Amardeep Singh
Lehigh University
Introduction: English 385. Fall 2001
"You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ a
heap of broken images"
--T.S.
Eliot
“We can only see ourselves as outlines, cadaverous,
sculpturesque.”
--Virginia
Woolf
“On or about December 1910 human character changed.”
--Virginia
Woolf
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." (George Orwell, 1940)
There was a time when
'British modernism' referred to five of six European authors and about 30 years
of time (1910-1940). These were the accepted "great" writers of the
period, and whatever modernism was --
past tense since this narrow conception of the "modernist" era only
emerged in the academy in the 1960s -- one assumed, could be derived from a
reading of the ‘big six’: Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Yeats, Woolf, and maybe
Lawrence. No one seemed particularly bothered by the fact that Eliot was an
American and that Joyce and Yeats were Irish, and at times wrote bitterly about
English colonialism. Why is it therefore still "British"? Nor were
many critics troubled by the fact that these five or six writers really are
very different from one another, both philosophically and formally. First, in
terms of style: some of the canonical writers use “stream of
consciousness," some use radical syntax and populate their writings with
neologisms and snippets of various languages. But others write much more conventionally.
Both Woolf and Lawrence wrote novels -- radical novels, rather unlike any
people had written previously -- but still decidedly novels, with complete sentences, with conventional grammar,
semi-conventional characterization and plot, etc. If modernism is whatever
Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Yeats, and Woolf are, what would that be exactly?
Secondly, the matter of
theme. Many modernist writers focus on personal alienation -- from tradition and history, from family life,
including heterosexual norms & values, as well as from consumer
culture. In terms of theme, we might say that modernists are intentionally,
perhaps even revolutionarily, rude: they write manifestoes, are
perpetually intoxicated (Freud: cocaine; Joyce: booze), and sleep with whomever
they want to, boy or girl. These are the best-known attributes of modernism in
form and in theory, but even this very limited group of authors did not express
alienation consistently in their writing. T.S. Eliot became a devout Catholic
mid-way through his career. Yeats was deeply interested in eastern mystical
traditions like Theosophy. And Pound became a fascist, who ranted on
Mussolini’s radio stations about the degeneration of Europe before being,
eventully, institutionalized. And Woolf also struggled with mental illness,
though never quite as publicly. What do these different trajectories have in
common, if anything?
If the conventional approach
is to look at the Big Six (authors) and define modernism as whatever it is that
they are, a goal of this course is to define modernism from the opposite
direction. I would like us to try and define modernism, first, from its
historical context -- modernism in twentieth century world culture, responding
to World War I and other historical events and processes -- as well as from its
philosophical and formal principles. This isn’t something we will talk about
every day; indeed, my primary interest on any given day is in talking about the
literature at hand – reading closely, whether or not our discussions have
anything to do with “modernism”. But from time to time, and certainly at the
end, it is something I’d like us to come back to.
My instinct is that the fact
that there is a multiplicity of approaches to modernism is a good thing, an
interesting mess. However, if there is one approach to reading that I am
opposed to, or if not actively opposed at least pointedly not interested
in, it is the approach to literature that reads everything in terms of archetypes.
In archetypal reading, every character is a version – a retelling – of a single
primordial story that has been told over and over again, and must continue to
be told by writers in the present moment. In this mode of reading, there are a
limited number of stock characters or narrative possibilities open to us, and
we must repeat them, perhaps with small variations, indefinitely. Many
archetypalist readings, especially of modernist texts, are especially dependent
on language derived from rather crude readings of Freud and Jung. Responding to
Freud, people often look for the Oedipal conflicts and anxieties (an alienation
from the father that is also a desire to replace him). Responding to Jung,
literature is a way of accessing our collective unconscious; we can see traces
of ancient histories even in modern texts. People who read, for instance,
Joyce’s Ulysses this way tend to emphasize the parallels to the Odyssey
over the myriad aspects of the text that seem to have nothing to do with Homer
or ancient Greece. In a gentle form, archetypal reading can remind us
(productively) to think about history – there’s a precedent for just about
every apparently original idea out there. But in its extreme form, archetypes
chains writers (and readers) to tradition in a way that is entirely unhealthy.
As if we are trapped in TV land, and everything new must be a version of
something that came before. All plots and devices must be adaptable to the
sit-com format – deadening.
I
have been suggesting that the connections between and among the canonical
modernist writers is one we might question, and indeed, rather than pull these
various writers too closely together, a goal of this course is to pull them
apart – find out what makes these texts unique and different from one another.
So you might be wondering, why even use the term “modernist” if it creates so
many problems, and if it seems inadequately represent the true variety of
spirit and style of all of the important writing of the time? In fact, I
am not that attached to the term “modernist.” For now, it is an open term; its
definition will evolve as the course develops. Whatever term or terms people
decide to use to describe literature of the early twentieth century, the
language we choose should be there to assist us in understanding the literature
as well as the period, rather than the other way around.
The only consistent rule I
have used in designing the syllabus for this class is that all of the texts
here are amazing pieces of writing. Otherwise, I have had to be somewhat
arbitrary. In some cases I’ve had to stay away from key texts (such as Pound’s Cantos;
Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake) for purposes of
manageability. And even though I believe that some texts from the latter
nineteenth century belong firmly alongside the great novels of the early
twentieth (and there are a number of texts from after 1945 that might also
fit), I have generally limited the chronology to 1900-1945.
With only one exception, I
have focused on writers that seem to belong in a rough configuration of the
“British.” This includes T.S. Eliot and Joyce, but it also includes colonial
subjects like Mulk Raj Anand and Rabindranath Tagore. “British” then refers to
writers of any nationality who wrote in Great Britain, or writers from British
colonies. The exception I should mention is Aime Cesaire, a Francophone writer
from Martinique, whose early surrealist poetry is so important, and yet so
widely overlooked, that I felt it necessary to include him despite the
linguistic and historical differences entailed.
The first consequence of a
revisionist approach to the concept of "modernism" such as the one I
have been outlining is that the canon of relevant authors explodes. Let us do
away with the ‘Big Six’; in fact there were dozens
(hundreds) of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and
architects who were engaged in serious literary and aesthetic experimentation
in England in Europe more broadly, and even outside of Europe. As importantly,
upon actually reading, for instance, The Waste Land or Ulysses, one sees immediately that Eliot and Joyce are themselves
incorporating many outside sources (or 'intertexts') into their high modernist
"masterpieces" (Are they even masterpieces? Perhaps we might think of
them are merely brilliant experiments -- "No more
masterpieces!" the French surrealist Antonin Artaud once said -- I think I
agree). To be quite radical, we could say that writers like Eliot and Joyce are
not so much 'authors' in the conventional sense, as collage artists. What would be the implications of this
reconceptualization?
A side point: some recent
biographies of writers like Joyce and the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald
have used their personal correspondence to reveal the remarkable extent to
which both writers plagiarized their wives in designing their women
characters. What might this do to our conception of their unique authorship?
Should the author of The Great Gatsby now be given as Scott & Zelda
Fitzgerald???
In keeping with the
anti-masterpiece line of thought, this course approaches modernism not as a
very limited canon of high literary texts, but as a series of textual,
cultural, and philosophical explosions. The texts in this course are all
radical, and they do all signify 'modernist', but they do so in ways that are
highly varied. The emphasis is on reading in the interest of drawing
connections between and among different authors and events, as well as on
learning about the transformations occurring in British (and to an extent,
world) culture between 1900 and 1945.
The
formal inventions of modernism, primarily stream of consciousness writing and
the growing emphasis on abstraction, are closely intertwined with modernism's
social and philosophical themes. Some of the most important of these I have
begun to allude to: the unraveling of social boundaries and the alienation of
the subject; the crises produced by industrialization, capitalism, and the
mechanization of war, and the intense sense of spatial displacement produced by
imperialism.
I might end with a word
about the title of the course. The course is called 'The End(s) of the Human'
because an overriding modernist
theme, present in all of the texts we will study, is the collapse (or
explosion) of established Renaissance (and Enlightenment) ideas of the 'human'.
If the greatest achievement of Renaissance art was the discovery of perspective
and depth of field, it was used not to represent architecture and space so much
as the form of the human body. And it is this form that seems to have vanished
in the world-view of the modernists. If Da Vinci thought it was extremely important,
an act of grandeur, to figure the human body in three-dimensional perfection,
as a concrete object in time and space, Picasso looked at the people posing for
him (often, interestingly women) and thought of jumbling up bodies with their
backgrounds, imagining them from multiple perspectives. Modernism in painting
was partly a fad, but it also represented a new fascination with abstraction,
a fascination that I see everywhere in the literature of this course.
There is no more “human”:
neither as a flesh-and-blood entity (the machines and robots take over), nor as
the center of the 'civilized' world ('savages' and women take over), nor as the
autonomous individual (individuals become part of faceless humanity; ownership
and authorship dissolve into mass collectivities).