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Modernist Chaos

Question

When T. S. Eliot shored fragments against his ruin, Iris Murdoch took it as a sign of his �Totalitarian Man� �desire to have the form and clarity of something necessary, and not accidental.� Such figures fear �whatever is contingent, messy, boundless, infinitely particular, and endlessly still to be explained.� This obsession with the contingent is a commonly cited feature of modernists, who are often said to react against the chaos of modernity by using art to extract meaning out of the fragmentation, isolation, and perhaps even meaninglessness of experience. Discuss the relation between contingency and necessity in the modernism, discussing at least two poets and two novelists.

Terms

• Contingent, messy, boundless: there is no order
• ...Freedom and self-determination to be found somewhere in the middle…whereas much polemic turned this murky area into an apparent X versus Y clear-cut argument…as Levenson will help me demonstrate…
  • notes that they all sounded like they had come to final beliefs, but the rapid succession of such final beliefs shows that their heavy statements are often �the hasty formulae of polemicists� ix
  • says that modernism tried to erase its own tracks and he wants to restore the �false starts, reversals, hesitations, resolutions� to �restore modernity to history� rather than believe in a spirit of the age
• Determinism: there is too much order
• Levenson will show via solipsism discussion how this dialectic came about.
• Fragmentation/disorder often associated with contingency; and unity/order with necessity

Material

• Waste Land and Levenson on it
• Eysteinnson
• Marshall Berman
• Loy, Eliot, Yeats
• Woolf, Rhys, Murdoch

Structure

• Intro: Berman, Eysteinnson, Burger to give an elucidation of the issues at stake
  • Berman
    • Takes Marx’s account of modernity as always in crisis and extrapolates: this is what modernism is, a half fascinated half horrified reaction to modernity: �Marx lays out the polarities that will shape and animate the culture of Modernism in the century to come: the theme of insatiable desires and drives, permanent revolution, infinite development, perpetual creation and renewal in every sphere of life, and its radical antithesis, the theme of nihilism, insatiable destruction, a shattering and swallowing up of life, the heart of darkness, the horror.�
    • and Baudelaire’s ephemeral, fleeting which is the modern
    • “You can’t step into the same modernity twice” “art…born in the midst of traffic”
    • Modernity “annihilates all it creates…in order to create more” (Faust) where bad comes out of the good and good out of the bad
    • Modernism created as a dialectical response to modernization, can be negative or affirmative; modernism as a mode of cultural experience that goes way beyond the literature
  • Bradbury and Mac Farlane?’s Modernism anthology shows over and over how, 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.
    • Social itself has been fragmented to to modernization: industrial expansion (Fordism, Taylorism, mass consumer culture), secularization, improvements in transport and communications technology, rise of mass culture, WWI, Marx Darwin Freud Nietzsche, new fields of study (theosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology), urbanization, the scientific method and positivism, relativity and uncertainty principle as destruction of Cartesian science, migration; leads to disruption of traditional society, feeling of constant crisis and flux, exile and homelessness, impermanence of truth, bleak outlook contrasted w/exhilaration, cultural relativism
    • And my favorite, the destruction of some systems and the creation of others to make up for it (religion, tradish science; but replaced by Darwin Marx and Freud’s systems) and then modernists’ systems (Lawrence, Yeats) while some say life escapes systems (Woolf)
  • Joseph Frank: “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” points to the destruction of temporal order as the source for textual fragmentation
  • Ford Madox Ford (artists will mimic fragmentation of modern life)
    • Ford on modernity: �its confusing currents, its incomprehensible riddles, its ever present but entirely invisible wire pulling, and its overwhelming babble;” in our �terrific, untidy, indifferent empirical age�
    • Ford’s reaction to modern complexity: narrow your vision to yourself only; you have to ACCEPT and �yield sufficiently to the exigencies of the present,� instead of his fellow artists� �the failure to concede the fragmentation, the fragility, the precariousness, and to write accordingly,� in Levenson�s words 61
    • Modern life, says Ford, is �a dance of midges� so admit it, convey that vagueness
  • Burger: A G rejected the organic work of art (�internal semantic plenitude that escapes simple fixations,� rather than �ideological demarcations that enclose the work of art from external considerations�): thus collage and montage significant: ��The avant-garde saw that the organic unity of the bourgeois institution of art left art impotent to intervene in social life, and thus developed a different concept of the work of art. Its concept of art sees a chance to reintegrate art into social praxis if artists themselves would create unclosed, individual segments of art that open themselves up to supplementary response. The aesthetic fragment functions very differently than the organic whole of romantic artwork, for it challenges its recipient to make it an integrated part of his or her reality and to relate it to sensuous-material experience.� xxxix
    • As Adorno said in Aesthetic Theory, �it is the characteristic of the non-organic work of art using the principle of montage that it no longer creates the semblance of reconciliation�The insertion of reality fragments into the work of art fundamentally transforms that work�They are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality.�
      • b/c it �admits actual fragments of empirical reality, thus acknowledging the break, and transforming it into an aesthetic effect.�
      • whereas �organic work of art�pretends to be like nature projects an image of the reconciliation of man and nature 78
      • Adorno�s words: �the negation of synthesis becomes a compositional principle� that is negation of reconciliation: not �unity of meaning�
    • Burger: �the parts �emancipate� themselves from a subordinate whole; the parts are no longer its essential elements�the parts lack necessity� 80 you could�ve had diff elements, a diff order �refusal to provide meaning� b/c avoids �total impression that would permit an interpretation� and the shock will be �Stimulus to change one�s conduct of life� 80
    • also means that you think of the �principles of construction,� on art-making, meaning-making itself 81
    • �art is detached from daily life�it cannot be integrated into that life� �The lack of tangible effects is not the same as functionlessness�but characterizes a specific function of art in bourgeois society: the neutralization of critique.� 13 so art plays role �in the development of bourgeois subjectivity�
    • art understood as diff from all other activities by the 18th century, with Kant�s aesthetics: �non-purposive creation and disinterested pleasure, this whole was contrasted with the life of society which it seemed the task of the future to order rationally, in strict adaptation to definable ends� �does not fall under the principle of maximization of profit�
      • Kant�s 1790 Critique of Judgment: �subjective aspect of the detachment of art from the practical concerns of life is reflected� between senses and reason (�The delight which determines the judgment of taste is independent of all interest�), that is it�s detached from practical contexts
      • how separated? aesthetic judgment universal, whereas reason and bourgeois interests are particular; he also separates it from morality; �Between sensuousness and reason� so taste is �free and disinterested� hence universal
  • Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: �The starting point of modernism is the crisis of belief that pervades twentieth-century western culture: loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and shattering of cultural symbols and norms. At the center of this new crisis were the new technologies and methodologies of science, the epistemology of logical positivism, and the relativism of functionalist thought�in short, major aspects of the philosophical perspectives that Freud embodied.�
    • How? Science destroys traditional symbols like religion and art; technology is destructive (war, atomized society)
    • �Art produced after the First World War recorded the emotional aspect of this crisis; despair, hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and a sense of meaninglessness, chaos, and fragmentation of material reality…they emerged fro the paralysis of absolute despair to an active search for meaning. The search for order and pattern began in its own negation, in the overwhelming sense of disorder and fragmentation caused by the modern materialist world. The artist as seer would attempt to create what the culture could no longer produce: symbol and meaning.�
    • More Susan Stanford Friedman, from �Modernism of the �Scattered Remnant:�� effects on women modernists of the war; H. D.: who starts to identify w/all the people �scattered� by war: �blacks, Jews, Indians, homosexuals and lebians, women, and artists� 30-1; women like Nin and H D thought that �political organizations reproduce on a dangerously large scale the unresolved violence within the individual� qtd 31, a distrust echoed by Woolf Stein Richardson Sinclair Hurston Barnes Rhys.
      • H D develops �political syncretism, a modernism of the margins rather than the reactionary center� qtd 31
      • WWI makes women �solidified commitment to liberal causes and a fear of repressive and inhumane political power structures�war was a strengthened feminism in awareness of the ways women�were vulnerable to patriarchal violence� (though some like Stein get all reactionary, it is MOSTLY that men go reactionary and women go marginal liberalism)
  • Peter Ackroyd on The Sacred Wood
    • �Eliot provided literature with an order and certainty all the more potent because these were the qualities lacking in social and political life�.T. E. Hulme had sketched out something of a similar thing, and in 1919 Clive Bell wrote a series of essays on �Order and Authority� for the Athenaeum. But Eliot�s stance was, in the end, more influential. He reaffirmed the status of literature, as a way both of understanding the larger culture and of disciplining private feelings and experience. His own need for order reflected that which existed among his generation; his own fears of fragmentation and meaninglessness�were also theirs.� qtd 33 in Benstock
    • Benstock reacts: �But Eliot�s fears were not shared by all of his generation, nor was his obsessive need for order and discipline common to all of his contemporaries.� For example, Edith Sitwell, �Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity�in an age when the edict has gone forth for the abolition of personality, for the abolition of faces, which are practically extinct. It is because of this hatred of personality, that the crowd, in its uniformity, dislikes artists endowed with an individual vision.� �Modernist Poets,� 1930 (coming in 1930 this is no innocent Romantic longing for understanding the unique individual but instead a belief that lasted through the violence of the war and is coming to terms with its social, psychological, economic, and political effects, as well as dealing with the new modernisms of impersonality) (who shares Sitwell�s �aesthetics of the individual and irrational�against Eliot�s claims for tradition and logic?� Barnes, Cunard, Natalie Barney, Stein, Woolf 34)
  • Adorno’s Critique of Realism in Aesthetic Theory
    • Bitter Critique of Realism: �Realism in art has become an ideology� which will “feign a nonexistent reconciliation of reality with the subject�
    • As a result, realism merely �acts according to prevalent institutions,� limited by those institutions, not free
    • Modernism does not try to create this fake world
      • Joyce�s interruption of time in Ulysses reflects the real dissolution of time in the modern world
    • On collage and fragmentation
    • The realist holistic narrative gives way to the fragmented modernist work that doesn�t give you the feeling of an organic whole
    • �The semblance of art being reconciled with a heterogeneous reality because it portrays it is to disintegrate as the work admits actual fragments of empirical reality.�
      • �The negation of synthesis becomes a compositional principle�
  • Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde,
    On the future for modernists: �The present is valid only by virtue of the potentialities of the future, as the matrix of the future, insofar as it is the forge of history in continual metamorphosis, seen as a permanent spiritual revolution.�
  • Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, modernism�s �totalitarian use of form� reflects the �authoritarian society�
  • Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries “in essence, modernists prize order�both aesthetic and political� (160)
  • Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide
    • 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
  • Eysteinnson
    • �Modernist discourse confronts the bourgeois self with its fragmented, decentered, and altogether damaged image.� (170)
      • thus “Modernism �breaks the shackles of normative instrumental rationality� (237) b/c it gives a negative reflection of it
    • Modernism can’t give a new order b/c that would ruin its status as purely oppositional: Do they ever actually make codes? Eysteinnson says no: �I do not think modernist practices have decisively changed prevalent signification systems of the cultural order.�
      • �Can at least hint what it is like not to be caught up in the prevalent sociosymbolic network of meaning.� Lack of order is constituent of what modernism DOES
    • Modernism multiplies the answers, where fragmentation is the juxtaposition of multiple possible codes without ever arriving at a final one
      • �The communicative crisis we associate with modernism can be described as an urge to carry out the act of reference without the instrumental function of reference.�
    • Don’t be sad that modernism can’t establish a formal order b/c that’s what gives it social lever: �a revolt against perceptual and ideological anesthesia� (203); �a dialectical hesitation, as it were, between sense and non-sense� (238)
      • modernism can only be understood in an oppositional sense against realism or rational discourse; does not give “new culture” but stands at “remove” from main culture
    • Eysteinnson likes Jameson’s modernism as “canceled realism”
    • Fragmentation is deliberate strategy to evade the problems that it wants to critique society for: �It is precisely to elude incorporation into a holistic continuum, reflecting in the organic wholeness of individual works, that modernism manifests itself in nonorganic texts.� (209)
      • Modernists texts can �reprocess the messages of the culture industry� by stripping them of their contexts, because they have �disjointed structures�
      • Ideally, then, the reader is stimulated to do so himself/herself (227), thus becoming political tool (228) to tear apart the process whereby hegemonic powers control folks through rhetoric
    • �As a historical paradigm, then, modernism is caught between the crisis or even breakdown of modern rational discourse and the attempts of that very discourse to critique its own social or ideological effects and functions.� (240)
      • It can’t show you a new discourse but just points the way for you finding one
  • Fragmentation could be seen as both a social mood created by the discontinuities created by modernization with its destruction of old relations and (what I would add) constant experimentation to set up new ones; or could be seen as the attendant nature of consciousness in such a world (while others say consciousness is always like that); or fragmentation is something deliberately done to overtheorized and over-ordered systems (like bourgeois repressive ways of being)
  • Relation to Chaos
    • Three Different Potential Readings
      • Seems to reflect the chaos of society
      • Seems to order the chaos of society
      • Seems to make chaos out of ordered society
    • Sometimes society has created the chaos, and other times art has
    • My answer: What they’re truly horrified about is the survival of the old order despite the superficial (or even not superficial) evidence that it’s gone
      • The best and the worst of it, in that everything is shaky and yet you aren’t free to do what you want
      • Eysteinnson seems to agree with me: “retreat of social power into subtler and more dispersed, but no less hegemonic, forms” (141)
  • So, what’s going on with fragmentation? It’s a complex issue that usually refers to the destruction of traditional forms of social cohesion, which are met with nostalgia and a feeling of anomie (Tonnies), or with euphoria at the supposed opportunity for freedom (Baudelaire and the literature of flanerie), or both at the same time (Simmel). It sometimes refers to the feeling of breaking apart and the destruction of a unity (The Good Soldier), and at other times to the idea of self-contained wholes (F. H. Bradley, Stirner), or the wholesale rejection of any idea of wholeness in the first place (Bergson). What matters for modernism is that as a result of this variety of theories of fragmentation, new forms of the conscious subject and its relation to the outside world were explored and new artistic forms were developed alongside these explorations.
    • And what about determinism? Destruction of traditional forms was initially met with a feeling of release and an argument against any determinism (the rejection and ridicule of social Darwinism, Dora Marsden’s arguments against technological determinism), but as the pressures of modernization grew with war, social movements, imperialism, and mass poverty, fragmentation was either seen as a problem to be solved or as not having gone far enough, allowing new, suspect forms of unity and determinism to develop quietly underneath the apparent fragmentation and freedom (often in form of critiques of democracy)
• Getting Closer: Levenson and the Waste Land
  • �Modernism was individualist before it was anti-individualist, anti-traditional before it was traditional, inclined to anarchism before it was inclined to authoritarianism.�
  • Summarize what he does
  • What are the pros and cons?
  • Can I get an initial thesis from me reading Waste Land esp via the other Eliot poems?
  • Go see Genealogy Modernism
  • What’s cool about Levenson’s tracing of Eliot’s negotiation of Bradley, is that we have a rewriting of a culturally specific moment into a philosophical, essential condition of man, even though Waste Land might have seemed a reaction to European cultural dissolution in postwar era. And this is a kind of unfortunate institutionalization. We’re back to necessity. The contingency of the point of view (Levenson would call this solipsism) is corrected by Eliot’s system of checks and balances. But is there a diff way?
• Mina Loy
  • Order is the medium through which the fundamental lack of order (which is diff from disorder) can be experienced and understood, reconciled
  • Nominalism is defeated and opposites are reconciled, leaving you nothing to “order” b/c there are no principles of order: Life, Death, Love, Lust, First, Last, Space, Time
  • Futurist (movement speed), Bergsonian (no objects except in time)
  • It is so diff from her other poems; it’s like an incantation that introduces you to the rest of her oeuvre; the rest of her poems are in free verse, play with typography and the placement of words on the page
  • Her “Feminist Manifesto” reminds women that if they define themselves against men, as what men are not, they are left with prostitution, parasitism, or negation
  • Go see Lunar Baedeker
• First Bite: Yeats, The Tower where violence is seen as the truth, whereas we’ve been lulled by an illusion of permanence and beauty; we are doomed to violence and chaos that ruins the beautiful
  • “Sailing to Byzantium” (193), which wants to avoid the fragmented nature of the life cycle by becoming a permanent art object, even if it’s a relatively useless one
  • “The Tower” (194) where he says aging has “been tied to me / As to a dog’s tail” so that it is a human condition to be fragmented
  • “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” (206) with “Many ingenious lovely things are gone” that had seemed protected and we had thought the “worst rogues and rascals had died out” making the “Platonic Year” “whirls out the old instead” of the new…but ultimately you have to “Mock mockers after that” instead of “traffic in mockery” “that would not life a hand maybe / To help good, wise or great”
  • “Fragments” 214, two parts. Part one “Locke sank into a swoon / The Garden died; / God took the spinning-jenny / Out of his side” (where developments of industry killed the orderly optimism of Locke) and part two: “Where got I that truth? / Out of a medium’s mouth / Out of nothing it came” which is diff from industry and will lead us to the Loy
  • “Meditations in Time of Civil War” 200 where the “bronze and marble” of “Ancestral Houses” is also being destroyed and even if it wasn’t still symbolizes bitterness along with greatness b/c colonial, and he’s only finding stability in his own tower, which itself is slowly crumbling but relatively stable yet makes him think about past and present wars, and the part of the poem about “Sato’s gift, a changeless sword” next to his pen and paper and will therefore cure his “aimlessness” and make him focus “Yet if no change appears / No moon; only an aching heart/ Conceives a changeless work of art” and realizes that his own culture’s accomplishments “In painting or in pottery” was inherited “seemed unchanging like the sword” and gave you a taste of “the soul’s unchanging looks” and then compares the beauty of the “most rich inheritor” envied for his beautiful things heard the scream of Juno’s peacock (who was given beautiful feathers and strutted around but then was snack-caked when saw and eagle, wanted to emulate and fly, but couldn’t b/c its heavy finery wouldn’t let it, and remember many of the sections in this poem obsess over what he can give his children, and even in this beauty “I see Phantoms of Hatred” w/the imagery of war
  • “Among School Children” (215)
• A little Other Yeats
  • Easter 1916 (180): where “Hearts with one purpose alone… seem / Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream” but can’t help that the clouds change the images on the stream and that’s when their hearts are sacrificed and led to their deaths; so when the poem ends w/”Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born” it’s like the natural cycle of changes in A Vision was stopped up until an unnatural change occured
  • The Second Coming (187): “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth” and he’s asking, What’s next? “what rough beast… / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
  • But of course Yeats’ A Vision gives a theory of history that accommodates change and unity at the same time, where the inverted cones that give history a determinate shape allow for chaos and change to occurs within a larger incipient order
• Fiction 1 and stream of consciousness: Woolf, Orlando, The Years, and The Waves etc
  • The Years, 1937
    • Woolf using the technologies of science to go against ideology of progress (which is a kind of determinism); even and uneven work dialectically
    • One of her best selling books
    • Much more focused on an assembly of characters who speak to one another; but the narrative is not continuous but only picks up when Woolf wants to; so it is her spin on the novelistic epic, much like Buddenbrooks
    • technique of montage but combined with much more ordinary style, syntax, and pattern of availability of consciousness
    • It crystallizes around moments when people gather together: where space makes it inevitable that people are forced to interact with one another despite the characters’ general will towards atomization, towards aloneness. and it ends here too, on one of these moments of being. This is truly the only order, the only true rhythm. It can only be known in literature, through an organizing force that makes this order visible. Free atoms who associate with one another every once in awhile just end up being connected anyway, almost despite themselves.
  • Orlando, 1928
    • Had been an even more hectic book than The Years. Which means that we can actually read Woolf’s career in a certain sense as dimming away PAST formless experimentation b/c there’s more and more form, more and more “Realist” stuff: b/c we have, after the boring tepidity of The Voyage Out and Night and Day (of which KM said she thought she would never see the likes of again) to branching out to the incredible newness of the early and mid 20s (Jacobs Room; To the Lighthouse; Dalloway), and then madcap riot of Orlando, which caps it off and signals through its use of the epic form gets more “typical” and even more so as we move from the Waves to the Years…but then again it’s more like Woolf realizes she can make her critique within some old conventions; not everything has to be thrown out (this is NOT a complete embrace of chaos) and yet what she does ends up being a bigger critique of order and rationality b/c of the amalgamation of the two.
    • It deconstructs historical materialism because the engine of historical meaning becomes manifested as one particular character; history moves through a lack of sense (how Orlando changes sex, nationality, age, identity, and occupation almost capriciously)...restoring a playful chaos to history that might not allow the individual total control but is completely unpredictable and not determined: though the individual cannot create history directly, neither does history streamroll somebody in scientifically predictable fashion.
  • And Between the Acts, the received, folk form of the medieval British pageant!
  • Jacob’s Room: go see Jacobs Room for a bunch of contingency (such as Fanny Elmer walking through the Garden Suburb, but no matter how you plan, the chaos will always come through)
  • B/c �Nobody sees anyone as he is;� and “It is no use trying to sum someone up” and �But whether this was the right interpretation of Jacob�s gloom�it is impossible to say.� �For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing.� �But though all of this may very well be true�there remains over something which can never be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob himself.� �It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it�that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn by ribbons.�
  • So, this is the moment we need to understand Woolf reacting against: the moment when people realize that subjectivity is flawed (Freud, Saussure, Wittgenstein), so they turn to objects: it’s not b/c they are fascinated by objects as such, but b/c they represent themselves an escape from a diff ideology
  • What do we do with his boots? cries the mother: objects themselves are the inheritor of someone’s being, the outside, the out of place. But the out of place is what keeps the space for personhood.
    • For Woolf, staying outside of explanatory measures will SAVE YOU FROM BEING SWALLOWED UP by modernity which tries to order and order and control. Literature can make the order of the social world apparent to the reader, but that’s the best you’ll get. (Unless you are some privileged person like Clarissa Dalloway who keeps being “dartlike” and “gathering herself into a point” and whose parties give one moment of social organization. They are temporary moments of being.) Of course her suicide in the wake of her thinking of the coming of Hitler to England suggests this isn’t a powerful weapon against totalitarianism and the complete lack of freedom. (This is where you transition to Rhys.)
  • The Waves, 1931
    • The clockwork undulation of the form ends up, along with the clockwork description of the sunrise with its empirical precision: it’s like observation, pure observation, but it happens within metaphors, so it’s pushing empirical description…but it’s curiously free from emotion.
      • The narrator’s description, as the opening section points out, is v different from a personal viewpoint, each of which character gives: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Louis; also an image-laden language, but so focused it’s individualistic, and together they make a chorus, a communal gathering-up of description
    • The inhuman and objective plus the subjective, the latter of which doesn’t add up to the completeness, the wholeness, of the narrator’s description. There’s a huge tension between narrator and the characters’ own streams of consciousness (which Woolf externalizes as speech)
    • Again, we have a scientifically perfect medium that allows the transmission of meaning which is itself chaotic and undermines the significance of the analytical part.
    • The careful arrangement of voices doesn’t create a continuous, progressing narrative, but actually highlights the contingent
      • the form is necessary, the content is contingent
• Fiction 2 and determinism: Rhys
  • Wide Sargasso Sea is what will help us put back the determinism stuff b/c Rhys works within the tradition and has to accept Bronte’s ending
    • Yet Rhys is able to create a completely different meaning from Antoinette/Bertha’s actions, one that even makes determinism itself the revelation of conspiracy, and therefore a social critique
  • The class of the living dead…
  • Rochester is driven mad b/c he keeps finding order in things; his paranoia is that things that look disconnected turn out to be connected. As this paranoid narrative takes him over, his consciousness itself becomes fragmented, and he loses the rational power over it. Power and status recover his sanity, however.
  • We see how Antoinette and her mother aren’t mad BUT ARE MADE MAD by people who won’t listen to them; they both become mad b/c men are trying to control them and their exhibitions of emotion. Rhys replaces a rhetoric of heredity (like it’s in her genes, which is what Rochester wants to say) with a social process rooted in specific economic formations and historical moments: the second son, the dying old form of imperialism making way for a new form. Rhys in essence gives a hist mat critique of Jane Eyre, revealing that yes, there is order behind things, but that order is a human one that you do, not a determinist order that passively is transmitted. THERE ARE DIFF KINDS OF DETERMINISM, Rhys reveals.
  • Antoinette: “There is always another side, always” she reminds Rochester, who won’t believe that. Rochester is a positivist who uses Western tools (ethnography and the police) to control, penetrate, get knowledge of the islands which are threatening to unravel him b/c he keeps TRYING to make it mean something, therefore creating his own obeah.
  • See Three Womens to see how Spivak sees that Rhys recovers Bertha who has been reconstructed by imperialist discourse: Most significantly, Bertha�s actions at end of WSS show that she is placed in the book (the �cardboard walls� that she insists is not England) and then MADE TO DO what she was �Brought here to do;� that is that imperialism robbed her of her self-control and her own identity, it hijacked her, which Spivak sees as �the self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer� � which makes Bertha the �good wife� b/c she does what Rochester brought her there for � the widow sacrifice of suttee (Spivak�s other topic)
  • See Wide Sargasso Sea?
• Epilogue: Under the Net
  • See Under Net
  • End of modernism
  • Instead of having lots of meaning yet fragmentation, Mudoch’s world has no meaning but is continuous, or rather it has meaning but the meaning is mundane rather than romantic
    • The old crisis driven and character development driven, narcissistic illusions about the art of life have to go in favor of taking your destiny by the horns just by going to work every day. The modernist character who vaunted the lack of meaning and tried to locate some kind of transcendent, romantic meaning by making life into art was lazily avoiding the actual conditions of meaning-making, which are completely boring.
    • The signs of his own making his life, he interpreted as magic, as coincidences, but in the end magic and art (following Anna after a night of fireworks in Paris after a completely chance meeting, in a beautiful, form-filled Cubist moment of running through the woods, very romantic)...disappear and it’s the people who are working quietly (his hack French writer) who win the prizes (Prix Goncourt).
  • Series of anti-climaxes leads to a faux miracle ending
  • Simulacra, fakery everywhere; aging; the constant striving for fast money…but in the end he settles down to writing, but unknown and workmanlike
    • Things that he thought were meaningless turn out to be meaningful, and his reaction is a “happiness [that] has a sad face” and a new sense of resolution where instead of chasing women and money he’ll finally settle down
  • So what happens is that the fragmented is uncovered as actually meaning something all along, and it was kind of a lack of will power anyway. Suggesting the problem is in the modernists themselves. Their protest and worries about fragmentation were really just a result of rejecting the ordinary daily world of meaning-making for the higher reaches of aestheticized and philosophized life. Meaning was there all along. And it turns out self-determinism looks a lot less interesting than it did when modernism began. The “Conspiracy” against you turned out to be your own daily acts, which weren’t sexy and flashy enough for you to recognize, and the totalitarian, determinist regime you were reacting against was yourself.