Cage the Insurgents!: Modernist Political Discourse

Sara Blair begins her chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Modernism by saying that Modernism’s “most notable—indeed, perhaps only—unifying feature was the attempt to transcend the political altogether” (Blair 157). However, even in this attempt to “transcend” is an inherent, almost unavoidable failure. In the purposeful absence, avoidance, or omission of a political stance is a political stance. As Blair continues, she supports my premise that endeavoring to move beyond political debates is yet another political position that inevitably engages in an ongoing political discourse. She mentions the right wing fascism of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, for which Pound was incarcerated for treason (161) and the anti-Semitism found in T.S. Eliot (160). She also brings up liberals James Joyce, H.G. Wells, and D.H. Lawrence, who fought for the proletariat by making them the central to their works (164). Each author was unable to “transcend the political” because he or she wrote with the ink of his or her own personal experience and political bias.

However, E.M. Forster seems to express this transcendence best in “What I Believe.” He asserts that the importance lies in people rather than politics, relationships rather than republic. He accurately predicts what can come of loving a democracy, which is a governmental structure (not the actual government of a particular country). A reader in 2008, may not be able to avoid a continuous echo, voiced with the drawl of Texas twang, of “War on Terrorism” and “Spread of Democracy,” while reading Forster’s comment, “Democracy is not a beloved Republic really, and never will be” (Forster 167). Well, Forster is absolutely right. Democracy is to government as MLA is to paper format. Democracy is to the United States as blue print is to an architect. According to Forster, democracy is even less deserving of allegiance than country is.

Now, with this devotion to a blueprint, we hear the screams of “extremist anxieties of ‘liberty,’” just as were heard by Ezra Pound circa World War II. He promoted such fallacies as “[A]re you the arsenal of democracy or of judeocracy?” and “[W]hat races can mix in America without the ruin of the American stock, the American brain?” (Blair 161). Woolf would equate these “extremist anxieties” to fear and would point out yet another appearance of the repetition of history though the voice of the Owl when he says, “[P]lus ça change plus c’est la meme chose” (L. Woolf 148).

Pound seems to have been calling for a cage to protect “the American stock.” Mussolini and Hitler seem to have been calling for a cage, of sorts, for the same reason. The Elephant, in “Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo” though he claims to have no position, having “transcend[ed] the political” (Blair 157), also calls for a cage for mankind and reveres its protection (L. Woolf 151). The dangers of the wild are much too risky and undoubtedly degenerative, much like the dangers of racial mixing and government heterogeneity. This “somber, meditative melancholy” (138) of certain caged animals such as those of the Zoological Gardens and the “old gentlemen” (137) of South Kensington is an indicator of achieved civilization, in Woolf’s satire. These animals, humans included, should be confined and made powerless and protected from the powerful, which relieves them of fear. The absence of this fear allows for an environment conducive to wonderful debates, at least until this “somber, meditative melancholy” state grows into “homicidal irascibility” and the gentlemen “go mad and kill their wives” (138). How’s that for civilization?

Woolf’s satirical answer to the world’s problems is to cage all of the fascists, communists, imperialists, colonialists, Sunnis, Shiites, Hutus, Tutsis, insurgents, Islamic extremists, Catholics, Protestants, etc. because none of these individuals and groups can control themselves or their need to conquer or, as Woolf would claim, their fear of being conquered.