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Genealogy Modernism (changes)

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Preface

• Skeptical about the narrative the modernists give about themselves
  • notes the polemic tone where Hulme, Pound, and Ford would divide art into two camps
  • 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
• Change “not homogeneous or throughgoing” but instead complex, intricate, and has continuity w/what came before (for ex, Conrad and late Victorian)
• Also continuity among genres: literature, criticism, and nonfiction all interpenetrating
• His will be a history of ideas: “the structure of English modernism, as it slowly assumed coherence, as aesthetic concepts received new formulation, as those concepts were worked into doctrine” vii
  • image (Impressionism)
  • symbol (Imagism)
  • [removed]Vorticism)
  • objectivity (Classicism)

Consciousness: Conrad

• Conrad’s preface to The N of the Narcissus give two conflicting ideas: one of the familiar impressionism (Marlow: “before all, to make you see” with attention on “physical immediacy) but then the other about going down into the artist’s inner life
  • depth and surface
  • fiction “appeals to temperament,” one temperament giving TRUE meaning to events, transmitting this meaning to other temperaments 2: the surface of the world gets meaning through human temperament, not on its own
    • “True justice” to the world requires you going to a person’s inner life b/c that’s where meaning is made
    • “against the evanescent flux of the phenomenal world, it [human temperament] provides permanence, pattern and significance” 2
    • method: for the author to make “light of magic suggestiveness” with use of words
• This “tension” isn’t just Conrad, but all early modernism
• Reading of the Narcissus
  • Faithful Old Singleton shows how in fidelity to work you lose your conscious self (ie will to be an individual or an expressive voice)
  • The narrator is thus the one who has to interpret events and give them meaning 4
  • While in third person, Conrad avoids psychological language, and instead uses similes and metaphors that tend to evoke emotion indirectly 5
    • it makes the perfect rendering of precise physical detail what puts the emotion in, undercover
    • “it is plain that the conventions of omniscience were breaking down” (hence relying on phys description)
  • This strategy gets heavy: all sentences like each other, but it’s getting strained
  • Then a switch to first person and all is simple, varied, direct
    • “the first person exercised great rhetorical flexibility” 6
    • this moment is what he calls the “leap into consciousness” where subjectivity doesn’t have to be reconstructed but is in there already “immediately accessible”
    • It seems so much more easy and natural b/c “he may quite plausibly give utterance to his beliefs, perceptions, inferences” and so you can be more direct about feelings
    • Also, the narrator before this time had used all sorts of license, jumping in and out of physical and psychological spaces whenever s/he wanted: disembodied, superpowers way beyond that of everyone else 8, without recognizing any irony or problem in assuming you can just invade people’s consciousnesses or rooms
• N of N has “division of narrative labor” where third person does physical, first person does psychological, philosophical, moral etc
  • It’s a rejection of omniscience: no one “voice” can know all; which leads to the two diff directions (just like the two functions of writing said in the preface)
  • Conrad switches to the first person whenever the event needs some interpretation
• Note: this chapter was headed w/reference to “Victorian sailing ship” but didn’t really say anything about ship-ness, frowny

Consciousness: Huxley, Pater, Arnold

• Wants to epitomize Victorian by using Arnold on religion
  • Arnold: acknowledges that religion comes under fire when now this age doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but says that he wants to USE science to prove Christianity, “give to the Bible a real experimental basis…instead of any basis of unverifiable assumption” Literature and Dogma qtd 11
    • We’ll keep religion but only insofar as science proves it throwing out miracles, personal God, etc
    • Religion is actually based in human experience, “morality touched by emotion”
      • so, religion about “immediate perception” says Levenson b/c Christianity will be based on personal experience: not on transcendence anymore
  • Cf George Eliot w/similar attitude: “fellowship between man and man which has been the principal of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man” so “the idea of God…[is] entirely human” qtd 12
    • Levenson: this is a modern, secular, humanized religion
• Arnold: poetry significant because is will STAY on despite the fact there’s not any dogma or tradition “which does not threaten to dissolve” says Arnold
  • Anything setting store by the fact is being demolished, such as religion. Poetry however is based on IDEA (for poetry, “the idea is the fact”) and will last
  • How will religion last? By experience. 13 a radical psychologizing of religion, says Levenson
• Victorian period is two things: secularizing; attention to individual experience and consciousness
  • This second thing, seen in Mill’s Utilitarianism where greater good gotten by regard for your own gain
  • Also seen in Huxley (his “scientific subjectivism”) and science where knowledge is gathered from empirical observation, admitting that scientific objects of inquiry “are known to use only as forms of consciousness” and all “phenomena of Nature are…known to us only as facts of consciousness” qtd 14
    • Huxley calls this idea a “resting place” but we can see it holds trouble for the future (instability)
  • It’s where the loss of religion was used as context for a gain: human subjectivity will reground social institutions on a better basis
  • What is happening? “Large areas of traditional conviction are abandoned without regret” 13
    • Secularism and subjectivism seen as good 14 and we’ll still have religion and community somehow
      • “All meanings are to derive from immediately given facts of human experience” 14
      • religion, aesthetics, morality will be there but just now spoken of in “psychological terms”
    • It’s this Victorian optimism…I assume we will see the optimism gone but the abandoned stuff can’t be wished back, causing a problem
• Rise of middle class cult of independence is reality to this secularism and subjectivism 15
  • cf Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help where the individual can do anything!
  • Levenson notes Smiles isn’t so far from Arnold or ourselves after all b/c we all have trust in the ability of the individual to abandon tradition and self-ground, esp in determining values
• Eliot: seeing Pater as “accept[ing] Mill’s psychological hedonism without hte system of morality it generates” so that subjectivity withdraws “from the realm of fact” 16
  • It represents a move backwards from the mid-Victorian compromise epitomized by Arnold
• Levenson: Pater is “destructive and skeptical” further than Arnold took it b/c all is temporary, EVEN in the inward world and life
  • Pater is all about sensation and perception, without any theorizing
  • For Mill, personal happiness is morality and for Arnold personal experience is religion, but in Pater it isn’t anything so big or traditional
    • Relying on the self is now CONTRA to traditions whereas for the Victorians they weren’t combative
  • Pater brought the “logic of immediacy” to its natural conclusion: it’s all subjective, not connex to community morality etc
    • Result? Fact separated from Subjective 18 (and aesthetic value is now separate from objective realm) (me: a sidenote: where Eliot saw dissociation of sensibility in 17th c, Levenson sees it during late Victorian era)
      • And “The human spirit is served, rather than serving” while philosophy and culture merely “mental stimulants” says Levenson
      • Gone is that intermediate form where subjectivity was to serve the community and tradition
• As the final effect of secularism and subjectivism: The objective and permanent have disappeared.
• What people tend to like in this stuff and see in it is aestheticism, art for art’s sake, Levenson ignores in favor of its other quality, “psychologism…life and art for the sake of a ‘quickened multiple consciousness’ – consciousness as a source of value and a refuge from experience” 19
  • He says this is more important than aestheticism proper
• How Do We See Consciousness in Lit?
  • devaluation of “facts”
    • cf Lord Jim, Marlow saying, “Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!” qtd 19 and then Marlow says what mattered “was purely psychological” (ie emotion)
    • Levenson continues seeing in Conrad a “conflict between work and consciousness” 20
    • Marlow himself shows ascendency of “sense of fact” rather than fact
  • both Conrad and James want to show outward physical facts AND expression, that is, the mind, the value
  • They don’t doubt or malign the surface or the outside: “The meaning of the physical reality, not its independent existence, is called into question” 21
    • so it’s not as radical as you might want to think: it’s on the road to subjectivism, but not fully there
  • fact is there but “lifeless” until consciousness comes along to give it meaning
  • James, “The new novel,” writing about Conrad: “a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed” qtd 22
    • for James the mind is advantaged, superior, b/c it gets to move around
• What Are We Talking About: “the disintegration of stable balanced relations between subject and object and the consequent enshrining of consciousness as the repository of meaning and value” 22
  • I’d tweak this by saying the moment actually in a sense CREATES subject and object which before didn’t have to be experienced as horribly separate; so that the Victorian stuff he’s tracing also traces the coming to consciousness of that dualism… hmmm

Authority

• This is the objective strand that developed in opposition to the subjectivist strand; it is there quite early
• Eliot quite “hostile” to all this consciousness stuff, slamming Yeats for caring more about his feelings about something than the object itself
  • “Why introduce the mind?” he complains
  • So Eliot’s totally diff, but this is a late example so let’s turn to the earlier ones…
• Arnold cared about mind, about “the free play of consciousness” and “made Pater plausible” 24, but also “against egoism, sensation and anarchy”
  • Arnold: complains about Keats and Browning being too fascinated w/the world’s “multitudinousness” (which Levenson says is the “standard Arnoldian demand: the need for a principle of organization of offset the drift towards sensuosness and disorder” which he saw in the Romantics, who are “empty” “incoherent” etc aren’t critical enough or restrained enough or have enough ideas to wield against the “confused multitudinousness”)
  • English literature has no standards or balance, he says in many of his publications b/c doesn’t have “recognized authority” like the French Academy 25 which has awesome “wholesome restraining influences”
  • Culture and Anarchy: “the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and of itself…that it is a most happy and important thing for a man merely to be able to do his like…random and ill-regulated action” 26
    • doesn’t let any authority come through to help them
    • referring to riots in Hyde Park, saying that England is “in danger of drifting towards anarchy”
    • So they need an authority; and thinks about the “best self” that is a part of the State beyond class interest: the state = “the organ of our collective best self” qtd 27
    • state is thus “our truest friend”
• Levenson: what’s funny is that Arnold is trying to contend against individualism through conceding individualism: the self (the best self) is the basis of society. still. so the authority still “from within, self-generated” 27
  • Eliot said Arnold was in a period of “false stability” qtd 27 (while moderns have real instability). Levenson: this shows Victorians were in a contradiction that was collapsing: the individual consciousness yet wanting some kind of authority
• Irving Babbitt, New Humanism
  • humanism “a return to standards”
    • aristocracy of people who are disciplined
  • reject ideas of progress, democracy, individualism: they are not where history must go, he says (contra Arnold)
  • “beneath its veneer of scientific progress, is barbaric violation of the law of measure” with no “rigor” or “discipline”
  • all ethics close to being swept away in “everlasting flux” qtd 28
  • Masters of Modern French Criticism 1912 but truly about his contemporary moment: standards instead of “individual caprice” qtd 29 b/c he doesn’t like when “one man’s opinion in literature has become as good as another’s”
    • so criticism now is impressionist, which is silly b/c it only refers to yourself
    • individualism means that you are “confined to private vision” (Levenson’s words” which is a loss of standards and discipline
    • all the critiques are mere effete romantics
  • Science too kills restraint and standards b/c the scientist will say that any absolute is unknowable
  • Science, democracy, and the literature of it = relativism, impotence
• Why does Babbitt matter? Shows how the war against Romanticism and Impressionism of later modernism is part of larger humanitarian, democratic, naturalist society 30; against the world of “empiricism, liberalism and romanticism” 30
  • Also b/c he goes beyond Arnold: he and Arnold see similar problems, but Arnold is going for “invigorated liberalism,” whereas Babbitt goes futher w/authority: wants “keen-sighted few” and an “aristocracy of the intellect” which will have “virility” and “discipline” qtd 31
  • wow, what language
• Back to Conrad
  • Conrad “defends discipline and standards, virility and seriousness” 31 community and order
  • The ship is all about “group solidarity” and all against “voluble self-assertion” 32
    • Where order is silent and insubordination unbearably chatty: that is to say insubordination is consciousness
  • Pater had shown us that individualism and consciousness went hand in hand: consciousness leads to individualism; self awareness kills your feeling of solidarity and communal responsibility and belonging
    • And for Conrad in Narcissus leads almost to mutiny: if you do not think you will be happy; but if you do … terrible b/c if you know yourself you know mortality, insignificance, decay
  • Singleton has duty, not consciousness 34 (and Marlow saying, “Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time.” qtd 34 “There was surface-truth enough in these things [the duties of being on crew] to save a wiser man.”)
    • Yet, Marlow, Levenson points out, IS conscious! he reflects, broods!
      • What does this mean? Conrad shows tension between theme and form: theme says unconscious duty is good; form says otherwise. And this “reflects an emergent crisis” (the one already explained above, “the assertion of individual will as the only criterion of judgment” AND Conrad also ends in favor of tradish community nostalgia instead of pro-individualism)
• However, this is only nostalgia: Conrad clearly believes that “consciousness is the source of meaning and value,” 35
  • Narcissus shows back and forth of yeah consciousness (meaning), yeah unconsciousness (work, community)
  • “dissociation of fact and subjectivity” 35 (this is quite like Gallagher…)
• My problem: There’s slippage, Levenson. How does work and community come in between these two things? And is fact in this scheme paired with unconsciousness? Consciousness has to be in the form of pro-individuality for it to be placed in your value scheme. What is someone else might think consciousness will not necessarily lead to individualism?
• Conrad: “an interesting place…in the development of modernism, when the defense of work and solidarity must begin to accommodate the claims of consciousness” 35
  • Me: yet don’t you understand that the examples you gave w/Narcissus show a diff alignment: first person narration expressed communal values; third person narration focused on individual folks like Singleton. Are work and solidarity always together? Or only when there’s a crisis environment like the ship? If only there were a first person PLURAL consciousness! (Maybe that’s what Woolf is doing.)
• Conrad’s wanting both “surface” and “temperament” (fact and consciousness) is an example of the larger authority/consciousness issue
  • me: why is surface on the authority side? I supposed he’s demonstrated that depth/consciousness seemed to lead to anarchy only. Perhaps the fact that surface and authority are aligned is the interesting cultural moment.
  • him: fidelity to phys world and description will protect you from the excesses of the personal
• “These two aims – the registering of fact and hte recording of consciousness, physis and psyche – have invited contradictory interpretations of Impressionism; it has been characterized as both a precise rendering of objects and an unrepentent subjectivizing.” 36
  • In early Conrad, the problem is just starting, is in an okay balance, but by later Conrad the problem will emerge in its full form
  • “The agon of modernism has already begun to emerge: its ideological crisis, the struggle between its values and its forms, the instability in the forms themselves.”

Random

• “It is the noise of social agitation which is often the great prod to the imagery of reaction.” 32
• Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
  • Hebraism: “conduct and obedience”
  • Hellenism: “to see things as they really are”
  • while people are now Hebraism, they need to be Hellenism
    • both contribute to human progress but we are too disproportionate and need better balance
  • pp 18
  • how about this as theory of realism?
• James, preface to Princess Casamassima, “I never see the leading interest of any human hazard but in consciousness (on the part of the moved and moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement” qtd 21
  • and “figures in any picture” which is what he’s calling his characterss, “are interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations; since the consciousness…of the complication exhibited forms for us their link of connexion with it”
  • see the art, Cartesian dualism thing
  • calls the mind “a reflecting and coloring medium”
• Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate
  • The end of art is the ecstasy awakened by the presence before an ever-changing mind of what is permanent in the world, or by the arousing of that mind itself into the very delicate and fastidious mind habitual with it when it is seeking those permanent and recurring things” qtd 23
• 44 great Hulme quote that I can use for my metaphor to literal movement: prose is “images that have died and become figures of speech”

Hulme

• Parsing modernism by dating Hulme
• Hulme, Pound, Lewis, Ford seen as inconsistent, incoherent during 1908-1914: “Seething cauldron”
  • Why seen that way? B/c we try to treat it outside of temporality, as one moment itself rather than historical movement
  • We need to date carefully and that will somewhat restore coherence 37
• Why Hulme?
  • Part of early early modernist stuff, Poet’s Club 1908-9; theorized and worked until 1917; his writings collected in 1924 (causing Eliot to call Hulme the forerunner)
• Problem: the collection included lots of stuff jumbled together so it made him look inconsistent b/c he’d be plus Bergson, than minus Bergson, etc and esp b/c Herbert Read didn’t place the chronology correctly
• Hulme is called unoriginal but Hulme says that’s just fine and right b/c he put things together: so Hulme is an intellectual “Site” where ideas run together 39
  • He just kept changing his mind
• After trip to the Continent, came back to England one of the first Bergsonians
• What was bugging Hulme at the outset: the way science affected religion and morality, esp b/c it made you think everything was deterministic, run by necessity, where everything is ruled by mechanical causality
  • Science means = universe always stays the same, the static solitary atom
  • Hulme: “It is impossible, if mechanism be a true account of the world, for us to believe in any preservation of values.” If you are materialist, “the word ‘value’ clearly has no meaning.” qtd 40
• Bergson SOLVED it for him: “I had been released from a nightmare which had long troubled my mind…an almost physical sense of exhilaration, a sudden expansion, a kind of mental explosion”
  • me: the wording of this makes it clear that you are often trading one chaos for another: “explosion”
  • (These quotes are in Further Speculations)
  • Levenson on what Bergson did for Hulme: “Materialism introduces into consciousness factors only appropriate to the external world – quantity, causality – and attempts to make the inner and ‘intensive’ realm continuous with the outer and ‘extensive’ sphere” 40
    • For Bergson scientific method works for science. But that’s where it stops. In Hulme’s words, “It can deal with matter but it is absolutely incapable of understanding life” qtd 41
  • For Bergson, freedom and consciousness can’t be understood via scientific analysis, for we try to spatialize it, but these “intensive manifolds” can’t be understood spatially. Hence significance of time.
    • Bergson: Time and Free Will: “the problem of freedom has thus sprung from a misunderstanding…through which we confuse succession and simultaneity, duration and extensity, quality and quantity” qtd 41
      • Can’t explain subjects wholly via material world analysis, only superficially
  • So for Hulme this is “a solution to a consuming anxiety” says Levenson, with his “refutation of materialism”
• Hulme then writes prolifically about Bergson, does the 1913 trans of Intro to Metaphys; very willingly accepts the anti-intellectual stance that followed from this distrust of rational thought
  • In the New Age 1911: “I am a pluralist. There is no Unity, no True, but forces which have different aims” qtd 42
• Hulme’s “A Lecture on Modern Poetry”
  • to place modern poetry in its historical context
  • “the ‘ancients’ had attempted to evade the fluidity and instability of the world by constructing ‘things of permanence which would stand fast in this universal flux which frightened them”
    • resulting in fixed meter and form in poetry; in pyramids; Plato’s ideals
    • “a static fixity where their souls might rest” qtd 43
      • hence “purity of form” as refuge
    • content of poetry: “big things…epic subjects”
  • moderns: no “absolute truth”
    • “we no longer believe in perfection, either in verse or in thought, we frankly acknowledge the relative” 43
    • in poetry, regular meter no longer dominates and sounds “jangling” and “meaningless”; we have “impressionist poetry”
      • content: “tentative and half-shy” “definitely and finally introspective and deals with expression and communication of momentary phases in the poet’s mind” qtd 43-4
      • no longer that “stanzas shall be shaped and polished like gems” (hmmm I don’t agree)
      • all about maximizing individual expression, not absolute beauty (no big system, that’s why is Bergsonian)
  • also wants to escape the ordinary and conventional, says Levenson 44
    • while prose is a “reflex” done without thinking are are just “counters” that have no “vision” and no imagery at all, poetry “endeavors to arrest you…to prevent you from gliding through an abstract process” 44
    • while prose is dead poetry, poetry is the “advance guard of language”
      • Levenson: “this is a characteristic modern strategy: to narrow the domain of the literary, even as the claims of literature increase” (ie think of the poets only writing about individual life no big epics; but yet lit has a big responsibility of saving language)
      • Hulme wants it both ways: says no to epic, says no to metaphysics; yet wants to get to the deeper truth beyond ordinary appearances and ordinary languages (“other-world-through-the-glass-effect”)
• When Bergson looks to “intuition,” Hulme says he wants an “image” (as source of this deeper truth, deeper knowledge) 45 (and the image is Hulme’s deepest contribution says Levenson)
  • The image can only remain in the foreground when the subject itself is restrained, muted: can’t have interesting narrative or characters or ideas
  • Image will be “visual and concrete” rather than philosophical or grand 46: “modesty”
    • “piling-up and juxtaposition of distinct images in different lines” (Hulme, “Lecture”) which for Levenson is modernism’s modesty
    • Effective language = “fresh” “individuality” “exhilaration” “direct” “unusual”
      • For Levenson, it helps you avoid both excess and banality
• The image, then, kind of sums up Hulme’s ideas about modern poetry as a whole: no absolute or permanent, no triviality; total individuality and personality; sincerity, expression
  • Remember Hulme likes free verse and image b/c they allow your individuality to show, esp b/c the point of all these techniques is to convey your own specific emotional mood
    • when metaphysics recedes, the individual takes center stage, trying to find expression
• And the kicker: this is SO different from later Hulme and later modernism…yet it’s the first theory of the image
  • First, image is “anti-traditional, individualist, intuitive, expressive”
  • Then, it becomes “precision” “clarity”
  • Finally, “tradition, objectivity, reason, authority” 47
• And yet Hulme is here the arch early modernist, exactly, says Levenson
  • “Emotional subtlety” 47

Ford Madox Ford

• “an exemplar of the early development of modernism” and a representative figure; “a gradual and piecemeal adjustment to a rapidly changing situation” 61
  • “skeptical individualism” and relativity (private perspective) that goes away from mass culture, politics, democracy; away from science, from materialism; from philosophy, etc; where the individual will be where values retreat to
  • he’s another in the subjectivist tradish of Arnold, Mill; Conrad, James; Hulme…. and Ford like Hulme has “radicalized” this attitude b/c of going to individual without hesitation or excuse
• “argued that art should correspond to the incoherence, the tenuousness and the ‘odd vibration’ of life” 48
• Identified with Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev; Conrad, James; which he “transformed” and “extended”
  • 49 “between two generations:” Hardy, James Conrad; as wells as Pound, Lewis, Lawrence; he published them in the English Review
• was the leader of Impressionism
  • Ford said that Conrad, James, Maupassant were the best examples of it, though
  • Ford’s concept of it was the main understanding of it in pre-war England
• “His aesthetics took shape in reaction to his politics…set out to retrieve literary value from social degradation” 49
  • felt that Edwardian society was falling from its Victorian heights esp b/c it was “standardizing” and getting rid of all “outstanding” b/c of mass education, democracy, mass culture, where the stratified society has been replaced by mediocrity
  • also life is “bewildering” b/c of advances of science, leading people to avoid thinking
  • no one thinks, esp coherently: “any connected thought its almost an impossibility” qtd 51
• “social stability, moral consensus, and intellectual reflection” was in Ruskin, George Eliot, Tennyson, Mill, Arnold; instead “technical specialists” “and the daily press” (which only wants to entertain, not provoke thought)
  • wanted back the “moral alchemist” where you don’t want to please your audience! b/c that’s cheap and leads to “rottener and rottener books” qtd 52
  • no on has “political and moral conviction” anymore, even though we still retain sense of crisis and bias against established order
  • no one has the steady, coherent vision of a Victorian sage b/c life is too complex, too much about specialists, and you can’t see life whole anymore
  • and then Ford begins being nostalgic of feudalism
• Shows “the association of a declining liberalism with the rise of literary modernism” 53
• Why does the disappearance of the “great figure” matter? B/c no way to decide among viewpoints, leading to “weariness, a confusion” that leads to “indifference”
  • So difference between Victorian (Arnold) and Modernist (Ford) is that Arnold still thought that the hierarchy of values existed whereas Ford says nope
    • He thus defends James with his lack of talking about politics, war, class b/c no one can know anything about it, either
    • Levenson: this shows how intellectual class is now losing its confidence
• “Little Moderns”
  • There is opportunity for the artist in this situation of intellectual complexity and moral confusion: the artist can pay strict attention to art only, without worrying about other things 54
    • B/c the Victorian obsession w/morals was “antagonistic to the artistic process…stultification:” they wanted to be morally influential, not great artists
  • Now, artists must go private: poets don’t have to worry about morals or be serious about himself, so you can be more “sincere”
    • You can stick to personal experience: no generalizing
    • Tons more great, but smaller, poets, instead of two or three great poets who you suspect are posing 55
    • English novel was even worse, up to Meredith, but esp Thackeray Fielding Scott, who were sentimental, sensational, moralizing, amateur, poor writers
      • Only Richardson, James, Conrad ok
  • Ford says James REFUSES a profound morality, “philosophical anarchist” and “purely non-historic personality” “bestowed his sympathies upon no human being and upon no cause” “passionless and pitiless” and just an “observer” qtd 56
    • This is good, Ford thinks, the beginning of modern writing, b/c there’s no more moral purpose in art (cf he always felt he was a terrible little boy b/c of his Victorian parents and figures who were upon “unattainable heights” and tells his daughters “Do no desire to be great figures” b/c will make them “timid”)
      • Levenson: Ford does this “return to childhood innocence, irresponsibility” thing a lot
      • w/Ford himself trying to present himself as a ”naif, the deliberate cultivation of the unserious” 57
  • Levenson: Ford’s “the artist as child” as reflecting the new shift from big ideas to private expression, from seriousness to sincerity
    • And it reflects two sides of Edwardian consciousness: Conrad with his childishness of “simplicity” and “naturalness” that create social harmony, versus Ford with his escapist childishness
      • Cultural examples: Boys Scouts, Peter Pan; both as cultural reactions to the England post-Boer War that felt vulnerable, not ready, not strong
      • From Conrad to Ford: “from a style of moral earnestness to one of moral skepticism” 59
• Ford: 1913: “what we want most of all in the literature of to-day is religion, is intolerance, is persecution, and not the mawkish flap-doodle of culture, Fabianism, peace and good will. Real good religion, a violent thing full of hatreds and exclusions!” qtd 59 b/c he thinks he needs more courage
  • What does Levenson call this? “the deliberate flouting of bourgeois conventions and traditions” and having an art that is released from those constraints, tradish norms
  • I see something more than that, something a little scary.
• Ford: art avoid politics, morality; tell it like YOU see it
  • “to register truth as he sees it, and no more than Pilate can he, as a rule, see the truth as it is”
  • “not in facts and his value is in his temperament” qtd 60
• Ford on modernity: “its confusing currents, its incomprehensible riddles, its ever present but entirely invisible wire pulling, and its overwhelming babble” qtd 60 “terrific, untidy, indifferent empirical age”
  • Reaction to 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
• Ford: “I try to give you what I see to be a spirit of an age… This cannot be done with facts…. This book in short is full of inaccuracies as to fact but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute.” Ancient Lights qtd 60

Waste Land

• Eliot unimpressed w/Georgian Anthology
  • Review of it for the Dial saying English authors are lazy, won’t “recognize foreign competition”
  • Shows that Eliot was estranged from modernists before he was the chief: “from provocation to consolidation” 167
• Pound calls Waste Land “the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900” qtd 168
• Waste Land as “doctrinal act” “a critical gesture” giving “new conceptions of poetic form”
  • Shows us modernism “hard between cultural institutions and literary forms”
    • ie anthropology, psychology, the Golden Bough; historical works of art; foreign or international art and philosophy
• He gives an “as you read” account of it, where the “unassimilable poetic datum” yields to a “certain continuity” 170
  • structure of overlapping, discontinuous continuities
  • “in any given line we may find a stylistic feature which will bind it to a subsequent or previous line” 170 and yet another, a “new principle of continuity always replaces the old one
    • “frustrating the attempt to make strict demarcations…collision of interpretive concentions…a delicate, though steady, evolution…do not resolve into the attitudes and tones of an individual personality…the boundaries of the self being to waver” 171
    • “bridges and chasms” 172
    • characters appear, then disappear, fade to background
• The corpse thing: the first part is the viewpoint of the dead, but one about to rise again
  • Golden Bough: hanged gods, resurrection, etc
  • “buried are not yet dead” or maybe ghosts or maybe gods etc: lots of available figures here
  • Shows that boundaries of living and dead aren’t firm
  • it’s a gothic strain in the poem: someone trying to live again; or maybe it’s Dantesque Neutrals who have been rebuffed by death and sent back
• Random folks on the poem
  • Conrad Aiken: “not a unit but a chance correlation or conglomerate of mutually discolorative fragments”
  • F R Leavis: a record of Tiresius’ consciousness
    • Which viewpoint Levenson destroys
    • No, says Levenson, that’s cheap and doesn’t explain anything. The heterogeneities are still left unexplained.
    • Instead, let’s get somewhere between “Submerged unity” and “chaos of fragments”
• Eliot’s “points of view” theory
  • Which he derived by adjusting the parts he liked from F H Bradley along the lines of the anti-idealist, empiricist critic of Moore and Russell
  • F H Bradley, Appearance and Reality
    • recognizably modernist b/c it questions the self, science, experience, and b/c it is part of the widespread “effort to eradicate the hypostatization of subject and object”
      • see, William James also did this last thing, by saying immediate experience doesn’t have a subject object duality
      • and critiques categories of rational thought as “makeshift, a device” 177
    • Wants to believe in an Absolute, that is, that “Reality is one” both at beginning of experience and as it transcends the contradictory world or rational human categories
      • Attacked by Russell and Moore b/c you can’t prove it
  • Eliot is brokering a compromise between the idealist (Bradley) and empiricist (Russell, Moore) position
    • Takes Bradley’s “finite centres” (“unity of consciousness” “a universe in itself” but of course finite, temporary) (like Leibniz’ monads: in Levenson’s words, “isolated and impervious, a single momentary unity of consciousness” and 182 “absolutely individuated entities, utterly distinct from one another” 182)
      • And says it comes before a self or soul is consolidated
      • they are “the stuff of which selves are made” 181
      • Levenson: Similar to Pound’s image (an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time)
      • Finite: limited, provisional; making limited glimpses, not the self, the fundamental character of experience
    • And says the “experience is simply a plurality of perceptual moments, out of which the more complex realms of subject and object, reality and unreality can later by constructed” 181
    • Problem: you are risking solipsism b/c if each one is separated, what’s your basis for judgment? Well, instead of being imagist (believe that the one image is good enough) or impressionist (the self is the source of meaning), reality comes out of comparison, juxtaposition of finite centers
      • self “passes from one point of view to another” and “is real or unreal only in relation” to another center, another moment qtd 184; in Levenson’s words “only in multiple perspectives does the world become real”
      • reality is a construct built out of many perspectives, not out of the individual perspective seen as “autonomous and self-sufficient” as Hulme and Husserl believed)
      • Self emerges from these points of view, but what matters is less the person than the “developing system of points of view which extends beyond the ego and within which alone it is possible to speak of reality, truth, meaning, value self. The human subject, then, was neither primary nor ultimate.” 185
      • he avoids solipsism, idealism, and the transcendent mistake
      • consciousness really “a tradition of consciousnesses” where authority rules but one of lots of individuals: “totality of individuals” becomes authority (not rejecting forebears, as Stirnerians did, Futurists did)
      • You see where tradition comes in, right? And the structure of the Waste Land?
    • “No meaning without relations…without order, without system” 188
    • And critiques Leibnitz’ belief that the monads are “windowless;” instead, his monads are
      • “melts into” “not wholly distinct” qtd 188 188, “not impenetrable” 189
• Why it Matters
  • Modernism can be read as the movement of the sides: “apostles of freedom” against the “guardians of order”
    • “the instability of the movement…must be linked to the incompatibility of these rival imperatives” 186
  • Eliot thus makes an attempt “to restore equilibrium” in the movement
    • Both Eliot and Pound were trying to go against the total rejection of order and authority, making “tradition a secularized authority” to reject solipsism
• “characters are little more than aspects of selves…fragments of consciousness…which overlap, interlock…to form emergent wholes.”
  • they are interpenetrating, rather than juxtaposed 190
    • that is very cool: not juxtapose, but interpenetrate
    • combine two characters, which makes something that is not just a sum of both of them but
      “includes them both”
• Also, just because each “finite center” can dissolve and melt into another, doesn’t mean that we have only “a heap of broken fragments” but instead “constructed into new wholes” through what Eliot calls “the painful task of unifying…jarring and incompatible [worlds], and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them” qtd 191
  • This is where Woolf comes in: Eliot doesn’t say how this occurs
  • How? Tiresius “a subsequent phenomenon emerging out of other characters, other aspects” 191
    • they kind of caused him
• For Eliot, it is the condition of consciousness that you are “compelled” “to pass from one point of view to another” 1td 191
  • So Tiresius can unite, but his consciousness is not responsible for all of the voices in the poem; it is not all FROM him but he is a function that can unite
    • the “struggled-for emergence of a more encompassing point of view” which in Eliot’s words is “a felt whole in which there are moments of knowledge” which Levenson says are “instants of lucidity”
    • Me: I wonder why you want to make Tiresius so important after all of your argumentation that points to the contrary
• “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” is where “the poem becomes conscious of itself…to recognize fragments as fragments…is already to have transcended them….does not achieve a resolved coherence, but neither does it remain in a chaos of fragmentation. Rather it displays a series of more or less stable patterns, regions of coherence, temporary principles of order…” 192
  • “provisional” “Intermittent” “not sustained”
• Eliot and Anthropology
  • Anthropology was his inspiration for how to create a usable past
  • We need a new way to find wholes because as Eliot says in metaphysical poets essay “the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary”
  • Review of Lewis where he calls the latter “a cave-man” in his primitive energies isn’t a primitivism but instead a type of history
    • “not to emulate the primitive but to assimilate it” 195
  • Eliot on Golden Bough: “a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation” qtd 195, which will help relieve the isolation of modern man
• Structure
  • Anthropology is a way to give him structure
  • Authority for Eliot comes in the shape of structure, a framework, very different from the imagism of one moment
  • “what he regrets most is the loss of larger coherences” and he thus seeks a way to organize all of this new information (like the metaphysical poets, they need “a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience” in metaphysical poets essay)
    • This is what the mythic method does for him, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” with its “continuous parallel” of antiquity and modernity
    • He wants modernism to find this system. And this is what Waste Land is.
• For Eliot, both the self and society are fragmented and incoherent, and Levenson points out that Eliot takes this as an opportunity: “The dissolution of the boundaries of the self creates possibilities for new and powerful effects.” 197
  • How? Well, the continuous parallel means that the fragment of consciousness is the fragment of culture, cf all of the direct quotations from literary works (Spenser, Dante, Shakespeare)
    • And the cumulation of these quotes is what CREATES human consciousness: putting these together, then you begin to understand the “I” which is in Levenson’s words “virtually epiphenomenal, a mere effect of literary history” via enumeration of literary historical context 198
  • Of course, he says in Metaphys Poets that modernists need to be “amalgamating disparate experience” and “forming new wholes” 199
    • And of course Waste Land as a poem creates a new whole, a new literary history for people to use, a useable past (after all Eliot had said that you have to create your own history, tradition “cannot be inherited, and here is him doing that)
      • So that Waste Land is also a piece of literary criticism and cultural renewal
    • that tradition won’t be unified, just like the personality can’t be unified 204
• Myth v narrative: Narrative requires focus and progress, but Eliot wants parallels
• Internationalism and open-minded inclusion of non-Western culture happens in the poem (Sanskrit) unfortunately reverse in his Eurocentric criticism
  • While he is “comparitist…refuses to bestow privilege on any culture or epoch” 206
    • The Other Darker Side: anthropology as the rationalism that even understands the irrational
  • Historically and geographically, you see “widening perspectives” and “overlapping perspectives” 203
• Note: Hulme is not as strictly classical as some people want to pretend; later he’d call classicism “half-measure” (ie to see European culture not at the center of things)
  • However, Eliot interpreted Hulme as being classicist, and everyone has trusted Eliot: so Eliot “tamed” Hulme just as he “tampered” with his own discovery in Waste Land, making it more conservative
    • After the success of the Waste Land and his landing the editorship of the Criterion, he loses his earlier stance of uncertainty and opposition real fast
  • Eliot’s version of modernism was what won it canonicity 209 “widespread cultural recognition” and legitimized avant garde
• Eliot in Lit History
  • “Eliot provided the rudiments of a continuous literary history” in his criticism and his poetry 194
    • Though in Waste Land it challenges Eurocentrism, his later works reverse this tendency
  • “After its Impressionist, Imagist, and Vorticist avatars, modernism returns to classicism…the suspicion of progress, the hostility towards individualism and modern democracy, the insistence on hierarchy and order…reason over emotion…the need for an outer authority.” 210
    • Authority and reason mediate immediate experience
  • Early modernism (Hulme Ford) which says the “half-shy” poetry and its “vague mood” will reflect and “exemplify” the vagueness of experience and the outside world; whereas late modernism (Eliot’s hegemony) where art will correct society “tonic”
    • Early: individualist, inner experience, expression, freedom, spontaneity, emotion
    • Late: anti-individualist, outer control, discipline, order, restraint, control, reason
    • Early modernism had been “thrilled” by the “clash of sensibilities” and the “adversary relation between epochs, styles, an artists” whereas Eliot’s later modernism wants equilibrium among all tradition: “Classicism thus absorbs its rivals” 212
    • It is Eliot’s modernism where “Art – even as it may employ superstition, taboo, myth, dream, irrationality – works these into pattern and supplies what the modern world lacks: coherence, form, control, order” 211
    • It is Eliot who leads “modernism back towards a rapprochement with England, Europe, and their traditions” 211

• Why it Matters
  • Modernism can be read as the movement of the sides: “apostles of freedom” against the “guardians of order”
    • “the instability of the movement…must be linked to the incompatibility of these rival imperatives” 186
  • Eliot thus makes an attempt “to restore equilibrium” in the movement
    • Both Eliot and Pound were trying to go against the total rejection of order and authority, making “tradition a secularized authority” to reject solipsism

Me

• Waste Land and Leisure
  • He’s about on the edge of a breakdown when the writing for the Waste Land begins
  • a month from mid-October to mid-November 1921, in Margate, one of a pair of seaside resorts in Kent (Ramsgate is the other) popular from mid-Victorian era
  • then home
  • then Lausanne in Switzerland side of Lake Geneva, facing the French side, Evian-les-Bains: there he says he can work without “waste” (what a key word here) and says that he needed the “leisure”
    • end of November until end of year
    • this is where he does bulk of the work on it (had been on the table since summer)