Lawrence Rainey
Almost thirty years have elapsed since Andreas Huyssen published After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Although the issues he addresses in that book are now constellated in very different ways, his formulations achieved a schematic clarity that made them beguiling and worthwhile revisiting. For Huyssen, building on earlier work by Peter Bürger (1984), a sharp distinction was to be drawn between modernism and the avant-garde. Modernism was typified by its hostility to mass or popular culture. ‘Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project’, Huyssen urged, a project in which popular culture is construed as a threat of encroaching formlessness, gendered as female, and held at bay by reaffirming and refortifying the boundaries that divide authentic art and inauthentic mass culture (Huyssen, 1986, 47, 53).
Hostility to mass or popular culture not only defined modernism’s essence, but it differentiated it from the avant-garde (Dada, constructivism, futurism, surrealism and the New Objectivity of the Weimar Republic [Neue Sachlichkeit]). While modernism seeks to reaffirm the boundaries of traditional art, the avant-garde ‘attempts to subvert art’s autonomy, its artificial separation from life, and its institutionalization as “high art,”’ an impulse that also accounts for its ‘urge to validate other, formerly neglected or ostracized forms of cultural expression’, chief among them popular culture (Huyssen, 1986, 61).
The third term contributing to this constellation, after modernism and the avant-garde, was postmodernism, a term endowed with breathtaking elasticity. It could take ‘the form of happenings, pop vernacular, psychedelic art, acid rock, alternative and street theater’, though it could also embrace ‘Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, Burroughs and Barthelme’ (Huyssen, 1986, 193, 188).
Architecture presented a special problem: yes, there was ‘something patently absurd’ about Robert Venturi’s claims that the vernacular style of the Caesars Palace casino, in Las Vegas, offered the blueprint for a renewal of contemporary architecture; nevertheless, such claims forced us ‘to acknowledge the power they mustered to explode the reified dogmas of modernism’ (Huyssen, 1986, 188). More importantly, the case of Venturi exemplified a much wider phenomenon: ‘Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today [1985], the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture’ (Huyssen, 1986, 188). In short, postmodernism was aligned with the historical avant-garde in its acceptance of the popular and the vernacular; modernism, instead, was a reactionary, perhaps paranoid attempt to roll back the tide of mass or popular culture. This cluster of ideas has become sufficiently influential that one recent book can simply refer to ‘the Great Divide theory’ – tersely echoing the title of Huyssen’s book (Goldstone, 2013, 22).
There were many problems with Huyssen’s arguments. One was his troubling distinction between modernism and the avant-garde. Huyssen kept illustrating the distinction with increasing desperation, if not always success: ‘It makes little sense to lump Thomas Mann together with Dada, Proust with André Breton, or Rilke with Russian constructivism’ (Huyssen, 1986, 163).
Fair enough. But is Rilke, with his many images of roses and angels, best thought of as a modernist? Or is he one more variant of late nineteenth-century decadence, overlaid with a Grecian veneer? And why shouldn’t one collate Breton with Proust? After all, when working for the French publisher Gallimard in 1920, Breton went daily to Proust’s flat and read aloud the proofs for The Guermantes Way. As for the opposition between Thomas Mann and Dada, it glosses over the immense gap in their literary quality. Consider the opening to Raoul Hausmann’s ‘Pamphlet against the Weimar Republic’s Conception of Life’, which begins:
I announce the Dadaistic world!
I laugh at science and culture, these ailing safeguards of a society condemned to death.1
(Hausmann, 1977, 49)
Laudable sentiments, perhaps, but expressed with a crudity at some remove from the delicate ironies found everywhere in Mann. Indeed, one may wonder whether the adolescent posing of Dada merits equivalence with the musings of Gustav von Aschenbach or the subtle acerbities of Serenus Zeitblom.
Another problem resides in the aesthetic parameters that Huyssen ascribes to postmodernism. He insists that it includes ‘Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, Burroughs and Barthelme’, but then goes on to include the architects Robert Venturi, Michael Graves and Philip Johnson, albeit with reservations. But for most observers there is a difference between the cultivation of sincerity and spontaneity promulgated by the Beats and the arch and knowing wit of postmodernist architecture. Perhaps both do have their origins in the popular, as Huyssen asserts; but there is a big difference between the popular and ‘the popular’, a difference that resides in irony, a quality notable only for its absence in the writings of Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beats. As defined by Huyssen, the postmodern yokes together, under a single rubric, aesthetics that are deeply incompatible, if not downright inimical to one another.
Nor is it self-evident that his principal thesis, that modernism was relentlessly hostile to popular culture, even has much hold in the English-language world, at least not if we take Joyce’s Ulysses as a representative text. After all, when Simon Dedalus and Ben Dollard sing their renditions of ‘When First I Saw’ and ‘The Croppy Boy’ (in the ‘Sirens’ episode), they are simply restaging a ritual of middle-class parlour life, public singing, a mode of conjuring sociability that remained part of popular life until it was slowly decimated by the onslaught of recorded song after 1918. And their choice of tunes is revealing: ‘The Croppy Boy’ was a perennial Irish favourite well into the 1960s, while ‘When First I Saw’ was essentially a parlour song, one that has since dropped out of any musical repertoire except in its earlier Italian form, ‘M’apparì’. (It continues to appear in every tenor’s collection of greatest arias only because the high notes at the end offer an occasion for vocal display.) The opera in which it first appeared, Martha (1847), though performed in 1906 and subsequent seasons at the New York Metropolitan Opera, has entirely vanished from the modern repertory, dismissed as too light, too French, too middlebrow.
Even the few quotations of Latin that take place in Ulysses only reinforce the book’s dialogue with popular culture. For every Latin quotation comes from the Catholic mass, universally performed in Latin until 1962, when the Second Vatican Council authorized the vernacular masses still in use today. Pointedly, Ulysses never quotes from Vergil, Cicero or Tacitus, benchmarks of classical Latin, but only from the ecclesiastical Latin known to every churchgoer.
Every reader of Ulysses swiftly discerns that the book has an elastic, mobile relationship with both the Odyssey and Mozart’s most popular opera, Don Giovanni. Molly Bloom, we learn early on, will be singing the opera’s duet ‘Là ci darem la mano’ with Blazes Boylan at a forthcoming concert, hinting at the love triangle that forms a central plot thread. But most readers will be disconcerted by the novel’s repeated references to Turko the Terrible. The first appears in ‘Telemachus’, when Stephen Dedalus ponders the events his mother once recollected:
She heard Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:
I am the boy
That can enjoy
Invisibility.
(Joyce, 1984, 1.257–62)
The second occurs a bit later when Leopold Bloom, walking in the morning towards the butcher’s shop, imagines himself somewhere in the Far East:
Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled pipe. (Joyce, 1984, 4.88–90)
The third occurs in ‘Circe’, when Bloom sees a phantasmagoric vision of his wife’s late father, Major Tweedy:
Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his breast bright with medals, toes the line.
(Joyce, 1984, 15.4612–15)
It is possible that Stephen also sees this hallucination, since the text, at this point, no longer obeys the logical-causal coordination of realism. But what are we to make of it?
Turko the Terrible was a Christmas pantomime that premiered at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in December 1873, that theatre’s first-ever pantomime. It was written by the Irish author Edwin Hamilton (1849–1919), though it was also repeatedly updated and revised as it moved into subsequent years. Further, Hamilton was merely adapting or rewriting an earlier pantomime by William Brough, an ‘extravaganza’ that was at first, in 1868, titled Turko the Terrible; or, The Fairy Roses, and later, in 1876, retitled Turko the Terrible; or, the Great Princess Show (Thornton, 1961, 17).2 In the 1873 Gaiety production, the role of Turko was played by Edward E. Royce, and we know that he sang ‘Invisibility’. But thanks to the impressive research of Cheryl Herr, we also know that Royce had already performed the same song a year earlier in a burlesque called Amy Robsart (Eldred’s Company, 1872, Gaiety), where he achieved a ‘striking success’ (Herr, 1986, 120). The song, in short, was simply lifted from the burlesque (Amy Robsart, 1872) and inserted into the pantomime (Turko, 1873) that was an adaptation of an extravaganza (another Turko, 1868). Still more, Royce returned to Dublin in 1892, again at the Gaiety Theatre where, in homage to his earlier success, he played the role of Captain M’Turco in that year’s ‘Grand Christmas Pantomime’, Sindbad the Sailor. Did he reprise ‘Invisibility’ yet again? We do not know. We do know, however, that this 1892 production, alongside Sindbad the Sailor, featured characters named Tindbad (the tailor) and Whinbad (the whaler).3 Famously, as Bloom falls asleep at the end of the ‘Ithaca’ episode, he recalls that he is weary because he has travelled so far during the course of the day. The text then asks the simple question, ‘With?’ Which begets the answer:
Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.
(Joyce, 1984, 17.2321–26)
Joyce, in other words, adopts and adapts the principles that drive the energies of popular pantomime, turning them into a machine that generates his very text. Such simple devices of repetition and variation are exploited again and again. When viewed against the backdrop of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, Bloom is both Leporello (in relation to Molly) and Don Giovanni (in relation to Martha Clifford, or whoever stands behind that name). But he is also simultaneously Lionel (in the opera Martha), a role also momentarily assumed by Simon Dedalus when he sings ‘When First I Saw’, the aria sung by Lionel in Martha. To suggest this heady fusion of the opera character Lionel with Simon Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, Joyce exuberantly conjures a single word: Siopold! (Joyce, 1984, 11.752). Identity is no longer a fixed or given status, but an amalgam of any number of roles within any number of popular fictions.
Nowhere does Joyce adopt popular cultural forms more vigorously than in the ‘Circe’ episode. It begins when Stephen Dedalus and his friend Lynch enter into ‘nighttown’, Joyce’s name for a Dublin slum notorious for harbouring houses of ill repute. While they walk and talk, Stephen repeatedly interrupts their conversation with snatches of song, evidently in Latin. A reader who assembles these snatches will discover that Stephen is singing lines from the Catholic mass, specifically the second chant that precedes the blessing of the altar in the mass that is sung in the Paschal or Lenten season, the period of roughly four Sundays preceding Easter:
Vidi aquam – Introit for Paschal (Lent) |
Translation: I saw water |
|
Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a |
I saw water pouring forth from the temple from |
|
latere dextro. Alleluia. |
(77) |
its right side. Alleluia. |
Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista |
(84) |
And all those to whom that water came |
Salvi facti sunt |
(98) |
Have been redeemed. |
(Joyce, 1984, 15.77, 84, 98) |
With these words, the text signals one of the two forms most crucial for structuring ‘Circe’, the Catholic mass of the Easter period. ‘Circe’, in effect, will register the metaphorical or fantastic death and resurrection of its two unheroic protagonists, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. But what is the second form?
Noticing the presence of the mass should not blind us to another popular form no less powerfully present in ‘Circe’. A hint about it comes only a few lines farther down, when Lynch asks Stephen, ‘Where are we going?’ Stephen replies: ‘Lecherous Lynx, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam’ (Joyce, 1984, 15.121–122). It’s the last phrase, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam, that seizes our attention, because it invokes the second line of the same ‘Introit’ earlier invoked by Buck Mulligan in the book’s first spoken speech, when he carries his shaving bowl to the top of the Martello tower and intones the chant that a priest would utter when approaching the altar before communion, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’:
Introibo ad altare |
Translation: I shall enter into the altar |
|
Introibo ad altare Dei |
I shall enter into the altar of God, |
|
Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam. |
Towards God, who has made glad my youth. |
But Joyce seizes on these well-known phrases to introduce a slight alteration in the wording, changing only a single letter: the ‘u’ in the word ‘deum’, meaning ‘God’, has been replaced with an ‘a’, turning it into ‘deam’ or ‘goddess’. His alteration encapsulates a broader transformation in the mass’s form, one related to the role of gender in a competing popular form. Not much later, it makes its appearance when Leopold Bloom is enchanted by the sudden apparition of his dead mother, Ellen:
(in pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, widow Twankey’s crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her hair pleated in a crispine net, appears … ) (Joyce, 1984, 15.282–85)
Widow Twankey is a female character in the Christmas pantomime Aladdin, but she is played by a ‘pantomime dame’, the term applied to a man who plays a female role and is a comic foil to the ‘principal boy’, Aladdin, played by an actress. Indeed, we know a celebrated Widow Twankey of Joyce’s day, Dan Leno.
Pantomime dames are played either in an extremely camp style or else by men acting ‘butch’ in women’s clothing, wearing big make-up and big hair, having exaggerated physical features and performing in a melodramatic style. Joyce, in short, is invoking the sensational theatricality and cross-dressing of British pantomime as a counterweight to the solemnity of the Roman Catholic mass, and the explosive mixture of these genres gives ‘Circe’ its wild, comical, hypnotic power.
When, later in ‘Circe’, the brothel owner or ‘whoremistress’ Bella Cohen makes her appearance (15.2742–48), she speaks only a single line in propria voce (‘My word! I’m all of a mucksweat’ [15.2750]) before being transformed, via a single letter, from Bella into Bello:
BLOOM
(mumbles) Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen …
BELLO
(with a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice) Hound of dishonour!
BLOOM
(infatuated) Empress!
BELLO
(his heavy cheekchops sagging) Adorer of the adulterous rump!
BLOOM
(plaintively) Hugeness!
BELLO
Dungdevourer!
BLOOM
(with sinews semiflexed) Magmagnificence!
BELLO
Down! (he taps her on the shoulder with his fan) Incline feet forward. Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!
This initial dialogue establishes the tone for everything that follows. Bloom has been transformed into a woman, just as Bella has been turned into Bello, a man who dominates and orders him about. Bloom, in other words, experiences the everyday degradations experienced by women, degradation that even extends to small items of clothing as Bella promptly orders that he be ‘laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk’ (15.2975), and, perhaps more importantly, demands that he confess his sins:
Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career or crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be candid for once. (Joyce, 1984, 15.3041–42)
Bloom, heeding her command, confesses that he once sniffed his wife’s underwear, but that doesn’t suffice and, angrily, Bella offers Bloom for auction:
BELLO
What offers? (he points) For that lot. Trained by owner to fetch and carry basket in mouth. (he bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (Joyce, 1984, 15.3088–90)
Does Bello’s query, ‘What offers?’ echo the ‘No Reasonable Offer Refused’ embroidered into Dan Leno’s costume? Whatever the case, Bloom has now been turned into a prostitute who will be sold to the highest bidder, a variant of Bella/Bello Cohen herself. This portion of the text, in other words, becomes an inverted microcosm of the entire episode, with its male-dominated world in which the women of ‘nighttown’ are oppressed in exactly this manner. He experiences first-hand the forms of exploitation that are sexual relationships as constituted in the novel’s present day. But he can do so only because the novel so explicitly invokes the gender-bending properties of British pantomime, in which the ‘pantomime dame’ is a man and the ‘principal boy’ a woman. Popular culture isn’t being held at bay here, as Huyssen asserts; it is being welcomed, adopted as the motor that drives the book’s central action.
Further, we must add an important qualification. For pantomime is a distinctly British institution, a phenomenon wholly unknown to American, German, French, Italian or other audiences. Yet that is also telling: for Huyssen consistently treats popular culture as though it were a monolithic and homogeneous whole, a solid and unchanging block. But it was only after 1920 that popular culture, under the impress of the Hollywood cinema that swept through Europe in the 1920s, began to assume something like its modern form, and then only fitfully. That change, in turn, precipitated the decline of British music hall, so deeply admired by T. S. Eliot and so liberally quoted throughout Ulysses (most notably ‘Those Seaside Girls’ and ‘My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl’), a decline that would leave it a ruin by the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1927, meanwhile, Britain passed the Cinematograph Films Act, requiring that a certain percentage of the films shown on British screens be produced in Britain, but that merely led to ‘quota quickies’, inferior films that audiences disliked. Instead, what did most to revive the British film industry was the influx of (mostly Jewish) refugees from Nazi Germany after 1933. Popular culture, even within a single country such as Britain, was a complex and ever-changing field in which a constellation of competing forms competed, thrived – and sometimes died. British pantomime survived; British music hall died; while British cinema has had a more complex history. But Huyssen flattens everything into a monolithic block that strips popular culture of every particularity. Just as he addresses modernism without ever adducing a single passage from a modernist text, so he conjures a blank and largely empty popular culture that may never have existed. What masquerades as a historical genealogy turns out to be a species of legerdemain, a shell game with historically empty shells.
Consider another modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land. There are many ways to approach it, and one common reading emphasizes the relationship between the cards dealt out by Madame Sosostris in Part I and the title of Part IV, emphasizing the poem’s unity. Famously, at line 55, Madame Sosostris tells her listener (who is a figure for the reader): ‘Fear death by water’. And just as plainly, the title of Part IV reads ‘Death by Water’. We have, in other words, a use of repetition, a likeness. As one critic has observed of Madame Sosostris: ‘She must provide the dots that the rest of the poem must connect into a semblance of plot’ (Bedient, 1986, 56).
This is perceptive, provided we understand that its keyword is really ‘semblance’, to be taken in the strong sense as ‘an assumed or unreal appearance of something: mere show’. The Waste Land has neither a plot nor narrative coherence, but the semblance of a plot, the likeness of a plot that swiftly dissolves into illusion. For it requires only a moment to recall that Madame Sosostris is a charlatan or that the drowned Phoenician sailor isn’t even a card in the traditional Tarot pack. And when she discloses the drowned Phoenician card:
Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician sailor,
The text swiftly divorces itself from straightforward narrative, intruding cruelly:
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Phlebas the Phoenician, whose reappearance (read: repetition) at first promises narrative connectedness between the first and later parts of the poems, turns out to be another figure in the poem’s grim histrionics of non-relationship. The Waste Land doesn’t have a narrative; instead, it has the scent of a narrative that hovers in the air, like the perfume of a woman who has just left the room.
If there is a single moment in the poem where we can see that grim histrionics of non-relationship enacted, and a moment as well where the conjunction of narrative and repetition is restaged with ferocity, it is the encounter between the unnamed typist and the (equally unnamed) young man carbuncular, an encounter that takes place in the middle of the poem’s Part III or in the middle of the five-part work. It is a long passage stretching over forty-two lines (from line 215 to line 256); it presents a continuous story that is punctuated by three interruptions/repetitions from Tiresias, the prophetic figure who has experienced life in both sexes.
In taking up a typist as subject matter in a serious poem, Eliot was doing something unprecedented. Before The Waste Land, typists had figured only in light verse that was humorous or satirical.4 To be sure, typists had long been a subject matter for novels: between 1893 and 1922, sixty-five novels had been published in which the principal protagonist, the heroine, had been a typist. But of these, only eight specifically took up the subject taken up here, a typist who engages in what we would now call premarital consensual sex.5 The typical age of the typist was twenty-two, and it was a ubiquitous convention of these novels that they were orphans, stemming from middle-class families that had precipitously fallen on hard times. Often, the novels elaborated on commonplaces of contemporary journalism about typists, which highlighted stories about the poor food they consumed, the cramped lodgings they inhabited, which often meant that a bed would double as a divan, or even the threadbare lingerie they wore.6 Eliot succinctly revisits these topoi (starting at line 220):
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives | 220 |
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, | |
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights | |
Her stove, and lays out food in tins. | |
Out of the window perilously spread | |
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, | 225 |
On the divan are piled (at night her bed) | |
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. |
But the passage is doing more than recycling realistic details in the poem. For beginning at line 224, a quatrain slowly emerges into view, and by its end it lies spread before us as neatly as ‘Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays’. Well, perhaps a bit less neatly: for the metre of this passage is marked by deep uncertainty – it shifts uneasily between four and five stresses per line, and ranges between nine and thirteen syllables in length – uncertainty that turns it into a sign of poetry’s flimsiness, its fragility in the face of the modern world, or that tacitly asks a question: can poetry’s traditional resources, rhythm and rhyme, suffice for what the modern world can throw in its path? A typist, her room, a scene of urban squalor.
A similar uncertainty is evident in the point of view that is adopted from the very moment the typist appears on the scene (line 215):
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting
For what perspective can enable us to see, at the same time, ‘the eyes and back’ of that ‘human engine’, unless a very contorted or abnormal one? And these difficulties in meter and perspective find a counterpart in syntactical complications that require the reader to readjust and reconsider. Consider this passage (line 218):
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, | |
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see | |
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives | 220 |
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, | |
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights | |
Her stove, and lays out food in tins. |
At line 222, the phrase ‘the typist home at teatime’ is made to perform three different grammatical functions. On the one hand, it may be the grammatical object of the verb ‘see’ (line 219); on the other, it may be the grammatical object of the verb ‘brings’ (line 221), which in turn is governed by the noun phrase ‘the evening hour’ (back in line 220):
[…] the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime,
At the same time, however, ‘the typist’ is simultaneously not just a grammatical object, but also a grammatical subject that governs the verb ‘clears’ in line 222:
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Nor is this case of syntactic uncertainty an isolated aberration. At line 237, the verb ‘endeavours’ (in ‘Endeavours to engage her in caresses’) lacks any grammatical subject to govern it, and the same thing happens again at line 247 with the verb ‘bestows’ (in the line ‘Bestows one final patronising kiss’), which again lacks a grammatical subject to govern it.
This syntactic uncertainty makes what happens next still more startling. For when the poem returns to the scene, the principal actress disappears (beginning at line 231):
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, | |
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, | |
One of the low on whom assurance sits | |
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. | |
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, | 235 |
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, | |
Endeavours to engage her in caresses | |
Which are unreproved, if undesired. | |
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; | |
Exploring hands encounter no defence; | 240 |
His vanity requires no response, | |
And makes a welcome of indifference. | |
[…] | |
Bestows one final patronising kiss, | 247 |
And gropes his way, finding the stair unlit … |
In this tableau, the typist vanishes as an autonomous agent. She exists only through the thoughts of the young man carbuncular, reduced to a present-tense variant of free indirect discourse, as at line 235 (‘as he guesses … she is bored and tired’) or into the pronominal object of his gropings, as at line 237 (‘Endeavours to engage her … ’). Further on, she dissolves into a series of negations at once ghastly and ghostly:
‘unreproved’ | line 238 |
‘undesired’ | line 239 |
‘no defence’ | line 240 |
‘no response’ | line 241 |
‘indifference’ | line 242 |
Their horror is amplified because four of the negations occur in the emphatic position of ending a line of verse, reverberating with each other (thus, ‘no defence’ in line 240 rhymes with ‘indifference’ in line 242) or with other rhyme words (‘undesired’ with ‘tired’ at lines 238 and 236; or ‘no response’ with ‘at once’, in lines 241 and 239). Words such as ‘unreproved’, ‘undesired’ or ‘indifference’ are said to have privative prefixes, because the prefix deprives a word of its original force. But the same term appears in the cognate word ‘privation’, and that is certainly what we have here: inexplicable, unbearable privation.
Not only the typist disappears in the course of this central tableau. The young man carbuncular, as soon as he ‘assaults at once’ (line 239), is displaced with synechdoche (‘Exploring hands encounter … ’ in line 240) and then vanishes under personification (‘His vanity requires no response’ in line 241). Even his ‘final patronising kiss’ has nobody or nothing that serves as a grammatical subject to bestow it; we must infer that ‘bestows’ is governed – but is anything being ‘governed’ here? – by the subject of the preceding clause, ‘His vanity’. Vanity is a cognate of the term ‘vanishing’ that we have used to describe the typist’s disappearance: both stem from the Latin word vanus, meaning ‘empty’, or to cite a fuller definition: ‘1, that contains nothing, empty, void, vacant; 2, empty as to purport or result, idle, null, groundless, unmeaning, fruitless, vain’ (Lewis and Short, 1980, s. v. vanus). But is that all there is at the end? Void and vacant, groundless and unmeaning. Or does it convey ‘that sense of universal and hysterical negation so characteristic of the avant-garde’, as Matei Calinescu notes in a passage quoted approvingly by Huyssen? (Huyssen, 1986, 163).
That final kiss is horrific, rehearsing a convention of popular fiction, in which the novel makes a kiss into the climax of a scene, a chapter, even a whole work. Eliot, instead, turns it into a gratuitous anti-climax. Then he turns to the coda, the aftermath.
Eliot was not the first author to portray a young woman in the aftermath of a sexual liaison. Beginning in 1908, some eight novelists took up secretaries who engage in what we would now call premarital consensual sex, using it to revisit the conventions of the ‘fallen woman novel’ that had been codified in the Victorian period.7 One such book is The Questing Beast, by Ivy Low, a leftist and feminist, first published in 1914; after the heroine, Rachel Cohen, has her first sexual experience, this is how she reacts:
She wondered if she had not plumbed the limits of disgust. She could not believe that life would ever hold zest for her again. A very plain person, who had never seen his face in a glass and had had to form an opinion of his features from his natural vanity and the features of other people, might have felt, on being suddenly presented with a mirror, something of the shock and horror that Rachel now felt. Exactly the question that this person would most naturally ask was constantly in Rachel’s mind: ‘Am I like that?’ … Rachel, hitherto triumphant over other people’s weakness, now thought, in her bitter humiliation, that none was so fallen that she was not sister to. Again and again the memory of her pride in being ‘not that sort of girl’ stung her to fresh writhings. (Low, 1914, 157)
Consider an analogous scene from a novel serialized in numerous newspapers throughout the United States, all those belonging to the Hearst news syndicate, with some fifty million readers; it was called Chickie and appeared just a year after The Waste Land’s publication:
In her mind was a black spot of terror. It grew large – a stark live thing, shaking her pulse with dread. It was the memory of the night.
She shrank from it. It pressed down and seized her heart. It was a dark, heavy beast crouching on her chest. She tried to beat it off. It came nearer and blew warm, sickening breaths in her nostrils. Fighting, she had to draw them down. Again and again …
She hid from it – oh, she would get away – push off this thing of horror weighing so heavily on her breast. Be free – be light again.
She hated herself. (Meherin, 1925, 272–3)8
Both books were written by feminists who were tacitly urging a more tolerant approach to premarital consensual sex. But the guilty histrionics that ensue are double-edged; they make it seem as if their heroines have participated in something unspeakably sordid, something genuinely meriting condemnation, if only because the heroine herself has issued such a judgement. Disgust, shock, horror, bitter humiliation, terror, dread, memories that sting, seize the heart, or weigh heavily: here is the lexicon of the contemporary, popular novel when treating a post-coital scene.
The text of The Waste Land is more restrained:
She turns and looks a moment in the glass, | |
Hardly aware of her departed lover; | 250 |
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: | |
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’ | |
When lovely woman stoops to folly and | |
Paces about her room again, alone, | |
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand | 255 |
And puts a record on the gramophone. |
More than any other passage in the poem, this one attracted the ire of conservative critics, damned as a desecration of an earlier poem by Oliver Goldsmith, which begins:
When lovely woman stoops to folly
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can sooth her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?
Eliot’s aesthetic, by contrast, is aloof, austere, evincing icy neutrality. He shuns both the easy moralizing of Goldsmith and the guilty histrionics typical of the contemporary novel, replacing them with the mute, and yet eloquent, gesture of playing a popular song to fill the silent void: empty as to purport or result, idle, null, groundless, unmeaning, fruitless, vain.
Two points in Eliot’s final two lines are arresting. One is that ‘automatic hand’. For in Western philosophy from Aristotle to Heidegger, the hand has been invoked to signal the critical difference between the human and the animal, at once the instrument of reason and its material counterpart.9 Yet the typist’s gesture blurs precisely that boundary between wilful human action and the helplessness of automatism. At the same time, it also invokes what might be called a lyrical temporality and effect: for it interrupts, shocks and freezes the scene. Gesture, here, is being summoned to substitute for speech, assigned a total expressivity. Tellingly, Eliot himself urges that the hand performs an analogous function in the Jacobean play, The Duchess of Malfi. Reviewing a recent performance of it in 1920, he singles out the notorious scene in which the Duchess, trapped in a darkened chamber, is deceived into kissing a severed hand, one which she is told is that of her lover Antonio. It was ‘extraordinarily fine’, Eliot says, for ‘here the actors were held in check by violent situations which nothing in their previous repertory could teach’. What Eliot calls ‘the scene of the severed hand’ has an uncanny effect: it prevents the actors from acting. The dead hand, contracted in the clutch of rigor mortis, dispenses with all mediation, which can only ‘distort’, and is transformed into an eerie paradox: it is a trope of not troping and, at the same time, is pure, unmediated communication. ‘Here’, writes Eliot, ‘the play itself got through, magnificently, unique’ (Eliot, 1920, 37).
Another resides in the name of the machine that the typist cranks up: rhyming with ‘alone’, it is the gramophone. It comes with an etymology that Eliot knew well: the first part of the word, ‘gramo-’, derives from the ancient Greek word gramma, meaning a ‘letter’ or an ‘inscription’; while the second part, ‘-phone’, is the ancient Greek word for ‘voice’. Inscribing voices is of course just what The Waste Land has been doing, both in its lavish use of quotation and in its brisk modulations through numerous voices. It has become a machine for replaying them, a species of dictaphone. And that, after all, is one of the fundamental activities performed by a typist in this period, taking dictation, inscribing the voice of someone else onto paper. Her final action is a microcosm of the poem – and is all the more haunting for just that reason.
In the long scene that occupies the middle of the poem, competing rhetorics reach an impasse. The trope of repetition, uttered insistently by Tiresias, is cancelled out by the shards of narrative that culminate only in still more repetition – an ‘automatic hand’, a ‘record on the gramophone’. The two rhetorical modes restage a grim histrionics of non-relationship, itself a recapitulation of the grisly puppet show that is the encounter between the typist and the young man carbuncular.
What was the poem’s relationship to contemporary popular culture? Just one year after the poem appeared, the novel Chickie came out in newspapers belonging to the Hearst syndicate, running from 26 November 1923 to 28 February 1924. It told the story of a young typist who engages in premarital consensual sex, and the ensuing complications. Ten months later, on 13 January 1925, shooting for the film version began at the First National studio in New York; it starred Dorothy Mackail (1903– 1990), and was produced by Earl Hudson (1892–1959) and John Francis Dillon (1884–1934). Dillon, at the time, was celebrated for one work, Flaming Youth (November 1923), a film that had turned Colleen Moore into a superstar and made her ‘the first to establish the screen archetype of the flapper’ (Konzarski, 1994, 307). Single-handedly, Flaming Youth ‘launched the flapper cycle’ of films that were produced over the next six years and remained a constant ‘reference point for later flapper films’ (Ross, 2001, 422, n8). Moore herself replayed the role six months later (in May 1924) in The Perfect Flapper, also produced by Hudson and directed by Dillon, and would do so a third time in We Moderns (November 1925), again directed by Dillon.
Dillon, plainly, adhered to a successful formula, and when he began Chickie, he elected to turn it, too, into a flapper film. But to turn a domestic melodrama, the book, into a flapper film was no easy feat, and the resulting film, released in April 1925 (it ran for the next three months), showed the scars of that process. As a biting review in the Los Angeles Times put it: ‘Of all the stupid, tiresome, badly acted, inartistic, long drawn-out, badly cut, uninterestingly photographed, moronic pictures, Chickie takes the medal.’ But, the same reviewer noted, ‘It is breaking local records – its local box-office being almost without precedent’ (Carr, 1925, C2).10
Alas, when Chickie finally made it to Britain, a year later in June 1926, it entirely lacked the pop-cultural hinterland that might have made it comprehensible. Because there were no Hearst newspapers in Britain, the novel had enjoyed a much reduced readership. Further, because Dorothy Mackail happened to be the best friend of cinematic comedienne Marion Davies, William Randolph Heart’s mistress, Hearst-owned newspapers lavished Chickie with favourable reviews. But that was no help in Britain, where it flopped.
In short, The Waste Land’s potential dialogue with popular culture went unnoticed: the poem and Chickie, as well as The Questing Beast, shared overlapping concerns that can prove mutually illuminating. But the two novels also moved within economies of popular culture that were separated by deep and unbridgeable differences. There was never, at this time, a single popular culture that encompassed both. The Questing Beast was never published in the United States, and Chickie remained an almost exclusively American phenomenon.
Andreas Huyssen’s examination of modernism and popular culture offered schematic clarity, but achieved it at the price of all historical and textual complexity.11 Its defence of postmodern architecture was also measured but unhelpful. But in the present day, the postmodern is now as remote as the Grizzly Bear Dance, and probably just about as popular. The sterile attempt to lay claim to the postmodern and the popular, at the expense of demonizing modernism, now seems very vieux jeu. It’s time to start over.
Notes
1 The translation is mine.
2 The later edition (London: R. K. Burt & Co.), from 1876, is reported by the British Library.
3 Herr reproduces the pantomime programme for Sindbad the Sailor (1986, 122).
4 Examples include Crosland, 1902, 30–2; Miner, 1904; Kiser, 1907; and Lang, 1923, 179–80. A serious, and hence rare, poem about a typist is Interlude: Eurydice by Arthur Henry Adams (1906, 34–6).
5 The eight novels are listed here. Four are British: Sally Bishop: A Romance (Temple Thurston, 1908); The Questing Beast (Low, 1914); Latchkey Ladies (Grant, 1921); and Lilian (Bennett, 1922). For a discussion of these four, see From the Fallen Woman to the Fallen Typist (Rainey, 2009, 273–97). The other four are American: The Winning Chance (Dejeans, 1909); Gloria Gray, Love Pirate (Doles Bell, 1914); The Dwelling-Place of Light (Churchill, 1917); and Chickie: A Hidden, Tragic Chapter from the Life of a Girl of This Strange ‘Today’ (Meherin, 1925). This latter edition was published as a movie tie-in; the book’s real first edition appeared serially in all the newspapers belonging to the legendary Hearst empire, between 26 November 1923 and 28 February 1924.
6 On the topos that typists ate poorly, see ‘Five O’Clock Tea talk; A Woman’s Restaurant’, (‘Frances’, 1903, 918); Suffragette Secretaries: A Report on Office Life 60 Years Ago (Anonymous, 1979, 19–29); The Questing Beast (Low, 1914, 42–3); and Money Isn’t Everything (Cole, 1923, 24–5). On their poor and cramped housing, see The Girl behind the Keys (Gallon, [1903] 2005, 5); and on the bed/divan, see The Grain of Dust (Philips, [1911] 1912, 300). On the shabby underclothes, see The Questing Beast (Low, 1914, 9) and The Grain of Dust (Philips, 1912 [1911], 326).
7 The category of the ‘fallen woman’ conflated three forms of sexual activity later deemed quite distinct: premarital consensual sex, extramarital sex and prostitution. The best overviews of Victorian sexuality remain Michael Mason’s two volumes, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (1994a) and The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1994b). On the fallen woman, with reference only to prostitution, see Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Anderson, 1993). On the theme in the English novel, see The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Watt, 1984); on it in drama, see ‘The Fallen Woman on Stage: Maidens, Magdalens, and the Emancipated Female’ (Eltis, 2004, 222–36).
8 On this novel and its filmic adaptation, see ‘Popular Literature, Silent Film, and the Perils of Genre: Chickie (1923–1925)’ (Rainey, 2010, 277–88).
9 See The Complete Works of Aristotle, Parts of Animals (Barnes, 1984, vol. 1, 1071–72); for Heidegger, see the terms ‘presence-at-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand’ which recur through his Being and Time (Heidegger, 1961).
10 My discussion here abridges many complications; see the fuller treatment in ‘Popular Literature, Silent Film, and the Perils of Genre: Chickie (1923–1925)’ (Rainey, 2010, 277–88).
11 For Huyssen’s later defence of his book, see his ‘High/Low in an Expanded Field’ (2002, 363–74). For a later assessment that offers a broad context, see ‘Exploring the Great Divide: High and Low, Left and Right’ (Scholes, 2003, 245–69).
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