Table Of ContentSTRUCTURE AND DISSOLUTION IN
ENGLISH WRITING, 1910-1920
Also by Stuart Sillars
ART AND SURVIVAL IN FIRST WORLD WAR BRITAIN
BRITISH ROMANTIC ART AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR
VISUALISATION IN ENGLISH POPULAR FICTION 1860-1960
Graphic Narratives, Fictional Images
Structure and
Dissolution in English
Writing, 1910-1920
Stuart Sillars
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-27666-0 ISBN 978-1-349-27664-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27664-6
First published in the United States of America 1999 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-22449-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sillars, Stuart, 1951-
Structure and dissolution in English writing, 1910-1920 / Stuart
Sillars.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-22449-3 (cloth)
1. English literature-20th century-History and criticism.
2. Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970. Howards End.
3. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885-1930. Rainbow. 4. English
language-20th century-Rhetoric. 5. Sassoon, Siegfried, 1886-1967-
-Technique. 6. Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917-Technique. 7. Owen,
Wilfred, 1893-1918-Technique. 8. Literary form. I. Title.
PR471.S55 1999
820.9'00912-dc21 99-22464
CIP
© Stuart Sillars 1999
Sotlcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
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with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
2 1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99
For Marina Cara,
carissima mia
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Language, Tradition and Silence 1
2 Howards End and the Dislocation of Narrative 31
3 Wilfred Owen and the Subjugation of the Poetic 62
4 The Rainbow: Language Against Itself 93
5 'The singing will never be done': Siegfried Sassoon
and the Exile of Language 125
6 Language Beneath Words: Edward Thomas 155
7 An Epilogue on Modernism 190
Notes 196
Select Bibliography 202
Index 209
vii
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to thank the many people who have contributed to
the writing of this book. The staff of Cambridge University Library
were endlessly patient in sorting out queries, minor and major. The
Burford weekly class, administered by the Oxford University Depart
ment for Continuing Education and the Workers' Educational Asso
ciation, contributed with generosity to the formation of my ideas of
Edward Thomas.
Basil Aivaliotis, Ray Cross, Dr Mara Kalnins, Mendell D. Morgan
Jr., Dr Jem Poster, Dr Matthias Schubnell and Clive Wilmer read pas
sages in draft or made valuable comments and suggestions. My stu
dents in Cambridge, Texas and elsewhere unwittingly aided in the
process of gestation with questions and comments of all kinds.
Charmian Hearne, of the Macmillan Press, was patiently supportive:
Christina Zaba edited the text with precision and tact.
With such a plethora of assistance, error should be unlikely: how
ever, for that which remains I claim unshared responsibility.
Stuart Sillars
March, Cambridgeshire, 1998
viii
1
Language, Tradition and
Silence
The profound kinship of language with the world was dissolved.
The primacy of the written word went into abeyance. And that
uniform layer, in which the seen and the read, the visible and the
expressible, were endlessly interwoven, vanished too. Things and
words were to be separated from one another. The eye was
thenceforth destined to see and only see, the ear to hear and only
hear. Discourse was still to have the task of speaking that which is,
but it was no longer to be anything more than what is said. (Fou
cault 43)
Foucault is here speaking of the rift in epistemology which occurred
in the seventeenth century when the mystical links between words
and things were severed. His concern is with the development of
a new system of signification, and thus of hermeneutics, that de
veloped in what he calls the Classical episteme, that replaces the
miraculous unity of being that both orders and is ordered by Renais
sance Neoplatonism. Before the rift, all names were in mysteriously
variable ways part of what they denoted; after it, a relation of mere
rational parallelism obtained. At the close of his account of this schism,
Foucault talks of the subsequent reclaiming of its 'own being' (44)
that language achieved in the nineteenth century, but he does so
with regret: 'henceforth, language was to grow with no point of
departure, no end, and no promise' (44). In this concluding para
graph, Foucault allows himself almost a moment of nostalgic regret
at the passing of the interconnectedness of things and words.
These reflections, even though concerned with a much earlier fis
sure between language and object, are a fitting point of departure
for the present study, for they suggest two key elements that are
fundamental to the view of English writing in the second decade of
the twentieth century that I shall propose in this book. The first is
that a profound shift in the relation between words and things took
place in literary epistemology; the second is that, ever since, we
1
2 Structure and Dissolution
have been approaching the period with a sense of dispossession and
nostalgic longing. These are, however, no simple parallels: they
need careful definition. The shift is not one which is immediately
apparent as the result of religious or political changes. Indeed, it
is one that is often completely overlooked by critics who are anxious
to rush on to that more celebrated epistemic swerve, the eruption
of International Modernism, preferring to leave most or all of the
writers considered here bracketed within a loose parenthesis of liter
ary history as figures concerned with continuing 'The English Line' .1
A concomitant irony of this, indeed, is that the works discussed are
very often regarded in the light of social or political turmoil but
without any explicit concern for what this does to them as linguistic
constructs, as if the shift were one that could be measured only in
terms of narrative content and thematic burden. None the less, I will
argue that, despite a lack of critical awareness, a shift there most
palpably was. That this comes close to the famous claim of Virginia
Woolf, that something profound happened to the human conscious
ness around December 1910, is far from coincidental, but it is a rela
tionship that is not as immediate as it may appear: what I am talking
about is not a notional, linear emergence of high Modernism, but a
move that may or may not be part of the shifts that are generally
seen to constitute that notoriously centreless movement.
The second key element, that of nostalgia, is most evident in
populist readings not only of the texts of this age but of the whole
period, the Edwardian long weekend in which the idle hill of sum
mer reaches its peak, from which we look back with gentle despair
at the sunlit lowlands of the past and forward with horror at the
depredations of the new century. The view is, however, compounded,
in that the period itself, in which the linguistic schism is most pro
foundly apparent, is regarded with the same yearning as that which
preceded it, suggesting another feature of this schism: however pro
found it may be, it is not instantly apparent to many readers, includ
ing some of the most sophisticated. There is a further irony in that
Foucault's implied yearning, suggested in the markedly postlapsarian
tone of his concluding sentence, echoes the sadness felt by Walter
Benjamin for the lost 'aura' (221) of the work of art when mechanic
ally reproduced, and this too is a fitting link, since writing of the
years 1910 to 1920 was reproduced by an extremely sophisticated
network of mechanical reproduction, that made it available to an
unprecedented number of readers and which may in some ways
have influenced its aesthetic nature.
