The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism

In the 1909 preface to "The Altar of the Dead," Henry James proclaimed his "earnest aversion to waste" and his belief that "in art economy is always beauty."¹ These ideas develop out of a culture in which efficiency, economy, and the elimination of waste were increasingly heralded as industrial and social ideals. Modernist art, like the industrial cultures of modernity, engages centrally with the rhetoric of efficiency, aiming at, in Ezra Pound's words, "maximum efficiency," but an anxiety about exactly how to identify what was efficient in a work of art meant that the modernists' quest for precision and compression was often a matter of rhetoric as much as of practice.² Writers who identified themselves with a new, efficient art, such as Ezra Pound and Dorothy Richardson, disagreed profoundly over what that actually meant. The early years of British modernism saw the emergence of a number of different and apparently incompatible literary idioms, all of which were concerned with the ways in which literary writing did or did not waste words. In this article I shall focus on two of modernism's most characteristic and influential techniques, Imagism and stream of consciousness. Although the two might at first seem to be at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, with Imagism featuring short forms such as the Japanese haiku, and stream of consciousness encouraging the inclusion of the smallest details in novels that could extend—like Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage—to thirteen substantial volumes, both methods aimed at adjusting the economy of the art-work to the economy of the world. Practitioners and critics of both techniques emphasized the thrifty nature of each form, arguing that the successful representation of the processes of perception required every word that arrived on the page. Gone were the days of the decadent era when art could represent itself as useless and extol the wastefulness of those who produced it. Now writers were in tune with the British middle classes, eager to expand their share of the national wealth. Art had to be modern and to be modern meant to be accurate, stream-lined, and efficient.

The efficiency movement

In 1904, H.G. Wells delivered a lecture on local government to the Fabian Society and declared that the only question a local official need ask about different administrative structures was: "Which will give the maximum efficiency?"³ Wells' near-obsession with efficiency during this period was far from being an idiosyncrasy. The early decades of the twentieth century in Britain saw an explosion of exhortations and recommendations all aimed at increasing the efficiency of British society and minimizing its waste. As Jonathan Rose has noted, "Efficiency was, in fact, one of the great shibboleths of the Edwardian period," and in just a few years the ideal of efficiency had permeated almost every aspect of national life.⁴

Efficiency came in many forms—social efficiency, physical efficiency, industrial efficiency, domestic efficiency, mental efficiency, personal efficiency, and so on—but in all its manifestations, efficiency was designed first and foremost to eliminate waste. "Social efficiency," as Benjamin Kidd defined it in 1894, entitled the "superior" races to take control of the raw materials of the world: "the last thing our civilization is likely to permanently tolerate is the wasting of the resources of the richest regions of the earth through the lack of the elementary qualities of social efficiency in the races possessing them."⁵ The McKillops, popularizers of scientific management in Britain, announced in 1917 that increased industrial efficiency would result in "increase of production and elimination of waste," and in 1918, Henry Spooner, a London-based professor of engineering, noted that the "current of public opinion has been flowing strongly in the direction of economy and the elimination, or at least the reduction, of wastes."⁶ The promotion of efficiency was a way of eliminating the waste and the low productivity that was linked in the popular imagination to decadents, the unemployed, the "inferior races," and childless women, and as the rhetoric of efficiency saturated much public discourse, the category of waste became more and more capacious, more and...