T. Hugh Crawford
Although they long predate the official emergence of Modernism proper, two American poems, both written within a few years of each other, in many ways embody the tensions and, ultimately, the direction of the arts and literature in the first part of the twentieth century. In “I like to see it lap the miles,” Emily Dickinson attempts to domesticate what was, for her historical moment, the radically transformative technology – the railroad, which brings a change in relation not just to space, but also to nature, and, perhaps most significantly, to time. Dickinson gently raises these questions: her train is obedient, docile, punctual, supercilious, and “licks the valley up” (Dickinson 1976: 286). And her trope is nothing if not inventive; comparing the train to a horse – a new form of transportation to an old, familiar one – is simultaneously absurd and apt. Still, one cannot help but sense that her attempt to clothe such a massive and distributed technological system in a rhetoric of the agrarian familiar is strained, if not a bit desperate. Dickinson’s train is completely domesticated, purely docile, and is even sung to a familiar tune: the old and comfortable hymn meter that characterizes her poetic form.
Walt Whitman, on the other hand, presents the reader with a profoundly different train, in part tricked out in operatic finery, but defined primarily by a simple articulation of its parts, perhaps an attempt to depict both its bulk and complexity. His poem, “To a Locomotive in Winter,” first published in 1876 (within a few years of the composition of Dickinson’s poem), includes the following list:
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels.
(Whitman 1996: 583)
It remains possible to see his approach as, following Dickinson, an attempt to domesticate the train, this time as yet another catalogue, similar to his listing of trees growing on his native continent, but what breaks out of this interpretation and through the poem itself is the sheer thisness of the locomotive, which seems to insist that it not be regarded as a horse, or a mythological force, or merely fodder for poetic idealism. Rather it is first and foremost a thing – a massively deployed collection of objects that must be taken on its own terms since there are no poetic resources to capture its modern essence.
From this perspective, Whitman and his locomotive are indeed the “type of the modern”: objective, material, productive of its own logic and necessary form, and perhaps above all, an aesthetic object in its own right. For a student of Modernism, it is difficult to read Whitman’s poem without calling to mind the industrial landscape paintings of Charles Sheeler or Charles Demuth, the technology photographs of Paul Strand, the industrial design of Raymond Loewy, or Hart Crane’s poetic tribute to one of the most massive single technological projects of its era – the Brooklyn Bridge.
Whitman’s train poem describes the first of a panoply of technologies that would achieve large-scale deployment in the first years of the twentieth century. Others include air travel (the Wright Flyer – 1903, Bleriot’s monoplane – 1907, and Zeppelins), networked communication technologies (telephone and radio), skyscrapers (the 1913 Woolworth Building in New York, 792 feet tall, built with a steel skeleton, and using high-speed elevators), and of course, automobiles (the first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908). In many ways the broad disposition of such massive technological systems makes the first decade of the twentieth century one of the most radically transformative periods in the history of the West. In the decade that followed, these very innovations produced the devastation of industrial warfare that was World War I. It is difficult not to see the art and culture that emerged in the West as an almost desperate reaction to these shifts. The chorus of calls for “the new”–for new artistic forms and an aesthetic to accommodate them – was an implicit rejection of an aesthetic based on a rhetoric of familiarity, and instead a recognition that this new disposition would, like Whitman’s train, have to be taken on its own terms.
This is not to claim that early twentieth-century technology determined artistic form, but rather to observe that such visible, material transformations, coupled with more broadly theoretical transformations in scientific practices (particularly in physics and the biological sciences) helped prompt a significant re-evaluation of most older cultural forms and helped produce a modern artistic practice and aesthetic sensibility that rooted around in older, often ignored, or forgotten forms (e.g., Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot) or attempted to forge the radically new (e.g., the music of George Antheil or the poetry of e.e. cummings).
Of increasing significance to poets, novelists, and artists in general were a series of conceptual changes. Crucial changes to cosmology came from the work of theoretical physicists – particularly Albert Einstein, whose Relativity: The Special and General Theory was published in 1920. Of equal importance were the transformations of biology, as a result of the adoption of germ theory, originally articulated in the latter part of the nineteenth century by Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and Joseph Lister. Medical practices changed along with the rationalizing of medical education on a scientific basis in the early decades of the twentieth century. Add to these the emergence of psychology and psychoanalysis as disciplines in their own right. The influence of William James and Sigmund Freud helped restructure many artists’ sense of narrative possibility and symbolic (as well as interpretive) cohesion.
Albert Einstein’s popular Relativity brought together his own high theoretical concepts with concrete examples that were the preoccupation of many of the denizens of the early twentieth century, combining a relativistic cosmology with careful explanations of the compression and dilation of time and space in the now-famous examples of the man-on-the-bank and the man-on-the-train. His examples served to link his new theoretical understanding of space and time to the equally new sense of space and efficiency permeating industrial life. Through Einstein’s metaphors, the labor practices of Henry Ford – along with the innovations promulgated by efficiency expert Fredrick Winslow Taylor as well as by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (wonderfully lampooned by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times) – were coupled with the more abstract ideas of a space/time continuum.
Among writers and artists, responses to (and theoretical understanding of) the particulars of Einstein’s theories were mixed at best (see Friedman and Donley 1989). One of the more sincere efforts was made by the American poet William Carlos Williams who, in response to Einstein’s relativity, argued that poetry be written with a variable foot – a relativistic measure that could respond to the compression and dilation of the poet’s thought. He describes this idea in “The Poem as a Field of Action”: “How can we accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, affecting our very conception of the heavens about us of which poets write so much, without incorporating its essential fact – the relativity of measurements – into our own category of activity: the poem?” (Williams 1969: 283).
The new physics probably affected art and culture most with the notion of the relativity of time. It is no accident that the two major works of philosophy published in the Modern period – Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality – take time as a significant philosophical question. Stephen Kern titles his study of Modernism The Culture of Time and Space (Kern 2003), and time truly became the playground of many writers. While it is difficult to find art that clearly depicted the nuances and implications of the new physics, many modern writers experimented with alternative experiences of time in an attempt to think through the broader implications of Einstein’s work, as well as the embodied experience of the multiple temporalities produced by broadly instantiated transportation systems and the complex temporal rhythms of modern industrial culture. Drawing on Einstein and Henri Bergson (as well as on insights derived from the emergence of cinema as a new art form), many novelists both explored and rebelled against the increasing rationalization (if not fetishization) of industrialized time.
For example, John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy deploys different narrative styles to mark out the different temporal experiences of modern life. Perhaps the classic novel addressing new notions of time remains Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway of 1925, which explores the lives of a number of post-war Londoners across the single day of Mrs. Dalloway’s dinner party. Each character experiences their own subjective dureé even as the world of the novel is regularly punctuated by the striking of public clocks, particularly Big Ben as it tolls the hours of Mrs. Dalloway’s day. The conceit of the single-day or circadian novel was explored by a number of high modernist writers including James Joyce in Ulysses of 1922, and later, in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano of 1947. Each writer worked through the experience of time outside the tight regulation of industrial temporality.
Along with the large-scale deployment of new technological systems and the spur to the popular imagination provided by the new physics, shifts in medical practice – both biological and psychological understandings – had a profound impact on the arts and culture more broadly construed. Once again, the nineteenth century provides perhaps the best entry point into this shift, specifically two paintings by the American painter Thomas Eakins, whose studies of the human body in motion would also influence the understanding of human physiology. His 1875 Gross Clinic is a brutal depiction of surgery on a young man to clean out a portion of his femur which has deteriorated from osteomyelitis. Dressed in what appears to be street clothing, Dr. Gross stands poised over his incision, looking out at his audience, which is crowding forward to get a clearer view, while a woman in the foreground (presumably the young man’s mother) tried to look away in anguish. In 1889 Eakins returned to the subject, this time with The Agnew Clinic. There the patient is a woman undergoing thoracic surgery in a room quite different from the harsh contrasts of The Gross Clinic. Instead, this space – the audience, the onlooking nurse, and the surgeon himself – is suffused with calm, muted tones. The operating gown, low partition wall separating operation from audience, and the closed instrument case mark the transition to aseptic surgical practice, and, more importantly, the triumph of germ theory.
The understanding of the mechanism of the transmission of infectious diseases brought on by late nineteenth-century microbiology enabled sanitary projects with the potential to vastly expand the size of city populations without significantly raising mortality rates – those very cities that were now expanding as the result of modern transportation technologies and building practices. And, during World War I, sanitary measures enabled large populations of soldiers to live in close proximity with few amenities, and remain at least somewhat healthy. While it is important to note that during World War I disease carried off more soldiers than did combat, and that just after the war an influenza epidemic carried off even more of the population, it remains significant that the improvements made by modern medicine in sanitary science made it possible to mass and sustain populations of soldiers in ways unthinkable in earlier eras.
An ideology of cleanliness and sanitation, militarized by the edict to seek and destroy disease-causing germs, pervaded the modernist sensibility. In architecture, Le Corbusier would advocate building sleek, bare homes, as high-modern but also as sanitary as Agnew’s surgical theater – as an antidote to the traditional housing he called “an old coach full of tuberculosis” (Le Corbusier 2008: 277). Although tempered by a more complex presentation, this attitude of literary sanitation recurs in the work of the American physician/poet William Carlos Williams, who reveled in the opportunities afforded him to enter the filthy houses of the urban poor in Paterson, New Jersey, even as he imaginatively purged these very slums in his poems. This sensibility framed his aesthetic position, for example, in the ideal of poetic form he described in a discussion of the work of his good friend, Marianne Moore: “With Miss Moore a word is word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried and placed right side up on a clean surface” (Williams 1969: 128).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, physicians and microbiologists of the period also became popular heroes. The leaders of the Pasteur institute – including Pasteur himself, but also Roux, Metchnikoff, and Bordet – as well as others such as Fleming in the United Kingdom, were widely recognized and lauded (they say there are more streets in France named for Pasteur than any other single figure except Bonaparte). Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters of 1926, offering multiple biographies of illustrious biological scientists, was a remarkably popular work, as was Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 Arrowsmith, which depicted the exploits of Martin Arrowsmith as country physician, medical-industrial researcher, public-health plague fighter, and, finally, as ascetic pursuer of biological truth. Ultimately, the high-modernist credo articulated early on in Ezra Pound’s plea to “make it new” found support through an emerging set of medical practices based on germ theory and the need for hyper-cleanliness, which is then manifested in literature and the arts, all the way to kitchen design and and the emergence of the suburbs.
Medicine, microbiology, and sanitary science were not the only point where biological studies produced transformations in medical practice with broad-reaching cultural implications. Also of significance were developing medical imaging technologies and new models in the emerging behavioral sciences. The technologies developed by Étienne-Jules Marey and the Lumière brothers were originally designed to study bodies in motion – to use photography to break down the movement of human or animal bodies in action into very thin slices of time (Marey) or to reproduce smooth motion via pictures projected at a relatively high frame-rate (the Lumières). Even as they furthered biology’s understanding of motion, these physiologists contributed to the emergence of cinema as both a medical and a popular technology. Perhaps the most famous example of such frame principles was deployed in paint in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 of 1912, a series of angled echo lines following the path of a body moving through space. Of the high-modern painters, Duchamp was perhaps the one who most closely followed emerging science and technology (see Henderson 1998).
Another significant medical imaging technology, this one with its roots in the nineteenth century, was Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery and development of X-rays as a means of seeing inside the human body. This practice was depicted in close detail in one of the great modernist novels, one that also addressed germs, sanitation, medical treatment, and recuperative isolation, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Set in the years before World War I, on a visit to his cousin who is resting in a tuberculosis sanitarium, young Hans Castorp discovers that he too is infected with the disease, which affected an inordinately large segment of the population in that era. At the time, rest in a dry climate (a practice generally only available to the wealthy) was the only therapy. Hans spends many years in his alpine retreat, learning about life from the global village of fellow sufferers, but, more important, learning about X-rays, medicine, and, ultimately psychology and psychoanalysis. In effect, Mann brings together each of the biological and medical concerns of the modern period: germ theory and sanitary science, state-of-the-art medical-imaging technologies, and the rapidly developing behavioral sciences.
Regarding the latter, there are many places to begin – the reforms of the nineteenth-century European madhouses (see Foucault 1988), or an entire range of new and novel treatments of the insane deployed in American asylums early in the twentieth century (see Grob 2007). But perhaps the best place to start is William James’s research into brain structure and his articulation of what became American psychology. James’s brother, Henry, could be regarded as the originator of the complex psychological novel, and his debt to William is evident. Although William James questioned its epistemological status in his justly famous essay “Does Consciousness Exist?,” he does begin to provide a concept of human consciousness that had a broad impact, particularly on literary practitioners. His Principles of Psychology of 1890 articulated the notion that humans experience the world as a “stream of consciousness,” a seemingly disjointed but ultimately coherent flow of ideas and images playing out just below a conscious, rational explanation of experience. Such a concept found favor among novelists who were striving for new forms through which to articulate the modern world. Once again, one can find Virginia Woolf at the forefront of formal innovation, whose aforementioned Mrs. Dalloway along with To the Lighthouse of 1927 exploited ideas inherent in James’s formulation of that mental dynamic. The reader of these novels often gropes through disparate images and impressions. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf depicted the profoundly disturbed consciousness of Septimus, a veteran of World War I who suffers from what today would be labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. The chaos and the clarity of Septimus’s musings and ultimately his suicide show the power and possibility of this narrative technique.
Similarly, the American author William Faulkner refined formal devices derived from his preoccupation with alternative understandings of temporal processes. In order to make narrative sense of the untimeliness of his own post-Civil War American south, he was radically innovative with his narrative technique, particularly in the now-classic The Sound and the Fury, where each character has a peculiar relationship to clock time (for instance, Benjy seems to live in some form of perpetual present), while each tells what is essentially the same story. Each chapter is modulated through the peculiar consciousness of a single character, so that only at the end does the story seem to cohere.
Experiments in narrative technique as they relate to a differently articulated notion of human consciousness reached their zenith in the work of James Joyce, whose Ulysses and Finnegans Wake stand as undisputed classics of high-modernist narrative innovation, and at the same time as brilliant explorations of the complex systems of representation articulated by psychologists and psychoanalysts. Joyce’s work also called attention to the complex function of language in mental processes, an area of concern for one of William James’s more gifted psychology students, Gertrude Stein. Stein served as hostess for an entire generation of modern artists and writers – Matisse, Picasso, and Hemingway, just to name a few – as mentor to some, as chronicler to the era (Stein 1933), and as brilliant if somewhat opaque experimental writer in her own right. If high modernism is first encountered as high opacity, then Stein is the leading figure of the era, but that opacity is best understood as a continued, imaginative attempt to articulate and explore the psychological insights she first had while working with James.
Stein’s formal innovations – verbal portraits, the spare but exquisite Tender Buttons of 1914, and the massive, sprawling Making of Americans (1925) – all show a thinker struggling with a psychology of character types, framed in a complex understanding of conscious temporal processes. In her attempts to articulate a “perpetual present,” Stein imaginatively engaged a range of psychological questions initiated by James, while her later work re-articulated the processual unfolding event that characterized the work of another friend with an influence equal to or complementary with that of James, Alfred North Whitehead. Initially associated with his work with Bertrand Russell, Whitehead then moved on to his own process-oriented metaphysics. A key moment of relationship can be seen in the relation between Stein’s research in “automatic writing” with James’s and Whitehead’s broader interest in non-cognitive perceptions or understandings. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925) is in itself a formally innovative text, mixing the history of science and aesthetics with a remarkably complex philosophical argument:
The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word apprehension, even with the adjective cognitive omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive.
(Whitehead 1925: 69)
Here Whitehead is articulating a key concept that returns magnified in his later Process and Reality (1929). But in relation to modernism and psychology, what he helps construct is something deeper than unconscious processes, something which Stein attempted to articulate in different form across much of her work. For Stein, the sound of words, their rhythms in grammatical structures, provided something akin to prehension, what Whitehead would later call “lures for feeling” (Whitehead 1929: 185). The lure tempts or invokes a precognitive understanding, that which underpins the modern search for what goes on in the stream of consciousness or in strangely dilated non-industrialized time structures.
Another key to understanding the impact of psychology on modernism is the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis as well as the work of his one-time friend and colleague, Carl Jung. While not necessarily a direct influence on major high-modern creative writers, Jung’s focus on the importance of mythological archetypes for understanding cultural structures was very much part of the era. Much of the groundwork for such understanding in popular culture in English-speaking cultures was laid by Sir James Fraser and Jesse Weston. In 1922, Eliot reviewed Joyce’s Ulysses and described what he called Joyce’s “mythic method” (Eliot 1975: 175–78). Clearly there was interest among both poets and psychoanalysts in the function of myth to provide coherent symbols or structures to a fragmented or groundless experience. Eliot expressed this sentiment most clearly with his frequent references to mythic archetypes in The Waste Land. Near the end of that remarkably fragmented poem Eliot’s narrator – the fisher-king – expressed what many post-war moderns were feeling: “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” (Eliot 1991: 69).
Of all the artists and writers of the early twentieth century discussed so far, Freud’s articulation of psycho-sexual processes had perhaps the broadest if not the most scandalous impact. In part because Freud’s work is malleable – an adaptive explanatory structure for a remarkably broad range of human activities – it is easy to locate Freudian moments in much of the era. But his work was widely read and often consciously deployed. In England, James Strachey did much to promote Freud, particularly among the writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group (including Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, and masterfully caricatured by Wyndham Lewis in The Apes of God). Freudian themes emerge in many central modernist texts – the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and, perhaps most strikingly, in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.
Without doubt, Freud’s major impact was his clear, if controversial, articulation of the sexually driven manifestations of human behavior – drives that provide explanations for human practice, deviance, and ultimately, for psychic health. However, it is important not to stop with his articulations of human sexuality. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1931), he turns toward broader social structures, providing a diagnosis for the angst that had beset humans at least since Whitman and Dickinson imaginatively engaged the locomotive engine:
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
(Freud 1931: 76)
Dickinson’s flesh-and-blood iron horse first gave way to Whitman’s magnificent object, but it is Freud who put the human uncomfortably back into the formulation. The technological “auxiliary organs” celebrated in much of machine-age art do make mankind magnificent, but also “give him much trouble.” No better articulation of high modernism has since been uttered.
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