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Modernisms Literary Guide

Order Structure Self Realism and The Turn and Leisure

• On Dada, “fragmented phrases under high syntactical tension produce a world tipped towards hallucination, a world of part-objects and half-glimpsed presences.” 250
• Post war: the ‘Men of 1914’ modernity had “growing concern with ‘order’ and ‘structure’” which “derived much of its energy from an attack on modernity” 251
  • “The polemical thrust given here to an anti-mimetic art was directed against the imitative tendencies associated with the mass politics of a democratic age in which, as Lewis put it, ‘the life of the crowd’ forces man to ‘live only through others, outside himself’”
  • So what do you do? “reconstitute the self as closed, autonomous, and antagonistic.”
    • while still avoiding romanticism of thinking you’re authentic or spontaneous – which are also a problem “of the democratic age”
• The men of 1914 want the self autonomous but “had no great desire to explore its interior – that was associated with the ‘twilight’ romanticism of Freud’s chaotic unconscious”
  • instead, they “restore art to the public realm”
  • he realizes this is an insanely diff conception of modernism: “modernism has so often been defined in terms of a turn to subjectivity”
    • for men of 1914, in the subjectivity you only find blind mimetics, sameness
• Public
  • Henry James complained how everything in America was too private, but then again he feels disoriented in “public spaces of hotels” 251
  • Wyndham Lewis’ early work (see Alan Munton, “Wyndham Lewis: the Transformations of Carnival”) “preoccupied” with bars, pensions: “priviledged spaces of adult hospitality, spaces freed from the claustrophobic constraints of the domestic scene, and his subsequent critique of modernity focuses on the disappearance of an authentically public sphere.” 252 b/c sociality replaced by the “personal life” in Lewis’ words “little universe to himself”
    • For Lewis, “as work becomes less important than play” “A society defining itself in terms of leisure is thus one in which life becomes increasingly aestheticised: ‘art’ provides the collective representations of a ‘private’ life which is founded in the rituals of imitation.”
      • your public life is a mere performance of your supposedly ‘individual’ private life which is just a copy of someone else immersed in culture of consumption… commodification provides criteria for beauty
      • so that life is “a tawdry zone of half-art” – Tarr
    • Time and Western Man: “The world in which Advertisement dwells is a one-day world. It is necessarily a plane universe, without depth. Upon this Time lays down discontinuous entities, side by side; each day, each temporal entity, complete in itself, with no perspectives, no fundamental external reference at all.” qtd 252
  • In this world, Lewis says you need truly public values (private ones are a dead end), just as he believes art shouldn’t just be style but instead should be antagonistic and “save history” from style 252
• Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Lewis now create new historical social narratives
  • Wolf Man: “an event in the past requires a second event to release its traumatic force. The first event belongs to the subject’s past but is experienced as something foreign when it is restructured through memory.” 253
    • me: in general for Freud, your present hysteria or neurosis is where something in the PAST is released
    • remember that for Freud memory is protective and coded like a dream; memory’s restructuring changes the event, thus making the original event foreign
    • the other Freud quote: “these scenes from infancy are not reproduced during the treatment as recollection, they are the products of construction.”
      • belatedness, deferred action: the shock of the first event is too much and won’t be felt until a second event, a reverse of causation b/c the second event “causes” the trauma of the first; something that looks like it’s happening now is really the effect of something earlier on; a repetition (you repeat the first event but in diff way) so that trauma is a kind of memory; you can’t get back to the original moment; recollections are “produced like stories from psychically collectible narrative material” (Thomas Di Piero?); they represent real wishes and desires but are imaginatively produced as symbolic representation of those desires; the event itself is a representation; “Gradually and laboriously” constructed says Freud; “unconscious fantasy” is the primal scene, perhaps
• While European modernism wanted an unqualified new, Anglo-American “inextricably enmeshed with cultural tradition.” 253. it’s about new, sure, but not about original.
  • “writing becomes a re-writing” rather than modernity’s usual “passive mimesis” b/c this is “imitation of a higher order”
  • ex: Waste Land, where “articulation of past and present together which promises release from a merely repetitive history” just like psychoanalysis promises
• Twenties: two types of modernism
  • impersonality, achieved by the “interplay of historical times” (Eliot) (belatedness)
  • 254: “contents of consciousness and the self’s labile existence in time” (Woolf) (stream of consciousness)
  • of course Ulysses has both (1922) with “double focus” on sentence level construction and large-scale structure
    • note: Pound said Ulysses was realist novel, and Lewis regarded it as naturalism: “a time-book…Aladdin’s cave of incredible bric-a-brac in which a dense mass of dead stuff is collected” “a monument like a record diarrhoea”
    • whereas Eliot said it killed off the novel and emphasized the mythic structure. what’s wrong with realist novel? to Nicholls, “prevents a novelist from adopting a sufficiently distanced or external view of that modernity which is his subject” 255 and its “trapped within it” (while Ulysses can add to or supplement the past, rather than be determined by it)
      • and Eliot said in diff context realism had the 19th c vices, “cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness” 255
      • remember Eliot is our guy against authenticity and expressivity of romanticism (though Nicholls notes Lawrence was still doing good stuff with that model)

Marx

• 1848 Communist Manifesto
  • “Like Emerson and Baudelaire…stressed the impulse towards innovation and diversification which marked the age, but at the same time they revealed a darker paradox…while change was everywhere apparent…the process of modernisation actually entailed the continuous reproduction of the same relations, the relations which govern capitalist production” 6
• The Eighteenth Brumaire 1852
  • More about no new change: “Louis Napoleon’s imperial regime as a grotesquely theatrical simulation of the original Napoleonic state” which is “history without events…constant repetition…painted grey on grey”
  • me: neat how his “passions without truth, truth without passions” echoes Eliot’s upsetness about the dissociation of sensibility

Consumerism, Social Fiction

• A rebours is “an economic tragedy”
• “modernist ambition was now to consume reality rather than to represent it as an image of the bodily self” 78
• “it is strangely characteristic of modernism that the now much-vaunted repossession of a public sphere [think a g] should coincide with the rejection as ‘anti-modern’ of a whole mass of social material which had provided the focus of nineteenth-century fiction.”
  • hence modernism has a “hostility to narrative” (where you see “the world of human production” disappear along w/its “intricate thematics of domestic manners tied to the accumulation and transfer of capital”)
    • he says that it won’t continue when now the world is “increasingly deriving its values from the realm of consumption” (rather than capital accumulation and transfer); “conditioned less by stratification and class than by an all-embracing capitalism” 79
      • all embracing? he means Gramsci’s bourgeoisie so powerful that it can “absorb the entire society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level”
• What happens as a result? the disappearance of the belief of being outside
  • 19th c avant-garde: “aim…to situate itself somewhere outside the bourgeoisie it derided”
    • “followed Baudelaire’s lead in spurning the economic as the domain of ‘natural’, bourgeois values”
  • new generation: “illusion of a seamless social totality,” “mesmerised by modernity as an all-embracing condition”
    • Des Esseintes’ tragedy is that he finds out “there is ultimately no space untouched by modern capital” 79
    • new avant-garde “looked to the process of global modernisation and imperialist expansion for tropes with which to shatter the confines of the decadent interior” and looked for “expanded, spatial figures of the self” b/c decadence is self-absorbed, feminized, overcultivated 79
      • technology, communications, capitalism all see a bigger force at work: pre-war A G movements “conceived as an attempt to penetrate the deep structures of modernity, those structures of capital flow and circulation which suddenly seemed homologeous with the drives of the newly ‘liberated’ imagination” wow! it’s the “mystique of capital which is everywhere in this period” b/c of finance capitalism
      • Rudolf Hilferding, 1910, Marxist economist: “the specific character of capital is obliterated in finance capital. Capital now appears as a unitary power which exercises sovereign sway over hte life process of society” 80: “superhuman” in Nicholls’ words, “a force working according to its own laws and having no clear connection to the mundane sphere of production: a fetishism of capital which structually complements a fetishism of the commodity”
• Thus he says you understand why “fantasies of power and mobility during the period are emblematized by the adventures of consumerism, since to purchase is, in these terms, to ‘liberate’ oneself into the cycle of capital’s reproduction.” 80, a disembodiment, an action beyond the mere human body
  • he says the “erotic aura of the body is displaced within an expanding consumerism so as to reappear in the form of a depersonalised libidinal energy which invests the commodity and its rituals” (you find your energy by placing yourself w/in capital cycle)
  • “we may now begin to see how the spectacle of modern consumerism might instigate a new practice of writing: for we are dealing here not with concepts of lack and compensatory form but with a plenitude which seems always mystically to reconstitute itself in and through the experience which consumes it” 80
    • ie not about chaos, fragmentation, etc but plenitude and circulation (me: perhaps the opposite of fragmentation isn’t unity but circulation?)
• “consumer world is an increasingly dematerialised one” as “production, use, and need” diminish
  • “modes of engagement with commodities become less direct, a matter of visual flirtation rather than the fetishistic possession which motivated Des Esseintes.”
  • advanced consumerism: “depends as much upon the mobility of desire as it does on actual purchase” (that’s what I think, remember my Huxley stuff on window shopping), a visual spectacle relying not exactly on particular products but instead upon the “circulation of exchange value…operates as the general equivalent of all things, seems itself to exceed the possibilities of stable representation”
    • he then talks about some French poetry, but I’d like to talk about this in diff context