Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

Craig Bradshaw Woelfel

Description

An exploration of belief as an experience, both secular and religious, through the study of major literary works

At the height of modernism in the 1920s, what did it mean to believe and how was it experienced? Craig Woelfel seeks to answer this pivotal question in Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and Dissociation of Belief, a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between secular modernity and religious engagement.

Woelfel hinges his argument on the unlikely comparison of two revered modern writers: T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster. They had vastly different experiences with religion, as Eliot converted to Christianity later in life and Forster became a steadfast nonbeliever over time, but Woelfel contends that their stories offer a compelling model for belief as broken and ambivalent rather than constant. Narratives of faith—its loss or gain—are no longer linear but instead are just as fractured and varied as the modernists themselves. Drawing from Eliot's and Forster's major and minor creative and critical works, Woelfel makes the case for a "dissociation of belief" during the modern era—a separation of emotional and spiritual religious experience from its reduction to forms. He contextualizes belief in the modern era alongside modernist religious studies scholarship and current secularization theory, with particular attention to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of religious engagement at the time.

In Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, Woelfel considers major literary works—including Eliot's The Waste Land and Forster's A Passage to India—as well as the Cambridge Clark Lectures and previously unstudied personal writings from both authors. The volume revolves around a line from Eliot himself, from a lecture in which he said that he wanted "to see art, and to see it whole." Rather than excluding belief from the conversation, Woelfel contends that modernist art can become a critical liminal space for exploring what it means to believe in a secular age.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Living
• Philosophie et théologie
• Relativismo
• Aesthetic Theory
• Sophistication
• Oceanic feeling
• Humanism
• Objective correlative
• Religious experience
• Subjectivism
• Art for art's sake
• Good and evil
• Secularization
• Aestheticism
• General officer
• Moral realism
• Ineffability
• Relativism
• Suspension of disbelief
• Spirituality
• Individualism
• Aesthetics
• General
• Idealism
• Immanence

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611179064
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Varieties of Aesthetic Experience
Varieties of
Aesthetic Experience
Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief
Craig Bradshaw Woelfel

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-905-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-906-4 (ebook)
Front cover illustration: Free Curve to the Point-Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves , 1925, by Vasily Kandinsky, courtesy of Open Access at The Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
To Lindsay amabat amat .
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Modernist Literature and the Dissociation of Belief
2 The Modern Background of Belief and Religious Experience
3 Beliefs about Belief: Eliot, Dante, and Religious Experience in The Waste Land
4 Stopping at the Stone: A Passage to India and Dissociated Belief
5 Eliotic Varieties of Aesthetic Experience
6 Forsterian Varieties of Aesthetic Experience
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Thanks first to those at UC San Diego who first helped get this book started-especially Richard Cohen, who showed me what real religious studies scholarship was; and Michael Davidson, who helped me in ways it has taken me over a decade to understand and appreciate. Thanks to everyone at Notre Dame who gave me guidance and support as the project took real shape-Romana Huk and Maud Ellmann, Christian Moevs, the Devers Program in Dante Studies, Religion and Literature , Susannah Monta; and Steve Fredman, who, like Statius, has that rarest of teacher s gifts: knowing how to lead from behind and carrying the light with him for when it is needed. Thanks to the T. S. Eliot Society, for cultivating a community where this project could grow through the best form of scholarly work: friendly conversation-to Dominic Manganiello, a model of intellectual generosity since the day I met him; John Morgenstern, who gave me invaluable advice along the way; and Tony Cuda, whose small encouragement almost ten years ago in Florence legitimized the project, and whose subsequent criticism and friendship have seen it through. Thank you to Doug McFarland, who righted my will and is this book s honorary coauthor. Thanks go to the manuscript s first reader, Jeff Johnson, il miglior amigo .
An earlier version of part of chapter 4 appeared as Stopping at the Stone: Rethinking Belief (and Non-Belief ) in Modernism via A Passage to India , originally published in Twentieth-Century Literature 58.1 (2012): 26-59. Copyright 2012, Hofstra University. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu .
Reprint permission granted for material from chapter 1 by the University of Notre Dame, Religion Literature 44.1 (Spring 2012).
1
Modernist Literature and the Dissociation of Belief
A minor addition to the catalog of modernism s great annus mirabilis: E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot almost spent a lovely weekend together in May 1922. Lady Ottoline Morrell had extended Forster an invitation to come to Garsington for a weekend. For Forster, it was a move out of his normal Bloomsbury circle into another realm, that of the London high modernist literary scene. He was given the choice by his hostess of a first meeting with either Eliot or Wyndham Lewis. He chose the latter. Forster s biographer has related that he and Lewis got on amicably-they escaped from a crowd of overzealous undergrads by means of a long walk, one of Forster s favorite activities. However, he found the weekend of high society rather intrusive, and resented in particular Lady Ottoline s fishing for confidences about his recently deceased lover, Mohammed el Adl. 1
Eliot s and Forster s careers nearly met once more five years later, though again their persons did not. 2 In winter 1926-27 Forster delivered the prestigious Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, three years after the publication of A Passage to India . Though his audience could not know it at the time, the writing of that novel had taken a toll; he would not publish another. Much in the lectures indicates that Forster knew this, as they have a strong sense of finality. 3 But as he stood to begin, he was thinking not of his future as a novelist but of the shadow his critic-predecessor cast over the occasion:
Let me quote here for our comfort from my immediate predecessor in this lectureship, Mr. T. S. Eliot. Mr. Eliot enumerates, in the introduction to The Sacred Wood , the duties of the critic. It is part of his business to preserve tradition-when a good tradition exists. It is part of his business to see literature steady and to see it whole; and this is eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time. The first duty we cannot perform, the second we must try to perform. We can neither examine nor preserve tradition. But we can visualize the novelists as sitting in one room, and force them, by our very ignorance, from the limitations of date and place. I think that this is worth doing, or I should not have ventured to undertake this course. 4
Eliot had given the lectures in 1925-26, an honor that would help establish him in the role of his generation s definitive critic. The conscious attempt by both to see literature steady and to see it whole produced from the back-to-back lectures two monumental summary works on aesthetics: Forster s Aspects of the Novel , published in 1927; and Eliot s The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry . Eliot had originally intended the lectures to net three books, but they would not in fact produce any until the lectures themselves were published in 1993, under the editorial guidance of Ronald Schuchard. Eliot s lectures are his most comprehensive historicization of literary and intellectual history, and they served to codify his influential theory of the dissociation of sensibility as well as his classicist position. Forster s criticism has sadly not been much remembered by critics. But Forster was not chosen by accident; the lectures are remarkable. They more than hold their own with Eliot s not only in scope and insight but also in their penetrating treatment of key modernist aesthetic themes. Where they differ most greatly is in tone: Forster s reference to Eliot for our comfort is emblematic of his accommodating humility and charm as a speaker, and a world apart from the pedantic esotericism that made Eliot seem so masterful. He would not mention Eliot again.
The year 1926 was when T. S. Eliot entered St. Peter s in Rome and, to the surprise of his brother and sister-in-law who were with him, fell to his knees in prayer before Michelangelo s Piet . 5 Eliot was mired in a period of mental and emotional breakdown-one of several he underwent over the first half of his life and to which his brother was often privy. His letters suggest that this breakdown can be traced back to around 1925-that is, when Eliot was writing his own Clark Lectures-and a series of compounding causes: the near-deadly illness of his first wife, Vivien, and the continuing deterioration of their marriage; personal and financial stress over his pending decision to leave Lloyd s Bank and to relaunch the Criterion; and, surely not least, simple overwork. He who desires to be a competent banker, a powerful literary magazine editor, and the most influential poet-critic in English letters burns the candle at both ends. So it was not the collapse itself but its spiritual nature that was cause for surprise. Less than one year later, on 29 June 1927, Eliot was baptized in the Church of England. In November he would take the oath of British citizenship, and a transformation of multiple sorts would seem to be complete.
If his family was surprised, his fellow modernists were shocked. 6 Again, this was not necessarily because such radical change was unexpected in Eliot s particular case-many foresaw that he was headed for another collapse or crisis of some sort-but because orthodox belief was seemingly unfathomable for a member of the avant-garde. It is easy to forget, in the rear view of the conservative icon he became, that Eliot was an iconoclast. Pound would later recall in The Cantos a walk with Eliot in the Dordogne region of France, nearly a decade before the St. Peter s incident, when Arnaut 7 turned there / saying / I am afraid of the life after death. / and after a pause: Now, at last, I have shocked him. Pound s reaction was incredulity; he could not even take Eliot s confession on its own terms. But this beats me, / Beats me, I mean I do not understand it he commented, able only to see Eliot s fear as this love of death that is in them. 8 Virginia Woolf s reaction was even more telling. In a letter dated 11 February 1928 she wrote that she had the most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to Church. The shock was not personal; there was simply something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. 9
After 1927 Eliot worked increasingly to incorporate his beliefs into his art and criticism, and he separated himself in matters of politics, art, and faith from the views of his former coterie. The radical modernist poet of The Waste Land turned conservative figurehead, or as he soon would (in)famously put it in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Classicist, Royalist, and Anglo-Catholic. Forster, meanwhile, moved out along an opposite trajectory. After the publication of A Passage to India he became an active public supporter of the spread of liberal democratic politics, as well as a skeptical variety of humanism that included a consistent vocal rej