Modernist Heresies (review)

Modernist Heresies uses the concept of religious heresy as an avenue into literature of the “transitional period” between 1883 and 1924, focusing particularly on heresy in the Edwardian era, where Damon Franke locates the “origins of modernism” (9, xi). Although he opens with the broad definition of heresy from the Oxford English Dictionary—“religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition . . . to” orthodoxy, and, “by extension, opinion or doctrine in philosophy, politics, art, etc., at variance with those generally accepted as authoritative” (xii–xiii)¹—he concentrates chiefly on religious heresy as it plays out culturally during these years (5). Accordingly, although the book’s examples derive from the British literature of Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Walter Pater, and D. H. Lawrence, Franke spends little time considering transpositions of religious heresy into aesthetic or secular terms: most of the texts addressed (Pater’s The Renaissance, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Joyce’s Dubliners, and Shaw’s Saint Joan²) in some way engage religious heresy per se, and often paganism. Franke’s enological metaphor for the phenomenon of heresy (effective, if somewhat overused in the book) is “new wine in old bottles,” drawn from Hardy’s Arnoldian allusion to Matthew in Jude the Obscure (1–2):³ with both this concept and its converse position, Franke argues that heresy during this period consisted of an effort to blend old and new, to reconcile older religious thought with changing times and older religious forms and rituals with new thought. For Franke, the majority of heretical work of this period aims for forms of synthesis, which he reads as the era’s primary “mode of transgression” (xiii). He interprets this syncretic heretical work as reflecting a typically Edwardian desire for the integration of old and new—one that his study seeks to validate, countering dismissive attitudes toward Edwardian thought from such commentators as Jonathan Rose (17–19).⁴

In order to examine religious heresy prevalent during this period, Franke astutely focuses on two salient cultural developments that attested to and fueled its prominence: the late nineteenth-century “modernist” controversy within Catholicism (involving a reinterpretation of church teachings according to modern methods in philosophy, history, and science, which led to Pope Pius X’s denunciation of Catholic modernism as a “synthesis of all heresies” in 1907—7)⁵ and the establishment of the Cambridge Heretics Society in 1909. Franke chooses his bookend years (repeated somewhat too insistently in the book) because 1883 was the year of a landmark trial of blasphemy in England and 1924 witnessed several events signaling a turn away from syncretic heresy (10, 21).⁶ These include C. K. Ogden’s resignation as president of the Cambridge Heretics, which helped to speed the group’s demise, and trends in work from Woolf, Forster, and others that Franke reads as more modernist than Edwardian. For him, modernist literature favors a “mode of heresy” different from the Edwardian syncretic mode, involving “stricter aesthetic ‘choices’” between possibilities than does harmonizing Edwardian literature (xiv, 21).

The book’s first three chapters on the Cambridge Heretics Society offer a skillfully researched, absorbing chronicle of the organization’s rise and decline, abundant with colorful anecdotes and lovely archival finds. Franke emphasizes that, although the Heretics’ kindred groups—Bloomsbury and the Cambridge Apostles (whose memberships overlapped with its own)—are widely credited with influence, the impact of the Heretics remains comparatively underresearched (28). He has unearthed a wonderfully rich vein of material, and while his account would benefit from tighter organization, there are particularly effective discussions of the controversy surrounding William Chawner, a Cambridge don who inspired the Heretics; the welcoming address of classical scholar and anthropologist Jane Harrison at the Heretics’ inaugural session, which emphasized the importance of synthesis; the vigorous debates between Shaw and G. K. Chesterton; and Ogden’s tireless efforts to recruit members and speakers for the Society.⁷ Franke rightly illuminates the multifacetedness of the career of Ogden, an innovator too often described...