Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form

369 Pages·2015·4.49 MB·English

by  Paul K. Saint-Amour

Tense Future

Tense Future
Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form
Paul K. Saint-Amour
1
3
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© Paul K. Saint-Amour 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Saint-Amour, Paul K., author.
Tense future : modernism, total war, encyclopedic form / Paul K. Saint-Amour.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–020094–7 (cloth) — ISBN 978–0–19–020095–4 (pbk.) —
ISBN 978–0–19–020096–1 (updf) 1. Modernism (Literature) 2. War and literature.
3. War in literature. I. Title.
PN56.M54S25 2015
809'.9112—dc23
2014024774
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For my mother, Constance Saint-Amour
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Traumatic Earliness 1
Bukimi 1
The Precincts of Time 4
Collective Psychosis 6
Facing Trauma 13
Critical Futurities 23
Three Interwars 33
Weak Modernism 37
Part One
1. On the Partiality of Total War 47
The Case of L. E. O. Charlton 49
Intimations of Totality 55
Interwar Air Power Theory 60
Rival Preemptions of Law and War 65
National Totality and Colonial Air Control 71
Bombing Display I 76
Bombing Display II 82
2. Perpetual Suspense: Virginia Woolf’s Wartime Gothic 90
Morphologies of Suspense 99
Mark Time 103
Mrs. Dalloway and the Gaze of Total War 110
The Years: Immunities Lost and Found 120
“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” 125
3. Fantasias of the Archive: Hamilton’s Savage and Jenkinson’s Manual 133
A Promise of Terror to Come 143
Savage Foreclosures 147
Declining Fertility 152
Jenkinson’s Manual 157
War Archives: Theory and Performance 165
Thoughts on Archives in an Air Raid 169
Archival Fire 171
viii Contents
Part Two
4. Encyclopedic Modernism 179
Against Epic 182
Revisiting the Encyclopédie 190
The Eleventh 199
Encyclopedic Narrative 203
Modern Epic 209
Pace Bersani 215
5. The Shield of Ulysses 222
Ulysses’ Encyclopedism 228
Encyclopedia Prophetica 236
Urban Violence and Amity Lines 246
Theater of Total War 253
Scattering 260
6. War Shadowing: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End 263
Obviating All Future Wars 269
Uncyclopedia Britannica 272
Total Worry 282
Overcast Pastoral 294
Conclusion: Perpetual Interwar 303
Appendix: Chapter Abstracts 317
Bibliography 321
Index 339
Acknowledgments
When I started working on this book over a decade ago, I had no idea it
would take up so much future. But then it started out, if you can believe it,
as a cultural history of aerial perspective and took a long time to afflict me
with a hunch about the traumatic uncanny, and longer still to become the
place to which I trailed that frisson. That the intervening years were so much
more absorbing than anxious I owe entirely to the family, friends, colleagues,
and interlocutors who made the project a place worth staying in, to the point
where it is oddly hard now to let it go.
I was supported at the earliest stages by fellowships from the American
Council of Learned Societies and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell
University. Dominick LaCapra was then director of the Society and intro-
duced me to trauma studies. I was fortunate in the company and generosity
of the other fellows, particularly Marlene Briggs, Joel Dinerstein, Neil Hertz,
Simon Jarvis, Huda Mustafa, Gregory Shaya, and Mary Woods. We were all
lucky that year to enjoy the administrative support and geniality of Mary Ahl,
Linda Allen, and Lisa Patti.
Later on, fellowships from the Howard Foundation and the National
Humanities Center enabled me to live with the project until it assumed some-
thing like its present shape. Exchanging chapters and ideas at the NHC with
new friends Theresa Braunschneider, Peter Mallios, and Philip Rupprecht
was one of that year’s great pleasures. Another was the chance to discuss
work with Scott Casper, Mark Fiege, and Mark Maslan. Catherine Gallagher
ignited my interest in counterfactuals and has been a friend to the project
and to me since then. My year in the Research Triangle would not have been
the same without Mary Kinzie or Cara Robertson. Nor would it have been
productive for any of us fellows without the Center’s matchless librarians,
Eliza Robertson, Betsy Dain, and Jean Houston. They were joined in their gift
for generous provision by director Geoffrey Harpham, deputy director Kent
Mullikin, and their colleagues Lois Whittington, Sarah Payne, Pat Schreiber,
Bernice Patterson, Richard Schramm, Phillip Barron, Joel Elliott, and James
Getkin. Thank goodness we caught the end of Corbett Capps’s years in RTP,
his pig pickin’ and peach moonshine.
Work on this book has spanned two chapters of my institutional life. My
colleagues in the Pomona College English Department—particularly Martha
Andresen, Dan Birkholz, Ed Copeland, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Rena Fraden,