Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person.1
General confidence is, for the individual who inspires it, a great force, a great means of action; but, for the public who feels it, it is a profound tranquillity of the soul, a fundamental condition of existence.2
Civilisation is possible only through confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about the streets.3
It would be hard to imagine a more heterogeneous trio of self-described sociologists than the authors of these remarks: Georg Simmel, Gabriel Tarde and H.G. Wells.4 And yet, these three ill-assorted observers of modernity, all writing in the first decade of the twentieth century (1900, 1902 and 1909, respectively), reached strikingly similar conclusions about the fundamental importance of trust to an understanding of modern societies, and hence to the nascent discipline of sociology. For Wells and Simmel, trust was a universal social glue, without which basic institutions would crumble; for Tarde, it was an important, overlooked form of capital, affording power to its recipient and peace of mind to its bestower. To be sure, these thinkers were not the first to point out the importance of trust to the formation of human societies: as Steven Shapin observes, ‘The trust-dependency of social order has always been recognized’.5 But whereas Enlightenment philosophers like (for example) John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith had tended to focus on the particular problem of promise-keeping,6 the concept of trust appeared in rather a different light to observers like Simmel, Tarde and Wells, preoccupied as they were with the phenomena of complexity, technical sophistication and scale that characterized European societies at the turn of the twentieth century.
Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900), for example, took money as the key to several classic features of Gesellschaft, including the impersonalization of social intercourse, the vast spatial distension of social and economic ties and the division of labour. Money, for Simmel, allowed the trust that lubricates local interactions to be objectified and reproduced far beyond the local context: ‘economic and legal conditions overcome spatial separation more and more, and they come to operate just as reliably, precisely and predictably over a great distance as they did previously in local communities’.7 Anthony Giddens has usefully developed this aspect of Simmel’s theory into the notion of money as a ‘disembedding mechanism’, one of the means by which ‘modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between “absent” others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction’.8 This process of ‘disembedding’ is highly pertinent, not only to Simmel’s landmark analyses of modern trust, but also to the thinking of Tarde and Wells, both of whom were fascinated with the question of how social order is sustained in large complex societies. In diverse ways, all three thinkers sought to grasp the concept of trust as a distinctively sociological phenomenon, but also as a distinctively modern one – a phenomenon, that is, which had to be rethought in light of developments like fiduciary currency, or mass communication, or the spread of occupational specialization and the growing authority of experts.
This collection grows out of a sense that this moment, and the moment of cultural modernism more generally, were characterized by a concern with the question of trust, and especially with how trust, like ‘human character’, might be said to have changed, and even to have entered a period of crisis. But it also emerges from a sense that we, now, are particularly attuned to this same question, and that the modernist preoccupation with trust and with the failure of trust mirrors some of our own pressing contemporary concerns. Think of how readily we grasp Wells’s line about banks and confidence today, at the levels of both retail and investment banking; we are all now intensely aware of just how much the global financial market in general, and investment banking in particular, run on trust. In a timely 2009 book, the economists George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller urged their colleagues to pay more attention to the concept of confidence, warning that ‘[e]conomists have only partly captured what is meant by trust or belief’.9 Trust is an attitude that reaches beyond knowledge (‘The person who knows completely need not trust’, wrote Simmel in 1908), but we often forget this extra-cognitive element, which is why anyone whose trust has been betrayed ‘may well feel that he is a little crazy’, as Harry G. Frankfurt puts it.10 There is certainly something hallucinatory about the spectacle of gigantic international banks suddenly unable to honour their financial obligations.
Finance is the current epicentre of concerns about trust, but recent interest in the topic is not confined to this domain. The popular 2005 reissue of Frankfurt’s 1986 essay ‘On Bullshit’ itself bespeaks a concern about trustworthiness extending well beyond the world of finance. Mark C. Taylor offered a bold summa of this pervasive anxiety about trustworthiness in 2004, writing that
In recent years, American society has undergone a disturbing crisis of confidence in many of the individuals and institutions responsible for the country’s well-being. Priests, politicians, and financiers as well as the press, media, courts, and schools no longer seem trustworthy.11
Political life in the United States, in particular, is often said to be traversing a crisis of trust. The belief that politicians and political process are less trustworthy than they used to be is probably common to all Western democracies in the twenty-first century, but it seems to be particularly marked in the United States, where the ‘credibility gap’ between what politicians say and what voters believe is often alleged to have worsened markedly over the past four decades.12
One might expand Taylor’s diagnosis, holistic as it is, by including the perceived decline of social cohesion among the symptoms of a contemporary ‘crisis of confidence’. Here again, while every Western democracy has an indigenous version of this discourse, the perception that traditional communities are in crisis seems to have particular traction in the United States. The idea was influentially articulated by Robert D. Putnam in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), which argued that the American genius for forming community associations, recorded by Alexis de Tocqueville in De la démocratie en Amérique (1835–1840), had all but disappeared, greatly depleting the nation’s social capital. For Putnam, the crisis of trust often associated with the overarching systems of finance and politics was a grass roots phenomenon, unravelling the ties of community.13
Trust and distrust, then, have been topics of urgent inquiry in recent years, both in public discourse and in a variety of academic disciplines.14 It is our hope as editors that the essays collected in this volume will make a contribution to this contemporary debate. But our main aim is to focus attention on the importance of trust to an understanding of literary culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. Modernism was shaped by many of the same historical developments that redefined the nature of social trust: the ‘disembedding’ of social relations, the ‘crisis of liberalism’, the catastrophe of mechanized warfare, the increasing sophistication of advertising and the emergence of a modern insurance industry, to name just a few.15 Several of these historical coordinates are addressed in this book, especially in the section entitled ‘Trust and Society’. At the same time, this collection also aims to show that questions of trust and deception were deeply implicated in modernism’s own distinctive aesthetic programs and cultural practices. In the next part of this introduction, I gesture to some of the salient ways in which questions of trust intersect with the main lines of modernist culture, focusing in particular on language, complexity, sincerity and fictional truth. I then give an overview of the book’s contents before returning, briefly, to one of the authors with whom I began, H.G. Wells.
Taylor posits that the ‘crisis of confidence’ affecting contemporary culture is bound up with a more fundamental shift in semiotic paradigms, ‘the symptom of a profound crisis of representation that is endemic to modern and postmodern society and culture’. The final ‘complex’ stage in Taylor’s tripartite ‘theology of culture’ is best expressed in ‘Postmodern religion, art, architecture, and philosophy’, but he traces the roots of the representational crisis back to the modernist avantgarde, and credits Simmel with a prescient ‘recasting of meaning and value in terms of relation rather than reference’.16 If this is right, then it is no surprise that contemporary anxieties about trust find their prototype in the modernist era. Taylor’s diagnosis of a contemporary ‘crisis of confidence’ linked to a ‘crisis of representation’ certainly recalls one of the classic traits of cultural modernism, which is commonly supposed to manifest doubts about mimesis, communication and reference. George Steiner, for example, framed this modernist crisis of representation specifically in terms of a crisis of trust:
There would be no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any ‘social contract’ or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world. … It is my belief that this contract is broken for the first time, in any thorough and consequent sense, in European, Central European, and Russian culture and speculative consciousness during the decades from the 1870s to the 1930s.17
Hard to gainsay the gravitas of this sweeping pronouncement, than which few received ideas of literary history are more canonical: modernism bore witness to a sundering of the referential bond between words and things. The locus classicus of this loss of faith in language is perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1873 essay ‘On truth and lying in an extra-moral sense’, with its famous image of truth as a dishonoured currency: ‘Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins’.18 Nietzsche argued that language is rooted in metaphor because there is no real affinity between words and the inaccessible material things they designate; the statements we call true are only a stable, conventionally ratified subset of this metaphorical, ultimately tautological system. Nietzsche’s numismatic image, recalling Simmel’s and Tarde’s work on trust in the money system, foregrounds the role played by trust in this theory of language: words, like coins, depend for their value not on any intrinsic property but rather on collective confidence in the system itself.
A well known passage of William James’s Pragmatism (1907) proposed a still more explicit analogy between truth and fiduciary currency:
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass’, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever.19
For James, unlike Nietzsche, there is an end-point to this regress: some empirical experience, somewhere, underwrites the currency of truth. But if Jamesian pragmatism was not a full-blown scepticism, it does point nonetheless to a sharper awareness that day-to-day knowledge existed as bank-notes rather than bullion: truth was more often fiduciary than it was apodictic, resting on an unexamined foundation of trust.
In modernist literary culture, Nietzsche’s numismatic image became a common shorthand for the sense of linguistic scepticism Steiner describes. Hence Joseph Conrad, in the 1897 ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, alluded mournfully to the ‘old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage’; the modernist project of ‘mak[ing] you see’ involved a fleeting poetic refurbishment of these abraded coins.20 Remy de Gourmont, in Le Problème du style (1902), invoked the commonplace of the ‘worn medal’ to describe the pervasiveness of abstract words, devoid of sensory content, their ‘obverses and reverses so effaced that the most tyrannical imagination can no longer animate them’.21 In a very similar vein, T.E. Hulme would distinguish in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1911) between the ‘abstract counters’ of prose and the sensual concreteness of the poetic word.22 The ekphrastic impulse of early modernism, articulated in these examples by an impressionist, a symbolist and an imagist, was given to figuring ordinary language as shabby coins or tokens, shunned by the verbal artist. Inverting Nietzsche’s use of the trope, Conrad, de Gourmont and Hulme used the numismatic image to convey how the everyday word is assigned a merely conventional value by collective fiat, in the manner of money: like James’s common knowledge, the meanings of the ‘old, old words’ are bank-notes that no-one ever bothers to cash out as sense data. The poetic word, by contrast, has no need of credit or trust because it collapses the distance between the sign and the empirical experience it refers to. In this version of Steiner’s crisis of linguistic trust, poetic or artistic language is imagined as self-authenticating, rather than as a token to be accepted on credit.
The etymology of the word ‘bullshit’ also seems to open a line of communication between contemporary preoccupations and the moment of modernism.23 Readers of Frankfurt’s essay know that one of the citations in the OED for ‘bullshit’ comes from Ezra Pound, and consultation of the OED entry shows that the dictionary’s earliest example of this word is a letter from Wyndham Lewis to Pound about T.S. Eliot’s doggerel ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’: look up bullshit in the dictionary, that is, and you will find three out of four ‘Men of 1914’.24 Pound’s marginal comments on the draft of The Waste Land, moreover, suggest that bullshit and its synonyms were not only part of Eliot, Lewis and Pound’s macho argot, but also had a central role to play in modernist poetics. Pound, as Ronald Bush points out, scrawled the abbreviation ‘B—11—S.’ in the margin of an excised page, surely signifying ‘balls’, but also, perhaps, evoking the initials of the nearly synonymous ‘bullshit’.25 Whether Pound meant ‘bullshit’ or ‘balls’ or both at once, the annotation dramatically illustrates how modernist poetry, for Pound and Eliot in 1922, was negatively defined by the insidious prevalence of humbug: bullshit was what the really modern poets managed to leave out.
As Jean Paulhan complained in 1941, modern literary revolutions are typified by an intolerance of clichés and commonplaces.26 In this perspective, Pound’s effort to expel bullshit from The Waste Land can be seen as continuous with a wider anxiety in modernist culture about empty rhetoric and linguistic humbug: Nietzsche’s linguistic scepticism is expressed in this context as an impatience with cant and encrusted convention. As a character in André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (1925) puts it, reprising the familiar monetary image of Nietzsche’s essay: ‘I give you fair warning – if I edit your review, it will be in order to prick bladders – in order to demonetize fine feelings, and those promissory notes which go by the name of words.’27 (See Chapter 5 for further discussion of Gide and Strouvilhou.) It was, indeed, common for the literary reviews to take on this role of puncturing bombast and demonetizing cant phrases, sorting out authentic uses of language from affectation and imposture. Harold Monro offered a rousing blurb for this mission in connection with his magazine The Poetry Review, which he saw as
waging a just and righteous war against formalism, pose, affectation, inflation, and all kinds of false traditionalism; against the monotonous jingling of the rhymed quatrain, or flat, heavy, blank-verse; against everlasting repetition of worn-out phrases, symbols and images; the futile inversion, the stereotyped adjective, the refuse of tired language, the old lumber stock of the poetaster, in a word cliché in all its tedious and detestable forms.28
The figurative modernist war against cliché, affectation and inflation in literary language was raised to a white-hot pitch of intensity by the literal war of 1914 to 1918, in whose aftermath the intrinsic crookedness of language was glaring. As David Goldie has written, the post-war mood of ‘disenchantment’ extended to a sense of exhaustion and exasperation with traditional forms of speech, so that Hemingway’s famous line in A Farewell to Arms (1929) about the obscenity of abstract words was seconded by writers as different from him as Ford Madox Ford (‘the large words Courage, Loyalty, God and the rest … were gone’), Edith Wharton (‘the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers’) and Henry James (‘the war has used up words’).29 Goldie shows how Murry’s journal The Athenaeum carried Monro’s campaign against cliché into the age of disenchantment, describing itself in advertisements as the ‘declared enemy of every form of intellectual cant and humbug, however eminent and established’.30 The war was a terrible object lesson in Nietzschean linguistic scepticism, and, as Jessica Weare’s essay in this book explains, war memoirists and war novelists in the modernist period were obliged to redraw the chart of truth and fiction in order to write about it.
Eliot’s 1920 essay ‘The Perfect Critic’ articulates another, historically specific form of modernist anxiety about the untrustworthiness of modern language. ‘The vast accumulations of knowledge – or at least of information – deposited by the nineteenth century’, Eliot wrote,
have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.31
Quite clearly, Eliot was talking about bullshit: ‘Bullshit is unavoidable’, Frankfurt tells us, ‘whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.’32 Eliot suggested that one such set of circumstances – the fragmentation of knowledge into specialized disciplines – was historically locatable, the cause of a marked increase in the incidence of bullshit around the turn of the twentieth century. Another face of this phenomenon of fragmentation was the feeling that modern life had become too complex to be seen ‘steadily and whole’, receding beyond the intellectual grasp of any single observer. This sense of bewildering complexity was a leitmotif in the social criticism of Ford Madox Ford, who wrote in 1911 that
the life of to-day is more and more becoming a life of little things. We are losing more and more the sense of a whole, the feeling of a grand design, of the coordination of all Nature in one great architectonic scheme. We have no longer any time to look out for the ultimate design. We have to face such an infinite number of little things that we cannot stay to arrange them in our minds, or to consider them as anything but as accidents, happenings, the mere events of the day.33
As this complexity increased, Ford complained in a 1909 essay, so too did the authority of experts: ‘All questions have become so exceedingly complicated, there is so little opening for moral fervour that the tendency of the great public is more and more to leave all public matters in the hands of a comparatively few specialists’.34 For Eliot, the proliferating spheres of expert knowledge multiplied the occasions for bullshit and muddle. For Ford, they disqualified amateurs and laypeople from having opinions about matters of civic interest. Both reactions emphasize the intersection of three core characteristics of modernity: complexity, specialization and the expanding role of trust.
Among contemporary trust theorists, the nexus linking complexity and trust is particularly important in the work of Niklas Luhmann, for whom ‘trust is required for the reduction of a future characterized by more or less indeterminate complexity’.35 ‘[I]n conditions of increasing social complexity man can and must develop more effective ways of reducing complexity’, and trust serves this purpose by ‘prun[ing] the future’: filtering out the noise of contingency to enable action and belief in spite of imperfect knowledge.36 In highly differentiated modern societies, Luhmann argues, personal trust tends increasingly to be supplanted by ‘system trust’ – trust, for example, in the peer review system for testing scientific research. Echoing Ford, Luhmann observes that the expansion of system trust brings with it an increasing reliance on experts: ‘In practical terms, control over trust can only be exercised as someone’s main occupation. Everybody else must rely on the specialist involved in such control, and thus is forced to remain on the periphery of events’.37 As Simmel pointed out, trust in complex modern societies becomes increasingly mediated, ‘disembedded’ (in Giddens’s term) from the sphere of personally verifiable relationships. Literary modernism was shaped in complicated ways by the expansion of system trust and the growing authority of experts. For a writer like Ford, the power of specialists was cause for alarm. But at the same time, many modernist texts were themselves a kind of expert discourse, mediating between the lay reader and the ungraspable complexity of contemporary life – ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy’ of Eliot’s oft-quoted essay on Ulysses.38
In a celebrated study, Lionel Trilling argued that modernist literature did away with the concept of sincerity as a norm of literary utterance, replacing it with the more complicated test of ‘authenticity’.39 It’s hard to resist Trilling’s basic insight that the act of literary self-expression was repeatedly critiqued and reimagined over the course of the modernist project: poetry is not ‘the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ (Eliot); ‘the deliberate ideas of the man veil, conceal, obscure that which the artist has to reveal’ (Lawrence); and so on.40 Yet it is notable, in spite of this, just how often the norm of sincerity was invoked during the modernist period as a pertinent test of literary quality. For Herbert Read, ‘all that is necessary for clear reasoning and good style is personal sincerity’.41 For John Middleton Murry, similarly, ‘the goodness of an idiosyncrasy of style will depend upon whether it is the expression of genuine individual feeling or not’.42 And in The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), I.A. Richards evolved an arcane, deeply moralistic definition of ‘the sincerity of the artist’ qua ‘wholeness of the mind in the creative moment’: ‘As we have seen, this completeness or wholeness is the rarest and the most difficult condition required for supreme communicative ability.’43
Modernism may have ushered in a poetics of impersonality and a deconstruction of the self, but these developments could not in themselves render the concept of sincerity obsolete, since the problem still remained of distinguishing genuine literary experiment from imposture. For critics like Richards, the assessment of sincerity was a subtle matter, calling into play the refined faculties of the critic. But for the wider public, the problem was frequently posed more crudely, as one of credibility. As Tim Armstrong puts it, ‘In refusing readability, modernism in art and literature often seemed, to early audiences, to produce works which were spurious, empty; supported by a critical conspiracy’.44 Audiences inclined to doubt the sincerity of modernist art would have felt vindicated by literary hoaxes like the fake ‘Spectra’ school of modernist poetry, cooked up in 1916 by disgruntled traditionalists Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, or, much later, the Ern Malley affair in Australia.45 Stunts like these underlined the risk one ran by trusting modernist artworks. The essays in this volume by Leonard Diepeveen and Rod Rosenquist, in particular, shed light on the often paradoxical ways in which modernist authors and their associates sought to shore up their credibility in the face of readerly scepticism.
The ‘Spectra’ hoax underlined a structural vulnerability inherent in avant-gardes: after the smash-up of received aesthetic canons, how do you spot a fake? One agent in the cultural economy who stood to gain from this climate of uncertainty was the critic, whose services were now more than ever needed to protect the public from imposture. As Monro put it in a Poetry Review prospectus, ‘Time is ripe for the forging of a weapon of criticism, and for the emphatic assertion of literary standards’.46 Monro was not alone in feeling the need of an authoritative criticism, but, as his contributor Arthur K. Sabin pointed out in the first issue, the basis on which such ‘literary standards’ could be erected was by no means clear: ‘Criticism is always with us, yet it has achieved no consistent method by which the true artist can be distinguished from the false with any reliability’.47 Similarly, for Virginia Woolf in ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923), ‘a contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same table at the same moment will pronounce completely different opinions about the same book.’48 Or as T.S. Eliot put it in his own ‘weapon of criticism’, The Criterion, in 1923:
on giving the matter a little attention, we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.49
The contrast in concreteness between the image of Speaker’s Corner and the mysterious ‘field of beneficent activity’ underlines how much easier it was to diagnose the problem of critical pluralism than to imagine a solution.
No modernist critic and editor took to the task of exposing artistic imposture with greater relish than Wyndham Lewis. In Time and Western Man (1927) Lewis explicitly acknowledged the contemporary problem of distinguishing true artistic ‘revolution’ from mere affectation, advertising his own ‘critical system’ as ‘an almost fool-proof system of detection where contemporary counterfeit, of the ‘revolutionary’ kind, is concerned.’50 In a chapter entitled ‘Tests for Counterfeit in the Arts’, he seized on Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation (1926) as proof of its author’s insincerity, accusing her of simulating, ‘with solemn humbug’, an inability to write conventional English sentences.51 The allegation of ‘studied obscurity’52 that Lewis levelled against Composition as Explanation is the most elementary form of doubt than can attach to a difficult modernist work: is the opacity justified – by, for example, the ‘great variety and complexity’ of contemporary civilization – or is it gratuitous, as in the spoof poetry of the ‘Spectra’ school?53 Gorham Munson enumerated the permissible forms of ‘esoteric writing’ in a 1923 review of The Waste Land, finding, however, that none of them excused the ‘deliberate mystification’ of that poem.54 In the introduction to A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1928), Robert Graves and Laura Riding raised the same question, acknowledging public doubts about the authenticity of much experimental poetry:
If, after a careful examination of poems that seem to be only part of the game of high-brow baiting low-brow, they still resist all reasonable efforts, then we must conclude that such work is, after all, merely a joke at the plain reader’s expense and let him return to his newspapers and to his Shakespeare.
Taking the example of e.e. cummings, Graves and Riding proceeded to use the critical tools of close reading to demonstrate that he, at least, ‘really means to write serious poetry’.55
Modernist culture found new and more complex ways of posing the question of authorial sincerity. It also found new ways of stirring up the volatile borderland between fact and fiction. These twin concerns were both addressed in Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism, which proposed, alongside its discussion of sincerity, an equally elaborate distinction between ‘the scientific use of language’, whose propositions are empirical and verifiable, and the ‘emotive use of language’ found in fiction, where what matters is not ‘reference’ itself but ‘the emotion or attitude produced by the reference’.56 This same line of thought was revisited in his short manifesto Poetry and Science (1926), where he classified the non-veridical sentences of poetry as ‘pseudo-statements’, morally and psychologically potent but referentially void.57 Richards’s attempts to smooth out the relationship between fiction and fact underline how this interface had become an irritant in advanced literary culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, no longer something that could be taken for granted.58
Related to Richards’s anxious meditations on the truth value of poetry was a certain confusion, in the theory and practice of the modernist novel, about the truth value of fiction. In their philosophical survey of fiction and truth, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen point out that classic modernist essays like Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) ‘insisted that their fiction (serious fiction, the fiction of the artist) was as true as, and perhaps truer than, history’.59 Modernist authors like James and Woolf were thus strident exponents of what Lamarque and Olsen call the ‘theory of novelistic truth’, maintaining that ‘the novel is true, true in its particulars’.60 As Sean Latham has shown, however, the relationship between modernist fiction and empirical truth was even messier and more complex than these high theoretical pronouncements imply. Latham argues that the intrinsically hybrid, traditionally disreputable genre of the roman à clef allowed modernist novelists from Oscar Wilde to Jean Rhys to subvert the distinction between fact and fiction, exploiting the possibilities of a burgeoning celebrity culture to close the gap between literature and the public sphere.61 James and Woolf, as Lamarque and Olsen rightly point out, sought to boost the prestige of the novel by paradoxically claiming the status of truth for their fictions. But in order to do so, Latham tells us, they needed to repress another, more unsavoury form of factuality, associated with memoirs and, worse, gossip. The modernist roman à clef brought fiction’s embarrassing kinship with such genres into plain view, opening another front in modernism’s war with the conventions of the realist novel. The often overlooked resurgence of the roman à clef during the modernist period thus points to a more pervasive turbulence surrounding the categories of fact and fiction, also apparent in, for example, the emergence of what Virginia Woolf called the ‘New Biography’ and of other contemporaneous experiments in life-writing.62 Essays in this book by Suzanne Hobson and Jessica Weare address still other ways in which modernism destabilized these categories: Hobson examines how H.D.’s engagement with psychical research asked difficult, literally embarrassing questions about the nature of readerly belief, while Weare explores the ambiguous relationship between fiction and memoir in representations of the First World War.
The interface between modernist works and their readers, and the strategies deployed by modernist authors to establish their trustworthiness, are questions addressed in the first part of this book, Reading and Trust. Leonard Diepeveen’s essay details the scepticism provoked in many critics and readers by experimental modernist texts, and traces this reaction to the wider social conditions of mediation and ‘proliferation’ that characterized the modernist moment. Paying close attention to the literary weeklies and monthlies where modernism’s cultural capital was bartered, Diepeveen charts the challenges posed by these conditions to traditional tokens of authorial sincerity. Whereas Diepeveen begins from the premise that modernist impersonality had instituted a barrier between authors and their readers, Rod Rosenquist’s essay follows the fortunes of the modernist poetics of impersonality past modernism’s salad days and into its early middle age. Focusing on the modernist memoir – a genre that flourished between the years 1929 and 1939 – Rosenquist examines the use of personality in closing the distance caused by lack of trust between common reader and high modernist. The growing reputation of modernist writers in the 1920s attracted the attention of a wider readership, whose doubts and curiosity demanded to be satisfied by information about, precisely, the personalities behind the impersonal masterpieces of modernism. Suzanne Hobson’s essay on H.D.’s paranormally ‘influenced’ autobiographical-novel, The Sword Went Out to Sea, drafted between 1946 and 1950, examines how the unusual truth claims of such spiritualist fictions elicit a particularly complex kind of modernist reading. H.D. and other modernist spiritualists risk the reader’s incredulity, avoiding the comfortable binary of knowledge and disbelief upheld in the scientific discourse of psychic research.
The essays collected in Part 2, After Sincerity, consider the responses of several modernist novelists to the collapse of traditional notions of sincerity and authenticity. Paul Sheehan assesses the importance of folk culture in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1953), showing how Ellison posits the folk figure of the untruthful trickster as a resource for dismantling and rebuilding the self, and hence surviving an inimical social reality. Scarlett Baron takes up the pervasive imagery of money and counterfeiting in novels by James Joyce and André Gide, arguing that modernist textual counterfeit ultimately rejects an ethics of copy and original, inaugurating instead the web-like universe of intertextuality. Paul Edwards reads Wyndham Lewis’s late novel The Revenge for Love (1937) in light of a range of Lewis’s published and unpublished philosophical writings to show its corrosive critique of the social and cultural ‘myths’ purporting to tell the truth about reality.
Part 3, Truth and Narrative, investigates three moments of crisis in the relationship between narrative and truth. Max Saunders applies the lens of trust to a canonical instance of unreliable narration in his essay on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). In its portrayal of misjudgement and puzzlement, The Good Soldier poignantly thematizes the combined inadvisability and inevitability of trust, while Ford’s virtuoso experiment with narrative voice keeps the question of readerly trust constantly in view. Samuel Cross, in his reading of Malone Dies (1951), shows how the extreme incapacity and impoverishment of a very different kind of unreliable narrator give rise to a peculiar discursive ‘earnestness’, one in which to speak at all is to lie, and to do either is indistinguishable from self-experience itself. Meticulously contextualizing the idea of narrative truth in the context of the War Books Controversy of 1929–1930, Jessica Weare examines how various ‘sibling’ war narratives – especially Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth (1933) and her novel Honourable Estate (1936) – bent the truth to reach a composite picture of the war.
Part 4, Trust and Society, considers three different perspectives on trust in its public and collective dimensions. Sean Pryor shows how Ezra Pound shuttled between two modes of trust throughout the 1930s and 1940s: the pragmatic assessment of risk and an idealistic faith in faith. Pound espoused contradictory views on trust, lauding both Mussolini’s shrewd insusceptibility to being fooled and the Fascist fede fascista, or bond of faith, and these two positions, Pryor shows, structure the reader’s pact with The Pisan Cantos. Jason Puskar situates Wallace Stevens’s 1936 poem Owl’s Clover in terms of a similar opposition, between the traditional liberal value of interpersonal trust and a more loosely articulated liberal community held together by social technologies like corporate sureties – Stevens’s speciality as an insurance lawyer. My essay on trust in Proust argues that the discontinuous self imagined in A la recherche du temps perdu undermines this traditional liberal value of interpersonal trust as social glue. Instead, Proust imagines a peculiarly modern form of episodic trust, comparable in its combination of transience and interconnectedness to the contemporary sociological hypotheses of Simmel and Tarde. Finally, Rosenquist’s Afterword addresses pivotal interventions in the discourse on trust and belief by Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Joseph Goux and Jacques Derrida, and applies this conceptual framework to the questions of trust raised in this volume and in modernist studies more generally.
H.G. Wells understood Locke’s dictum that trust is the bond of society better than most, and his great condition-of-England novel Tono-Bungay (1909) – source of one of the epigraphs for this introduction – was keenly aware of how the mass media, and especially advertising, were capable of ringing the changes on that bond. Even given this quick grasp of the new media ecology, though, the Wells who wrote Tono-Bungay could scarcely have envisaged the central role that another of his fictions would play in one of the new century’s great mass media hoaxes. Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of Wells’s 1898 novella remains the iconic example of the phoney news broadcast, surpassing in sophistication and chutzpah any of the marketing stunts that Wells’s quack medicine millionaire Teddy Ponderevo dreams up in Tono-Bungay. The partnership, nonetheless, is fitting: Welles’s career, like Wells’s, was marked by a canny grasp of the evolving world of new media, and especially of their propensity to deceive. The vision of Citizen Kane (1941) was already present in essence in the War of the Worlds hoax, which turned on the power of the press to manufacture belief, and the profound possibilities of trickery and deception made technically available by the new media. Welles’s incontinent use of special effects, his taste for pastiche, his penchant for mirrors and trompe-l’oeil framing (a snowy cottage becomes a snow globe, and so on), bespeak a deep commitment to cinema qua chicanery. The late oddity F for Fake! (1973) says as much, and can indeed be read as Welles’s own cinematic manifesto as much as a kaleidoscopic essay on art forgery. Fake is often claimed as a distinctively postmodern artefact, but in its equation of huxterism with cinematography and its questioning of authenticity in modern art, it reprises some of modernism’s originary themes – just as our contemporary concerns with trust and deception are foreshadowed by commentators like Simmel, Tarde and Wells.
The nostalgia that Welles expressed in F for Fake! for the unsigned, ego-transcending majesty of Chartres cathedral was itself a characteristically modern gesture: the retrojection of authenticity into a pre-modern past. The mobilization of the past as a site of authenticity was a key component of what Elizabeth Outka calls the ‘commodified authentic’, and, as Outka convincingly shows, Wells’s Tono-Bungay contained an exuberant unmasking of the commodification of the past in advertising.63 In Outka’s reading, Wells’s novel ends with a softening of this position, as ‘the narrator returns to an idea of authenticity, a hope for a stable term that might be purified from the accretions that surround him’.64 But whereas Outka sees the narrator divided between a sense of ‘bubbling’ flux and a desire for stable authenticity, it is at least arguable that the choice for George Ponderevo is, rather, between two different kinds of progress: one capitalist and spastic, the other scientific and coordinated. Such a reading gains plausibility from the vantage point Wells supplies for these musings: Ponderevo’s valedictory glimpse of England is had from bridge of the prototype destroyer he has designed, unsentimentally christened the X2. London may not know where it’s going, but the narrator, by contrast, has plotted a definite, rather ominous course for the future: ‘I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space. We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to talking in unfamiliar tongues’.65 Here, too, we encounter a hallowed image of a cathedral – not Chartres but Saint Paul’s, ‘the very figure of whatever fineness the old Anglican culture achieved’ – but ‘everyone has forgotten it’, and ‘intricacies of telephone wires and poles cut blackly into its thin mysteries’.66 Wells’s novel ends, that is, with images of the emergent transport and communication technologies that drove what he described as ‘delocalisation’, and what Giddens calls ‘disembedding’: processes that decisively shifted the terrain of modern trust.67 Outka seems to be profoundly right about Wells’s satire of the commodified authentic, but she may sell short the vision laid out in this final chapter. Wells, acutely aware in 1909 of how ‘civilization is possible only through confidence’, also understood that modernity brought with it new channels for this confidence and new possibilities for deception. If the Wells of 1909 had travelled forward in time to hear his own fantasy diffused on the airwaves and mistaken for truth, it seems, after all, reasonable to suppose that he would not have been surprised.
1 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 178–9.
2 ‘La confiance générale est, pour l’individu qui l’inspire, une grande force, un grand moyen d’action; mais, pour le public qui l’éprouve, elle est une profonde tranquilité d’âme, une fondamentale condition d’éxistence.’ Gabriel Tarde, Psychologie économique, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1902), 71.
3 H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (London: Penguin, 2005), 296.
4 Most people wouldn’t label Wells a sociologist, but he did number this as one of his many hats. Addressing the London Sociological Society in 1906, Wells said: ‘I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology’. H.G. Wells, ‘The So-Called Science of Sociology’, Sociological Papers 3 (1907), 367.
5 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 7.
6 This bias in the Enlightenment tradition is cogently critiqued in Annette Baier, ‘Trust and Antitrust’, Ethics 96 (1986).
7 Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, p. 182.
8 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 18. For a suggestive application of Simmel’s and Giddens’s theories of trust in a literary context, see Lawrence Rainey, ‘Pretty Typewriters, Melodramatic Modernity: Edna, Belle, and Estelle’, Modernism/modernity 16, no. 1 (2009), pp. 116–17.
9 George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 12.
10 Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), 318, Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘On Truth, Lies, and Bullshit’, in The Philosophy of Deception, ed. Clancy Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 41.
11 Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 1.
12 Martin Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 14. Also see David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
13 Francis Fukuyama mounted a similar argument in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), with a particular emphasis on the role of trust in the creation of wealth.
14 It is beyond the scope of this introduction to give a full bibliography of recent social scientific research on trust, but further reading might usefully begin with Russell Hardin, Trust (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), Martin Hollis, Trust Within Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Adam B. Seligman, The Problem of Trust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Two recent essays written for a non-specialist audience are Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: Money, Markets and Society (London: Seagull Books, 2011) and Marek Kohn, Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
15 ‘The crisis of liberalism’ was the title of a 1909 book by the New Liberal theorist J.A. Hobson. For a more recent account of how the dominant ideology of nineteenth-century Europe foundered during this period, see Marcel Gauchet, La Crise du libéralisme 1880–1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). For a study of modernist culture in the context of ‘political debates about the status of liberalism and democracy’ (12), with a particular emphasis on gender difference, see Rachel Potter, Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
16 Taylor, Confidence Games, 1, 5.
17 George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 89, 93.
18 Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, trans. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair and David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 250.
19 Quoted in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 6.
20 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Typhoon and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 12.
21 Remy de Gourmont, Le Problème du Style: Questions d’Art, de Littérature et de Grammaire (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1902).
22 Karen Csengari, ed. The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1994), 70. Hulme had already made this distinction in 1909, in ‘Searchers after Reality – II: Haldane’.
23 Jonathan Goldman’s fascinating paper on ‘Modernism and Bullshit’ at the 2009 Modernist Studies Association conference first drew my attention to this link.
24 A phrase coined in Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937), 9.
25 Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 57. I’m grateful to Sean Pryor for pointing out that ‘balls’ is a more viable interpretation of this abbreviation than ‘bullshit’.
26 Jean Paulhan, Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou La Terreur dans les Lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). ‘Les rhétoriqueurs … expliquaient avec complaisance comment nous pouvons accéder à la poésie : par quels sons et quels mots, quels artifices, quelles fleurs. Mais une rhétorique modern … nous apprend d’abord quels artifices, sons et règles peuvent à jamais effaroucher la poésie’ (41). [‘Rhetoricians used to explain complacently how we can attain to poetry: by what sounds and what words, what artifice, what flowers. But a modern rhetoric … teaches us first what artifice, sounds and rules can scare off poetry forever’.]
27 The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy [1931] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), 291.
28 ‘The Bookshop’, Poetry Review 1, no. 2 (November 1912), quoted in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 186.
29 Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale (London: William Heinemann, 1934), 55. Wharton and James are quoted in David Goldie, A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919–1928 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 23.
30 Advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement, 11 December 1919, quoted in Brooker and Thacker, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1, 369.
31 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Perfect Critic’, The Athenaeum: 4708 (23 July 1920), 103.
32 Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 63.
33 Ford Madox Ford, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), 61–2.
34 Ford Madox Ford, ‘The Critical Attitude: The Passing of the Great Figure’, English Review, 4: 13 (December, 1909), 102.
35 Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power: Two Works by Niklas Luhmann, trans. Howard Davis, John Raffan, and Kathryn Rooney, ed. Tom Burns and Gianfranco Poggi (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 15.
36 Ibid., 7, 13.
37 Ibid., 57.
38 T.S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 175. For an account of the analogy between modernist literature and the expert discourses of professionalism, see Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
39 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
40 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950), 21; D.H. Lawrence, The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Centaur Press, 1962), 17.
41 Herbert Read, English Prose Style (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1928), 96.
42 John Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press, 1922), 15.
43 I.A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 188–9.
44 Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Polity: Cambridge, 2005), 62.
45 For a recent discussion of the Spectra hoax in light of modernist periodical culture, see Suzanne W. Churchill, ‘The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917’, in Churchill and Adam McKible, ed. Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
46 Quoted in Brooker and Thacker, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1, 179.
47 Arthur K. Sabin, ‘On Criticism’, The Poetry Review, 1: 1 1912), 6.
48 Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23.
49 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, in Selected Essays, 13.
50 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928), 22.
51 Ibid., 49.
52 Ibid., 51.
53 As Eliot put it in 1921 in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, collected in Eliot, Selected Essays, 248.
54 The Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1923, 7, quoted in T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), 157.
55 Robert Graves and Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (New York: Haskell House, 1968), 10, 24.
56 Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism, 267.
57 I.A. Richards, Poetries and Sciences (New York: Norton, 1970), 58.
58 Recent books by Mark Wollaeger and Max Saunders explore different aspects of this interface. Wollaeger’s study of the parallel emergence of modernism and modern propaganda shows how both discourses exploit the ambiguous nature of the modern fact, which is at once raw data and theoretical construct: ‘Propaganda’s influence on the truth value of facts or, to put it another way, on the tension between the seeming immediacy of facts and the subtle ways in which facts are already and always mediated, registers across a wide range of modernist texts’. Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 15. Saunders’s research on the relationship between modernism and modern life-writing shows how modernism was bound up with the proliferation of genre-defying auto/biographical forms around the turn of the twentieth century and the resultant destabilization of the relationship between fiction and auto/biography. See Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
59 Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
60 Ibid., 290.
61 See Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
62 On Bloomsbury and the ‘New Biography’ (the title of Virginia Woolf’s review of Harold Nicolson’s Some People), see Saunders, Self Impression, 438–83.
63 Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 124–6.
64 Ibid., 126.
65 Wells, Tono-Bungay, 267.
66 Ibid., 385.
67 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 27. Wells coined the term ‘delocalisation’ in the essay ‘Administrative Areas’, collected in Mankind in the Making (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906), 163. He then playfully cited this essay in Tono-Bungay, 356.