BSLS Review of Vetter's Modernist Writings
Rachel Potter on BSLS site (2011):
“Modernist literature has long been seen in the light of its break from religious
orthodoxies and situated in the context of philosophical accounts of secularism by
Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, James Frazer, William James, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund
Freud. While there have always been writers who do not fit this narrative – T. S.
Eliot and W. B. Yeats, for example – many twentieth-century studies of modernism have
argued that religious scepticism was foundational to modernism. The first book comprehensively
to re-assess modernism’s relationship to religion was Leon Surette’s The Birth of
Modernism: Pound, Yeats, Eliot and Occult Modernism (1993), which took seriously the
literary significance of the alternative or ‘occult’ religions which feature in poems
and novels in the early twentieth century. Other books and essays followed. Helen
Sword’s Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D.
(1995) argued that non-standard forms of spiritual understanding were significant
for the creation of anti-authoritarian and female models of authorship. More recently
Pericles Lewis’ Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010) considers modernist
writing in the light of mainstream religion and argues that the open abandonment of
God by writers such as Proust, Woolf and Joyce often involved a repressed and anxious
yearning after the sacred.
Lara Vetter’s new book, Modernist Writings and
Religio-Scientific Discourse responds to the different kinds of reflections on religion
detailed above. She has a specific object of analysis – her book is a cultural history
of religious interpretations of science, as well as scientific responses to religion.
But she also follows Sword in seeing alternative visionary ideas as the basis of non-authoritarian
models of poetic authority. For Vetter, the unveiling of the non-institutionalised
religious content of ideas of poetic authority is seen as of particular significance
for modernist writers who were sexually or racially marginalised – H.D., Mina Loy
and Jean Toomer. The book, as well as being a cultural history of the discourses of
science and religion, also contains an argument about the imaginative resources of
marginalised modernists.
The strength of this book lies in the sheer range
of material that has been uncovered and re-assessed. The science of the book’s title
refers to a number of different areas of knowledge, including theories of electricity,
pseudo-scientific models of physical perfection, eugenics and evolution. But Vetter’s
excavations have also unearthed an extraordinary range of hybrid accounts of the physical
and spiritual universe. A fantastical world of strange religious and scientific belief
opens up in the pages of this book. These documents serve to situate, and to some
degree explain, the bizarre ideas of physical or spiritual health propounded by Loy,
H.D. and Toomer. The first chapter considers how electricity as both a ‘real-world
power’ (32) and an idea furnished writers with metaphors for paranormal or super-sensual
ideas of vitality, the erotic body and sexuality. This cultural history allows Vetter
to offer a range of new insights into H.D.’s poetic references to electricity, often
situated in a spiritual frame, as well as a sustained reading of Mina Loy’s playful
use of electrical metaphors to capture Surrealist artistic inspiration in her novel
Insel. Chapter two looks at the proliferation of new dance techniques in the early
twentieth century, and the varied attempts to marry ideologies of physical improvement
to spirituality. This discussion facilitates new readings of texts by H.D., particularly
‘The Dancer’, Majic Ring and Red Roses for Bronze, which as Vetter notes does not
often feature prominently in H.D. criticism. Vetter also analyses the centrality of
dance and ideas of physical perfection to Jean Toomer’s poems and prose works. Chapter
three discusses the connection of evolutionary theories of racial difference to spirituality,
with reference to Loy’s engagements with eugenics and ambivalent response to Jewishness,
and Toomer’s equally complex and ambivalent writing of race. In this chapter Vetter
provides an invaluable understanding of Loy’s interest in Christian Science, a topic
that has often been a puzzle to Loy scholars.
Through the analysis of a
wide range of books, pamphlets and essays, Vetter’s book provides important new insights
into the discursive cross-fertilisation of science and religion in the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth century. By so doing it allows one to experience the ideas
of Loy, H.D. and Toomer in all their eccentricity, and points beyond its pages to
offer insights into the writing of other writers from the period. There are three
aspects of the book, however, that could have been usefully clarified. The argument
operates at a slightly meta-scientific level. It opens with a series of statements
about how the scientific discoveries of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin
and Max Planck overturned nineteenth-century mechanistic models of scientific thought,
but there is no sustained discussion either of the specific nature of these discoveries,
or their departure from previous understandings. This omission or elision of key arguments
runs through the book. In Chapter three, Vetter notes that ‘’eugenicists deployed
and misapplied the rhetoric of Darwin to argue for a cleansing of bloodlines’ (115),
but there is no explanation of how, exactly, Darwin’s rhetoric was deployed and misapplied,
or of the significance of his rhetoric – as opposed to other aspects of his writing
– for this misapplication. Such assumptions – or gaps – produce a slightly dizzying
read.
There is also a linguistic imprecision in the writing. The words
religion, spirituality, paranormal, metaphysical, as well as other terms, are used
interchangeably. I wanted clarification – however tentative – about the meaning of
these terms, so that the different elements of the argument could be kept in focus.
One other question I had about the book relates to poetic form. Modernism’s metaphoric
scientific entanglements have been comprehensively assessed in Daniel Albright’s Quantum
Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism (1997), where he concerns
himself with the ‘appropriation of scientific metaphors by poets’ (1). Vetter also
thinks about modernism and science by way of metaphor. In Chapter one, the significance
of electricity for modernism is seen mainly through its ‘metaphorical possibilities’.
But, the wider claim of the book seems to be that scientific-religious ideas influenced
the compositional structure and themes of modernist poems, as well as the models of
poetic authority which regulated these structures. Electricity as metaphor and electricity
as structure or model for poetic authority seem like distinct kinds of influences,
and their differences could have been usefully clarified.
At moments with
this book I felt that I was reading a series of arguments with missing pieces. But
Vetter’s writing progresses by way of confident and insightful claims. Moving quickly
as she does between modernist poems, pseudo-scientific theory, occult doctrines, and
many other documents, she succeeds in carrying her reader along.”