Vibratory Modernism

A. Enns, S. Trower, A. Enns, S. Trower

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137027245
• eBook ISBN: 9781137027252
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Vibratory Modernism is a collection of original essays that show how vibrations provide a means of bridging science and art - two fields that became increasingly separate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

1

From Vibratory Occultism to Vibratory Modernism: Blackwood, Lawrence, Woolf

Justin Sausman

Introduction

The relationship between modernity, modernism and occultism has become a growing field of scholarship in recent years. In contrast to Max Weber’s thesis of disenchantment, we have become familiar with the ways that scientific incursions into the domain of belief produced new forms of re-enchantment in the form of spiritualism,¹ telepathy,² or magical thinking associated with new technologies.³ Wouter Hanegraaff has argued that occultism persisted into modernity through processes of psychologisation: ‘magic has been interpreted increasingly as a series of psychological techniques for exalting individual consciousness; the original focus on learning how to use the hidden forces of the natural world has become dependent on learning how to use the hidden forces of the psyche’.⁴ Hanegraaff’s view has been challenged by Egil Asprem, who has argued that psychologisation can be equated with psychological escapism, while occultists such as Aleister Crowley were seen to ‘embrace natural scientific inquiry and tirelessly pursue such critical assessment of magical techniques, practices and results, reclaiming the subjective experiences for intersubjective scrutiny’.⁵ In both cases the authors are interested in the ways in which occultists are able to legitimate their beliefs and practices within the intellectual (and more specifically scientific) contexts of modernity.

While both tendencies can certainly be identified in esoteric texts, I want to pose a different question: in what ways might occultism persist in modernity through being incorporated within literary texts during the early twentieth century? My suggestion is that, alongside processes of psychologisation and naturalisation, we should also consider the ways in which the language of occultism was applied by novelists to subjects that lay outside the immediate concerns of esoteric discourses. In pursuing this aim I am adapting Bruno Latour’s description of the role of ‘translation’ in the dissemination of new scientific or technological projects: ‘Every time a new group becomes interested in the project, it transforms the project – a little, a lot, excessively, or not at all. In the translation model there is no transportation without transformation’.⁶ In other words, as a concept is discussed in different contexts its meaning will shift as literary writers adapt occult terminology as a metaphorical resource for thinking through wider questions, such as those associated with literary aesthetics. This approach enables us to move beyond cases of direct transfer, such as tropes of haunting derived from Victorian spiritualism, to consider some of the more indirect ways in which the language of modernism and occultism converge.

This chapter argues that the language of vibration provides a case of the translation of ideas between these two fields during the early twentieth century. If we can identify a distinct strain of vibratory modernism, as the essays in this volume suggest, then there is an equally distinct strain of vibratory occultism that emerged during the late nineteenth century, and what follows aims to bring these two fields together. As Shelley Trower has demonstrated, vibrations played a prominent role in the physical sciences from the mid-nineteenth century onwards as a way of describing the transmission of light, heat or energy throughout the cosmos and the human body.⁷ Vibrations also played an equally prominent role in the occultism that flourished during the fin de siècle and in the early years of the twentieth century, producing hybrids of modern physics and older esoteric ideas. This chapter traces how these vibrations (alongside related synonyms such as quivering, trembling and tremulations) were ‘translated’ into literary texts during the early twentieth century. Tessel Bauduin has shown that this synthesis of vibrations, occultism and aesthetic experimentation can be traced in modernist visual arts, and this chapter demonstrates that a parallel process can be identified in fiction, expanding on what Tim Armstrong’s discussion of modernism and spiritualism has suggestively called ‘the vibrating world’.⁸

This chapter focuses on three novelists, all of whom used the language of vibrations within their writings. However, as much recent work in modernist studies has argued, the danger in focusing exclusively on modernist figures is that it may obscure the ways in which more popular fictional forms also responded to the contexts of modernity. To avoid this, the bulk of this chapter focuses on Algernon Blackwood, an early twentieth-century writer more often discussed in terms of fantasy and gothic than modernism. He was immersed in the worlds of late Victorian occultism and included the vibrations he encountered there in a number of his works. In particular, his novel The Human Chord (1910) put vibrations at the centre of its plot in which a sinister clergyman attempts to vibrate the Hebrew name of God to manipulate hidden occult forces. The chapter then turns to D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, both of whom included vibrations within their writings. In contrast to Blackwood’s more direct transfer of occult ideas into his literary texts, these authors demonstrate how the language of vibratory occultism could be translated into terms used to articulate modernist aesthetics.

Algernon Blackwood and ‘the trade jargon of modern occultism’

Although relatively obscure today, Blackwood (1869–1951) was a well-known figure in his lifetime, becoming a radio and television presenter during the 1930s and 1940s and receiving a CBE in 1949. He was known as the ‘ghost man’, a label he was uncomfortable with given that his writing extended beyond gothic to encompass occultism, fantasy and children’s literature. He also created a psychic detective, John Silence, an occult double of Sherlock Holmes, who featured in John Silence and Other Stories (1907).⁹ The small critical literature that exists on him notes the difficulty of locating his fiction in generic terms. Jack Sullivan describes him as ‘an uncharacteristically “positive” writer’ of gothic fiction.¹⁰ S.T. Joshi suggests a new category is needed for Blackwood: ‘The optimistic weird tale: his cosmicism [...] typically sees the human being as an intimate part of the cosmos and not some minute excrescence upon it.’¹¹ Blackwood’s cosmic perspective is also noted by Roger Luckhurst: ‘the supernatural oppressors seem to be the ancient and august forces of nature or the cosmos itself, as if to suggest that humanity has reneged on its inheritance of the planet’.¹²

Such cosmic forces are at the core of The Human Chord’s depiction of powerful vibratory energies central to esoteric beliefs. Joshi seems rather puzzled by this, noting that ‘what Blackwood is getting at, I suppose, is that these sorts of conceptions are really the science of the future – they are the things orthodox science will come to prove experimentally at some later date’.¹³ There is, however, no need to speculate on the science of the future here: Blackwood is drawing on ideas from the synthesis of science and esotericism that flourished during his own time. As Alex Owen has noted, ‘the “new” occultism in particular co-opted the language of science and staked a strong claim to rationality while at the same time undermining scientific naturalism as a world view’.¹⁴ Indeed, in Wouter Hanegraaff’s view the term occultism first comes to prominence during the nineteenth century to describe these hybrids of older esoteric or magical ideas with the latest scientific advances.¹⁵

Blackwood was actively involved with the three most prominent groups associated with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultism. He embraced the Theosophical Society during the 1880s, joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1900, and carried out investigations of haunted houses on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research. David Punter and Glennis Byron note that ‘what is distinctive about his writing should probably be seen to follow from the fact that he is one of the few writers of Gothic fiction actually to have believed in the supernatural’.¹⁶ Mike Ashley describes The Human Chord as ‘his one complete novel arising out of the Golden Dawn.’¹⁷ In more hostile terms a review published in The Equinox, the periodical started by the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, complained that Blackwood was ‘suffering from indigestion brought on by a surfeit of ill-cooked Theosophy’.¹⁸ Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was also ambivalent about Blackwood, describing him as ‘the one absolute master of the weird atmosphere’ but criticising his ‘too free use of the trade jargon of modern occultism’.¹⁹ If we are to explore the ‘jargon’ of vibration in The Human Chord then this necessitates first of all turning to the occult groups in which Blackwood firs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower
• 1 From Vibratory Occultism to Vibratory Modernism: Blackwood, Lawrence, Woolf
• 2 ‘A Sinister Resonance’: Vibration, Sound, and the Birth of Conrad’s Marlow
• 3 Physics as Narrative: Lewis, Pound and the London Vortex
• 4 Throbbing Human Engines: Mechanical Vibration, Entropy and Death in Marinetti, Joyce, Ehrenburg and Eliot
• 5 Materialising the Medium: Ectoplasm and the Quest for Supra-Normal Biology in Fin-de-Siècle Science and Art
• 6 A Sense and Essence of Nature: Wave Patterns in the Paintings of František Kupka
• 7 Ether Machines: Raoul Hausmann’s Optophonetic Media
• 8 Vibratory Photography
• 9 Good Vibrations: Avant-Garde Theatre and Ethereal Aesthetics from Kandinsky to Futurism
• 10 The Vibratorium Electrified
• 11 Vibration, Percussion and Primitivism in Avant-Garde Performance
• 12 Deleted Expletives: Vibration and the Modernist Vocal Imaginary
• Index