Katharine Burdekin and Collective Speech: Politics, Chorus and Liturgy

Abstract

This paper explores the phenomenon of collective speech (or speaking in unison) in the fiction of Katharine Burdekin (1896–1963), focussing on The Rebel Passion (1929), Proud Man (1934) and Swastika Night (1937) (the latter two novels were initially published under the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’). Highlighting Burdekin’s abiding concern with religious rituals, it suggests that the political dimensions of Burdekin’s oeuvre can be profitably read in relation to a set of liturgical debates that go back to the English Reformation. The Book of Common Prayer, which features in some way in all three of these novels, proves a profitable site to focus questions about collective speech, its rituals seeming to model a kind of communal collectivity, but one that was imposed by political force. The negative connotations of collective speech are particularly evident in the Nazi liturgy at the heart of Swastika Night, which combines elements of the prayer book with features of the Nazi Thingspiele. Whereas Proud Man seemed to want to counter enforced rituals of collective belonging with a retooled ‘unselfish individualism’, both Swastika Night and The Rebel Passion seek to mobilise more positive forms of speaking in unison to counter dangerous conformity and authoritarianism. Burdekin even innovates a form of narration that can be referred to as ‘collective interior monologue’, as she explores the relationship between individual consciousness and collective belonging. The paper thus builds on the valuable scholarship of Elizabeth English, Daphne Patai, Glyn Salton-Cox, Adam Stock and Keith Williams, positioning Burdekin as an important and innovative novelist of ideas whose historical, religious and philosophical interests are unusually wide-ranging.

Keywords:

• Katharine Burdekin
• Women’s Writing
• Modernism
• Political Literature
• 1930s Literature
• Religion and Literature

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Clara Jones and Natasha Periyan for their advice on this paper and for organizing the symposium on ‘Interwar Women Writers: Politics, Citizenship, Style’ at King’s College London, 1 June 2018, where an earlier version of it was delivered. I also thank the participants on that day for their insightful comments, suggestions and questions, and Benjamin Kohlmann who kindly read and commented on a later draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fred Cummins has produced a valuable body of work on what he tends to call ‘joint speech’ or ‘synchronous speech’, though he is perhaps more concerned with the technical means by which joint speech is produced than its cultural import. See for example Cummins 2009; 2013a; 2013b; 2014.

2 Examples of press reporting of Thingspiele include the article by ‘A Correspondent’ in The Times in 1935 and the one by J.M.D.P. in the Manchester Guardian in 1937.

3 It seems highly likely that Burdekin had in mind Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146-1220), AKA Gerald of Wales. However The Rebel Passion’s present is ‘in the seventh year of the reign of King Stephen’, i.e. 1142: four years before Giraldus Cambrensis was born. Other historical figures from this milieu are found in the right place at the right time: for example Henry of Blois was indeed the Abbot of Glastonbury in 1142, and acts as a mentor to Burdekin’s fictional Giraldus. Giraldus Cambrensis was an important scholar and, unlike Burdekin’s protagonist, an ambitious courtier. If Burdekin’s choice of Giraldus as a name for her narrator is intended to provoke comparisons with Giraldus Cambrensis, these might merely serve to position Burdekin’s narrator as a certain kind of historian. Giraldus Cambrensis is credited with ‘an alert interest in the social patterns and behaviour of other peoples that can only be called ethnographic’ (Bartlett 2006).

4 While the Person and Giraldus are different kinds of character in various ways, they function similarly as narrators because they are so far displaced from the world of the story, and the resulting effect of defamiliarization is underlined by the fact that they frequently lack the specific vocabulary to describe it.