Erik Tonning

Mediating Modernism: The Third Programme, Samuel Beckett, and Mass Communication

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s Third Programme was instrumental in mediating modernist writing to a mass audience between 1946 and 1970, and especially in the post-war decades. This chapter examines the archival record of the Third’s initial encounters with Samuel Beckett’s work in the 1950s from two angles: the Third’s need to present and communicate a difficult modernist author to a wider audience than these works had previously received, and the need to manage the potentially problematic perception of Beckett’s work as blasphemous. Both angles reveal the flexibility and adaptability of the Third’s approach, and suggest wider implications for studying the programme’s relationship not just to Beckett but also to modernism more generally.

Rethinking ‘Modernism and Christianity’

This book is about the formative and continuing impact of Christianity upon the cultural movement known as Modernism. It defends the view that any theoretical, historical or critical discussion of Modernism that neglects or minimizes that impact is inevitably flawed. The whole field of Modernism studies should thus be rethought in accordance with the insight that the role of Christianity is intrinsic to any coherent account of Modernism.

Conclusion: Modernism and Christianity as a Field of Study

This book has made use of a range of incisive studies of single authors, specific issues or movements, and theoretical themes that are relevant to ‘Modernism and Christianity’, but as I noted at the outset, no previous attempt has been made to systematically outline a distinct field of Modernism and Christianity studies. It is no exaggeration to say that the conjunction is not in fashion: among the 56 chapters of the recent Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010), just one discusses Christianity, and that very briefly, within the limiting context of ‘Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism’.153 If the reader has got this far in the present book, such neglect should seem not just quaint but shocking, and in need of some explanation.

Catholic Modernisms: James Joyce and David Jones

The phrase ‘Catholic Modernisms’ should give the reader pause. The Catholic Church at the beginning of the twentieth century waged a very public campaign against theological ‘modernism’, defined in Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis as agnosticism regarding knowledge of God (devaluing revelation, scripture and dogma), and as ‘vital immanence’ — the association of God, not primarily with a pre-existing supernatural order, but with a human desire for the divine that can attach itself to various symbolic forms as it evolves through time. What, if anything, does the battle over theological modernism have to do with the cultural Modernism (capitalized throughout this study) of a novelist such as James Joyce, or a poet and painter such as David Jones?28 Furthermore, if Joyce, in his own words, ‘left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently’, proceeding to ‘make open war upon it by what I write and say and do’,29 is it not (as Geert Lernout has recently argued) pointless for the critic to somehow drag this determined anti-Catholic back into the fold by labelling him a ‘Catholic’ Modernist? Contrariwise, how could Jones — a Catholic convert whose faith was undeniably central to his aesthetics, to his painting and to the palimpsestic poetry of In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952) — choose to associate himself both with a Church so apparently hostile to all ‘modernism’, on the one hand, and with cultural-Modernist artistic influences such as Joyce himself, on the other?

Old Dogmas for a New Crisis? Hell, Usury and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden

In 1939, on the cusp of war, W. H. Auden could, in Michael North’s words, ‘summarize in one paragraph what had become a familiar indictment’ (North 1991: 2): The most obvious social fact of the last forty years is the failure of liberal capitalist democracy, based on the premises that every individual is born free and equal, each an absolute entity independent of all others; and that a formal political equality, the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right of free speech, is enough to guarantee his freedom of action in his relation with his fellow men. The results are only too familiar to us all. By denying the social nature of personality, and by ignoring the social power of money, it has created the most impersonal, the most mechanical and the most unequal civilisation the world has ever seen, a civilisation in which the only emotion common to all classes is a feeling of individual isolation from everyone else, a civilisation torn apart by the opposing emotions born of economic injustice, the just envy of the poor and the selfish terror of the rich. (APr II, 6–7)

Samuel Beckett, Modernism and Christianity

Christianity is Samuel Beckett’s fundamental antagonist: his thought, his aesthetics and his writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from his lifelong struggle with it.116 That may seem a large claim, until one realizes how persistently Beckett returns to this agon with Christianity when defining his whole artistic project vis-a-vis those of his contemporaries and chosen precursors. A telling emblem of this is the above letter to Duthuit (part of an important series from 1949 which culminated in the publication of Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit in December). Inserted into the discussion of Bram Van Velde’s painting is a reference to the ‘great refusal’ made by one in Dante’s zone of unnamed neutrals in Inferno III, those rejected by both Heaven and Hell and driven to chase one banner after another for eternity. In Three Dialogues, Van Velde’s art is tellingly associated with Beckett’s own obsessive concern with a ‘fidelity to failure’ (SBDi, 145); similarly, in another letter, Van Velde exemplifies ‘fidelity to the prison-house, this refusal of any probationary freedom’ (to Duthuit, 2 March 1949; SBL2, 130). The artistic task of the gran rifiuto therefore is to remain within a probationless zone of rejection and expulsion, tracing the ever-onward but futile movement inside the prison-house of existence, while eschewing both heroism and any kind of redemption.