Sex isn't everything (but it can be anything): the symbolic function of extremity in modernism.

In the era of Sex and the City it is almost impossible to imagine how shocking the sex in modernist fiction used to be. Modernist form may have been difficult, but readers kept returning to Kurtz's "monstrous passions," Molly Bloom's monologue, and Lady Chatterley's trysts in the woods. In one critic's judgment, "No aspect of human life changed more in the transition from Victorian England to modern England than the way Englishmen thought about sex" (Hynes 1968, 171). The same might be said about the difference between modern England and today's world. Jaded by increasingly permissive attitudes, we tend to read sexual scenes as realistic accounts of ordinary behavior. As a result, we lose the symbolic indeterminacy that descriptions of sex produced when they were transgressive. The critical response to D. H. Lawrence's fiction illustrates the consequences of this loss. In 1915 The Rainbow seemed so transgressive that it was suppressed, but as explicit sex came to seem less extreme, its symbolic meaning was often limited to ideas Lawrence expressed elsewhere. By daring to write about the unspeakable, however, D. H. Lawrence and other modernists were also representing the unsayable.

The conviction that there is more to life than science can explain survived the late nineteenth-century demise of faith. As empiricism undermined religious belief, writers looked for other ways to articulate immaterial experience. In 1880 Matthew Arnold proposed that poetry of "truth and seriousness" (1973, 171) could be a substitute for religion: "More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us" (161). Poetry was to be science's new partner: "Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry" (161-62). By the turn of the century, Arthur Symons viewed literature as the opponent rather than the partner of science. The Symbolist movement, he wrote, fought "against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition" (1919, 9). In contrast to symbolism in the past, the new movement was "conscious of itself" (3) as it created "a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream" (4). Emphasizing the "conscious" construction of symbols, Symons characterized Symbolism as a response to the period's epistemological crisis. Symbolist literature assumed the functions of religion: "in speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, [literature] becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual" (9). Reading literature as religion became so common that in 1928 T. S. Eliot remarked: "Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion" (1964, 32). Having become an Anglo-Catholic, Eliot wanted to restore the distinct functions of each: "Literature can be no substitute for religion, not merely because we need religion, but because we need literature as well as religion" (36). Speaking from a position of faith, he was unwilling to grant literature the authority of religion or to permit religious texts to be interpreted as freely as literary texts are.

As Eliot implies, conflating religion and literature obscures an important difference between them. Although both express immaterial experience by departing from ordinary reality, one through miracles and the other through secular forms of extremity, religious texts attempt to stabilize the meaning of symbols through creed and ritual. Belief limits the symbolic meanings of a religious text the same way that empiricism limits the referentiality of a realist text. While a symbol can evoke many referents--sexual, aesthetic, political--when any one is called a "new religion," the others disappear. The symbol solidifies into a ritual, becoming a formula for attaining the experience. The literary text assumes, in Symons's words, the "duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual." When readers allow this to happen, they judge the social impact of the ritual as if it were an act in a realist text. (1)

Taking the symbol as a path to the non-empirical experience it conveys, critics can argue that modernists made a new religion of sex or art or politics. (2) This conflation of literature and religion may be intended as praise, but it reduces the indeterminacy of modernist symbols to tendentious formulas. By recovering the extremity of these symbols, however, we can restore their indeterminacy. Indeterminacy makes it possible for symbols to represent the immanence of non-empirical experience in everyday life without grounding it in any fixed belief. At a time when many "new religions" were proposed to challenge science and materialism, the indeterminacy of modernist symbols expanded readers' sense of interiority without demanding belief. I use the term "non-empirical" to encompass all the discourses that offered supplements to empiricism. "Spiritual" would be too mystical, "ideal" too metaphysical, "beautiful" too aesthetic, "ideological" too political, "uncanny" too fantastic, "unconscious" too psychological.

Modernist symbols were indeterminate and non-empirical as a result of the linguistic structure of the symbol and the rhetorical effect of extremity. Although every symbol begins with empirical referents, Roman Jakobson's structural definition of symbolism accounts for its capacity to generate nonempirical meanings as well. Jakobson locates syntax on a horizontal axis of combination and semantics on a vertical axis of selection (Jakobson and Halle 1956, 60). He proposes literary parallels to each axis. The principle of contiguity in syntax corresponds to metonymy as used in realism (78). Realism is metonymic because the text refers to a particular time and place: meaning depends on contiguity between word and thing. The principle of substitution in semantics corresponds to metaphor as used in symbolism (77-78). Symbolism is metaphoric because the text generates multiple possibilities in each structural position. These possibilities extend from empirical to nonempirical referents. (3)

In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault provides an explanation for the indeterminacy of extreme symbols. Although the aim of his argument is to show how repression of sexual discourse serves "the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world" (1978, 11), his "repressive hypothesis" also accounts for the shock value of sexual discourse. (4) According to this hypothesis, psychological and social repression of sexual discourse gives it transgressive power: "If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression" (6). Releasing what is repressed produces the pleasure of transgression:

 
    What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression 
    is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that 
    be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together 
    enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a 
    discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination 
    to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly 
    delights. (Foucault 1978, 7)