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Katherine Mansfield and World Literature
The idea for this talk came to me while reading Amit Chaudhuri’s recent book on Calcutta.
There he notes that while living in England as a student he was often reminded of Calcutta—
the city of his childhood holidays—in “the oddest of places”, but especially in Katherine
Mansfield’s New Zealand, which, to cite Mansfield herself, she presents down “to the last
detail, including the “creak of the laundry basket”” in her stories (Chaudhuri 74). Elsewhere
Chaudhuri has said that his nostalgia for India was also triggered by his sense that some of the
family members he left behind resembled characters out of Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. I
found this sufficiently curious to begin to wonder about whether Mansfield worked in this way
not just for Chaudhuri but for others too, and, if so, why it was that her fictions in particular
might appeal to readerships from very different cultures.
A little further enquiry supported the notion that Mansfield is indeed a remarkably
transportable writer. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Armenian, Czechoslovakian,
Dutch, Farsi, Esperento, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portugese, Romanian,
Russian, Spanish, Turkish as well as, no doubt, other languages. And we know from Gerri
Kimber that she has won particular recognition in France. Indeed Kimber argues that she has
been more respected there than in Anglophone nations (Kimber 2008). But her transportability
is most evident in her Chinese reception: Sheen Gong’s recent collection of essays, The Chinese
View of Katherine Mansfield, demonstrates that she has had a presence in Chinese literary history
ever since her meeting with Xu Zhino in Hampstead in 1922 and his publication of his
translations of nine of her stories soon after, which apparently helped to set the course for the
modern Chinese story. This seems especially remarkable given that Chinese conditions of
everyday life, like Chinese literary traditions, stand so far apart from Europe’s.
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My task here, however, is not to add to the scholarship on Mansfield’s international
reception. It is rather to draw on this sense of her transportability to explore what it might be
for her to be a “world writer”, and so to reflect a little on the concept of world literature itself.
I want to make the case that Mansfield’s short fictions—at least in their most developed
form— can be understood precisely as creating experiences that at the same time constitute
concrete—fictional—“worlds.” As such her writing stands apart from writing that regards its
purposes to be for instance and inter alia, moral, or pleasure-producing, or rhetorical. To
anticipate my argument: she writes stories that communicate a coherent experience by virtue of
their concreteness, and a concrete experience by virtue of their coherence, where this concrete
and coherent experience constitutes a world. And I want simultaneously to suggest that this can
indeed be considered a reason why she is an especially transmissable “world” writer. In other
words, for me here, “world literature” is writing that, in some intelligible sense, creates and
communicates experiences as worlds and—for that very reason—is global in its reach. And I
want to propose further that Mansfield became a maker of verbal artifacts that constitute
fictional worlds in these terms under particular conditions, and that world writing in this
sense—the making of fictional worlds —may thus be a more limited procedure than is
sometimes supposed. One of these conditions, as it turns out, was her possession of a now
obsolete critical and philosophical lexicon which precisely understood fictions as creating
worlds, and which may be more useful than our own critical and philosophical lexicons—
shaped by the linguistic turn—in understanding what constitutes a world literature.
In presenting this case, I am conscious of joining a body of scholarship on world
literature, so that before I focus in on Mansfield in particular it may be useful to spell out my
sense of how my approach relates to established work in the field.
There are, roughly speaking, currently four main academic schools of thought
concerning world literature. The first, which we associate with Pascal Casanova, takes a
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sociological—a Bourdieuan, world system theory— approach to the global literary field to
show how the consecration of a global canon has been organized from the centre (Casanova
2007). The second, which we associate with David Damrosch, is catholic: it is concerned to
expand our sense of the literary heritage implicitly by downplaying both the importance of local
languages and traditions and of the power relations that have divided the world historically,
most notably, of course, Western colonialism (Damrosch 2003). The third, which we associate
with Franco Moretti bypasses criticism and evaluation calling upon so-called “distant reading” in
order to uncover the patterns in which genres and works have circulated into different cultural
settings around the world (Moretti 2013). The last, which we associate with Gayatri Spivak and
Emily Apter, insists on literature’s untranslatability, and in a poststructuralist spirit, explores
how that untranslatability might, nonetheless, join intensified global connections (Apter 2013).
My approach is clearly different from all these, even if it is quite compatible with
Casanova’s since the channels of global consecration can be analysed quite apart from any of the
qualities, including the qualities of worldedness, that any particular work or oeuvre possesses.
My approach is less compatible with Damrosch’s since it breaks with his catholic view of world
literature in arguing that there exists a branch of world literature that consists of particular
works of particular intent written under particular conditions. Its relation to Moretti is more
complicated, and in this context I want merely to suggest that when Moretti himself attends to
literary writing in Mansfield’s period he has a view of it that depends on Raymond Williams’s
account of modernism as the product of a “city of strangers” committed to increasing divisions
of labour, which, as will become clearer, is not, for me, especially relevant to Mansfield and
her circles (Moretti 2013, 12-15). And its relation to Spivak and Apter’s poststructuralism is
equally frictional since by shifting to a concept of ‘making fictional worlds’ the question of
translation is marginalized.
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Recently, however, Eric Hayot in his important book On Literary Worlds has made a new
move in this divided field by acknowledging that “no-one has a very good theory of the world”,
and suggesting instead a method focused on “the ontology of composed works” and thence to an
“understanding of worldedness as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon—as a symptom and as
a compass for the history, in other words, of totality as a function of the human imagination”
(Hayot 2013, 40-41). Which is to say that he wants to take the long neglected concept of the
fictional or aesthetic world seriously and then to relate it, not the Heideggerean existential
concepts of das Welt and Umwelt but rather to the “total social world as a ground for human life
and human activity” (88). This is roughly the line I am pursuing here, although I do not believe
that the concept of the world and the concept of totality are equivalent, nor that
phenomenological-existential-idealist understandings of the “world” can be completely
subtracted from the more secular concept of “world literature.” Nor will I follow Hayot’s
structuralist method or his Jamesonean approach to the issue, which puts the (for me, here,
crippingly abstract) periodizing category, “modernism,” at its centre.
***
The easiest access into my investigation is through a description of Mansfield’s own
career.
Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888. She was sent to London for
her secondary schooling, and on returning home, soon realized that colonial New Zealand was
no place for her. After her parents discovered her lesbian relationship with a Maori friend, they
allowed her—aged twenty—to return to London alone, ostensibly to study music. There she
soon took up a Bohemian and sexually promiscuous life, committing to a career as a writer.
And she established a very specific persona, partly no doubt as an expression of, as well as a
cover for, uncontainable personal drives— an intense, witty, funny, cynical, emotional,
insincere, untruthful, risk-taking, role-playing persona. She soon began to publish short stories
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in A.R. Orage’s New Age, a journal whose political project at the time was to endorse a form of
non-progressivist anti-capitalist and anti-democratic socialism known as distributionism, as then
best expressed in the Hilaire Belloc’s essays for the journal, later published as The Servile State
(1912). Some of Mansfield’s New Age stories, based on time spent in Munich, and expressing a
certain antipathy to Germans, were published in book form under the title In a German Pension
in 1911.
That year too, aged 23 she formed a relationship with the young literary intellectual
John Middleton Murry with whom she would stay, through ups and downs, for the rest her life.
At the time she first met Murry, he was still an Oxford undergraduate, editing the avant-garde
and avowedly “modernist” (the first such?) magazine Rhythm. The meeting was decisive for
them both, since for the rest of Mansfield’s life, with some gaps, they perceived themselves as a
unit positioned against the world. They soon signed some of Rhythm’s aggressively conservative
manifesto statements together for instance. More than once Murry wrote to Mansfield on
terms like these: “you and I have carried our thoughts in literature so much further than our
contemporaries” (Hankin 1983, 336). Indeed Murry’s most significant work, The Problem of
Style (1922) can be read as a justification of Mansfield’s work and its values, as he explicitly
noted after her death.i In turn, Mansfield once wrote of her work’s relation to Murry: “I don’t
feel as though I have really written anything until you have passed your judgment…Without
that I am just in a state of ‘attente’” (Mansfield 1984-1996, 2: 121) and her careful and
passionate criticism of Murry’s The Evolution of an Intellectual (1920) shows the degree to which
she felt herself implicated in his criticism (see Mansfield 1984-1996, 3: 139-141).
Soon after meeting Murry, Mansfield published several stories in Rhythm including
“Woman in the Shop,” set in the rough life in New Zealand’s remote Ureweras. And quite
quickly the couple joined the most advanced literary circles of the time, becoming friends with
D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Bertram Russell among many others. Their acquaintances,
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struck by the couple’s personae and presence, often wrote about them both— for instance,
Mansfield is widely regarded as being an “original” of Gudrun in Lawrence’s Women in Love and
Murry contributed to Gerald’s characterization in that novel, while Murry figures, negatively,
in Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow (1921) as well as in Point Counter Point (1928). So they became
at least fictional public figures, and when Murry published his autobiography in 1935, this
aspect of his career was highlighted on the dustjacket.
In 1915, after her younger brother’s death at the front, Mansfield began to compose
what she thought would be a novel set in the New Zealand of her childhood, one which marked
another formal and topical departure for her. It was published as a short book by the Woolf’s
newly established Hogarth Press in 1918 under the title Prelude, although it did not then attract
the attention that she and the Woolfs expected. About the same time, she was diagnosed with
tuberculosis and from then on spent much of her time on the Continent, dying and writing.
Before she died she published two collections of stories both of which were, this time, very
well received. After her death, Murry zealously promoted a spiritual interpretation of her
work. It is, however, only recently that that her oeuvre’s importance been fully recognized, so
that, despite her choice of the short-story genre and despite her writing relatively little, she is
beginning to acquire something like the status of peers such as Lawrence, Woolf and Joyce.
From our perspective, there are two main questions through which to engage this
career. The first is: what are the qualities by which it accedes to world literature in the terms I
have briefly sketched. The second concerns those conditions that made her writing career
possible, and their application for a critical understanding of world writing in general.
I want mainly to define Mansfield’s writing negatively, that is, by pointing out what it
was not. Nonetheless it is useful to notice that, while her stories are of all kinds and many of
them were written for particular readerships and journals, her most achieved stories at least fall
under three—admittedly overlapping—heads.
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We can name the first of these Mansfield sub-genres “switch” stories: examples include
“The Swing of the Pendulum”, “Miss Brill”, and “Bliss”. They present narratives involving and
organized around sudden, disconcerting and destablizing inversions of mood or perception.
The second Mansfield sub-genre consists what we can call “brutal” stories, for
instance, “The Woman at the Store”, “Je ne pense pas française”, and “The Fly.” These tell of
regressions from the polite, the civil or the moral into selfish or cruel will and desire. They
belong less to naturalism in Zola’s manner than to an ambivalent engagement with the difficult
and variegated contemporary moral politics of pain and savagery and what we today would call
“development”. On one level, they clearly join antinomian “neo-barbarism” as, for instance, it
was articulated by Frederick Goodyear in the lead article of Rhythm’s first issue. In this piece
called “Themela” after Alistair Crowley’s dark, esoteric sexual cult, Goodyear writes, “In the
future there are to be no pariahs in our streets and no pariahs in our souls; and it is neo-
barbarians, men and women who to the timid and unimaginative seem merely perverse and
atavistic, that must familiarize us with our outcast selves, in order that we may learn that
ultimate charity without which Thelema can never be build and occupied” (Goodyear 1911, 3).
At another level, they involve a sensitivisation to what Mansfield called contemporary
“corruption” (Mansfield 1984-1996, 2: 86). And the thematic of “re-barbarization” was also
connected to the debate over imperialism in the wake of Herbert Spencer’s claim in a 1902
essay of that name that imperialism itself was leading to metropolitan barbarism. In this
connection, Mansfield’s brutal charity, an immersion in corruption, stands as a qualified
endorsement of the imperial ethos. Last, the question of barbarism and savagery was at the
heart of the emergent entanglements between Russia and Western Europe, as, for instance, as
Rachel Polonsky has pointed out, in the periodical Cosmopolis (Polonsky 1998, 29-33). But, as I
shall be arguing, all this is beside the point at least to the degree that Mansfield’s fictions are in
fact adjacent to the moral-political field.
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The last sub-genre of the major Mansfield story fictionalizes her childhood
reminiscences. The earliest is probably “New Dresses,” ostensibly set in Germany, published in
Rhythm in 1912, but the most famous and developed stories in this manner are set in
Wellington, and include, of course, “The Garden Party”, “Prelude” and “At the Bay.” They
involve many more characters than either the switch or brutal stories, and their effects proceed
from the interplay between, and sudden interruptions by, different points of view and moods,
especially exchanges or switches between adults and children.
These childhood stories are told in a minimalist, not quite impersonal, ambiguously
placed, narratorial voice, as we can see in this characteristic passage from “At the Bay.” It
describes Lottie—a very young child—swimming in the shallows, before being interrupted by
a adult voice:
She [Lottie] liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And that way was to
sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight, her knees pressed together, and to
make vague motions with her arms as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when
a bigger wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in her direction,
she scrambled to her feet with a face of horror and flew up the beach again.
“Here, mother, keep those for me, will you?”
Two rings and a thin gold chain were dropped into Mrs Fairfield’s lap
(Mansfield 2012: 351).
In the first sentence, Lottie is not under any other character’s observation, the extra-diegetic
narrator alone attends to her. It does not quite offer an indirectly free report on her attitude to
swimming (her liking to swim alone) despite that ‘please’ at the end: it is, rather, an adult, if
vernacular, translation of such a childhood attitude. The second sentence begins as objective
and external reportage before moving closer to Lottie’s focalization, hesitating between
entering her consciousness (does she really expect to be wafted out to sea?) and describing a
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mimed performance (isn’t she just pretending to swim?) The third moves closer still to Lottie’s
point of view, if again ambiguously, since its wonderful figure for a wave, “an old whiskery
one,” is given both from a child’s point of view and, with its patriarchal resonances, from an
adult one. That sentence ends with a description of Lottie’s “face of horror,” a description
which once again belongs securely to the realist adult world, and which, in focusing on her
externally observable face just hints that her fear might be less than deeply felt. The next
sentence—in direct speech— disorientates the reader since, as written, it precedes
identification of its speaker, whom we cannot after all see or hear. This is true even if it is
heard by Lottie as she joins her mother up the beach, indeed it occurs in a new temporality—
not the imperfect and elongated time of Lottie’s dispositions and water habits, but that of the
past historic tense. As it turns out it is uttered by Lottie’s aunt Beryl. And it is sufficiently
abrupt and insouiciant to mirror the narrative boldness of the switch (almost a montage) from
Lottie’s perspective to Beryl’s, a switch which worlds the scene by creating a continuous space
between the two characters. And it also marks a connection between the characters, stuck as
they are in a faraway, provincial everyday world, and us, the story’s readers, who are engaged
with a narrative whose bold jumps and avant-garde fictional method foreground not just its
technical but its cultural sophistication. The last sentence returns to reportage, to recording
the names of specific object—“two rings and a thin gold chain”—which, in their detail, hover
between having significance and having none but which in presenting a scene that contains hard
and named objects channel this world’s concreteness.
These three sub-genres are not wholly dissimilar. They are, for instance, all recursive
which is to say that they all narrate a departure from the adult, ordered world, whether into
childhood, brutality or, in the switch stories, into what we might call bi-polarity. I have argued
elsewhere that this recursive move is key to much of the writing that we call “modernist”
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because it was a way to articulate anti-humanism and anti-progressivism (During 2013). That is
to say it was a preferred form of the modernist conservatism to which Mansfield was attached.
In all of these sub-genres Mansfield also presents characters who cannot fully
communicate with one another. The signifying systems they use—whether gesture or style or,
most importantly, speech—do not meaningfully connect their experiences to one other. And it
is in part language’s insufficiency within the diegesis that also motivates the fiction itself—a
written text of course—to find ways to transmit, and to pass itself as transmitting, a discrete
experience or world, rather than presenting itself as, say, as a text—as member of a literary
genre, say, or as articulating an external moral or spiritual purpose.
Diegetically, this incommunicability goes deep. Take ‘Bliss.” It is about Bertha Young,
a married woman living in London who is preparing to host a party in her house that evening.
She is in an unconditioned state of rapture which spills out into (and from) her love for her
husband. But at the end of the party she happens to see her husband declare his love for one of
her guests, the beautiful and enigmatic Miss Fulton. And the story concludes with Bertha asking
herself “what is going to happen now?” while staring at a pear tree which is, despite the shock
that Bertha has just received, “as lovely as ever” (Mansfield 2012: 152). The pear tree then is a
symbol which isn’t one: it stands for the gap between a human consciousnessness and the world
out there, however beautiful. Given the pear tree’s indifference to Bertha’s gaze, this moment
is also an epiphany which isn’t one. The tree has nothing to say or even to hint. It is, almost,
itself brutal. Just in the (or a) world.
Indeed what the moment triggers is not so much an insight or inspiration as
confrontation with a limit through which it becomes apparent that it is not so much the case
that Bertha is deceived about her husband as that she is deceived about herself. Her rapture,
her bliss, has been all the while hollow, strained, performed—perhaps even part of what caused
her husband’s infidelity. But there’s no conspectus which sets the record straight on what has
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happened, largely because Bertha doesn’t know herself very well. She can’t as it were
communicate herself to herself: it is the indifferent pear tree that does the communicating even
if what it communicates is nothing, and it is left for readers to figure things out as best they can.
So in this case it is the gap between the two Bertha’s, blissful Bertha and disillusioned Bertha, as
set apart from any larger purpose by the indifferent pear tree, that solicits us to receive the
story as presenting a coherent as well as a concrete world. Of course that world is posited in
the slightly gimmicky twist which has Bertha catch sight of her husband and his lover by chance.
A twist that also marks the story as a commodity, written to sell an experience into a particular
market. Ultimately, as it turned out, into a world market.
On this basis then, let me list then what Mansfield’s stories, at least her most successful
and acknowledged ones, do not do, while also briefly indicating how these limits position them
to provide experiences in the terms just outlined.
1. They do not make moral judgments, that failure being exactly what T.S. Eliot
remarked upon in After Strange Gods (1934) when he accused “Bliss” of what he
rather oddly called heresy or blasphemy (Eliot 1934, 35-37). Indeed Mansfield
stories are not, in the Arnoldian sense, “criticisms of life,” despite Mansfield’s
immersed sensitivity to “corruption.” This is important to their experiental status
since it means that they are not aimed at giving any kind of instruction, that is to
say, at passing from experience into a meaning that might lead to action.
2. Especially after about 1915, they do not describe social types but individuals whose
typicality, where it is able to be inferred at all, is secondary to their diegetical
function. As a result they do not present allegories of social or moral conflict: they
don’t map politicizable social tensions. In this way too they do not point out into
society, but remained contained within their own world.
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3. They are not progressivist either, by which I mean that their endings are not
‘happy’ in any sense that suggests wider reconciliation or improvement.
4. They are not ‘tragic’ either: no deep ethical realization is embedded into their
(often indeterminate) closures.
5. As already noted they do not induce positive epiphanies, although as we have seen
they may present blank substitutes for transcendental access. This resistance to
presenting figures and moments that spark non-secular, transcendental
“suggestions” in the symbolist mode was a key to the forms of writing that were
developed after 1911 in different ways by Mansfield, Lawrence and Eliot. The
grounds for this resistance to epiphany were spelt out by Mansfield and Murry in
one of their jointly signed articles for Rhythm, where they argued that “inspiration”
—their name for such transcendental gestures—had become democratized, and
hence jeopardized the aristocratic “careless self-assertion” proper to the artist. As
they put it, “’inspiration’ is the eternal protest of democracy against aristocracy”
which is exactly why it was to be avoided (Murry and Mansfield 1912: 18). In
refusing both democracy and transcendental gestures, the fictions immanentize
themselves. They confine themselves to this world.
6. Mansfield’s fictions do not foreground their fictionality: they do not, as the Russian
formalists put it, “bare the device.” Furthermore, while carefully written with a
particularly close attention to punctuation, rhythm and sound, they do not appeal
to fixed norms of technique or style or form either. What replaces received modes
is the kind of writing that my brief readings of passages from “At the Bay and “Bliss”
have suggested. This is important because it prevents reified forms coming
between the reader and the worlded experience that reading the stories transmits.
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7. And, last, the characters that populate Mansfield’s stories are not in the fullest
sense characters at all. On the one side they are containers of intensities, appetites,
perceptions, wills, rather than coherent, intelligible persons. This is of course is a
result of incommunicability reading all the way down since to be a person in what
we might call the normative sense, is to be not only be a unified whole but able to
be meaningfully connected to all parts of oneself. So this dispersion of subjectivity
is not, I think, to be thought of as Freudian. Its point is to bar us from identification
or empathy with characters as people since that again would be to be engaged with,
rather than just to experience, the fictional world. And on the other side
Mansfield’s characters are performers through and through, that is to say, when
their senses, perceptions, desires and so on do take shape as something like
coherent personalities, then those personalities are roles, enactments, (as we have
already seen in the passage from ‘At the Bay’) with the result that one character can
have several personalities as does Beryl in Prelude for instance. We might put this in
more philosophical terms: Mansfield has no ethical conception of personal integrity
or authenticity, and that too, perhaps surprisingly, enables her to articulate
fictional worlds since, as we have seen, these rely on a coherence formed in the
subsumption of gaps and emptiness (often within a characters’ interiority) by a
contained fiction, a story.
Mansfield’s mode of writing then marks out a discrete space within, but also against, the
literary structures and purposes that she received from fiction’s traditions.
What, then, are the conditions that underpin this mode? I want to address just two: the
first in the broadest sense sociological and political, and the second, which I will dwell on a
little more carefully, intellectual.
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Mansfield’s metropolitan career coincided with a period in English and colonial history
in which the ruling class to which she belonged—by which I mean the landed gentry and the
educated bourgeoisie—were both destabilized and given new opportunities for influence and
control. We might call the situation in which they found themselves one of “command under
instability”. My claim then is that Mansfield’s fictions are formed in precisely this situation:
despite their refusal to instrumentalize themselves ethically, socially or politically, they express
command under onstability within and for literary writing in particular.
While this is not the place to offer anything like an adequate account of the social
transformations that underpinned “command under instability” as a widely embraced stance, it
is helpful to make it more apprehensible by citing some of its characteristic moments.
To begin with, the period in which Mansfield wrote was a period of quite intense
democratization across a number of social zones. Murry’s career can itself be taken as an
example of this: born into a lower-middle class family without education, he successfully passed
through various meritocratic barriers to become a successful man of letters writing for an
expanded literary public in the daily newspapers. And let Lloyd George’s 1910 “People Budget”
stand as a political instance of the process. For the first time in English history, the state then
took on redistributionist responsibilities by raising taxes both on land and income to pay for a
suite of new welfare benefits aimed at the working classes. It was this policy that the New Age
positioned itself against, as indeed did Murry and Mansfield in Rhythm when they embraced
aesthetic aristocratism and autonomy. So Mansfield’s rejection of more established modes of
fictionality can in part be understood as an self-assignment of a cultural aristocracy, an
appropriation of command in resistance to destabilizing, democratizing forces that nonetheless
strengthened it.
This was also a period that simultaneously restructured the economy to smooth the
way for capitalism. Lloyd George’s budget, for instance, was also aimed at raising taxes on land
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to the degree that large inherited estates would be sold into the market. Similar market and
business friendly policies were established in New Zealand at about the same time by Bill
Massey’s Reform Party, and when, in 1914, Mansfield’s father Harold Beauchamp jumped ship
from James Ward’s party to join Massey’s in order to secure the Chairmanship of the Bank of
New Zealand, his move was denounced by Liberals and the trade unions as opportunistic. But
the Reform Party was on the side of finance capitalists such as Harold Beauchamp had become
against the large South Island run-holders and the labour unions, so that in his own domain he
was commanding the instability of the state’s relation to the economy. He is indeed enacting
the same logic as his daughter’s writing. (It comes as no surprise to read her outbursts against
Labour in her private correspondence).
Next: this was also a period in which imperialism was under contestation, again by
British intellectuals such as Herbert Spencer as well as writers associated with The New Age, but
of course also by indigenous peoples including the South Asians linked to the Congress
Movement with whom Mansfield had in some contact in London, and by the new
understanding of geopolitics worked out by Harold Mackinder and others which predicted that
the coming century would be dominated by the continental rather imperial powers, namely by
Russia and America (Mackinder 1904). Mansfield and Murry’s embrace of Russian literature
fits into this context, which recognized Britain and its empire as already being provincialized.
This is important because as we have seen Mansfield was loosely connected to imperialism
insofar as she and Mansfield (at least for a time) considered brutality as salvic. But it was also
important because, in turning towards Russia, Mansfield was turning to a literary culture that
possessed a programmatic sense of ‘world literature’, then lacking in Western Europe, and it
may be in this context that Mansfield’s drive to produce fictions as experiences of a world and
the ‘world literature’ in contemporary academic understanding came into contact with one
another. Indeed, Murry begins his introduction to Koteliansky’s 1916 translation of Leon
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Shestov’s essays on Russian literature, with this programmatic statement: “Tolstoi, Dosteovsky,
and Tchekhov make explicit in their works conceptions of the world which yeild in nothing in
definiteness to the philosophic schemes of the great dogmatists of the old, and perhaps may be
regarded as even superior to them in that by their nature they emphasize a relation of which the
professional philosopher is too often careless—the intimate connection between philosophy and
life” (Murry 1916a, vii). Potentially, it was these Russian writers, whose project as understood
by Murry helped motivate Mansfield, who could form the basis of a genuinely world literature,
that is a literature created where life, philosophy and fiction intersect.
Last, this was a merely temporary period because after about 1930 members of the
ruling class came under intense pressure fully to politicize themselves by taking party sides than
they were to be in the nineteen thirties. And once that phase ended with the fully fledged
welfare/security state that emerged after 1939 they became subject to its full apparatus of
enablement, inspection and control, and bohemian aristocratic freedom and mastery ended. So
the breakdown of older structures of authority and power allowed them room (as it were) to
enjoy and expand what in their jointly-signed Rhthym editorial Mansfield and Murry called
“careless self-assertion” into new domains. So, to repeat, Mansfield’s career as a writer, and
her experiments in fiction writing, is also to be understood as such a “careless self-assertion”,
the carelessness being directed against respectable prudence, the self-assertion being largely
expressed in her very far from careless writing committed to worldedness. And we can, more
speculatively, say that their command of the world took the form of careless self-assertion
because it was “under instability.”
“Command under instability” was also, if indirectly, expressed in the philosophies
embraced by the British intelligentsia of the time, and in particular in its dominant form,
namely idealism. Without wishing to push this further, the abstract qualities of the idealist case
for identifying experiential unity as both universal and real seems to express a will to command
17
the world which is more flimsy and underargued than it can acknowledge to itself. This is
important because Mansfield’s writing program (like that of T.S. Eliot in particular) was
organized through British idealism: it was there that the relations between coherence,
concreteness and worlded experience that I have spelled out were originally articulated. And I
make this argument this being fully cognizant that it is more usual to think of Mansfield as a
member of an English literary modernism whose intellectual background was primarily
Continental—Nietzsche and Bergson in particular—or, if not, was formed by George Moore
and emergent analytic philosophy.ii So my analysis here has a revisionist aspect.
Idealism was an important component of the intellectual world of the time partly
because it could also quite easily absorb Continental thought into itself. Certainly it dominated
academic philosophy, and spilled out into the literary world. T.S. Eliot of course had written a
PhD dissertation on the then most prominent of the British idealists, F.H. Bradley, and in 1916,
at the time he was closest to Mansfield, he contributed a couple of articles on Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (arguably the first idealist of them all) to the idealist, quasi-academic journal
The Monist. Mansfield’s cousin and Murry’s sometime housemate, friend of the Bloomsbury
set, Sydney Waterlow was The Monist’s review editor and he too then contributed a poem and a
piece on universal language to the journal. Bertrand Russell (with whom Mansfield had a brief
but intense friendship in 1916) had published a book on Leibniz in 1900, which began to make
the argument that would ground analytic philosophy to come (i.e. that Leibniz was committed
to the erroneous principle of ‘internal relations’, namely the idea that everything is related to
everything else, which, as Russell will later contend, subtends (and falsifies) all philosophic
idealisms whatsoever). And, last, Murry’s criticism, like Eliot’s, owed much to idealism. For
example, in his book on Dostoevesky he argues that Dostoevsky’s “grim mysteries” might serve
as a “test case” for Bradley’s philosophy on the grounds that for Dostoevsky as for Bradley there
18
exist “degrees of reality”, reality being ontologically seconded to experience or consciousness
(Murry 1916, 228).
We can begin to approach the confluence between idealism and Mansfield more closely
by first briefly describing Eliot’s approach to Leibniz, then remarking on a couple of works
which connect idealism to aesthetics, and finally by turning in more detail to Murry himself,
who, as I say, helped work out Mansfield’s literary project.
Eliot treats Leibniz as “opening the way for modern idealism” (Eliot 1916b, 556).
Leibniz invents the modern concept of perspective or point of view; he establishes the concept
of the subconscious, and he places force at the centre of his ontology. But what is most
important is that he establishes the coherence theory of reality, by which the criterion for
judging something real and true is its “completion and cohesion” (Eliot 1916a, 571) or its
“perfection” as a moment in consciousness, that is to say, the degree to which it coheres to the
world’s unity or totality as it exists for what will later be called experience. But Eliot’s
argument is that in fact neither Leibniz nor Bradley (who follows Leibniz in this regard) can
establish the reality of this world as such (Leibniz cannot distinguish between a substance and an
accident, to use his own scholastic vocabulary), so that idealist ontology in effect collapses into
a set of “finite centres” (Bradley) or “monads” (Leibniz). The “world” becomes rather “the
intending of a world by several souls or centres” (Eliot 1916a, 571). This goes against the grain
of idealism’s founding claim which is (and here Eliot cites Bernard Bosanquet) that “no phase in
a particular consciousness is merely a phase in that consciousness, but is always and essentially a
member of a further whole of experience, which passes through and unites the states of many
consciousnesses” (Eliot 1916a 572).iii In Eliot, then, the question that idealism poses concerns
not the unity of the transindividual worlds that individuals experience but the status of the
separateness of the particular worlds that they experience, even if (as idealism requires) these
cannot be completely sundered.
19
Murry himself began his career as, at least in part, bound to a slightly different
inflection of British idealism, one that flowed through Walter Pater’s Platonism (See Pater
1893). Let us not forget that Murry had been an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford
where Pater had taught and which remained a centre of Paterism (so to say). He had met his
collaborators in Rhythm magazine through the college’s Pater Society, which had been
established by his and Mansfield’s later friend, Frederick Goodyear. And Pater had reconciled
Plato to the canons of British idealism by arguing that he synthesized early Greek thought into a
philosophy which, as Wolfgang Iser put it, “took worldly experience into the abstract, thus
bringing this realm to life,’ and in which “ideas and experiences began to interpenetrate; the
ideal enriched experience, and experience gave concrete forms to the idea” (Iser 1987, 90).
For Pater, Platonism, thought like this, is also aesthetic since experience can become
perfect only in art. Art is the name of an activity in which experiences can be controlled or
“mastered” sufficiently for a perfect synthesis of abstract and concrete, a complete world, to be
achieved. And, for Pater, there is a political dimension to this. This activity can only take place
in sovereign states which secure the “harmony” of each with each, allowing collective unity and
harmony to be articulated in works of art. These ideas subtend Murry’s theories at the time he
and Mansfield were writing for Rhythm although there they are subjected to the concept of ‘re-
barbarization,’ partly because, for them, it is no longer the state, but the personality, that
grounds the mastery or command required to perfect and realize experience, although this is a
personality which is not to be considered a collection of character traits as much as a Bradleyean
“centre” or Leibnizian “monad.” That is the background against which Pater’s Platonic and
aristocratic perfection joins bohemian and avant-gardist atavism. The “mastery” (or command)
that the artist requires to imagine/create a perfect experience is given by virtue of a certain
(Nietzschean, aristocratic, imperialist) brutality which does not break the world’s unity.
20
By drawing together British idealism’s Leibnizian and Platonic strands we can say that
Mansfield’s fictions are expressions of a personality or monads in a particular sense. They are
made worlds, which belong to, and gain their perfection by, their internal and concrete
“completion,”— their “cohesion” —both internal and in relation to larger flows of force and
experience. Various formal features of her stories—their disconnections, ambiguities, apparent
formlessness; their plotlessness; their lack of interest in moral character—turn out to constitute
them as monads, or worlds. As such they can signify or (in a Leibnizian sense) “reflect” a larger
world and they do so through an effort of mastery which is an expression of a personality itself
in effect thought of as a monad.
My next instance of philosophic idealism’s relation to literature during the period is
more practical. In 1907, Elinor Glyn’s best-seller Three Weeks caused a scandal for its sexual
frankness. Glyn called upon F.H. Bradley to address the issues on her behalf, and in his
(posthumously published) paper, “On the Treatment of Sexual Detail in Literature” he did so.
Implicitly drawing on a coherence theory of reality, Bradley’s essay argues that success in art
and literature is its own justification (Bradley 1935, 626) and that, furthermore, the exercise of
the literary imagination is a practice of freedom able to produce a “new-born world” (624)
which is “impersonal” in that is independent of either writer or reader. Here English idealism’s
connection to liberalism stands exposed since both the aristocratic freedom of the writer and its
literary equivalent, the autonomy of the fictional world, are positioned against philistine
morality. It is as if mastery and positive freedom have become identified with one another.
And that indeed is one way of describing the space carved out by the literary avant-garde which
Mansfield joined.
Perhaps the clearest expression of Murry’s idealism is to be found in his The Problem of
Style a series of lectures delivered at Oxford (and dedicated to Brasenose College) in 1922, and
where he made his most significant contribution to the kind of literary criticism which would
21
come to dominate anglophone English departments in the fifties and sixties.iv The Problem of
Style made the arguments, first, that “a great work of literature was not so much a triumph of
language, as a victory over language” (Murry 1922, 111); second, that, for that reason
technique should not be apparent or in the Jamesian mode, “form a life of its own” (21); and
that, third, style in particular should be thought of just in relation to experience and feeling.
To use his own words: in a successful style, “we should be able to catch an immediate
reference back to a whole mode of feeling that is consistent with itself” (ibid, 16). That is to
say, the true literary work was a unified experiential world in idealist terms, whose style was
nothing but its condition of articulation. More than that, “the work of a great master of
literature” was an expression of a “mode of experience” (27) (not a philosophy or a form) which
was ultimately dependent upon “a sense of, and emphasis upon, a dominant quality pervading
the human universe” (26). Here the three levels of literary idealism are marked out: 1) the
literary work as experience or world; 2) the fictional experience or world as centred on
mastery or personality; 3) mastery or personality as sensitive receptiveness to the larger flows
of experience in the world thought of as everything exists. And in Murry, it is noticeable that
coherence as a criterion for the reality of an experience gives way to “dominance”.
The full implications of Murry’s way of thinking are drawn out in a passage in which
the writer’s choice of plot is discussed:
The plot he [the writer] chooses will then be one in which—to use Baudelaire's
words—'the deep significance of life reveals itself in its entirety'. Life, in this phrase,
means the universe of the writer's experience; its ' deep significance' is the emotional
quality which is the common element in the objects and incidents which have habitually
made the most precise and profound impression on his mind; a quality that is in part
the creation of the poet himself, but in part also a real attribute of the existing world,
which needs the sensitiveness of the creative writer in order to be discerned. The plot
22
of the writer of mature genius, who is a completely free agent, will be absolutely in
harmony with this quality (30-31).
What is important here is that the writer transmutes experience into significance as a Bradleyan
“completely free agent”, that is, from the sociological perspective, by taking up an aristocratic
relation of command over the world, and she can do so (because Murry implicitly has Mansfield
(as well as others) in mind here) because that command allows the ‘real attribute of the existing
world” to be articulated. Actually, the line of transmission from the experience of the world to
the creation of the fiction requires a further step since, as Murry argues in a passage which helps
inaugurate modern criticism as centred on “close reading”, the author also needs critics for their
work—their worlds— to join the larger world:
the critic needs to have an apprehension of the unique and essential quality of his
author; he needs to have frequented him until he is saturated with his mode of
experience. He is, in fact, in a position analogous to that of the great writer
himself.[The writer], in search of a plot, looks for an incident that shall be completely
congruous to his harmonized experience of life; the critic, in search of a quotation,
looks for one that shall be completely congruous to his harmonized experience of the
author's work. He has become—in all but name—a creative artist in miniature himself.
He looks for some conjuncture, some incident in the work of a great writer, which was
so precisely fitted to his complex mode of experience that it served in the office of a
prism: through it the whole spectrum of his emotions is suddenly concentrated into a
ray of intense, pure light—the perfect condensation of a whole universe of experience
into a dozen lines, or a hundred words (34).
The critic, we might say, commands the author’s oeuvre when she selects the exact passage
which best contain the oeuvre, just as writers command the world when they choose an
experience that concretizes it. But more to the point: it justifies not only Mansfield’s project of
23
worlding her experience by universalizing it in its fictionalization, but Mansfield and Murry’s
joint project, since it makes literary criticism essential to the circuit of what we might call
world literature.
In his Oxford lectures, which mark his consecration as an English man of letters, Murry
does not mention Mansfield, let alone cite a passage from her work. But years later he did
quote such a passage “of crucial importance for a true understanding of her work” (Murry 1949,
12). Taken from a letter from her to him written in 1918, it describes Mansfield’s return visit
to a villa in Bandol that she and Murry had rented two years earlier, and her meeting with the
villa’s owners. And it too presents an experience that is a world:
But oh, as we sat there, talking & I felt myself smile and answer & stroke my muff &
discuss the meat shortage & the horrid bread and the high prices & cette guerre I felt that
somewhere, upstairs, you & I lay like the little Babies in the Tower, smothered under
pillows & she and I were keeping watch like any two old crones! I could hardly look at
the room. When I saw my photograph that you had left, on the wall I nearly broke
down—and finally I came away & leaned a long time on the wall at the bottom of our
little road looking at the violet sea that beat up, high and loud against those strange
dark clots of seaweed—As I came down your beautiful narrow steps—it began to rain.
Big soft, reluctant drops fell on my hand & face—The light was flashing through the
dusk from the lighthouse and a swarm of black soldiers was kicking something about on
the sand among the palm trees—a dead dog perhaps or a little tied up kitten—
(Mansfield 1984-1996, 2: 10-11).
It is not surprising that Murry chose a passage from a letter rather than a story to encapsulate
Mansfield: after all his criticism, like Mansfield’s practice, seconded fictionality to experience
and insisted on the close connection between author’s personality and the world that the fiction
communicated. It is more surprising, however, that he chose such a cruel passage— one that
24
imagines Mansfield and himself as innocent children lying dead and smothered in an upstairs
bedroom. But various characteristics of the last sentence in particular do as well as any to
exemplify the general argument that I have been making. First, its pronouns—you and I—are
used so as to unite rather than to separate personalities. Then its aggregated details— the
distance between the palm trees and the bedroom; the menacing arbitrariness of those dark
clots of seaweed; the punctuated lighting from the lighthouse; the everyday practicality of bread
prices, Mansfield’s failure to look at the room she has come to see, the wild cruel imagining of
the soldiers kicking a dead dog or live kitten instead of a football, which extravagently
punctures but also expresses her mood in their passionate fragmentariness— are concrete
fragments joined together by force of a mood, a passion. It’s not so much a coherent picture, or
an expression of a coherent person, as an articulation of a coherent world, gathered together,
ultimately under a certain paranoic fear of the world out there.
But the passage also belongs to the wider social world insofar as it is suffused in merely
social command and brutality—the hint of racism in the phrase “swarm of black soldiers” who
are, nonetheless in the service of an imperial nation (here France). Last, the sentence opens up
to the universe, to the world in those big, soft reluctant drops of rain that stand for tears. This
is the world crying, not just Mansfield herself. The boldness of that figure, disguised in realist
mimesis, seals the text’s idealist capacity to make coherence the condition of its concreteness
and vice-versa and does so via a claim to command not just a social terrain but a world (here the
weather that cries for her) in the face precisely of an instability that is here, once more, marked
by death and cruelty, ultimately the instability, the fragility of her hold on life.
25
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___. 1916b. “The Development of Leibniz’s Monadism,” The Monist, 26/4: 534-556.
___. 1934. After Strange Gods: a Primer of Modern Heresy. The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University
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Iser, Wolfgang. 1987. Walter Pater: the Aesthetic Moment, New York: Cambridge University
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___. 2012. The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916-1922, ed. Gerri Kimbler and
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___. 1916b. Fyodor Dostoevsky: a critical study, London: Martin Secker.
___. 1922. The Problem of Style, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
___. 1923. “Katherine Mansfield, Stendhal and Style,” The Adelphi 1/4: 342-343.
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27
iMurry explicitly connected The Problem of Style to Mansfield in a note in The Adelphi published after her death (Murry 1923).iiThebibliographyofBergsonandNietzsche’simpactonBritishliterarymodernismistoolargeforselectionstobeuseful.For the new analytic philosophy see Ann Banfield’s excellent book on Woolf, Abel 2007.iiiThepassageoriginallyappearedinBosanquet1912,315.ivMurrywasdevelopinghiscriticismain dialogue with T.S. EliotDavidGoldieinGoldie1998offersanrichlyinformativeaccountoftheintellectualconnectionsbetweenthetwo,although,unfortunately,hedoesnotdealwiththeirsharedidealism.
