ABSTRACT
In 1922—the annus mirabilis of modernist literature, when James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's Waste Land both saw first publication—William Butler Yeats was busy receiving otherworldly messages from ghostly “instructors” through the trance mediumship of his wife; Ezra Pound, the midwife of literary modernism, had been dabbling for nearly a decade in séances and occultist lore; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of one of the most famously rational characters in literary history, had just published a straight-faced work of psychical research called The Coming of the Fairies; Rainer Maria Rilke had recently tried to overcome a long spell of writer's block by contacting otherworldly spirits through séances and automatic writing; H.D. had had the first of the mysterious bouts of visionary consciousness that would eventually culminate, during the air raids of the Second World War, in her séance communications with a group of dead R.A.F. pilots; Radclyffe Hall had recently emerged from a libel case involving spirit messages from her dead lover; and finally, as a kind of antispiritualist counterpoint, Eliot was railing in poems from “Gerontian” to The Waste Land against candle-shifting, cheap fortune-telling, and other forms of false or debased prophecy, while Joyce, similarly, was parodying spiritualist rhetoric in Ulysses. The persistence of popular spiritualism, that credulous Victorian fad, may seem a curious anomaly in the cynical age of literary modernism. Yet spiritualism anticipates, and thereby could be. said to validate, many of literary modernism's central principles, mirroring modernist writers' attempts to establish a dialectic that might embrace both authority and iconoclasm, both tradition and innovation, both continuity and fragmentation.
