Table Of Contenti
Blasphemous Modernism
ii
Modernist Literature & Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions Modernism and the New Spain
Elizabeth Outka Gayle Rogers
Machine Age Comedy At the Violet Hour
Michael North Sarah Cole
The Art of Scandal Fictions of Autonomy
Sean Latham Andrew Goldstone
The Hypothetical Mandarin The Great American Songbooks
Eric Hayot T. Austin Graham
Nations of Nothing But Poetry Without Copyrights
Matthew Hart Robert Spoo
Modernism & Copyright The Degenerate Muse
Paul K. Saint- Amour Robin Schulze
Accented America Commonwealth of Letters
Joshua L. Miller Peter J. Kalliney
Criminal Ingenuity Modernism and Melancholia
Ellen Levy Sanja Bahun
Modernism’s Mythic Pose Digital Modernism
Carrie J. Preston Jessica Pressman
Pragmatic Modernism In a Strange Room
Lisa Schoenbach David Sherman
Unseasonable Youth Epic Negation
Jed Esty C.D. Blanton
World Views Modernist Informatics
Jon Hegglund James Purdon
Americanizing Britain Blasphemous Modernism
Genevieve Abravanel Steve Pinkerton
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Blasphemous
Modernism
The 20th- Century Word Made Flesh
Steve Pinkerton
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iv
1
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I think that there is an interesting subject of investigation, for the student
of traditions, in the history of Blasphemy, and the anomalous position of
that term in the modern world.
—T . S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (1934)
to your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that
you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark… .
thus shall evolve the language of the Future.
— Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914)
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vii
Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: “First- Rate Blasphemy” 1
1. “For This Is My Body”: James Joyce’s Unholy Office 19
2. Blasphemy and the New Woman: Mina Loy’s Profane Communions 51
3. Blasphemy and the New Negro: Black Christs, “Livid Tongues” 79
4. Go Down, Djuna: The Art of “Transcendence Downward” 110
Conclusion: To Be as Gods 131
Notes 143
Works Cited 163
Index 179
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Series Editors’ Foreword
In a celebrated sequence of Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629),
the poet revisits a favorite theme of Christian humanism— the triumph of baby
Jesus over the pagan gods— in the silencing of classical oracles: “Apollo from his
shrine / Can no more divine.” But banished gods have a way of returning, and
so when “Our Babe” in the cradle is revealed as having the power to “control
the damned crew” of deposed deities, forcing them to abide in a past sealed off
forever from the new truth that has entered the world, His strength is made man-
ifest through classical allusion: “The dreaded Infant’s hand,” that is, the hand
of Hercules, who strangled serpents (evoked by Milton’s “snaky twine”) in his
crib. With the dawn of Christianity, the classical world, safely stripped of its false
divinity, becomes available as trope.
And yet the awe and solemnity evoked in Milton’s description of the lost world
bespeaks what today we have learned to call ambivalence, and an ambivalent rela-
tion to religious orthodoxy, Steve Pinkerton shows, lies at the heart of blasphemy.
Although in the Nativity Ode Milton steers well clear of the blasphemous—
nothing wrong with an admiring glance at pre- Christian majesty— in Paradise
Lost Milton would have to work harder to fend off charges that he might be
usurping rather than elaborating scriptural authority. Pinkerton’s Blasphemous
Modernism: The 20th- Century Word Made Flesh acknowledges the rich history of
literary blasphemy; but in the modernist period, he argues, blasphemy becomes
fundamental in a new way. Elite culture’s proclamation of the death of God (in
the West, anyway) has kept us from recognizing that modernists continued “to
seek in scripture and theology the particular sources of meaning, affect, and
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