Chesterton, modernism, and the representation of reality

Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation seeks to demonstrate and propose a resolution to modernism in the form of the thought and literature of GK Chesterton. Chesterton, whilst constantly touted as either a harmless kind of literary clown or as a Christian crypto-fascist, has largely been ignored within all serious academic discourse. Therefore, the work of this dissertation takes place in three, interconnected and inter-weaved, stages. Firstly, the core of modernism – its problems, inconsistencies, and political ramifications - is elucidated; secondly, the central ideas of Chesterton's work are explored; and, finally, the way in which Chesterton's work presents a viable resolution to modernism's problems, is explained. In this explanation, I propose an academic return to Chesterton as a serious and coherent counter-voice to the literature of canonical high modernism. At the heart of this thesis is the presupposition that the primal energy of modernism stems from the crisis of representation - the doubt that any reality, other than that which is subjective, can ever be known or represented. I suggest that this turn towards subjectivity exposed the modern world firstly to a kind of negative liberalism that tends to dehumanise politics, and secondly to an authoritarianism that enlarges the subjective to grand proportions in a bid to include absolutely everything into its ambit. Chesterton's thought counters such scepticism with his faith in the coherence and goodness of Being, and the organic participation of Mind and language within that Being. In his opposition to scepticism, Chesterton proposes an allegorical view of literature that has at its heart a belief in the priestly nature of writing and its ability to transfigure language into an allegory of reality. Not only is this a mere counter, but I argue that it becomes an attempt to reposition modernism itself within a scheme of Being, so as to re-configure its sceptical nature as a necessary pre- which offers a kind of sacred humanism as the new centre for a liberalism that is neither totalitarian nor relativist, but rather democratic in its proposal of an objective reality accessible to all people. In Chesterton’s vista, the artist is reduced from modernist master to servant of reality. My thesis works along the theoretical lines proposed by figures such as Erich Auerbach and Pericles Lewis in their analysis of mimesis and modernism in the Western canon, as well as, in particular, Lewis's theorising of the political nature of the modernist novel, in its bid to intervene upon the liberal crisis of subjectivity and thus pre-empt an organic totalitarianism. Overarching such theoretical underpinnings, however, is an analysis of Chesterton's deployment of Thomas Aquinas, and the way in which Chesterton approaches Thomism as the philosophical means by which he attempts to unite the literal graphics of writing with metaphysical reality. In so doing, this dissertation argues that Chesterton charts a way beyond both modernism and anti-modernism toward a new kind of literary sublimity that is able to incarnate objective reality