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Thirties Marxist fiction and late modernism

2009-11-23T22:56:56Z

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	'''Late thirties Marxist fiction and late modernism'''		'''Late thirties Marxist fiction and late modernism'''

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-		+	In the following essay I examine a recent turn in the study of Marxist fiction of the late thirties and early forties towards a conception of these texts as examples of second generation modernism. Although this classification of writers such as Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Edward Upward and Patrick Hamilton is more accurate than the previous tendency to see them as peddlers of stultifyingly orthodox socialist realism, it is nevertheless somewhat inadequate. Rather than representing a moment of late modernism, the formal experimentation of late thirties Marxist fiction should rather be seen as a response to the demands of engaged realism as put forward in the work of Georg Lukács. Taking the example of Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel Hangover Square and Edward Upward’s Journey to the Border (1938), I thus posit a new reading of this body of work which reintegrates the commitment to Communism of these writers to a reading attentive to their vibrant formal experimentation. In fact, it is precisely the commitment to a search for engaged form which accounts most convincingly for the fascinatingly heterodox forms of this body of work.
-	In the following ~~paper~~ I examine a recent turn in the study of Marxist fiction of the late thirties and early forties towards a conception of these texts as examples of second generation modernism. Although this classification of writers such as Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Edward Upward and Patrick Hamilton is more accurate than the previous tendency to see them as peddlers of stultifyingly orthodox socialist realism, it is nevertheless somewhat inadequate. Rather than representing a moment of late modernism, the formal experimentation of late thirties Marxist fiction should rather be seen as a response to the demands of engaged realism as put forward in the work of Georg Lukács. Taking the example of Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel Hangover Square and Edward Upward’s Journey to the Border (1938), I thus posit a new reading of this body of work which reintegrates the commitment to Communism of these writers to a reading attentive to their vibrant formal experimentation. In fact, it is precisely the commitment to a search for engaged form which accounts most convincingly for the fascinatingly heterodox forms of this body of work.	+

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	For many years, English leftist novels of the late thirties – particularly those associated with the Popular Front – were seen primarily as dreary socialist-realist narratives. This view was inaugurated by George Orwell in ‘Inside the Whale’ where he argued that the political orthodoxy of the thirties precluded the production of any good novels: "it is probably not a coincidence that the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."<ref>"Inside the Whale" in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940; repr. London: Penguin, 1962), 9-50 (39).</ref> This is a view which sadly endured for some time. For instance, Valentine Cunningham, in his 1988 work, British Writer of the Thirties, bluntly states that "British Marxists had put their shirts on Comrade Radek’s doctrines of Socialist Realism issued at the Moscow Writer’s Congress of 1934". Cunningham argues that, for Marxists of this period, "the plainer, the more revelatory the linguistic medium and the more like the most naturalistic of nineteenth-century fiction the novel, the better."<ref>British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5.</ref> This view has now however been robustly challenged. Janet Montfiore’s excellent study, Men and Women Writer of the 1930s trenchantly debunks the Orwellian orthodoxy: "anyone who actually knows the literature of the late thirties, however, must wonder just how much of it Orwell bothered to read."<ref>Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (London: Routledge, 1996), 19.</ref> But the question remains, how are we to classify this body of work, in which political message and literary form operate in a series of complex dialectics which belie any attempt to generically classify these novels as realism, allegory or fantasy, as entertainments or political tracts? One answer was given recently in a recent article by Gerald Barrett, in which he argues for a re-appreciation of Hamilton as a modernist writer, despite Hamilton’s avowed rejection of modernism:		For many years, English leftist novels of the late thirties – particularly those associated with the Popular Front – were seen primarily as dreary socialist-realist narratives. This view was inaugurated by George Orwell in ‘Inside the Whale’ where he argued that the political orthodoxy of the thirties precluded the production of any good novels: "it is probably not a coincidence that the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."<ref>"Inside the Whale" in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940; repr. London: Penguin, 1962), 9-50 (39).</ref> This is a view which sadly endured for some time. For instance, Valentine Cunningham, in his 1988 work, British Writer of the Thirties, bluntly states that "British Marxists had put their shirts on Comrade Radek’s doctrines of Socialist Realism issued at the Moscow Writer’s Congress of 1934". Cunningham argues that, for Marxists of this period, "the plainer, the more revelatory the linguistic medium and the more like the most naturalistic of nineteenth-century fiction the novel, the better."<ref>British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5.</ref> This view has now however been robustly challenged. Janet Montfiore’s excellent study, Men and Women Writer of the 1930s trenchantly debunks the Orwellian orthodoxy: "anyone who actually knows the literature of the late thirties, however, must wonder just how much of it Orwell bothered to read."<ref>Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (London: Routledge, 1996), 19.</ref> But the question remains, how are we to classify this body of work, in which political message and literary form operate in a series of complex dialectics which belie any attempt to generically classify these novels as realism, allegory or fantasy, as entertainments or political tracts? One answer was given recently in a recent article by Gerald Barrett, in which he argues for a re-appreciation of Hamilton as a modernist writer, despite Hamilton’s avowed rejection of modernism:

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	Hamilton’s antagonism to what he regarded as the excesses of certain modernist writers need not, however,   disqualify  him from being one of them. Indeed, there is a case to be made for including Hamilton in a second wave of modernist writers that includes James Hanley, Edward Upward, Rex Warner and Henry Green, writers who absorbed the lessons of Joyce and Woolf but did not necessarily feel compelled to write that way themselves.<ref>Gerald Barrett, “Hamilton and the Nets of Language,” Critical Engagements I.1 (2007), 212-234 (213).</ref>		Hamilton’s antagonism to what he regarded as the excesses of certain modernist writers need not, however,   disqualify  him from being one of them. Indeed, there is a case to be made for including Hamilton in a second wave of modernist writers that includes James Hanley, Edward Upward, Rex Warner and Henry Green, writers who absorbed the lessons of Joyce and Woolf but did not necessarily feel compelled to write that way themselves.<ref>Gerald Barrett, “Hamilton and the Nets of Language,” Critical Engagements I.1 (2007), 212-234 (213).</ref>

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	Barrett examines how Hamilton’s deployment of the abuse of language reveals his ‘admittedly subdued affinities with modernism’<ref>Ibid., 213.</ref> and provides nuanced and convincing reading of the modernist echoes in Hamilton’s work, and I do not seek to deny these echoes. However, I do want to suggest that there is another, potentially more suggestive way to see how Hamilton’s fascinating formal experiment in this novel arises, which is Hamilton’s engagement with precisely those theories of high realism which have been associated with the worst excesses of socialist realism: those of Georg Lukács.		Barrett examines how Hamilton’s deployment of the abuse of language reveals his ‘admittedly subdued affinities with modernism’<ref>Ibid., 213.</ref> and provides nuanced and convincing reading of the modernist echoes in Hamilton’s work, and I do not seek to deny these echoes. However, I do want to suggest that there is another, potentially more suggestive way to see how Hamilton’s fascinating formal experiment in this novel arises, which is Hamilton’s engagement with precisely those theories of high realism which have been associated with the worst excesses of socialist realism: those of Georg Lukács.
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	What is set up in Lukács’s work in the late thirties – particularly in the 1938 essay ‘Realism in the Balance’ and in The Historical Novel (1937) – is a sense of the herculean task of the committed realist novelist. The task facing Popular Front novelists was, for Lukács, nothing less than world-changing:<br>		What is set up in Lukács’s work in the late thirties – particularly in the 1938 essay ‘Realism in the Balance’ and in The Historical Novel (1937) – is a sense of the herculean task of the committed realist novelist. The task facing Popular Front novelists was, for Lukács, nothing less than world-changing:<br>

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	Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history. This will prepare it for the new type of revolutionary democracy that is represented by the Popular Front.<ref>“Realism in the Balance” trans. Rodney Livingstone in Aesthetics and Politics (1938; repr. London: Verso, 1977), 28-60 (56-7).</ref><br>		Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history. This will prepare it for the new type of revolutionary democracy that is represented by the Popular Front.<ref>“Realism in the Balance” trans. Rodney Livingstone in Aesthetics and Politics (1938; repr. London: Verso, 1977), 28-60 (56-7).</ref><br>
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	A similar anxiety is at work in Edward Upward’s 1938 novel, Journey to the Border. The protagonist of Upward’s novel is known by his occupation, always referred to as ‘the tutor’. This designation is designed to highlight the pathetic inadequacy of such roles in a new, unstable world, much as the delusional alcoholic Geoffroy Firmin is referred to as ‘the consul’ throughout Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. But what is most important about this ironic moniker is that it is a comment on the key concept of typicality. Lukács asserted that the true realist examines the deep dialectics of typicality:<br>		A similar anxiety is at work in Edward Upward’s 1938 novel, Journey to the Border. The protagonist of Upward’s novel is known by his occupation, always referred to as ‘the tutor’. This designation is designed to highlight the pathetic inadequacy of such roles in a new, unstable world, much as the delusional alcoholic Geoffroy Firmin is referred to as ‘the consul’ throughout Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. But what is most important about this ironic moniker is that it is a comment on the key concept of typicality. Lukács asserted that the true realist examines the deep dialectics of typicality:<br>

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	Since such realism must be concerned with the creation of types […] the realist must seek out the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have to act; he must focus on those elements which endure over long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society and indeed of mankind as a whole.<ref>"Realism in the Balance," 47.</ref>		Since such realism must be concerned with the creation of types […] the realist must seek out the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have to act; he must focus on those elements which endure over long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society and indeed of mankind as a whole.<ref>"Realism in the Balance," 47.</ref>

-	<br>In Upward’s novel, the precariousness of the tutor’s position is precisely the grounds for the incessant use of his occupation as his moniker. Upward therefore questions the reflection of typicality in the representational strategies of the novelist, whilst clearly acknowledging the importance of the concept of typicality itself. What we see in Upward as in Hamilton is an anxious sense of the overweening importance of the task of the committed realist writer set up by the grand claims of Lukácsian realism. How this moment in the development of the novel can be reintegrated into a wider narrative of twentieth century literary history is a difficult question. But one structurally tempting impulse which must be resisted is to begin to see this Marxist crisis of representation at play in the run up to the Second World War as a recapitulation of the very different, earlier crisis of high modernism. For to do so would not only do violence to the historical specificity of this crucial juncture in literary history whilst also needlessly rearticulating the hegemony of the First World War in the study of twentieth century literature, but would also overlook the particular influence of the thought of Georg Lukács, the most important strain in Marxist literary theory of the period. Moreover, the condemnation by writers such as Hamilton of high modernism (he infamously dubbed it ‘meaningless masturbation’), should be read as a convinced rejection of just one way of making new.<ref>Patrick Hamilton, Impromptu in Moribundia (1939; repr. Nottingham: Nottingham Trent, 1999),164.</ref> Marxist fiction of the late thirties thus provides a particularly salient example of how the subordinationand co-option of other forms of experimental fiction to the rubric of high modernism is no longer a tenable way to read twentieth century literature.	+	<br>In Upward’s novel, the precariousness of the tutor’s position is precisely the grounds for the incessant use of his occupation as his moniker. Upward therefore questions the reflection of typicality in the representational strategies of the novelist, whilst clearly acknowledging the importance of the concept of typicality itself. What we see in Upward as in Hamilton is an anxious sense of the overweening importance of the task of the committed realist writer set up by the grand claims of Lukácsian realism. How this moment in the development of the novel can be reintegrated into a wider narrative of twentieth century literary history is a difficult question. But one structurally tempting impulse which must be resisted is to begin to see this Marxist crisis of representation at play in the run up to the Second World War as a recapitulation of the very different, earlier crisis of high modernism. For to do so would not only do violence to the historical specificity of this crucial juncture in literary history whilst also needlessly rearticulating the hegemony of the First World War in the study of twentieth century literature, but would also overlook the particular influence of the thought of Georg Lukács, the most important strain in Marxist literary theory of the period. Moreover, the condemnation by writers such as Hamilton of high modernism (he infamously dubbed it ‘meaningless masturbation’), should be read as a convinced rejection of just one way of making new.<ref>Patrick Hamilton, Impromptu in Moribundia (1939; repr. Nottingham: Nottingham Trent, 1999),164.</ref> Marxist fiction of the late thirties thus provides a particularly salient example of how the subordinationand co-option of other forms of experimental fiction to the rubric of high modernism is no longer a tenable way to read twentieth century literature. Rather, as Susan Stanford Friedman suggested in a recent MSA presentation, we might think of this moment in literary history as one particular modernism, reacting to its own particular modernity.

Oswald Spengler

2009-11-21T19:08:47Z

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By: Annie Pfeifer

== Spengler’s Context and Milieu ==

Oswald Spengler, the German historian and author of the seminal, two-volume work, ''Decline of the West'' or ''Der Untergang des Abendlandes'', was born in 1880 to a conservative, petit bourgeois German family. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1904, after having initially failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus because of insufficient references.<ref>H. Stuart Hughes, "Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate," New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952.</ref> As his editor Arthur Helps suggests, Spengler’s pessimism was inflected by his own frustrated professional ambitions and meager economic means.<ref>Arthur Helps, "Oswald Spengler," The Decline of the West, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, p. viii.</ref> By 1911, Spengler foresaw war and hoped for an imperial future for Germany, which he feared might deteriorate like Rome after the Punic Wars.<ref>Arthur Helps, "Oswald Spengler," The Decline of the West, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, p. ix.</ref> Although he voted for Hitler in 1932, by the time of his death in 1936, his books were banned by the Nazis after he criticized their policies of anti-Semitism and publicly opposed their biological ideology.

 The publication of ''Decline of the West'' in 1918 met with resounding success in Germany; it seemed to assuage the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles by rationalizing the German downfall as part of a larger world-historical process. The book was widely successful outside of Germany as well, and by 1919, it had been translated into several languages. In part, his book was so popular because it tapped into the pervasive feeling of decline that dominated the modern psyche, particularly after WWI.<ref>For instance, in his poem, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Ezra Pound wrote that a “botched” Western civilization was an “old bitch gone in the teeth.” Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, New York: New Directions, 1957.</ref> Spengler’s defense of authoritarianism and hostility toward the “leveling” in mass society appealed to conservative revolutionaries in the Weimar Republic.<ref>Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, "The Weimar Republic Sourcebook," Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 355.</ref> Although he is typically regarded as a pessimistic, conservative, and even anti-modern thinker, I will propose that his historical framework takes on a peculiarly modernist tenor in its emphasis on historical relativism and his dramatic, self-proclaimed break with and rejection of the typical linear historical narrative. In doing so, he employs the very terms that modernists used to position themselves in relation to their past. For a historian like Spengler, who studied the past, this was a particularly radical gesture, as it signaled the rejection of an entire disciplinary ethos. As I will conclude, it also bears the seeds for the contradictions in Spengler’s project; his role as a historian complicates his efforts to portray cultures as organisms in flux, just as his desire to represent a holistic perspective of world history undermines both his self-described position of cultural relativism as well as his refusal of Western claims to universality.

== Historical Framework ==

More than simply a pessimistic eulogy to the West, ''Decline of the West'' begins by establishing a historical framework in opposition to the “current West European scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the presumed centre of all world-happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history” (13).<ref>Oswald Spengler, "The Decline of the West," New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.</ref> In its place, Spengler introduces the idea of world-history, which widens the scope of historical inquiry beyond the “Western European scheme” that is predicated on an arbitrary lineage from ancient Greece to the European Enlightenment. This new system “admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico—separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power” (14). He humbly calls this non-centered form of history the “Copernican discovery in the historical sphere,” through its radical departure from existing historical schemas.

 Spengler articulates the “problem of Civilization” as the primary focus of his inquiry because it crystallizes the decline, death, and posthumous extension of world cultures. He differentiates between culture and civilization, suggesting, 
<blockquote>“Civilization is the ultimate destiny of the Culture… Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion… petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood” (24). </blockquote>
The distinction between civilization and culture is analogous to the difference between the Greek soul and the Roman intellect (25). Civilization represents “petrified” or reified culture, divorced from the “soul” and process of becoming, and ultimately signifying the swansong rather than the apex of a culture’s development. For Spengler, the German poet Goethe best epitomizes the dynamic “philosophy of Becoming” through his emphasis on development and growth in his works Wilhelm Meister and Poetry and Truth, in contrast to the static “philosophy of Being” represented by Aristotle and Kant (38). Goethe’s concept of “living nature” emphasizes this “thing-becoming” and opposes the “world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form,” which is propagated and expressed by civilization (20).<ref>Spengler writes, “That which Goethe called Living Nature is exactly that which we are calling here world-history, world-as-history. Goethe, who as artist portrayed always the life and development of his figures, the things becoming and not the thing-become… For him the world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form” (20).</ref>

 ''Decline of the West'' is also based partly on Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly ''Thus Spake Zarathustra'', where, according to Spengler, he “brilliantly and theatrically formulates… the creative will-to-life” (34). For Spengler, Goethe and Nietzsche form the two great pillars of German intellectual life, representing the climax and decline of Western culture respectively.<ref>Oswald Spengler, “Nietzsche And His Century,” Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze, Munich: 1937.</ref> Unlike Goethe who was able to “understand and solve the great [formal] problems of his time as a recognized member of his society,” Nietzsche’s nihilism “shatters the ideals” of his own culture and “protests passionately against everything contemporary, if he was to rescue anything his forebears had bequeathed to him as a cultural heritage.”<ref>Oswald Spengler, “Nietzsche And His Century,” Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze, Munich: 1937.</ref> Nietzsche’s concept of the “transvaluation of all values,” or the affirmation of new values of life and pleasure over Christian suffering and chastity, epitomizes a dynamic “philosophy of Becoming,” much like Goethe’s idea of “living nature.”<ref>Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Gay Science," trans. by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books: 1974.</ref> Nietzsche also bequeaths to Spengler the tools to issue his diagnosis of decline, such as the idea that a civilization in its death throes “begets no more, but only reinterprets… it assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities” (181).<ref>In his address on the occasion of Nietzsche’s eightieth birthday in 1924, Spengler wrote: “His ultimate understanding of real history was that the Will to Power is stronger than all doctrines and principles, and that it has always made and forever will make history... to him the most important thing was the image of active, creative, destructive Will in history.” Oswald Spengler, “Nietzsche And His Century,” Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze, Munich: 1937.</ref> Nietzsche’s concept of the “Will to Power,” or the primary driving force of man, manifests itself in the “creative, destructive Will in history” that Spengler seeks to chronicle. Thus, in a way, Nietzsche also provides Spengler with a life-affirming emphasis on dynamism and individualism that uneasily coexists with his fatalistic pessimism.<ref>Ultimately, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Übermensch and eternal recurrence combine to inform Spengler's emphasis on individual creative power and its reflection of the absolute patterns of human society, which culminates in a vehement elitism. Kevin McNeilly, “Cultural Morphologies: Yeats, Spengler and Adorno,” Irish University Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, p. 248.</ref>

== Spengler’s Modernist Inheritance ==

Although he saw modernist art, such as atonal music and abstract painting, as manifestations of cultural decay, Spengler himself was profoundly influenced by the principles of modernism. Like [[John Maynard Keynes]], [[T.S. Eliot]], and other modernists, he attacked the “immense optical illusion” that pervaded an existing world order and people’s attendant “unshakeable belief in the efficacy of… such orders” (176).<ref>Spengler’s quotation is reminiscent of the opening lines of Keynes’ "Economic Consequences of the Peace": “Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family.” John Maynard Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920, p. 1.</ref> His insistence on writing non-linear history while decentering the dominant, Eurocentric scheme of history echoes the alternative narrative approaches of [[Marcel Proust]], [[Virginia Woolf]], and [[James Joyce]] Like other modernist writers who rejected the conventional narrative techniques and experimented with narrative chronology, Spengler breaks with his predecessors to reject the linear narrative of history. Spengler and modernist writers altered existing representations of through historical and literary means respectively—conceptions that seemed to be corroborated by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which espoused that the measurement of time and space is dependent on the position and velocity of the observer. Spengler’s scathing critique of historiography, specifically the subdivision of history into “ancient, medieval, and modern,” creates a radical break with the practice of history. He consciously breaks with the “professional historian,” who sees history “as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding onto itself one epoch after another” (18). The false, parasitical linearity of the professional historian’s approach mirrors civilization’s stifling influence on culture and “things-becoming.”

 In his emphasis on “becoming” instead of “being,” Spengler’s philosophy of history has a distinctly modernist tenor; he is keenly aware of the radical instability and flux of life that cannot be captured through static forms. He recalls Henri Bergson's concept of duration, which can only be grasped through simple intuition of the imagination rather than objective science or logical analysis.<ref>Henri Bergson, “The Creative Mind: An introduction to Metaphysics,” New York: First Carol Publishing Group, 1992, p. 168.</ref> Spengler writes: “I see, in place of the empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of fact, the drama of mighty Cultures” (17). For Bergson, no two moments can be the same; for Spengler, no two cultures or cultural moments can be the same. He writes, “Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return” (17). Underscoring the ephemeral, inimitable nature of each culture, Spengler’s view of history and temporality is colored by a profound sense of unrecoverable loss, much like Eliot's “[[The Waste Land]].”<ref>Spengler recalls the sense of decay and disillusion captured in modernist literature: “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,” T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” 1922, http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html</ref>

 Perhaps at his most modern, Spengler privileges cultural relativity and renounces the Eurocentric vantage point of other historians in a way that strongly resonates with his contemporary reader. Spengler criticizes Western philosophers, such as Nietzsche, for failing to consider vantage points outside of a narrow linear frame of Western history, suggesting: “It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it—insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only” (18). Ironically, Spengler seems to have inherited this idea from Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism, which holds that there is no absolute, “God's eye” standpoint from which one can survey everything that is.<ref>Robert Wicks, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/</ref> In a way, Spengler outdoes Nietzsche in his own relativism. Paradoxically, the thinker who has often been co-opted by the right berates Nietzsche for his lack of historical and cultural relativity.

 Conservative appropriations of Spengler’s ideas have often prompted historians to overlook Spengler’s opposition to imperialism and biological definitions of race. Implicit in Spengler’s analysis of civilization is a critique of imperialism, “which is civilization unadulterated” because it petrifies and disseminates a dying or dead culture to all parts of the globe (28). An empire disregards the historically contingent and individual status of world-history by blindly imposing its own forms onto other cultures. Empires, such as the Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese, become phantom civilizations or “dead bodies” that live on for hundreds of years after their deaths through their imperial domains (28).<ref>Curiously, Spengler personally advocated the development of a German empire (Helps ix).</ref>

 Spengler dismisses 19th century ideas of race as a biological phenomenon as well as pseudo-anthropological claims about the phrenology of cultures. Instead, he suggests that the idea of race derives largely from a geographic location and that “race-expression is completely transformed” in the migration and movement of peoples (254).
<blockquote>“…'race' in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people were ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science—never for folk-consciousness—and that no people was ever stirred to enthusiasm by this ideal of blood purity… It is the incoordination of this (wholly metaphysical) beat which produces race hatred” (265). </blockquote>
His ideas about race fundamentally opposed National Socialism, which predicated its policies on a biological distinction between the "Aryan" and Jewish race. Due to his opposition to the racist biology of Nazism, Spengler’s books were eventually banned during the Third Reich. Spengler’s rebuttal of 19th century and Nazi race theories positions him as a modern, if not modernist thinker, who sought to break with the outdated methods of his predecessors and conservative contemporaries by renouncing Western claims to universality and supremacy.

== “Organic” View of History ==

In his self-described “organic” theory of history, Spengler labels “cultures as organisms,” a concept which he derives from Goethe’s idea of “living nature” (71). Living nature encapsulates the “the idea of becoming” from a standpoint of “the phenomenal world in motion,” which is best studied through “erfühlen” or “living into” rather than by dissection (72). He writes, “I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms” (18). Drawing heavily on natural, biological terms, such as “properties of species,” (16) he compares humans to butterflies and orchids, describing the way “cultures spring with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle” (17). By appealing to biological and organic forms, Spengler seeks to naturalize his theory of history in a way that recalls Herbert Spencer’s attempts to extend evolutionary biology into sociology and ethics.

 His method of studying history draws heavily on analogy, through which “the form and duration… can be calculated from available precedents” (30). Northrop Frye suggests that Spengler’s analogical method regarding cultures rests “on a further analogy between a culture and an organism.”<ref>Northrop Frye, “‘The Decline of the West’ by Oswald Spengler,” Daedalus, Vol. 103, No. 1, Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited (Winter, 1974), p. 6.</ref> Curiously, however, one of Spengler’s major critiques of existing historical scholarship is that “History was seen as Nature (in the objective sense of the physicist) and treated accordingly, it is to this that we must ascribe the baneful mistake of applying the principles of causality, of law, of system” (39). Yet, this “baneful mistake” seems to be precisely what Spengler is in danger of committing by uncritically using the organism as an analogy for society, thereby treating history like nature. Paradoxically, as I will later suggest, under Spengler’s microscope, history becomes a study of “things-become,” where even the “things-becoming” are transformed into lifeless forms (70). The discipline of history, like other forms of inquiry, risks killing “things-becoming” in order to classify and analyze them.

 Spengler’s organic analogy breaks down when he tries to assert that each culture is “self-contained… like a peculiar blossom or fruit,” a claim which has little basis in reality (17). After all, Spengler himself describes the ways that various cultures impact others through empire and trade, propagating their influence long after their declines. This complex network of influences seems to complicate his naturalistic analogy; a butterfly or orchid does not continue beyond its physical existence in the same way that Plato or Greek philosophy does. At times, Spengler undermines his own argument by forcing historical developments into his “organic” paradigm.<ref>The modernist German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was deeply influenced by Spengler, similarly emphasized an “organic” mode of building that sought to place his architectural theory into a naturalistic framework. In his educational curriculum, Mies emphasized “dependence on the epoch” and “the obligation to realize the potentialities of organic architecture.” Werner Blaser, "Mies van der Rohe," Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag für Architektur, 1997, p. 75.</ref>

== Western Civilization and its Discontents ==

Ultimately, according to Spengler, Western or “Faustian” culture is characterized by its restless thrust toward the infinite and unattainable, or the “conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole” (165). The Faustian individual “strives to direct the world according to his will” (410). In architecture, the “infinity-seeking” Faustian tendency is most apparent in the endless vertical thrusts of Gothic cathedrals and the “depth-experience” of paintings, in which parallel lines meet in infinity (125). From its inception around 1000 with the Cluniac reforms, the Faustian civilization marked a radical break with its predecessors, the Apollonian (Classical) culture and the Magian (Judeo-Arabic) culture (98). According to Spengler, the differences between Faustian and Apollonian art are instructive: “The Apollonian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming” (139).

 Yet, according to Spengler, after nearly 900 years of dominance, the Faustian era has reached its death throes. He writes, “the future of the West is not limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time… but a single phenomenon of history” (30). Like other modernists, he attacked the positivistic, Enlightenment myth of unending progress based on universal criteria. Harbingers of this cultural decay are, among other things, atonal music, avant-garde art produced for oversensitive connoisseurs, manipulation of the public opinion by mass media, and imperialism. Much like Goethe’s ''Faust'' becomes shackled by his insatiable quest for knowledge, “Faustian man has become the slave of his creation,” particularly through the machine which enslaves both the worker and entrepreneur (412). For Spengler, “Caesarism” is another manifestation of this decline, as authority becomes increasingly concentrated in the hand of one person and the modern institutions of the state begin to disintegrate (396). Even modern writers, such as Nietzsche and [[Henrik Ibsen|Ibsen]], who “embraced the possibilities of a true philosophy,” also “exhausted them” (35).

 Towards the end of volume two, Spengler becomes increasingly bitter and pessimistic in his invective against the decay of modern society, and begins to betray his own principle of historical relativity. As Helps astutely observes, “his claim to observe from a neutral standpoint shows a neglect of the relativity which is his favorite weapon. If the whole of reality is being constantly transformed in a continuum of aspects from perpetually changing viewpoints, it must be impossible to obtain a precise picture.”<ref>Arthur Helps, "Oswald Spengler," The Decline of the West, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, p. xiii.</ref> In spite of his self-proclaimed “non-centered” history, Spengler uses the printing press, Goethe, and Nietzsche—Germanic history—as his primary historical markers. Perhaps stepping out of himself to view his theory against the backdrop of his peculiar world-historical moment, Spengler might suggest that his own historical framework is a reification of the dynamic impulses of German or Western European culture. It is ironic that the thinker who opposed theories as mummified versions of “things-becoming” became best known for a taxonomy of decline that perhaps prematurely petrified his own culture.<ref>McNeilly writes, “He demands purity, depth and objectivity but cannot manage to achieve a holistic critical perspective without in some sense betraying the historical organism, the actual ‘becoming’ he wants to describe.” Kevin McNeilly, “Cultural Morphologies: Yeats, Spengler and Adorno,” Irish University Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, p. 245.</ref> Perhaps, this contradiction can best be described by the tensions between Spengler’s metaphysical aims and his historical project; narrating history necessarily reifies the past as a “thing-become” in order to represent and study it.

 

<references />

Swann's Way

2009-11-20T20:14:56Z

←Older revision		Revision as of 20:14, 20 November 2009
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-	by [[Elyse Graham]] ~~and~~ [[Steven Hobbs]]	+	by [[Elyse Graham]], [[Steven Hobbs]], and Laura B. Marcus

	''Swann's Way'', the first installment of [[Marcel Proust]]'s seven-volume ''In Search of Lost Time, ''was published in [[1913]].		''Swann's Way'', the first installment of [[Marcel Proust]]'s seven-volume ''In Search of Lost Time, ''was published in [[1913]].

		+	<br>

	== Overview ==		== Overview ==
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	== Literary Expression of the Unconscious in Swann’s Way ==		== Literary Expression of the Unconscious in Swann’s Way ==

-	by Steven Hobbs	+	by Steven Hobbs
-		+

		+	<br>

	Marcel Proust never suffered from writer’s block—far from it. Isolated in his cork-lined room, he churned out pages with an almost religious zeal. Often, he broke engagements with friends and family to write. Working from bed—using his knees for a desk—he wrote all night and slept during the day, growing increasingly reclusive. His rapidly decreasing health helped to further isolate Proust from the outside world, leaving him alone with his pen, paper, and past. This debilitation also served as a grim reminder of time’s fleetingness, fueling his fervent literary output.		Marcel Proust never suffered from writer’s block—far from it. Isolated in his cork-lined room, he churned out pages with an almost religious zeal. Often, he broke engagements with friends and family to write. Working from bed—using his knees for a desk—he wrote all night and slept during the day, growing increasingly reclusive. His rapidly decreasing health helped to further isolate Proust from the outside world, leaving him alone with his pen, paper, and past. This debilitation also served as a grim reminder of time’s fleetingness, fueling his fervent literary output.
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	<br>		<br>

-	<~~references /~~>	+	== <br>Narration and Self in Swann's Way<br> ==

-	[~~[Category~~:Marcel Proust]] [[~~Category:1913~~]]	+	by Laura B. Marcus<br>
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	Critics differ in their appraisal of the autobiographical elements of ''Swann's Way, ''the first volume of Proust’s masterpiece ''In Search of Lost Time''. The overt similarities between the author and his narrator are undeniable; the latter shares his given name, recalls nearly-identical memories, and expounds similar philosophies to those of his creator.<ref>Jean-Yves Tadié. Marcel Proust. (New York: Viking, 2000). 40-41.</ref> And yet Proust, it seems, made a conscientious effort to distance himself from Marcel in several key details – perhaps most prominently those relating to the former’s homosexuality.<ref>Philip Kolb. “Proust’s Letters.” Yale French Studies. No. 71. 1986. 199.</ref> Regardless of the exact relationship between Proust and Marcel, the fictional narrator serves as his author’s mouthpiece in the exposition of a theory concerning the tensions present in that very relationship. Marcel, like his own narrator, is a narrator himself; thus he is able to fulfill a quasi-automimetic role in two directions, both in relation to the author who created him and to the self (or rather, selves) he creates in his own writing. Investigating the second of these two relationships, we can read the objectification of the author – that is, the self-enacted transformation of the author into the subject of his own fiction – as the realization of the author himself. The protagonist of a story enjoys an enviable stability of character, an enduring reality noticeably absent in the pervasive transience of the world. The narrator seeks this stability for himself, and the fruition of this search he finds in the task of literary self-creation. Throughout the novel, however, the truthfulness of art and narrative seems undermined by the very fact of its endurance in time, thus calling into question the efficacy of the narrator’s mission.
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	''Swann’s Way'' begins in hypnagogic hallucination. “…I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading,” Marcel muses, “but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin. (New York: Modern Library, 1992.) 1.</ref> The mind of the narrator, acting independently of his will, absorbs him into its own imaginings. There is a marked passivity in this phenomenon – accompanied by and tied to a questioning of the fixedness of identity. To the narrator’s dreaming mind, there is no doubt of selfhood, but there is also no doubt that the nature of that selfhood is inherently a historical figure, an inanimate object, even an abstract concept. Despite the absurdity of these fantasies, they “did not offend [his] reason.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 1.</ref> The concrete – if transient – self, therefore, is the creation of a mind working under the direction of a mysterious force: literature, perhaps, or else a veiled interior impetus unknowable to the willing ego.
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	But the aware yet unreflective self of this dream does not endure. Eventually, Marcel recalls, “the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 1.</ref> The narrator’s revelation of his independent existence from the world of his dream frees him from pure objecthood at least, sheer lifelessness at most. And yet the opening and widening of this subject-object gap does not prohibit its transcendence. For though the narrator is now granted will where once he lacked it, that will can be directed towards the bridging of the divide between himself and his dream. He is still “free to apply [himself]” to his dream, to submit himself to that narrative. It is here that the creative process is born.
		+
		+	<br>
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		+	For Marcel, it is the delicate interplay between the unwilled apocalyptic phenomenon and the willed process of narration that gives birth to the creative event. Apocalyptic is meant here in both its literal and its literary senses. On the one hand, the apocalyptic phenomenon is a “lifting of the veil,” the revelation of something either forgotten or as yet unrealized; its instigator is a force independent of the creator. It is also apocalyptic in the more conventional sense, as a rupture in the natural progression of time. <br><br>
		+
		+	The most famous of these phenomena in Swann’s Way, as well as the most literarily significant, is the “madeleine episode.” Once again, Marcel is the passive recipient of an unknown impulse. Or perhaps more accurately, he is the both the recipient and the product of this impulse, for he says “this new sensation [had] the effect… of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it ''was ''me.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 60.</ref> Once again the narrator obliquely expresses some uncertainty as to the fixity of his selfhood vis-à-vis this mysterious power and its product. The experience of eating the tea-soaked madeleine reveals something ineffable to him and about him. He “had ceased… to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 60.</ref> Already he intimates that the experience has freed him from the oppression of reality and its temporal constraints, lending him an ontological weight all his own. His selfhood no longer rests within the milieu of the world of things, nor is it bound to that world.<br><br>
		+
		+	Marcel understands instinctively that this revelation is bound up with something else, but that something does not come to him immediately. He tries unsuccessfully to repeat the experience. But ultimately, what the madeleine reveals to him is not that “something” he is seeking, but the gap between himself and that something. "I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day."<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 61.</ref> The process of creation, this “bringing to the light of day,” is a collaborative effort between the muse trapped in the object and the would-be creator who unintentionally releases it. There is a delay between Marcel’s first taste of madeleine and the revelation of his childhood memory of a similar experience. In the interim period, he found that “ten times over [he] must essay the task, must lean over the abyss.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 63.</ref> He had to search in his own mind to bring up the memory that hovered just beyond the bounds of his consciousness. During this period, Marcel is truly “in search of lost time.”
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	But he does not unearth the memory, rather “the memory reveal[s] itself.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 63.</ref> The narrator is once again the passive figure. The recognition of the madeleine’s taste calls up a complete image of his childhood home at Combray and its accompanying details, much as his nighttime reading would induce hypnagogic hallucinations inspired by the same events the works narrated. And for a brief moment, Marcel is ensnared by this memory, transported back into the setting of his youth. But by the end of the first part of “Combray”, he has become narrator again; there is distance between himself and the product of his imaginations. As with his dreams, he has the power to “apply himself” to this fantasy even after he has achieved some narrative distance from it. The second part of “Combray” begins with a relatively objective description of the Combray of his childhood, of his family, their relations, and so forth – all of which are interspersed with direct references to the temporal gap between their author and themselves. Marcel regular cites the differences between affairs as they were then and how things “seem to [him] now.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 65.</ref> But he quickly loses himself in the narrative – loses himself, and, it seems, finds - or creates - himself.
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	Proust does not shy away from complicating the reality of the past and its relationship to the author. Reminiscing on the flowers of Méséglise, he comments that, “whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 260.</ref> Yet at the close of Swann’s Way he remarks on “how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 606.</ref> In the former he privileges the reality of the past over that of the future; in the latter, the exact opposite. Furthermore, the latter statement seems to indicate the narrator’s role as a “searcher” in reality, whereas the former implies the possibility – perhaps a possibility now extinguished – that the narrator may have the power to create his own reality.
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	Perhaps the appeal of the past, then, is its silence – its inability to fight back against one who would plunder it as an archaeologist or create it as an artist. It reveals itself to Marcel, but immediately must submit to his pen. Yet at the same time, Marcel would submit himself to the past. The first part of Combray, at least, is autobiographical. The narrator becomes the object of his own narration.
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	Even as a boy, or so it seems to Marcel-the-narrator, Marcel has a predilection for enmeshing his life experiences in literature. Proust’s own biographer comments on the significance of reading in the life of the writer: “Biographers often forget that in a writer’s life, the books that he or she has read may be more important than the people they have met; they may tell us everything there is to know about some chance hostess, yet nothing about Racine or Balzac.”<ref>Jean-Yves Tadié. Marcel Proust. 52.</ref> Marcel himself does not make this mistake; his own description of childhood is riddled with references to works of fiction. He recalls even before the madeleine episode the magic lantern that used to project stories and images in his room. “I cannot express,” he remembers, “the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think – and to feel – such melancholy things.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 11.</ref> Despite the superficial unpleasantness of this memory, it carries overwhelming significance in the life of the writer; it is exactly in this moment, when he himself is swallowed by a story, that he is jarred out of anesthesia. His aesthetic sense is awakened, and it is that sense which will shape not only his childhood but his memory of it.
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	This aesthetic – which eventually developed a particular taste for the literary – provided the lens through which young Marcel viewed the world. "It is true that the people concerned in [these books] were not what Francoise would have called ‘real people.’ But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement. A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to day, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift."<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 116.</ref> This literary power rears its head most noticeably during the episode in which Marcel first sees Mme de Guermantes. His disappointment at the commonality of her physical appearance fades when he narrates her into a story. “Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the Guermantes had the right of life and death over their vassals. The Duchesse de Guermantes descends from Genevieve de Brabant.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 246.</ref> The context of myth and legend, helpfully supplied by the narrator’s mind, transforms the plain woman into the romantic figure of his imagination.
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	It is noteworthy that Swann himself exhibits similar behavior, though his artistic taste runs to the visual while Marcel’s runs to the literary. Swann’s gaze transforms serving maid into Giotto’s Charity, Marcel’s friend Bloch into Bellini’s Mahomet, and Odette de Crécy, his own femme fatale, into Mariano’s Zipporah.<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 110,134,316.</ref> There is no implication that the young Marcel mimicked this behavior of Swann’s; perhaps, then, this is a deliberate instance of narrative doubling of the protagonist. While Marcel and Swann, like Marcel and Proust, are clearly distinct personalities, Marcel, like Proust, seems to write some of himself into his narration of Swann’s life. Ultimately, this tendency of Swann’s ensnares him in the fantasy of his own creation, thus subtly hinting at the dark side of the aesthete’s enchantment of the world. By that very facility which transforms the world into art is the artist himself ensnared in his own work. Briefly, at the end of “Swann in Love,” it appears that he is released from this fantasy. His strange dream, ending with the suggestive departure of Napoleon and Odette and Swann’s comforting of the strange young man in the fez, serves as a bridge between the imagined and the real worlds in much the same way as Marcel’s hypnagogic hallucinations at the outset of Swann’s Way. Also similarly, Swann himself is doubled in the dream. “So Swann reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed at first to identify was himself too; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, the one who was dreaming the dream, and another whom he saw in front of him sporting the fez.”<ref>Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way. 540.</ref>
		+
		+	<br>
		+
		+	There may be no clearer explication of Proust’s treatment of self and art than this describing Swann’s dream. Considering his own literary doubling (vis-à-vis Marcel the narrator), and the further literary doubling of Marcel the narrator (vis-à-vis young Marcel and M. Swann), it is difficult not to read the above passage as a wry commentary on his own work. But for all his preoccupation with self-creation in literature, Proust concludes Swann’s Way on an ambiguous note with regard to this theme. Or rather, perhaps, he concludes with a generally pessimism towards the possibility of creating reality in art. Like Swann confronting Odette after his dream, and also like his childhood self seeing Mme. de Guermantes for the first time, Marcel’s visit to the haunts of his youth only fills him with disappointment. The reality in no way measures up to the imagined fantasy. The bitter truth destroys the beautiful narrative. The verity of art and the efficacy of the artist are called into question. And the reader is left to wonder whether the narrator can recapture this new reality in prose, or whether the harshness of this world will forever suck from him “the faith that creates.”<br><br>
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		+	<br>
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		+	<references />

Swann's Way

2009-11-20T05:57:02Z

Literary Expression of the Unconscious in Swann’s Way:

←Older revision		Revision as of 05:57, 20 November 2009
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	== Literary Expression of the Unconscious in Swann’s Way ==		== Literary Expression of the Unconscious in Swann’s Way ==
		+
		+	by Steven Hobbs
		+
		+

	Marcel Proust never suffered from writer’s block—far from it. Isolated in his cork-lined room, he churned out pages with an almost religious zeal. Often, he broke engagements with friends and family to write. Working from bed—using his knees for a desk—he wrote all night and slept during the day, growing increasingly reclusive. His rapidly decreasing health helped to further isolate Proust from the outside world, leaving him alone with his pen, paper, and past. This debilitation also served as a grim reminder of time’s fleetingness, fueling his fervent literary output.		Marcel Proust never suffered from writer’s block—far from it. Isolated in his cork-lined room, he churned out pages with an almost religious zeal. Often, he broke engagements with friends and family to write. Working from bed—using his knees for a desk—he wrote all night and slept during the day, growing increasingly reclusive. His rapidly decreasing health helped to further isolate Proust from the outside world, leaving him alone with his pen, paper, and past. This debilitation also served as a grim reminder of time’s fleetingness, fueling his fervent literary output.

"1920 (Mauberley)"

2009-11-20T01:39:54Z

←Older revision		Revision as of 01:39, 20 November 2009
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-	by [~~http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Edgar_Eduardo_Garcia~~ Edgar Garcia]~~<br>~~	+	by [[Edgar Eduardo Garcia]]

	<br>''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', published by The Ovid Press in 1920, is commonly referred to as [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Ezra_Pound Ezra Pound]'s "farewell to London."<ref>Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York 2003), 1216.</ref> He moved to Paris shortly after its publication. The circumstances of his departure, in combination with the poem's satirical inveighing of English culture and intellectual life, prompt readings of the poem as a transitional work. An examination of the poetics of backwardness in the work, however, will result in a reading that is more skeptical about the poem as a representation of the passage from one place to another. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is not a look toward new directions, but instead a study of what occured, of what was occuring, and perhaps of what would have occured, if Pound were to have stayed in London. To emphasize the backward gaze of the poem, this wiki article will focus on the second part of the poem, "1920 (Mauberley)" and its looking back, cross-referencing, and reprocessing the first part. A wiki article on the whole poem has already been provided by [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Pericles_Lewis Pericles Lewis].<br>		<br>''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', published by The Ovid Press in 1920, is commonly referred to as [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Ezra_Pound Ezra Pound]'s "farewell to London."<ref>Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York 2003), 1216.</ref> He moved to Paris shortly after its publication. The circumstances of his departure, in combination with the poem's satirical inveighing of English culture and intellectual life, prompt readings of the poem as a transitional work. An examination of the poetics of backwardness in the work, however, will result in a reading that is more skeptical about the poem as a representation of the passage from one place to another. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is not a look toward new directions, but instead a study of what occured, of what was occuring, and perhaps of what would have occured, if Pound were to have stayed in London. To emphasize the backward gaze of the poem, this wiki article will focus on the second part of the poem, "1920 (Mauberley)" and its looking back, cross-referencing, and reprocessing the first part. A wiki article on the whole poem has already been provided by [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Pericles_Lewis Pericles Lewis].<br>
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	<br>Because I will emphasize the backward-referencing of the second part of the poem, it is necessary to demonstrate that the book was obviously divided into two segments. The segmentation is indicated in the table of contents by the placement of the "ENVOI" in the middle of the two, itself adjoined to neither. Pound's "ENVOI" is in a strange place. Typically the envoi, as it is found in the poetry of the troubadours, was a stanza or a set of stanzas at the end of the poem, addressing either the poem some other entity. In ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' the envoi is dead center. In this position it is reduced of the quality of final statement of the poem. But while it is divested of that quality, it nonetheless serves as a terminus to the first part of the poem while creating the condition of new beginning, or alternate beginning, for the second part. In other words, the second part is something other than mere continuation of the first part.[[Image:Xxxxpoundxxxx\|right]]<br>		<br>Because I will emphasize the backward-referencing of the second part of the poem, it is necessary to demonstrate that the book was obviously divided into two segments. The segmentation is indicated in the table of contents by the placement of the "ENVOI" in the middle of the two, itself adjoined to neither. Pound's "ENVOI" is in a strange place. Typically the envoi, as it is found in the poetry of the troubadours, was a stanza or a set of stanzas at the end of the poem, addressing either the poem some other entity. In ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' the envoi is dead center. In this position it is reduced of the quality of final statement of the poem. But while it is divested of that quality, it nonetheless serves as a terminus to the first part of the poem while creating the condition of new beginning, or alternate beginning, for the second part. In other words, the second part is something other than mere continuation of the first part.[[Image:Xxxxpoundxxxx\|right]]<br>

-	<br>The rupture within ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' is further emphasized by the dates given for "ENVOI (1919)" and "1920 (Mauberley)." Whereas "ENVOI (1919)" foregrounds a poetic form with the paranthetical year as an aside, the "1920 (Mauberley) foregrounds the year, and the historical moment it contains, while the poet, "Mauberley," becomes a parenthetical aside. The disappearance of the poet will be discussed later in this article. Here it is worth noting the suggestion that the poetic form, the envoi, is given a kind of valorization which it no longer has by 1920. Pound's early efforts to "resuscitate the dead art/ Of poetry... in the old sense" as he puts it in the first stanza of ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', were "wrong from the start." As he later refers to general loss of appreciation for the ""sculpture" of rhyme, the failure of poetic resuscitation could be read as Pound's failure to implement traditional poetic forms, such as the envoi. This "dumb-born book," as the envoi addresses it, is dumb-born because of its hopeless deployment of forms such the envoi.	+	<br>The rupture within ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' is further emphasized by the dates given for "ENVOI (1919)" and "1920 (Mauberley)." Whereas "ENVOI (1919)" foregrounds a poetic form with the paranthetical year as an aside, the "1920 (Mauberley) foregrounds the year, and the historical moment it contains, while the poet, "Mauberley," becomes a parenthetical aside. The disappearance of the poet will be discussed later in this article. Here it is worth noting the suggestion that the poetic form, the envoi, is given a kind of valorization which it no longer has by 1920. Pound's early efforts to "resuscitate the dead art/ Of poetry... in the old sense" as he puts it in the first stanza of ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', were "wrong from the start." As he later refers to general loss of appreciation for the ""sculpture" of rhyme, the failure of poetic resuscitation could be read as Pound's failure to implement traditional poetic forms, such as the envoi. This "dumb-born book," as the envoi addresses it, is dumb-born because of its hopeless deployment of forms such the envoi.

	<br>The feeling of failure expressed in the poem, which inveighs an unappreciative reading public along with a poet who did not see that this public could never appreciate poetry "out of key with [its] time," recalls another poet's Grand Testament, which Pound likely had in mind at this time. Francois Villon's ''Grand Testament'' is a long poem detailing the circumstances of his wasted talent, especially due to an unappreciative reading public and his own dissolute and socially dismissive nature. The hidden allusion to Villon within the "ENVOI" is perhaps the most striking of the work. Villon acrostically inserts his name in the envoi of his poem:<br>		<br>The feeling of failure expressed in the poem, which inveighs an unappreciative reading public along with a poet who did not see that this public could never appreciate poetry "out of key with [its] time," recalls another poet's Grand Testament, which Pound likely had in mind at this time. Francois Villon's ''Grand Testament'' is a long poem detailing the circumstances of his wasted talent, especially due to an unappreciative reading public and his own dissolute and socially dismissive nature. The hidden allusion to Villon within the "ENVOI" is perhaps the most striking of the work. Villon acrostically inserts his name in the envoi of his poem:<br>
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	<br>Pound's satirical mode in the second part of the poem serves to spelunk the caverns of a poet resigned to hollow productions. His understanding of the substance and style of satire is outlined in an essay on Jules Laforgue in an issue of ''Poetry'' from 1917. He writes:<br>		<br>Pound's satirical mode in the second part of the poem serves to spelunk the caverns of a poet resigned to hollow productions. His understanding of the substance and style of satire is outlined in an essay on Jules Laforgue in an issue of ''Poetry'' from 1917. He writes:<br>
	<blockquote>Laforgue was a purge and a critic... He is the finest wrought; he is most "verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of cliche unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is good verbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is a master... The tyro cannot play about with such things, the game is too dangerous. Verbalism demands a set form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive it home."<ref>"Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire," Poetry, Vol. XI, No. II, November 1917 (Chicago), 93-98.</ref> </blockquote>		<blockquote>Laforgue was a purge and a critic... He is the finest wrought; he is most "verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of cliche unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is good verbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is a master... The tyro cannot play about with such things, the game is too dangerous. Verbalism demands a set form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive it home."<ref>"Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire," Poetry, Vol. XI, No. II, November 1917 (Chicago), 93-98.</ref> </blockquote>
-	The critic who takes cliche as the object of his critique is simultaneously a critic of an overused phrase and of the communicants who keep the overused phrase in currency by continuing to use it. Laforgue can satirize society and its less vital speech habits in a single stroke. One could easily replace Laforgue's name in the previous quotation with Eliot's and see why Pound saw so much of Laforgue both in Eliot's satirical mode and his exquisite rhymes:	+	The critic who takes cliche as the object of his critique is simultaneously a critic of an overused phrase and of the communicants who keep the overused phrase in currency by continuing to use it. Laforgue can satirize society and its less vital speech habits in a single stroke. One could easily replace Laforgue's name in the previous quotation with Eliot's and see why Pound saw so much of Laforgue both in Eliot's satirical mode and his exquisite rhymes:
	<blockquote>''Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-la!" ni le superbe!<br>Mais mon ame, qu'un cri un peu cru exacerbe,<br>Est au fond distinguee et franche comme un herbe."''<ref>Ibid., 96.</ref><br></blockquote><blockquote>		<blockquote>''Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-la!" ni le superbe!<br>Mais mon ame, qu'un cri un peu cru exacerbe,<br>Est au fond distinguee et franche comme un herbe."''<ref>Ibid., 96.</ref><br></blockquote><blockquote>
	In the room the women come and go<br>Talking of Michelangelo..."<ref>Accessed November 18, 2009, at http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html .</ref>		In the room the women come and go<br>Talking of Michelangelo..."<ref>Accessed November 18, 2009, at http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html .</ref>
	</blockquote>		</blockquote>
-	Pound's own use of this satiric style is evident in the first lines of the second part of ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'':	+	Pound's own use of this satiric style is evident in the first lines of the second part of ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'':
	<blockquote>"Turned from the "eau forte<br>Par Jaquemart"..." </blockquote>		<blockquote>"Turned from the "eau forte<br>Par Jaquemart"..." </blockquote>
	Cutting lines of rhymes, of course, do not constitute satire. The hypercritical introspection of characters like J. Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is the main engine of the satiric mode in these poems. And, in Pound's poem, the hypercritical introspection is communicated as poetic self-referentiality. Not only does the second part quote the first part, with "His true Penelope/ Was Flaubert," it also explicitly cross-references a page in the first part, with the title of its third section, ""The Age Demanded" Vide Poem II. Page [ ]." The reader is referred to a previous section and indeed can only properly process "The Age Demanded" by reading it in consideration of "Poem II. Page [ ]." The retrospective inwardness of the second part's formal features is resonant with Mauberley's fundamental failure. Mauberley cannot look beyond himself and his fancies. His disconnect from the world is expressed with lines such as the following: "Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,/ Irresponse to human aggression.." Mauberley's disconnect by self-confinement limits his aesthetic to the maudlin and renders his socialization insensitive. Pound, perhaps, by 1920 was feeling such tendencies developing in himself.<br>		Cutting lines of rhymes, of course, do not constitute satire. The hypercritical introspection of characters like J. Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is the main engine of the satiric mode in these poems. And, in Pound's poem, the hypercritical introspection is communicated as poetic self-referentiality. Not only does the second part quote the first part, with "His true Penelope/ Was Flaubert," it also explicitly cross-references a page in the first part, with the title of its third section, ""The Age Demanded" Vide Poem II. Page [ ]." The reader is referred to a previous section and indeed can only properly process "The Age Demanded" by reading it in consideration of "Poem II. Page [ ]." The retrospective inwardness of the second part's formal features is resonant with Mauberley's fundamental failure. Mauberley cannot look beyond himself and his fancies. His disconnect from the world is expressed with lines such as the following: "Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,/ Irresponse to human aggression.." Mauberley's disconnect by self-confinement limits his aesthetic to the maudlin and renders his socialization insensitive. Pound, perhaps, by 1920 was feeling such tendencies developing in himself.<br>
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	<references />		<references />

-	[[Category:~~Ezra_Pound~~,~~_1920~~]]	+	[[Category:Ezra Pound, 1920]]

Edgar Eduardo Garcia

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-	Edgar Garcia, a PhD student at Yale since 2008, is interested in language, poetry, politics, and early America.	+	Edgar Garcia, a PhD student at Yale since 2008, is interested in language, poetry, politics, and early America.

-	[[Quia Pauper Amavi]]	+	[[Quia Pauper Amavi\|''Quia Pauper Amavi'']]
		+
		+	[["1920 (Mauberley)"]]

Between the acts

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[[Between the acts]] moved to [[Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts]]

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Between the acts

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== "Cold Pastoral:" Virginia Woolf's Reevaluation of the Late Modernist Aesthetic in ''Between the Acts '' ==

By Anne Aufhauser 

 

Virginia Woolf opens her last novel, ''Between the Acts'', with a summer night’s discussion about a cesspool and an offhand remark suggesting a new attitude that locates art in the everyday. Mrs. Haines, a guest at a country house that is to host a pageant the next day, hears a bird and asks if it is a nightingale, a bird associated with the lyric poetic voice.<ref>Melba Cuddy Keane, “Notes,” in Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (Orlando: Harcourt Inc, 2008), 152.</ref> “No,” the narrator replies, “It was a daylight bird, chuckling over the substance and succulence of the day, over worms, snails, grit.<ref>Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (Orlando: Harcourt Inc, 2008), 3.</ref> 

From the outset of ''Between the Acts'', Woolf challenges the ability of modernist literature as it stands to include the “chuckling…substance and succulence” of the quotidian. Using John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a framework to examine the limitations of modern art, especially in its written form, Woolf suggests in ''Between the Acts'' that modernism fails to affirm “breathing human passion.”<ref>John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900 ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919, [c1901]), 28; available at www.bartleby.com/101/. [accessed 8 November 2009].</ref> While using Keats to comment on the state of modernism may seem a stretch, as Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in 1819, Woolf’s exploration of Keats’ themes draws on the modernist tradition of entering “into a sort of conversation with the art of the past,” and places Between the Acts within the modernist tradition that built itself upon the reinterpretation of traditionally revered authors, such as Keats.<ref>Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26-27.</ref> In a world again on the brink of war, the silent and lifeless quality of modernist art seems to be stretched to its limits, and Woolf explores ways to reinvent it for the loud and the living. Woolf locates the limitations of modernism within an older generation and its allusively unoriginal and barrenly silent forms of communication, suggesting that art can only retain significance by directly involving audible expression. Woolf critiques modernism, arguing that the revolutions of form and content of the high modernist age demand reevaluation for a new generation and a new epoch. 

Woolf employs modernist techniques in her exploration of how they fall short, seeking to reinvent, rather than reject, modernism. Pericles Lewis describes the modernist movement as a “crisis of representation,” in which modernists began to question “their ability to represent reality” in “historically new types of experience,” including “modern technology and mass culture; a new scale of warfare; changing gender roles and attitudes to sexuality; the questioning of empire,” themes that Woolf explores in ''Between the Acts''.<ref>Ibid., 2, 28.</ref> To some extent, ''Between the Acts'', began in 1937 and published posthumously in 1941, is “anticipated by all Woolf’s work.”<ref>Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 130.</ref> From shifts in perspective, form, and narrative structure—Woolf advises her readers against puzzling “out the plot”—Woolf still operates within a modern framework.<ref>Woolf, Between the Acts, 63.</ref> Her relative success and failure within the contained world of the novel, however, suggests a dissatisfaction with the fruits of over twenty years of literary modernist experimentation. 

=== "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ===

Woolf references Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in the beginning and the end of ''Between the Acts'', establishing a framework through which to challenge current conceptions of art the role of the artist. Before the pageant begins, the narrator describes Isabella’s dining room: 
<blockquote>Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.<ref>Ibid., 26.</ref> </blockquote>
Woolf’s description of the vase echoes Keats’ description of the urn, especially in its focus on silence and emptiness: “Thou, silent form! Dost tease us out of though/As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!”<ref>Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 44-45.</ref> “Cold Pastoral” seems an apt term to apply to ''Between the Acts''; Woolf focuses on the vase’s smooth, “cold” quality within the setting of the English countryside, a departure from her more metropolitan novels such as Mrs. Dalloway. Mark Hussey sees the “empty, empty, empty” passage as especially noteworthy as a replacement of a passage Woolf had labeled “Silence” in an early typescript: 
<blockquote>Who observed the dining room? Who noted the silence, the emptiness? What name is to be given to that which notes a room is empty? This presence certainly requires a name, for without a name what can exist? And how can silence or emptiness be noted by that which has no existence?...Does it not by this means create immortality? And yet we who have named other presences equally impalpable—called them God, for instance, or again the Holy Ghost—have no name but novelist, or poet, or sculptor, or musician, for this greatest of all preservers and creators…Nameless it is yet partakes of all things named; it is rhyme and rhythm; it is dressing and eating and drinking; is procreation and sensation; is love and hate and passion and adventure.<ref>Virginia Woolf, “Silence,” Typescript for Between the Acts, quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 152-153.</ref> </blockquote>
Woolf initially envisions the artist as able to combine life, from “rhyme and rhythm” to “love and hate,” with a detached artistic silence. In contrast, Keats’ poem, alluded to only in the later version of the passage, examines the art itself rather than the artist. By removing the artist from the equation, Woolf asks if an essentially lifelike quality of the room disappears. Her replacement of the artist with a stark image of the artistic object hints at an evolving attitude towards modernist techniques. Maria DiBattista writes that the removal of the author from the typescript was a rejection of “‘the damned egotistical self’ she discerned and disliked in the writing of Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, two pioneers in the ‘stream-of-consciousness technique.’”<ref>Maria DiBattista, “Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130.</ref> By changing the focus of the novel from the artist’s role to the participant’s, Woolf examines modern art’s dependence on the insertion of the author’s own lifelike force into it, testing modernism’s claims of immortality. 

=== The Modernist Aesthetic for Older Generations ===

Woolf addresses the question of mortality and spoken communication, an issue at the forefront of her mind as she wrote ''Between the Acts'' from 1937-1941, by examining generational differences in the Giles/Swithin household. Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes that aging and mortality began to preoccupy Woolf from 1932 onward, and she ties these thoughts to Woolf’s feelings about silence and the relative power of words. Lytton Strachey’s death in 1932 left Woolf with “the greatest silence. It was a closing-down of the past; it made her feel (as she always in any case tended to feel) older, more mortal, part of an age that was past.”<ref>Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto &amp; Windus, 1996), 630.</ref> Two years later, Roger Fry would die, and Woolf was saddled with the task of writing his biography, a project that occupied her through its publication in 1940. After attending his funeral, which featured musical rather than spoken eulogies, Woolf wrote, “I liked the wordlessness.” She also felt “suddenly and powerfully, a fear of her own death.”<ref>Ibid., 656.</ref> While associating spoken words with mortality, Woolf does not denigrate their impact, writing “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”<ref>Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 2.</ref> Woolf’s bittersweet approach to silence in ''Between the Acts'' is an outgrowth both of her musings mortality and of an appreciation for the artistic forces that shaped her generation. 

Woolf’s sense of impending death and its wordlessness is reflected in the older generation’s peaceful silence in''Between the Acts''. Lucy and Bartholomew, elderly siblings, seem able to achieve an admirable artistic goal through their silent communication. During the pageant’s intermission, for example, Lucy responds to a cue from Bartholomew “as if he had said [it] aloud.”<ref>Woolf, Between the Acts, 82.</ref> The silent communion between Lucy and Bart accomplishes the transcendent and timeless connection that Woolf described in her typescript: “Flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t—and so on, ''ad infinitum''.”<ref>Ibid., 18.</ref> Lucy and Bart deny a universal perspective, each retaining his or her individual world view, yet nevertheless find “a common element in which the perishable is preserved, and the separate become one.”<ref>Woolf, “Silence,” quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 152-153.</ref> DiBattista writes that the silent communication between Lucy and Bart, while comical in a Bergsonian sense, develops “that concord in discord and unity in dispersity by which society paradoxically renews itself—''ad infinitum''.”<ref>Maria DiBattista, Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 202.</ref> 

While DiBattista celebrates the seemingly immortal continuity in Lucy and Bart’s silent communication as signifying a social renewal, a discussion of their mortality calls DiBattista’s optimistic reading into question: 
<blockquote>Tick, tick, tick the machine continued. “Marking time,” said old Oliver beneath his breath. “Which doesn’t exist for us,” Lucy murmured. “We’ve only the present.”<ref>Woolf, Between the Acts, 57.</ref> </blockquote>
While partially justified in evaluating the effectiveness and beauty of their unspoken connection, DiBattista describes a connection that is limited to the present, especially when interrupted by the industrial and bellicose tick of the machine. While Woolf acknowledges power and value of Bartholomew and Lucy’s connection, she does envision its impending end. Jed Esty notes that the technological advances of the late 1930s fed a sense of English imperial contraction. This sense, he argues, prophesied an end to “what Keynes called the ‘international but individualistic’ era of European culture,” or to the historical, cultural, and economic forces that had first given rise to modernism.<ref>Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7-8.</ref> John Maynard Keynes, a close friend and Bloomsbury contemporary of Woolf’s, wrote of European capitalism in the post-World War I period: “It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous…In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it.”<ref>John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” The Yale Review, Vol. 22, no. 4 (June 1933), 755-769.</ref> By the late 1930s, Woolf, while not engaging in the same scathing rejection of modern forces as Keynes, still predicts the end of these forces with the “tick, tick, tick” towards war and a new epoch. 

=== The Limitations of Literary Modernism for a New Generation ===

In a further comment on the future constraints on the modernist aesthetic, the younger generation’s attempts at silent communication seem unproductive, lacking the artistic unity achieved by Lucy and Bart. When Lucy declares “We’ve only the present,” Isabella disagrees: 
<blockquote>“Isn’t that enough? William asked himself. Beauty—isn’t that enough? But here Isa fidgeted. Her bare brown arms went nervously to her head. She half turned in her seat. “No, not for us, who’ve the future,” she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present.<ref>Woolf, Between the Acts, 57.</ref> </blockquote>
Keats, posits that beauty is, in fact, enough: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”<ref>Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 49-50.</ref> Isabella’s unspoken disagreement and her fidgeting in relaying it, however, hints at a discomfort with static beauty. Her worries about the future of art disturbs the present, suggesting that even though the cataclysm of war has yet to arrive, the feeling that it cannot be regenerated has already marred its quality. 

The question of beauty without a future continues to trouble Isabella, especially regarding procreation and her relationship with her husband and children. Keats calls the urn a “foster child of Silence,” a statement both about artistic silence and, in the context of ''Between the Acts'', about an unnatural approach to the future and reproduction.<ref>Ibid., 2.</ref> Isabella’s immersion in clichéd literary tropes, for instance, isolates her from her children. Musing on a crush she has for “the ravaged, the silent, the romantic gentleman farmer,” Isabella thinks of her “other love; love for husband, the stockbroker—“The father of my children,” she added, slipping into the cliché conveniently provided by fiction.”<ref>Woolf, Between the Acts, 10.</ref> Isabella notices her children in the garden. Attempting to make them notice her, she “tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them.”<ref>Ibid.</ref> Distracted by two clichéd literary images, both silent throughout the novel, Isabella becomes unnaturally isolated from her children and their participation in the “incidents of garden life.” Isabella’s isolation from her children differentiates them from Keats’ foster children of Silence, for, although separated from their mother, they participate in a linguistic world that focuses on sound rather than meaning. Their nurses speak with “rolling words, like sweets on their tongues; which, as they thinned to transparency, gave off pink, green, and sweetness.”<ref>Ibid., 8.</ref> The nurses, imparting a modernist aesthetic to the children, do so in the absence of a creative, nurturing maternal presence, perhaps hinting at Woolf’s worries about modernism after her death. The nurses’ spoken contact with the children makes them, rather than Isabella, the “conservators and curators” of modernism’s next generation.<ref>DiBattista, Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship, 130.</ref> Isabella’s fixation on literary cliché prevents her from participating in the genesis of a new linguistic understanding. 

Isabella’s efforts to break free of her isolation through silent communication offer little hope for the continuity, represented through reproduction, of a silent modernist aesthetic. Isabella’s only moments of silent connection block the possibility for creation or regeneration by inviting William Dodge, a homosexual artist whose “child’s not my child,” into her relationship with Giles, her husband.<ref>Woolf, Between the Acts, 51.</ref> During the pageant, the three share a brief moment of silent connection: 
<blockquote>He said (without words), “I’m damnably unhappy.” “So am I,” Dodge echoes. “And I too,” Isa thought. They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening.<ref>Ibid., 119-120.</ref> </blockquote>
Isabella and Dodge’s relationship, in inhibiting her communication with Giles, alludes to T.S. Eliot’s “Burial of the Dead” from ''The Waste Land'': “There was Dodge, the lip reader, her semblable, her conspirator, a seeker like her after hidden faces.”<ref>Ibid., 141.</ref> In “Burial of the Dead,” the speaker wades among the dead, finally finding a friend and paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire: “'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'”<ref>Baudelaire’s line is translated as “Hypocrite reader,--my likeness,--my brother!” fckLRCharles Baudelaire, “Flowers of Evil,” tr. Eli Siegel, Hail, American Development (New York: Definition Press, 1968); available at http://fleursdumal.org/poem/099 . [accessed 8 November 2008]. fckLRT.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 76; available at www.bartleby.com/201/. [accessed 8 November 2009].</ref> Woolf’s places Isabella in Eliot’s world of the dead while conflating reading and Dodge’s unproductive artistic sensibility, making him both a “Hypocrite Reader” and her “likeness.”<ref>Mrs. Manresa calls William Dodge “an artist,” although he corrects her “I’m a clerk in an office.” The sense that he is an artist persists, however, and Isabella silently asks “what did he do with his hands, the white, the fine, the shapely?,” hinting at a wasted artistic talent. fckLRWoolf, Between the Acts, 27, 36.</ref> The refraction and repetition of allusion suggests not a modernist regeneration but rather a prolonged and self-perpetuating pessimism regarding the future of literary art. 

=== Reinventing Late Modernism ===

In the face of the limitations and the sense of an impending end for literary modernism, Woolf attempts to breathe life into the static and unmoving. While Keats envies art’s separation from life, writing, “More happy love!...All breathing human passion far above,/That leaves a heart high-sorrowful,” Woolf argues that art should incorporate human passion.<ref>Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 25, 29.</ref> . In “Silence,” Woolf discusses not only the role of artist as a preserver, but also as a participant in human feeling: “it is rhyme and rhythm; it is dressing and eating and drinking; is procreation and sensation; is love and hate and passion and adventure.”<ref>Woolf, “Silence,” quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 152-153.</ref> Art should, Woolf argues, incorporate the pain of reality and human passion, the “burning forehead, and a parching tongue” that Keats seeks to escape.<ref>Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 30.</ref> 

Lucy and Bart’s silence, compared with Isabella and Giles’, hint at the inability of art to carry a sense of human passion and sensation into the future, an inability Woolf confronts by approaching art not as an end in itself but as a framework within which to understand and advance everyday human life. Woolf approaches art not as an imitation of life but vice versa, a perspective that frees art from its stasis, making it relevant to the future. In what critic Melba Cuddy-Keane deems “an extraordinary life-art intersection,” Woolf attended a village play in August 1940 that is interrupted by the sounds of an air raid, a case of life mirroring the Reverend Streatfield’s interruption by “twelve aeroplances in perfect formation” that Woolf had already written into ''Between the Acts''.<ref>Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Introduction,” in Woolf, Between the Acts, xxviii. fckLRWoolf, Between the Acts, 131.</ref> While the real-life interruption of the village pageant should not be interpreted as anything beyond coincidental, Woolf seems to have been anticipating the future in her writing. 

In a more deliberate example of Woolf’s bringing art alive, she animates Keat’s “heifer lowing at the skies” that leads it.<ref>Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 32-33.</ref> The cows bring a moment of transcendence in the face of art’s failure: 
<blockquote>Miss La Trobe leant against the tree. Her power had left her. Beads of perspiration broke on her forehead. Illusion had failed. “This is death,” she murmured, “death.” Then suddenly, as the illusion petered out, the cows took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of time she lifted her great moon-eyes head and bellowed. All the great moon-eyes heads laid themselves back. From cow after cow the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment…The cows annihilated the gap; bridged the distance; filled the emptiness and continued the emotion.<ref>Woolf, Between the Acts, 96.</ref> </blockquote>
A new kind of expression, one more natural and coming from Nature’s, rather than the artists’, hand “takes up the burden.” The insertion of nature as the artist resolves the problem of the artist’s inevitable mortality; Nature, Mrs. Manresa notes, will “be there…when we’re not.”<ref>Ibid., 37.</ref> As the director of the pageant, Miss La Trobe feels she has failed as an artist. “This is death,” she says, reinforcing the sense that deliberately contrived art in ''Between the Act''s is lifeless. The cows, however, refer back to Keats’ sacrificial heifer, both bemoaning the effect of art (the calf has been lost) and, in their pain, giving the image of the sacrificed calf emotional meaning in the present. The cows wordlessly “filled the emptiness,” filling Keats’ empty vase not with formal beauty but a temporal and real emotion, one that prevents Miss La Trobe’s illusion from petering out, and suggesting a solution for bridging the gap between modernism and a new age that demands the injection of a lifelike force. 

Miss La Trobe reflects that the pageant is “a failure,” but her despair is interrupted by a flock of birds “sylablling discordantly life, life, life, without measure.”<ref>Ibid., 142.</ref> Miss La Trobe looks for the source of the interruption, finally settling on “old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of flowers—pinks apparently—to fill the vase that stood on her husband’s grave.”<ref>Ibid.</ref> At the end of the novel, in the midst of challenging and rethinking the modernist tradition, Woolf returns to the image of the empty vase associated with death. Mrs. Chalmer’s action in filling the vase, however, spurs a life-affirming cacophony. ''Between the Acts'' does not reject the modernist tradition it builds upon, but nevertheless challenges future modernists to enliven the movement. 

The pageant structure within the novel and the novel’s ending argue that a reinvented form of modernism, perhaps spoken and acted rather than written, can carry modernism forward. Isabella and Giles finally face one another, and the silent enmity of modernism’s forms creates the possibility for generation and creativity: 
<blockquote>Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought. They would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born…Then the curtain rose. They spoke.<ref>Ibid., 148-149</ref> </blockquote>
 

[[Category:Virginia_Woolf]]

"1920 (Mauberley)"

2009-11-19T18:38:03Z

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"1920 (Mauberley)"

2009-11-19T16:31:47Z

New page

by [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Edgar_Eduardo_Garcia Edgar Garcia] 

''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', published by The Ovid Press in 1920, is commonly referred to as [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Ezra_Pound Ezra Pound]'s "farewell to London."<ref>Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York 2003), 1216.</ref> He moved to Paris shortly after its publication. The circumstances of his departure, in combination with the poem's satirical inveighing of English culture and intellectual life, prompt readings of the poem as a transitional work. An examination of the poetics of backwardness in the work, however, will result in a reading that is more skeptical about the poem as a representation of the passage from one place to another. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is not a look toward new directions, but instead a study of what occured, of what was occuring, and perhaps of what would have occured, if Pound were to have stayed in London. To emphasize the backward gaze of the poem, this wiki article will focus on the second part of the poem, "1920 (Mauberley)" and its looking back, cross-referencing, and reprocessing the first part. A wiki article on the whole poem has already been provided by [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Pericles_Lewis Pericles Lewis]. 

Because I will emphasize the backward-referencing of the second part of the poem, it is necessary to demonstrate that the book was obviously divided into two segments. The segmentation is indicated in the table of contents by the placement of the "ENVOI" in the middle of the two, itself adjoined to neither. Pound's "ENVOI" is in a strange place. Typically the envoi, as it is found in the poetry of the troubadours, was a stanza or a set of stanzas at the end of the poem, addressing either the poem some other entity. In ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' the envoi is dead center. In this position it is reduced of the quality of final statement of the poem. But while it is divested of that quality, it nonetheless serves as a terminus to the first part of the poem while creating the condition of new beginning, or alternate beginning, for the second part. In other words, the second part is something other than mere continuation of the first part.[[Image:Xxxxpoundxxxx|right]] 

The rupture within ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'' is further emphasized by the dates given for "ENVOI (1919)" and "1920 (Mauberley)." Whereas "ENVOI (1919)" foregrounds a poetic form with the paranthetical year as an aside, the "1920 (Mauberley) foregrounds the year, and the historical moment it contains, while the poet, "Mauberley," becomes a parenthetical aside. The disappearance of the poet will be discussed later in this article. Here it is worth noting the suggestion that the poetic form, the envoi, is given a kind of valorization which it no longer has by 1920. Pound's early efforts to "resuscitate the dead art/ Of poetry... in the old sense" as he puts it in the first stanza of ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', were "wrong from the start." As he later refers to general loss of appreciation for the ""sculpture" of rhyme, the failure of poetic resuscitation could be read as Pound's failure to implement traditional poetic forms, such as the envoi. This "dumb-born book," as the envoi addresses it, is dumb-born because of its hopeless deployment of forms such the envoi.

The feeling of failure expressed in the poem, which inveighs an unappreciative reading public along with a poet who did not see that this public could never appreciate poetry "out of key with [its] time," recalls another poet's Grand Testament, which Pound likely had in mind at this time. Francois Villon's ''Grand Testament'' is a long poem detailing the circumstances of his wasted talent, especially due to an unappreciative reading public and his own dissolute and socially dismissive nature. The hidden allusion to Villon within the "ENVOI" is perhaps the most striking of the work. Villon acrostically inserts his name in the envoi of his poem: 

''"Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit ''

''Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit ''

''Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien s'entresuit ''

''L'ung vault l'autre, c'est a mau rat mau chat ''

''Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit ''

''Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit ''

''En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat."<ref>Accessed November 11, 2009 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12246/12246-8.txt ; Pound also alludes to Villon's work with his "in l'an trentuniesme/ De son eage...," which echoes the first line of Villon's Testament, "En l'an trentiesme de mon age..." Furthermore, his first large project upon arriving in Paris was an adaptation of Villon's Testament. Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York 2003), 1217.</ref>''

And Pound acrostically inserts two words of concealed vituperation: 

"Hadst thou but song 

As thou hast subjects known, 

Then were there cause in thee that should condone 

Even my faults that heavy upon me lie 

... 

Life to the moment, 

I would bid them live 

As roses might, in magic amber laid, 

Red overwrought with orange and all made..." 

It is impossible to determine if this 'HATE' is self-hate and this 'LIAR' is Pound's assessment of himself for having pursued a poetic program that was not of his time. But the dismissal of the poetic program, which would have valorized a form like the envoi, corresponds with the loss of the "ENVOI" from a foregrounded position ("ENVOI (1919)") after 1919. The old forms have failed him, or he has failed them. Either way, the resultant poet, the poet that emerges in the second part, "Mauberley," is an aesthete without the conviction to "wring[ ] lilies from the acorn." And his poetic project, though still absorbed in tradition and rangy allusion, is now limited to satire. 

Pound's satirical mode in the second part of the poem serves to spelunk the caverns of a poet resigned to hollow productions. His understanding of the substance and style of satire is outlined in an essay on Jules Laforgue in an issue of ''Poetry'' from 1917. He writes: 

"Laforgue was a purge and a critic... He is the finest wrought; he is most "verbalist." Bad verbalism is rhetoric, or the use of cliche unconsciously, or a mere playing with phrases. But there is good verbalism, distinct from lyricism or imagism, and in this Laforgue is a master... The tyro cannot play about with such things, the game is too dangerous. Verbalism demands a set form used with irreproachable skill. Satire needs, usually, the form of cutting rhymes to drive it home."<ref>"Irony, Laforgue, and Some Satire," Poetry, Vol. XI, No. II, November 1917 (Chicago), 93-98.</ref> 

The critic who takes cliche as the object of his critique is simultaneously a critic of an overused phrase and of the communicants who keep the overused phrase in currency by continuing to use it. Laforgue can satirize society and its less vital speech habits in a single stroke. One could easily replace Laforgue's name in the previous quotation with Eliot's and see why Pound saw so much of Laforgue both in Eliot's satirical mode and his exquisite rhymes: 

''"Je ne suis pas "ce gaillard-la!" ni le superbe! Mais mon ame, qu'un cri un peu cru exacerbe, Est au fond distinguee et franche comme un herbe."''<ref>Ibid., 96.</ref> 

"In the room the women come and go 

Talking of Michelangelo..."<ref>Accessed November 18, 2009, at http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html .</ref> 

Pound's own use of this satiric style is evident in the first lines of the second part of ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'': 

"Turned from the "eau forte 

Par Jaquemart"..." 

Cutting lines of rhymes, of course, do not constitute satire. The hypercritical introspection of characters like J. Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is the main engine of the satiric mode in these poems. And, in Pound's poem, the hypercritical introspection is communicated as poetic self-referentiality. Not only does the second part quote the first part, with "His true Penelope/ Was Flaubert," it also explicitly cross-references a page in the first part, with the title of its third section, ""The Age Demanded" Vide Poem II. Page [ ]." The reader is referred to a previous section and indeed can only properly process "The Age Demanded" by reading it in consideration of "Poem II. Page [ ]." The retrospective inwardness of the second part's formal features is resonant with Mauberley's fundamental failure. Mauberley cannot look beyond himself and his fancies. His disconnect from the world is expressed with lines such as the following: "Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,/ Irresponse to human aggression.." Mauberley's disconnect by self-confinement limits his aesthetic to the maudlin and renders his socialization insensitive. Pound, perhaps, by 1920 was feeling such tendencies developing in himself. 

The poem ends with the forging of a medallion. "A sleek head emerges" but, as was predicted in the first section, this artist could only accomplish "an art/ In profile." The full figure is missing. The medallion emblematizes Mauberley's inability to apprehend and articulate depth of experience. In December of 1920 he proclaimed his departure from England and by mid 1921 he had settled in Paris. As he tells in a later Canto, he left England with "a letter of [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Thomas_Hardy Thomas Hardy]'s."<ref>The Cantos (New York 1970), 500.</ref> It was likely the last letter he could have received in London from Hardy, dated December 3, 1920, which was responding to Pound's gift of a copy of ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'', and states, "your muse asks for considerable deliberation in estimating her."<ref>Hardy, Collected Letters, Volume 6: 1920-25 (New York 1987), 49.</ref> The statement, at least, vindicated the poetry's allusiveness and acknowledged its depth. 

<references />

[[Category:Ezra_Pound,_1920]]

The Rainbow

2009-11-19T03:31:52Z

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	<br> <br>While drafting ''The Rainbow'', Lawrence read ''Christian Symbolism ''by Katherine Jenner and recorded that he “liked it very much.” The somewhat obscure text, published by Methuen in the Little Books on Art Series, provided Lawrence with “a new respect for the old framework of Christian symbolism.”<ref>T.R. Wright, D.H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86.</ref> He began, as Wright further explains, to see Christ as having symbolic value—rather than historical or redemptive. Raised in a decidedly Protestant, blue-collar home, this new perspective on Christianity marked a sizable shift for Lawrence.<ref>Wright, 86.</ref> A symbolic view of Christ offered opportunities for departure from the dogmatic doctrines and practices that the Church espoused. Moreover, in his reading of Jenner, he discovered his lifelong fascination with the symbol of the phoenix—a symbol that would often appear in and on the covers of subsequent works. Along with the phoenix’s connection to Christ’s death and resurrection, Lawrence became fixated with Christ’s phrase “you must be born again.” He saw this command as fundamental to all human and religious experience—the necessity to break from the past, parents, and society.<ref>Wright, 93.</ref>		<br> <br>While drafting ''The Rainbow'', Lawrence read ''Christian Symbolism ''by Katherine Jenner and recorded that he “liked it very much.” The somewhat obscure text, published by Methuen in the Little Books on Art Series, provided Lawrence with “a new respect for the old framework of Christian symbolism.”<ref>T.R. Wright, D.H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86.</ref> He began, as Wright further explains, to see Christ as having symbolic value—rather than historical or redemptive. Raised in a decidedly Protestant, blue-collar home, this new perspective on Christianity marked a sizable shift for Lawrence.<ref>Wright, 86.</ref> A symbolic view of Christ offered opportunities for departure from the dogmatic doctrines and practices that the Church espoused. Moreover, in his reading of Jenner, he discovered his lifelong fascination with the symbol of the phoenix—a symbol that would often appear in and on the covers of subsequent works. Along with the phoenix’s connection to Christ’s death and resurrection, Lawrence became fixated with Christ’s phrase “you must be born again.” He saw this command as fundamental to all human and religious experience—the necessity to break from the past, parents, and society.<ref>Wright, 93.</ref>

-	<br>Reading Jenner~~, coupled with Frieda’s sexual inhibitions,~~ had a profound effect on Lawrence while he worked on ''The Rainbow''.<ref>Worthen, 112.</ref> As he drafted the novel and reordered his views regarding Christianity and its symbols, he formulated a particular brand of Biblical intertextuality that sought to challenge worn-out and archaic dogmas of the religion—ones that were incongruous with the changes in the modern culture. With ''The Rainbow'', he discovered that he could perform a double duty, synthesizing the spiritual with the sensual, thereby commenting on both. He reveals, primarily through his female characters and their spiritual and sexual awakenings, that old, dogmatic forms of Christianity—literal interpretations of Scripture, male domination, sexual repression—will not hold up in a modern society, thus rendering the religion void. For Lawrence, Christianity, like art and literature, must find a fresh way to adapt and speak to the changes of the culture. Through ''The Rainbow'', he aims, then, to raise Christianity from the ashes and express that the faith itself must be born again. In short, the novel is an attempt to pen a new Gospel.	+	<br>Reading Jenner had a profound effect on Lawrence while he worked on ''The Rainbow''.<ref>Worthen, 112.</ref> As he drafted the novel and reordered his views regarding Christianity and its symbols, he formulated a particular brand of Biblical intertextuality that sought to challenge worn-out and archaic dogmas of the religion—ones that were incongruous with the changes in the modern culture. With ''The Rainbow'', he discovered that he could perform a double duty, synthesizing the spiritual with the sensual, thereby commenting on both. He reveals, primarily through his female characters and their spiritual and sexual awakenings, that old, dogmatic forms of Christianity—literal interpretations of Scripture, male domination, sexual repression—will not hold up in a modern society, thus rendering the religion void. For Lawrence, Christianity, like art and literature, must find a fresh way to adapt and speak to the changes of the culture. Through ''The Rainbow'', he aims, then, to raise Christianity from the ashes and express that the faith itself must be born again. In short, the novel is an attempt to pen a new Gospel.

	<br>Unlike modernist contemporaries such as [[Virginia Woolf]] or [[James Joyce]], Lawrence ascribes The Rainbow with a decidedly traditional narrative style. Throughout the novel, Lawrence appropriates the simple, repetitive syntax of Scripture as well as a genealogical narrative structure reminiscent of Genesis. The Brangwen family, the reader discovers, has existed on the Marsh Farm for generations, and the narrative describes these generations with scriptural weight, reflecting the Abrahamic line found in the Pentateuch. Lawrence uses Biblical language to describe the family in the first chapter: “So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of money.”<ref>D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 9.</ref> In the narration of the Brangwen’s story, Lawrence often uses repetition, and his shorter, somewhat curt sentences attempt to mirror the Bible’s didacticism. Like the writers of Scripture, Lawrence wants to make certain that his readers understand his new Gospel. He goes so far as to adopt the chiastic structure inherent in the Psalms or the Gospels. A scriptural example of this technique is found in the parable of the vineyard workers when Christ remarks, “So the last shall be first, and the first last.”<ref>The Holy Bible, King James Version (American Bible Society, 1999), Matt. 20:16.</ref> In The Rainbow, Tom’s inebriated, often incoherent wedding speech is also chiastic when he says, “A man…enjoys being a man: for what purpose was he made a man, if not to enjoy it.”<ref>Lawrence, 128.</ref> Lawrence, then, uses the Bible as an intertext to support his new Gospel. Similar to Saint Paul’s epistles, he seeks to reveal a vast and authoritative knowledge of Scripture to engender deference from his readers.		<br>Unlike modernist contemporaries such as [[Virginia Woolf]] or [[James Joyce]], Lawrence ascribes The Rainbow with a decidedly traditional narrative style. Throughout the novel, Lawrence appropriates the simple, repetitive syntax of Scripture as well as a genealogical narrative structure reminiscent of Genesis. The Brangwen family, the reader discovers, has existed on the Marsh Farm for generations, and the narrative describes these generations with scriptural weight, reflecting the Abrahamic line found in the Pentateuch. Lawrence uses Biblical language to describe the family in the first chapter: “So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of money.”<ref>D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 9.</ref> In the narration of the Brangwen’s story, Lawrence often uses repetition, and his shorter, somewhat curt sentences attempt to mirror the Bible’s didacticism. Like the writers of Scripture, Lawrence wants to make certain that his readers understand his new Gospel. He goes so far as to adopt the chiastic structure inherent in the Psalms or the Gospels. A scriptural example of this technique is found in the parable of the vineyard workers when Christ remarks, “So the last shall be first, and the first last.”<ref>The Holy Bible, King James Version (American Bible Society, 1999), Matt. 20:16.</ref> In The Rainbow, Tom’s inebriated, often incoherent wedding speech is also chiastic when he says, “A man…enjoys being a man: for what purpose was he made a man, if not to enjoy it.”<ref>Lawrence, 128.</ref> Lawrence, then, uses the Bible as an intertext to support his new Gospel. Similar to Saint Paul’s epistles, he seeks to reveal a vast and authoritative knowledge of Scripture to engender deference from his readers.

Swann's Way

2009-11-19T03:29:48Z

Literary Expression of the Unconscious in Swann’s Way:

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-	Proust’s obsessive writing practice suggests a darker desperation, one that points to an overwhelming anxiety far beyond a writer’s typical frustration with language or plot. Proust’s anxiety stemmed from what he termed involuntary memory. Through sensory response to an object or smell, he was often helplessly transported to memories of his childhood, memories that—in the eclipsing shadow of his mother’s death in 1905—he was desperate to reclaim. His inability to physically experience the people and places that memory, through the senses, conjured in his mind produced a paralytic disquietude. His mother never appeared bodily. He was unable to feel the warmth of her skin. She had gone to a place forever veiled, a place to which he could not follow. Proust, in turn, understood that his elusive past must serve as the subject for his fiction. Thus, he already had his source material. Yet, he was unable to find the key to unlock his story. In the preface to ''Contre Sainte Beuve'', he states, “Everyday I attach less and less importance to the intellect. Everyday I realize more that it is only by other means that a writer can regain something of our impressions, reach, that is, a particle of himself, the only material for art.” This frustration with the limitations of literature—specifically the traditional novel—propelled Proust to seek a transcendent, sensual experience through literary expression. In ''Swann’s Way'', he employs a particular first-person narrative stance that substantiates an exploration of the unconscious. Proust, therefore, discovers that, through reordering and recreating memory, it is possible to reclaim the past.	+	Proust’s obsessive writing practice suggests a darker desperation, one that points to an overwhelming anxiety far beyond a writer’s typical frustration with language or plot. Proust’s anxiety stemmed from what he termed involuntary memory. Through sensory response to an object or smell, he was often helplessly transported to memories of his childhood, memories that—in the eclipsing shadow of his mother’s death in 1905—he was desperate to reclaim. His inability to physically experience the people and places that memory, through the senses, conjured in his mind produced a paralytic disquietude. His mother never appeared bodily. He was unable to feel the warmth of her skin. She had gone to a place forever veiled, a place to which he could not follow. Proust, in turn, understood that his elusive past must serve as the subject for his fiction. Thus, he already had his source material. Yet, he was unable to find the key to unlock his story. In the preface to ''Contre Sainte Beuve'', he states, “Everyday I attach less and less importance to the intellect. Everyday I realize more that it is only by other means that a writer can regain something of our impressions, reach, that is, a particle of himself, the only material for art.”<ref>Painter, George D, Marcel Proust: A Biography (Random House, 1958), 129.</ref> This frustration with the limitations of literature—specifically the traditional novel—propelled Proust to seek a transcendent, sensual experience through literary expression. In ''Swann’s Way'', he employs a particular first-person narrative stance that substantiates an exploration of the unconscious. Proust, therefore, discovers that, through reordering and recreating memory, it is possible to reclaim the past.

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-	<references />	+	<references />

-	[[Category:~~Marcel_Proust~~]] [[Category:1913]]	+	[[Category:Marcel Proust]] [[Category:1913]]

Thirties Marxist fiction and late modernism

2009-11-19T00:28:15Z

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'''Late thirties Marxist fiction and late modernism'''

In the following paper I examine a recent turn in the study of Marxist fiction of the late thirties and early forties towards a conception of these texts as examples of second generation modernism. Although this classification of writers such as Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Edward Upward and Patrick Hamilton is more accurate than the previous tendency to see them as peddlers of stultifyingly orthodox socialist realism, it is nevertheless somewhat inadequate. Rather than representing a moment of late modernism, the formal experimentation of late thirties Marxist fiction should rather be seen as a response to the demands of engaged realism as put forward in the work of Georg Lukács. Taking the example of Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel Hangover Square and Edward Upward’s Journey to the Border (1938), I thus posit a new reading of this body of work which reintegrates the commitment to Communism of these writers to a reading attentive to their vibrant formal experimentation. In fact, it is precisely the commitment to a search for engaged form which accounts most convincingly for the fascinatingly heterodox forms of this body of work.

 

For many years, English leftist novels of the late thirties – particularly those associated with the Popular Front – were seen primarily as dreary socialist-realist narratives. This view was inaugurated by George Orwell in ‘Inside the Whale’ where he argued that the political orthodoxy of the thirties precluded the production of any good novels: "it is probably not a coincidence that the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."<ref>"Inside the Whale" in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940; repr. London: Penguin, 1962), 9-50 (39).</ref> This is a view which sadly endured for some time. For instance, Valentine Cunningham, in his 1988 work, British Writer of the Thirties, bluntly states that "British Marxists had put their shirts on Comrade Radek’s doctrines of Socialist Realism issued at the Moscow Writer’s Congress of 1934". Cunningham argues that, for Marxists of this period, "the plainer, the more revelatory the linguistic medium and the more like the most naturalistic of nineteenth-century fiction the novel, the better."<ref>British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5.</ref> This view has now however been robustly challenged. Janet Montfiore’s excellent study, Men and Women Writer of the 1930s trenchantly debunks the Orwellian orthodoxy: "anyone who actually knows the literature of the late thirties, however, must wonder just how much of it Orwell bothered to read."<ref>Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (London: Routledge, 1996), 19.</ref> But the question remains, how are we to classify this body of work, in which political message and literary form operate in a series of complex dialectics which belie any attempt to generically classify these novels as realism, allegory or fantasy, as entertainments or political tracts? One answer was given recently in a recent article by Gerald Barrett, in which he argues for a re-appreciation of Hamilton as a modernist writer, despite Hamilton’s avowed rejection of modernism:

Hamilton’s antagonism to what he regarded as the excesses of certain modernist writers need not, however,   disqualify  him from being one of them. Indeed, there is a case to be made for including Hamilton in a second wave of modernist writers that includes James Hanley, Edward Upward, Rex Warner and Henry Green, writers who absorbed the lessons of Joyce and Woolf but did not necessarily feel compelled to write that way themselves.<ref>Gerald Barrett, “Hamilton and the Nets of Language,” Critical Engagements I.1 (2007), 212-234 (213).</ref>

Barrett examines how Hamilton’s deployment of the abuse of language reveals his ‘admittedly subdued affinities with modernism’<ref>Ibid., 213.</ref> and provides nuanced and convincing reading of the modernist echoes in Hamilton’s work, and I do not seek to deny these echoes. However, I do want to suggest that there is another, potentially more suggestive way to see how Hamilton’s fascinating formal experiment in this novel arises, which is Hamilton’s engagement with precisely those theories of high realism which have been associated with the worst excesses of socialist realism: those of Georg Lukács.

 

What is set up in Lukács’s work in the late thirties – particularly in the 1938 essay ‘Realism in the Balance’ and in The Historical Novel (1937) – is a sense of the herculean task of the committed realist novelist. The task facing Popular Front novelists was, for Lukács, nothing less than world-changing: 

Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history. This will prepare it for the new type of revolutionary democracy that is represented by the Popular Front.<ref>“Realism in the Balance” trans. Rodney Livingstone in Aesthetics and Politics (1938; repr. London: Verso, 1977), 28-60 (56-7).</ref> 

What these incredibly strong claims for literature require is a glorified conception of a certain type of literary artist: "the profundity of the great realist, the extent and the endurance of his success, depends in great measure on how clearly he perceives – as a creative writer – the true significance of whatever phenomenon he depicts."<ref>Ibid., 33.</ref> Lukács also argues that the realist writer "knows how thoughts and emotions grow out of the life of society and how experiences and emotions are parts of the total complex of reality. As a realist he assigns these parts to their rightful place within the total life context."<ref>Ibid., 36.</ref> What this creates for the committed novelist of the period is a sort of neurosis, or enabling tension. Whilst adhering to something like a traditional realist narrative praxis – noting the true significance of the phenomena observed – he or she must also prepare the soul of the masses for a new epoch in history. It is precisely the daunting level of this task as set up in the Communist Party discourse about the writer in the late thirties that accounts for the search for new forms of the novel in writer such as Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Edward Upward and, particularly, Patrick Hamilton.

 

Hangover Square is set between the Munich Peace Conference and the declaration of war, and follows the doomed, sleepwalking progress of its protagonist towards his murder of his fascist supporting tormentors. What is most interesting about the novel is the sense in which the central characters are simultaneously aware and unaware of the impending crisis, at once inscribed in world history and yet strangely removed from it. In the following passage George, the sleepwalking protagonist, is describing his feelings about the Munich agreement, which his tormentors, Netta and Peter, greet with jubilation.

Oh yes, it was their cup of tea all right, was Munich. But it wasn’t his. He didn’t know much about politics, he didn’t know as much as them (not to talk about, anyway), but he knew that Munich was a phony business. Fine for an Earl’s court binge, but a phony business, however much you talked. Shame, that was all he had felt, shame which he couldn’t analyse. He had felt it all the time they were getting drunk – in fact he had hardly been able to drink at all himself. He was so ashamed he could hardly look at the pictures…All grinning, shaking hands, frock-coats, top-hats, uniforms, car rides, cheers – it was like a sort of super-fascist wedding or christening. (Peter, of course, was a fascist, or had been at one time – used to go about Chelsea in a uniform.) And then home again, news-reels, balconies. ‘I think that it is peace in our time,’ Mrs Chamberlain the first lady of the land…He was ashamed then, and he was still ashamed.<ref>Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (1941; repr, London: Penguin, 2007), 32.</ref>

 

Note how the event of the Munich Treaty is grafted onto the private sphere through the idea of it being sufficient reason for a group of fascist sympathizers in West London to get drunk, followed by the even more arresting conception of a "super fascist wedding or christening" by which the personal and the political are embroiled in a peculiarly synthetic way. Here is another particularly telling passage, in which a character becomes disassociated from his own experience, and the narrative passage devolves into a series of arrestingly topical details which punctuate and disrupt the process of association.

 

In the middle of the square the effigy of Shakespeare stared greyly out in the direction of the Empire Cinema with its bright advertisements of ‘Goodbye, Mr Chips’, with Robert Donat and Greer Garson. A pidgeon had alighted on the head of the poet, who seemed to be watching the red coat […] of the man who cleaned shoes on top of the Men’s Lavatories. Fine, fine, fine…Blue and sunshine everywhere… Fine for the King and Queen in Canada… Fine for the salvaging of the Thetis… Fine for the West Indian team… Fine for the I.R.A. and their cloakrooms… Fine for Hitler in Czechoslovakia… Fine for Mr Strang in Moscow… Fine for Mr Chamberlain, who believed it was peace in our time – his umbrella a parasol!... You couldn’t believe it would ever break, that the bombs had to fall.<ref>Ibid., 101.</ref>

 

In Hangover Square we thus see the culmination of the productive formal neuroses of the thirties. Whilst the text ostensibly sets out to show the deep dialectical entanglement between the individual and the world historical, again and again, the syntheses possible within this model are found to be imperfect at best, and hopelessly confused at worst. What Hamilton’s novel lucidly dramatizes is not only the uncertain fate of Europe but also the fate of realism hanging in the balance; the sense throughout the novel is that sleek dialectical reflection, despite its desirability, is a near impossible task for the committed writer of the period.

 

A similar anxiety is at work in Edward Upward’s 1938 novel, Journey to the Border. The protagonist of Upward’s novel is known by his occupation, always referred to as ‘the tutor’. This designation is designed to highlight the pathetic inadequacy of such roles in a new, unstable world, much as the delusional alcoholic Geoffroy Firmin is referred to as ‘the consul’ throughout Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. But what is most important about this ironic moniker is that it is a comment on the key concept of typicality. Lukács asserted that the true realist examines the deep dialectics of typicality: 

Since such realism must be concerned with the creation of types […] the realist must seek out the lasting features in people, in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have to act; he must focus on those elements which endure over long periods and which constitute the objective human tendencies of society and indeed of mankind as a whole.<ref>"Realism in the Balance," 47.</ref>

 In Upward’s novel, the precariousness of the tutor’s position is precisely the grounds for the incessant use of his occupation as his moniker. Upward therefore questions the reflection of typicality in the representational strategies of the novelist, whilst clearly acknowledging the importance of the concept of typicality itself. What we see in Upward as in Hamilton is an anxious sense of the overweening importance of the task of the committed realist writer set up by the grand claims of Lukácsian realism. How this moment in the development of the novel can be reintegrated into a wider narrative of twentieth century literary history is a difficult question. But one structurally tempting impulse which must be resisted is to begin to see this Marxist crisis of representation at play in the run up to the Second World War as a recapitulation of the very different, earlier crisis of high modernism. For to do so would not only do violence to the historical specificity of this crucial juncture in literary history whilst also needlessly rearticulating the hegemony of the First World War in the study of twentieth century literature, but would also overlook the particular influence of the thought of Georg Lukács, the most important strain in Marxist literary theory of the period. Moreover, the condemnation by writers such as Hamilton of high modernism (he infamously dubbed it ‘meaningless masturbation’), should be read as a convinced rejection of just one way of making new.<ref>Patrick Hamilton, Impromptu in Moribundia (1939; repr. Nottingham: Nottingham Trent, 1999),164.</ref> Marxist fiction of the late thirties thus provides a particularly salient example of how the subordinationand co-option of other forms of experimental fiction to the rubric of high modernism is no longer a tenable way to read twentieth century literature.

The Rainbow

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	== Lukács and typicality ==		== Lukács and typicality ==

-	<br>         Moving away from this orthodoxy, I want to suggest that, whilst it is hard to disagree that ''The Rainbow ''contains elements of both more traditional realism narrative praxis (particularly the echoes of the ''Bildungsroman ''format and the linear narrative), ''and ''more experimental, modernist elements (in particular, the introspective examination of personal sexuality), there is one important way in which ''The Rainbow ''can be seen primarily as a realist text. This is the way in which the concept of ''typicality'' as developed by Georg Lukács in the 1930s is an ever present - although sometimes obscured - structure in the text. There has been some resistance in Lawrence studies to the application of Lukácsian matrices to even ''Sons and Lovers'', a resistance which is hard to countenenace, particularly given the utter saturation of both Lawrence and Lukács in Balzac at precisely the time at which the former was working on ''Sons and Lovers ''and the latter was developing his theory of high realism. The essential problem stems from a misreading of Lukács's concept of typicality which we can observe in Jack Stewart's comparison, "one difference between Lukács's theory and Lawrence's practice is that  Lukács, following Marxist doctrine, sees realism as dealing with types rather than individuals, and as consequently anti-subjectivist and anti-impressionist."<ref>Jack Stewart, The Vital Art of D. H. Larence: vision and expression (Carbondale, IL.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 28. It seems that Stewart is deploying the standard Cold War reading of Lukacs as the Stalinist peddler of socialist realism, an absurdity seeing as Lukacs provides perhaps the most important and enduring critique of socialist realism, encoded in his work as the 'bad immediacy' of photographic naturalism.</ref> This is not what Lukácsian realism is at all: rather, in Lukács's conception of typicality realism expresses the deep dialectical entanglement between the individual and the world historical, which must attend to the individual as an important entity in itself ~~and, in Lukács~~'~~s reading of nineteenth century texts, for itself: this is particularly obvious in Lukács~~'~~s Hegelian discussion of the~~ '~~world historical individual~~' in ''~~The Historical Novel~~''~~.<ref>See Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1937, repr. London~~: ~~Penguin, 1960), particularly 40-41.~~<~~/ref~~>	+	<br>         Moving away from this orthodoxy, I want to suggest that, whilst it is hard to disagree that ''The Rainbow ''contains elements of both more traditional realism narrative praxis (particularly the echoes of the ''Bildungsroman ''format and the linear narrative), ''and ''more experimental, modernist elements (in particular, the introspective examination of personal sexuality), there is one important way in which ''The Rainbow ''can be seen primarily as a realist text. This is the way in which the concept of ''typicality'' as developed by Georg Lukács in the 1930s is an ever present - although sometimes obscured - structure in the text. There has been some resistance in Lawrence studies to the application of Lukácsian matrices to even ''Sons and Lovers'', a resistance which is hard to countenenace, particularly given the utter saturation of both Lawrence and Lukács in Balzac at precisely the time at which the former was working on ''Sons and Lovers ''and the latter was developing his theory of high realism. The essential problem stems from a misreading of Lukács's concept of typicality which we can observe in Jack Stewart's comparison, "one difference between Lukács's theory and Lawrence's practice is that  Lukács, following Marxist doctrine, sees realism as dealing with types rather than individuals, and as consequently anti-subjectivist and anti-impressionist."<ref>Jack Stewart, The Vital Art of D. H. Larence: vision and expression (Carbondale, IL.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 28. It seems that Stewart is deploying the standard Cold War reading of Lukacs as the Stalinist peddler of socialist realism, an absurdity seeing as Lukacs provides perhaps the most important and enduring critique of socialist realism, encoded in his work as the 'bad immediacy' of photographic naturalism.</ref> This is not what Lukácsian realism is at all: rather, in Lukács's conception of typicality realism expresses the deep dialectical entanglement between the individual and the world historical, which must attend to the individual as an important entity in itself. In '' "''The Intellectual Physiogonomy in Characterisation," Lukács clearly stated this double nature underlying his concept of typicality, which must simultaneously be individuals ''and ''social types:<br>

-	<br>	+	A group of living people emerges before us, unforgettable etched in their individuality. And all these people have been individualised exclusively through their intellectual physiognomy, distinguished one from the other and developed into individuals who are simultaneously types.<ref>"The Intellectual Physigonomy in Charaterisation," in Writer and Critic (London: Merlin, 1970), 149-189 (150).</ref>

-	~~        Lukács's paradigmatic statement of the concept of typicality comes in his 1938 essay, "Realism in the Balance':<br>~~	+

-	~~Realism must be concerned with the creation~~ of ~~types [...] the realist writer must seek out the lasting features~~ in ~~people in their relations with each other and in the situations in which they have~~ to ~~act; he must focus on those elements which endure over long period and which constitute~~ the ~~objective human tendencies~~ of ~~society and indeed~~ of ~~mankind as a whole~~.<ref>~~Georg Lukacs~~, "~~Realism in the Balance~~," ~~trans~~. ~~Rodney Livingstone in Aesthetics~~ and ~~Politics~~ (London: ~~Verso~~, ~~1971~~), 28-59 (47).</ref><br>	+	This way of thinking about character in literature (stretching back of course to Engels's famous letter to Margaret Harkness) stems from the philosophically realist claim of classical Marxist epistemology, the reflection (''Abbildlehre'') of the long-lasting structures of reality in the superstructure of culture.<ref>Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Margaret Harkness," in eds. Milne and Eagleton, Marxist Literary Theory (London: Blackwell, 1996), 40-42 (41).</ref> Lukács also argues that the realist writer "knows how thoughts and emotions grow out of the life of society and how experiences and emotions are parts of the total complex of reality. As a realist he assigns these parts to their rightful place within the total life context."<ref>Ibid., 36.</ref> Lukács's theory of realism is sensitive to the representation by the inner life of the individual character of wider and deeper trends in society as a whole: it is precisely this relationship which creates the dialectics of typicality.

-	This line of thought (stretching back of course to Engels's famous letter to Margaret Harkness) stems from the philosophically realist claim of classical Marxist epistemology, the reflection (''Abbildlehre'') of the long-lasting structures of reality in the superstructure of culture.<ref>Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Margaret Harkness," in eds. Milne and Eagleton, Marxist Literary Theory (London: Blackwell, 1996), 40-42 (41).</ref> Lukács also argues that the realist writer "knows how thoughts and emotions grow out of the life of society and how experiences and emotions are parts of the total complex of reality. As a realist he assigns these parts to their rightful place within the total life context."<ref>Ibid., 36.</ref> Lukács's theory of realism is sensitive to the representation by the inner life of the individual character of wider and deeper trends in society as a whole: it is precisely this relationship which creates the dialectics of typicality.	+	<br>
-		+
-	<br>	+

	== ''The Rainbow ''and typicality ==		== ''The Rainbow ''and typicality ==

Juno and the paycock

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	It is interesting to read this use of dialect as a perhaps incomplete assertion of Irish nationalist linguistics. O'Casey became a member of the Gaelic League in 1905, eventually becoming branch secretary and Gaelicising his name to Sean O Cathasaigh.<ref>Ayling, xi.</ref> That said, the Abbey Theater, while it did produce Gaelic plays including several by Gaelic League founder Douglas Hyde, was in fact angrily denounced by the Rev. Michael O'Flanagan of the Gaelic League in 1911:		It is interesting to read this use of dialect as a perhaps incomplete assertion of Irish nationalist linguistics. O'Casey became a member of the Gaelic League in 1905, eventually becoming branch secretary and Gaelicising his name to Sean O Cathasaigh.<ref>Ayling, xi.</ref> That said, the Abbey Theater, while it did produce Gaelic plays including several by Gaelic League founder Douglas Hyde, was in fact angrily denounced by the Rev. Michael O'Flanagan of the Gaelic League in 1911:
-	<blockquote>The plays are written in a new dialect of English produced by a literal translation of ~~Irish~~ idioms into ~~Gaelic~~.  This is a purely literary dialect, and is not spoken in any part of Ireland. The Gaelic League is not interested in the creation of a new dialect of English. Its concern is with the Irish language. The spirit of the Gaelic League is a thing entirely different from the spirit of the Abbey Theater, the very antithesis of it in many ways.<ref>"League Disowns Irish Players," New York Times, Dec 4, 1911. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E5DB1E31E233A25757C0A9649D946096D6CF></ref><br> </blockquote>	+	<blockquote>The plays are written in a new dialect of English produced by a literal translation of Gaelic idioms into Irish.  This is a purely literary dialect, and is not spoken in any part of Ireland. The Gaelic League is not interested in the creation of a new dialect of English. Its concern is with the Irish language. The spirit of the Gaelic League is a thing entirely different from the spirit of the Abbey Theater, the very antithesis of it in many ways.<ref>"League Disowns Irish Players," New York Times, Dec 4, 1911. &amp;lt;http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E5DB1E31E233A25757C0A9649D946096D6CF&amp;gt;</ref><br> </blockquote>
	While I cannot speak to the question of whether the language of the Abbey (notably here, language which predates O'Casey's play) was indeed a literary creation, it is clear that O'Casey is presenting a mode of speech that reflects the reality of spoken language in a way that Yeats is not.		While I cannot speak to the question of whether the language of the Abbey (notably here, language which predates O'Casey's play) was indeed a literary creation, it is clear that O'Casey is presenting a mode of speech that reflects the reality of spoken language in a way that Yeats is not.

	It is also worth looking at Yeatsian intertextuality through an examination of the character of Charlie Bentham. While Yeats and O'Casey did not fall out until 1929 when, as director of the Abbey, Yeats rejected O'Casey's play ''The Silver Tassie'', it is possible to view Bentham as an unflattering characture of Yeats. Like Yeats, Bentham describes himself as a "Theosophist" and comically describes his beliefs as the Boyle's listen:<br>		It is also worth looking at Yeatsian intertextuality through an examination of the character of Charlie Bentham. While Yeats and O'Casey did not fall out until 1929 when, as director of the Abbey, Yeats rejected O'Casey's play ''The Silver Tassie'', it is possible to view Bentham as an unflattering characture of Yeats. Like Yeats, Bentham describes himself as a "Theosophist" and comically describes his beliefs as the Boyle's listen:<br>
	<blockquote>'''''Betham''''': [. . .]. Theosophy's founded on The Vedas, the religious books of the East. Its central theme is the existence of an all-pervading Spirit-- the Life-Breath. Nothing really exists but this one Universal Life-Breath. And whatever even seems to exist separately from this Life-Breath, doesn't really exist at all. It is all vital force in man, in all animals, and in all vegetation. This Life-Breath is called the Prawna.<br>'''''Mrs. Boyle''''': The Prawna! What a comical name!<ref>O'Casey, 36-37.</ref><br> </blockquote>		<blockquote>'''''Betham''''': [. . .]. Theosophy's founded on The Vedas, the religious books of the East. Its central theme is the existence of an all-pervading Spirit-- the Life-Breath. Nothing really exists but this one Universal Life-Breath. And whatever even seems to exist separately from this Life-Breath, doesn't really exist at all. It is all vital force in man, in all animals, and in all vegetation. This Life-Breath is called the Prawna.<br>'''''Mrs. Boyle''''': The Prawna! What a comical name!<ref>O'Casey, 36-37.</ref><br> </blockquote>
-	Bentham is comically detached from the reality of daily Dublin life. Not only is his religious belief removed from the local in a way that seems nonsensical in light of the highly ~~local~~ nature of the play but its central focus on Spirit is in stark contrast to the material realities of the play. Jerry Devine, Charlie Bentham's rival in love, is described as "a type, becoming very common now in the Labor Movement"<ref>Ibid, 9.</ref>. It seems that Bentham too is a type, modelled on the eastward looking, spiritualist inclinations of certain modernist authors, notably Yeats. Bentham states "dogma has no attraction for me."<ref>Ibid, 36.</ref> In "The Second Coming", Yeats writes, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity" (lines 7-8).<ref>Yeats, "The Second Coming," 76.</ref> In O'Casey's world it is the worst, despite his greater acculturation, Bentham, who lacks all conviction, representing a rejection of the elitism of Yeats' politics in which the best are the artistic elite.	+	Bentham is comically detached from the reality of daily Dublin life. Not only is his religious belief removed from the local in a way that seems nonsensical in light of the highly parochial nature of the play but its central focus on Spirit is in stark contrast to the material realities of the play. Jerry Devine, Charlie Bentham's rival in love, is described as "a type, becoming very common now in the Labor Movement"<ref>Ibid, 9.</ref>. It seems that Bentham too is a type, modelled on the eastward looking, spiritualist inclinations of certain modernist authors, notably Yeats. Bentham states "dogma has no attraction for me."<ref>Ibid, 36.</ref> In "The Second Coming", Yeats writes, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity" (lines 7-8).<ref>Yeats, "The Second Coming," 76.</ref> In O'Casey's world it is the worst, despite his greater acculturation, Bentham, who lacks all conviction. representing a rejection of the elitism of Yeats' politics in which the best are the (admittedly politically passive) artistic elite.

-	It would seem presumptuous to mock the artist to whom O'Casey appealed to have his work staged; nevertheless, Bentham can be read as a sort of send-up of Yeats. Furthermore, it is ironic that Bentham, whose name hearkens back to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is so philosophically detached from the material world-- so detached indeed that he disappears by Act III, only leaving the consequence of his material presence, that is, Mary's pregnancy.	+	It would seem presumptuous to mock the artist to whom O'Casey appealed to have his work staged; nevertheless, Bentham can be read as a sort of send-up of Yeats. Furthermore, it is ironic that Bentham, whose name hearkens back to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is so philosophically detached from the material world-- so detached indeed that he disappears by Act III, only leaving the consequence of his material presence, that is, Mary's pregnancy.

	==  "Principle" and Reality, or O'Casey's Materialism ==		==  "Principle" and Reality, or O'Casey's Materialism ==

The Rainbow

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	In ''The Rainbow'' Lawrence constantly strives to create such a relationship, to seek out, to use Lukács's terms, "the lasting features in people, and indeed, the human tendencies of society and mankind as a whole." But it is also clear that Lawrence didn't think of what he was doing in such classically realist terms. Perhaps the clue to how this comes about might be found in Lawrence's letter to Edward Garnett about ''The Rainbow ''in 1914, in which he stressed that he was not going to present traditional notions of stable character, but rather to represent characters in flux. Nevertheless, Lawrence also stressed that he would create characters which represented "some greater, inhuman will"; using the metaphor of diamonds and coal, Lawrence claimed that there was also a permanance to his characters, and that whereas traditional novels would tell the story of the diamond, Lawrence wanted to tell the story of the underlying substance, coal.<ref>D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Edward Garnett, cited in James Wood, "Indroduction" to The Rainbow,</ref> This sounds rather like the classical Marxist epistemology of Lukácsian high realism, and indeed is simply a mystified version of the dialectics of typicality.		In ''The Rainbow'' Lawrence constantly strives to create such a relationship, to seek out, to use Lukács's terms, "the lasting features in people, and indeed, the human tendencies of society and mankind as a whole." But it is also clear that Lawrence didn't think of what he was doing in such classically realist terms. Perhaps the clue to how this comes about might be found in Lawrence's letter to Edward Garnett about ''The Rainbow ''in 1914, in which he stressed that he was not going to present traditional notions of stable character, but rather to represent characters in flux. Nevertheless, Lawrence also stressed that he would create characters which represented "some greater, inhuman will"; using the metaphor of diamonds and coal, Lawrence claimed that there was also a permanance to his characters, and that whereas traditional novels would tell the story of the diamond, Lawrence wanted to tell the story of the underlying substance, coal.<ref>D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Edward Garnett, cited in James Wood, "Indroduction" to The Rainbow,</ref> This sounds rather like the classical Marxist epistemology of Lukácsian high realism, and indeed is simply a mystified version of the dialectics of typicality.

-	<br>	+	<br>

	All the characters in ''The Rainbow'' represent clear social types, drawn more or less sensitively. I am just going to take a few salient examples. Winifried Inger, Ursula's schoolmistress with whom she has an affair, is given by Lawrence all the apparently typical attributes of the middle class Women's Movement at the turn of the century: educated at Newnham, belonging to "several athletic clubs," a debunker of religion and friend of "educated, unsatisfied people."<ref>Ibid., 311,318.</ref>   Will Brangwen is the typical artisan, integrated into the life of the parish and then into new educational structures which are springing up at the turn of the century. Particularly telling is Will's honeymoon anxiety, which is the point at which his interiority is most clearly explicable in terms of his class status: as an artisan, the idea of inactivity inside the home is especially difficult for him. His uncle, Tom Brangwen grows into his type over the first half of the novel, and becomes the satisfied, stout yeoman farmer, drawn by Lawrence in a description which almost lapses into stereotype, but which manages not quite to go this far through a certain amount of self-awareness (note the "lent itself"):		All the characters in ''The Rainbow'' represent clear social types, drawn more or less sensitively. I am just going to take a few salient examples. Winifried Inger, Ursula's schoolmistress with whom she has an affair, is given by Lawrence all the apparently typical attributes of the middle class Women's Movement at the turn of the century: educated at Newnham, belonging to "several athletic clubs," a debunker of religion and friend of "educated, unsatisfied people."<ref>Ibid., 311,318.</ref>   Will Brangwen is the typical artisan, integrated into the life of the parish and then into new educational structures which are springing up at the turn of the century. Particularly telling is Will's honeymoon anxiety, which is the point at which his interiority is most clearly explicable in terms of his class status: as an artisan, the idea of inactivity inside the home is especially difficult for him. His uncle, Tom Brangwen grows into his type over the first half of the novel, and becomes the satisfied, stout yeoman farmer, drawn by Lawrence in a description which almost lapses into stereotype, but which manages not quite to go this far through a certain amount of self-awareness (note the "lent itself"):

-	<br>	+	<br>

-	Tom Brangwen, the father, as he grew older seemed to mature into a gentleman-farmer. His figure lent itself: burly and handsome. His face remained fresh and his blue eyes as full of light, his thick hair and beard had turned gradually to a silky whiteness. It was his custom to laugh a great deal in his acquiescent, willful manner. Things had puzzled him very much, so he had taken the line of easy, good humoured acceptance.<ref>Ibid., 224-5.</ref><br>	+	Tom Brangwen, the father, as he grew older seemed to mature into a gentleman-farmer. His figure lent itself: burly and handsome. His face remained fresh and his blue eyes as full of light, his thick hair and beard had turned gradually to a silky whiteness. It was his custom to laugh a great deal in his acquiescent, willful manner. Things had puzzled him very much, so he had taken the line of easy, good humoured acceptance.<ref>Ibid., 224-5.</ref><br>

-	<br>	+	<br>

	Sometimes Lawrence's types are actually wholly stereotypical, which is particularly notable with the Polish characters: Paul Lynsky is of course the typical mid-century nationalist intellectual, "patriotic yet very European," Lydia Lynsky, The Widow, the homesick émigré adapted to English life, Baron Skrebensky is The Fallen Aristocrat, ‘madly proud’, who doesn’t understand lack of homage and is reintroduced into the social fabric as a clergyman. However, with Skrebensky jr., Lawrence provides the most acute presentation of typicality in the novel. Skrebensky represents the next stage in the dissolution of the aristocratic order: pathetically excited by Ursula’s playful idea of the restoration of aristocratic rule, his reactionary desire to be part of the colonial ruling class is ruthlessly and brilliantly exploded by Ursula in the most socially perceptive passage in the whole novel:		Sometimes Lawrence's types are actually wholly stereotypical, which is particularly notable with the Polish characters: Paul Lynsky is of course the typical mid-century nationalist intellectual, "patriotic yet very European," Lydia Lynsky, The Widow, the homesick émigré adapted to English life, Baron Skrebensky is The Fallen Aristocrat, ‘madly proud’, who doesn’t understand lack of homage and is reintroduced into the social fabric as a clergyman. However, with Skrebensky jr., Lawrence provides the most acute presentation of typicality in the novel. Skrebensky represents the next stage in the dissolution of the aristocratic order: pathetically excited by Ursula’s playful idea of the restoration of aristocratic rule, his reactionary desire to be part of the colonial ruling class is ruthlessly and brilliantly exploded by Ursula in the most socially perceptive passage in the whole novel:

-	<br>	+	<br>

	"You with your dainty fingers, and your going to India because you will be one of the somebodies there. It's a mere dodge, your going to India" [...] "You think that the Indians are simpler than us, and so you'll enjoy being near them and being a lord over them," she said. "And you'll feel so righteous, governing them for their own good. Who are you, to feel righteous. What are you righteous about, in your governing. Your governing stinks. What do you govern for, but to make things there as dead and mean as they are here?"<ref name="null">D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 427-8.</ref>		"You with your dainty fingers, and your going to India because you will be one of the somebodies there. It's a mere dodge, your going to India" [...] "You think that the Indians are simpler than us, and so you'll enjoy being near them and being a lord over them," she said. "And you'll feel so righteous, governing them for their own good. Who are you, to feel righteous. What are you righteous about, in your governing. Your governing stinks. What do you govern for, but to make things there as dead and mean as they are here?"<ref name="null">D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 427-8.</ref>

-	<br>	+	<br>

-	Ursula's analysis provides a moment in the text where there is a genuine sense of historical acuity manifest dialectically in the inner life of an individual character; Skrebensky's desire for colonial prestige is the perfect expression of precisely his position in the evolution of class society. Unfortunately, for much of the novel, the typicality structuring Lawrence's characters is either shrouded in the mystifications  ~~- Nietzschean, Freudian, biblical and, at times, simply Lawrentian -~~ which he insisted on deploying in his desire to make the novel new, or elsewhere diminished by a tendency towards clumsy stereotype. However, as George Orwell wrote of Lawrence "whatever else he was, he was honest," and Ursula's polemic is one moment where Lawrence's honesty overcomes his obscurantism, revealing the real structures which ultimately govern not only Lawrence's text, but also society as a whole.	+	Ursula's analysis provides a moment in the text where there is a genuine sense of historical acuity manifest dialectically in the inner life of an individual character; Skrebensky's desire for colonial prestige is the perfect expression of precisely his position in the evolution of class society. Unfortunately, for much of the novel, the typicality structuring Lawrence's characters is either shrouded in the mystifications which he insisted on deploying in his desire to make the novel new, or elsewhere diminished by a tendency towards clumsy stereotype. However, as George Orwell wrote of Lawrence "whatever else he was, he was honest," and Ursula's polemic is one moment where Lawrence's honesty overcomes his obscurantism, revealing the real structures which ultimately govern not only Lawrence's text, but also society as a whole.

-	<br>	+	<br>

	= Primitivism and the Gender of Media in ''The Rainbow''<br> =		= Primitivism and the Gender of Media in ''The Rainbow''<br> =

Yale Modernism Lab

2009-11-18T15:52:26Z

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-	Welcome to the Modernism Lab Wiki, a home for brief interpretive essays on literary works, authors and movements of the modernist period designed to complement Modernism Lab's research platform, [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/ynote/index.php YNote].	+	Welcome to the Modernism Lab Wiki, a home for brief interpretive essays on literary works, authors and movements of the modernist period designed to complement Modernism Lab's research platform, [http://modernism.research.yale.edu/ynote/index.php YNote].

	<br>		<br>

-	<u>Featured Article: Virginia Woolf's ''~~Roger Fry: A Biography~~''</u>	+	<u>Featured Article: Virginia Woolf's ''The Years''</u>

-	by [[~~Michael Shapiro~~]]	+	by [[Robert Higney]]

-	In ''~~Roger Fry~~''~~—the~~ last ~~book she saw to publication—Virginia~~ Woolf ~~experiments with~~ the ~~structure~~ and ~~style~~ of ~~biography~~. ~~She exercises editorial control to burnish~~ the ~~occasionally imperfect life~~ of ~~her subject~~ and, by ~~implication~~, to ~~smooth over public critiques~~ of the ~~Bloomsbury group~~.	+	[[Robert Higney\|<br>]][[Image:The Years.jpg\|thumb\|right\|232x324px]]Published in [[1937]], ''The Years'' was the last of [[Virginia Woolf]]’s novels to appear in print during her lifetime. Over the previous six years, Woolf had undertaken a massive project combining fiction and social critique that eventually produced both ''The Years'' and the polemical essays of [[Three Guineas\|''Three Guineas'']]. (While not the single volume tour de force that Woolf first envisioned, she would later write that the two works really constituted “one book.”) ''The Years'' consists of two long sections entitled “1880” and “Present Day” (approx. 80 and 120 pages, respectively) that bookend nine shorter sections, each headed only by a year: 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, and 1918. Sections open and are occasionally interrupted by passages of what could be termed panoramic narration that describes seasons, weather, celestial bodies, and the day to day movements of people and things before the its scope tightens to inhabit the consciousness of particular characters. Each section covers a single day with the exception of the first, which includes events on at least three days. <br>

-	~~[[Image:Fry, Self Portrait~~.~~jpg\|thumb\|right\|260x306px\|Roger Fry~~, ~~Self~~-~~Portrait~~, ~~1930~~-~~1934~~]]	+	<br> ''The Years'' defies plot summary and includes nothing that could be termed a continuous storyline or a central protagonist. Nor is there much of the charged, poetic language that works in many of Woolf’s novels to evoke memory and the processes of perception--indeed, among the novel’s distinguishing features is its curious flatness of affect or tone. Woolf presents a large cast of characters whose ordinary activities and thoughts we follow on seemingly random days over a span of fifty-odd years. ([[The Years\|more...]]).

-	<br> [[Roger Fry\|Fry]] (1866–[[1934]]) was an English artist and art scholar, a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1906–10) and the Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge (1933). He coined the term “post-Impressionism” and introduced England to its principal artists through [[First Post-Impressionist Exhibition\|two London exhibitions]] ([[1910\|1910]], [[1912\|1912]]); he [[Art\|worked with Clive Bell]] to develop a new theory of art—formalism—to justify post-Impressionism (1913–14); and most lastingly he founded and ran the Omega Workshops (1913–19), whose decorative crafts helped heal England’s interior design of the “eczematous eruption” of Victorian ornament.<ref name="null">Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1976, p. 188. All subsequent parenthetical citations refer to this volume.</ref>	+	<br>
-		+
-	<br> Fry was an intimate of the Bloomsbury circle from at least [[1911]], when he fell in love with [[Vanessa Bell]] during a tour of Turkey. Bell—Woolf’s older sister—was already married, and Fry had just admitted his wife of fifteen years to a mental hospital, but the Bloomsbury prejudice against monogamy encouraged their romance, which was genuine and lasting even if the affair was short. In [[1926]], longing for the domestic comforts of married life, Fry moved in with Helen Anrep, with whom he would remain until his death eight years later. ([[Roger Fry: A Biography\|more...]])<br>	+

	== <u>Articles by Year</u> ==		== <u>Articles by Year</u> ==
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-	<br>	+	<br>

	== <u>Articles by Author<br></u> ==		== <u>Articles by Author<br></u> ==

Edgar Eduardo Garcia

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	Edgar Garcia, a PhD student at Yale since 2008, is interested in language, poetry, politics, and early America.		Edgar Garcia, a PhD student at Yale since 2008, is interested in language, poetry, politics, and early America.
		+
		+	[[Quia Pauper Amavi]]

The Years

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	by [[Robert Higney]]		by [[Robert Higney]]

-	<br>Published in [[1937]], ''The Years'' was the last of [[Virginia Woolf]]’s novels to appear in print during her lifetime. Over the previous six years, Woolf had undertaken a massive project combining fiction and social critique that eventually produced both ''The Years'' and the polemical essays of [[Three Guineas\|''Three Guineas'']]. (While not the single volume tour de force that Woolf first envisioned, she would later write that the two works really constituted “one book.”) ''The Years'' consists of two long sections entitled “1880” and “Present Day” (approx. 80 and 120 pages, respectively) that bookend nine shorter sections, each headed only by a year: 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, and 1918. Sections open and are occasionally interrupted by passages of what could be termed panoramic narration that describes seasons, weather, celestial bodies, and the day to day movements of people and things before the its scope tightens to inhabit the consciousness of particular characters. Each section covers a single day with the exception of the first, which includes events on at least three days.	+	<br>Published in [[1937]], ''The Years'' was the last of [[Virginia Woolf]]’s novels to appear in print during her lifetime. Over the previous six years, Woolf had undertaken a massive project combining fiction and social critique that eventually produced both ''The Years'' and the polemical essays of [[Three Guineas\|''Three Guineas'']]. (While not the single volume tour de force that Woolf first envisioned, she would later write that the two works really constituted “one book.[[Image:The Years.jpg\|thumb\|right\|276x397px]]”) ''The Years'' consists of two long sections entitled “1880” and “Present Day” (approx. 80 and 120 pages, respectively) that bookend nine shorter sections, each headed only by a year: 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, and 1918. Sections open and are occasionally interrupted by passages of what could be termed panoramic narration that describes seasons, weather, celestial bodies, and the day to day movements of people and things before the its scope tightens to inhabit the consciousness of particular characters. Each section covers a single day with the exception of the first, which includes events on at least three days.

-	<br>''The Years'' defies plot summary and includes nothing that could be termed a continuous storyline or a central protagonist. Nor is there much of the charged, poetic language that works in many of Woolf’s novels to evoke memory and the processes of perception--indeed, among the novel’s distinguishing features is its curious flatness of affect or tone. Woolf presents a large cast of characters whose ordinary activities and thoughts we follow on seemingly random days over a span of fifty-odd years. In “1880” we meet Colonel Abel Pargiter; his wife Rose, on her deathbed; their children, Eleanor, Morris, Milly, Edward, Delia, Martin, and Rose; and their longtime female servant Crosby. Later we are introduced to cousin Kitty; to Abel’s brother Digby and his family (wife Eugenie, daughters Sarah and Maggie); to Sarah and Eleanor’s friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky; and to Morris’s children, Peggy and North. While not all of these characters are equally present in the novel (Eleanor, for example, appears quite often; Milly hardly at all), the narrator moves frequently among them, and the sheer number of significant figures conveys a sense of the personal and historical scope Woolf aimed to capture.	+	<br> ''The Years'' defies plot summary and includes nothing that could be termed a continuous storyline or a central protagonist. Nor is there much of the charged, poetic language that works in many of Woolf’s novels to evoke memory and the processes of perception--indeed, among the novel’s distinguishing features is its curious flatness of affect or tone. Woolf presents a large cast of characters whose ordinary activities and thoughts we follow on seemingly random days over a span of fifty-odd years. In “1880” we meet Colonel Abel Pargiter; his wife Rose, on her deathbed; their children, Eleanor, Morris, Milly, Edward, Delia, Martin, and Rose; and their longtime female servant Crosby. Later we are introduced to cousin Kitty; to Abel’s brother Digby and his family (wife Eugenie, daughters Sarah and Maggie); to Sarah and Eleanor’s friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky; and to Morris’s children, Peggy and North. While not all of these characters are equally present in the novel (Eleanor, for example, appears quite often; Milly hardly at all), the narrator moves frequently among them, and the sheer number of significant figures conveys a sense of the personal and historical scope Woolf aimed to capture.

	<br>''The Years'' has long suffered from critical indifference despite its early popularity: though it was Woolf’s best-selling novel during her lifetime and went on to be published, somewhat oddly, in an American Armed Forces edition, today it squares off with ''[[Night and Day]]'' for the title of Woolf’s least-read (certainly least-commented upon) novel. The lack of critical attention to the finished version of ''The Years'' is perhaps understandable when one considers the exhilaration with which Woolf first conceived the project:		<br>''The Years'' has long suffered from critical indifference despite its early popularity: though it was Woolf’s best-selling novel during her lifetime and went on to be published, somewhat oddly, in an American Armed Forces edition, today it squares off with ''[[Night and Day]]'' for the title of Woolf’s least-read (certainly least-commented upon) novel. The lack of critical attention to the finished version of ''The Years'' is perhaps understandable when one considers the exhilaration with which Woolf first conceived the project:
-	<blockquote>I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book--a sequel to a Room of Ones Own--about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps--Lord how exciting!</blockquote>	+	<blockquote>I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book--a sequel to a Room of Ones Own--about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps--Lord how exciting!</blockquote>
	In this spirit Woolf began work in October of 1932 on ''[[The Pargiters]]'', which was to be a “novel-essay” combining sections of historical fiction interspersed with critical commentary and explication. She abandoned this unusual though relatively straightforward form in February 1933 with a plan to incorporate the sections of commentary directly into the text of a far more ambitious book:		In this spirit Woolf began work in October of 1932 on ''[[The Pargiters]]'', which was to be a “novel-essay” combining sections of historical fiction interspersed with critical commentary and explication. She abandoned this unusual though relatively straightforward form in February 1933 with a plan to incorporate the sections of commentary directly into the text of a far more ambitious book:
-	<blockquote>I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold & adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society--nothing less: facts, as well as vision. And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night & Day . . . . It should aim at immense breadth and immense intensity. It should include satire, comedy, poetry, narrative, & what form is to hold them all together? Should I bring in a play, letters, poems? I think I begin to grasp the whole. And its to end with the press of daily normal life continuing. And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching--history, politics, feminism, art, literature--in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like admire hate & so on.</blockquote>	+	<blockquote>I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold & adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society--nothing less: facts, as well as vision. And to combine them both. I mean, The Waves going on simultaneously with Night & Day . . . . It should aim at immense breadth and immense intensity. It should include satire, comedy, poetry, narrative, & what form is to hold them all together? Should I bring in a play, letters, poems? I think I begin to grasp the whole. And its to end with the press of daily normal life continuing. And there are to be millions of ideas but no preaching--history, politics, feminism, art, literature--in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like admire hate & so on.</blockquote>
	Ultimately, Woolf would cut the social commentary completely, reserving it for ''Three Guineas'', and drastically diminish the narrative authority of some of the novel’s most striking and politicized characters (mainly Sarah and Nicholas, who, in the process of revision, go from a fiery anti-war feminist and a homosexual utopian thinker to more or less harmless cranks). In light of this early plan--which seems to promise something like a feminist riposte to landmark epics of high modernism like [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Ulysses]]'' and [[Ezra Pound]]'s ''[[Cantos]]''—later scholars have tended to view the relatively modest novel that resulted as at best a tactical retreat, at worst an outright failure.		Ultimately, Woolf would cut the social commentary completely, reserving it for ''Three Guineas'', and drastically diminish the narrative authority of some of the novel’s most striking and politicized characters (mainly Sarah and Nicholas, who, in the process of revision, go from a fiery anti-war feminist and a homosexual utopian thinker to more or less harmless cranks). In light of this early plan--which seems to promise something like a feminist riposte to landmark epics of high modernism like [[James Joyce]]'s ''[[Ulysses]]'' and [[Ezra Pound]]'s ''[[Cantos]]''—later scholars have tended to view the relatively modest novel that resulted as at best a tactical retreat, at worst an outright failure.

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	<br>''The Years'' thus speaks to modernist studies’ recent and still growing concerns with history and transnationalism; at the same time, its often un-“modernist” style troubles accounts of the history of the novel that engage with modernism primarily through a narrative of crisis, rupture, and fragmentation. Though it would perhaps be difficult to argue that ''The Years'' is in the first tier of Woolf’s fiction, neglect of the novel may also be due in part to a dominant account of the modernist novel that has not fully taken on the legacy of terms like character, realism, and representation and their associated critical stakes. ''The Years'' is particularly suited to draw our attention to these issues. As Woolf herself wrote, “Its different from the others of course: has I think more ‘real’ life in it; more blood & bone.”		<br>''The Years'' thus speaks to modernist studies’ recent and still growing concerns with history and transnationalism; at the same time, its often un-“modernist” style troubles accounts of the history of the novel that engage with modernism primarily through a narrative of crisis, rupture, and fragmentation. Though it would perhaps be difficult to argue that ''The Years'' is in the first tier of Woolf’s fiction, neglect of the novel may also be due in part to a dominant account of the modernist novel that has not fully taken on the legacy of terms like character, realism, and representation and their associated critical stakes. ''The Years'' is particularly suited to draw our attention to these issues. As Woolf herself wrote, “Its different from the others of course: has I think more ‘real’ life in it; more blood & bone.”

-	<br>	+	<br>
-		+
-	~~<references /><br>~~	+
-		+

		+	<references /><br>

	[[Category:Virginia_Woolf]] [[Category:1937]]		[[Category:Virginia_Woolf]] [[Category:1937]]

Image:The Years.jpg

2009-11-18T15:37:58Z

uploaded "[[Image:The Years.jpg]]"

New page

'Paris: A Poem'

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The Flaneur and The Peace Conference:

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	= ‘Paris’ and Its Journey =		= ‘Paris’ and Its Journey =

-	<br>Despite her legacy in the novel form, it is one of Mirrlees’s poetic works, ‘Paris: A Poem’, which is most significant in terms of the development of Modernism. The poem has avoided much critical attention, despite Julia Briggs (one of the few who has kept any sort of interest in the work alive), describing it as ‘modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition, written in a confidently experimental and avant-garde style’.<ref>Julia Briggs, ‘Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism’, Gender in Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Illinois, 2007), p.261</ref> It offers a description of the city in Spring 1919, where the themes of Paris mourning its war-dead as well as those of religion, art and literature, both past and present, can be found beneath the assembled fragments of street advertisements, overheard conversations and generally chaotic metropolitan impressions. Indeed, this juxtaposition of allusions has led it to be compared with [[T.S. Eliot\|Eliot’s]] later masterpiece, ''[[The Waste Land\|The Waste Land]]'', the similarities between the two drawn by critics such as Bruce Bailey, who yet lament their respective fates:	+	<br>Despite her legacy in the novel form, it is one of Mirrlees’s poetic works, ‘Paris: A Poem’, which is most significant in terms of the development of Modernism. The poem has avoided much critical attention, despite Julia Briggs (one of the few who has kept any sort of interest in the work alive), describing it as ‘modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition, written in a confidently experimental and avant-garde style’.<ref>Julia Briggs, ‘Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism’, Gender in Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Illinois, 2007), p.261</ref> It offers a description of the city in Spring 1919, where the themes of Paris mourning its war-dead as well as those of religion, art and literature, both past and present, can be found beneath the assembled fragments of street advertisements, overheard conversations and generally chaotic metropolitan impressions. Indeed, this juxtaposition of allusions has led it to be compared with [[T.S. Eliot\|Eliot’s]] later masterpiece, ''[[The Waste Land\|The Waste Land]]'', the similarities between the two drawn by critics such as Bruce Bailey, who yet lament their respective fates:
-	<blockquote>Paris, of course, never raised the sort of critical turmoil which swept around ''The Waste Land''. Mirrlees’ poem is undoubtedly a slighter work than Eliot’s, but this great and unfortunate difference in reception would seem to be accountable mainly to the vagaries of distribution.<ref>Bruce Bailey, ‘A Note on The Waste Land and Hope Mirrlees’ Paris’, T. S. Eliot Newsletter (vol. 1, no. 1, Spring: 1974), p.4</ref> </blockquote>	+	<blockquote>Paris, of course, never raised the sort of critical turmoil which swept around ''The Waste Land''. Mirrlees’ poem is undoubtedly a slighter work than Eliot’s, but this great and unfortunate difference in reception would seem to be accountable mainly to the vagaries of distribution.<ref>Bruce Bailey, ‘A Note on The Waste Land and Hope Mirrlees’ Paris’, T. S. Eliot Newsletter (vol. 1, no. 1, Spring: 1974), p.4</ref> </blockquote>
-	For although published by the [[Virginia Woolf\|Woolfs]] in 1920, only 175 copies were produced. And then, after Harrison’s death in 1928 and Mirrlees’s subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, the poet herself forbade the work to be reproduced, owing to some of its more blasphemous passages. Then, despite editing it for republication in 1973, Mirrlees’s journal of choice folded after only a few issues, thus yet again condemning ‘Paris’ to be lost.	+	For although published by the [[Virginia Woolf\|Woolfs]] in 1920, only 175 copies were produced. And then, after Harrison’s death in 1928 and Mirrlees’s subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, the poet herself forbade the work to be reproduced, owing to some of its more blasphemous passages. Then, despite editing it for republication in 1973, Mirrlees’s journal of choice folded after only a few issues, thus yet again condemning ‘Paris’ to be lost.

-	Within the poem itself, there is also the sense of getting lost as we embark on a journey through the city as proffered by the second line ‘NORD-SUD’. The Nord-Sud metro line opened in Paris in 1910, though was not fully functional until 1916. It started in ~~Montmarte~~ and ended in Montparnasse, thus corresponding with the general migration of the artistic community from ~~Montmarte~~ to the Left Bank. The sights which we pass mesmerize us from all directions, and yet we are encouraged to keep moving, ‘And on and on…’ (line 59), the repeated ellipsis throughout pushing us forward, into phrases such as ‘And yet…quite near / Saunters the ancient rue Saint-Honore’ (lines 66-67). But here it is not a person who saunters, but the street itself, a street which runs from East to West through the city, parallel with the River Seine. Thus a new direction has been taken, corresponding with the poem’s third line ‘ZIG-ZAG’, despite it actually denoting a Metro sign advertising a brand of cigarette papers. Already the allusions are multiplying.	+	Within the poem itself, there is also the sense of getting lost as we embark on a journey through the city as proffered by the second line ‘NORD-SUD’. The Nord-Sud metro line opened in Paris in 1910, though was not fully functional until 1916. It started in Montmartre and ended in Montparnasse, thus corresponding with the general migration of the artistic community from Montmartre to the Left Bank. The sights which we pass mesmerize us from all directions, and yet we are encouraged to keep moving, ‘And on and on…’ (line 59), the repeated ellipsis throughout pushing us forward, into phrases such as ‘And yet…quite near / Saunters the ancient rue Saint-Honore’ (lines 66-67). But here it is not a person who saunters, but the street itself, a street which runs from East to West through the city, parallel with the River Seine. Thus a new direction has been taken, corresponding with the poem’s third line ‘ZIG-ZAG’, despite it actually denoting a Metro sign advertising a brand of cigarette papers. Already the allusions are multiplying.

-	<br>	+	<br>

	= The Flaneur and The Peace Conference =		= The Flaneur and The Peace Conference =

-	<br>This idea of wandering through the streets of Paris calls to mind one of the fathers of Modernism, and his notion of the Flaneur: Charles Baudelaire. He is alluded to within the poem through a reference to his own 1857 work ‘Le Voyage a Cythere’ (line 29), thus instilling his characterization as a journeyman. In his essay of three years later, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, he describes the Flaneur as a man of the world who yet has the impressions of child since the sum of his experience is involuntarily amassed by the external world he observes whilst ambling.<ref>Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, trans. P.E. Charvet, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Kolocotroni, Goldman, Taxidou (Edinburgh, 1998), pp.102-108</ref> ‘The lover of universal life’, he writes, ‘moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He [..] may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life.’<ref>Baudelaire, p.105</ref> Thus the flaneur plays a double role; simultaneously part of and apart from city life, combining sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.	+	<br>This idea of wandering through the streets of Paris calls to mind one of the fathers of Modernism, and his notion of the Flaneur: [[Charles Baudelaire]]. He is alluded to within the poem through a reference to his own 1857 work ‘Le Voyage a Cythere’ (line 29), thus instilling his characterization as a journeyman. In his essay of three years later, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, he describes the Flaneur as a man of the world who yet has the impressions of child since the sum of his experience is involuntarily amassed by the external world he observes whilst ambling.<ref>Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, trans. P.E. Charvet, in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Kolocotroni, Goldman, Taxidou (Edinburgh, 1998), pp.102-108</ref> ‘The lover of universal life’, he writes, ‘moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He [..] may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life.’<ref>Baudelaire, p.105</ref> Thus the flaneur plays a double role; simultaneously part of and apart from city life, combining sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.

-	The greater populace of Paris 1919 necessarily corresponds to that of Europe as a whole, owing to the presence of the Postwar Peace Conference within the city. The conference itself is alluded to within the poem, such as in the image of President Wilson who ‘grins like a dog’ (line 125), or the mention of ‘Thick halting speech’ (line 234). But the work itself contrives to form its own European-ism or polyglot community through its combination of languages and allusions from throughout the continent. Though written mostly in French and English, Mirrlees’s knowledge of Greek features in the quoted ‘Brekekekek coax coax’ (line 10), the noise made by the frogs in Aristophanes’ so-titled play. This combines not only a pun on the French/frog stereotype, but the play’s own concern with a descent into underworld as the sound is here paired with the line ‘we are passing under the Seine’; a journey below of our very own, denoted by this multi-layered transposition of the train carriage’s rattle. Furthermore, the OED cites the most recent usage of this Greek animal noise in 1656, when John Trapp is writing about the Jesuits, accusing their religious ceremony of sounding like gibberish, thus bringing about the theme of religion and religious decay which is found throughout.	+	The greater populace of Paris 1919 necessarily corresponds to that of Europe as a whole, owing to the presence of the Postwar Peace Conference within the city. The conference itself is alluded to within the poem, such as in the image of President Wilson who ‘grins like a dog’ (line 125), or the mention of ‘Thick halting speech’ (line 234). But the work itself contrives to form its own European-ism or polyglot community through its combination of languages and allusions from throughout the continent. Though written mostly in French and English, Mirrlees’s knowledge of Greek features in the quoted ‘Brekekekek coax coax’ (line 10), the noise made by the frogs in Aristophanes’ so-titled play. This combines not only a pun on the French/frog stereotype, but the play’s own concern with a descent into underworld as the sound is here paired with the line ‘we are passing under the Seine’; a journey below of our very own, denoted by this multi-layered transposition of the train carriage’s rattle. Furthermore, the OED cites the most recent usage of this Greek animal noise in 1656, when John Trapp is writing about the Jesuits, accusing their religious ceremony of sounding like gibberish, thus bringing about the theme of religion and religious decay which is found throughout.

-	The theme of literature also asserts itself through this polyglottal vocabulary, as we hear in a passage of recorded (and seemingly overheard) French dialogue, of the book ‘Anna Karénine.’ (line 224). The Russian title has been translated into French within this predominantly English poem, while the characters of the novel feature some pages later; just another pair of faces in the bustling cosmopolitan crowd (line 282). Elsewhere, puns between languages occur to necessarily combine yet distinguish them, such as ‘the silence of la greve’ (line 263,) which plays on the English cliché ‘the silence of the grave’, while the word greve also means a strike (as here described), or a riverbank (where the itself strike took place).	+	The theme of literature also asserts itself through this polyglottal vocabulary, as we hear in a passage of recorded (and seemingly overheard) French dialogue, of the book ‘Anna Karénine.’ (line 224). The Russian title has been translated into French within this predominantly English poem, while the characters of the novel feature some pages later; just another pair of faces in the bustling cosmopolitan crowd (line 282). Elsewhere, puns between languages occur to necessarily combine yet distinguish them, such as ‘the silence of la greve’ (line 263,) which plays on the English cliché ‘the silence of the grave’, while the word greve also means a strike (as here described), or a riverbank (where the itself strike took place).

-	Dug up from their own grave, or ‘subterranean sleep of five long years’ (line 123), are the paintings of the Louvre which, having been stored underground for the duration of the war, were rehung in 1919. Reminding the reader of France’s war-dead who, by contrast, can never arise from their ‘slumber’, the list of artistic works here given form instances of high culture which the poem then places alongside those of the very lowest/everyday variety; the metro advertisements. This combination of high and low art forms creates a democracy which corresponds back to the Peace Process itself, whilst also introducing the theme of the visual with which Mirrlees seems so concerned throughout the work.	+	Dug up from their own grave, or ‘subterranean sleep of five long years’ (line 123), are the paintings of the Louvre which, having been stored underground for the duration of the war, were rehung in 1919. Reminding the reader of France’s war-dead who, by contrast, can never arise from their ‘slumber’, the list of artistic works here given form instances of high culture which the poem then places alongside those of the very lowest/everyday variety; the metro advertisements. This combination of high and low art forms creates a democracy which corresponds back to the Peace Process itself, whilst also introducing the theme of the visual with which Mirrlees seems so concerned throughout the work.

	= The Visual =		= The Visual =

'Bliss' and 'The Garden Party'

2009-11-18T15:19:39Z

Virginia Woolf and Mansfield:

←Older revision		Revision as of 15:19, 18 November 2009
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	== Virginia Woolf and Mansfield ==		== Virginia Woolf and Mansfield ==

-	The overlap of party and external death in the protagonist’s experience has ~~lead~~ this story to be compared to [[Virginia Woolf\|Virginia Woolf]]’s novel of three years later, Mrs Dalloway.<ref>Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford, 1999), p.26</ref> However, the links between the two women are far more numerous than this, to the extent that Woolf wrote:	+	The overlap of party and external death in the protagonist’s experience has led this story to be compared to [[Virginia Woolf\|Virginia Woolf]]’s novel of three years later, Mrs Dalloway.<ref>Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford, 1999), p.26</ref> However, the links between the two women are far more numerous than this, to the extent that Woolf wrote:
	<blockquote>I feel a common certain understanding between us – a queer sense of being ‘like’ – not only about literature - & I think it’s independent of gratified vanity. I can talk straight to her.<ref>The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2 (California, 1980), p.45</ref> </blockquote>		<blockquote>I feel a common certain understanding between us – a queer sense of being ‘like’ – not only about literature - & I think it’s independent of gratified vanity. I can talk straight to her.<ref>The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol 2 (California, 1980), p.45</ref> </blockquote>
-	Their friendship has been described as ‘intimate but guarded, mutually inspiring but competitive’,<ref>Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, 1996), p.386</ref> and indeed Woolf admitted that Mansfield was the only writer of whom she had ever been jealous.<ref>Ibid. p.227</ref> However, despite such praise, or perhaps precisely because of it, Woolf was still very vocal in her critiques of some of Mansfield’s stories, such as the following remarks on ‘Bliss’: ‘She’s done for! Indeed I don’t see how much faith in her as a woman or writer can survive that sort of story.’<ref>Ibid, Vol 1, p.179</ref> The emphasis here on Mansfield’s sex offers an insight into the real reason Woolf wished to distance herself from this work; its explicit dealings with sexuality. For Mansfield was known for having had more than one homosexual relationship and this, together with her foreign background and membership of an inferior class, seemed to cause the undeniably snobbish Woolf great discomfort.	+	Their friendship has been described as ‘intimate but guarded, mutually inspiring but competitive’,<ref>Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, 1996), p.386</ref> and indeed Woolf admitted that Mansfield was the only writer of whom she had ever been jealous.<ref>Ibid. p.227</ref> However, despite such praise, or perhaps precisely because of it, Woolf was still very vocal in her critiques of some of Mansfield’s stories, such as the following remarks on ‘Bliss’: ‘She’s done for! Indeed I don’t see how much faith in her as a woman or writer can survive that sort of story.’<ref>Ibid, Vol 1, p.179</ref> The emphasis here on Mansfield’s sex offers an insight into the real reason Woolf wished to distance herself from this work; its explicit dealings with sexuality. For Mansfield was known for having had more than one homosexual relationship and this, together with her foreign background and membership of an inferior class, seemed to cause the undeniably snobbish Woolf great discomfort.

-	<br>Of these social contrasts between the women, Mansfield wrote:	+	<br>Of these social contrasts between the women, Mansfield wrote:
	<blockquote>How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression as though she were at peace – her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call. Boge what have I done that I should have all the handicaps – plus a disease.<ref>Letters, Vol 3, pp.127-28</ref> </blockquote>		<blockquote>How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression as though she were at peace – her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call. Boge what have I done that I should have all the handicaps – plus a disease.<ref>Letters, Vol 3, pp.127-28</ref> </blockquote>
-	But had she achieved the security of Woolf’s situation, Mansfield would not have been the writer she was, as her position as an outsider brought about an overall sense of disconnect within her own life, which she was then able to convey in her stories. Furthermore we, the reader, are placed in a similar position to Mansfield herself; always on the edge, watching on, but never being fully implicated in the tale’s happenings. For as Eliot writes of ‘Bliss’: ‘the moral and social ramifications are outside the terms of reference’ – before we can draw conclusions or indeed, be offered any by the narrator herself, the mist intercedes; the connection is lost.<ref>After Strange Gods, p.36</ref>	+	But had she achieved the security of Woolf’s situation, Mansfield would not have been the writer she was, as her position as an outsider brought about an overall sense of disconnect within her own life, which she was then able to convey in her stories. Furthermore we, the reader, are placed in a similar position to Mansfield herself; always on the edge, watching on, but never being fully implicated in the tale’s happenings. For as Eliot writes of ‘Bliss’: ‘the moral and social ramifications are outside the terms of reference’ – before we can draw conclusions or indeed, be offered any by the narrator herself, the mist intercedes; the connection is lost.<ref>After Strange Gods, p.36</ref>

	<br>So we must learn to draw pleasure from Mansfield’s stories for what they are – a series of impressions which, though they may centre around apparent ‘moments of revelation’, never ‘reveal’ any ultimate truths. Instead, they offer us repeated sensations of modern detachment, teaching us that perhaps, ignorance is indeed bliss, and that ‘after all’ we may find ourselves having learned nothing at all.<br>		<br>So we must learn to draw pleasure from Mansfield’s stories for what they are – a series of impressions which, though they may centre around apparent ‘moments of revelation’, never ‘reveal’ any ultimate truths. Instead, they offer us repeated sensations of modern detachment, teaching us that perhaps, ignorance is indeed bliss, and that ‘after all’ we may find ourselves having learned nothing at all.<br>