A Cartography of Hope: Mirrlees and the Poetics of New Materialism

The preface to Hope Mirrlees’s 1919 novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists sets forth a statement of aesthetics and reads like a seminal text of modernism. However, the novel was published in a limited run in 1919 and has never been reprinted. In the brief paratext, Mirrlees outlines a distinctively modernist and materialist conception of literature, the threads of which can be traced throughout her oeuvre. The preface begins:

Fiction—to adapt a famous definition of law—is the meeting-point of Life and Art. Life is like a blind and limitless expanse of sky, forever dividing into tiny drops of circumstances that rain down, thick and fast, on the just and unjust alike. Art is like the dauntless, plastic force that builds up stubborn, amorphous substance cell by cell, into the frail geometry of a shell. These two things are poles apart—how are they to meet in the same work of fiction?[1]

Immediately the reader is flung into a consideration of the workings of Art and Life. Here, art is a granular and fluid matter which has a stubborn agency of its own. The preface’s position as a statement of modernist aesthetics follows a lineage that includes the likes of Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) and the paratextual preface to Stéphane Mallarmé’s “A Throw of the Dice” (1897); it also anticipates Virginia Woolf’s 1925 essay “Modern Fiction,” both as a model of art’s relationship to life and in the imagery used to evoke this.[2] To add to this, Woolf pays particular attention to the preface in her review of the novel for the TLS, taking up the philosophical opposition posed by Mirrlees to guide her overall reading.[3] In this essay, I consider how Mirrlees’s paratext outlines a conception of life and art that is framed by a concern with vitalist, material, multiple, relational, and spatial power. In short, I read it through a productively neo-materialist philosophy of literature.

Neo- or new materialism positions matter as distributed, immanent, and always in process. In this way, the traditional ontological division between the external world of objects and the human sensorial experience of objects becomes superseded by a more embedded and relational process ontology. Through this, the human subject as active meaning-maker is dethroned to make room for distributed material-discursive forces both human and nonhuman. This is the “vibrant matter” proposed by Jane Bennett, the “storied matter” of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, the “vital neo-materialism” of Rosi Braidotti, the “enchanted materialism” of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.[4] This vital materialism positions all matter as imbued with different degrees of power through a capacity to affect or become affected: the vital force of matter. I want to emphasize here that this vital force is not a transcendental or spiritual force but is rather grounded and immanent to the matter in question and its relations and entanglements; to what it is in the process of becoming.

These always in-process material entanglements are mapped through writing cartographies of them. The cartography is a writerly method of bringing to light a previously unmapped relation between locations. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “language is a map, not a tracing.”[5] A map is not fixed: landscapes change constantly and imperceptibly, and endless different maps can be made of the same landscapes. Points on a map indicate the lines of connection between places, the distances and proximities of the shown locations. The concept of the text as cartography is apt for thinking about Mirrlees’s practice of textual composition in the context of print modernism, as the material-paratextual traces of collaborators, translators, typesetters, publishers, booksellers, readers, and writers become points on a map of transnational and multilingual modernist space. Here I want to map how a new-materialist reading of this preface and of Mirrlees’s work more broadly brings to the fore a conception of modernist aesthetics that gives agency to the multiple and amorphous matter of Life itself. This matter is immanent to (that is to say, part of) embodied human subjectivity, but the human is by no means at its center.

Mirrlees’s materialist aesthetics necessitates a close reading of the multiple materialities both of and within Paris. These materialities relate to the poem’s content, as the female protagonist traverses the cityscape of Paris via multiple material encounters which situate the poem in its geographical and historical context. However, they also operate on another poetic axis: that of form. The conceptualization in the preface of Madeleine of Art as a cellular form is mirrored in Paris, which Mirrlees wrote in the spring of 1919 as she was finishing the novel. In the poem, the many-faced city of Paris at a specific moment in time—something huge and ungraspable but made visible by modernity, reminiscent of Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject—is formed up through experience into the “frail geometry” of the poem:[6]

The poem’s tangible presence in the world—a text with texture—is evident in both the poem’s collaborative printing history and its multiple materiality: the text becomes a map of Paris, a breadcrumb trail history of the narrator’s journey through the city that records her wandering on the white space of the page. These two axes of content and form intersect, becoming entangled as they continue their multi-directional journey through the city of Paris in 1919 and through the hands of past, present, and future readers. Reading Paris through its material and multilingual markers of locations reveals a cartography of the poem that maps transversal and nomadic movements across textual and linguistic space.

Mirrlees continues the preface by proposing two ways to approach the problem of uniting art and life in fiction. The first, she writes, is “to fling down, pêle-mêle, a handful of separate acts and words, and then to turn on them the constructive force of a human consciousness” (Mirrlees, Madeleine, vii). This “constructive force” moves outward, counter to the notion of consciousness as a bounded, interior, and limited trait of the individual subject. This forceful configuration is suggestive of a vital materialist ontology in which the primacy of human agency is overridden by an immanent understanding of the capacity of all matter to affect and be affected by and through the potential forces of this matter.[8] As Matt Kilbane writes in his analysis of the poem’s affirmative plasticity, the poem’s focus on the “fluid traffic between life and art” makes “freedom from representation and quarantined forms” possible.[9] Like the “plastic force” earlier in the preface, I read “constructive force” as evocative of conatus, the nonhuman inclination of matter to endure, and potentia, the affective potential of different matter. Within this theoretical framework, these different forces of different matter point towards an immanent neo-materialist ontology in which matter differs only in its different degrees of power. In this understanding of human consciousness as a creative material force, the classical humanist subject, along with his bounded and exceptional agency, is thus displaced.

The place and function of modern matter has already been widely theorized within the new modernist studies. In his article “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown writes of “the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power.”[10] The eponymous theory of things developed in and from Brown’s article has been applied extensively to modernist literature, especially in the work of William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara. Similarly, Douglas Mao writes of modernism’s “extraordinarily generative fascination with the object understood neither as commodity (Goods) nor as symbol (Gods), but as “object,” where any or all of the resonances of this complexly polysemous word might apply.”[11] From this starting point, I want to reframe this matter as the permeable stuff of modernity. Brown and Mao both point to the power of things or objects in modernist texts, but I want to assert the power of matter itself. Matter in its molecularity and permeability dissolves the assumed boundedness of the mind-body interrelation of the European humanist subject. It is the stuff which becomes entangled with linguistic difference to engender different degrees of power: what Donna Haraway calls the “material–semiotic node” or “knot.”[12] Matter and meaning form discursive entanglements and material enchantments, privileging a mode of becoming-with which is more attuned to the embodied, relational, and affective forces of the world. This ontology emphasizes relational processes of becoming rather than static ontologies of being. Through these material-discursive entanglements, ethical, epistemological, and ontological realms co-emerge as interrelated and, indeed, inseparable, as the physicist Karen Barad argues through her concept of “ethico-onto-epistem-ology.”[13] Mirrlees’s use of the ursa major asterism, with which she “signs” all her printed works before 1926, is exemplary of this process ontology. This asterism is produced using asterisks, the shared etymology already connecting the typographical symbol with its cosmological counterpart. As Melanie Micir and Anna Preus note in their essay in this cluster, Mirrlees’s use of the asterism in print opens up possibilities for creating a digital edition of the poem precisely because of how the use of asterisks “gestures . . . formally toward things that cannot be directly represented on the page.”[14] In astronomy, a constellation is a name given to a particular cluster of stars, whereas an asterism is the perceived relational arrangement of a series of stars from a fixed point in space. This necessarily includes the position of the viewer as a contingent part of the entanglement, a becoming-with the constellation in its material-semiotic rendering into an asterism. The asterism points back to one of the key poetic strategies of Paris—literature as “the meeting-point of Life and Art” as Mirrlees writes in her Madeleine preface—a poetic strategy for approaching the “curse of vastness” of the cosmos in both a physical and philosophical sense, to borrow a line from the poem (Mirrlees, Madeleine, vii; Paris, 13). In this way, sensorial experience is not a matter of a static being experiencing an external world. Rather, it marks an embedded and embodied relational subjectivity that is always caught in processes of becoming through its material entanglements.

In Paris, the reader is presented with a cacophonous soundscape and a cosmopolitan cityscape but also an immersive materialscape. Things abound in the poem, and the reader is bombarded by their fragmentary presentation—on the first page of the 1920 edition we encounter Metro signs and weighing scales and advertisements posted on the station walls:

The posters present things for the commuters to encounter, commodities packaged for consumption, interaction and, importantly, transformation: cigarette papers to be rolled and smoked, polish to shine black work shoes, and cocoa powder to be boiled with water into a sweet drink. Real and imagined things interact: the advertised commodities are deterritorialized by the “Black-figured vases in Etruscan tombs” of the following line, suggesting that the graphic design of the posters connects to deeper timescales. The juxtaposition here is reminiscent of Douglas Mao’s formulation of the subject-object relation in modernity as one of either “Goods” or “Gods.”[15] There is an ambivalence in “Black-figured”—to what extent does this refer to the classical Greek tradition of painting figures in black, and to what extent does it exploit Blackness as a racial category? How much are these Black figures positioned as things to be consumed, like the advertisements, or as ornamentation on a functional object?

The images on the posters and the images on the vases enter into a relation which situates empire and négritude within the very matter of Paris, as Julia Briggs has argued.[16] Through uniting the Dutch cocoa powder of “CACAO BLOOKER” and its imperial and colonial roots with the racialized bodies of antiquity, the poem enacts a process of “nomadic thought,” which, according to Rosi Braidotti, is “a politically invested cartography of the present condition of mobility in a globalized world.”[17] In Mirrlees’s case, this condition is that of an affluent, educated, and mobile white woman in early twentieth-century Paris. As such, the poem attempts to situate these commodities within a system of global imperialism and colonialism while at the same time reducing Black bodies to the status of mystified and mystifying objects.[18] The political cartography of the poem is presented through the materiality of both its content and expression, as the reader is guided through Paris via spatially situated encounters that connect the lasting effects of imperialism to the contemporaneous condition of transnational Western commercialism.

These encounters happen by and through the body: the bodies reduced to figures on vases, the bodies on the Metro or on the street, and the ambulating body, moving through urban space, whose action and direction is affected by other material bodies in that space—whether organic or textual or commercial. In the line “The Eiffel Tower is two dimensional / Etched on thick white paper” there is a many-bodied gaze (Mirrlees, Paris, 11). Firstly, the tower itself is a symbol of modernist progress and masculine imperial power and was originally conceived as a self-publicizing temporary monument to the French Revolution for the Exposition Universelle of 1889.[19] Secondly, the tower is gazed upon and represented on paper by a street artist, and the perceiver sees only the sketch at the level of the street with the tower itself somewhere blurred in the periphery. With this line the material of the paper itself collapses into the content of the poem: the textures blend and overlap; different bodies are placed in relation. The materiality of the enfleshed human female body wandering the streets of Paris is transversal: it becomes the material of the text as the poem enacts embodiment across temporal and geographical space, while remaining a cartography from a perspective grounded in a specific time and place.

The poem’s political investments are not limited to its references to contemporaneous intellectual concerns and current events: it is a cartography of the material relations and affects of the world. This is a cosmopolitanism that, as Briggs writes, is “alert and responsive to its political moment,” echoing Braidotti’s aforementioned conceptualization of nomadic thought.[20] As Nina Enemark notes, Paris alludes to “the Peace Conference, the general strike, the artistic and political interest in Russia and Freud’s theories, and changing sexual norms.”[21] In the stanza presented below, politicized matter from colonial locations in India, South America, Algeria, and Java continues to cross borders as it makes its way into the human body itself, affecting it and becoming with it.

Tobacco is smoked, rice powder applied to the face, the smell of burning rubber makes its way into the olfactory system. In one breath, there are references to the multiple sensuous, smelly, organic, smoking, intoxicated, maquillaged, human bodies of Paris and their various relations with other bodies via female sexuality, imperial exploitation, and modern cultures of commodification. For the speaker of Paris, the pleasure of being in the city necessarily means becoming-with the city, in all its messy multisensory materiality. The molecular mixing of different matters perceived via the olfactory system in Paris portrays the world of Deleuze’s Spinozist empiricism: “a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations veritable external passages.”[22] Furthermore, the materials listed in these lines are grounded in the specificity of a time, place, and history—the Grand Boulevards become an immanent and political node through being this place in this time where these materials mix. In this way, the poem is a cartography because of and through the material-spatial arrangement of the text, which allows the traditional humanist masculine framing of the world to become “permeable to the female gaze,” as O’Keefe argues, thereby becoming indiscernible, imperceptible, and many-centered, while at the same time grounded and situated in its many-centered historical specificity.[23]

This vital neo-materialism is evident in Mirrlees’s later work A Fly In Amber (1962), in which she sets forth a methodology of antiquarianism via a biography of the Elizabethan collector Robert Cotton. In this text, Mirrlees argues that in antiquarianism there is a refusal of logic as an organizational process; it has “no methodical order,” unlike the orderly narratives of historians.[24] Mirrlees’s development of thought via her study of classics was itself informed by new developments in archaeology and the discovery of sites by Western scholars. These developments led to a new attitude in classics that focused on the artifact and the site more than the text, and critics have noted the importance of multisensory interaction as a way of knowing the world in Mirrlees’s works.[25] The roots of this outlook can be found in earlier non-fiction work by Mirrlees. In her 1926 essay “Listening in to the Past,” she talks of the “sudden physical conviction” that comes with the intrusion of the past into the present via material encounters that carry with them fragments of imagined sensory experiences such as sounds, sights, and smells, which for her is akin to a “mystical experience.”[26] This is thinking as, in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, the “groping experimentation” of the witch’s flight: forceful and productive without relying on a logical order.[27] In A Fly In Amber Mirrlees sets forth the importance of the material world and its affective power for literature: “If poets could only be antiquaries! For antiquaries alone can restore the past and preserve the present, tangibly – and it is touch that matters most” (Mirrlees, A Fly in Amber, 92–93, emphasis in original). In her cogent essay, Enemark argues that “Paris . . . gives shape, urgency and rhetorical force to this wish to preserve and articulate a historical moment tangibly, beyond the level of verbal representation” (Enemark, “Antiquarian Magic,” 116). Here Enemark touches upon the significance of materiality, of privileging material affect over representation or indeed “beyond” the representational level. As mentioned earlier, in the preface to Madeleine Mirrlees likens the process of literary creation to the “frail geometry of a shell.” This geometric figuration transverses Deleuze’s work, for whom geometry is abstract but “must be made concrete or felt, and at the same time the sensation must be given duration and clarity.”[28] This is how literature becomes a non-representational mode of figurative semblance, a “language of relations” (79). The title of A Fly In Amber itself invokes trapping life materially in a kind of suspended animation—animation that is only suspended and not dead, waiting to be discovered by another body with which it can enter into a new productive and affective relation. A poem is such a fly in amber, and the reader and a book connect through their shared material and postnatural bodies. Together, the reader and the text become a material-semiotic machine through degrees of openness and transformation, machinistic in its ability to produce new affects, concepts, and precepts in the world.

Thus, Mirrlees proposes a poetics which is both aesthetically modernist and philosophically materialist. This is not only proposed explicitly in the preface to Madeleine but also developed extensively throughout her written work, especially in interactions with different materialities, bodies, and languages. What is at stake here is an alternative lineage of modernist aesthetics and philosophy, not to mention an acknowledgement of the extent of Mirrlees’s own engagement with and place in modernism and modernist genealogies. In short, a vital neo-materialism is embedded within Mirrlees’s non-fiction writing and practice as a classicist: in the biography A Fly in Amber Mirrlees likens the poet’s task to that of the antiquary in that they are both concerned with tactile material encounters mediated via touch; in “Listening in to the Past” Mirrlees talks of the “sudden physical conviction” that comes with the intrusion of the past into the present via material encounters; the paratextual materialist poetics outlined in Madeleine is put into practice in Paris, which was published the following year; and in Paris, the granular and stubborn agency of the detritus of the modern city is enacted via the materiality of the text itself.