[ilds] Gifford's "Late Modernism's Migrations"

[Bruce Redwine]

James Gifford recently posted his article, “Late Modernism’s Migrations:  San Francisco Renaissance, Egyptian Anarchists, and English Post-Surrealisms,” on the ILDS Listserv.  It’s taken from his recent monograph, Personal Modernisms:  Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (U of Alberta, 2014).  “Migrations” is a fine piece of literary history, which deals with the period of Late Modernism between (roughly) the 1930s and 1950s.  James is to be thanked for illuminating this (often ignored) period and credited for his painstaking research in digging through those obscure journals, archives, and publications in which these overlooked authors appeared.  Surrealism and Anarchism are major topics, especially as they originate in Paris at the Villa Seurat.

The main thrust of James’s essay is on describing the “network” of Surrealists/Anarchists leading to the “San Francisco Renaissance” and the “Beats.”  I’ll focus, however, on a narrow aspect of James’s argument.  My interests/biases in Lawrence Durrell revolve primarily around the workings of his imagination and the intersection of his life and art.  Durrell’s “Heraldic Universe,” in all its complexity and evolution and confusion, is a big aspect of both of these concerns.  I tend to treat the matter metaphysically/metaphorically, as Durrell himself describes in A Smile in the Mind’s Eye (New York, 1982), that is, as some imaginative dimension:  “the alchemical sigil or signature of the individual; what’s left with the ego extracted.  It is the pure nonentity of the entity for which the poem stands like an ideogram” (p. 86).  My approach follows Ray Morrison’s as he explains Durrell’s Taoism in his excellent article, “The City and Its Ontology in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (Mosaic 46 [2013]).

James offers a very different take on the “Heraldic Universe”:  he looks at the “politicised context” of Durrell’s poetics (p. 11).  That has to do with Surrealism and Anarchism as they pertained to a small but interesting “network” of writers:  the Egyptians George Henein and Albert Cossery, Herbert Read and Henry Miller, along with others such as Robert Duncan, an American poet associated with the San Francisco literary scene in the 1940s and 50s.  James draws an analogy between the anti-authoritarian concerns of these writers (esp. their emphasis on individual freedom) and “Durrell’s resistance to the standardising of syntax and social unity implicit in a common syntax” (p. 12).  In other words, the obscurity of Durrell’s poetics, as expressed in his statements about the Heraldic Universe, owes something to the politics of anti-authoritarianism and its response to fascism, Nazism, and Communism.  James’s critical approach appears indebted to Marxism, possibly the Marxist critic Frederic Jameson, whom James cites in his monograph.

James also draws another interesting analogy between Durrell’s and Duncan’s concerns about the nature of the “self,” a very important topic indeed.  Duncan’s “I, I, I” (“Towards an African Elegy” [1942?]) recalls Durrell’s “I per se I” (“Carol on Corfu” [1937]).  As James remarks, “[Duncan’s] kinship to Durrell’s Heraldic Universe comment is indirect yet reflects both poets’ kindred notions of the self. [. . .] Duncan’s assertion seems to move the self to some other location that is not contiguous with desire or the containing ego” (p. 16).  Surrealism derives from Freud’s theories, the ego and sexuality among them, and for both writers, sexuality is crucial.  Both express this importance in terms of the “human will” and its power.  These authors’ intuitions are often unclear (probably to be expected), but similar diction suggests collaboration or shared views (if so, then Durrell is probably the original source).  “Human will” seems to equate with authority, possibly social authority.  (Duncan, by the way, was an overt homosexual.)  And both writers treat the “self” as “unstable” and unknowable, Freud’s or Nietzsche’s unbewusstes ich (unknown I).  Here, James brings in his theme of individual freedom v. totalitarian authority.  That is, the “freedom [of the unstable self] is not another manifestation of authority’s stabilising influence on the ego” (p. 18).  I must say, however, that I find hard going unusual terms such as “desublimation,” “regressive desublimation,” and “interpellations” (p. 16).  I assume this terminology is part of current critical or psychoanalytic theory.

My question is exactly what the “unknown I” meant to Lawrence Durrell (assuming he himself knew).  James writes about Duncan:  “for Duncan the anti-egoic includes the notion that stabilising the ego, through the repressive desublimation of desire, is the same force that drives false consciousness or makes one desire one’s own repression” (p. 16).  This presumably applies to Durrell as well.  I’m not certain what this means, but it seems rather dark and sinister to me.  Hence, Duncan’s (and Durrell’s) emphasis on Africa and the allusion to Conradian “darkness,” however that may be taken.



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