Welcome

'Entrance to a Lane' by Graham Sutherland (1939)

Welcome to The Life Illusion. This is a blog I have started primarily to coincide with research for my PhD, as well as being a space in which I can post other bits of writing. As such, topics will vary quite widely, but they will focus mainly on literature, art and culture. My PhD will be in English and the (current) subject of my thesis is British Neo-romanticism and the autobiographical novel.  As implied above, however, this will probably be subject to numerous changes, re-iterations and re-orientations. This is often the case with research and my hopes for this blog are that it charts my intellectual journey as the more I read and the more I write, the more sophisticated and substantial my thesis becomes. Ultimately, my goal is to make a solid contribution to the field and establish a new understanding of the unique relationship between British Neo-romanticism and life writing and, perhaps most significantly, why this matters today.

Readers will perhaps be familiar with that sense of having stumbled upon some vast, previously undiscovered world in their intellectual journeys, as Keats’ expresses in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken…

It is with a similar sense of anticipation and awe that I begin my research project. There is still so much to read and map out and, so far, it feels as if I have only glimpsed its outer-most layers. In this post, I will briefly write about how I became interested in this topic and my current understanding of it. In later posts, I will flesh out and develop a lot of the stuff outlined here. But, for now, here is a brief introduction.

I studied English Literature and Social History at university which, by allowing me to read the coursework of one subject under the light of the other, renewed my interest in the canon of English literature and discover its cultural significance. During this time I was greatly influenced by the writings of the cultural and social historians that emerged from the New Left; E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, the work of Terry Eagleton, and by other studies that bridged cultural and social history, Martin J. Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country etc. Furthermore, around this time I acquired an interest in the lineage of cultural commentators who shaped public opinion on art and society, and their meeting point in the built environment; John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Roger Fry, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clarke, John Berger, Iain Nairn, Jonathan Meades etc. My aim throughout my studies has always been to read literature not a transcendental source of eternal truths, free from all material circumstance, but to situate it within its broader historical contexts, to ask; how is this work informed by and contribute to the discourses of its time?

It was from this perspective that I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and the “Ideologies of the Edwardian home”. I noticed that both works possessed similar underlying attitudes towards things such as landscape, history and modernity. I was curious about the spatial representations of these works, the symbolism behind the country houses of Howards End and Toad Hall, behind furniture or old bits of countryside. Why does, for instance, the landscape “merge and congeal like porridge” when, in Forster’s novel, Margaret is anxiously driven around in a motor car? It is also a motor car which threatens the peace and orderliness of the Riverbank in the Willows. Furthermore, there is an underlying class commentary to both works; the gentle condescension of the Bloomsbury Set-esque Schlegel sisters towards lowly bank clerk Leonard Bast and his attempts to better himself through close readings of John Ruskin. Or how Ratty, characterised as an idling upper-class bohemian, tellingly pauses at the cheap, gaudy ornamentation of Mole’s habitat. In both works there is a pervasive set of attitudes which amount to an ideology. I wondered what the underlying conditions of these were. The spatial symbolism of these books reflect a broader commentary on their social and cultural circumstances. As a result, this relationship between society, culture, politics and space became central to my research.

Throughout my master’s degree, I explored the evolution of this attitude towards landscape, culture and society in much greater depth, taking courses on “Literature and Society 1750-1890” and “Image and Text 1780-1880,” in which I covered the histories of social theory, political economy and aesthetics in much more detail. I completed my master’s dissertation on the “biopolitics of community” in the poetry of John Clare and George Crabbe. Despite the pretence of this title, what I was attempting to explore in this project was how both poets documented their localities and how this act of literary cartography constituted an alternative form of knowledge which challenged the rising economic rationality of thinkers like Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. The essay ended up being quite nebulous and was rather more an attempt to bring together and exercise my knowledge of much of what I had learnt over the degree; on the one hand the sociocultural milieu of these lesser known romantics, and on the other the “new configurations” in critical theory that encompassed biopolitics and the post-humanities.

The lack of a real focal point in this dissertation stemmed from having put to one side an author I was more genuinely passionate about: John Cowper Powys. In fact, I could have written about Powys, but the scant amount of academic material on him coupled with my personal lack of knowledge regarding the modernist era and the absolutely forbidding size of any one of his novels simply made it a less than desirable task. However, Powys is the author I have perhaps the most long-standing fascination with. He isn’t so easily de-constructible, or readily slotted into a milieu as many of his contemporaries are.

I first discovered Powys through a reference to him in a John Gray book (possibly Straw Dogs). Coincidentally, the first work I bought of his, a 1961 hardback copy of Wolf Solent (1929), contained within it a newspaper clipping of a column written by Gray, ‘I wish I’d written… Wolf Solent’. He writes:

Wolf Solent is one of the very greatest 20^th century novels, and perhaps the book I’d most like to have written, because it renders in an apparently traditional, fictional form some of the most distinctive and elusive experiences of late modern times… Solent’s [the protagonist] concern is to protect his “personal mythology” by telling a narrative available to him, and his life-illusion deserts him. His introspection reveals no final truth about himself but only a shifting inner landscape of fleeting images. He finds the very idea of truth suspect. For Powys, as for Solent, philosophy can only be an art-form, not unlike painting. In this sceptical perspective, Wolf Solent is a philosophical novel precisely because it is not a novel of ideas. It is a “psychological” novel, whose subject is the evanescence of selfhood in a time when our identities are written on water.

This idea of philosophy as an art-form strongly resonated with me. As someone who spends a lot of time in my own head, immersed in metaphysical worlds of my own making, I found much in common with Powys’ protagonists. Their approach to life, one in which the ambiguity of selfhood must constantly negotiate with sensory experience, was one I understood and could learn from. And it is this very relationship, between biography and romantic subjectivity, that I would like to explore in my thesis. It is from Wolf Solent that I take the name of this blog, the “life-illusion,” this idea of the constructed identity of the modern self. Because, I believe it is essentially not a reaction to modernity which creates awareness of one’s “life-illusion,” rather this romanticised awareness of one’s “life-illusion” is a process of modernity. Wolf Solent, instead of using his sense of identity to rebel against the forces of modernity, must undergo a dialogue with the real world that ultimately shatters his “life-illusion”. This is very loose point I’m making and one I wish to flesh out a lot more completely over the course of this blog. But it is the first step in situating him within the cultural discourse of his era.

There are several other writers from roughly around the same time whose work is preoccupied with many of the same themes as Powys’. These include, but are in no way limited to; Mary Butts, Henry Williamson, D. H. Lawrence etc. They establish a strong regional attachment, approaching place above all else as a site, as manifestations of deep time with long, meaningful histories. This is often coupled with profoundly anti-modern sentiment, an ambivalence towards social change and, very often, outright hostility towards technology. Collectively, their cultural allegiances lie more with the cause of romanticism than with modernism: they see the quality of life of humans as under threat from civilisation. It would be easy, from this perspective, to simply pass these writers off as artistic reactionaries. However, to merely label them as such is too reductive a reading; theirs is a modernist romanticism, one in complex conversation with the discourses of their time.

Whilst Powys’ novels may have the outward appearance of Hardyesque Victorian dramas, there is something decidedly modern(ist) about their attention to the mundane details of everyday life. Their rambling, uneventful plots, punctuated by profound moments of transcendence and revolutions in consciousness, reflects the modernist developments in psychology and philosophy. Furthermore, their fusion of modernist and romantic perspectives sees them tied a lot more closely to the cultural milieu explored in Alexandra Harris’ book Romantic Moderns (2010). In this study, Harris complicates the binary of “modernists” and “romantics” by showing the numerous overlaps between the two.

The term “Neo-romanticism” has been more thoroughly explored with regards to a constellation of British artists from the 30s and 40s, including figures like Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, John Minton etc. It is associated with the preservation of old landscapes, ways and customs threatened by the looming second world war and an unclear post-war future. Rejecting enlightenment rationality, as Malcolm Yorke writes in The Spirit of Place (1988), the Neo-romantics’ practice was informed by the “inter-relationship of Nature and Man”, so that “Nature provided some kind of touchstone by which their pictures’ validity could be tested” (Yorke, 1988: 17). They represented a return to subject matter, responding to Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry’s then-popular emphasis on form. However, Yorke comments, “…the Neo-romantics did not know who they were until the reviewers told them. As a group they issued no manifesto, had no subscription list, no joint exhibitions, no agreed meeting place, no leaders, no appointed spokesman and agreed programme” (Yorke, 1988: 22). Some even came from modernist abstract, formalist backgrounds, such as John Piper. The meeting of abstract formalism with Neo-romantic setting is typified in Paul Nash' 'Equivalents for the Megaliths' (1935)

 

'Equivalents for Megaliths' by Paul Nash (1935) 

The historicising of “Neo-romanticism” has since expanded to include writers such as Mary Butts, and the travel writing of H. J. Massingham, Adrian Bell etc. The democratising of rural leisure and rise of cults of outdoor living in the 30s are explored under the term “Neo-romantic” in Frank Trentmann’s article, ‘Civilization and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture’ (1994). Again, rather than representing a regression to rural tradition, many of these social movements and trends were, to an extent, socially progressive and their anti-modernism stemmed primarily from their romantic, mystical view of nature. This attitude of fusing traditional subject matter with modern form is also explored through the phrase “the archaeological imagination,” by Kitty Hauser in Shadows Sites (2007). In this study, Hauser distinguishes the archaeological imagination from the preservationist mindset upon the condition that 

The difference between a preservationist and an archaeological sensibility is often one of emphasis: while preservationists tend to mourn the disappearance of a historic landscape, campaigning for its conservation, the archaeological imagination perceives the presence of the past in a landscape despite the incursions of modernity. (Hauser, 2007: 4)

Sometimes, this persistence of the archaic in cultural discourse is in fact reliant on the “incursions” of modernity. Unlike the destruction of the landscape by the motor car in Howards End and The Wind in the Willows, for some works, modern transportation becomes a new means of accessing and enjoying the landscape. Consider, for example, the Shell Guides published throughout the 1930s, illustrated and curated by many of the Neo-romantic crowd, aimed at a newly mobile working class. Or, J. B. Priestley’s appraisal of the class-erasing potential of the new motor coaches in English Journey (1934)

They offer luxury to all but the most poverty-stricken. They have annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor travellers. No longer can the wealthy go splashing past in their private conveyances, driving the humble pedestrian against the wall, leaving him to shake his fist and curse the proud pampered crew. The children of these fist-shakers now go thundering by in their own huge coaches and loll in velvet as they go. Perhaps it is significant that you get the same sort of over-done comfort, the same sinking away into a deep sea of plush, in the vast new picture theatres. (Priestley, 1994: 3-4)

This comparison to cinemas, perceiving the countryside as a spectacle, is similarly captured by Eric Ravilious’ ‘Train Landscape’ (1939), in which a hill-side chalk horse figure can be safely and conveniently enjoyed from the comforts of the train carriage.

'Train Landscape' by Eric Ravilious (1939)

However, when it comes to John Cowper Powys, modern transportation is, again, a nuisance. The apparent conservatism of this outlook, however, is complicated by Powys’ anarchist leanings and friendship with Emma Goldman. Conversely, Mary Butts’ Neo-romanticism was aristocratic in nature and fiercely opposed to the “invasion” of the countryside by inner-city tourists, as made clear in her 1932 essay, ‘Warning to Hikers’.

There are numerous contours, nuances and differences in what can be called British Neo-romanticism. As a cultural formation, it doesn’t neatly fit into a “modern” or “anti-modern” mould. I have only very briefly outlined a very few examples of “British Neo-romanticism”, but already the range and complexity of the subject is apparent. It appears in a wide array of things from the era, tangled up with manifold, and often contradictory, sentiments and perspectives. This introduction has been as much about reiterating to myself my understanding of the topic and the direction I wish to go in, as it has been for any other reader. As I progress through my project, I hope to dig a lot deeper into the subject and forge new understandings and connections. A central concern however, and perhaps more important than Powys’ work, is the underlying philosophy of “Life” that informs Neo-romantic discourse. What fascinates me most about the autobiographical work of these authors (Powys, Butts, Lawrence, Williamson etc.) is how they conceive of a vision of their own life and how it is attached to the life around them, specifically the natural world. Furthermore, how do they approach the technology (or, magic?) of writing in order to capture and express this life? I think there is a connection to the artists of the 30's and 40's in the way that they place self and landscape in dialogue as a way of establishing, developing and complicating identity. In the spiritual gulf left by modernity, these writers sought a unifying sense of enchantment in their lives attached to a greater, capital L-Life and the Life in places. There is, obviously, connection too to the blood-and-soil vision of the Nazis, the "Life" philosophy of figures like Ludwig Klages and the authenticity of Heidegger, etc. The politics of Life will occupy a central role throughout my project. The looming climate catastrophic has seen these views become, once again, mainstream. In addition the misanthropic tendencies of deep ecology, the legacies of these authors is ambiguous and urgently in need of attention. 

I am unsure how often I will be uploading to this blog. Its main function is to record, clarify and synthesise ideas relevant to my research project, and this will surely move at varying speeds over the coming months. However, there are numerous tangential and parallel topics, irrelevant to the main project, which I would also like to explore in this space. If you are interested in my work please consider sharing or responding to it, above all else my aim is to raise awareness of my subject and help continue the discourse around it.