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Chapter Overview

An Old and New Approach 136

The City and Human Character 139

Modernists on Art 141

Romantics and Classicists 144

Futurism and Dada 146

The View from Bloomsbury 148

Marxists on Modernism 149

Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Approaches to Modernism 152

Interpretation of Modernist art and literature has emerged as a veritable industry. When James Joyce wrote Ulysses (1922) the first copy of which, incidentally, was brought into England by the critic F.R. Leavis (1896–1975), he was not just penning a masterpiece, he was also offering employment to literary scholars for generations to come. Here was a novel radically different from its nineteenth century predecessors. It wasn’t just that it broke taboos in describing bodily functions, or that it had a mythic structure or that it had a complicated relationship with Irish nationalism. What made it stand out was its linguistic ingenuity. Joyce declared war on English because it was the language of the colonizer. ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine’, muses Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914) during a conversation with the Englishman who is dean of studies at his university. ‘I cannot speak these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech’ (159) (for Joyce, see also Stinson).

And so Joyce lays siege to its syntax, mines its diction with Irish terms and lays waste its grammar. The result can be exquisite, as is seen in Ulyssses:

‘Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore’ (ibid.: xlii). But it can also be enigmatic. Joyce’s coin-ings and joincoin-ings of words, his suspension of punctuation, his unfinished sentences and, above all, his ambition to make language approach the condi-tion of music make some pages of Ulysses appear more like clues for a cryptic crossword than parts of a story. ‘Pearls: when she. Liszt’s rhapsodies. Hissss’

(1992: 330).

An Old and New Approach

The problem with which the reader is confronted here, namely how to inter-pret this piece of writing, is a common to number of Modernist works. The poetry of T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and the novels of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) appear not just difficult but downright obscure. Why should this be? John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (1992) famously suggests that such writers felt their cultural authority threatened by the spread of democracy and responded by making their art an exclusive affair. This is not an entirely convincing argu-ment. Since these same artists felt that the new reading public, beneficiaries of the 1870 Education Act, were not interested in their work, it is difficult to see what was to be gained by making it even less appealing to a wider audience.

One of the first serious investigations of modern art was Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (1947). He sought to make it intelligible to a wider audience, which implies contra Carey, that the reading public were interested in what artists were doing. Wilson argued that the literary movement represented by Yeats, Eliot, Joyce and others has its roots in the French symbolism of the late nineteenth century which itself goes back to romanticism. From the mid-eighteenth century we can detect a move away from classical ideals of balance, order and proportion towards originality, imagination, nature and emotional expression, culminating in the romantic emphasis on self rather than society, on subjective rather than objective truth.

James Longenbach argues that ‘Modernism makes most sense when we understand it as part of a continuum beginning with the Lyrical Ballads’ (100), one of the key works of the Romantic Movement. The advertisement for the volume, published in 1798, makes a number of claims that will later be echoed in modern manifestos. For example, the majority of poems ‘are to be con-sidered as experiments’ and that ordinary language is to be adapted for poetic purposes (2005: 49), very comparable in certain ways to the intentions outlined in the ‘Preface’ to Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology (1915) which admits its

‘principles are not new’ (vi) expounding the view that the poet in free verse

should ‘use the language of common speech [. . . always the exact word’

[emphasis in original]] (vi) while reflecting passionately the ‘artistic value of modern life’ (vii). In his 1800 Preface to the collection, Wordsworth further notes that his ‘principal object was to make the incidents of common life inter-esting’ (ibid.: 289). Joyce could have made that claim for Ulysses and his desire

‘to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race’ (1952:

257) also had its roots in the romantic support for national self-determination.

After romanticism came realism, a feature of nineteenth century English writing. It arose partly because of a feeling of dissatisfaction with the effusiveness of romanticism which, in addition, appeared to have little to contribute to understanding the problems of industrial society. Scientific advance was also a spur to the development of realism. The theory of evolu-tion, in particular, suggested that human beings were the products of heredity and environment, very different to the exalted conception of man found in romanticism. French writers such as Émile Zola (1840–1902) created a literary style that reflected these changes. Naturalism, as it became known, sought to document the social and economic influences on behaviour with an almost photographic attention to detail. Many naturalists wrote for the theatre, the most well known being Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), but the return in his later plays of the supernatural creatures that can be found in his early ones sug-gests the limitations of a wholly naturalistic explanation of character (Wilson, 1947: 10).

The reaction to naturalism in France was known as Symbolism, which was to have a much wider influence in Modernist circles. We can trace the origins of this particular movement back to Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849) and the French poet essayist and translator Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855), the pen name of Gérard Labrunie. Poe believed that a poem should express a single mood or emotion and that every element of the poem should be subordinated to that end. He was also interested in the affinities between poetry and music arguing that ‘indefiniteness’ in both produces a spiritual effect.

This idea was central to the aesthetic of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) who in ‘Crisis in Poetry’ stipulates that artists should avoid the precise delineations of naturalism, of such ‘description’ in favour an arbitrariness, of

‘evocation, allusion, suggestion’ [emphasis in original] (40), and he was also insistent that poetry was a form of music. Labrunie suffered periodic bouts of insanity but believed, even in his lucid periods, that we cannot separate dream from reality which, incidentally, was the basis of surrealism. It, too, was a reaction to a world in which as André Breton (1896–1966) says in the first surrealist first manifesto (1924), that although ‘the reign of logic’ (9) per-sists self-evidently ‘experience itself has found itself increasingly circum-scribed’ (10). Breton maintains that surrealism stood for the freedom of the imagination, or ‘the actual functioning of thought’ (26) something which

Joyce tries to capture in the stream of consciousness style, though he was not a surrealist.

In his book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), Arthur Symons (1865–1945) argues that the symbol is an incarnation of the infinite, claiming that the modern poet’s self-conscious use of symbols distinguish him from his predecessors (3). Only in such a transcendent form can life be validated and

‘all art worth making, all worship worth offering’ (175). Such a sensibility also characterizes other Modernist genres, with Woolf, for example investing water with a great deal of symbolic value in novels like To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). She uses symbols in a personal way which is quite different to how they were used in the past. Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–

1321), for instance, assumes knowledge of the symbols of both Christianity and courtly love (for Woolf see also Stinson, Murray, Baxter). One of the characteristics of modernity is the absence of a symbolic system expressing common beliefs and values. In its place we have arbitrary symbols, chosen as Wilson says by the poet ‘to stand for special ideas of his own’ (20). One major, overarching reason for such hange was the industrial revolution, which over-turned many of the social, religious and political beliefs in which civilization had previously been rooted.

So far, then, we have two critical approaches to Modernist literature and art.

Both take as their point of departure its notorious difficulty. Carey states that this is due to the elite trying to maintain their position, while Wilson traces it back to earlier literary movements, suggesting that the poetry of Eliot and the prose of Joyce are not so bewildering once we place them in this wider con-text. Both critics concentrate on the stylistic features of Modernism but each explains them in a different way, one doing so in social terms, the other in terms of literary history.

As the twentieth century progresses, more and more interest focuses on the social rather than on the artistic aspects of Modernism, although surely the two cannot really be viably separated. When Wilson talks about French Symbolism as an intensification of the romantic emphasis on the individual, he is also saying something about the increasingly atomized nature of modern existence. However, while we cannot separate art from the social one must be wary of conflating the two, something very easy to do if one is examining a text such as To the Lighthouse solely in terms of its representations of gender. Then the temptation is to forget that it is precisely the notion of repre-sentation that is at issue in modern art (as it is in politics too, incidentally).

Remember that the suffragettes, for instance, were agitating for the right to vote, to have their views represented in Parliament. Classical authors might argue that one aim of art was to imitate nature, but there is nothing in Aristotle or Horace to guide writers about how they should portray such radical developments. A new form of social organization required new forms

of expression. Consequently, as the artist and critic Roger Fry (1866–1934) says the painter does not seek to ‘imitate life but to find an equivalent for it’

(Kolocotroni: 190).

After the good deal of criticism that has been devoted to explicating the nature of the literary and artistic forms that appeared in the early twentieth century, attention is now shifting from reading Modernist works to examin-ing how they were promoted, circulated and discussed, all of which helps establish their status as objects set apart from the mass society. Here perhaps a key work is Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998). There is still, though, much work to do, for as Aaron Jaffe points out recently, ‘the full range and extent of the practices that regu-late Modernist cultural production remain one of the principal blind spots of contemporary criticism’ (6).

The City and Human Character

Although Woolf declares famously ‘that on or about December 1910 human character changed’ (1994: 160), even before that time artists had begun to notice that the old idea of character as a coherent, consistent entity was in crisis. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912), for example, declared in his ‘Preface’ to Miss Julie (1888) that his heroine was a ‘modern character’, that is, she was ‘an agglomeration of past and present cultures, scraps from books and newspapers, fragments of humanity, torn shreds of once fine clothing that has become rags [she is] a human soul patched together’ (Kolocotroni: 116). This anticipates Lawrence’s description of the self in ‘Why the Novel Matters’ as a ‘curious assembly of incongruous parts’

(536) and the broken selves of The Waste Land (1922) who can connect nothing with nothing. (1978: 74).

What, though was the reason for this change in the conception of character?

There is no single answer. The work of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud had begun to alter the conception of what it meant to be human. Darwin argues in his work that man is not created by God, but descends from apes;

Marx claims that it is not consciousness that determines existence but social and economic existence that determines consciousness; Nietzsche demands a revision of all values, that one should learn to think beyond good and evil, while Freud declares that human personality was essentially neurotic because of the thwarted development of one or more of the sexual instincts (For Freud see also Wilson, Stinson, Paddy). The condition of life in the cities, meanwhile, affected perception and psychology. The German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) makes the point that the tempo of life becomes much quicker in the urban environment than the rural one. The bustling boulevard places far greater demands on the senses than a stroll down the village street. Coping

with a constant barrage of stimuli, deciding which to accept and which to reject, means that the city dweller has a more heightened consciousness than his country counterpart. The life of the latter is based on the unconscious rhythms of emotion and feeling, while that of the former is based on the intellect which operates at the farthest ‘remove from the depths of personal-ity’ (Kolocotroni: 52–3). That is to say, the need to defend the mind against an army of impressions leads to the over-development of the rational faculty and the under-development of the affective, aesthetic and ethical ones. Some art-ists tried to heal this split, or, to use Eliot’s phrase in ‘Metaphysical Poets,’

‘dissociation of sensibility’ which he, incidentally, traced back to the seven-teenth century (64), by recourse to myth. So too, of course did the Nazis with their appeal to a German volk.

According to Simmel, the difference in psychic organization between the inhabitants of the city and those of the country results in a different approach to relationships. Those who live in the city treat people as means to an end while those who live in the country treat them as ends in themselves.

However, the city-dweller’s treatment of others is not just a product of a new form of perception, but also of capitalism. Mind and money are closely intertwined. ‘The economy and the domination of the intellect’, writes Simmel, share ‘a purely matter of fact attitude [towards] persons and things’

(Kolocotroni: 53). Moreover, each concentrates on general characteristics, ignoring individual ones.

Simmel elaborates on the nature of commified alienation in the modern age.

In his view the purely intellectualist person is indifferent to all things personal because, out of them, relationships and reactions develop which are not to be completely understood by purely rational methods – just as the unique ele-ment in events never enters into the principle of money. Money is concerned only with what is common to all, that is with the exchange value which reduces al quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level (53).

Moreover by his account the nature of work in modern society also fosters certain qualities that help condition social interaction, whether in an office, a shop or a factory, employees are required to be punctual, to calculate correctly and to be exact in their dealings with customers. Simmel argues that these modes of behaviour are imposed on the individual from without and that they stifle those ‘irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits which seek to determine [him] from within’ (54).

The combination of the city’s assault on the sensory apparatus and capital-ism’s refashioning of human psychology produces three distinct attitudes.

The first is what Simmel calls a ‘blasé outlook’, the second is a cloak of reserve and the third is a desire for self-display (55, 58). The blasé outlook is the result of sensory overload. The individual is no longer capable of reacting to new stimulations and responds by cultivating an indifference to them. He comes to

experience the distinction between things, and therefore things themselves, as meaningless. This attitude is also related to the circulation of money which, with its indifference to quality, ‘becomes the frightful leveller, hollow[ing] out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair’ (55).

The attitude of reserve is a reaction to the numerous encounters that charac-terize city life. While it is possible for those who live in a small town to respond fully to those around them, this is not the case in the city where such openness would cause a person to be ‘completely atomized internally [and]

to fall into an unthinkable mental condition’ (55). To prevent his inner self from being worn down by acquaintances, casual contacts, advertisers and all those officials who demand proof of identity, the individual must play a role or wear a mask. However, the preparation of a face to meet a face is tinged with resentment. The other is perceived as a threat because he is always poised to invade the self and so the relation between the two is marked by hostility as well as distance.

Since the individual is in danger of disappearing in mass society he feels the need to assert his identity, to separate himself from the crowd. But how can he do this and still maintain a necessary air of reserve? How can he signal himself yet remain secret? The metropolitan type, one might say, wants to be noticed but not known. Indeed, he hardly knows himself: his mind may have penetrated the mysteries of the atom but it has not peered into the recesses of his heart. He is a one-dimensional creature, with an over-developed intelligence and under-over-developed emotions, more caricature than character. Perhaps this accounts for the particular type of self-display found in the city; fantastic, eccentric, extravagant, precisely the sort of behaviour, in fact, that we find in Dickens (1812–1870).

Modernists on Art

Simmel’s description of how the urban conditions perception and psychology provides another context for understanding modern art. Indeed, the role of the metropolis in shaping the character of Modernism later becomes a staple of critical discussion. Yet, long before such responses, contemporaries were aware of the relation between the experience of the city and the experi-ence of art. The essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839–94), for instance, in the

‘Conclusion’ in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry ([1986] 1873) written in 1868 makes the rapid fire of stimuli the basis of aesthetic appreciation. For him one lives in a swirl of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures. The attention is captured for a moment before it is seized by something else;

‘impressions of the individual mind [. . .] are in perpetual flight’ (151). Some of these impressions are more valuable than others but because, as Pater says,

‘our failure is to form habits’ (152), and so one misses the diamond sparkling in the dirt. Pater believes in a requirement to be more observant, to learn to discriminate between impressions, since some are choicer than others, capable of stirring the sense, exciting the mind or reviving jaded spirits. Art

‘our failure is to form habits’ (152), and so one misses the diamond sparkling in the dirt. Pater believes in a requirement to be more observant, to learn to discriminate between impressions, since some are choicer than others, capable of stirring the sense, exciting the mind or reviving jaded spirits. Art