Anarchism Is Not Enough

by Laura Riding, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Lisa Samuels (Editor)

Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson.

Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.

Genres: Poetry, Theory, Nonfiction, Literature, Essays, Philosophy, Politics

356 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Laura (Riding) Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.

1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson

She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first several chapters are serious fun; the next several, which would include "The Corpus" and the pieces on poetry's relationship to the pastoral arts of music and painting, are mischievously earnest, as they lead to the astounding "Jocasta," in which Riding attempts to create a mythological person (Oedipus's wife/mother) in her consciousness of the "collective real" in Stein's "everybody writing the modern composition" and the "individual un-real," belonging "to childish, democratic mass-art" as well as to "the individual, non-physical, non-collective unreal." In short, then, "Jocasta" is a person of the imaginal drama of the Psyche. "Think of Freud if he had had a Jocasta complex!" Robert Duncan hectored a group of poets at Boulder in 1976. "Where would we be then?" Here's where we find out.

[Jacob Wren]

Laura Riding writes:


Plainly the only problem is to avoid the love of lost identity which drives so many clever people to hold difficult points of view – by difficult I mean big, hungry, religious points of view which absorb their personality. I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold themselves away when I do not wish to think.




.

[Dan Kugler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Genius. The best book you don't know about. A brilliant exercise in creative and critical (crazy) thinking.

[Bren]

not a little mesmerizing in how correct and wrongheaded she can be at the same time. idiosyncratic and refreshing in the way the best criticism of pound or olson is, only she goes to greater lengths than either and unlike most of her contemporaries is attempting a complete upheaval of poetic (and, as follows for her, civilizational) tradition. like pound shes also definitely a little racist, and homophobic, though i dont know enough abt her later career to know if those opinions shifted. her main idea here is almost predictive of the nouveau roman, centering on her concept of the 'individual-unreal', where societal/collective aspects are reduced and the language involved supersedes (emphatically not a contradiction) the typical use. its an aesthetic of reduction, draining meaning from words, very ahead of her time and very interesting

[Hannah Gadbois · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Corpus, in making categorical demands upon the individual, thus limits the ways in which works may be conceived and presented. These demands become the only ‘inspiration’ countenanced, and theoretically all creative supply has its source in them. This seems a fairly plausible view of the status of the arts and sciences in human society. The occurrence of a supply independent of Corpus demands, its possibility or presence, is a question that the social limitations of our critical language prevent us from raising with any degree of humane intelligibility. We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.”

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I actually didn't finish this book because it was dull and it seemed like she was just rambling nonsense. I picked the book up thinking it was political, but it turned out to be mostly criticism of writing. I was unfamiliar with Laura Riding, so reading the introduction was interesting and I learned a bit about her, but I did not enjoy what I read of this book.

[steve smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

definitely a difficult book by a difficult writer...
BUT
Worth it. I'm aspiring to re-read this 20 years after my first reading with a whole new phase-of-life perspective (from 40's to 60s).

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know whether to call the book challenging or baffling. At the moment I can appreciate reading a book I have to really work at. One of the essays begins with this:

"Language is a form of laziness; the word is a compromise between that it is possible to express and what it is not possible to express. That is, expression itself is a form of laziness. The cause of expression is incomplete powers of understanding and communication: unevenly distributed intelligence. Language does not attempt to affect this distribution; it accepts the inequality and makes possible a mathematical intercourse between the degrees of intelligence occurring in an average range. The degrees of intelligence at each extreme are thus naturally neglected: and yet they are obviously the most important."