Britain's vote to leave Europe and America's election of Donald Trump to president represented a backlash against the orthodoxy of modern identity politics. Much of the subsequent discussion among liberal and left-leaning intellectuals has been marked by a sense of shock and alarm at the rejection of values that had for decades been taken as articles of faith. This chapter traces these tenets to the American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, in order to better understand the contemporary backlash against them. Through analysis of writings by various countercultural figures, it considers the beginnings of the revolution that contributed to the moral and political certitudes of the next 60 years. It asks in what ways did the heretical spirit of the Beat Generation, their contemporaries, and immediate literary descendants result in the orthodox position? What exclusionary and politically contradictory criteria did they employ? And what lessons can be learnt from the 1950s and 1960s about the current turn against identity politics, a turn that is presented by many involved as the new, true counterculture? Reading the current historical moment as one of new and unfamiliar heterodox rebellions, I have aimed to put the orthodoxy it is challenging in its early heretical context. By doing so, I argue, we may move beyond outrage and condescension at the new nationalist backlash, and towards a better understanding of the reasons for that backlash, including the religious impulse behind these developments.
The aim of this thesis is to provide a new way of reading Henry Miller by drawing attention to his unlikely aesthetic and moral intersections with Ezra Pound. It traces the lineage of a particular strand of radical modernist expression that is exemplified in Pound’s critical essays between 1909 and 1938 and finds its way – incongruously - into Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical novels of the 1930s. In the process, I will illuminate hitherto underexplored territory that is shared by two seemingly incompatible writers, pointing the way to a better understanding of the aesthetic and moral contradictions in Miller’s – and indeed Pound’s – work.
Crucially, I propose that Miller’s literature is morally engaged rather than amoral or unwittingly counter-revolutionary, two common and reductive assumptions. By reading him in the context of Pound’s often suspect pronouncements on hierarchy and order it is possible to reassess George Orwell’s widely accepted conclusion that Miller is simply a ‘passive, unflinching’ recorder of life.* It is also possible to treat his textual violence as an important part of his aesthetic, rather than condemning or glossing over it. This thesis will define a set of aesthetics that are common to Pound and Miller and involve complex, often paradoxical impulses – most crucially between the desire to cultivate a radically inclusive artistic approach and the instinctive adherence to a set of absolute tastes and values.
Taking as my starting point a little known review by Pound of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I demonstrate that the latter’s often brutal, anti-humanist rhetoric enables rather than undermines his larger humanistic project. I show that Miller’s idiosyncratic assimilation of high modernist reactionary tropes and ideas were integral to his original and influential view of art, ethics and reality. Concomitantly, this comparison of two very different writers seeks to generate a new perspective on the slippage between retrograde and progressive elements in both their works as well as the period in which they were writing. *George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’ in Collected Essays, ed. by George Packer (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), pp. 95-137, p. 128. Originally published in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940).
Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Miller was not a fashionable writer for literary studies. In fact, there exist only three collections of essays concerning Henry Miller's oeuvre. Since these books appeared, a new generation of international Miller scholars has emerged, one that is re-energizing critical readings of this important American Modernist. Henry Miller: New Perspectives presents new essays on carefully chosen themes within Miller and his intellectual heritage to form the most authoritative collection ever published on this author.
This essay compares the unorthodox literary economic theories espoused by Ezra Pound and Georges Bataille in the 1930s and 1940s, and explores the connections that these politically and stylistically divergent writers made between monetary and sexual circulation, wealth and natural growth. Interrogating their respective primitivist approaches to pre-capitalist cultural systems (Pound’s to a medieval arcadia before usury and Bataille’s to ancient Aztec and North American tribal societies), it draws attention to unexpected convergences between the writers’ political and economic ideas. The author demonstrates that Pound – a supporter of Mussolini’s fascist state – was, by the use-value basis of his economics, in many ways closer to Marx than the expressly Marxist Bataille. Although Pound shared Bataille’s preference for pagan and Catholic ‘splendour’ over Protestant thrift, as well as his belief that sexual repression and puritanical fear were contributors to a blockage in the system, his economic approach ultimately abhorred the Nietzschean ‘squander’ celebrated in Bataille’s The Accursed Share. The essay ends by using the two writers to shed light on the literary-philosophical conditions that incubated fascism, as well as the perversely depoliticising and dangerous effects of interpreting the economy according to metaphysical ‘truths’. In so doing it warns against such tempting conflations in the present day.
'%3e%3cpath fill='%23012169' d='M0 0v30h60V0z'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='6' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='4' d='m0 0 60 30m0-30L0 30' clip-path='url(%23b)'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='10' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3cpath stroke='%23C8102E' stroke-width='6' d='M30 0v30M0 15h60'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)