This panel aims to present new work that reassesses the singularity of Mirrlees’s poem as well as its place within the broader network of literary modernism. While scholars such as Julia Briggs, who produced the first annotated edition of the poem in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007), and Sandeep Parmar, who edited the first critical edition of Mirrlees’s Collected Poems (2011), have done the important archival and recovery work that restored Paris to critical attention, Peter Howarth solidified Paris’s position within the modernist “canon” with his chapter, “Why Write Like This?,” in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011), which introduces readers to the disorienting pleasures of “modernism’s most famous poems” through an extended analysis of Mirrlees’s “difficult” work.
No longer solely focused on recuperative work (Briggs, Parmar) or the necessity of justifying Paris’s place within the modernist tradition (Howarth), the three papers on this panel seek to initiate a “new” wave of Paris scholarship that complicates and extends the poem’s aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political import on the occasion of its centenary. Each paper therefore pays tribute to the exceptionality of the poem while at the same time insisting on the “complex intersections” that resist canonical trends of exceptionalizing marginalized writers like Mirrlees.
The first paper, by Sandeep Parmar, addresses these concerns by favoring a more expansive view of Mirrlees’s oeuvre. Reconciling Paris alongside Mirrlees’s two novels (Madeleine, 1919 and The Counterplot, 1924) that sit in chronological and aesthetic uneasiness on either side of her poem, this paper situates the poem as a critical and formative interlude. Rife with interruptions and intercessions, Paris responds to and continues Mirrlees’s fascination with dramatic unity, ritual, and the moral action of what Jane Harrison describes as art’s social and collective origin. By reading Paris as a crisis point that formally and tonally resists unity of the self and of action, time and place, Parmar sees Mirrlees’s singular poetic project as a bridge between the choral self-abnegation of Madeleine and the “ritual fight” between intellectualism and emotion in The Counterplot. Textual anxiety—and interruption as a specifically modernist historical crisis—imposes differently these properties of unification on Paris’s speaker as it does for Mirrlees’s female heroines (themselves aspiring artists). These disconnections and lapses, when transposed across Mirrlees’s three texts, illuminate her engagement with both modernist aesthetics and ideas of myth and ritual across these interwar years.
In the second paper, Alice Staveley examines how Woolf’s typesetting of Paris offered the novice publisher a formative introduction to the manipulation of typeface and white space as an artistic response to a global crisis. While Julie Briggs has remarked that typesetting the poem must have informed Woolf’s emerging ideas for how to reform the novel, in both the political and materialist sense of the word, and Edward Bishop has written persuasively on the connection between silence, white space, and materiality in Jacob’s Room, no critic has yet taken up the challenge of explaining how Paris and Jacob’s Room are aligned—materially, politically, narratologically, or experientially. Staveley argues that, like the ghosts that haunt the Parisian streets in Mirrlees’s poem, the spectral presence of Jacob Flanders, that famously hollow center and characterological cipher of Jacob’s Room, has its origins in Woolf’s reconceptualization of narratorial focalization informed by her role as a woman compositor handsetting a woman poet’s depiction of Paris. This global modernist capital becomes, in Woolf’s depiction, a gap or a blank space in the novel itself, a place Jacob misses on his European tour, only to have it resurge, the past being prologue, in an end foretold before he was born. The perspectival inversions of time, typeface, and gender that Woolf acquires as compositor of Paris radically altered her own artistic vision, inaugurating her formal experiments in novelistic genre.
In the final paper, Nell Wasserstrom reexamines the question of the erotic in Paris, which Mirrlees’ scholars have interpreted in terms of the relationship between Mirrlees and Jane Harrison. Shifting the register from the biographical to the generic, Wasserstrom reads Paris as an epic—that is, as “a poem including history” to use Pound’s formulation—that reconfigures the act of including history as a particularly erotic one. Through rhetorical figures such as metaphor and pun, Mirrlees stages the urgent questions of her historical moment in terms of paradox: the drawing together of that which maintains an irreducible difference. This unresolvable tension figures the restless reach of desire in the poem that has certain socio-political implications. Paradox’s force emerges from its ability to keep the mind in motion; Mirrlees wields this power to create an erotic historiography that resists consigning the events of the “just now” to the “stillness” of the past. In this way, Paris resists offering an easily-consumed portrait of life in Paris in the spring of 1919. Rather, predicated on the rhetorical as opposed to the merely referential, the poem reveals that historical occurrences—including historical tropes of women—are always necessarily constructed figuratively, marking at once the limits of recording history and the poem’s means of (and grounds for) historical critique. As Paris takes its place within the epic tradition of literary modernism, Wasserstrom argues that the poem asks us to reconsider the erotic dimension of this tradition’s acts of “including history.”
To promote discussion, there will be no formal commentary following the presentations. Catherine Flynn will chair the panel, and the work of her forthcoming book, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge UP, 2019), makes her ideally suited to moderate and inspire a lively discussion. Building on these approaches to Mirrlees’s work, this open discussion hopes to stimulate new perspectives on the figures and works that anchor literary modernity.