Michelle Weinroth
Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity, and the Rhetoric of Dissent
Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996. Pp. 302. $55.00
Reviewed by Leon Surette

Reclaiming William Morris is dedicated to the author’s father, “who combined the rationalism and romanticism of the Communist intellectual,” and to her young son. One would not normally begin a book review with the dedication, but this dedication speaks volumes. As learned and sophisticated as this study is, it is clearly driven by an intimate engagement with the fortunes of British Communism.

The study is divided into an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter articulates a theory of propaganda. The next chapter applies the theory to Stanley Baldwin’s 1934 speech, inaugurating the centenary celebrations of William Morris’s birth. The next three apply it to R. Page Arnot’s response to Baldwin in the pamphlet William Morris: A Vindication. The penultimate chapter prints and discusses Jack Lindsay’s 1936 poem “not english? A Reminder for May Day,” and the last chapter analyzes a political address of 1951 by E. P. Thompson entitled “William Morris and the Moral Issues To-Day.” None of these works are well known to either literary scholars or philosophers of aesthetics-the audience towards which the book appears to be pitched. Weinroth has two objectives: to present a history of English Communism through the lens of the management of the reputation of William Morris; and to articulate a theory of rhetorical strategies employed in propagandistic writing. The theory is intricate and subtle, but it is deployed to justify a disappointingly primitive taxonomy-the mere dichotomy into the rhetoric of consensus and the rhetoric of dissent.

I was interested in reviewing this book to learn more about William Morris, whom I thought of as an English conservative and political radical in the tradition of Carlyle and Ruskin. As a literary scholar with an interest in the relationship between literature, political ideology, and economic theory, I have perhaps more reason to be well informed about Morris’s ideological posture than most-though Morris is generally consigned to the Victorians, and my research interests are twentieth century.

From the perspective of a literary scholar, the most interesting aspect of Reclaiming William Morris is the revelation that he was in fact a Communist in the uncontroversial sense that he endorsed the theories and political program of Marx and Engels-older contemporaries of his. Indeed he declared himself a Communist and attended the Communist International in Paris in 1889. This fact about Morris has been successfully occluded by standard scholarly opinion, which continues to portray him as a backward-looking social reformer of the G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc type. A cursory glance at any handbook, anthology, or literary encyclopedia will confirm that Morris’s Communism has been almost entirely erased from the institutional memory. More detailed studies do not ignore it, but explain away his Communism as an “aberration.” William Morris: A Vindication gives a tantalizing glimpse at the strategies of the conservative recuperation of Morris’s reputation.

But the history of reputation formation is only of marginal interest for Weinroth, whose primary concern is to generate a general theory of propagandistic writing. She grounds her theory in the Kantian distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. For Kant the former is “bounded,” and the latter “unbounded,” and in neither case does the experience produce knowledge, since the content of the experience cannot be subsumed under a concept. Weinroth’s analysis concentrates on “the discursive poetics of propaganda,” whose effect is to “induce holistic, conceptless perceptions of reality.” That is to say, propaganda induces a state in its audience equivalent to that which Kant says we experience in the presence of either the beautiful or the sublime. Weinroth makes a very large claim for the import of her theory, claiming that this feature of propaganda is an “irreducible feature of human epistemology, indeed the very irrational matrix from which political discourse gains its consensual power” (19).

Her starting point is Terry Eagleton’s assertion that bourgeois capitalist political rhetoric is dominated by appeals to the beautiful, while Communist rhetoric appeals to the sublime. The Kantian distinction is, thus, crucial to the argument. Assigning beauty to bourgeois rhetoric thus categorizes it with boundaries, with the safe and limited; Communist rhetoric, on the other hand-like the sublime-appeals to the awesome and infinite. This can be seen to be dangerous and open-ended. Although Weinroth makes case with dense and intricate arguments, I must say that I was not persuaded that as a theory it does much more than underpin a truism. Of course, defenders of the status quo will stroke their audience, and of course, subversive-or “dissenting,” as she calls them-rhetoricians will bestir and alarm them.

From the perspective of literary-as opposed to aesthetic-theory, the works selected are hardly adequate to give the theory any credible empirical support. Four works hardly constitute a sound empirical base for any sort of theory. But these four works do not qualify as exemplary or classic instances of the propagandists art. They are obscure and marginal works, by virtually unknown authors. They are selected for their centrality to the history of Communism in England. And Weinroth’s analysis of the role that sentimental English pastoral­ism plays in these works is fascinating. We find that Baldwin trots out “Englishness” to praise the non-Communist Morris in 1934-and is scorned by Arnot for doing so. But by the 1950s E. P. Thompson is appealing to exactly the same sentiments so as to praise Morris for his prophetic resistance to crass, un-English American imperialism. But none of this much strengthens her larger, philosophical argument.

It is difficult to see that Weinroth’s application of Eagleton’s aperçu takes us much further than that. But it may be that I am too committed to safe, bourgeois, limited beauty to fully appreciate the vertiginous pleasures of dissenting rhetoric. Though I remain unpersuaded that the theory offers much illumination or insight, Weinroth does not permit her bifurcation of rhetorical strategies to degenerate into a simple contrast of admirable Communist and deplorable capitalist propaganda. In fact, one central point she makes is that both varieties are duplicitous, misleading, and manipulative. However, this intellectual honesty is somewhat vitiated for me by her apparent acceptance of the reflexive axiom that these are the inescapable properties of all discourse!

I’m not sure what audience this book will find. It has buried within it a valuable and informative account of English Communism, but it is organized so as to advance a general theory of propaganda, which I find weakly supported, and of dubious utility-though carefully and vigorously advanced. I have one quibble with the presentation: a book of this density ought to have an index that is both thorough and analytical; unhappily, the index is not very thorough and is not at all analytical.