Thesmophoria: Suffragettes, Sympathetic Magic, and H.D.'s Ritual Poetics

Introduction

From impressionism to futurism to surrealism and beyond, the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century seem to share a rigidly oppositional logic. These antagonistic programs are united in their efforts to construct authority against and through the rival claims of each other. For each, the attempt to establish a certain authenticity, a new perspective, a transcendent consciousness depends upon the presence of some fallen other, some decadent or marked double. Indeed, as argued by critics from Walter Benjamin to Rita Felski, it is this oppositional logic that informs the avant-garde's tendency toward violence. ¹ Avant-gardism is all too easily aligned with imperialism, with discourses of racial and cultural superiority, of progress and evolutionary advance. Similarly, it often exhibits an aggressive chauvinism, a hostile and repressive attitude toward the cultural markers of the feminine. Moreover, it is precisely this oppositional logic that links the avant-garde with totalitarian politics. The aesthetic and fascist movements of the early twentieth century are united in their celebration of violent renewal, by their faith in an aesthetic transcendence of the fallen world. ² What needs to be realized, however, is that these movements, both aesthetic and political, tend to abandon the conventional terms of tyranny--order, control, stasis--for a dialectic between stasis and change, regulation and revolt. In other words, what defines the aesthetic politics of the period is a romantic metaphysic in which authority exists only by way of dissent, the center by way of margins, the self in and through the other. As the romantic artist evokes a creative struggle of work and world, the nation establishes itself through "war, the world's only hygiene." ³ Importantly, as Russell Berman and Andrew Hewitt have argued, these violent dialectics move us beyond specific aesthetic and political regimes to a much more pervasive influence. The conflation of order and progress helps to affirm a specific economy. For both art and politics, only within the bourgeois struggle for significance is any significance possible--individual, national, or historical. A romantic aesthetic, as it is diffused throughout the social order, offers ontological stability to a culture driven by market relations. ⁴

The British avant-garde, however, needs to be explored as part of a larger national reaction to both bourgeois liberalism and the successive invasions of romantic modernism from the continent. Artists such as T. E. Hulme, Lewis, and Ezra Pound found themselves in the peculiar position of needing to be modern after the modern had, in some ways, already occurred. The value of their work, as they saw it, was its recognition of the collusion between romanticism and reification. Modern society, they argued, may now exhibit an unprecedented state of freedom, but it has never experienced a greater standardization. Thus, throughout Blast, Wyndham Lewis argues that the aesthete and the average man have grown indistinguishable; chaos and conformity work together to destroy social integrity. He laments a seemingly free world given over to mechanical progress and ceaseless faddism, a world in which "there is no revolt, it is the normal state." ⁵ In response to this state of affairs, the British avant-garde turned to classicism. For them, classicism represented an artistic and social integrity, one that eschews bourgeois individualism and foregrounds the material tensions that define and delimit individuals, classes, and nations. The classical aesthetic, particularly in its more tragic aspects, begins with the chaotic energy of the romantic spirit, but subject and object exist in a dynamic tension that restricts the tendency of either to spin out of control. Worldly forces restrain and refine each other, producing a balanced order that is at once fluid and formal. The classical work of art expresses as it reinforces these tensions, and thus serves to halt, clarify, and redirect the violent production (and reproduction) of the world. It reveals as it challenges the material constraints of the individual and his seemingly free activity. In Hulme's famous formulation, "The...