When T. S. Eliot joined the magazine as an assistant editor in 1917, his literary criticism dealt with science as both a cultural institution and a method for poetic truth. His famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which claims that “art may be said to approach the condition of science” (55), was serialized in the final two numbers.

The paratexts give a strong sense of how the Egoist’s readership connected science with art and ideas. Near the end of the first number, a quarter-page ad claims that The Divine Mystery: A Reading in the History of Christianity down to the Time of Christ, by John Upward, “is the only work on science and religion that has ever been accepted by both sides,” wherein “the history of religion is presented as the history of science” (20). The interdisciplinary examination of two seemingly opposite sides, emphasizing the book’s interest to feminists and reformers, shows an attitude that seeks to synthesize a wide array of material into a socially progressive work.

The same attitude is also visible in a juxtaposed, quarter-page ad for Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, the seminal text for the Egoist staff and readership. The ad quotes The Morning Post, which finds “something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of this lonely thinker applying himself to the hopeless task of destroying the myriad mansioned structure of human society with a small hammer that no suffragist would look at and a bent nail for chisel” (20). The ideal of the individualist artist, here applied to a social thinker, will become a trope applied to the scientist elsewhere in The Egoist and in other modernist periodicals during the interwar years. The same blurb explains that “[t]o Stirner, the Ego is the only reality, the only ideal,” and that only when all humankind can say with him that there is “nothing else in the universe” can freedom be fully achieved (20). This snippet illustrates the tenor of the magazine’s goal of recreating the whole social order—“the myriad mansioned structure of human society”—along the lines of an idealism of the individual. The same ad also features a blurb from The Athenæum claiming that Stirner’s doctrine of “complete egoism” gives it permanent importance (20). Below this advertisement is one for Anarchism, by Dr. Paul Eltzbacher (which Joyce owned in Trieste), ⁹ a comparative study of the writings of Godwin, Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoi, and Tucker. According to a blurb from Chicago Public, the author’s “scientific exposition is all the more valuable because he is not an Anarchist” (20). Likewise, the anarchist translator Steven Byington, a regular Egoist contributor, describes the book as “the most complete and accurate presentation of anarchism that ever has been given in so short a space” (20). Another book advertised on this page attempts to delineate the agreements and differences between state socialism and anarchism.

This typical page of advertisements gives a strong sense of the attitudes and social positions of The Egoist’s readership. The books are pitched toward a university-educated working- and middle-class audience interested in the larger questions of religion, science, and politics. Authoritative endorsements are culled from a mix of relatively high-brow literary magazines such as the Athenæum and the French Nouvelles Littéraires, of conservative daily newspapers like The Morning Post, and of other avant-garde magazines like The Little Review, Poetry (1912–present), The Future, BLAST (1914–1915), and Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire (1919–1924). Thus, it clearly sought to gather a broad range of ideological material.

One important pattern running through the ads is the use of science as a legitimating reference point. Upward’s book addresses science and religion in a way that is meant to advocate the social and sexual liberty of women. Eltzbacher’s book is lauded as a “scientific exposition” of individualist anarchy. What the pattern suggests is that the readership viewed science as an authority in the struggle to bring about greater individual freedom. Such an audience, socially and artistically progressive, is therefore generalist in its interests but specialized in taste and ideology.

In the primary content of The Egoist, pieces concerning science contribute to a long-term debate over free will versus determinism, questioning whether civilization and the self are governed by universal law. For instance, the very first article of the first issue, aptly titled “Liberty, Law, and Democracy” and authored by Marsden, argues that the law devours the spirit of the populace. In apparent opposition to the ad for Upward’s book, one climactic point states that “we who are so near an age when the mere mention of ‘Universal Law’ would produce lyrical intoxication, ‘All’s love, All’s law,’ a very swoon of security, do not propose here to break in upon the belated obsequies of that dead or dying concept” (3). The scientific and religious overtones of Victorian “Universal Law,” invoked in a quotation from Robert Browning’s poem “Saul,” are deemed here an enervating concept tied to the legal system, the very foundation of civilization. In the Views and Comments section, one reader’s letter criticizes Steven Byington and Henry George, who in earlier issues of The New Freewoman argued that capitalist interest “is not an arbitrary, but a natural thing … the result … of laws of the universe which underlie Society” (5). The negative tone in which these works are quoted contributes to the magazine’s program of individual liberty against capitalism and the legal system. It also hints at disillusionment with “old science,” whatever that might be.

Edgar A. Mowrer’s “France To-Day: A Group of Thinkers” reviews Le Matérialisme Actuel (Present-Day Materialism), edited by Ernest Flammarion, in order to bolster the new international idealism of the individual by discarding the “old materialism.” The review builds cumulatively toward the argument that, considering materialism and the variety of sciences, artistic creativity is the most important agent of social transformation. It features essays by Henri Bergson (psychology), Henri Poincaré (mathematics/physics), Jean Friedel (biology), Charles Gide (economics), François de Witt-Guizot (literature), Gaston Riou (literature), and Firman Roz (literature), stemming from their presentations at a conference on the state of materialism and its philosophical basis in French science and art. “Materialism” is never quite defined, but it can be taken as the view that all phenomena, including human nature and the mind, are determined by matter and its motions. “A bas la matérialisme is the cry,” reports Mowrer, for “France … has suffered most from two generations of ‘scientists,’ of scoffers and of Zolas” (6). Like Pound, he rails against the narrowness and obfuscation of mass media, where conflicting politics such as “monarchical reaction, nationalism, syndicalism, socialism … make of journalistic bulletins a chaos” (6). Against the “old science of Huxley, Renan, Edgar Quinet and Haeckel” arise the “aesthetic anarchists, who are working for the spiritual regeneration of their nation by means of Walt Whitman and Nietzsche, are expression and individualism” (6). Like Marsden...