“One of Those Stupendous Mornings of Human Thought”: Ford’s Cycles of Literary History

Ford Madox Ford has long occupied a transitional place in literary history. As Sam Trainor writes, “Ford is not merely a writer in transition, but a writer of, about and via transition” (86).¹ The first writer to assert this positioning was Ford himself: memoirs like Ancient Lights (1911) look back to the Victorians of his youth; his works on Impressionism (“On Impressionism,” 1914; Joseph Conrad, 1924) portray him at work alongside Henry James and Joseph Conrad; and his editing of the English Review (1910) and transatlantic review (1924) puts him at the center of Modernism, that new era that promoted its own novelty more than any other, best encapsulated by Ford’s friend Ezra Pound when he told his generation to “Make It New!”²

Ford’s other writings might also be called historically transitional, in the specific sense of capturing moments when one era seems to give way to another. The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–10) charts the emergence of the modern nation state and political professionalization against a receding feudal backdrop; Parade’s End (1924–28) sees the birth of the postwar world that’s had enough with outdated Victorian mores; and Provence (1935) critiques industrialism by inviting a new era based on local production and consumption. Yet Provence calls for a rebirth, not new formulations; a return to the past, not a transition into an entirely new period. Like Pound’s call for innovation that, in his case, involved a poetics of historical documentation and engagement, modernist impulses often used the old to Make it New. Thus, we might ask if Ford sees his own era as a unique one—transitioning into an unknown future—or if he believes instead that there’s nothing new under the sun. For Ford was not only a chronicler of his own literary era(s), but a theorizer and narrator of literary periodization, organizing a cultural heritage in The English Novel (1929) and The March of Literature (1938), two texts that, as Angus Wrenn has recently noted, have received scant attention from critics on Ford (Wrenn 316). The latter, like most large-scale literary histories, is full of announcements of new eras, but how linear he sees literary progress is open to debate.

The very concept of being witness to the dawn of a new era is a modern one, maybe even a modernist one. When the French Revolution declared the start of Year One, it ushered in a new way of thinking about time and history, one marked by self-consciousness, and by new possibilities, both productive and terrifying. This spirit animated industry, technology, politics, and, of course, a wider European culture, and modernist experimenters took such disruptions as both subject and formal modeling for their works. As Andrzej Gąsiorek writes, Ford “explores modernity’s impact on art and literature. Anxiety and nostalgia vie with excitement and exhilaration; modernity seems to represent both a frightening rupture with a familiar past and a welcome release into new possibilities” (5). For Gąsiorek, “Ford does identify a socio-cultural break with the past and he does believe that a new kind of writing is required if literature is to do justice to a transformed world” (4), and in The English Novel, Ford warns that modernity threatens to “make a cleavage between the world cosmos of to-day and that of all preceding ages such as no modern inventions and researches of the material world have operated” (Ford, English Novel 16). Here “cleavage” defines cultural history by its breaks, and such language saturates Ford’s oeuvre: In A Man Could Stand Up — (1926), for example, the war is “a crack across the table of History” (Ford, A Man 17). Yet, in his 1913 book on Henry James, “I write a little as a black Papist and, for what it is worth, a Tory mad about historic continuity” (Ford, Henry James 103). So is Ford the poet of historical continuity, or a modernist compelled to illustrate the cracks that fissure cultural history?

That question might prompt further ones: does cultural growth, for Ford, depend upon returning to a past, a renaissance in the true sense, or, is what is so unique about the present its intensification of previous eras, its use, for example, of the methods of Flaubert to propel further experiments into the future to Make it New? As Gąsiorek persuasively demonstrates, Ford “doesn’t try to step outside traditions altogether; he traces the lineaments of a symptomatically modern tradition within which he situates his own work” (5). So, if Ford sees his own literary practice as neither antithetical to the past, nor traditionally bound to established literary practices, how does he conceive of his own relationship to cultural traditions, transitions and innovations? More specifically, as I will pursue, how does he periodize literary developments? I will argue that for Ford, literary historical narratives sometimes take linear shapes that validate his own writerly practices. This mode dominates The English Novel, which draws a temporal line behind his own literary Impressionism, narrating a steady development of novelistic technique that ends with the present and Ford-as-stylist. Yet in the later The March of Literature, he recourses to a model of literary history that downplays the importance of both Impressionism specifically and Modernism in general, instead depicting such concepts as already worked through centuries ago. For late Ford, literary qualities, like empires, rise and fall, resisting linear shape, and as a result this second effort at literary history relies on circularity.

While such themes often dominate scholarly attempts to define or situate cultural modernism,³ Ford’s very suggestion that modernism itself is simply a local variant of a recurring process might prompt us to widen our scope for theoretical approaches. Medievalist Hans Robert Jauss approached similar topics in much of his work on cultural traditions and transitions, and in “Modernity and Literary Tradition” argued that most cultural histories did not proceed linearly or teleologically but instead operated either cyclically or typologically. Cyclical narratives posit a new era marking a break with the past: the dawn of a new age in the specific sense of dawn as a repeated and predictable phenomenon. Figures of the Renaissance “saw in the present-day flourishing of learning and the arts the revival of antiquity’s lost grandeur” and “there appeared on the heels of the light metaphor the cyclical periodization of history” (Jauss 342). This classical light contrasts with the perceived darkness of what emerging Renaissance humanists disparaged as “Gothic.” Like Pound, they made it new by turning to the past, rejecting the barbarisms of the immediately preceding era by reclaiming something far older. Ford’s own ambivalence to his Victorian forebears can likewise feel revolutionary in the strict sense, a turn away from the immediate past and back towards cultural ideals once cherished.

Typological narratives, by contrast, see an historical continuum where eras can build upon—not just replicate or return to—previous ones. Jauss looks to the twelfth-century moderni, “the men of now,” as his example, ecclesiastical elites who wanted to reform culture and society by utilizing the past:

Ford’s relationship to literary Impressionism often feels typological, as he repeatedly cast James, Conrad, and Ford himself as the “dwarves” perched upon the shoulders of giant Gustave Flaubert, fulfilling the aesthetic ideals announced in the French master’s letters and practiced in his novels.⁴ Fredric Jameson uses Jauss’s concepts to theorize periodization in A Singular Modernity (2002), arguing that both of Jauss’s models feature returns and reject simple teleological views of history. For Jameson the cyclical model “is better described as an awareness of history invested in the feeling of a radical break,” whereas the “‘typological’ form consists rather in the attention to a whole period, and the sense that our (‘modern’) period is somehow analogous to this or that period in the past” (Jameson 21). We could apply this to modernist visions of cultural change, for example T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” (1923) anxiously narrates a break with previous literary modes, yet essays like “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) suggest modernism could (or should) be “analogous to” the Classical era that preceded Romanticism, of which he took a dim view. The stress in the essay is less on the breaking point—less on the moment of cleavage or transition in or out of any era—and more on what comes to define an era, what comes to distinguish, in retrospect, the Classical from Romantic, or the Romantic from the Modern.

Jameson argues that every time we deploy the term “modern” or any of its variations we imply periodization, either cyclically or typologically, and his first “law” of modernity is “1. We cannot not periodize” (29).⁵ Jameson is not enthusiastic about his discovery, hence his couched double negative (and compare it to his “Always historicize!” that raucously introduced The Political Unconscious in 1981), as periodization usually “abuses” history (28).

Ford, like the rest of us, and for better or for worse, cannot not periodize, and the remaining question is simply how, how does he organize his historical eras of literary development, and does he see cultural history as defined by breakages, typological continuities, or teleological straight lines? As I’ve suggested, we can see Ford as an historian of deep traditions. Think of the presence of the eighteenth century in Parade’s End: that was an era upon whose shoulders A Man Could Stand Up. But that same volume also announces a series of ruptures and breaks, painting the dawning of new eras of the postwar world indicated by Tietjens’ emergence from trench mud in scenes read by most critics as a symbolic rebirth.⁶

The English Novel and The March of Literature are the places where Ford most assiduously periodizes literary history, but it is worth first considering some prewar writings where he articulates his aesthetic principles, as they vary little across his lifetime. Before the war, Ford wrote a series of articles under the banner “The Critical Attitude,” adopting the Arnoldian position that “so many small things crave for our attention that it has become almost impossible to see any pattern in the carpet. We may contemplate life steadily enough to-day: it is impossible to see it whole” (Ford, Critical Attitude 28).⁷ Ford then champions writers who intuit this and respond by prioritizing precision above all else when it comes to rendering our lived experience: “the nearer the record comes to registering the truth, and to so rendering it as to make it assimilable by the human apprehension, the more near it comes to being an historical expression, the more near it comes to being an historic event itself” (31). Ford will often dub this principle “Impressionism,” especially in his essay “On Impressionism” and his book on Joseph Conrad. But none of these early essays organize literary texts via narrative, they are analytic. Ford is, of course, writing Impressionist works of narrative fiction simultaneously, but it is only in his last decade that he utilizes the tools of literary history to advocate for his preferred cultural practices and explore periodization.⁸

The English Novel, then, tells the story of Impressionism as much as it analyzes it. Ford still maintains his Arnoldian notions of the role of culture: “It is, in short, unbearable to exist without some view of life as a whole, for one finds oneself daily in predicaments in which some sort of a pointer is absolutely necessary” (English Novel 12). This crisis puts extra pressure on culture, the “sort of pointer,” and for Ford here specifically the novel which, more than poetry, is capable, so he argues, of the precision and narrativity necessary to render life as it feels. Ford was saying the same thing before the war, yet now feels compelled to offer not just a diagnosis but rather a narrative that traces the influences that have shaped English fiction, especially the practice of English-language Impressionism in James, Conrad, and Ford himself.

The shape of his narrative is theorized in the book’s opening moments, when he compares how simple it is to write forward-moving narratives of English political history, against the difficulties of writing English literary history. Traditional English history is “easy,” Ford argues:

Ford gives us leave to bracket any truth claims of English “Whig” progressivism, and just think about the shape of English historical narratives. The “story” is linear and progressive, neither cyclical nor typological. English history does not return to the Magna Carta, it springs from it, the Magna Carta was a “precedent” that gives way to further ones.

The history of English literature is different, and “difficult.” There is no “pattern” or broadening:

English literary history does not lend itself to an easy shape. The tradition seems incoherent, thus the necessity of The English Novel to offer some clarity.

Ford’s solution to this cultural jumble is quite simple: to weave the French tradition into the English, tracing the tidal flow of literary experimentation. The English Novel, then, looks to France as much as England, the title maybe Ford’s joke at how narrowly English readers have conceived of their own tradition. Ford stresses the debts that good English fiction owes to the French, especially Flaubert, but also highlights the debts the French had owed to Jane Austen and Samuel Richardson. Thus, the problem is not that English literary culture has an incoherent history, rather, it is incoherent to think in narrowly English terms. Broadening the narrative scope alleviates the difficulties: the narrative stream flows smoothly and linearly, Richardson-Flaubert-Conrad, emptying out into the sea of the present, Ford himself. As a result The English Novel ends up just as progressive and teleological as any Whig history of English freedom. English and French writers keep adding to the technical toolkit of the novelist, building precedent upon precedent, until you end up with Ford Madox Ford.

Things are radically different less than a decade later when he turns to The March of Literature. One of his last works, it is a 900-page history of literature “from Confucius’s day to our own,” as its subtitle announces.⁹ Ford’s principles remain unaltered, Flaubert and Impressionism remain aesthetic touchstones, and it carries over his advocacy for heterogeneous cultures: “So civilizations spread themselves and the one modifies the other, England, as you might say, blessing the United States with her woolen goods, and the United States returning her Negro jazz melodies and syncopated turns of speech” (Ford, March 26). In instances like this, The March of Literature maintains the claims of The English Novel but broadens the scope beyond the English Channel.

Yet his narrative of literary history, his periodization, has radically altered, and not only in temporal or spatial scope. Narrative here takes on an even greater function. In The English Novel, the story simply incorporates French writers into an English framework to chart a series of cross-channel influences. By contrast, The March of Literature relies much more on a narrative apparatus to suggest arguments beyond the analytic ones explicitly stated. And, unlike the earlier literary narrative, this one is cyclical, neither linearly progressive nor typological. This cyclicality is abundantly evident, for example in his introduction to Dante:

Such “stupendous mornings” recur with the frequency of dawn itself: each era a new day with a new beginning but also an inevitable decline into darkness.

Ford theorizes this process several times. Early in the text he states that his goal is to portray

We might first ask to whom the pronoun “our” refers: in this text, it is sometimes “the West” at its broadest, but often more specifically the English or French speaking West (Ford’s treatment of non-Western cultures is interesting, not free from problematics but far from the dismissive attitude of most Western literary chroniclers of his day, and merits further research.) The passage presents a double metaphor of the Nile and the Silk Road that both empty into the Mediterranean region. Both metaphoric vehicles suggest linearity, no matter how wandering. Rivers and trade routes cease to exist if blocked or dammed up, and Ford repeatedly returns to “the unbroken chain of thought that is literature” (283). Yet even his arguments for this model of literary history are undercut by images of cyclicality:

Ford will allow local “eddies,” but the stream of culture encompasses all “humanity” and flows in only one direction. Yet the scene is staged at dawn. The river metaphor is undermined by the sunrise, linking this scene to the larger cyclical narrative structure that traces the rise and fall, not forward flow, of human literary achievement.¹⁰ Thus Angus Wrenn could characterize the text as an attempt at a “cumulative teleological progress” from antiquity to the present, but also insist that such a view “is hardly borne out by the work itself” (Wrenn 320).

This figurative conflict is never resolved, only continually tested throughout the narrative. If we take The March of Literature at its word, its title suggests a forward moving narrative of continuity, and this is consistent with many aspects of the text, as when he discusses the plays of Terence which imitated those of Menander, and “you see how extraordinarily the flame of civilization is carried from century to century, though imperial cities fall and the whole world crash in ruins” (Ford, March 196). Things “march” forward, the river flows.¹¹ All rivers end somewhere, and we have seen how the bi-cultural stream of The English Novel emptied into the delta of the present and the triumphant emergence of Impressionism. The March of Literature is not so teleological, anticlimactically ceasing as the march limps towards the twentieth century, a disquieting aspect of the text for some readers. Roger Poole lamented that the narrative ends so deflatedly, and asks, if Ford was such a champion of the Modernist greats, why did he “not present himself as being part of that illustrious group?” and “Why is the category of Modernism never discussed, never even mentioned?” (Poole 192). Poole answers these questions biographically: “I attribute this messiness, this poverty of inspiration, to the fact that Ford was old, ill, extremely lonely, and conscious of having failed in his larger scheme of things” (Fortunati 191). No doubt Ford was these things toward the end of his life, yet I will argue that The March of Literature ends as it does because of its radical vision of literary developments, one that pictures the shape of cultural history as cyclical, not linear.

If we push the metaphor of the river, Ford locates the Lake Victoria, the source of all literature, in prehistoric chanting:

Here are Ford’s first two dawns, the birth of verse, and the birth of prose. As in cosmic time, it’s possible to be both cyclical (the revolutions of days and years) and temporally linear or progressive (the accumulation of those days and years). Yet that’s not what Ford presents: the birth of verse and prose is not the “precedent to precedent” model as we saw in The English Novel, because humanity does not keep adding to the tools available to the writer: verse and prose remain our two literary formats. Thus, the historical model resists linearity, as he argues:

These cycles repeat, whether in poetry or prose, throughout this giant work, and the centrality of “returns” reveals the river metaphor to be inadequate to Ford’s own purposes. Instead, he continually stresses the back and forth, the ebb and flow, of literary style, more tidal than riverine. To switch metaphors yet again, Ford often moves between two poles: sometimes between technique and spontaneity, or between empirical observation and literariness, or, as in this passage, between artifice and naturalism:

Thus, literary history is, in one view, nothing more than the cycling of naturalism and “formalisms,” a process bound to produce revolutions, but not necessarily innovations. Given this model, can Ford believe in any new literary “precedents” since the dawn of recorded history?

Impressionism itself, for example, Ford’s lifelong project, has a cyclical history, an ebb and flow that does not begin with Gustave Flaubert but rather much earlier:

Two millennia later, Gibbon “must therefore, achieve a sort of impressionism” (626). “For just as was the case with Conrad, the ambition of Gibbon was, above all, to make you see.” Whereas in The English Novel everything leads up to Flaubert and then that spirit moves to England, in The March of Literature literary trends are more complex. Flaubert is the cyclical return of a literary quality not yet named until the nineteenth century, but no less operative for it. The Impressionists, then, are not so much innovators as rediscoverers, as their qualities have reemerged every few eras, sometimes in histories, sometimes in fiction. Thus, we witness an entirely different model of literary periodization from The English Novel, as The March of Literature no longer stages a teleological narrative that moves from “precedent to precedent.”

What is the cause of this cyclicality, what is the centripetal force of literary revolutions? W.B. Yeats, also sensing the recurrence of aesthetic standards, would argue in A Vision (1925) for mystical life cycles that wax and wane over two millennia. Ford’s vision of literary history is more enmeshed in political or social history, at one point insisting that the Battle of Sedan is crucial for understanding nineteenth-century literature (740). It is an earnest assertion, as the text thematizes the role of empires in literary developments. In any epic history of culture this is to be expected, as, for example, the rise and fall of Latin literature is so closely bound to the trajectory of the Roman Empire. Yet Ford is more persistent in arguing for the importance of imperial developments for culture:

Ford had long championed an international “Republic of Letters,” free from regional blinders and in pursuance of literary quality only.¹² But empires are also international, and in the above passage Ford posits not a Republic but an Imperial imagination. If one legacy of Gibbon is to see empires as bound to fall, then we might compare such an expectation to the narrative of the nation-state, which posits a mythical origin and then proceeds linearly into the future, never anticipating cessation. Thus, a cyclical vision of literary development has more in common with imperial than with national narratives, and that is precisely why Ford had an eventual “easy” time writing The English Novel once he brought in French literature: such a narrative replicated the “easy” nationalist Whig histories of England, even as the French texts foreclosed any nationalist tendencies.

Global developments in both politics and culture would never fit easily into such teleological narratives, but Ford is more aggressive than might be expected in his handling of empire and culture:

The dusty images of this passage evoke Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Gibbon’s saga of decline. Yet Ford’s vision is not as ironic as that of the poet or historian: empire, for Ford, is both culturally destructive and creative. Politically nothing is left but dust, but culturally the era lives on through the “tales of chants” that are all that survive. Thus, the cycles of empires and literary developments suggest an eventual end to them all, yet the literary products of any empire or any cultural trend “far outlive them” and accumulate.

In this valuation of empire, Ford is no apologist for his own. He had long held a dim view of Britain’s overseas dominance, was pro-Home Rule for Ireland, and even wrote that during the Boer War “I made one or two speeches in the interests neither of the Boer nor of Englishman, but of the African natives. To them it seemed to me—and it still seems so—the African continent belongs” (England 244). Yet imperialism, as Ford witnessed as a British subject, meant the contact, however violent, of disparate cultures, and just as he applauds the cultural fusion of English and French, “Negro” American and English, Chinese and Egyptian, etc., he will always posit the imperial point of contact as culturally productive. However, unlike imperial narratives of progress that see Europe bringing the “sacred flame of civilization” to dark places, Ford is more interested in the reverse process, the means by which the colonizers are culturally altered by their conquest:

The “civilizing process” here applies, not to the native peoples subjugated, but to the imperialists who, whether in triumph or defeat, return home altered and culturally enriched. If we bracket the ethics of Imperialism—and Ford’s position as a British subject who lived at the zenith of the empire needs further investigation—Ford clearly portrays imperialism as a force of cultural heterogeneity. Thus, an imperial nation is bound to be aesthetically innovative because of the amount of cultures it absorbs. Yet also bound to fall and fail: no empire can bear its own weight for too long, and the cultural cycles continue.

When Poole remarked that The March of Literature had so little to say about modernism, he compares that late text to the many Ford penned in defense of the literary innovations of the pre and postwar era. But Poole might also have expected Ford, as both theorizer and practitioner of Impressionism, to craft a narrative that leads to the ultimate triumph of modernism, be a literary Clement Greenberg, seeing all literature as marching towards the emancipation of the medium from representation. He laments that “the sense in which the ‘march’ has finally arrived at the sunny uplands where ‘Conscious Art’ has at last taken over from Realist amateurism is never established” (Poole 191). Poole is correct because that is not what Ford produced, whatever his original intentions. Ford had written to Pound about his “history of the world’s literature from Confucius to Gertrude [Stein], not to mention Joyce” (Ford, Letters 285). But instead of this teleological narrative of modernist triumph, Ford reveals—or maybe discovers through his process of research and writing—a concept like Impressionism to be as old as written history, as we have seen. And note below the interesting reference to Joyce in a discussion of Ford’s beloved Troubadours. Ford argues that their contributions to literature have been their seemingly endless formal innovations, and not their subject matter, which was flimsily built upon romantic love:

For Greenberg, Abstract Expressionism was the painterly equivalent of “absolute imaginative literature,” and could only emerge historically after the modernist break with representational realism (Manet and the Impressionists) and the deconstructions of Cubism, finally leading to Greenberg’s contemporary art scene where New York Abstract Expressionists operated at the culmination of centuries of pictorial freedom. But Ford detects such modernist freedoms in the Middle Ages, or possibly earlier. Ford is thus still an advocate for Modernism; he just does not think it modern at all. Just as Impressionism is at least 2500 years old, Conrad just a novelist in the Herodotus tradition, Joyce is just a novelist in the Troubadour tradition. How can anyone be expected to Make it New when everything has been done several times over? The radical cyclicality in Ford’s periodization precludes any true innovation, only rediscovery and accumulation.

The narrative principles of The March of Literature make it more open to subsequent literary and cultural developments, especially in contrast to Greenberg’s, whose model of artistic change cannot account for the return of representation in Andy Warhol or Cindy Sherman. Ford’s text would easily explain the reemergence of realism in the postmodern era, or Samuel Beckett’s minimalism as a response to the maximalisms of Joyce. How could literary history proceed otherwise? But Ford also anticipates the work of Ernst Robert Curtius, to whom Jauss spends much of his career responding. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953) was a landmark study of its subject matter, demonstrating the enduring power of styles and concepts across eras, so much so that periodization itself comes under suspicion. In his chapter on “Classicism,” he explores the relativity of terms like “ancients” and “moderns” throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages:

For Curtius the emergence of the specific word “modern” was not significant, as synonymous terms and concepts had already been in use for centuries. Thus, what we could now term a “modern” mindset has been a “constant phenomenon of literary history,” one that resurfaces with predictable cyclicality: precisely Ford’s argument regarding Herodotus and Impressionism, or the Troubadours and Joyce.

In response, Jauss anxiously asked, are we trapped in the “unrecognized or unacknowledged emulation” of previous modernists (Jauss 331)? He believed not, insisting that Baudelaire represented a radical, unprecedented break:

For example, Terrence’s impatience with Greek tradition might sound like Baudelaire’s dismissal of his own predecessors, yet the latter’s rejection of the weight of the past marks a fundamental break like no other, Jauss argues, a truly new cleavage in cultural history, and this can

Instead, the opposite of modernité is the enduring, or the “eternal.” So what Baudelaire—and Manet and Picasso and Stein—ultimately break from is not their Victorian ancient lights, but rather the timeless or eternal.

Such an argument might, appropriately enough, cycle us back to Ford’s earlier analytic diagnoses of modernity. In The English Novel he worried that the modern “sweeping away of the humaner classical letters in the interests of the applies sciences” will, as I have quoted, “make a cleavage between the world cosmos of to-day and that of all preceding ages such as no modern inventions and researches of the material world have operated” (Ford, English Novel 16). For Curtius, such a “cleavage” would be a cultural “constant,” but for Jauss a radical break. Ford’s entire oeuvre might resist any binary categorization, even single texts moving between linear and circular metaphors: as I have tried to argue, The English Novel is dominated by its will to establish a straight, albeit bi-national line of literary development that terminates in the Impressionism of Ford-as-novelist. The March of Literature may have set out to deploy this model on a global scale, but ends up as a text that dramatizes the circularity of literary developments and the recurrence of seemingly unique movements like Impressionism and Modernism.

Ford composed The March of Literature during the Spanish Civil War, the Stalinist Show Trials, the tail end of the global economic depression and the rearmament of Hitler’s Germany. His previous two works of nonfiction, Provence (1935) and The Great Trade Route (1937), both urge Western society to abandon massive industry and turn to local farming. For Ford, the multiple crises looming could only be settled peacefully by a rejection of the Industrial Revolution and a return to unalienated labor and consumption. “Provence” becomes Ford’s shorthand for these ideals.

Thus, when Ford considers the Troubadours in The March of Literature, we might wonder if he is staging them as a “literary constant” that he hopes to see return again, in which case his advocacy for the Provençal way of life might be tied to his cyclical notion of history. If the Troubadours anticipate Joyce, wouldn’t that make them modern, proto-modernist? And would that not evidence the possibility—even the inevitability—of a return to local agrarian values? Yet that’s not how Ford posits Provençal culture in his narrative history. Provence does not anticipate anything. Rather, it is a holdout against the worst aspects of modernity, a place that resists breaks, cleavages, cycles, or new eras. Provence has never lost touch, Ford argues, with the best of human culture: “There has been hardly an interruption” (Ford, March 196) between fourth century poets and today, and

And earlier in the text he writes,

Once again, Ford presents a stream, one he insists suffers no “discontinuity.” It “remained unbroken” and does not cycle back or break off, there is “no sudden cleavage and no sudden resurrection.” Provence is both intensely local—that is what Ford loves best about it—but also international, “Greek and Oriental,” “Gaul and Allemaign,” as in the best cultural moments where multiple cultures exchange ideas. And Provence is not even the origin of the quality he thinks of as Provençal! They sing “as they sang in the mists” of prehistory.

Thus, Provençal culture does not represent a break with its own past: there is never a new dawn in Provence because its sun never sets. Does it even make sense to speak of eras there? In Provence one does not have to periodize, apparently, and instead Ford sees “the backward and forward trend of civilisation—backwards and forwards through Provence—but always with that country as its hanging place, its shelter and its nourishment” (Provence 156). So the presence of Provençal literature in The March of Literature does not disrupt its model of cyclicality, because Provence is the center of the circle, the centripetal force of the whirlpool that generates cultural change. Provence never experiences a renaissance because it never passes away. It stays in place and the rest of the world revolves, cycles, around it.

It might be hard to assent to these concepts as literary-historical claims. Do global literary developments really revolve around Provençal culture? But Ford may have needed Provence, both as place and idea, because of where he found himself in history. We might recognize his anxiety, and his need for a cyclical vision of history that promises a return, as we stare into a new period, a new dawn of history—the Anthropocene—that seems to promise only environmental catastrophe if conceived teleologically. We have also begun looking to the past, to the other modes of living, other modes of production and consumption, and Ford’s return to local farming feels modern, fresh because of how it looks to the past.