politics

I can’t decide which was more amusing, the zoo metaphor used by Leonard Woolf in which he compares, as far as I can tell, the literary censorship with the containment of many kinds of animals or Wayne Chapman and Janet Manson’s comparison of Woolf’s political work, the art of persuasion, as sport. I think that while both make me laugh, the former provides a greater degree of understanding regarding the politically tumultuous times under which Leonard, Virginia, and the rest of the Bloomsbury group produced their writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Coinciding with this week’s emphasis on the political seems to be a strong prominence on the personal, interesting insofar as political activism is readily associated with the operation of power in the social. If in this case the social is the Bloomsbury group, the writers, intellectuals, and academics, then any relevant discussion about the individuals who make up that group should yield a discussion which would include both biographical information and specific views on modernism and politics.
I find it comforting that the collective definition of modernism that we came to as a class in the first few weeks, and the one to which I most often return, is likewise stated in Sara Blair’s “Modernism and the politics of culture.” She declares, “Modernism has been notoriously inhospitable to definition” (157). I couldn’t agree more. I find, even after reading numerous texts and participating in many discussions on the topic, modernism resists easy categorization. It may be far more agreeable to develop a list of characteristics or to notice a specific tone, feel, or hallmark of literature of the time, but it is damn near impossible to come up with one concise and relevant definition. Perhaps this is because modernist literature was constantly changing, adapting and evolving to suit the times, and what active times they were.
However, Blair also acknowledges, regarding modernism, that “we are taught that its most notable – indeed, perhaps only - unifying feature was the attempt to transcend the political altogether?” (157). I tend to agree with Chapman and Manson rather than Blair on the matter. The political is inseparable from the social with regard to the great writers of modernist literature. If this were not so, there would be no “Fear and Politics.” The connection between literature and politics, I believe, is always present, but because the climate of the early twentieth century was full of events such as World War II and thus so over political, the literature and those who created it, Woolf and Eliot, for example, were that much more inclined to be active in their environment. Chapman and Manson point this out, saying, “Leornard had undertaken an international cooperation—projects that had just led to publication by the Fabian Society of his influential treatise on supranational councils for the prevention of war” (62). It is not surprising though that the Bloomsbury group had strong opinions about the war, specifically against it, for they were in the middle of it.
Distance can yield perspective, but in its absence, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, along with their peers, acted and wrote in protest of the war which threatened to come to their own backyards. They were in it at the ground level, had knowledge of the workings of the German machine well before the public as a result of inside connections. For instance, Leonard’s analysis forecasted “ the state of affairs that would precipitate the fascist takeover in Germany” (Chapman 62). The concern over the growing threat of Germany is clearly grounded in a political sphere, as war is nothing if not political, but I am interested in factoring in the close relationship between Leonard and his wife, “Leonard was Woolf’s most intimate and constant companion from their marriage until her death in 1941” (Hussy 372). Bloomsbury was a close-knit group, they even made a suicide pact regarding the Second World War, and Leonard was, according to Hussy, “always concerned about the reputation of Bloomsbury in general and his wife in particular” (374). This seems to echo the collision of personal and political, social and government, that appears to be the theme of this week.