SOURCE: "Mass Minds and Modernist Forms: Political, Aesthetic, and Psychological Theories," in Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 21-47.

[In the following, Tratner links Sorel with Gustave Le Bon, author of The Crowd, to examine the modernist works of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats.]

Two French political theorists set the terms for most analyses of the mass mind in the early twentieth century: Gustave Le Bon, in The Crowd (1895), and Georges Sorel, who extended Le Bon's ideas into a method for inciting mass movements in Reflections on Violence (1906). Sorel's theory became the basis of syndicalism, which powerfully influenced such diverse movements as the International Workers of the World in the United States and the Fascists in Italy. (Mussolini began his career as a syndicalist.)

Much of the power of Le Bon's and Sorel's theories came from their usefulness to both the Left and the Right. Le Bon's influence on twentieth-century politics was somewhat paradoxical, since he declared in 1896 that the coming "Era of the Crowd" marked the end of all civilization. Previously in history, he claimed, the crowd had gained power only in brief "barbarian phases" between periods of "elevated . . . culture." The crowd always had slipped back into passivity when a new "intellectual aristocracy" arose. But in the twentieth century, Le Bon feared, there would be no new aristocracy because the masses were not only destroying leadership, they were taking it over: "The destinies of nations are elaborated at present in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the councils of princes" (p. xv). What Le Bon did not predict was that politicians and social analysts would study "the heart of the masses" and would use his analysis of the unusual mentality found there as the basis of new kinds of political appeals. And modernist writers were as attracted as any contemporary intellectuals by those appeals, the sociopolitical analyses that lay behind them, and the techniques of representation and address those analyses made possible.

At first, such appeals seemed to involve abandoning reason and culture, placing a "heart of darkness" at the center of the social order. But gradually, new political philosophies gained power that inverted Le Bon's evaluation of the rise of the crowd: arguing that rationality is not the basis of civilization but only of the capitalist system, a system that had destroyed culture, such theorists concluded that empowering the masses was a way of restoring civilization.

We might expect such arguments to have come largely from the Left. Le Bon himself equated the rising power of the masses and the remarkable rise of socialist or communist politics:

Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalisation of mines, railways, factories and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, etc., such are these claims. (p. xvi)

But Le Bon went on to suggest that leaders could draw on the nature of the crowd to counter this communist trend: Crowds are "powerless .. . to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them, and it is not with rules based on theories of pure equity that they are to be led, but by seeking what produces an impression on them and what seduces them. .. . In practice the most unjust may be the best for the masses" (p. xx). In other words, there was nothing inherent in the crowd's fascination with communism: rather, communism was simply what was being "imposed" on the workers in 1895, and they could be seduced to some other philosophy that would restore civilization.

Le Bon had little hope of using the crowd mind to develop civilization because, he argued, "civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. . . . A civilization involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising" (p. xviii). The crowd at best would clear the ground for a new civilization, but if such a new order were to arise, according to Le Bon, it would owe nothing to the crowd mind, but would be merely a new aristocracy imposing itself. The conservatives who followed Le Bon, however, developed a different idea of the relation between the aristocracy that builds culture and the masses. The new conservatives, such as Georges Sorel, Charles Maurras, and Giovanni Gentile—social theorists that Yeats and Eliot followed—argued that the aristocracy is the part of society best able to express and make conscious what is in the crowd mind. Such conservatives argued for a culture based on instinct and irrationality, a culture growing out of the crowd, and hence a culture opposed to the old middle-class leaders. Le Bon noted some of this already going on in the 1880's: for example, he commented that many middle-class leaders, in response to the rise of the crowd, were turning to Catholicism, but he argued that it was a futile effort because "the masses repudiate to-day the gods which [the middle class] repudiated yesterday and helped to destroy. There is no power, Divine or human, that can oblige a stream to flow back to its source" (p. xvii). Eliot clearly disagreed, hoping for a Catholic revival. And Eliot could draw on Le Bon for support in this belief: though Le Bon believed that entirely new gods must emerge to restore civilization, he also said that the crowd always responded most powerfully to the oldest traditions, to the "soul of the race" (p. 67). Le Bon's contradictions made his theory useful to both the Left and the Right.

HOW TO THINK LIKE A CROWD

The key to Le Bon's influence did not lie in his predictions of which beliefs the crowd would continue to hold, but in his analysis of how the crowd functions. This analysis begins with his description of the moment of transformation of a collection of people into a crowd: "The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised crowd, or . . . a psychological crowd. It forms a single being" (p. 2). Such a transformation does not always occur with gatherings of people, but only under certain conditions. A few may become a crowd in the midst of hundreds who do not join together, or "an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences" (p. 3). Le Bon argued that the collective mind that emerges is not at all composed of the sum of the minds of the individuals who participate in it—"exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly" (p. 6). A single individual can be transformed in many different ways by different crowds, and hence Le Bon concluded that the kind of consistent character that had been glorified by literature is largely a fraud: "It is only in novels that individuals are found to traverse their whole life with an unvarying character. It is only the apparent uniformity of the environment that creates the apparent uniformity of character. . . . Among the most savage members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been peaceful notaries" (pp. 4-5).

Le Bon's call for a literature that would show how character changes as environment changes is closely related to the attitudes that led to modernism. One of the basic differences between Victorian and modernist literature is a change in the relationship between environment or setting and character. In Victorian novels, the setting remains fairly constant while the characters move across it and eventually develop personalities that in some sense fit the environment. In The Way of the World, Franco Moretti describes the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman in such terms: the "individual's formation and socialization .. . is conceivable only if . . . social norms, for their part, enjoy a substantial stability." Moretti goes on to say that the nineteenth-century novel cannot really portray social and political change because the novel "revolves around individual destinies, while politics moves to collective rhythms." Moretti ends with the comment that the Bildungsroman disappeared when "in ideology after ideology, the individual figured simply as part of the whole"—in other words, when the movement of the collective appeared to be more fundamental than the movement of the individual.¹

But the Bildungsroman did not disappear; it just changed form: writers developed methods of building novels around "collective rhythms" rather than around "individual destinies." Most of Woolf's major novels are Bildungsromanen in which the social setting changes, and those changes form the basic structure of the book. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis has argued, Woolf's later works are based on "a collective Bildung and communal affect" and so "suggest the structures of social change in the structures of narrative."² The individual is presented precisely as a "part of the whole" and as such changes along with the setting. The most striking example is Orlando, where a young person grows through four hundred years of English history, changing personality and even sex with each shift of period. Instead of suggesting that Orlando's inherent character is developed or hindered by these social influences, Woolf simply shows him/her having different traits in different eras—and all these traits end up layered on top of each other at the end. The book creates no sense of finality; it simply reaches the present, after which one expects that the next social shift will simply produce another layer of character to add to Orlando.

In modernist novels, setting is no longer a constant background against which individual character is defined but the main agent moving the "plot" along and determining what characters think and do. When we are following a character, we often lose track of the supposedly major issues of his life as his thoughts and actions get taken over by the concerns of the groups or the places he wanders through. How this differs from Victorian novels can be made clear by contrasting a dinner scene in Dickens and one in Joyce or Woolf. If people go to dinner in Dickens, we may read about the food they eat and the random conversation, but we are waiting for the clues to the destiny of the hero that are scattered throughout the scene. We are willing to enjoy the dinner, but expect the tale to pick up speed again as clues to the plot proliferate. In Ulysses and To The Lighthouse, in contrast, when people gather to eat, they talk and think about food, the house they are in, or each other, and major issues in individuals' lives fade into the background. A group of people coming together in these novels ends up defining the topics of conversation and even the thoughts that occur in the minds of the people in that group; each person is transformed. Woolf provides a metaphor for this process in The Years: she says that when two people join in conversation, weights underneath the skin of each of them shift to new positions, so that the two people do not even look the same as they did before they started talking. They have different bodies, different faces, different minds in the conversation than they would have had in other ones.³ The mind is not an internal substance that can be molded to conform to a stable set of moral or intellectual principles; it is rather a space through which pass numerous streams of contradictory words, images, and feelings, most of which never even become conscious.

In Ulysses, changes of social setting are marked by changes of style so complete that we often lose track of which characters we are following. Most of the styles used in the text are, as Karen Lawrence has described them, "anonymous, collective discourse," so that sentences seem to derive from institutions that shape characters and author alike rather than from any individual mind.⁴ In The Waves, Woolf shows six people all changing their thoughts together, not as they wander about the city, but as they age. Woolf emphasizes that setting is what is causing these changes, and not individual actions, by presenting before each chapter a setting that slowly changes throughout the book, tracing the cycle of a day, the sun rising and sinking. These "interludes" reveal the collective rhythm of the life of the group, and indeed of all of England, which rises to a moment of group glory in the triumphant group enterprise of imperialism and then falls with the sinking of the imperial sun.

Eliot and Yeats, in their later poems, also reverse the relationship of background and figure: instead of creating social worlds to define what the poet escapes in moments of lyrical reverie, they make us focus on the setting and suggest that the setting is the only agent in the poem. Yeats's poems often directly proclaim that the images in his brain are products of the surrounding social order and of the past, not of his own "genius." He is constantly trying to decide whether his images have truly emerged from a deep social tide, from the "blood" of the people, or from mere passing "winds" blowing about. In Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," similarly, the images the writer uses do not emerge from his head (which is hollow), but from the surroundings. These later Yeats and Eliot poems are all epics that, in Pound's phrase, "contain history," poems structured around the collective rhythms of vast and shifting social landscapes. They present characters as minor, fleeting images that blend into the background. The poets present themselves not as individuals, but as parts of eras, of currents of history, of traditions.

Part of the reason that modernism involved such a change in the form of literature was that, according to contemporary theories of crowd psychology, the new mind that a person acquires by joining a crowd is not simply "another" personality: it is a different kind of mentality. Le Bon described the crowd mind in terms that are quite close to Freud's view of the id—pure desires running rampant and constantly shifting due to external stimulation:

Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, he is a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images . . . and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. (pp. 12-13).

Le Bon was clearly ambivalent about the crowd: it is violent, ferocious, primitive, but also spontaneous, heroic, and enthusiastic. The crowd becomes the ideal mobilizer of revolution, the vehicle of social change. As Le Bon notes, "It is crowds that have furnished the torrents of blood requisite for the triumph of every belief (p. 18). Collectivists on the Left and the Right (anarchosyndicalists, Fascists) drew on the power of the crowd and glorified violence, myths, and irrational images for their ability to produce enthusiasm and spontaneity and overcome the dull bourgeois life, effects that pacifists like Joyce and Woolf sought as well.

Modernist literary techniques, like the techniques of modern political rhetoric and its parent, advertising, developed at least in part in order to speak to and from this crowd mind, to extinguish "conscious personality" in audience and writer alike and appeal instead to the mass unconscious supposed to take its place. It is often presented as a prima facie commonplace of modernist criticism that stream of consciousness and Imagism are aesthetic devices that mark a rejection of social concerns and identify "high-brow" literature as the extreme opposite of "mass" literature. The obscurity and contradictoriness of modernism are said to prove that such literature cannot have been seeking to influence the masses. Mass art supposedly consists of clear, simple stories and straightforward images. Yet the forms taken by advertising and political campaigning in recent years contradict this view. Advertising has shown that the mass mind is influenced by utterly bizarre images and words. Politicians have borrowed such tactics, moving more and more toward the Imagist poetry of "sound bites" as modern media have become more and more mass media. Modernist literature itself contradicts the critical commonplace as well. If we extract "sound bites" from modernist works, we can find moments quite as propagandistic, pandering, randomly violent, titillating, and banal as anything in any ad. Modernist works are full of short passages that would be at home in horror movies, pornography, or late-night TV, just as advertising juxtaposes images from Shakespeare, Wagner, Marx, the Bible, and T. S. Eliot as freely as did Eliot himself.

Many modernists believed that they were gaining contact with the mass mind by using their strange forms; they also believed that if they wrote in clear, easily comprehensible, realistic forms, they would be disconnected from the masses, thus merely serving the nineteenth-century capitalist system. Yeats expressed this idea very strongly throughout his career; he even developed two different kinds of obscurity—Romantic and modernist—in opposition to what he perceived as capitalist realism. His early position can be seen in his essay "What Is Popular Poetry?"

what we call 'popular poetry' never came from the people at all. . . . There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not understanding, and both, instead of that manifest logic, that clear rhetoric of the 'popular poetry,' glimmer with thoughts and images.⁵

Yeats says that the manifest logic and clear rhetoric of what passes for "popular poetry" was created by "the counting-house" as part of its creation of a "new class." Before "the counting-house" had "set this art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister, the art of the people was . . . closely mingled with the art of the coteries."⁶ Yeats's early poetry used Romantic strangeness to break out of the middleclass "clear rhetoric" and once again unite the masses and the coteries.

Later, Yeats defined the defects of clear and realistic forms of literature in somewhat different terms. In "Fighting the Waves," in 1934, he describes realism as part of the industrialism that brutalizes people into mechanical objects. Modernism, in all its obscurity, is part of the movement to escape this alienation:

When Stendahl described a masterpiece as a 'mirror dawdling down a lane,' he expressed the mechanical philosophy of the French eighteenth century. Gradually literature conformed to his ideal . . . till, by the end of the nineteenth century . . . characters . . . had been brutalized into the likeness of mechanical objects. But Europe is changing its philosophy. . . . Certain typical books—Ulysses, Virginia Woolf s The Waves, Mr. Ezra Pound's Draft of XXX Cantos—suggest a philosophy like that of the Samkara school of ancient India, mental and physical objects alike material, a deluge of experience breaking over and within us, melting limits whether of line or tine; man no hard bright mirror dawdling by the dry sticks of a hedge, but a swimmer, or rather the waves themselves. In this literature . . . man in himself is nothing.⁷

The unrealistic modernist literature of flow, of tides, of waves, is thus part of a social movement to end the domination of mechanical, middle-class capitalism. Man in himself—the conscious personality of the individual—becomes nothing, extinguished in the greater social waves. In contrast, the popular realism of writers such as H. G. Wells, Yeats says, is "the opium of the suburbs."⁸

The moves away from realism in the later works of all the authors I am studying here, similarly, were efforts to escape "the suburbs," to break out of the clean, clear shapes of private life. Modernist efforts to eliminate "man in himself' were efforts to write of the underlying social medium. Both novelists and poets moved in their more radical works toward producing streams of images that were overtly identified as the flow of images of a crowd or, perhaps, a culture. The Waste Land is a stream of images in the consciousness of "the land," perhaps England, perhaps Europe, perhaps all of Western civilization. Ulysses repeatedly shows individuals being engulfed by flows of images that cross all the minds in a given social institution.

Most stream-of-consciousness novels entwine a whole collection of individual streams and trace the group movement that is not controlled by any one person. (Think of As I Lay Dying or To the Lighthouse.) The streams entwine different people together in a portrayal of a social unit, a crowd. The process of creating a united social body involves not merely finding some common history, but becoming part of intertwined streams of conscious and unconscious thought. Early in Yeats's life, he thought that all he needed was to find the central image of Irish history to accomplish this goal; later, he found that the mind of the nation is "multiform." When he describes this multiform mind, he sounds very much as if he is describing a modernist multiple streamof-consciousness novel:

Is there a nationwide multiform reverie, every mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and reacting upon one another no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows he cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, bound together by this interchange among streams or shadows; that Unity of Image, which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol? . . . How could I judge any scheme of education or of social reform, when I could not measure what the different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce of reverie and of sleep: and what is luxury and what necessity when a fragment of gold braid, or a flower in the wallpaper, may be an originating impulse to revolution or to philosophy?⁹

Yeats summarized his anxiety in a phrase that could characterize all of modernism: "Was modern civilization a conspiracy of the subconscious?"¹⁰

Woolf s novels frequently focus on tiny fragments, such as a flower in the wallpaper, and suggest that such elements have great power. When Mrs. Dalloway asks if her roses are as important as her husband's political causes, she is not just being self-centered; it is a legitimate question of the sort that tormented both Yeats and Woolf in their efforts to discover the springs of social revolution. Yeats's description of the complexity of the "invisible commerce" that passes between "different classes and occupations" is quite similar to Woolf s description of the "invisible presences . . . immense forces that society brings to bear upon us," forces that cross classes and even decades of history.¹¹ Like Yeats, she believed that she needed to examine vast nets of unconscious influence that crisscross society if she was to make sense of her world.

Yeats went so far as to investigate supernatural phenomena. These investigations are considered by most readers as absurd and irrelevant to any real political effects his poetry may have. However, Le Bon gives strong credence to a belief in a certain kind of magic and supernaturalism. He says that the images that move crowds

do not always lie ready to hand, but it is possible to evoke them by the judicious employment of words and formulas. Handled with art, they possess in sober truth the mysterious power formerly attributed to them by the adepts of magic. They cause the birth in the minds of crowds of the most formidable tempests, which in turn they are capable of stilling. . . . Reason and arguments are incapable of combatting certain words and formulas. .. . By many they are considered as natural forces, as supernatural powers. (pp. 95-96)

Le Bon's comments suggest that Yeats's investigations of supernatural phenomena ought not to be seen as disconnected from his politics. Yeats writes at one point that when he passes an Irish cottage, he has stepped outside of Europe into the realm of the supernatural, the realm of the "most violent force in history."¹²

These writers believed that in the twentieth century, political battles were not going to be waged by logical arguments read by individuals in private rooms: the battles were going to be waged between competing streams of images in the crowd mind. Logic has little to do with such streams: "These imagelike ideas are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other's place like the slides of a magiclantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other. This explains how it is that the most contradictory ideas may be seen to be simultaneously current in crowds" (p. 47). Many of the most distinctive modernist effects seem to be described here: the juxtaposing, overlapping, and rapid shifting of disparate images, the overlay of one image on top of another, the rapid shifting of images. Conversely, it is not an accident that the most famous Imagist poem, "In a Station of the Metro," is about a crowd:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet, black bough.¹³

From the title to the end of this poem, we pass from the mechanical, realistic world of subway stations, through the faces of individuals, into the collective world of a single organic unit, a bough. This transformation also involves moving from dry to wet and from light to dark—dissolving the visible world into the dark unconscious wave that carries everyone along.

Pound's poem sets up an opposition between the almost weightless individual faces, flitting apparitions or petals, and the deep solidity of the social branch that holds them together. The poem could be referring to all the short Imagist poems themselves, which exist each as a small petal in a large book and are held together only by the dark spine that is not visible in any single poem. The passage beyond realism is the passage into the unconscious basis of social unity. The realistic world is merely an ephemeral surface, flickering over something deeper. Le Bon similarly sees it as useful to divide the ideas that inspire the images in the crowd mind into two categories:

In one we shall place accidental and passing ideas created by the influences of the moment; infatuation for an individual or a doctrine, for instance. In the other will be classed the fundamental ideas, to which the environment, the laws of heredity, and public opinion give a very great stability; such ideas are the religious beliefs of the past and the social and democratic ideas of to-day.

These fundamental ideas resemble the volume of the water of a stream slowly pursuing its course; the transitory ideas are like the small waves, for ever changing, which agitate the surface, and are more visible than the progress of the stream itself although without real importance.

At the present day the great fundamental ideas which were the mainstay of our fathers are tottering more and more. They have lost all solidity, and at the same time the institutions resting upon them are severely shaken. Every day there are formed a great many of those transitory minor ideas of which I have just been speaking; but very few of them to all appearance seem endowed with vitality and destined to acquire a preponderating influence. (pp. 46-47)

Le Bon's vision here is very similar to Pound's, Eliot's, and Yeats's: they all defined the goal of social change and of their art as the producing of a deep wave—a restored cultural center, a wet, black bough—that will hold together the chaotic small waves agitating society now. If the bough is in place, the leaves can randomly wave about all they want; if it is not, the leaves will blow apart in chaos. Modernist writers all recognized that it is very difficult to gain access to the invisible depths where deep waves are generated. In their poems, they constantly show their uncertainty—at times confidently presenting images of a new, deep order emerging, and at other times describing the impossibility of finding anything but dry, sterile words. The voice of thunder that brings water to the dry waste land, the beast that replaces the chaotic circling tides with a slow but unified motion of a giant social body, are presented as images of a new, unified social order—and both disappear in endings that express the doubts of the poets about their power to penetrate the current agitation of chaotic small waves.

Eliot and Yeats also shared Le Bon's belief that heredity and environment are the sources of the deep waves. Yeats went so far as to advocate eugenics as a way of altering the stream of images. Eliot also suggested racial and environmental criteria for producing the culture he would like, as I discuss in some detail in Chapter 4. Le Bon implied strongly that one needs some kind of hereditary unity to have a deep wave at all. He writes that people in the modern world often seem to have multiple and contradictory personalities because they are exposed to so many different influences and cultures. But "these contradictions are more apparent than real, for it is only hereditary ideas that have sufficient influence over the isolated individual to become the motives of conduct. It is only when, as the result of the intermingling of different races, a man is placed between different hereditary tendencies that his acts from one moment to another may be really entirely contradictory" (p. 48). Le Bon concludes that the "inferior characteristics of crowds are less accentuated in proportion as the spirit of the race is strong. .. . It is by the acquisition of a solidly constituted collective spirit that the race frees itself to a greater and greater extent from the unreflecting power of crowds" (p. 161).

Eliot's and Yeats's ideas of cultural unity are well known; what Le Bon provides is a way of linking those ideas to the wildly fragmented and contradictory flows of images that we find in their poems. Instead of trying to write out clearly the fundamental ideas that underlie deep waves (which would leave their writing in the conscious, surface mind), these poets were trying to operate in the medium of the unconscious crowd mind itself. Le Bon says that "ideas," especially "somewhat lofty philosophic or scientific ideas," must "undergo the most thoroughgoing transformations to become popular" (p. 48). This is a very unusual kind of popularizing, not via simple books that make complex ideas clear to the poorly educated, but via images that operate on the unconscious. The books that we would consider popularizing versions of great ideas engage only the conscious mind or the shallowest waves. Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Yeats were not seeking to do that at all: they did not wish to speak comprehensibly to average men because doing so was irrelevant to the job of creating deep waves.

Le Bon's distinction between deep and surface waves thus suggests an answer to the problem of how obscure poems and novels, to be read only by a few, might be written with the intent of influencing the masses and even popularizing lofty ideas. The surface of these works engages only the intellectuals, but the depths supposedly touch on the waves carrying the whole society along. Moreover, the whole problem with the threatening anarchy of the early twentieth century was not truly a problem with the masses because most theorists regarded them as carrying the tide of the future. It was the intellectuals who were thought to be weak and out of touch with these tides. As Yeats put it, the way to "deepen the political passion of the nation" is to make "current among the educated classes" the stories and images found among the "uneducated classes."¹⁴

The novels of Joyce and Woolf are similarly directed at the cultured few, trying to bring them to join with the masses—but in a subtly different way. Joyce and Woolf were seeking to bring high culture to serve socialist mass movements, and in particular were seeking to break with the whole idea of leadership, of ruling classes or individuals. Furthermore, Joyce and Woolf wanted to bring about the kind of hereditary mixture that Le Bon says produces contradictory personalities: Joyce and Woolf advocated such contradictoriness as a way out of the oppression that results from one race trying to hold itself separate and pure from others. We might even say that Joyce and Woolf inverted Le Bon's description of deep and shallow waves: the deep waves, in their view, are multiple and contradictory, and the appearance of a unified wave is a surface illusion produced by oppressive politics. Civilization can be made to appear orderly and disciplined by suppressing into the depths the waves that pass through the minds of, say, women, lower classes, and marginalized ethnic groups.

Le Bon joined in the debate between contrasting versions of an ideal collectivist state when he analyzed the factors that shape the deep waves that are fundamental to the shape of civilization. He describes two as essential: race and traditions. He says, "crowds are the most obstinate maintainers of traditional ideas," reaching the remarkable conclusion that the crowd is the most conservative part of society. We can see why conservatives embraced his theory even though he had at other points in his book equated the crowd with socialism. He also says that "political and social institutions" and "education" are very weak influences, almost negligible: "they are effects, not causes. Nations are not capable of choosing what appear to them the best institutions" (p. 66). Hence the emphasis in so much early-twentieth-century politics on ignoring overt political institutions and education, the cornerstones of liberal politics.

Collectivism was a politics that took place outside the political arena. This explains much of what appears to be the antipolitical attitude of modernists. Samuel Beer and Charles Maier both argue that the new mass politics involved a shift in the center of power to extraparliamentary institutions.¹⁵ As Joyce wrote his brother Stanislaus in 1906 about the Italian syndicalists: "Their weapons are unions and strikes. They decline to interfere in politics or religion or legal questions" because "public powers" always end up supporting "the middle-class government."¹⁶ In Ulysses, as I will show, Joyce developed a form of literary syndicalism: he attempted to change Ireland by acting on the collective consciousnesses, the "mental unions," we might say, that underlie institutions throughout the social order. He did not seek, however, to replace the government leaders or alter the religions or laws from within. Rather, so strongly did he believe in the need to alter those institutions that he could not work from within them: he thought they remained too completely tied to middle-class capitalism.

In order to make use of traditions and the "soul of the race" to move the crowd to join into unions, mass movements, or cultural wholes, the basic tools are the "magical power of words and formulas" and "the social illusion [that] reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future" (p. 105). The most important illusions are those of legendary, marvelous events, especially those involving heroes. Le Bon therefore concludes that

works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of illobserved facts, accompanied by explanations. . . . To write such books is the most absolute waste of time. Had not the past left us its literary, artistic, and monumental works, we should know absolutely nothing in reality in regard to bygone times. . . . Our interest is to know what our great men were as they are presented by popular legend. It is legendary heroes, and not for a moment real heroes, who have impressed the minds of crowds. (p. 31)

The importance of legends and heroes derives from Le Bon's belief in the "Instinctive need of all beings forming a crowd to obey a leader" (p. 112). Le Bon concluded that all crowds, even those forming socialist movements, are essentially religious, with a deep need for gods and priests.

It is easy to see how Yeats, Eliot, and other conservatives found such analyses congenial: Le Bon seemed to argue that the crowd will maintain religion, leadership, and a belief in great men. Joyce, Woolf, and the socialists who sought to free the masses from religion and ruling classes struggled against Le Bon's conclusion that crowds inevitably view their leaders as gods. The debate between Left and Right was finally in many ways a debate about whether or not crowds require images of superhuman leaders to hold them together.

MYTHS AND VIOLENCE

Debates about the masses' desire for leaders did not focus as much on images as on another literary form: myth. The importance of myth in early-twentieth-century theory of the mass mind derived from Georges Sorel, who modified Le Bon in ways that were influential on both the Left and the Right. Sorel sought to understand how to turn a crowd into a movement, and he decided that the essential trick was to find a "group of images" that functioned as a "myth":

men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist "general strike" and Marx's catastrophic revolution are such myths . . . [as are] those which were constructed by primitive Christianity, by the Reformation, by the Revolution and by the followers of Mazzini. .. . We should not attempt to analyse such groups of images in the way that we analyse a thing into its elements, but . . . they must be taken as a whole, as historical forces. (pp. 48-49)

Sorel's "myths" in this description are not what we usually think of as myths: he is speaking about what could be called histories of the future—theories of the social forces and currents moving the world that predict that a certain movement is going to triumph. During the early twentieth century, theories of history that described the present as on the cusp of some major change proliferated and were highly influential on the modernists. Yeats's cycles and Eliot's theory of the dissociation of sensibility dating from the seventeenth century are overt historical presentations; Woolf s later novels repeatedly trace history up to the present. Sorel suggested that the central point in any theory of the currents of history passing through the present is how such a theory motivates groups of people to act now.

Sorel dismissed the traditional forms of history and literature, saying the business of the true historian "is to understand what is least individual in the course of events; the questions which interest the chroniclers and excite novelists are those which he most willingly leaves on one side" (p. 70). We can being to see why Sorel's theories would imply a change in the nineteenth-century novel and in Romantic poetry. For one thing, Sorel's project was opposed to individualist theories of psychology: "I want to find out how the feelings by which the masses are moved form themselves into groups; all the discussion of the moralists about the motives for the actions of prominent men, and all psychological analyses of character, are, then, quite secondary in importance and even altogether negligible" (p. 68). Sorel objected to character for an unusual reason: because it is in his view a restriction on individual freedom. Character is formed of habits that keep people doing the same thing over and over again. So Sorel looked for moments when people "break the bonds of habit which enclose us"—and he concluded that the key to breaking habits is bringing people to be swept up in the enthusiasm of a mass movement (p. 55). Sorel was similarly opposed to liberal individualism because he viewed it as restricting people to thinking about their small, private lives. Sorel could thus regard the loss of conscious personality and individual psychology that occurs when people join the crowd as a liberation of the self, an improvement of the individual. By defining the crowd mind as the superior and deeper mind and the conscious personality as a dull complex of habits, Sorel inverted Le Bon's evaluations.

Sorel also separated what he was interested in from politics. He said that socialists became discouraged when it seemed "trades union organization was . . . becoming a kind of politics, a means of getting on" (p. 82). Sorel labeled as "politics," as means of getting on, such things as elections, governmental policies, and redistribution of income. Sorel, then, was as apolitical as he was antieconomic, even though he was seeking to cause a socialist (and hence an economic) revolution. Sorel sought to break free of all concerns about "getting on," all thoughts about goods, economic interests, or status. He asks, "Is there an economic epic capable of stimulating the enthusiasm of the workers?" (p. 276). He notes that "economic progress goes far beyond the individual life .. . but does it give glory?" (p. 276). Sorel disliked politics and economics precisely because they do not inspire enthusiasm, and such inspiration was his entire goal. Indeed, the myth that Sorel believed would bring about a socialist revolution was the myth of the general strike, a myth of stopping the economic system, a myth of an anti-economics, a refusal to care about goods entirely, no matter how distributed.

Sorel argued that the general strike could develop as a myth as a result of one particular tactic: violence. Violence and the general strike are quite similar as methods: they both are in essence disruptions that cause an intense need for something to happen with no sense of what that something will be. For Sorel, the moment of complete disruption, the general strike, is the best state of all, and an end in itself. The myth of the general strike "gives to socialism such high moral value and such great sincerity" because this myth has the "character of infinity" in its complete undefinability and its complete resistance to "argument" (p. 53). Modernists themselves have at times seemed also to valorize complete disruption. In a very Sorelian line, Yeats writes in "Under Ben Bulben" that "war completes the partial mind"—in the instant of action one becomes whole. Stephen Dedalus's desire to eliminate all space and time in a stroke of a Wagnerian sword named Nothung is an image of this general strike: Stephen strikes out at the whole world, seeking to free himself from space and time. And critics have valorized modernism for its embrace of these disruptions. Colin MacCabe sees Ulysses as enacting the "revolution of the word."¹⁷ Lucio Ruotolo has argued that "interrupted moments" in Woolf s works provide access to a world beyond ordinary reality—and has suggested that Woolf was an anarchist.¹⁸ Frank Kermode provides a subtly different vision of the importance of complete disruption in modernism: he sees modernists as dreaming of "apocalypse" and hence leading to totalitarianism (particularly Fascism).¹⁹

As part of my methodology of considering literary texts as participating in political debates, I regard modernist visions of ultimate revolutions of consciousness or of society—anarchistic, mystical, or apocalyptic moves beyond everyday reality—as ways of advocating or rejecting particular social changes. Modernist works themselves suggest that apocalyptic imagery may function as a transitional device. In many modernist works, the apocalyptic images appear in the middle, and show the world passing through complete or nearly complete annihilation. Both To the Lighthouse and Dangerfield's history use the apocalyptic imagery of a general strike to indicate such a moment of transition, a moment of political change. Similarly, The Waste Land passes through "death by water" to present an image of something beyond the sea change produced by social tides swamping the old capitalist system.

We can even apply this methodological principle to Sorel himself, treating his "theory of myth" as a political tactic, a narrative that functions to bring about a particular historical change. Sorel does much to make his theory of myth ahistorical: his use of many previous historical myths and the revolutions they produced imply that he is examining some eternally repeatable phenomenon, not something particular to his era. But as his own theory says, histories such as his own always serve simply to create a sense of inevitability about some future change. His history of myths adds a feeling of inevitability to the particular myth he is promoting: the general strike takes its place in the sequence of successful revolutionary myths that he presents.

There is an even stronger way in which Sorel's entire theory and history of myths served one particular political goal of his era, that of breaking the rule of middleclass capitalism. He presents all earlier revolutions as precursors of the break with capitalist individualism. In each of these earlier revolutions, Sorel claims, myths disrupted the desire to "get on" and also disrupted "rational argument." Rational argument and the desire to get on may have always operated to keep people from joining revolutionary movements, and so may have always been the obstacle that myths overcome, but these two things are practically defining features of middle-class capitalism, according to Sorel. So Sorel can define the goal of his whole theory (including his accounts of ancient history) as helping "to ruin the prestige of middle-class culture" (p. 62). Sorel's history shows the decline of the Western world from the "mythic" life of the Greeks, especially the Spartans, into bourgeois individualism.

In his account of this decline, "myth" changes from referring to any collection of images that creates a sense of inevitability to referring to the collection of stories that have been labeled "myths," particularly the Greek ones. Sorel claims that in every revolution, the participants have felt they participated in "truly Homeric conflicts, " so Homeric epics provide the model for all other myths (p. 268). He blurs these two different senses of myth so that he can then say that the emergence of any myth will transform the people of any country into essentially Greek heroes and heroines.

These two different senses of "myth"—as the history of the future and as elements taken from ancient tales that will revive ancient values lost in capitalist society—appear in modernist works extensively. Yeats's Vision is a theory of history that produces a sense of the inevitability of certain changes about to occur, but Yeats supplements this extremely abstract history with powerful images drawn from what we would more easily recognize as mythic sources (particularly Greek and Irish tales) to add another kind of power to his history. The "scientific" history and the images together were supposed to produce a mass movement, and frequently Yeats describes his goal in terms that sound very much as if he were seeking a general strike—a complete disruption of current production (especially cultural production)—in order to allow a radical change in the social order that is inevitable. Eliot says that myths, as Joyce used them in Ulysses, function as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."²⁰ Eliot thus blurs together the use of ancient texts and the provision of direction for current mass movements—"shaping anarchy."

Eliot also treated Joyce as seeking to restore the kind of hierarchical order characteristic of Greek society. Joyce was strongly influenced by syndicalism and by Sorel's formulations, but I will show later that the novel's relation to history and to social change has been seriously misrepresented by Eliot. Eliot's essay is an effort to take a work that was written to serve left-wing anarcho-syndicalism and turn it to the right-wing corporatism of Eliot himself. Such an effort to transform works was not at all unusual in the early twentieth century—politicians switched sides constantly, and they frequently reinterpreted their own works written while aligned on one side as arguments for the other side. Eliot treated Sorel's text in precisely the same way, praising Reflections on Violence as one of the five central texts in the movement for a return to a royalist Europe.²¹ That Sorel's book was written with clearly socialist goals did not disturb Eliot in the least, possibly because Sorel himself slid back and forth between right-wing and left-wing movements.

To understand the relationship of Sorel's theories to modernism, then, it is important to examine how they served opposed political movements. The two completely opposed directions syndicalism took are epitomized by pluralism and nationalism: the earliest syndicalists, at least in Italy, were, as the historian A. James Gregor puts it, "radically antistate, antinationalist, anticlerical, and antimilitant," and this form of syndicalism evolved into the nonviolent British pluralism of figures such as Harold Laski.²² Another branch of syndicalism developed into a powerful part of nationalist (and racialist) movements in Italy (Benito Mussolini) and in Ireland (James Connolly), and in these movements syndicalism became synonymous with violence.

One way to understand the opposed developments is to see them as deriving from two opposed interpretations of a single clause in Reflections on Violence. Sorel says that syndicalism is based on "corporate exclusiveness, which resembles the local or racial spirit" (p. 80). The pluralists emphasized the importance of the word "local," while the nationalists emphasized "racial": the pluralists argued that only in very small groups can there be the feeling of corporate unity, while the nationalists believed that size isn't the issue, but rather "common blood"—and hence that racial and national groups are not only possible, but preferable to small units.

Socialist syndicalists moved toward nationalism in Italy and Ireland because they became convinced that the nation embodied the myth that most unified people.²³ Part of this conviction was due to their belief that their countries were too poorly developed to have a coherent proletariat that could respond to the image of the general strike. Socialists thus adopted nationalist and developmental goals—building up the industrial base of the country—as a step toward the socialist revolution. Le Bon's analysis of the crowd also supported switching from a class to a national or racial basis: he argued that the crowd is best formed by drawing on "the soul of the race."

In Sorel's works, there are also strong hints that he was particularly interested in a French general strike, not an international one. For example, he describes as the ideal revolutionary the "soldier of Napoleon . . . [who] felt that the epic in which he was taking part would be eternal, that he would live in the glory of France." Sorel then asks, "do there exist among the workmen forces capable of producing enthusiasm equivalent to those?" (p. 276). Sorel often seems to equate the "glory of France" with the results of the socialist revolution he advocates. Similarly, the Italian syndicalists who formed the core of Fascism (Roberto Michels, Paolo Orano, etc.) merged together the restoration of Italy as a glorious empire and the ending of the economic troubles of Italian workers.

The particular form of nationalist syndicalism that evolved in Europe required one more element: the theory of elites. This is a central feature of the particular visions of ideal cultures in Eliot and Yeats and a central element opposed by Joyce and Woolf. Arguments for elites derived from many sources, but for modernists Sorel provided two justifications for an elite that were especially important: an elite is necessary to produce the myths to which the masses will respond, and images of an elite, of an aristocracy, are always part of the mythic imagery that motivates the masses. Italian philosophers and social psychologists developed these two halves of the theory of elites and were highly influential on the modernists I am discussing. Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano de Mosca argued that myths are always the product of an elite. Roberto Michels states the second point in its strongest form: "among the masses there is a profound impulse to venerate those who are their superiors. In their primitive idealism, they have a need for a secular 'divinity.' . . . This need is accompanied by a genuine cult for the leaders, who are regarded as heroes."²⁴

As such theories suggest, syndicalism became intertwined with aristocratic and right-wing movements in many countries. In France, Charles Maurras developed a theory of "socialist monarchy" that relied on the monarch to provide the intense veneration that would hold together the nation and replace the capitalist leadership that was, in his view, destroying the underlying cultural unity. The solidarity of socialism, he argued, is in its essence identical to the unity provided by a king. Eliot, in his 1916 lectures on French literature and on Sorel, developed similar ideas, arguing that socialism and royalism were actually relatively similar alternatives to capitalism in that both led to "centralization in government."²⁵ Yeats put together the necessity of violence and of an elite in the thoroughly Sorelian poems praising the Irish syndicalist James Connolly written in reaction to the events in Ireland from 1916 until independence. His later poems anxiously consider the impossibility of restoring the Irish aristocracy and the consequent necessity of some further violence (Fascism or war) to develop some new form of leadership.

Though Sorel himself followed the nationalist trajectory of syndicalism, there is another part of the analysis in Sorel's Reflections on Violence that radically opposes the forms that syndicalist nationalism became. This part of syndicalist theory served as inspiration for the antielitism, anti-Fascism, and antimilitarism of Joyce and Woolf. Sorel argued that his myths do not produce the kind of enthusiasm that leads people to obey leaders. In fact, Sorel saw myths as serving the "transformation of the men of to-day into the free producers of to-morrow working in manufactories where there are no masters" (p. 264). These workers without masters, he claimed, would be similar to the peasants fighting for Napoleon; their labors would be "collections of heroic exploits accomplished by individuals under the influence of an extraordinary enthusiasm" (p. 267). The syndicalist revolution, in turn, would then be

an immense uprising which yet may be called individualistic; each working with the greatest possible zeal, each acting on his own account, and not troubling himself much to subordinate his conduct to a great and scientifically combined plan. This character of the proletarian general strike has often been pointed out, and it has the effect of frightening the greedy politicians, who understand perfectly well that a Revolution conducted in this way would do away with their chances of seizing the Government. (p. 269)

We must distinguish this kind of "individualistic" life from liberal individualism: this is the individual as so completely a part of the group that he is devoted entirely as an individual to group goals. Sorel argued intriguingly that the individual who feels an epic enthusiasm does not lose himself, does not submit to domination by others, but becomes freer: "It might at first be supposed that it would be sufficient to say that, at such moments, we are dominated by an overwhelming emotion; but everybody now recognises that movement is the essence of emotional life, and it is, then, in terms of movement that we must speak of creative consciousness" (p. 55). Sorel's replacing of the phrase "dominated by an overwhelming emotion" with the term "creative consciousness" marks his denial of the common image of collectivism as an authoritarian system. Sorel defined the ideal revolutionary movement as one that eliminates authority, freeing each person from domination and to "creative consciousness." In a mass movement, every person becomes an artist.²⁶

British pluralists drew a different conclusion than nationalists did from Sorel's argument that syndicates needed the "corporate exclusiveness that resembled local or racial spirit." Sorel overtly denied that mass movements turn people into "passive instruments who do not need to think." Such passivity is a "morality of the weak" promoted by those who would turn revolutionary syndicalism into the bourgeois fraud of "State Socialism" (p. 264). Sorel argued that his myths would eliminate large government and the division of society into rulers and followers. Labour theorists also spoke frequently about empowering the masses directly and eliminating any "ruling elite": in effect, they were against leadership. The organization of the British Labour Party thus reflected the theory of anarcho-syndicalism. The party conference dictated policy, and elected officials were delegates of this conference, not leaders of the party. The party had a strongly unified ideology, but that was not inherent in the structure: indeed, the party was set up to allow trade unions autonomy and to disperse control among multiple party bodies. Harold Laski wrote an influential book called The Foundations of Sovereignty in which he argued that there should be no sovereign power at all, no central leadership of the state. He and G. D. H. Cole developed pluralist theories that suggested government be divided into separate bodies for every social organization. These writers emphasized that the corporate unity of feeling could exist only in small groups. It is to maintain the enthusiasm and dissolution of self in the social body, they believed, that government should be broken up and leaders eliminated.

Woolf's "Outsiders' Society" was very much an image of revolutionary syndicalism in this sense of people sharing an enthusiasm without leadership. Woolf of course knew Laski and Cole well through Leonard Woolf and her own involvement with the Labour Party. Joyce reached much the same ideas through his fascination with early syndicalism in Italy and through his rejection of later syndicalism, with its nationalism and epic militarism.

Much of the debate in modernism thus consisted of efforts to separate the contradictory parts of Sorel's theory: Joyce and Woolf tried to show that one can have enthusiasm, the joys of group unity, and even myths, without elites, without "common blood," and without violence. Eliot and Yeats tried to show that one needs elites and blood ties to have the enthusiasm of group unity, and Yeats defended the necessity of violence.

Critics have frequently criticized Yeats for his advocacy of violence; in contrast, Joyce and Woolf are often praised for their seeming pacifism.²⁷ I want to question such distinctions, because Sorel's claim that violence is essential to liberation, to the release of what lies buried in the unconscious, haunts and undermines Joyce's and Woolf's supposedly nonviolent works. In their novels, though violence is condemned, it still serves a necessary function. In both To the Lighthouse and Ulysses, the authors use overt acts of violence connected in odd, indirect ways to war in order to bring about a transition from one dominant form of consciousness to another: a soldier knocks out Stephen Dedalus; Mrs. Ramsay dies in the midst of World War I—and these acts seem necessary to allow Leopold Bloom and Lily Briscoe to take charge and become in some sense images of the authors' new, modernist selves.

Throughout Woolf's novels, uncanny acts of violence liberate characters from oppressive relationships. Because they feel mistreated, her characters' minds are full of murderous wishes: these wishes are never carried out, but other violent acts occur that seem to accidentally and indirectly accomplish the same purpose. In the beginning of To the Lighthouse, nearly everyone is full of violent anger at Mr. Ramsay, yet it is Mrs. Ramsay who dies suddenly and whose death seems to alleviate much of the oppressiveness of the Ramsay household. In The Voyage Out, Rachel's father and Mr. Dalloway seem to abuse her and cause her to have monstrous dreams of cutting men's heads off, yet she is the one who dies, and her death just before her marriage has been taken by critics as a symbolic act of escaping abusive male sexuality in general (see Chapter 3). In The Waves, the six characters are full of angry desires to destroy each other, yet it is the seventh who never speaks, the leader, Percival, who dies and seems to release them from their competitiveness. Woolf created novels about the need for violent release from oppression, but did not allow anyone's anger to be directly expressed in action. She disconnected her characters from the mechanisms that bring about the violent liberations that fulfill their dreams. Her novels embody a problem that runs throughout her essays: she analyzes brilliantly the violence of the social system but refuses to countenance aggressive reactions to it. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf shows the violence surrounding the women's movement as a male reaction; she ignores or minimizes the violence performed by the movement itself. We have to be careful if we want to valorize Woolf's nonviolence: is she condemning methods of liberation of which she takes advantage?

Joyce also creates in his novels worlds of such oppression that characters dream of violent responses; he even shows them at times becoming violent, but such violent acts are presented as futile, generally a result of drunkenness, and always misdirected: Stephen, dreaming of using a Wagnerian sword to free himself from everything, slashes a prostitute's lamp shade with a stick; the poor man in "Counterparts," in anger at his boss's unfairness, hits his own son; the citizen, fulminating against the British, throws a tin at the Jew, Bloom; in Finnegans Wake, such absurd violence becomes a repeated motif, particularly in the tale of a military figure being shot in the bottom while relieving himself.

Joyce's works also include numerous allusions to historical violent acts that have only an indirect relationship to the everyday lives being presented, e.g., lengthy discussions of murders and allusions to the violence of figures such as "skin-the-cat" in Ulysses and accounts of Napoleonic battles in Finnegans Wake. The role of these allusions is similar to the role of allusions to World War I in To the Lighthouse and The Waste Land: they create a sense that violent forces are at work somewhere else, in a hazy but quite real political world that we cannot help but feel has a close relationship to the unconscious, violent impulses revealed inside everyone.

Joyce and Woolf thus recognized the power of violence to express and satisfy the unconscious desires for liberation created by social oppression, but they struggled to find some other method of change. While my sympathies lie with Joyce and Woolf in their projects to break up what seems an inherent connection linking radical change, violence, and militarism, I cannot dismiss Yeats's position that violence must be advocated at certain times, particularly in the effort to escape colonial rule. Modernism has a particularly strong relationship to postcolonial writers, who have never had any trouble seeing the sociopolitical underpinnings of this art form. Edward Said says that Yeats has been accepted as a great national poet of the postcolonial world; Yeats's advocacy of violence has been a source of that acceptance.²⁸ At the same time, Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock claim that "Joyce remains a central figure for many of the postcolonial writers in English."²⁹ We might, then, consider how postcolonial theories illuminate the debates within modernism. Frantz Fanon has argued that only a violent national movement can bring about the demise of a colonial government, a version of Yeats's position.³⁰ If Fanon is correct, the political agendas in Joyce's and Woolf's works may not only be unrealistic, they may even serve to support certain oppressive systems that Yeats's visions would help overthrow. By advocating "outsiders' societies" with no treasurers, no leadership, and no unity, and by refusing to be part of movements that are arranged hierarchically and act militantly, Joyce's and Woolf's works may in effect support oppressive regimes by undermining the only possible oppositional movement.

On the other hand, theorists of the subaltern such as Partha Chatterjee have argued that nationalist liberation movements, in their insistence on unity, too often end up recreating hierarchical and oppressive states after colonial rule has ended. Chatterjee advocates instead a form of social organization that sounds modernist, composed of what he calls "fragments."³¹ Such a theory helps us see the political value of the fragmentary pluralism practiced by writers such as Joyce and Woolf, particularly as an antidote to the cultural homogeneity advocated by Eliot and Yeats.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES

During the modernist era, psychologists developed competing theories of the unconscious that played significant roles in the debates growing out of Sorel's work. Though Freud should be labeled a classical liberal in the scheme I have been employing, in which both socialism and conservatism stand at odds with liberalism, his own theories of the unconscious mostly supported the new conservatives because he argued that groups are held together by images of great male leaders, which merge with the unconscious mental formation that in English is called the super-ego. In a book on mass psychology (Massen-psychologie und Ich-Analyse, mistranslated as Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego), Freud declared that a group such as an army, church, or nation is unified by an "I-ideal," or what Freud later called the "super-I," an image of the perfect self that everyone in the group admires and tries to emulate, and by whom everyone feels criticized and judged. The individual becomes a docile group member because joining the group allows the individual to identify with the super-I and thereby become a greater person. The ego, accepting the limitations of society and reality, recognizes that it cannot satisfy all desires. But by identifying with a leader or an image of a leader who functions as an ideal, "a man, when he cannot be satisfied with his ego itself, may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in the ego-ideal." Joining such a group allows a return to primal feelings of unlimitedness and allows an "exaltation or intensification of emotion," especially feelings of love, or, as Freud puts it, libidinal ties. Humans, then, form mass movements not because of a natural need to be in herds, a kind of docility and unwillingness to stand alone, as Wilfred Trotter had argued, but because of a need to identify with and love a "primal father." Freud says he must "correct Trotter's pronouncement that man is a herd animal and assert that he is rather a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief."³²

Freud's theory of the super-ego was not so much a source of the modern politics of the leader as a part of the developing collectivist notions emerging all over Europe. He mirrored the attitudes of Le Bon and Sorel in declaring that the old ties that held social groups together, based on the religious worship of a "father god," were weakening: he celebrated this, arguing that the "weakening of religious feelings and the libidinal ties which depend on them" have reduced the "intolerance" in the world, or at least made it "less violent and cruel as in former centuries." But Freud warned that "if another group tie takes the place of the religious one—and the socialistic tie seems to be succeeding in doing so—there will be the same intolerance toward outsiders as in the age of the Wars of Religion."³³ Freud saw the socialist parties as following out his theories. Theodor Adorno says that Freud got it wrong, that Freud's essay actually serves much better to describe the power of Fascism;³⁴ but in the 1930's, theories of crowd and group psychology moved with strange ease from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Indeed, the reason that Freud's theories seem similar to Fascist practices is that Fascist propaganda was developed by people who originally sought to develop a syndicalist, socialist psychology—Roberto Michels and Paolo Orano. But even the fairly moderate Conservative Party in England believed in the natural deference of the masses and so sought to appeal to the masses by glorifying leaders and producing images of mythic national figures that formed a tradition in which to place current leaders.

The Labour Party in England and the anarcho-syndicalists who opposed the Fascists found support for their rejection of leadership in other theories of psychology. Harold Laski defended a pluralist political system as a way of adapting government to fit British theories of social psychology. Unified, sovereign governments with single leaders were based, he claimed, on outdated psychological theories that presumed individuals (both citizens and leaders) are unified wholes. Social psychologists had instead shown that "personality is a complex thing and the institutions—religious, industrial, political—in which it clothes itself are as a consequence manifold. The pluralistic state is an endeavor to express in terms of structure the facts we thus encounter."³⁵

Laski was following up a peculiarly British vision of social psychology, one that modified Freudian theory. As the historian Greta Jones notes, Freud's belief in one central instinct, sexuality, that could transform itself into every human motive, struck the British as "anarchistic" because it would deny the basis for the multiplicity of institutions in society.³⁶ Laski's vision of the complexity of personality derived from the dominant psychology text in England in the early twentieth century, William McDougall's Social Psychology, which was organized around a long list of different instincts and purported to show how various social institutions were connected to these various instincts.³⁷ The debate between conservative focus on leadership and Laski's attack on sovereignty was then in part a mirror of the debate between Freud's theory of the necessity of a single object for the single dominant instinct in humans and McDougall's theory of multiple objects that appeal to multiple instincts.

Joyce and Woolf were influenced by the McDougall side of this debate about human psychology. The multipleinstinct schools of psychology appear in Woolf's writing about "contrary instincts" bred into women by society, about "severances and oppositions in the mind," about two sexes in the brain.³⁸ In the chart Joyce prepared to explain Ulysses, Joyce also developed a model of personality similar to the multiple-instinct schools. He presents the mind as influenced quite separately by different organs of the body and connects the influence of these organs to the influence of different social institutions. The alimentary system is connected to restaurants, the lungs to newspapers. We may read these connections as merely metaphorical, but Joyce was certainly presenting a person's mind as functioning differently at different times of the day and in different locations. He was showing, as was Woolf, that people's bodies are filled and shaped by social institutions in ways they cannot control, ways that also shape their consciousnesses. As Bloom says, "Never know whose thoughts you're chewing."³⁹

Joyce referred directly to a psychologist Morton Prince, who carried the theory of multiple instincts further than McDougall, to a belief that every person has multiple personalities. Joyce indicated his affinity for Prince's psychology by basing Issy in Finnegans Wake on Prince's 1908 description of Christine Beauchamp, a woman with multiple personalities. Prince described the individual in terms similar to Le Bon's, as formed of multiple "systems" so that character is constantly changing: "this switching out and switching in, suppression and repression and resuscitation of enduring systems result in the ephemeral normal alterations of character in everyday life." He suggested we think of a person "as if he were a magic lantern with many colored slides passing in sequence before his eyes, and through which he looked; and as the world would be colored by those slides, so he felt and thought about it."⁴⁰ Prince argued, as did Le Bon, that this view of character ought to change literature. In an essay in 1924 entitled "The Problem of Personality: How Many Selves Have We?" Prince wrote out what could be a program for the novels of Joyce and Woolf:

nearly all writers of fiction and even biographers have failed to recognize—what in these modern days the most advanced criminologists and penologists have recognized—that man is a many-sided creature. .. . No one is wholly good or wholly bad; or wholly hard, or wholly sentimental. . . . In the realm of fiction the dramatist is forced by the conventional canons of his art, if not by lack of wisdom, and for the purposes of dramatic effect, to depict but one side of the personalities of his characters. Consequently there is probably not a character of the drama, excepting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of which the whole personality has been portrayed. Iago, devil that he was, probably at home with his children, if he had a home and children, might have been the picture of an angel father. Melancholy Jacques, if he had had a couple of cocktails before dinner, might have forgotten his pessimism and shown in vino Veritas, another side of his personality and entertained his company as a hilarious jester. Even Hamlet, though a good subject for a psychopathic hospital, if he had returned to his University at Wittenberg would have probably forgotten for one night, at least, all about his philosophies of life and his lamented father and exhibited himself in that other joyous, rollicking mood. . . . The world still awaits the great dramatist who will draw, if it be possible, a complete picture of a human personality, true to nature and under the confining canons of art.⁴¹

Joyce read Prince, but clearly Prince did not read Joyce, for Ulysses does just what Prince wanted—portrays all the sides of its main characters. Stephen is a Hamlet who does relax into jolly humor in the newspaper office, and into general pleasant talk in Bloom's living room; Bloom is a coward who hides from Blazes Boylan and then becomes a hero standing alone against the anti-Semitism of his friends and neighbors.

The break-up of character in Ulysses, as in other novels by Joyce and Woolf, was designed to reduce domination, to free the varieties of individual consciousness within society. In both psychological theories and modernist texts, domination has been figured often in relation to the sexuality of father figures. Prince developed his theory of multiple personalities partly out of a case in which an adult male tutor became frightening to a young woman; this is the case that Joyce refers to in Finnegans Wake. In Prince's case history and in Joyce's novel, there is a sense that the great power of father figures leads them to be implicated in sadistic or incestuous relations to their followers/family. Freud similarly commented on the "sadistic/masochistic" character of the relationship of masses and leaders who become 'I-ideals." Woolf also equated Fascism and the sexual jealousies that cause fathers to mistreat their daughters.⁴² Believing that people are inherently multiple, Joyce and Woolf presented all efforts to produce a single, all-encompassing relationship or identity—in a family, a social group, or a nation—as versions of dominating sexuality. They advocated instead multiple, partial, incomplete sexual relations and group identities.

In contrast, Eliot and Yeats frequently used images of restored passion and complete surrender to represent restored cultural wholeness. Incomplete and partial sexuality is, in their views, the result of alienation. They advocated a unified flood of emotion in the entire nation—the restored power of blood—while Joyce and Woolf feared such unified emotions. Joyce and Woolf were not seeking individual isolation, but rather the syndicalist local unities, local passions—a turbulent mix of passions that keeps any from dominating.

Both sides thus argued that they sought to release the passions of group involvement that capitalism had suppressed. Using Freudian terms, we can specify the difference in an intriguing way: both sides wanted to release the power of the id from the control of the "realist" ego. Both believed that domination by the ego is the result of capitalism, which empowers the calculating, rational part of the mind, the part that seeks the means of "getting on." Thus, all four of the modernists I am examining disagreed with Freud, who based his therapeutic practice on expanding the ego. His famous edict, "where id was, there ego shall be," could be interpreted as a method of maintaining a liberal order in the age of the masses, which is why, Adorno to the contrary, I have put him in that category. The ego, that is, rational, middle-class science, claims to be able to go where the id is buried, to speak for it, and to harness its power. In contrast to Freud, for conservatives such as Eliot and Yeats, the way to make use of the power of the id was by providing a real superego figure, a male leader: in a crowd with a powerful leader, everyone is released into passionate love of the leader, a return to the primal affections. Joyce and Woolf represented a third, socialist, possibility, that letting go of all super-ego figures and of rational, private selfhood are both necessary to experience the pleasure of communal unity, the pleasure of being part of the mass. In short, the modernism of both the Left and the Right sought to replace the politics of the ego with a politics of the id, to replace rational discourse based on the reality principle with unconscious discourse based on the pleasure principle. Modernism was an effort to write from and to the id, the mass unconscious.

NOTES

¹ Moretti, The Way of the World, pp. 79, 77, 228.

² DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, p. 163.

³ Woolf, The Years, p. 190.

⁴ Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Styles in 'Ulysses,' p. 64.

⁵ Yeats, "What Is Popular Poetry?" in Essays and Introductions, pp. 5, 8.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 10-11.

⁷ Yeats, "Fighting the Waves," in Explorations, p. 373.

⁸ Ibid., p. 377.

⁹ Yeats, Autobiography, pp. 158-59.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 159.

¹¹ Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," in Moments of Being, p. 80.

¹² Yeats, Autobiography, p. 242.

¹³ Pound, Personae, p. 111.

¹⁴ Yeats, Autobiography, p. 119.

¹⁵ Beer speaks of a "vast, untidy system" of extraparliamentary representation. Modern British Politics, p. 337. Maier speaks of "the bleeding away of parliamentary authority." Recasting Bourgeois Europe, p. 353.

¹⁶ Joyce, Letters, 2: 174.

¹⁷ MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word.

¹⁸ Ruotolo, The Interrupted Moment, discusses interruptions in the introduction (pp. 1-18) and anarchy in the conclusion (pp. 231-38).

¹⁹ Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 100-112. Kermode's analysis is worth looking at in some detail, because in it we can see the way that post-war anticollectivism sought to undo Sorel's arguments. Kermode recognizes that modernism was involved in the development of political myths, but he asserts that this was basically a mistake, an erroneous extension of the act of creating fictions: "Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths: people with live by that which was designed only to know by" (p. 112). Kermode is in effect denying Sorel's and Le Bon's claims that in the collective mind no one can distinguish fictions from real descriptions or myths. Kermode also inverts Sorel's claim that myths produce change: "Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change" (p. 39). Kermode tries to restore the liberal belief that the individual, in day-to-day life, can escape totalizing myths: he argues that there, is a "common language, the vernacular, by means of which from day to day we deal with reality" (p. 107). Change is, in Kermode's view, due to doubt and challenges posed by "reality," not to passionate belief and mass movements. In such a view, the modernist's search for the springs of mass thinking and of communal passions must seem extremely dangerous.

²⁰ Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth," in Selected Prose, p. 177.

²¹ Margolis, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual Development, p. 43 n.

²² Gregor, Italian Fascism, p. 25.

²³ Ibid., p. 100.

²⁴ Roberto Michels, Political Parties, trans. E. Paul and C. Paul (New York: Dover, 1915), p. 53; quoted in Gregor, Italian Fascism, p. 217.

²⁵ Margolis, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual Development, p. 11.

²⁶ Sorel says that socialism should bring workers to an "enthusiasm similar to that which we find in the lives of certain great artists." Reflections on Violence, p. 271.

²⁷ See, for example, Chadwick, "Violence in Yeats's Later Politics and Poetry"; Freyer, W. B. Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition, p. 72; Suheil Badi Bushrui, "The Rhetoric of Terror in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats," in Bramsback and Crogham, eds., Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature, pp. 19-38; G. J. Watson, "The Politics of Ulysses," in Newman and Thornton, eds., Joyce's 'Ulysses': The Larger Perspective, pp. 39-58.

²⁸ Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," in Eagleton, Jameson, and Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, p. 70.

²⁹ Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock, eds., Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, p. 15.

³⁰ Fanon says of colonialism: "It is violence in its natural state, and it will yield only when confronted with greater violence." The Wretched of the Earth, p. 55. He also >argues that the notion of transcending nationalism belies colonial liberation movements and that national movements cannot be divided. See pp. 247, 158-62.

³¹ Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 13.

³² Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 52, 22, 68.

³³ Ibid., p. 39.

³⁴ Adorno, "Freudian Theory," pp. 118-37.

³⁵ Harold Laski, reply to Walter Lippmann, New Republic, May 31, 1919, p. 149; quoted in Zylstra, From Pluralism to Collectivism, p. 46.

³⁶ Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought, p. 132.

³⁷ The lines of influence between psychologists and politicians went both ways. As Hearnshaw says, social psychology did not develop in England until the hold of individualism over British political thinking broke in the 1870's. A Short History of British Psychology, p. 105.

³⁸ Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pp. 51, 101, 102.

³⁹ Joyce, Ulysses, 8.718.

⁴⁰ Prince, Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality, pp. 213, 198.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 193-95.

⁴² Woolf, Three Guineas, pp. 133, 137.