Introduction: Modernism, Experimentation and Form
Ulrika Maude
Literary modernism is characterized by dazzling experimentation, perplexing narrative and poetic form, and often by contradictory aesthetic and ideological tendencies. The desire to ‘make it new’ is combined with a nostalgic yearning for a lost and at times primitive past; the admiration for technology and science is paired with a suspicion of their dehumanizing threat; and although modernist writing can often be radically progressive and even revolutionary in political and sexual terms, it also frequently expresses a fascination with and allegiance to far-right traditionalist and even totalitarian ideologies.1 The temporal and geographical parameters of literary modernism are similarly difficult to pin down. While modernism is often considered to begin in the late nineteenth century and to end around the 1940s or 1950s with so-called late modernism, there has always been controversy about the movement’s temporal reach, and advocates of the so-called new modernist studies argue both that modernist literature continues to be written in the contemporary period and that it extends well beyond the geographical parameters of the Anglo-American world.2 Despite considerable efforts to establish modernism as a historical category, with specific cultural, national and thematic boundaries, therefore, the movement continues to defy easy categorization and maintains a vital relevance in the twenty-first century.
In this sense, modernism has often been considered a stylistic rather than a temporal movement, and one of its most striking features is its salient formal experimentation. The experimental, anti-narrative structure of modernist writing is one of its crucial signifying features. The gaps, omissions and ellipses that tend to characterize modernist discourse and the overt challenge to narrative cohesion and closure that typifies the modernist novel, short story and drama are carefully considered, meticulously wrought traits of such writing. This lack of a traditional, cohesive structure in which the different actions, events and tropes of a narrative are made to appear purposive is problematized not only on the level of plot but also in the manner in which the various events portrayed relate to one another – or indeed fail to do just that. There are a number of reasons for this breakdown in structure and form. Charles Darwin’s work on evolution, for instance, ‘took narrative out of nature’, as Paul Sheehan puts it (35), foregrounding, instead, the chance and randomness of contingent cell mutations that cast radical doubt over the purposiveness and design implicit in the biblical theory of creation, which had firmly placed humankind at the centre of the natural world. Medical discoveries, such as those in neurology, radically questioned the principles of free will and agency by which the idea of selfhood is conventionally understood, by demonstrating that many of the functions of the human body operate independently from the conscious mind and are governed by the autonomous nervous system, with consciousness a mere by-product of vital bodily functions. And studies in aphasia and Tourette’s syndrome in the second half of the nineteenth century revealed that even language itself frequently escapes intention and often seems to speak itself. A parallel but rather different model of the human psyche was introduced by Sigmund Freud, who himself began his career as a neurologist and only later redirected his attention to developing the ‘talking cure’ for which he is famous. Psychoanalysis split the self into two by introducing what, in Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud calls a ‘second consciousness’. In this theory, the ‘unconscious’, as he came to refer to it, operates alongside the conscious mind, which, however, as a result of repression fails to recognize the subject’s true desires. These desires and ‘drives’ are said to reside in the unconscious mind and to express themselves through various forms of body language – including tics and nervous symptoms, hysterical convulsions and slips of the tongue. This fundamental split in the self renders us strangers to ourselves and condemns us to a life of perpetual frustration and dissatisfaction, as Freud famously argued in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
As this might begin to suggest, modernism disrupts and disavows some of the fundamental conceptions of what it means to be human. In this sense, modernism doesn’t necessarily make for comfortable or easy reading. As Frank Kermode argues in an influential book from 1967, there is something inherently consoling about the sense of an ending that conventional narratives present. Classical tragedy, for instance, is ultimately affirmative and reassuring: by presenting narratives structured around Aristotelian notions of peripeteia and anagnorisis (reversal and recognition), catharsis (release or purgation) and resolution, tragedy (and conventional narrative form more generally) offers a comforting return to what Tzvetan Todorov calls a ‘new equilibrium’. The disrupted, aleatory or contingent, seemingly inconsequential, often fragmentary and fragmented narratives that characterize modernist writing, by contrast, are far more disquieting and disturbing than any story matter might be, for they upset precisely our sense of purposiveness, order and even ultimately signification.
One way to think about the disturbance and fragmentation of form, structure and meaning in modernist literature is to consider the Euclidean figure of the gnomon that famously features in the opening paragraph of ‘The Sisters’, the first story of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). In geometry, a gnomon is the incomplete parallelogram that remains after a smaller but identically shaped figure has been removed from it, or as Bernard Benstock put it, ‘a nonappearance suggesting a presence made palpable only by the concept of its absence’. (520) In Dubliners, the gnomon becomes a figure for the short story sequence itself, with each of the stories featuring striking absences or missing parts. In ‘The Sisters’, which stages the death of Father Flynn, the gnomon makes its appearance in old Cotter’s insinuating but ‘unfinished sentences’: ‘No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion … ’, he says, in a way that specifically avoids presenting what should be the essential content of his sentences (Joyce, 2000, 3). It also appears in the boy-narrator’s inability to make sense of what he sees and hears, including, indeed, what old Cotter has to say: ‘I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences’, the boy remarks, in a way that seems to reflect the reader’s own predicament (4). And it is prominently apparent in the failure of religious (and by implication literary) symbolism, including especially the ‘idle chalice’, which Father Flynn breaks but which is anyway empty: ‘It was that chalice he broke … That was the beginning of it’, one of the titular sisters comments; ‘Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still’, she goes on, ambiguously (10, 9). In ‘Eveline’, the story of a young woman who contemplates leaving Dublin with her suitor, Frank, for a life in Argentina, the word ‘home’ is repeated ten times within the space of the story’s five pages. As Eveline dusts her home, ‘wondering where on earth all the dust came from’, she takes note of a familiar object: ‘And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium’ (25). Eveline’s apparent alienation from the objects in her home – including her ignorance of the priest’s name – constitutes a gnomon, but it also points to an even starker missing element in the story. Eveline’s physically and emotionally abusive father, who fails to provide the duty of care that he should to Eveline and his other children, renders him a ‘father’ only in name. Her home, therefore, offers none of the comfort, shelter and security that are conventionally associated with the concept; it, too, is a ‘home’ only in name. The fact that the priest in the picture is himself now in Melbourne constitutes another gnomon, for the reader is never informed why he left. His ‘yellowing’ picture is suggestive of decadence and decay, and may indicate that he left Ireland in disgrace, which seems to link him with Father Flynn in ‘The Sisters’, whose company, as old Cotter puts it, was ‘bad for children’ (4).3 Frank, Eveline’s suitor, who tells her ‘stories of the terrible Patagonians’ – mythical giants whose existence was known to be a tall tale – is himself ‘frank’ in name only, for as Katherine Mullin has revealed in her striking reading of the story, he is likely to be taking Eveline to a brothel rather than to be his wife in ‘Buenos Ayres’ (27).4 But Dublin does not have much to offer a woman of Eveline’s social class and background either, and the ‘pitiful vision’ of her mother on her deathbed ‘laid its spell on the very quick of her being – that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness’ (28). What the reader is shown in the disturbing image of the deranged mother is Eveline’s future, should she decide not to leave Ireland. The narrative points to the deficiencies of ‘home’ as a national, domestic and gendered space: home has little to offer its working-class female protagonist. Although modernism has come under criticism for advancing a negative and ultimately disempowered aesthetic response to social reality, Dubliners attests to its early and persistent engagement in subtle but incisive social critique.
Another way in which the gnomon makes its appearance in Dubliners, as we have seen briefly in relation to the chalice in ‘The Sisters’, is through Joyce’s deconstruction of conventional symbolism. ‘Clay’ focuses on Maria, who works in a Dublin laundry. She is described as having a ‘very long nose and a very long chin’, and it is noted three times that when she laughed, ‘the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin’ (76, 77). The story is set on Hallows’ Eve (Halloween), which reinforces the supernatural connotations of Maria’s witch-like appearance. And yet, disjunctively and somewhat perplexingly, she is named after the Virgin Mary and is known as (and seems to pride herself on being known as) a ‘peace-maker’ (76). To further complicate matters, Maria works in the ‘Dublin by Lamplight laundry’, a ‘Magdalen’s home’ or ‘reform institution’ for former prostitutes and women who have had children out of wedlock (based in Ballsbridge, Dublin, at the time Joyce was writing ‘Clay’) (77, 239). Nothing quite adds up in the story, or for Maria – who is ‘nice’ and a ‘peacemaker’ but who seems to rub people up the wrong way; who is probably cheated by the ‘stout gentleman’ who ‘has a drop taken’ but who is charming to her on the tram; and who signally fails to end the deadly, permanent feud between Joe and his brother Alphy (78, 79). The story, in other words, is heavy with symbolism, which invites the reader to approach it as a coded message containing the key (the clé, as it were) to its own enigmas. And yet, try as one may to crack the code, the symbolism Joyce uses intentionally fails to add up. There is no key, or clé, in ‘Clay’, in other words, and even the title word is notable for its enigmatic non-appearance within the story itself.
Samuel Beckett, who was profoundly influenced by Joyce, does something similar with the hermeneutics of symbolism in his most famous work, Waiting for Godot (1953). The play is notably sparse in props and scenery, which makes the dead tree of Act I seem particularly significant. At the beginning of Act II, the tree has sprouted leaves, in what is seemingly a symbol of hope, regeneration and resolution. But Godot fails to arrive. The tree’s sprouting is profoundly misleading if the audience seeks to read it as a symbol denoting epiphany, annunciation or resolution. As Daniel Albright puts it, rather than being an ‘asymbolic’ play (one that would be uninterested in or indifferent to symbolic meaning) Waiting for Godot is an ‘anti-symbolic’ play, one in which Beckett encourages us to interpret words, actions and props as symbols only to frustrate us in our hermeneutic urge; he exposes our ‘proficiency’ as readers and spectators as precisely the thing that will prevent us from properly attending to his play (53). Instead of offering us purposiveness, in other words, the play foregrounds chance, randomness and contingency – or indeed, as Beckett himself affirmed, the mere passing of time.
But we might discern a similar undoing of ‘symbolic’ meaning in Joseph Conrad’s great novella Heart of Darkness (1899) – a work written half a century earlier, as modernism is just beginning to emerge as a dominant cultural force. The anonymous and shadowy narrator who reports to us the telling of Marlow’s story warns us early that Marlow is not ‘typical’, because
to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (Conrad, 18)
Meaning in the story, as the narrator warns the reader, does not reside at the heart of the narrative, like a kernel, but is there only as something vague and indistinct, like a haze, mist or vapour; it merely ghosts the narrative, like a spectre. And yet, even for the experienced reader, it is nevertheless difficult not to expect that Kurtz, who is the goal and purpose of the journey that the narrative recounts, will provide answers to the numerous enigmas and ethical questions that the story presents. Once we finally encounter the elusive Kurtz, after three near-misses, he turns out to be nothing like the impressive figure we are led to expect (in this respect, at least, resembling that other early-modernist anti-hero, the Wizard of Oz, the titular character in a famous children’s novel first published in the following year). As Peter Brooks has persuasively argued, in spite of our expectations of narrative closure and hermeneutic disclosure, Kurtz’s final words, ‘The horror! The horror!’ (Conrad, 118), make a mockery of meaning, for they are ‘minimal language, language […] on the verge of a fall from language’ (250).
Modernist poetry is similarly governed by what we might see as a centrifugal rather than centripetal aesthetic. One of the most striking examples can be found in Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) and especially in the resonantly apocalyptic lines, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ (ll. 3–4). Yeats is writing in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, which, with all its devastation, had wiped out the sense of optimism that the rapid technological and scientific advances of the nineteenth century had seemed to offer.5 Responding also to a world turned upside down by the Russian Revolution, and to the troubles and incipient civil war in Ireland as the nation shook off its colonial chains, Yeats can furthermore be said to be anticipating the rise of fascism – which, as his poem seems to prophesy, would ultimately lead to the Second World War.
A similar anxiety and bewilderment over the breakdown of old ordering systems is signally present in The Waste Land (1922), where it is brought to the fore most strikingly in the apparently autobiographical lines, ‘On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing’ (ll. 300–2). Eliot suffered a breakdown in 1921, and the lines are a reference to his personal circumstances and the time he spent recovering in Margate. But they also function as a more impersonal comment on the poem itself, in all its perplexing imagery, ventriloquized voices and often wantonly obscure references, citations and allusions. These and other modernist texts embody and perform the condition of modernity in their disparate, disjunctive, fragmented and often incongruently despairing formal qualities – a sense of ruination articulated in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the final section of The Waste Land, when the speaker talks of propping up the now-tenuous if not untenable notion of a self with ‘fragments I have shored against my ruins’ (l. 431).
An analogy can be found in certain visual artworks of the early twentieth century. The salient fragmentation of a high Cubist painting such as Georges Braque’s Woman Playing a Guitar (1913) (Figure 1.1) can be read in terms of the constellated fragments of an image seen from various vantage points. This, in turn, can be interpreted in light of the philosophical doctrine of relativism, which proposes that rather than universal ‘truths’ we have different, conflicting, but equally valid perspectives on ‘reality’, embodied in the fractured image on the canvas. Another way of thinking about such paintings – which typically represent fragments of a face, a foot, a few fingers and perhaps a pipe, newspaper or a musical instrument, such as here, the guitar – is that the canvases self-consciously invite the spectator to piece together the fragments in order to allow the full picture to emerge. But no matter how long the observer spends looking at one of these dazzlingly beautiful paintings, the missing elements fail to appear: the only code that the observer cracks is that there is no code to crack – that ‘meaning’ is infinitely deferred.6
The fragmentation that, in a writer such as Eliot, is represented as a source of deep anxiety can, however, present itself as a source of exultation in other writers. One such is Virginia Woolf, who, in Mrs Dalloway (1925), stages Clarissa’s sense of the unboundedness of the self in often ecstatic, jubilatory terms: ‘sitting on the bus going up Shaftsbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere, not “here, here, here”; and she tapped on the back of the seat; but everywhere’ (2015, 136). At the florist’s, where Clarissa buys flowers for her party, she muses that
somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (Woolf, 2015, 8)
The self that the novel presents to the reader is not the singular, masculine ‘I’ that Woolf condemned in A Room of One’s Own (1929) – because, she wrote, ‘in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shapeless as mist’ – but rather a multiple and fluid self that is reflected in the prose and in the novel’s overall structure (2000, 90).7 Clarissa inhales the fragrance of the flowers at the florist’s and through their scent intermingles with them, just as she feels herself intermingling with the trees, with her house, even with people she has never met. Woolf’s prominent use of free indirect discourse – the peculiar osmosis of third-person narrator and individual character-focalizers – while not a modernist invention, itself offers an example of the most intense form of intersubjectivity. In free indirect discourse, character and narrator coalesce without, however, quite collapsing into one.
The most prominent example of ‘being part of people’ Clarissa ‘had never met’ is her mysterious connection with Septimus Smith. The two never do meet, but an intimate connection is nonetheless established between them, for instance through the theme of illness. For while Septimus suffers from war-induced psychosis, we learn that Clarissa Dalloway, too, has been seriously ill with influenza and heart trouble. Septimus’s suicide, which constitutes the main event – indeed the only real event, the climax – of the novel, is represented with compassion, understanding and, most strikingly, identification. It is never condemned as an act in Clarissa’s mind but, instead, enigmatically commended: ‘She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living’ (2015, 167). In the three-page ‘Introduction’ Woolf wrote to the second, 1928 American edition of the novel – the only introduction she ever composed to any of her fictional works – she revealed that ‘in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be [Clarissa’s] double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party’ (2015, 357). The American edition of the novel has, since its first impression, contained an additional sentence, which Woolf omitted from the English edition: ‘He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun’ (2005, 182). The sense of beauty and jubilation Clarissa feels at Septimus’s suicide is left ambiguous, but while it is perhaps precisely his inability to reconnect with ordinary, everyday life that leads to his suicide – since his psychosis knows only heightened, hyperbolic experience – his death paradoxically helps Clarissa to do just that. It brings her back to ‘this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely’ (2015, 165). In the novel, in other words, it is precisely the ordinary, the everyday, and Clarissa’s intimate feeling of being as much part of her surroundings as they are of her, that functions as a locus of value and as a stay against the eroding, at times destructive passing of time.8
In the novels of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen, the self is similarly far from the insular and arguably masculine immunity from one’s surroundings. In Death of the Heart (1938), for instance, the novel’s protagonist, Portia, whose early life has been spent on the Continent in hotels ‘before the season, when the funicular was not working yet’ (34) and who has more recently been living at Windsor Terrace in London in her half-brother’s house, finds herself on holiday in Seale on the Sea, on the Kent coast. Reminiscing of Windsor Terrace, she observes, ‘I am not there’:
She began to go round, in little circles, things that at least her senses had loved – her bed, with the lamp turned on on winter mornings, the rug in Thomas’s study, the chest carved with angels out there on the landing, the waxen oilcloth down there in Matchett’s room. Only in a house one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One’s relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain. (1998a, 139)
The memory of Windsor Terrace seems to reside in the eyes and the skin, in ‘the daily seeing or touching’, in pre-reflective experiences that dissolve any clear demarcation between object and self. In her essay ‘Bowen’s Court’ (1958), Bowen writes of a similar experience of her own, observing about the eighteenth-century big house that belonged to her family that ‘between those who were here and me there is a physical link, forged of touch and sight – a matter of handling the same door knobs, mounting the same stairs, looking out at the same scene through the same windows’ (2008, 148). Habit here transgresses individual experience and acquires a historical dimension. It becomes a transgenerational tie that in its effect seems to exceed both blood and heritage. Experience is encoded in the nerve endings of each generation through shared sensuous experience; it is transmitted through tactile objects or visual impressions afforded by the house itself. In Heat of the Day (1949), something like the reverse of this situation occurs when Roderick visits his mother Stella in her rented flat, with its alien-seeming furniture. Roderick acknowledges that it ‘did not look like home’ (47), but realizes nevertheless that ‘somewhere between these chairs and tables must run the spoor of habit, could one but pick it up’ (1998b, 52). The sofa he sits on, for instance, seems to be ‘without environment’ and the visit is made uneasy by the very ‘absence of every inanimate thing they had in common’. The surrounding objects afford ‘no benevolence’ to the meeting, and the narrator goes on to say that ‘love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void’ (1998b, 55). Bowen’s characters project their fears and desires onto objects, as Elizabeth Inglesby has argued (312–3), but the objects also have a hold over these emotions, as if they had scarred the characters, leaving their own inscriptions on the nerves and the senses. Bowen’s writing seems to suggest that we bury our intentions in objects, which in turn arouse in us volitions, thoughts or emotions.
Katherine Mansfield’s writing often exhibits a similar undoing of the singular, coherent self. In her stories, the energy flows and affects of the characters are typically driven by the surrounding landscapes and by the force field of other characters. Together with the writings of Woolf and Bowen, Mansfield’s short stories indicate that female modernists often find value in the undoing of a selfhood that for male writers tends to function as an ambivalent locus of power and autonomy, as well as of insecurity and anxiety. And yet one can also find the dispersal of the self celebrated in the work of an anti-rationalist male writer such as D. H. Lawrence, whose characters seem most at ease when they no longer feel themselves to be ‘persons’ or selves. In his short story ‘Sun’, written in 1925, for example, Juliet has been sent from New York to the Mediterranean to take the sun cure (a popular form of treatment in the period, also known as heliotherapy) in order to recover from ‘her silent, awful hostility’ and the irritation her young child arouses in her, for whom she feels ‘so horridly, ghastly responsible’ (20). The urban Juliet is presented as ‘pale’ and curiously disembodied, a ‘menacing ghost woman […] spectral and vengeful’ (35). As a result of living in New York, we learn, ‘iron’ has entered Juliet’s ‘soul’ (19). When she first arrives at the Italian villa, she feels no affinity with her surroundings: ‘She saw it all, and in a measure it was soothing. But it was all external. She didn’t really care about it’ (20). Juliet, however, has been advised by the doctor to ‘lie in the sun’ (20), which gradually, little by little, almost body-part by body-part – ‘her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly, her knees, her thighs and her feet’ (21) – transforms the ‘nervous New York woman’ into something or someone that is ‘no longer a person, but a fleet sun-strong body, soulless and alluring as a nymph’ (33). As Juliet’s body becomes increasingly ‘sun-tanned, wind-stroked’ (33), her maternal and sexual instincts are revived. When, for instance, her child staggers among prickly thorns, she is ‘quick as a serpent, leaping to him, when he was going to fall against the prickles. It surprised even herself. – “What a wild cat I am really!” she said to herself’ (26). Upon visiting Juliet, her husband, Maurice, finds his wife transformed: ‘the voice of the abrupt, personal American woman had died out, and he heard the voice of the woman of flesh, the sun-ripe body’ (34). The anxious little boy, too, has been healed by the sun: ‘The child fluttered around in silence, like a young animal absorbed in life’ (28). The new Juliet has ‘ceased to care about anything’ (26), ‘would take no thought for the morrow’ (28) and now resembles a creature of pure animal instinct: ‘She herself, her conscious self, was secondary, a secondary person, almost an onlooker’ (26).
This book explores the central formal and thematic questions raised by modernist literature. The twenty-one chapters of Part I are divided into four sections that reflect major research areas in contemporary modernist studies: ‘The Modernist Everyday’, ‘The Arts and Cultures of Modernism’, ‘The Sciences and Technologies of Modernism’ and ‘The Geopolitics and Economics of Modernism’. Part II features a ‘Resources’ section, offering a substantial ‘A to Z of Key Words’, an annotated bibliography of vital books on modernist literature and a chronology of key dates.
The opening section of Part I, ‘The Modernist Everyday’, explores the interest modernist writers took in representing ordinary, commonplace experience: it focuses on their concern to defamiliarize the everyday by giving it the kind of attention we often fail to because of what Virginia Woolf calls the ‘cotton wool’ of everyday experience (1985, 72). Habits, as Woolf implies in her autobiographical essay ‘A Sketch of the Past’, are performed only semi-consciously. They constitute part of what Woolf refers to as ‘non-being’ in that they are almost too familiar for us to spot, too liminal even, and difficult because of their familiarity to render into language. Eventfulness is easy to write about by comparison. But as Joyce commented to Djuna Barnes in 1919, a writer ‘should never write about the extraordinary’: ‘That is for the journalist’, he opines (Ellmann, 1983, 457). The ordinary and the everyday is almost infinitely elusive and presents the kind of challenge to representation that fascinated modernist writers.
The five chapters of the first section, then, approach the everyday from their own unique perspectives. The opening chapter, by Scott McCracken, concerns urban modernity and focuses on the everyday through the leitmotif of a bar of soap, a familiar daily object that, in the writing of Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, reveals the hidden depths of the quotidian. McCraken approaches the everyday through its paradoxicality, for it can entail both the ordinary and the extraordinary, routine actions and heightened or intense experiences, deep significance masked by apparent insignificance. The second chapter, ‘Geographies of Modernism’, focuses on the places, spaces and landscapes of modernist writing, which, as Andrew Thacker argues, have often been too narrowly conceived. Thacker begins by considering the work of cultural geographers and spatial theorists in reconfiguring our understanding of social spaces, before moving on to address the global and transnational reach of modernist literature and its wider implications for modernist studies. Shane Weller’s focus, in turn, is on late nineteenth-century language scepticism, which plays a decisive part in shaping the formal and stylistic features of literary modernism. As Weller persuasively demonstrates, language scepticism triggers a desire in high modernist writers for linguistic renewal, which in late modernism evolves into an enactment of linguistic negativism. Kirsty Martin’s chapter in turn questions the critical consensus of modernism as a ‘cold’ mode of writing, focusing on more difficult-to-articulate feelings in the work of Woolf, Lawrence and Eliot. The work of modernist writers, her chapter suggests, explores how profoundly the shape of a tree or the hue of a particular colour, a gesture or an encounter with one’s own racing heart can affect the subject. Drawing from psychoanalysis, nerve theory and aesthetics, Martin’s chapter maps modernism’s new emotional range. In the concluding chapter of this section, Michael Bell turns his attention to modernism’s relation to religion and to what anthropologists unmasked as both its origin and substitute, myth. Through a consideration of its pervasive focus on myth, Bell’s chapter unveils the residual persistence of religious impulses in literary modernism.
The second section, ‘The Arts and Cultures of Modernism’, considers the ways in which music, the visual arts, film and popular culture shaped modernist writing and examines the inception and dissemination of writing through so-called ‘little magazines’ and modernism’s manuscript culture. Modernist literature developed in part in reaction to formal innovations in music and the visual arts, as well as to the new medium of film, which was itself profoundly indebted to literature from its inception (symbolized by the public screening in Paris of films by the Lumière brothers in 1895). High modernist literary experimentation is in fact a relatively late development by comparison with the earlier radical formal experimentation in music and the visual arts – a point that Samuel Beckett makes in a letter to Axel Kaun in 1937. In this letter, Beckett pointedly questions whether ‘literature alone [is] to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have so long ago been abandoned by music and painting?’ (1983, 172). As Tim Armstrong argues in his chapter, although modernist literature tends to be engaged in ‘a multi-media mapping of the senses’, music nonetheless occupies a privileged role because of its affinity with language, for both entail ‘inbuilt codes and expectations’. However, unlike language, music escapes conceptual thought and operates as ‘the direct carrier of feeling’, and as Schopenhauer argued, it offers the listener an intensely embodied experience. In his chapter on the visual arts, Conor Carville similarly foregrounds aesthetic embodiment in his analysis of the implications of Henri Bergson’s notion of the fusion of subject and object, spectator and artwork. But modernist aesthetic theory also drew from neo-Kantian ideas of the autonomy of the artwork, and Carville traces theories of the visual through Beckett’s abiding interest in the visual arts and their reflection in philosophical discourse. Laura Marcus’s chapter examines the ‘two-way relationship’ between literary modernism and the new medium of film, offering a succinct overview of the ways in which this relationship has been perceived and conceptualized by critics, before turning to examine the influence of film and early film theory on the work of Woolf, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis and Beckett.
Lawrence Rainey’s chapter redresses a common misconception of modernism as constitutively hostile to popular culture through close readings of two high modernist works, Ulysses and The Waste Land. Rainey pays particular attention to the discourses of pantomime and cross-dressing in Joyce’s novel, and reads Eliot’s poem as focused on the typist’s violation of conventions surrounding pre-marital sex and the treatment of the ‘fallen woman’. Both works, as Rainey demonstrates, engage productively and prolifically with the mass culture of their time. Faith Binckes’s chapter turns its attention to the modernist little magazines that played so central a role in the literary and aesthetic culture of the early twentieth century. Her focus is on the relation of periodical texts to typography and design, as well as on the political significance of modernist magazines. While many of the magazines accepted and advocated a high modernist male canon, others identified strongly with the vanguard of political thought, including the emerging discourses and movements of anarchism and feminism. In the last chapter in this section, Dirk Van Hulle attends to the many preserved notes and manuscripts that survive their authors, in what has come to be known as ‘the golden age of the literary manuscript’. In Van Hulle’s reading, the notes and manuscripts reflect a significant shift in interest from reality to the perception of reality and the workings of the mind; manuscripts, that is to say, offer a record precisely of this process. The study of literary manuscripts affords an understanding of the inception of the work, which in turn helps the reader to assess the intricacies of the finished poem, novel or play.
Modernism develops in the wake of critical developments in nineteenth-century scientific materialism, which entailed a number of paradigm-shifting discoveries, including evolutionary theory, neuron theory and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Such discoveries triggered fundamental and often unnerving shifts in our understanding of the world and our place in it. It is therefore not surprising that ‘The Sciences and Technologies of Modernism’ constitutes a major area of research in contemporary modernist studies. The section opens with Paul Sheehan’s chapter on the conceptual affiliations between Einstein’s theory of relativity and the counter-realist aesthetics of modernism. The American poetic context of the 1920 and 1930s, Sheehan argues, accorded Einstein’s theories a positive and constructive reception, while the Anglo-Irish response veered between ambivalence and affirmation. Jana Funke’s chapter, in turn, argues that literary modernism was driven by an urge to find new modes of expression for the gender and sexual configurations, allegiances and identities opened up by the emerging sciences of sexuality, including psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis and sexology. These played an important role in the production of fluid or queer conceptions of gender and sexuality that have come to be seen as markers of literary modernism itself. Maude, in turn, analyses the ways in which modernist literature develops out of the intrinsic tension between scientific empiricism – the understanding of the world through observation and experimentation – and hermeneutics – the close analysis of signs, language and meaning. Developing the idea that Sigmund Freud can productively be read as a modernist writer and thinker, her chapter examines his modernist tendencies from the perspective of the tensions that emerge out of the origins of his clinical work in nineteenth-century science, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic method that forms the foundation of psychoanalysis, on the other. Maude proposes that this tension is also endemic to literature and that it appears in a dazzlingly heightened and intensified form in literary modernism. Salisbury’s chapter focuses on modernist writers’ engagement with theories of consciousness and perception, alongside their interest in psychopathological states of mind. She argues that only by placing new psychological theories of mind in dialogue with the philosophical and technological conditions of modernity can one make sense of the ‘inward turn’ that preoccupied so many modernist writers. Julian Murphet’s chapter on modernism and technology concludes this section by focusing on the feelings of alienation and depersonalization afforded by omnipresent mechanization, which enabled natural objects, including human beings, to be stored as what Heidegger calls ‘standing reserve’. Technology, Murphet proposes, channels desire and, in doing so, substitutes for it. Human beings become more machine-like as machines themselves assume increasingly human qualities. Technology’s reach also affects literature itself, which is forced to update and modernize its means of production.
The final section, ‘The Geopolitics and Economics of Modernism’, responds to the central concerns raised by new modernist studies in its call for an urgent reassessment of the temporal and geographical parameters of modernism and a reconsideration of its Anglo-American bias. With this in mind, Emily Hayman and Pericles Lewis address the question of global modernism by focusing on the feeling of isolation, on conflicts of identity and on the resistance to existing social and political paradigms in a period of rapid cultural and generational change. Their chapter traces modernist themes from Singapore to Istanbul and from there to Buenos Aires, and finds a common thread in global modernism’s need to break out of old artistic paradigms that fail to acknowledge or fully to incorporate the complications and contradictions of the modern world. Benita Parry’s chapter, by contrast, identifies a departure from modernism in the stylistic strategies of what she calls ‘peripheral literatures’. She argues that critics have favoured those forms of writing that have exhibited a penchant for formal experimentation at the expense of the continuing dynamism of realism. Tyrus Miller’s chapter on modernist literature and politics, in turn, engages with the radical potential of avant-garde form, in its analysis of the relationship between formal experimentation and political meanings. Miller suggests that modernist writing highlights the gap between literary representation and the existing political situation, but argues that by doing so it imagines new possibilities for the political in the present and future. Closing the volume, Ronald Schleifer focuses on modernist economics, examining twentieth-century literature in relation to the transformations in economic practices and understanding at the turn of the century.
Notes
1 The slogan is the title of Pound’s collection of essays Make It New, published in 1934. The phrase also occurs in block capitals in Pound’s Canto LIII (265), published the same year.
2 New modernist studies was inaugurated by an influential article written by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in 2008, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA, 123, (3), 737–48.
3 The fact that one of the young boys in ‘An Encounter’, the second story in Dubliners, refers to the pervert that the boys meet as a ‘queer old josser’ adds credibility to this reading: ‘josser’ is nineteenth-century Australian slang for a clergyman.
4 See Katherine Mullin’s James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, 56–82.
5 As Santanu Das puts it, the First World War was ‘the world’s first industrial war’ in which human ingenuity and modern technology were used on a mass scale for the brutalization and destruction rather than the betterment of humankind (Das, 136).
6 For a stunning political reading of high Cubism, see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 169–223.
7 See Vanessa Ryan, The Vanishing Subject, 190–8.
8 See Liesl Olson’s reading of the novel in Modernism and the Ordinary, 66–77.
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