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Bradbury Mcfarlane

Modernism: A Guide of European Literature

Central

• modernism “is the art consequent on the disestablishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fictions.”

Cultural Milieu

“The experience of modernity…happened in the streets…. The experience of Modernism was…rather more obscure” – Preface

The unity of the humanist, agrarian, aristocratic order has been lost, and now we are in the fragmented society, mechanistic, urban, and middle class—which refuses to accept emotional, non-rational, spiritual, and unconscious life.

• Industrial expansion
  • Late capitalism
  • Taylorism, Fordism
  • Mature consumer culture
• Apocalypse / millenarianism
• Disruption of traditional community
• Secularization
• Transport tech
  • Automobiles
  • Mass transit (buses)
  • Airplanes
• Inventions and Machinery
  • Communications Technology
    • Telephone
    • Telegraphy
    • Typewriter
  • Plastics
• Rise of mass culture
  • Film
  • Mass newspapers
• WWI
• Thinkers
  • Marx
  • Darwin
  • Freud
  • Nietzsche
• New fields of study
  • Theosophy, mysticism, and psychical research
  • Anthropology
  • Sociology
  • Comparative religion
• Science and Physics
  • Scientific method and positivism
  • Heisenburg uncertainty principle
  • Genetics
  • Relativity
• Urbanization
  • Population explosion
• Breakdown of traditional values

Modernist Themes

• “A relationship of crisis between art and history” (29)
• Consciousness of NOW: modernity
  • We are products of right now, not of history
  • Speed and concision
• International theme
  • Exile, expatriation, migration
• Sense of crisis
  • Bleak, dark, alienated, transition
• No feeling of certainty or solidity
  • Flux, continuum, chaos
• Truth
  • Truth is impermanent, individual, relative
  • Truth is irrational, subjective, intuitive, associative (not causal)
• Growing cultural relativism
  • Struggle to overcome provincialism
• Creating shock
• Systems
  • Reacting to Victorian systems-makers (Freud, Darwin, Marx)
  • Some created their own systems (Yeats, Lawrence)
  • Others said that life is “elusive, indeterminate,” escapes systems (Woolf, Forster)
• History
  • How can you keep touch with the past if you try to make it new?
  • Do we look at the past or the future?
  • Looking at history: futile or helpful?
  • Do we fit in with our age or not?
  • Lukacs: Modernism has no perspective, hence episodic (to him, modernism is anti-historical)
• Time
  • Not linear, but cyclical or associative
• Nietzsche
  • Get beyond decadent past and reassert human will
  • Birth of Tragedy shows dual nature of man, the chaotic wild man behind the civilized man (the Dionysus in all of us), the darker self underneath the surface
• Dehumanization
• Limits of positivism
  • How much can “science” and “rational thinking” tell us?
• Elitism or populism?
  • Usually elitism
• Artist as a professional
  • Artist has to be dedicated
  • Difficult, uncompromising, complex, educated
• Linguistics
  • Questions how to use language
• Representation
  • Not satisfied with “direct” representation
  • “Interrupts surface of reality”
• The Fleeting and Ephemeral
• World War One
• The City
  • Loneliness in the crowd
  • Freedom and energy of the city
  • Solipsism: dominance of viewer over the seen
    • The city is the raw material over which to contemplate modernity
• The Loner
  • Estrangement and rootlessness
  • Exile and emigration
  • Urbanization leads to loners
• The Individual
  • “changing relationship between individual and the whole”
  • Celebration or Damnation?
    • Egotism, Nietzsche, Stirner, etc champion the individual
    • Some artists see the individual as impotent, crippled, sterile, esp after WWI
• Destruction of dualities (into unity)
  • Mind/body
  • Subject/object
  • Seer/seen
• Contingency versus necessity
  • Chance versus determinism
• Freedom, independence
  • Attendant alienation
• New themes come into fictional representation
• Recognition or celebration of artifice
• Consciousness
  • Ellman Crasnow on Stevens: “intransitive consciousness” (not about outer world but ultimately about self)
  • Observation is not passive, but rather active (no direct contact with outside)
    • “Hauntings and hallucinations acquire objective existence”
  • Trying to figure out limits and power of human mind
• Reality
  • What is real, and what is illusion?
• Nostalgia
  • For lost purity
• Struggle between practical life and commitment/fulfillment
• Morality
  • Scorn for the sacred (Dada: even art isn’t sacred; that’s a bourgeois belief)
  • Wants to shock, entertain, and amuse with humor, erotics, etc (cf Marinetti’s manifesto for theatre)
  • Modernist novel doesn’t ask you to judge but just to see and appreciate the human paradoxes of our lives, the good and the bad
  • Must create their own systems of value
• Reflexivity
  • Art realizes its artifice, its status as a made object
• Doubting language
  • Are words just a dodge? an escape?
  • “Language ceases to be what we see through, and becomes what we see.” (Bradbury)
  • Mallarme’s symbolism, Eliot’s objective correlative, Stein’s thing in itself, and Pound’s image: somehow the noun itself isn’t sufficient or needs a little help (language isn’t a labeling process of finding the right one)
  • Language has gone opaque
  • Some original self is hidden underneath a crust of conventional language, inaccessible
    • To communicate, you must break through that crust
    • But can you really every get through it? Increasingly doubtful
    • Some even believe language itself will always be that crust
  • Dadaists and Surrealists say you must rely on other things to live well, not just language and art
  • Over time, less and less likely to say language is our salvation
• Art
  • What can art do for us?
  • Wants to believe that perfect art will create a perfect world
  • But increasing doubt…
  • Ortega y Gasset: art becomes more like a game when you go against realism, just fun play

Forms and Style

• Shattering of traditional art
• Multiplicity of style
  • Cultivation of personal style
• Technical fireworks and display
• Abstraction
• Conscious artifice (self-reflexivity) and mannerism
• Nonrepresentational, anti-mimesis
• Art will make the chaotic world cohere once again
• Fragmentation
• Images
• Spatial consciousness/form
• Time
  • Time is synchronous: simultaneity
  • Nonlinear time
  • Synchronicity of subjective time and historical time
  • Or, as separate from the past
• Fictional logic
• Dream logic

Theses

• James McFarlane
  • Experiences and environment change more rapidly than inertia-bound linguistic systems, so language resists expressing the new; hence, authors have to smash it in order to express the new

Some Definitions

• Modernism
  • Beginning of modernism
    • More like an intensification or acceleration of ideas already in the air
    • As a reaction to naturalism (post-naturalist movements like symbolism and impressionism give rise to modernism)
  • Not just opposition to romanticism, but a “complex reaction” to it and expansion of it
    • For instance, significance of individual creation
  • Search for style, not any one style
  • Any definition of it is provisional
  • Diverse approaches within it
    • “A movement of movements,” a “series of campaigns” (except that they’re fluid and not about membership cards, usually)
    • People write around and next to movements, not often announcing “Hey I’m a part of this movement”
  • “We are living at the beginning of a new age.”
  • Not all the lit produced during that era was avant garde
  • At first, struggles for recognition, but by twenties, largely accepted
    • Stuffy journals like Criterion and The Dial show that modernism now hegemonic
• Relation to Realism
  • Some m’ist experiments still true to realism, but to a broader definition “more real than realism” stance of finding out what life truly is
• Symbolism
  • Images, not direct statement or thesis
  • Looking for transcendence and transfiguration
  • “Refinement and concentration of the Romantic experience” (144)
  • Indirect, allusive, negating
  • Paradigm: the symbol
  • Intense, enlarged perception
  • Makes awareness of language acute and conscious
  • Senses are perfect but language is vague, so we must hint
• Impressionism
  • Makes reading language a perceptive act
  • Language becomes experience, not its register
  • It is of the moment: discontinuous, flux, series
  • “Groping among phenomena” for meaning
  • Relativism and subjectivism
• Futurism
  • Escape traditional bounds of art
  • Discontinuous, simultaneous stimuli are basis of modern life and art
  • Modern art needs to be about modern life
• Surrealism
  • Exalts love, action, inner life
  • Spiritual emancipation
  • Art is a means, not an end
    • Applied Marxism to art
  • No laws over imagination
  • Doubts clarity
  • Open to unconscious and chance
  • Self-discipline: always on the straight and narrow of the imaginative: to stay free in your mind
  • Interest in illness, sexuality, magic, clairvoyance
  • Looking for a richer rationalism (not totally transcendent)
  • Between the wars, politicized
  • Surrealist theatre: Artaud’s “total theatre,” where spectacle, color, movement, non-verbal signs matter as much as dialogue
• Expressionism
  • Transform spiritless bourgeois world into one of spirit
  • Force of artist’s mind will change world
  • Break down psychic habits
  • Anti-decadence, anti-apathy
• Dada
  • Political background: grows out of WWI
  • Anti-semiotic, antireferential ideas coming out of misuse of language during that time (ie patriotism, valorization of war)

Times

• Truly begins with Baudelaire in Haussman’s Paris
• Early modernist generation (born 1870s) still concerned with 19th century (Mann, Proust)
• Anglo-American modernism
  • French influence
  • begins 1890s
  • height 1910-1924
  • By 1920s, accepted as the establishment, not an eccentric spectacle
• German modernism
  • height: 1880-1890s
  • by 1909, modernism seen as old-fashioned
• Edwardian, 1901-1910
• Georgian, 1910-1914

Genres

• Poetry
  • Really begins with Rimbaud (active 1870-3)
    • Slangy but learned, unpredictable, vague, only outlines, novel topics
  • More obsessed with tradition and more likely to use it than drama or novel
  • More separated from politics and economics than other genres
  • Poet as mystic, a seer (occultism)
  • All about craftsmanship
  • Historically, poetry was used for epic (national mythos) and drama (tragedy)
  • Modernism, epic is in the novel form, while drama uses prose
    • So poetry is mostly the lyric: restricted, intimate (the long poem nearly disappears)
  • Free verse: German Heine and American Whitman worked in it, but most important free verse came from French poetry (prose poems included)
  • Free Verse
    • More flexible: you can now write about the miscellany of life, the erratic and irregular
    • Doesn’t have to rhyme
    • Line can be any length
    • Doesn’t need regular feet (scansion)
    • Line based on overall cadence, not meter
    • Don’t wrench apart natural syntax
  • Poetry not about feelings now
    • Poet suspicious of poem and poetry (precious, untruthful)
  • Will intensify reality (vers libre makes you pay attention again)
• Drama
  • It’s all about tragicomedy, says McFarlane
  • Rethinking the meaning of dialogue (progressively more about inarticular or silent drama a la Beckett)
    • You have nothing to say, no fit words, or you’re afraid to communicate: all underneath polite discourse
  • Really begins with rash of Ibsenism 1889-91, when his Ghosts is played in all European capitals
    • Ordinary language has profound suggestion underneath it
  • Brecht: refuses the “fourth wall,” acknowledges theatricality
  • Maeterlinck
    • “Dialogue du second degre” is his phrase for this resonance of vernacular
    • Belgian playwright who infl. Yeats, Chekhov, Strindberg
    • Serious emotion can’t be forced into dramatic eloquence, but only suggested
    • Low-keyed but intense
    • Every moment in life is charged with meaning, every day with tragedy
  • Chekhov:
    • Tedium, passivity, mood, estranged, talking past one another, regret, emptiness
    • Communication of unspoken thought
  • Yeats
    • Anti-naturalist, anti-realist
    • Doesn’t like vernacular, but wants chants and rhythm in speech
    • Symbol-heavy
    • Puts audience into trance
    • Rhythm, color, and gesture will create atmosphere
    • Simple (little scenery, action, dialogue)
    • Private and elite drawing room theatre (not mass entertainment)
    • Ancient dancing theatre
• Novel
  • Beyond plot and character: all about time, form, consciousness
    • Novel becomes self-aware (not just having a consciously narrating narrator, but shows reflection on the conditions of the production of fiction)
    • Questions of design reign: how to choose and structure material?
  • “Weakens the nexus between private and social spheres,” whereas realist novel showed their interdependence and sometimes unity (from J P Stern on Mann, “The Theme of Consciousness: Mann”)
    • “burgeoning of consciousness beyond the world of common indication, and thus the undermining of the realistic convention.”
    • If we “ask in what way Thomas Mann contributes to the ‘modernity’ of the novel, our first answer will be: by an increase in the consciousness portrayed and a corresponding increase in the consciousness of the portrayal.”
  • Realist unity transformed into parody, pastiche, plurality
  • But why?
    • To show “lived density” of experience
    • To show complexity and uncertainty of living
  • French symbolism invaded the novel during modernism
    • Joyce, Conrad, Woolf, James, Proust
    • Why? Patterns of symbols for structure, Wagnerian leitmotifs, synaesthesia
    • A rebors even about the symbolist experience
  • Characters are clusters of images and verbal habits
  • Eliminates slow, creaking description
  • Questions sequential structure
  • Questions possibility of representation
  • Goes beyond the “stable surface of reality”
  • Development
    • Really starts with James: closer to the characters than to reader
  • Teasing out the necessary versus the contingent, the chance versus the significant
  • Popular theme: the writer or artist central character
  • Patterned, not plotted
  • Narrator: not judging, but detached and ironic
  • Rejuvenation of tired prose, the writing of the unusual, to make it startle and shock
  • Recap: diminishing narrator, consciousness, self-reflexivity, nonlinear time, allusions, synaesthesia, leitmotifs, innovation

Quotes

• Pound
  • artists are the “antennae of the race”
  • image: “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”
  • avoid poetry that’s “an asylum for the affections”
• Nietzsche
  • “no artist tolerates reality”
  • “Whatever exists is both just and unjust, and equally justified in both.”
  • “There are no such things as facts, only interpretations”
• Flaubert
  • “a book about nothing…which would hold itself together…through the internal force of its style”
• Novelist Paul Alexis
  • telegram: “Naturalism not dead. Letter follows.”
• Eliot
  • on style of Ulysses, “make the modern world possible for art”
  • on Joyce’s myth, “a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense paradox of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”
  • lyric: the voice of the poet talking to himself or no one
• Strindberg
  • “My characters are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilizations, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul.”
  • student in Ghost Sonana has “been born into a bankrupt world”
• Yeats
  • “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”
• James
  • “a sickness of one’s own exquisite taste” (reaction to aestheticism)
  • “the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel”
• Stendhal
  • Who is a decadent? “Somebody who sacrifices himself to his passions, but to passions which he does not have.”
• Moore
  • on Stevens: “a triumph of explicit ambiguity”
• Valery
  • after WWI: “We civilizations now know we are mortal.”
  • “evolution from the articulated to the skimmed over – from the rhythmic and sequential to the instantaneous”
• Lawrence
  • “The nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless people – Ibsen, Flaubert, Hardy – represent the dream we are waking from”
• Lewis
  • “We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized!” (referring to Pound, Joyce, Hulme)
• Symons
  • decadence is “over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement”
• Marinetti
  • “mythological green-groceries” (on art nouveau)
  • “synthetic expressions of cerebral energy which have absolute novelty value”
• Mallarme
  • “Poems, my dear Degas, are not made with ideas but with words”
• Laforgue
  • “In short, I was about to surrender myself, with an ‘I love you,’ when…I registered the fact that I wasn’t really mine to give”
• Hulme
  • “Literature a method of sudden arrangement of commonplace. The suddenness makes us forget the commonplace.”
• Stevens
  • Ridiculed the “flash drapery” of supernatural imagery
• Rilke
  • About the unicorn (metaphor for supernatural): “They always left space for it:” “Sie liessen immer Raum.”
• Beckett
  • On novels: “You must either lie or hold your peace.”
• Mann
  • “The real goal to reach is not decision, but harmony, accord.”
• Kafka
  • “In the struggle between yourself and the world you must take teh side of the world.”
• Forster
  • Novels are about “expansion,” not about “completion”
• Maeterlinck
  • about Ibsen’s dialogue: the words have an underlying sense, “dialogue du second degre”
• Wedekind
  • “When realism has outlived itself, its representatives will earn their living as secret policemen.”
• Apollinaire
  • “When man wanted to imitate the action of walking he invented the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. He thus used Surrealism without knowing it.”

Comps Questions

• Relation of self to outside world
  • Extent to which we self-create that world (phenomenology)
• Relation of identity to objects (cf Rilke 376
• Novels, esp as response to realism, as mixture of form and contingency
  • Form creates necessity out of chaos
    • Power of the fictive over contingent (405-6)
  • Symbol versus History
  • Contingency versus Necessity

People to Read

• Laforgue
• Herve (politics)
• Apollinaire
• Stieglitz (photog)
• Alexander Benois
• Alexander Blok
• Z. Gippius
• Merezhkovsky
• Schnitzler
• Mach
• Doblin (with umlaut over o)
• Canetti
• y Gasset
• J A Hobson
• Pareto + Mosca
• Gustav Le Bon
• Wedekind
• George Moore
• Ionesco
• Hauptmann
• Pinero
• Malraux
• Bourget
• Hamsun
• Stringberg
• Musil
• Bauhaus (applied art)
• Hofmannsthal
• Stefan George
• Karl Kraus
• Sigrid Undset
• Stein’s Tender Buttons
• Pasternak
• Solzhenitsen
• Kandinsky
• Voloshinov
• Dujardin
• Biely
• Baudelaire’s “dandy” essay

Inward Turn, Representation of Consciousness: form “The Name and Nature of Modernism”

• Romanticism cared about consciousness and intense experience, but what modernism add is …
  • “discontinuity”
  • and that the consciousness is EVOLVING: “evolving consciousness: consciousness aesthetic, psychological, and historical”
  • and that it is occurring “under the pressure of history”
• “The new registers of consciousness alter our sense of history, and our sense of the stability of consciousness itself, taking us into new concepts of mental and emotional association.”
  • ex: Strindberg on his characters in Miss Julie
    • “Since they are modern characters living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age that preceded it, I have drawn them as split and vacillating…conglomerations of past and present…scraps from books and newspapers”
    • hmmm is it that history is going so fast that your relation to it has snapped?
    • it is modern b/c you have a sense of living in an age of transition that makes for fragmented consciousness
• during modernism, we have not an oscillation between reason and the irrational, but instead a fusion of the two
  • think of imagism: the image is “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”
  • all modern projects want to “objectify the subjective, to make audible or perceptible the mind’s inaudible conversations, to halt the flow…”
• Paul Klee on contingency: “There is a striving to emphasize the essential character of the accidental.”
• As they “Destroyed the tidy categories of thought” they want to…
  • Eliot: new juxapositions or wholes
  • find the perfect symbolic moment
  • some union: Yeats, dancer and the dance
  • Forster’s Marabar Caves
• Fragmentation: in the sense that human life “not a sequence” and history not evolving
  • So, modernist works ordered “not on the sequence of historical time or the evolving sequence of character, form history or story….they tend to work spatially or through layers of consciousness”
  • “De-creating the given surface of reality” but instead will cut historical time across w/the mind’s movements, or the “luminous image,” or a fictional order that isn’t the story
  • plurality of perception

Eric Cahn “Revolt, Conservatism, and Reaction in Paris”

• Pre-war artists not total chaos, anarchy
• Cubists weren’t “a total departure from order and reason…pursued their aims via a re-ordering of the elements of our visual experience at another level, via the creation of a new order” 169
  • this order isn’t scientific but personal
• Apollinaire’s poem if you undo the typographical experimentation is written in alexandrines
• Only with Dadaism and Surrealism do you have “total irrationalism” and “anarchy, total conflict and violence”.... truly only after 1920

“The Introverted Novel” Fletcher and Bradbury

• What changes?
  • Increase in “self-analytical presentation”
  • Increase in emphasis on structure and design
  • More poetic (stricter hand w/prose)
• These changes lead to emphasis on form, which leads to new forms and experimentation
• Two Major Effects
  • a) imitation and contingency replaced by language and design; wholeness rather than representativeness
  • b) “artistic crisis” of how to turn reality into words (relation of art to external world)
• Narrative Introversion Does Not Mean Self-Conscious Narration
  • Sterne already got that
  • What modernism does is turn that into a reflection on the fictive structure, not the narrator
• “show the process of the novel’s making and dramatize the means by which the narration is itself achieved” 394
  • in other words, make reader think about how the unity of the novel was achieved
• Seen to have relationship w/destruction of realism
  • “an art that does not report the world, but creates it.”
• When did this happen? Kinda w/Flaubert but mostly w/James
  • James’ narrator had “deft connivance” with his characters rather than a friendship w/the readers
  • James’ narrator tantalizes the reader and keeps back information from you
  • here the two scholars say that it’s a part of the “introspective novel” when novel comments on imagination or describes the writing/novel process
  • “to the point where it sometimes seems that the characters have read the novel in which they exist” (but I don’t agree w/this: that is more postmodern)
  • James on Awkward Age: says that “We are shut up wholly to cross-relations all within the action itself, no part of which is related to anything but some other part” (that’s neat)
    • but then the authors say that the characters “seem to participate in the act of their own creation” 397
      • I don’t like this b/c of the emphasis on characters’ individuality: look how they say “they seem to assert against their author the right to greater freedom, to profounder psychological depth, or to life that reaches freely back and forward in time”
• They do then admit that “the same techniques can be used to subordinate the characters to the design”
• “The form is not simply an enabling means of handling the content, but in some sense it is the content; experience generates form but form generates experience, and it is in the delicate intersections between the claims of formal wholeness and human contingency that we find some of the central aesthetics and tactics of Modernist fiction” 399
  • Conrad’s Under Western Eyes: “dramatizes the difficulty of establishing the material and ordering its significance, conveying its completeness; that becomes part of the story.”
    • and Conrad juggles a crazy load: “create for their admiration a creator creating a fiction before their eyes, and all the while convince them of its basic verisimilitude. His aim is to make dense the feel of life, and the conditions of uncertainty and complexity under which it is lived.” 400
    • Conrad on himself: his art is “my unconventional grouping and perspective” and has “effects” instead of “mere directness of narrative” (you plan carefully what to make the reader experience as the person reads…perhaps turn it into an event?)
• Mark Schorer, “Technique as Discovery,” on the modern novelist “not only that he pays so much attention to his medium, but that, when he pays most, he discovers through it a new subject matter, and a greater one”
  • technique: “any selection, structure, or distortion, and form or rhythm imposed on the world of action” that helps you understand that world of action
• “At times, what we feel is that the techniques of introversion bring us closer to life; at others, we are more aware that they bring us closer to the art of the occasion,” which is an “elegant consolation”
• Wholeness and unity: “the world beyond the contingent detail and haphazard reality acquires that luminosity which, for instance, Virginia Woolf sought in fiction.”
  • however, wholeness comes at a cost to realism: “progressive fading” of realism b/c “language ceases to be what we see through, and becomes what we see.”
  • novel “hangs on the border between” mimetic and autotelic
• Proust
  • it’s both realist description of a time and place but also examination of consciousness (this is what all agree, I think)
  • “Transcends mere realism”
  • “Art is thus the central illumination; it alone can give pattern or form which in turn make significance out of what would otherwise be a contingent sequence.”
  • So Marcel’s “literary vocation” is what he gets out of life
  • “a writer’s style is not a matter of technique but a vision or a symbolist totality” (hmmm I don’t know if they see the experimental cast of some modernist novels)
• Ulysses
  • “the trivial and everyday are thereby mythologized, and the contemporary man attains to the stature of a legendary hero” 405 thus letting it “transcend” the autobiographical and naturalist content (which clearly the two authors are degrading here and kind of meanly slamming; note they call it a “degenerate history which the symbol must transcend”)
  • However, “parody and pastiche, the use of plurality of language, demonstrate the lack of plot and discourse in the contemporary world.”
    • “the compulsion towards technique becomes a feature of a world in which there is no coherence to give outside the coherence of art”
  • Yet the novel seems skeptical towards Stephen’s “vocation” which “compromises” Joyce
• Buddenbrooks
  • This is Mann’s move from naturalism to symbolism **