The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

Anything but a Clean Relationship: Modernism and the Everyday

Scott McCracken

Introduction

The concept of the everyday can mean both everything and nothing.¹ It extends to every aspect of our lives, including those that go unnoticed. A concept with many names – the ordinary, the banal, the mundane, the quotidian, the habitual – it can be stretched to the point where it leaves no area of experience untouched.² Yet this comprehensiveness means it also includes those aspects of experience that are taken for granted or remain forever buried in our unconscious. The everyday represents a paradox or, as this chapter will suggest, a series of paradoxes. It can refer to both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Daily activities we hardly notice, such as washing our hands or eating breakfast, are everyday, but so too are states of heightened consciousness or intense experience, falling in love, intoxication, extreme physical pain or grief (Felski, 1999–2000, 29). Significance is often masked by insignificance. As Sigmund Freud documented in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), everyday slips of the tongue or lapses in memory can be the portals to unacknowledged fears and desires. As for art, everyday life is usually seen as its antithesis, yet Henri Lefebvre writes about an ‘art of living’, where life itself becomes a form of artistic expression (2008, 1: 199).

It was not so much the concept itself as these paradoxes that make the everyday so important in critical discussions of modernism.³ The idea of the everyday as that which is there, but does not signify, implicates it in some of the key aesthetic questions of modernism: the relationship between art and the real; the relationship between art and the ordinary rhythms of daily life; the relationship between art and the unconscious; the relationship between art and the commodity. However, before exploring these questions in the work of T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Walter Benjamin, a discussion of one everyday object in James Joyce’s experimental novel Ulysses (1922) will help to set the scene.

Leopold Bloom and the Bar of Lemon Soap

Ulysses takes place in Dublin, Ireland, on a single ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Just after eleven o’clock in the morning, the novel’s anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, is travelling to the funeral of a close acquaintance, Paddy Dignam, when he is discomforted by a bar of lemon soap in his pocket, which is sticking into his behind. The obvious thing to do would be to move it to more suitable pocket, but Bloom is unwilling to draw attention to himself. Reluctant to interrupt the solemn atmosphere in the cab with a matter that might seem trivial in the face of Dignam’s sudden death, he waits until the carriage stops at the graveyard before seizing his opportunity to act as his fellow passengers get out:

Change that soap now. Mr Bloom’s hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket. He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other hand still held. (Joyce, 1993, 83)

A bar of lemon soap is an everyday object and for most of the day Bloom forgets that he has bought it. When he moves the soap, his actions are discreet and unobserved. Yet Joyce chooses to document not just Bloom’s movements across Dublin but also those of the soap: from its purchase at Sweny’s Chemist in Lincoln Place to its use in a public bath to its final destination in Bloom’s home. The points in the day when it re-enters Bloom’s conscious thoughts are always noted and its constant presence in his unconscious is signalled by hints and allusions. In the novel’s more surreal episodes, such as the dream-like ‘Circe’, set in Dublin’s red-light district, the soap even achieves the power of speech.

In an earlier, realist, novel, the soap might have functioned as what Roland Barthes calls a ‘reality effect’ (1989, 141–8). In the work of nineteenth-century novelists, such as Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens, everyday objects, the contents of a cupboard or a description of furniture, create a sense of the real. They anchor the narrative in a recognizable world, distinguishing it from fictions of fantasy or magic. Such objects may also serve to locate the social position of their owners. They represent distinctions of class and status, locating a character in relation to residual, dominant or emerging social orders. In Joyce’s text the soap plays its part in establishing Bloom as an ordinary Dubliner, an ‘everyman’,4 who performs his daily ablutions like everybody else; but, as the narrative proceeds, the object starts to exceed the limits of realism, intruding into a surreal realm, much as it sticks into Bloom’s buttock, interrupting the narrative and disturbing the reader’s comfort. For example, it makes an unexpected and disconcerting appearance in one of the imaginary newspaper headlines that punctuate the ‘Aeolus’ episode, set in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal:

ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP

Alerted once again to its presence by the smell of lemon on his handkerchief, Bloom moves the soap back to its original position in his hip pocket (Joyce, 1993, 101).

During the day, through use and friction, the bar gradually degrades in his pocket, becoming sticky and shaping itself to his body. It adheres not just to the paper it is wrapped in but also to the focal points of anxiety in Bloom’s psyche. Just as the physical presence of the bar of soap returns through nudges and traces (its smell, the sensation of its melting surface), so feelings of guilt, inferiority and jealousy he associates with the soap seep into Bloom’s conscious mind. As he tries to avoid his wife’s lover, Blazes Boylan, he searches for it desperately just before he ducks in through the gate of the National Museum:

I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. Freeman. Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?

Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.

His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.

Safe! (150)

Each of the surprising variety of everyday objects he finds in his pockets indicates something about his life, but some of them assume a wider significance. The potato, which he carries for luck, for example, seems to allude to an Irish identity rooted in the famine of the nineteenth century. The soap, however, is a reminder of debt and guilt, specifically the fact that the soap and a lotion he has ordered from the chemist remain unpaid for, but it is also a signifier for some of Bloom’s deeper anxieties.

It is not surprising, then, that the soap makes its presence known again after he masturbates on the beach while gazing at a young woman, Gerty McDowell. As he reflects while enjoying the lingering sensations of his own pleasure, he mistakes the scent of the soap for the smell of his own sperm:

Source of life. And its extremely curious the smell. Celery sauce. Let me.

Mr Bloom inserted his nose. Hm. Into the. Hm. Opening of his waistcoat. Almonds or. No. Lemons it is. Ah no, that’s the soap. (307)

In the novel’s ‘Circe’ episode, the soap makes a surreal entrance, ‘diffusing light and perfume’, as it ‘arises’ like the sun over the scene:

THE SOAP

We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I.

He brightens the earth. I polish the sky. (360)

If the soap’s apparently autonomous existence can be partly accounted for by the role it plays in Bloom’s unconscious, it also relates to its participation in a larger political economy. Soap was a widely advertised commodity at the turn of the twentieth century. Both soap and Bloom are indeed a ‘capital couple’, each playing a role in capitalist relations. Bloom is a copywriter, who composes advertisements that encourage the public to consume manufactured products such as soap or tinned meat. The bar of soap is not just a useful item but also a commodity, subject to the laws of economic exchange. It achieves an illusory autonomy through what Karl Marx called commodity fetishism, the process whereby the contradictions in social relations appear as relationships between things:

The form of wood, for instance, is altered by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common every-day thing wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to other commodities, it stands on its head, and devolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table turning’ ever was. (Marx, 1954, 76)

The soap, like Marx’s table, also achieves a lively life of its own, not least because it has not been paid for. Its ownership and value exist in an abstract rather than a concrete realm, playing a role in Dublin’s complex economy of credit and debt. This overlaps with Bloom’s sense of his personal morality. He leaves Sweny’s chemist’s, promising to pay for the soap when he returns later that day to pick up a lotion he has ordered. He never does, but the debt lodges itself in his unconscious, becoming associated with a more general sense of guilt that returns at critical moments, such as his escape from Boylan, when the word ‘lotion’ follows that of ‘soap’ (Joyce, 1993, 150). As the soap rises in ‘Circe’, the ‘freckled face of Sweny, the druggist appears in the disc of the soapsun’ demanding payment:

SWENY

Three and a penny, please.

The soap by this time has come to represent the process Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) calls ‘condensation’: where one object or image stands for a nexus of associations and ideas (Freud, 2001, 279–304). If guilt connects these associations, they nonetheless represent a wide range of hopes and desires, indicating the whole of Bloom’s life experience. All of which contributes to how he apprehends even the slightest mundane incident. The bar of lemon soap represents both the daily in Ulysses and the extraordinary complexity of the social relations that produce the ordinary, including Bloom’s personal sense of morality and the unseen role of the economy in structuring the everyday.

If the history of Bloom and the lemon soap seems to highlight the awkwardness of Bloom’s fit with Dublin’s daily life, then this is deliberate. Part of Joyce’s artistic project was to create an Irish art that was international rather than inward looking and narrowly nationalist. He did not want to represent the daily as unproblematic. Another of the lemon soap’s manifold roles in the novel is to mark out Bloom’s difference, the otherness he experiences as the son of a Jewish father living in Irish Catholic Dublin. In ‘Circe’, a chorus of ‘Sisters of Erin’ sing of ‘wandering soap’ (Joyce, 1993, 407), linking the soap to Bloom’s correspondence with the figure of the ‘wandering Jew’. An element of Bloom’s discomfort in the carriage relates to the anti-Semitism expressed by his fellow travellers. It doesn’t help that their prejudice coalesces around the stereotype of the Jewish moneylender, an image that makes Bloom’s small debt to Sweny assume a larger symbolic importance.

The example of the lemon soap demonstrates the hidden dimensions of the everyday. If we remind ourselves of the four aspects of the everyday with which this chapter started – the real, the daily, the unconscious and the commodity – we can see that the lemon soap first works to anchor the narrative in a believable version of the real. Second, as an everyday object that plays a part in Bloom’s daily routine, it helps to signify his ordinariness, his status as an everyman. Third, the lemon soap represents aspects of Bloom’s unconscious psychic life: his uncertainties about his cultural identity, his sense of guilt, his ambivalent feelings about his wife’s affair. Fourth, the bar of soap as commodity indicates that Bloom’s ordinariness is positioned in relation to social and economic structures that are far more powerful than he is. Bloom’s role as modern hero, a twentieth-century version of the ancient Greek hero Odysseus (whose name in Latin is Ulysses), is realized through his struggle to attain some agency in the face of those structures.

The Real

In these respects, the real is a problem, not a given, for the modernist text. Rather than ‘reflecting’ that which already exists, the modernist text presents itself as epistemological form, that is, a new way of knowing the real. If, at an earlier stage in the development of the novel, the soap might have acted as one of Roland Barthes’s ‘reality effects’, an index of reality, embedding Bloom in a ‘real’ world, modernism is a response to the rapidly changing world described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, where far from there being a stable reality, ‘all that is solid melts into air’.5 The response of the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century was to emphasize the impermanence of any illusory sense of reality in a world that might change at any second. In this context, the bar of soap acts as a dialectical image, in the sense used by the critic Walter Benjamin.6 On the one hand, it signifies the ordinary, daily rhythms of life. On the other, it reveals the extent to which dailiness is governed and regulated by forces that are much larger and more powerful than what can be perceived within the narrow horizon of individual experience. As a dialectical image, the soap halts and condenses for a moment the rapid flux of modernity, drawing attention to the thresholds, boundaries and fractures that structure reality and exposing the contradictions that produce it. Modernism uses a number of formal techniques to draw attention to these contradictions, which suggest the world is itself a work in process rather than a finished entity.

Modernist Techniques

The most important technique used to defamiliarize the everyday in modernist artworks is ‘montage’: the art of composition by the superimposition or juxtaposition of miscellaneous elements. It is not uncommon for objects to appear enchanted in some of the great nineteenth-century realists, notably Dickens (see Carey, 1973), but for the most part nineteenth-century realism keeps the discourse of the fantastic carefully within the bounds of a realist narrative. Modernist texts are far more likely to permit the unconscious to seep into our experience of the everyday. ‘Stream of consciousness’, surrealism and works of montage constructed using objets trouvés (found objects) are all defamiliarizing techniques that work to upset the social and aesthetic conventions that define our sense of the real.

Both ‘stream of consciousness’ and surrealism bring to representation the influence of the unconscious mind on our apprehension of the real. The rearrangement of conventional forms, the body or the face in Cubist painting for example, provokes new ways of seeing the world and of seeing things in the world. The juxtaposition of apparently unrelated pieces of text and objects as ‘collage’ or ‘montage’ in modernist artworks opens up the possibility of new conventions, both aesthetic and social. In Joyce’s Ulysses, different styles – popular journalism, the mock-heroic, scholasticism, romance – are juxtaposed and parodied. In T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land (1922), fragments of text are carefully edited together to produce a disorientating effect on the reader:

‘On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.’

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning. (Eliot, 1974, 74)

One way of thinking about such passages is that modernism simply mimics the processes of urban modernity. The experience of the industrial city is an assault on the senses. It becomes impossible to comprehend its totality. Instead, it is only possible to apprehend impressions or fragments (see McCracken, 2010). But to see the modernist aesthetic of fragmentation as just mimetic is to overlook the extent to which it pushes its audience to reflect on the process it represents. In this respect, the significant thing about the modernist artwork is not its experimental form per se, but that it prompts us to think about everyday social processes towards which we would otherwise become blasé or habituated (see Simmel, 1974). In this respect, modernism, if not actively resistant, at least questioned the logic of modernization in capitalist societies.

Mass Culture

Sometimes modernist references to the everyday are explicit, as in Eliot’s fragments of urban detritus in Section III of The Waste Land:

[…] empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. (Eliot, 1974, 70)

More often the everyday object is an implicit referent around which our knowledge of the world can be reconfigured. In each case, modernism has a contradictory relationship to the mass society created by industrialization. In modernist art and literature, the industrial products that feed mass culture, such as Bloom’s bar of soap or Eliot’s list of discarded items in The Waste Land, often figure as a referent of the real. Yet, as Raymond Williams points out in his essay ‘When Was Modernism?’ (1989), the movements that produced modernist texts and artworks were not themselves mass movements. They were composed of small coteries and circles in metropolitan centres such as Paris, London and New York. The work they produced often set itself against mass culture. It was difficult, it had a small circulation, and most modernisms could justifiably be accused of elitism. It is then not surprising that historians such as Eric Hobsbawm argue that the new industrial technologies of mass entertainment, such as cinema and radio, played a greater role in changing culture than avant-garde and modernist art (1994, 178–98).

However, a balanced view of the relationship between modernism and mass culture needs to weigh the historian’s justifiable concern with the culture of the majority and modernism’s influence, by 1930, as what Fredric Jameson describes as a ‘cultural dominant’ (1991, 6). A closer look at the culture of the period suggests that the relationship between mass and elite cultures was more of a two-way process than a binary divide suggests. Modernism influenced popular culture, from high fashion to the fitted kitchen. In the 1920s, glossy magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair published articles that explained modernism for readers who wanted to understand the latest cultural trends. Modernism did impinge on everyday life. Clothes, book covers and domestic interiors were influenced by modernist design.

The relationship worked the other way as well. Cinema had an enormous impact on modernist writers.7 The films of Charlie Chaplin were highly popular and influential on avant-garde dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht. By the 1930s, modernism had started to creep into the popular design of everyday household items, from crockery to paperback book covers. Modernist aesthetics became the cultural dominant not in the sense that most culture was modernist, but in the sense that modernism became the measure against which earlier and newer forms were judged. In mass culture this dominant could act as a signifier for elitism, as it does in the hard-boiled detective novels of Raymond Chandler, whose style was admired by leading modernists such as T. S. Eliot, or as a mark of distinction, as it did in magazines of high fashion.

The Everyday and Mood

Nonetheless, where this positions modernism in relation to the everyday is a matter of dispute. Critics of modernism, such as Rita Felski, argue that twentieth-century theories of the everyday have taken their cue from modernism, valuing the extraordinary over the ordinary. She quotes Samuel Beckett’s epigram, ‘habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit’, as a typical example (Felski, 1999–2000, 26),8 an attitude she associates with a gendered contempt for routine dailiness. Felski recruits feminist theorists of the everyday, such as Agnes Heller (Everyday Life, 1984), in a bid to revalue ordinariness. However, arguably it was modernist women writers, such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, who initiated a gendered critique of dailiness (see Randall, 2007). Both writers focused on the daily work performed by women in the home. Dorothy Richardson even suggested this amounts to a form of art in itself. In Revolving Lights (1923), the seventh ‘chapter-volume’ of her long modernist novel Pilgrimage, the novel’s heroine, Miriam Henderson, develops a theory in an argument with the character Hypo Wilson (based on the author H. G. Wells) that women’s art is the art of making ‘atmospheres’:

Women are emancipated […] Through their pre-eminence in an art. The art of making atmospheres. It’s as big an art as any other. Most women can exercise it, for reasons, by fits and starts. The best women work at it the whole of the time. Not one man in a million is aware of it. It’s like air within air. It may be deadly. Cramping and awful, or simply destructive, so that no life is possible within it. So is the bad art of men. At its best it is absolutely life-giving. And not soft. Very hard and stern and austere in its beauty. And like mountain air. And you can’t get behind it, or in any way divide it up. Just as with ‘Art.’ Men live in it and from it all their lives without knowing […] the thing I mean goes through everything. A woman’s way of ‘being’ can be discovered in the way she pours out tea. (Richardson, 1979, 3: 257)

Although Miriam’s insights appear to support Felski’s argument for a revaluation of the everyday, they also suggest that such a revaluation cannot escape the paradoxes that lie at the heart of the quotidian. While her concept of art as ‘atmosphere’ is created out of the everyday, its ability to break out of the limitations of its surroundings is not guaranteed: ‘It may be deadly. Cramping and awful.’ At ‘its best it is absolutely life-giving’, but it is not immediately clear whether this is because it fulfils the potential of the conditions of its making or because it transcends them, becoming something else. In other words, the question is: Does Richardson’s female artist allow her audience, knowingly and unknowingly, to appreciate the everyday for what it is, or does she open their eyes to a realm of experience beyond their immediate (daily, habitual) environment?

To explore this question further, it is necessary to interrogate Richardson’s concept of ‘atmosphere’. Richardson knew German well, so it seems likely she was thinking of a concept from German aesthetics, Stimmung, which translates as ‘atmosphere’ or ‘mood’.9 She would have been aware that the etymology of Stimmung comes from the German word for ‘voice’, Stimme. Another translation is attunement, a concept which accords with the female artists’ ability to orchestrate a relationship between people and things in a domestic space, bringing them into harmony. In other episodes in Pilgrimage Miriam manages to create an atmosphere/mood/sense of attunement in a room directly through music, for example by playing a Beethoven piano sonata (1: 56; 4: 638).

Although best known in the twentieth century through the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the concept of Stimmung has a long history in the philosophy of aesthetics. David Wellbery suggests that this history includes three aspects. First, the power of mood/atmosphere/attunement stems from the fact that it is a ‘total quality’ nonetheless experienced as an ‘individual encounter’: the mood meets ‘the subject’s state of self, making apparent how one is and how one will become’ (Wellbery, 2003, 704). Second, moods are ‘not only modes of our psychic inner life, but also atmospheres, which surround us’. They consist of

an interaction of many elements, which is felt collectively. Moods have an integrative function with regard to objects and their properties. They combine into self-contained wholes, without specifying the rules for this synthesis. (705)

Finally, moods have a communicative dimension. The communication of a mood proceeds

through suggestion, it is infectious; but it operates below the threshold of rational explanation (so is deniable, easy to repudiate), resulting in a common field of orientations, attitudes, dispositions, which is nevertheless unstable, because not secured by expressly symbolised norms. (705)

Although difficult to quantify, the notion of mood is a useful one, putting the concept of the everyday in a different light. It suggests that our relationship with everyday objects is conditioned by a complex set of relationships between people and things. Like the everyday, our experience of mood is paradoxical: we experience it subjectively, yet it has an undefinable, but unmistakeably objective existence, which allows it to be shared and communicated. Our experience of the everyday depends on mood, which is produced by a particular cultural moment or constellation that is experienced both subjectively and collectively. In this respect, modernist techniques of defamiliarization are designed to shock us out of a comfortable mood and to (re)instate a sense of agency (our agency or the agency of others) in the process of mood creation.

However, these techniques of defamiliarization work in different ways in different works of art. The German dramatist Bertolt Brecht used the Verfremdungseffekt (‘distancing’ or ‘alienation’ effect) in his theatre to interrupt the creation of all-absorbing (in Richardson’s terms) ‘cramping and awful’ moods that would prevent his audience from thinking critically; he was, however, well aware that his theatre had to first create those moods before it could break them (see Brecht, 1964). For Richardson, women’s art involves a careful tending to people and objects, an arrangement that, if got right, will expand rather than stifle consciousness. Despite their differences, both Brecht and Richardson use formal techniques to provoke new forms of consciousness in their audiences in order to set the relationship between art and the everyday into a new light. Arrangement and rearrangement are, as it turns out, at the heart of modernism’s concern with the everyday. Modernist art is concerned with the arrangement of things and people as they are, but also as they might be. The mood or atmosphere produced by the former is usually unconscious. Modernist art rearranges in order to create a critical distance from the everyday, but also to seek the possibilities that exist within it: new moods, new atmospheres.

Arrangement

If this project appears relatively straightforward in relation to the fixed space of an interior or a theatre, the modern city presents a different set of problems. It is less easy to capture the diversity and complexity of the urban everyday, which is as much about rapid change and movement through the city as it is about fixed structures or stasis (McCracken, 2010). The modern city is experienced as fragmented, and urban experience itself becomes a series of intensities, punctuated by boredom. Modernism often also responds with an aesthetic of fragmentation, reflecting the subject’s experience of the city, but modernist art is never entirely random, even where an element of chance or unpredictability is built into its form.

One uncategorizable example of modernism (uncategorizable in the sense that it is at one and the same time a work of art, and of criticism, and of history and of philosophy) that responds to fragmentations through the technique of montage is Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. An unfinished commentary composed between 1927 and 1940 in multiple strands on the history of the city that became the capital of modernism, nineteenth-century Paris, The Arcades Project can be compared with some of the avant-garde novels of the early twentieth century: Joyce’s Ulysses, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1930–36) or E. E. Cumming’s EIMI (1933). Benjamin wrote that he wanted to create a text composed entirely of quotations. The version of The Arcades Project that he left when he died is not quite that. It is largely made up of citations from other texts, but it also includes short commentaries by Benjamin, which add an extra dimension to his juxtapositions.

Using sources from newspapers, history, philosophy and literature, Benjamin builds up a composite representation of nineteenth-century Paris. Part of Benjamin’s argument is that it is the very obsolescence of the arcades that opens them up for historical analysis: ‘to become obsolete means: to grow strange’ (1999, 336). Their decaying structures and out-of-date business practices reveal the processes through which the everyday is produced. In a sense, Benjamin performs a similar act of enforced degradation on his sources: breaking them up into fragments and reassembling them in such a way that they provoke new meanings.

Because Benjamin committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Nazis in 1940, the exact arrangement of the fragments that make up the Arcades Project will never be known. However, Benjamin gave a number of indications as to his method. Not only is the project an exercise in the aesthetics of montage, but the content is also preoccupied with the arrangement of things. Benjamin is fascinated by both interior and exterior spaces, and even more drawn to the thresholds between the private and public. He writes about the traces left by the human body on the soft furnishings of the bourgeois home, making it the perfect location for a murder mystery (1999, 20), and the semi-mystical function of the objects that mark urban boundaries and thresholds, which persist into modernity:

At the entrance to the skating rink, to the pub, to the tennis court: penates.10 The hen that lays the golden praline-eggs, the machine that stamps our names on nameplates, slot machines, fortunetelling devices, and above all weighing devices (the Delphic gnōthi seauton¹¹ of our day) – these guard the threshold […] Of course, this same magic prevails more covertly in the interior of the bourgeois dwelling. Chairs beside an entrance, photographs flanking a doorway, are fallen household deities, and the violence they must appease grips our hearts even today at the ringing of the doorbell. (Benjamin, 1999, 214)

In a similar vein, Benjamin explores the histories of the underground passages and catacombs that honeycomb subterranean Paris, documenting their use during periods of civil unrest and revolution.¹² His use of montage juxtaposes the ordinary life of the city with those aspects of urban life that are either invisible or taken for granted. Influenced by but not wholly in sympathy with the surrealists, he employs their methods of shock and defamiliarization to provoke a new look at city spaces. He asks us to look at pavement slabs through new eyes, as if we were homeless and were looking for the most comfortable place to bed down on them:

For what do we know of streetcorners, curb-stones, the architecture of the pavement – we who have never felt heat, filth, and the edges of the stone beneath our naked soles, and have never scrutinized the uneven placement of the paving stones with an eye toward bedding down on them. (P1, 10; Benjamin, 1999, 517)

Cities, for Benjamin, are replete with dreams and nightmares: ‘arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railway stations’ are all ‘[d]ream houses of the collective’ (405); but Benjamin is most interested in the points at which dreaming and waking meet: the uncertain point when the sleeper is not sure whether she is awake or asleep, but has still access to her dreaming as well as her waking worlds (see Buse et al., 2006, 105–12). The city, he suggests, is criss-crossed with thresholds and boundaries where dreamworlds and real worlds meet. Thus, for Benjamin, the everyday is poised on the threshold between what is and what might be (see McCracken, 2002). A modernist aesthetics of the city requires an appreciation of all its dimensions, all its real and surreal forms of consciousness.

However, one consequence of wanting to appreciate everything can be a loss of form, leading to incoherence or just boredom. In a continuation of their dispute in Richardson’s Revolving Lights, Hypo accuses Miriam of being ‘scattered’: ‘You’re too omnivorous, Miriam. You get the hang of too many things. You’re scattered’ (1979, 3: 377). Critics have been divided about whether Pilgrimage represents an aesthetic of accumulation or whether there is a design behind its form.13 It lacks the mythic structure of Joyce’s Ulysses but where some critics have, like Hypo, seen it as superficial, extending to touch everything, but penetrating nothing in depth, others have seen a careful design in its structures of growing awareness and repetition, which allow Miriam’s first impressions, which are indeed unformed and untested, to be reconsidered and reordered into meaningful experience.

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project could be read as an analogous response to urban modernity. Its fragmented, citational structure reflects the scattered experience of the modern city. However, there is a design to its arrangement. The citations are carefully juxtaposed. Arrangement is key. The method borrows from that of the ‘collector’, who ‘takes up the struggle against dispersion’ (Benjamin, 1999, 211) and, as Benjamin describes it,

makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows upon them only a connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one – one in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful. (9)

Modernism responds to the everyday by selecting, revaluing and rearranging. It is not the case that modernisms are contemptuous of the everyday. Unlike Beckett’s dog, they are fascinated by rather than chained to the forms habit takes and the new forms thrown up by the cultures of capitalism, such as the commodity.

Port Sunlight

Another literary bar of soap illustrates this. Entering a shop in Switzerland in Oberland (1927), the ninth ‘chapter-volume’ of Pilgrimage, Miriam Henderson is struck by the international nature of the goods, many of them British, including Huntley and Palmer biscuits and, in a (possibly deliberate) echo of Ulysses, soap:

As if from the bright intense sunlight all about her, a ray of thought had fallen upon the mystery of her passion for soap […] It was not only the appeal of varying shape and colour or even of the many perfumes each with its power of evoking images: the heavy voluptuous scents suggesting brunette adventuresses, Turkish cigarettes and luxurious idleness; the elusive, delicate, that could bring spring-time into a winter bedroom darkened by snow-clouds. The secret of its power was in the way it pervaded one’s best realisations of everyday life. No wonder Beethoven worked at his themes washing and re-washing his hands. And even in merely washing with an empty mind there is a charm; though it is an empty charm, the illusion of beginning, as soon as you have finished, all over again as a different person. But all great days had soap, impressing its qualities upon you, during your most intense moments of anticipation, as a prelude. And the realisation of a good day past, coming with the early morning hour, is accompanied by soap. Soap is with you when you are in that state of feeling life at first hand that makes even the best things that can happen important not so much in themselves as in the way they make you conscious of life, and of yourself living. Every day, even those that are called ordinary days, with its miracle of return from sleep, is heralded by soap, summoning its retinue of companion days.

To buy a new cake of soap is to buy a fresh stretch of days. Its little weight, treasure, minutely heavy in the hand, is life, past present and future compactly welded. (Richardson, 1979, 4: 62–3)

As in Ulysses the bar of soap is a dialectical image, where the object halts and condenses the larger structures that produce the everyday in modernity. In her study Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life, Bryony Randall writes that the ‘mystery of [Miriam’s] passion for soap’ (2007, 76) reveals three imbricated aspects of dailiness: first, the way in which, although each day is different, it mirrors or contains all that have gone before, ‘past present and future compactly welded’; second, soap was (as we have already seen in James Joyce’s Ulysses) like Huntley and Palmer biscuits, part of an increasingly commodified daily life. The connection between sunlight and soap in the passage is partly a tongue-in-cheek reference to Sunlight, the widely advertised, mass-produced soap, which was made at Port Sunlight (named after the product) near Liverpool by Lever & Co. The bar of soap Miriam buys is almost certainly Sunlight soap, which was sold in Europe and America as well as throughout the British Empire using the phantasmagoric and narcotic imagery of advertising alluded to in the passage: ‘voluptuous scents […] brunette adventuresses, Turkish cigarettes and luxurious idleness’. Finally, the selection of soap takes it out of the obscurity of ordinariness and draws attention to the shared ‘art of living’ (Randall, 2007, 77–8). Randall borrows this phrase from Henri Lefebvre’s imagined utopian future for the everyday, in his Critique of Everyday Life:

In the future the art of living will become a genuine art, based like all art upon the vital need to expand […] which will go beyond its own conditions in an attempt to see itself not just as a means but as an end. (Lefebvre, 2008, 1: 199)

She argues that Richardson continues this art, which Lefebvre sees as prefigured in earlier writers. Far from expressing contempt for the ordinary, Richardson sees the daily as an end in itself, attending not so much to ‘things that can happen’ as ‘the way they make you conscious of life, and of yourself living’ (Richardson, 1979, 4: 63).

It is noticeable that the paradoxes associated with the everyday continue in Randall’s comprehensive definitions. Becoming conscious of life as that which already is and of living as daily existence requires an initial shock of strangeness, produced in modernisms by a sense of things being temporally or spatially out of place. The shock of illumination may come from the content of the artwork, for example the strangeness of seeing familiar commodities, like British biscuits, in the Swiss Alps. More commonly, as in Ulysses, The Waste Land or Pilgrimage, this content is combined with formal innovation and it is the form itself that initiates the experience of estrangement.

Conclusion

If we return to the original questions with which this chapter began – about the relationships between art and the real, art and the daily rhythms of life, art and the unconscious, and art and the commodity – we can see that while different modernists had quite different political visions of the world, what they shared was a rejection of the world as something fixed, as something that could be taken for granted. Modernist works of art propose a model of how we might come to know (albeit imperfectly) a world that is in the process of rapid change, where the rhythms of daily life are just one beat in a plurality of different temporalities, some of which are so powerful that they threaten to crush and break the illusion of individual subjectivity. Modernism’s interest in that which escapes notice stems from its quest for an epistemology – a way of knowing – that is able to grasp the moment, even as it goes beyond it, to embrace the unconscious thoughts or discarded objects that are also a part of modernity. Modernism’s paradoxical embrace of and critique of commodity culture can be understood as both a recognition of the power of the commodity form in capitalism and the recognition that what it represents is a concentration of power relations and desires which needs to be slowly unpicked using new artistic techniques appropriate to a new age. That these techniques produce an art that often seems remote from ordinary life should not fool us into thinking that the everyday is not at the heart of modernism’s concerns. Modernism’s legacy is both a fascination with the world as it is and a sense of dissatisfaction that it is not what it might be. Modernist artworks are shot through with the utopian desire for something different, something better. It is because that desire is still with us that they still mean something today.

Notes

I would like to thank Bryony Randall for her insightful comments and suggestions about an early draft of this chapter.

1 For an overview of theories of the everyday, see Highmore (2002). For an overview of modernist literature and the everyday, see Randall (2010).

2 For Bryony Randall’s definition of the everyday as a temporal and psychological phenomenon, opposed to the ‘ordinary’, see Randall (2015, 180–90, n.7).

3 It is more accurate to write of ‘modernisms’ in order to register the diversity of modernist artworks, but as a shorthand I use ‘modernism’ throughout this chapter.

4 Although true to the paradoxical nature of the everyday, John Xiros Cooper writes that he could also be described as an ‘anyman’ (2004, 165).

5 ‘All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind’ (Marx and Engels, 1983, 207). See also Berman (1983).

6 For the best account of Benjamin’s use of the dialectical image, see Tiedemann (1999).

7 See Laura Marcus’s chapter in this volume.

8 The quotation comes from Samuel Beckett’s Proust and Three Dialogues (1965, 19).

9 For a suggestive account of how mood analysis might work in cultural studies, see Highmore (2013).

10 Roman household gods.

11 Greek: ‘know thyself’.

12 See Convolute C., ‘Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris’ (Benjamin, 1999, 82–100).

13 On Richardson’s aesthetic as one of accumulation, see Mansfield (1919) and Watts (2013–14).

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