“Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing”

Though the cross-medium modern style advocated by Herbert Read and Stephen Spender aimed to bring good design to political as well as aesthetic structures, the Ministry of Information mobilized modernist rhetoric for propaganda during World War II. British authors such as Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas scripted films promoting the “new Britain” to be achieved through architecture-led revolution, yet the politicization of style and wartime fears of double agents meant that Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, and Christopher Isherwood turned the intense focus on style to their own work. Bowen used the “swastika arms of passage leading to nothing” of the mock-Tudor Holme Dene to scrutinize her memory-laden, late modernist writing, while Orwell and Isherwood directed their attention to streamlined glass and steel structures to contemplate the potential duplicity of their seemingly candid vernacular style.

Waugh, Betjeman, Lewis, and the Missed Future of Modernism

World War I has long been considered literary modernism’s defining historical event, a catastrophe that changed avant-garde optimism into postwar pessimism and fragmentation; however, the utopian rhetoric of post-World War I architecture, along with writers’ enthusiastic elaboration of that rhetoric through architectural criticism, undermines any neat division. Instead, this chapter establishes a late 1920s and 1930s tendency to identify in hindsight a wartime rupture between the national future and the modernist future, as literary and architectural cooperation began to dissolve. Amid the rise of architectural modernism in Britain, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Wyndham Lewis scrutinized the cultural integration of modernist forms. While Waugh and Betjeman increasingly emphasized modernist architecture’s inability to provide a lasting social or physical structure for the nation, Lewis rued the perceived cooption of modernism by leftist, materialist movements and instead promoted the values of “extreme modernism.”

Planning for War and Peace

After modernism transformed from rhetoric to reality through state-sponsored reconstruction, postwar planning brought new literary formulations of the dystopian. By absorbing the conventions of planning genres into their own work, John Betjeman, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh turned those genres against themselves: they portray a dehumanization perpetrated by the architecture that had been billed as the new “humanism” for the postwar world. Betjeman relied on parody in his poetry and anti-planning films, whereas Orwell and Waugh—despite their vast political differences—both envisioned a Britain that was less democratic in the wake of Labour Party–led reform. Through their counter-representations of the postwar future, they show the technocratic state and modernist functionalism to be fundamentally irrational; planning for peace may instead be planning for more war.

Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism

Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and rhetoric of the modern movement. While his brother Julian sponsored modernist animal housing at the Regent’s Park and Whipsnade Zoos as part of his efforts to imagine a more egalitarian Britain, Aldous reconfigured the structuring role of the household in the novel. His foundational dystopian narrative, Brave New World, merges fiction and criticism, as Huxley stages debates between literary advocates and a World Controller. What emerges is a politics of medium, whereby literature serves as a vehicle for liberalism. Against the uniformity and “over-organization” of architectural modernism, Huxley demonstrates the capaciousness and flexibility of the novel as a genre.

Epilogue: Modernist Afterlives

While J.G. Ballard has been treated as a leading postmodernist, his dystopian fiction can best be understood in the mid-century architectural context of Huxley’s and Orwell’s pioneering narratives. Accordingly, the temporality of Ballard’s novels, with their “future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted,” aligns with Ballard’s interest in the ruins of “modernism of the heroic period”: a prewar utopianism irreparably compromised by the concrete and steel martial architecture of World War II. Ballard suggests that the postwar modern movement, rather than simply relying on war energies, produced structures whose very forms channel violence; state violence and interpersonal violence are inseparable. In Ballard’s narratives of buildings that outlive their makers, the new architecture portends extinction rather than new expressions of humanism. Through this architectural death drive, Ballard portrays modernism itself as a haunting presence, hovering over postwar literature as well as the postwar nation.

Introduction

While the city has been at the center of literary modernist studies through such influential formulations as Raymond Williams’s “metropolitan forms of perception,” the influence of architectural modernism has received comparatively little attention. Far from a lagging branch of the modern movement, architecture and design instigated one of the defining divides in British literary modernism, between Vorticism and Bloomsbury. At a time when Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were just starting their careers, Wyndham Lewis and Roger Fry formulated rival utopias, to be achieved through an architecture and design-driven mass modernism. These debates culminated in D. H. Lawrence’s end-of-life call to “Pull down my native village to the last brick” and use modernist planning to “[m]ake a new England.” The conflation of creation and violent destruction initially inspired members of the Auden Group but ultimately caused many mid-century authors to become wary of uniting aesthetic revolution with political revolution.