Modern English Literature, 1890 1960 (Literary Contexts) 8125062734, 9788125062738

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LITERARY CONTEXTS

Modern English Literature, 1890–1960









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Literary Contexts recognises that literature is always rooted in its social milieu and that we need to study literary cultures in all their complexity and connections. It offers the thrill of locating a text within its context and seeing a context reflected in a literary/cultural text. Each of the books in the series offers students of English and other literatures concise, informative insights into the history of ideas embodied in literary texts, authors and movements. Organised around themes and ideas with extensive examples from literary and cultural texts, the books enable students to understand how the “literary” takes shape in an intellectual milieu and discover manifestations of abstract ideas in literary texts. Written by scholarteachers who have taught and researched literature for several years, each volume in the series is a stand-alone reference book for students and teachers alike. Series editor Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. His most recent books include The Transnational in English Literature: Shakespeare to the Modern (2015), Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance (2015), The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary (2015) and Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology (2015). His forthcoming work includes a book on the Indian graphic novel.

LITERARY CONTEXTS

Modern English Literature, 1890–1960

Sipra Mukherjee Series Editor Pramod K. Nayar

















MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1890–1960 ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LIMITED Registered Office

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For Janhabi

CONTENTS

Cover Title Page Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Equality 2. Science 3. War 4. Mind 5. Language Timeline of Publications of the Modern Age

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

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he idea that the literature of every age is rooted in its social milieu is a truism. Mapping the contours of this milieu often requires, for the student, to read through several specialised texts. Titles in Literary Contexts, by bringing together the key contexts – both general and specialised – into one volume, offer the student of English and other literatures short, prescient and informative studies that provide the history of ideas embodied in literary texts, authors and movements. Intellectual history or the history of ideas has always been intertwined with the cultural practices and shifts within them in every age. Therefore titles in the series track the intellectual history of every age through social and historical contexts, whether these were contexts of imperial voyages, “Westward expansion”, the Reformation of the Church, great scientific discoveries or nationalist movements. Considerable attention is paid to the contexts of class, literacy, gender relations, the state and its functions in every age. The series’ titles demonstrate how certain dominant ideas in any age operated. To this end, every title in the series draws upon and cites numerous examples from literary texts. This enables the student to get a sense of the literary themes’ origins in the intellectual milieu, and discover manifestations of abstract ideas, such as “exceptionalism”, “hybrid and displaced identity” or “division of powers of Church and State”, in literary texts. The authors do not seek to establish a direct correspondence between the literary text and the dominant idea of the age, but they offer the student a sense of the dense exchanges between the idea

and the literary text. Each title maps ideas across cultural texts – popular forms, high culture, and scientific and philosophical texts – so that it demonstrates how ideas are mobile and cut across genres and domains. The titles in the series also document the conflicts and tensions in every age so that the student is made aware of the complicated nature of both, the history of ideas and the literary expressions of the same, and is alerted to the messy nature of cultural history of any age, in any nation. Written by scholar-teachers who have taught and researched literature for several years, Literary Contexts is student-friendly, being both jargon-free and incisive. Pramod K. Nayar

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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y first thanks must go to my editor, Pramod Nayar, for inviting me to be part of this fascinating series. I much suspect I would have given up on the book halfway if it had not been for his patience and confidence that, despite the delays brought on by the ubiquitous demands of teaching, examining and supervising, the book would get done. His impressive knowledge and perceptive comments on every chapter made this book a pleasure to work on. If he ever had doubts, he never showed it, though his rapid-fire responses to every mail that I sent and his overnight editing of my lengthy chapters may have been cleverly disguised and rather effective pressure tactics. Approaching literature through the lens of ideas is possibly what most of us teachers do instinctively, only to find ourselves hampered by the more conventional patterns to which we need to fit our classes: chronology, movements, genres. It has, therefore, been deeply satisfying to author a book which allows an unencumbered exploration of ideas through literature, instead of the other way round. I am grateful to Pramod for asking me to be part of such a project. I owe a huge debt to my family, to my mother and my father-in-law, Arindam and Ruku, for helping out with the eternal “keeping” of the house and for pitching in with hastily done stuff and a hastily kept house. Without the support of my mother especially, this book would either have taken much longer or remained undone. My thanks to Arindam for his insistent queries and for his discerning and patient hearings as I read out passages repeatedly, struggling to make the language lucid and jargon-free.

Thanks to my friends who remain so despite my frequent and unexplained “vanishings” and silences – Piya, Promita, Moni, Santa, Bhakti, Sarvani and Nandini. I gratefully acknowledge my many teachers and friends for their freely given knowledge, expertise and suggestions. I am thinking especially of Tirthankar Bose for his unconditional support, Amlan Dasgupta for help with the Latin mysteries, and of Supriya Chaudhuri and Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, whose knowledge of modern philosophy cleared some particularly dense clouds. A special thanks to Nilanjana Gupta with whom, many years ago, I first embarked upon the modern age. My thanks to my departmental colleagues, for no matter how much we try to fulfil our responsibilities, understanding and cooperation are indispensable for tackling research along with the semester load. I also thank the many students I have taught over the years who, with their questions and puzzled looks, have compelled me to rephrase and restructure till my language neared, as it should, Orwell’s “windowpane”.

INTRODUCTION

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efore one begins to introduce a book, it is always a good idea to draw up the boundaries within which the book works. Addressing, as this book does, the realm of the history of ideas in English literature, the early twentieth century is an especially plentiful age with a rich multiplicity of literatures in English. Emerging from a varied range of continents and backgrounds, the primary boundaries of this book will need to be marked not just with temporal but also with spatial markers. English had begun to be used as the literary language by many beyond the shores of the British Isles in these years (in the Americas, South Asia, the Far East, Australia and other regions), but the English literature dealt with in this book will be limited to England and continental Europe, more particularly, Western Europe – the more frequented playing ground for many of the writers who were exiles or immigrants. The English language, however, can only be largely used as a marker since some writers used languages other than English too. There is no way one can talk of this age and not include Proust or Beckett. Nor were many of the voices English, hailing from lands which had known shades of imperialism under the British Empire. F. W. Bateson had differentiated between the “native English writer” and the writer he called the “métèque” – the “writer with a non-English linguistic, racial or political background” who, “being on the fringe of a language and the culture that begot it, lacks respect for the “finer points of English language and grammar” (67). This leads métèque to “attempt effects of style, sometimes successfully, that the English writer would feel to be a perverse defiance of the genius of the language” (Bateson 67). Yet, as Anthony Burgess argues, there are grounds for supposing that the métèque have done more for English in the twentieth century than the “pure-

blooded men of letters who stick to the finer rules” (7). With the waning and fall of empires and the rise of democracies across the world, the idea of a well-delineated Englishness, or even British-ness, came under pressure from the devolving communities of Canada, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Resistance to imperialism was accentuated by the First World War, and emerging concepts of postcolonial identity significantly expanded the range of issues articulated by writers. Philosophy and sociology widened to include dynamics of power, modalities of disempowering, the idea of othering, politics of identity, and many other such subjects that revealed a critical consciousness of, and engagement with, the histories of imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. Dealing as writers do in language, one of the areas that received much attention was the ways in which language sanctioned particular ways of thinking and particular areas of knowledge. Ideas of nation and nationalism focussed attention on the construction of discourses, leading to studies of how language could be exploited to strengthen or weaken concerns. The groups of writers who fall in this period are the Edwardians, the modernists, the 1930s’ left-inclined writers, and some of the post– World War II writers who had begun writing with the modernists but who are better known to the world by their 1940s and 50s’ work. This last group includes writers like John Cowper Powys, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and Basil Bunting – who could be called, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, the “early late modernists”, though late modernism found its flowering more in American literature in the works of Kenneth Burke, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Norman Brown and James Baldwin. Despite this possible grouping of writers, I have avoided (as much as is possible) treating writers’ groups as distinct blocks. The focus of the book is on ideas and how these ideas came together to create the particular Zeitgeist,1 or the spirit of the age, which weakened, strengthened or engendered cultural forms and literary genres. The first half of the century is dominated by modernism and a significant amount of attention has been given to this canon of largely male, white writers. The contradictions within

modernism have also been focussed on so as to give a more nuanced perspective of this era where, as later research reveals, many strands other than the high modernist were fighting for a toehold. With the hindsight of a century, one realises that the modernist artists, despite the “Make It New” credo, were far more indebted to their history and their age than they themselves were aware of. Similarly, the writers of the 1930s who came after modernism, and who severely critiqued their predecessors, were successors of the high modernists to a far greater extent than they would possibly care to acknowledge. With this “stream-of-history” in mind, the book has been divided into chapters that discuss ideas, using literature to point and illustrate, rather than the other way round. Recent scholarship2 on the early years of the twentieth century have revealed the pluralities present within this age, making any consensus in the singular difficult to arrive at. Ezra Pound’s audacious “Make It New” motto for artists saw the dismantling of the spatial, temporal and aesthetic registers of traditional literature as artists struggled to make sense of tremendous changes that were transforming the geographies of the mind and the world. Many among these were voices that had not been part of the traditional world of English literature: exiles, women, those sexually marginalised and from the working class. Yet, even as these artists sparred with the then-mainstream establishment of writers, others even further removed from the centre were attempting to create spaces for articulation. Despite the dominance of modernism in the early years of the century, it is possible to recognise the beginnings of other movements or genres in literatures that came to gain visibility in the later years. The understanding of the literature of the first half of the twentieth century, therefore, has changed over time in the years since its occurrence. It has yielded to a diversity of interpretations and is seen now to subsume many heterogeneous discourses. Read as a period of transition and transformation, the age is viewed as one which saw that significant shift from the singular Arnoldian “Culture” with a capital C to the plural and various “cultures” which Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams championed.

Raymond Williams, in his Keywords, a record of an enquiry into English vocabulary, links four words with culture as forming a structure: class, art, industry and democracy (13). A Marxist critic, Williams read literature in terms of the historical conditions that produced it, and criticism as being shaped by its own historical situation. This intimate association between the text and its context was further widened by the New Historicists and the Cultural Materialists, who took reading beyond class struggle and hidden truths to move into more complex ways of thinking, searching for lost histories and conducting an exploration of mechanisms of repression and negotiation. In attempting to read the philosophies and thoughts of the early twentieth century in literary texts, we make the fundamental assumption that the literature of a particular time and people are, as Arthur O. Lovejoy writes, conditioned and shaped by the general ideas individuals entertain since “his thoughts have always had a good deal to do with his behaviour, his institutions, his material achievements in technology and the arts, and his fortunes” (3). The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus were, as Richard Wagner had believed, “the work of Athens” (46). Without taking the reading to the reductive extreme of treating the artist as the midwife to the birth of art, one could trace in the literature of the Modern Age the pathways traversed by the ideas of the times. Much in fact was happening in the early years of this century. Positioned a century away from 1914, one finds encapsulated in that year many events that epitomise the new winds sweeping across Europe. The year itself was considered so significant to modernism that Ezra Pound called James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and himself, the artists he believed stood at the frontline of the artistic Risorgimento, “the Men of 1914”. Joyce’s Künstleroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the most notable example of that subgenre of the Bildungsroman so characteristic to the age, began to be published serially that year in The Egoist. The all-male canon of the celebrated modernists was, interestingly, indebted to this London literary magazine, the primary vehicle of literary modernism, which had been founded by a woman, Dora Marsden, that very year.

Besides Joyce’s Portrait, Lewis’s Tarr, Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, and D. H. Lawrence’s and William Carlos Williams’s poems were also published in The Egoist. Even more interesting was the fact that the avant-garde, elitist paper, The Egoist, was the culmination of the earlier feminist paper, The Freewoman, which had been founded in 1911 by Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe. To support the feminist counter-public sphere which as yet did not have a firm readership base, the founders had, as done with most early suffrage papers, used institutions and adapted the tactics of the commercial mass market such as mass-advertising and masspublication. In fact The Egoist, despite its avant-garde position and its clearly articulated disdain for the commercialisation of art, documented a range of stances towards mass culture, from the ambivalent to the affirmative. It was also in the year 1914 that Eliot met the American poet Pound in London, a city that was to neither of them their hometown. This was also the year when war poetry made its first appearance with John Masefield’s poem “August, 1914”, introducing the themes that were to dominate war poetry: the “misery of the soaking trench”, the despair of the “blind soul” and the usually “uncouth” death. It was in 1914 that The Times Literary Supplement began to be published separately as a journal independent from The Times, indicating the institutional power that English literature was rapidly gaining. The international market that English literature was beginning to address became evident when Stanley Unwin purchased a controlling interest in the London publisher George Allen and when The Little Review was founded by Margaret Caroline Anderson as part of Chicago’s literary renaissance. This was also the year when Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes appeared in its book form. The next year, 1915, was to see Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin all take up residence in Zürich, Dorothy Richardson publish her first novel, Pointed Roofs, in the stream of consciousness mode, Eliot publish his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., establish the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house in New York City.

The conflating, conflicting strands of this age merged together to create the twentieth century milieu. The avant-garde artists of the early years, radical in their choice of cultural forms, inhabited a conceptual space that was “avant guerre”– a phrase Marjorie Perloff uses to denote a paradigm for the Futurists’ “arena of agitation and projected revolution” (5).3 In the chapters that follow, I have attempted to trace the trajectories of those ideas that proved to be the most dominant at the time. Not a single one of these ideas was newly born. Engendered in the earlier centuries, most of these were ideas whose historical force grew unmistakeable and inescapable in the twentieth. These were ideas which lay at the foundations of modernist innovations or feminist ideology and which, through the histories of political and social movements, of religious and philosophical questions, of economic and scientific changes, came to have concrete manifestations in these literatures. But reading cultural forms as consequences of ideas and sifting out what Lovejoy calls “unit-ideas” from the complex multi-dimensional and multilayered texts can be an intimidating job. This is because of the “perpetual interplay” of ideas: when ideas “manifest themselves in history, [they] do not run in enclosed channels corresponding to the officially established divisions of university faculties”. Ideas, being “migratory”, find manifestation in forms that often contradict and come into conflict with each other. This makes the study of the consequent forms and events difficult since, no matter how scholarly a fashion we divide the study of historiography for better comprehension, the historic process remains undivided (4). The events of the two world wars, for example, cannot be left out of any study of this century because of the tremendous impact they had on the ideas of the age. Nor can they tidily be put away into the discussion of any one or two ideas given that they impacted the mind of Europe with as great a force as an original idea, becoming the prism through which concepts of civilisation, progress and the arts continue to be viewed. Every idea of the age that determined the trajectory of literature and the arts appears therefore as many composite realities, multifaceted and complex. The division into chapters proves difficult

since the skeins of each idea are tangled with the others current in the age. The principle of equality, for example, initiated in modern Europe sometime in the seventeenth century (with the passage of the English Petition of Right in 1628 and the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679), was to snowball through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to bring to the twentieth century the modern idea of democracy. This idea of modern democracy, that grew increasingly ubiquitous in twentieth-century Europe, was intimately connected with the ideas of secularism and liberalism, both of which cannot be satisfactorily discussed without taking into consideration the spread of technology and industrialism. With the advance of science making ease of access a salient feature of modernity, the idea of egalitarianism is perhaps as closely connected with technology as with the philosophy of democracy. These philosophies of democracy, liberalism, industrialism and secularism are seen at their best in the metropolitan cities of Europe, thus connecting the process of urbanisation to the fundamental idea of equality. As mentioned before, division into chapters proves difficult. While the concepts of science, equality, language or the mind have been possible to discuss in separate albeit connected chapters, the idea of time entertained in the first half of the twentieth century has been a more difficult matter. The concept of time that developed in the early twentieth century was an all-encompassing concept entwined with the understanding of the mind and the experience of science, and was deeply affected by the wars, especially the First World War. As Richard Lehan observes in The Crisis in Modernism, the notions of mechanism and teleology were undone by Bergson, so as to undercut both Enlightenment and Darwinian assumptions, and give weight to the modernist belief that art is the highest function of our activity, and helped establish the modernist belief that the universe is inseparable from mind and that the self is created out of memory. If the moderns did not have Bergson, they would have had to invent him. (Burwick and Douglass 311)

It was from 1910 that Bergson’s work became available in English, revolutionising the understanding of time, memory and consciousness, and by 1911 Bertrand Russell found that “all England [had] gone mad about him” (318). As a matter of fact, in a study of the ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, one finds Bergson popping up at almost every turn, both expected and unexpected. The entire Zeitgeist of this age is influenced by the unique understanding that the modernists had of time. Any discussion on time is therefore better approached through the understanding of another topic: mind, science, realism, modernity. T. E. Hulme discusses Bergson’s theory of art in Speculations, not because Bergson “created any new theory of art”, but because “by the acute analysis of certain mental processes he has enabled us to state more definitely and with less distortion the qualities which we feel in art” (Speculations 143). Given the relevance of temporality in the Modern Age and the many ways this changed understanding entered modern thought, the concept of time has been dealt with in three chapters: those discussing science, war and mind. Drawing on Bergson’s study of time, for the modernist, the present was inextricably tied to the past through tradition. This was not a simple matter of blindly imitating the past. Artists who had attempted to relate themselves to tradition through gratuitous conformity had given birth to “simple currents” that had been lost in the sand (Eliot 43). Being with tradition as the artist articulated the modern was a more complex process involving a historical sense, “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (44). History, as Walter Benjamin said, is the object of a construction, which has its place not in homogeneous and empty time, “but time filled by, the presence of the now (‘Jetztzeit’)” (Web n.p.). This Janus-headed inclination of the age, looking simultaneously to the past and to the present, was to impact the very nature of modernism, allegedly the most significant of the movements in the first half of the century. Known for its decisive rejection of conventions and its dedication to creating the arts anew, modernism is equally famous, or infamous, for its return to the ancient classics and its Romanticist valorising of the artist. Modernist

associations with its past are indisputable and this is despite Kenner’s description of his book The Pound Era as a picture of how the modernist epoch was extricated from the fin de siècle (ix). Even as they carried forward the Enlightenment discourse which “actively promoted the modern against the inherited” (Armstrong 2), the modernists reacted sharply against the “mass” nature of much of modernity: mass education, mass production or mass housing, characteristics that they viewed as standardising and therefore fatal to the individual and the unique. Neither did their “Make It New” extend to capitalism’s cultural imperative of “what is newer, is therefore better”. This ambivalent relation to modernity is expressed in Tim Armstrong’s Modernism: A Cultural History: If one still fairly prevalent view of modernism is that it is a ‘reaction against’ modernity, ‘a kind of soul trapped in the gross body of modern industrial society’ as James Knapp puts it (1988: 22), then my argument throughout this book is that such a view must be displaced in favour of one in which the two are bound together in a relation which is often homologous rather than antagonistic. (1) Viewing modernity within the “luminous halo” of the ideas that were part of its milieu is Michael Levenson who, in The Genealogy of Modernism, traces the roots of modernism to the nineteenth century. The crisis of faith that came about in the wake of nineteenth-century science saw Matthew Arnold attempting to counter the crisis of faith by placing religion on the firmer foundations of scientific subjectivism. In Literature and Dogma, Arnold writes, “by the sanctions of miracles Christianity can no longer stand; it can stand only by its natural truth” (viii). This “natural truth” Arnold located in the human consciousness of certain psychological experiences: the verifiable personal experience. Instead of contesting science, the antagonist of religion, Arnold wisely appropriated the scientific worldview to strengthen his argument. This increasing dominance of science and the consequent approaching secularism of modernity is also revealed in George Eliot’s concept of her “religion”. The basis of her books, she writes, was “the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral,” and which was not

dependent on “conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human” (Gilmour 125). This intellectual equilibrium, though short-lived, was influential, despite the modernist impatience with Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill. Of Ruskin’s concerns with ethical questions, which to the twentiethcentury artists appeared didactic and priggish, Lawrence said, “The deep damnation of self-righteousness … lies thick all over the Ruskinite, like painted feathers on a skinny peacock.” (Lawrence 81). It is in Walter Pater’s works that the consequences of the nineteenthcentury compromise are evident. His work “represents the undoing of the mid-century synthesis” (Levenson 16). Like Arnold, Pater acknowledged the claims of science and the necessity of privileging the subjective impression. But while Arnold and George Eliot had found a certainty (and the possibility) of morality in the subjective consciousness, Pater was sceptical, recognising that the pattern the subjective eye perceives will be a reflection of itself, and that the holds of traditional morality will weaken. Arnold believed that the verifiable nature of subjective experience would be in accordance with the scientific standards achieved through a fine balance between “Hebraism” – conduct and obedience, and “Hellenism” – “to see things as they really are” (Arnold, Culture and Anarchy 151). But for Pater this “equilibrium has come undone” (Levenson 19), with Hebraism receding in importance, surrendering its powers to subjectivity – the only reality that humanity can verify. Levenson connected this to the early modernists, Conrad’s lack of faith in an objective truth, and to Conrad’s Lord Jim: “They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!” He also connected it with Hulme’s dismissal of philosophy’s rational quest for a universal truth: “I am a pluralist! … There is no Unity, no Truth, but forces which have different aims, and whose whole reality consists in these differences” (Collected Writings 108). Viewing modernity within the “luminous halo” of the ideas that were part of its milieu is Michael Levenson who, in The Genealogy of Modernism, traces the roots of modernism to the nineteenth century.

The crisis of faith that came about in the wake of nineteenth-century science saw Matthew Arnold attempting to counter the crisis of faith by placing religion on the firmer foundations of scientific subjectivism. In Literature and Dogma, Arnold writes, “by the sanctions of miracles Christianity can no longer stand; it can stand only by its natural truth” (viii). This “natural truth” Arnold located in the human consciousness of certain psychological experiences: the verifiable personal experience. Instead of contesting science, the antagonist of religion, Arnold wisely appropriated the scientific worldview to strengthen his argument. This increasing dominance of science and the consequent approaching secularism of modernity is also revealed in George Eliot’s concept of her “religion”. The basis of her books, she writes, was “the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral,” and which was not dependent on “conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human” (Gilmour 125). This intellectual equilibrium, though short-lived, was influential, despite the modernist impatience with Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill. Of Ruskin’s concerns with ethical questions, which to the twentiethcentury artists appeared didactic and priggish, Lawrence said, “The deep damnation of self-righteousness … lies thick all over the Ruskinite, like painted feathers on a skinny peacock.” (Lawrence 81). It is in Walter Pater’s works that the consequences of the nineteenthcentury compromise are evident. His work “represents the undoing of the mid-century synthesis” (Levenson 16). Like Arnold, Pater acknowledged the claims of science and the necessity of privileging the subjective impression. But while Arnold and George Eliot had found a certainty (and the possibility) of morality in the subjective consciousness, Pater was sceptical, recognising that the pattern the subjective eye perceives will be a reflection of itself, and that the holds of traditional morality will weaken. Arnold believed that the verifiable nature of subjective experience would be in accordance with the scientific standards achieved through a fine balance between “Hebraism” – conduct and obedience, and “Hellenism” – “to see things as they really are” (Arnold, Culture and Anarchy 151). But for

Pater this “equilibrium has come undone” (Levenson 19), with Hebraism receding in importance, surrendering its powers to subjectivity – the only reality that humanity can verify. Levenson connected this to the early modernists, Conrad’s lack of faith in an objective truth, and to Conrad’s Lord Jim: “They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!” He also connected it with Hulme’s dismissal of philosophy’s rational quest for a universal truth: “I am a pluralist! … There is no Unity, no Truth, but forces which have different aims, and whose whole reality consists in these differences” (Collected Writings 108). The daring search for subjective truths in modernist texts is, consequently, indebted to the history of ideas of the earlier century. In their commitment to the hard work of art and in their respect for the written word too, they remained, as Ellen Moers says, “men of the nineteenth century”: They were perhaps the last generation for whom religious issues mattered in both a larger theoretical and a smaller quotidian way. Their political views, when they had them, seemed to derive rather from the New Testament than from a party manifesto. Ideas mattered deeply to them all: philosophical, linguistic, historiographical, spatial, mathematical. Victorian in formation, they assumed that the great modern ideas were available to all, and particularly vital to the artist. (6) Similarly, the culture of modernism is a legacy that remains with the post–1930s writers despite their repeated accusations of irresponsibility and evasion, self-serving aestheticism and social indifference aimed at the modernists. It is the “indeterminacy, linguistic complexity, and reflexivity” (Ross 2) of the early twentieth century that makes possible the many antifoundational stances of diverse literatures through the twentieth century. As the century moved through Planck’s quantum theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity, the booming capitalist markets, one World War and then another far more devastating, nationalist movements in Ireland, workers’ socialist revolutions in Russia and Spain, and the

philosophies of imperialism, anarchism, communism, socialism and fascism, it became increasingly clear that it would be impossible to achieve what, from its initiation in the 1910s, had been a difficult proposition. This was the modernist ideal of concretising within the one text the twin convictions of creating “high” art as well as art that would play the role which literary tradition demanded, that of the teacher, of transforming “the contemporary environment, and hence by pacifying and ennobling its inhabitants, revolutionize the world” (Spender 83). Moving from the allegedly cooler heights of elite intellectual modernism to the more crowded, “real”, but no less contested terrain of the 1930s, one finds writers grappling with the complex realities of social and political issues in a vastly changed world. The questions that had been till the 1920s recurrently but intermittently voiced by the modernists increasingly gained ground. Their challenges to accepted notions of literary canon formation, to the binary of “high” and “low” culture or that of the gender and sex roles, to epistemological processes, to progress, civilisation, imperialism and to the blind spots of reason, continued into the later years of the century and into postmodernity, albeit in different registers. The book will trace this swathe of history through the ideas the artists held and the ideas they fought. When studying or even teaching literature, especially a canon as formidable as modernism, the attention given to literary giants and their oeuvres is often at the expense of a holistic perspective of the age. The same could be true of the literature of a period as darkly shadowed by world political events as the post–1930s. This perspective is also hampered by its relative proximity to the present times. This book is an attempt to present to the student a panoramic view of the first fifty years of the twentieth century with literature read more for the ambient ideas it showcases rather than for its literary or aesthetic qualities. With the disciplines of literature and culture studies drawing rapidly nearer each other, and the impact of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism swelling, there is a greater need now to view literature as texts within contexts. The number of political philosophies, social movements and cultural discourses of the

modern age that came into their own during this half-century is puzzling. One explanation for this may be that this was a time of transition and therefore there is no one dominant philosophy which governs or one ascendant narrative which can explain the age. Students can no longer expect to read literature dissociated from critical theories, nor can literature departments feign a universal agreement in the way literature is approached. The concerns and conflicts embedded in the texts are different for readers from different spaces and times. That the roots of many of the major critical theories are firmly implanted in the early decades of the twentieth century make these years especially significant in understanding critical perspectives on art and language. In the rapidly changing environment of critical theory, with its nuanced disagreements, differences and extensions that take off at a tangent from the original premise, it becomes imperative for the student to know the climate of ideas within which these literatures and theories were engendered.

Works Cited Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Print. Arnold. Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1869. Print. ———. “Preface.” Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1883. Print. Betson, Frederick Wilse. English Poetry: A Critical Introduction. London: Barnes and Noble, 1966. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Frankfurt School. Web. 7 September 2015. .

Brooker, Peter, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print. Burgess, Anthony. “Introduction.” All About H. Hatterr. By G. V. Desani. New York: New York Review of Books, 1986. Print. Burwick, Frederick and Douglass, Paul, eds. The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Gilmour, Robin. “The Novel in the Age of Equipoise: Wilkie Collins, Trollope, George Eliot.” Bloom’s Period Studies: The Victorian Novel. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2004. 103– 47. Print. Hulme, T. E. The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Karen Csengeri. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Print. ———. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Herbert Read. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1936. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Print. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. Print. Kenner, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985. Print. Lawrence, D. H. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 1, 1901–13. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print. Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Print. Lovejoy, Arthur O. “Reflections on the History of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 1.1 (January 1940). 3–23. Print.

Moers, Ellen. “The Survivors: Into the Twentieth Century.” Twentieth Century Literature 20.1 (January 1974). 1–10. Print. Morrison, Mark. “Marketing British Modernism: The Egoist and Counter-Public Spheres.” Twentieth Century Literature 43.4 (Winter 1997). 439–69. Print. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. Print. Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde , Avant-Guerre , and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Print. Ross, Stephen, ed. Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. London/ New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Russell, Bertrand. Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–1913. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P, 1963. Print. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1983. Print. Wagner, Richard. “Art and Revolution.” Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 1. Trans. W. A. Ellis. London: Keganpaul, Trench and Trubner, 1895. Print.

Notes 1 The term is attributed to the German philosopher Hegel. Though Hegel did not

actually use the term, he referred to the spirit or the mind of the age in his works. 2 Among the many books on this subject are The Oxford Handbook of

Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker; and Modernisms by Peter Nicholls.

3 Mark Morrison in his essay, “Marketing British Modernism: The Egoist and

Counter-Public Spheres”, uses the term “avant guerre” to refer to socio-political activist groups like women’s suffrage organisations and socialist, anarchist and syndicalist political movements, who shared space with the modernist avant garde, avant guerre artists – though one’s activities often disagreed with the other’s.

O NE

EQUALITY The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron (1961)

T

he city space dominates twentieth-century English literature, cutting across the many other differences that divide the literary works of the first six or seven decades of this century. Possibly the one feature shared by the Edwardians and the high modernists, the poetic dramatists and the absurdist playwrights, the city straddles literatures that otherwise frequently inclined towards opposition. It commands a dominant place in the novels of H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett – Edwardians who would have glanced condescendingly at the younger crop of experimenting modernists – and is central to the novels of the avant-garde modernists who scorned the conventional Edwardians for spending, as Virginia Woolf says, “immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring” (Common Reader 61). Whatever be the preferred content of their art, or the form chosen to articulate it, the city remained the prevailing space for the twentieth-century artist. Paul Morel, at the end of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), walks towards the “city’s gold phosphorescence”: the “humming, glowing city,” determined not to “give in” to the “darkness” (474 ). Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) seeks to leave the claustrophobia and paralysis of Dublin for the greater city, Paris: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience …” (273). Galsworthy’s Forsytes settle in “the fair heart” of London where “their desires were fixed” (12) and Bennett’s characters are haunted by London, frequenting the city in body and in mind despite their location elsewhere: There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious pleasure. Long before schooldays are over he learns to take a doleful pleasure in watching the exit of the London train from the railway station. He stands by the hot engine and envies the very stoker. (1) This penchant for the city was not peculiar to fictional characters writers created. It reflected the artist’s own inclinations. Bennett left the Potteries district for London at the age of twenty-one, and then moved to Paris at the age of twenty-five. Lawrence left the mining town of Eastwood for London, and Joyce self-exiled himself from the town-city of Dublin to the more international metropolises of Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Cityscapes dominate T. S. Eliot’s poetry. “All the hands … raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms” (The Complete Poems and Plays 12) are located, without the least trace of any doubt, within a city. It is clear that the city and twentieth-century literature are caught in an inextricable relationship. What gave the city its luminescent vibrant hum? More significantly, what brought this space of bustling pulsating life within reach and accessible to all classes and races? How did the city change from that distant, little-known place which it used to be in the eighteenthcentury novel – the place Sophia Western in Tom Jones (1749) flees to or where Lydia and Wickham in Pride and Prejudice (1813) elope to? In Eliza Haywood’s History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), it is

obviously the city of London that is the prime attraction of the book, and the readers are transported to this yearned-for location within ten pages of the 600-plus-paged novel: “Miss Betsy had never seen this great metropolis, but had heard so much …” (34). Across the nineteenth-century literature of Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, the idea of the city grew increasingly insistent.

INDUSTRY, DEMOCRACY AND THE LEGEND OF THE CITY Two events dominate this century and may be explicitly associated with the type of burgeoning city that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century: industrialisation and democracy. Both are events spread out over many years and many nations of Europe, and are themselves dependent on a multiplicity of smaller incidents, measures and their aftermaths, which initiated transitions in political and economic structures. The first, industrialisation, transformed the agrarian and feudal structure of the land and encouraged a mass exodus towards the city. Villages grew deserted, cities overpopulated, and wealth and resources appeared procurable to many whose lives had earlier been entrusted to destiny. Over the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, thousands migrated to the city, a word that became synonymous with “opportunity”. “‘Country’ and ‘city’,” writes Raymond Williams, “are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities” (Country and City 1). The country was what Mother Nature had given us. The city was an achievement of civilisation, and industrialism was a significant tool in this march of progress. The second event that grew to dominate the twentieth century was the concept of democracy. Consequent to the French Revolution, this idea had initiated a politics of the possible1 in the very notions of authority and political power. In the early twentieth century, pegged with the doctrines of democracy and socialism, the idea evolved from its 1789 formulation of liberty, equality, and fraternity,2 liberté, égalité, fraternité, to usher in the concept of equality for all of humanity.

During the last century and into the twentieth, various nations of Europe moved from acceptance of a limited “universal” male suffrage, dependent on property requirements, to a more catholic understanding of universal adult suffrage. A doctrine, though, is rarely a simple concept comprising one single homogeneous idea. The total body of any doctrine of any philosopher or school, as Arthur Lovejoy writes in The Great Chain of Being,3 is almost always “a complex and heterogeneous aggregate” (3), and the doctrine of democracy, or political egalitarianism, is no different. That the elemental components, or “unit-ideas”, that constituted this heterogeneous aggregate would not be contained by any one single “–ism” became clear through the diverse consequences of democracy which did not remain confined to political discourse. The concept of equality filtered into humanity’s diverse strands of thought, into the corridors of varied institutions, and into ways of thinking and feeling, transforming over the decades the Weltenschhaung4 of generations. The idea became a part, one could say, of the general consciousness of the people, and grew to be a part of their common sense, their assumptions, their unconscious mental habits. With the developments ushered in by industrialisation, the changed ways of thinking initiated by democracy made it possible for people to aspire to a status beyond that of their inherited socio-political positions. The future was no longer held in the invincible grasp of the past as it had been a century ago. The present grew malleable, thanks to the many concurrent ideas that went hand in hand with the doctrine of democracy: mobility of occupation, affordable literacy, access to legal recourse. The process of industrialisation often acted as the catalyst to such social restructuring as it connected, energised and rendered visible interest groups who had stakes in social, as well as political, reform. While attempting to establish mutuality between industrialisation and democracy has its problems, it may be stated with reasonable certainty that a correlation existed between these two, with either event buttressing the other. Such a statement may well appear counter-intuitive today, in view of the wide-ranging impact of socialism, the political doctrine that originated from an eighteenth-

century intellectual-and-working-class political movement that voiced concern over the effects of industrialisation on society. But in the early nineteenth century, “socialism” did not refer to this one single political doctrine. The term “socialism”, when it first came into use, was a general term that referred to concern for any social question or problem that had arisen in the radically different scenario of industrialised England.5 This concern, frequently voiced in the genre called “industrial novel”, may be seen as part of the spirit of the age (the Zeitgeist), which felt the need to recognise and resolve problems of all humanity, irrespective of class. The city, in short, was a composite reality built as much out of iron and steel as by the ideals and aspirations of Europe’s men and women. It was as much a concrete reality as a virtual one. Landing in Paris or London meant much more than a geographical shift from Dublin or Nottingham. It was an entry into a space that, as Williams said, was perceived as a centre “of learning, communication, light”; a “sense of cities” was a “sense of possibility, of meeting and of movement” (Country and City 2, 6). The city embodied the ideas associated with “modernity”, and twentieth-century English literature was dominated by such imaginary spaces. These spaces, existing in hopes and expectations but no less real than the physical spaces, existed by virtue of collective cultural representations – images, myths, legends, and by virtue of the implicit understandings shared by people. It is the “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (Taylor 23). THE INTERNATIONAL

METROPOLIS AND ITS LIMITS

Shaped by the socio-political developments taking place across Europe, mental spaces were founded upon histories that spanned the nations of France, England, Ireland and Germany. The “city” one aspired to reach in the pages of English literature is a space that traverses these diverse nations. In our attempt to understand the history of ideas underpinning the English novel, therefore, the student

of literature needs to look beyond England. Limiting the exploration to “ideas of England” that influenced English literature would lead one to an incomplete understanding of twentieth-century literature. The artistic space inhabited by writers of that time was a space more “inter-national” than confined to one nation. With most of the artists and intellectuals residing in metropolitan cities like Paris, Trieste and London, the very idea of modern literature and culture was international. These cities were, at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, abuzz with the dynamic presence of figures like Arthur Rimbaud, Sigmund Freud, Stephane Mallarme, James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Ezra Pound, Paul Valery and other writers. Earlytwentieth-century literature was consequently a European phenomenon. This feeling of internationalism was felt and articulated more keenly by the writers who came after the Edwardians – the modernists.Their belief that they inhabited an artistic realm that transcended petty political borders was visible in the novelty of the forms they used. While the Edwardian writers of the first decade, like Galsworthy and Bennett, remained largely within the conventional English literary canon in the style of Charles Dickens,Thomas Hardy and George Eliot’s nineteenth-century classics, the modernists stridently rejected Victorian forms of writing. James Joyce identified Henrik Ibsen as the “most enduring influence” upon Stephen Daedalus, the character who was the writer’s fictional self. The artist as portrayed by Joyce in his semi-autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is a figure shaped as much by Dante’s refusal to compromise with fraudulence or sanctimony as by Gabriel D’Annunzio’s cult of art as religion. The modernists looked outside Europe too and Russian literature was repeatedly hailed as an inspiration. Joyce drew from Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time (the early version of Portrait was named “Stephen Hero”) and was influenced by Ivan Turgenev’s attacks upon Russian nationalism. His claim that Dostoevsky was “the man more than any other who has created modern prose” (Power and Norris 58) was echoed by other modernists. Wyndham Lewis acknowledged his debt to the Russian novelists and the names

of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev come up repeatedly in his autobiography, Rude Assignment. Deriding the “blandly genteel” nineteenthcentury literature created before 1914, Lewis writes, “I do not mean, of course, to say that the English Public have arrived at the unquiet and piercing vision of the Slavonic mind.… But they have moved very appreciably away from the light-hearted pigeon-holing of their grandfathers” (84). Lewis’s choice of 1914 as the date that separates contemporary writers from their “grandfathers” is significant since this year has generally been viewed as the time around which modernism established itself, and Lewis, along with Joyce, Pound and Eliot, were designated by Pound as “the Men of 1914”. Virginia Woolf, whose fascination with Russian literature is well-known, reviewed in print thirteen Russian works between 1917 and 1927 and collaborated on several translations when the Hogarth Press published seven works by Russian writers, three of which Woolf herself helped translate. Of Dostoevsky, Woolf writes, “Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading” (Common Reader 73). She voiced her fascination with the indeterminate, formless character of Russian writings, with their focus on “this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul” (74), rather than the well-constructed plot. The outward gaze did not stop at Russia. The Imagists Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, looked further East to Japan for inspiration. The Japanese “haiku” form was used by Pound in his poem, “In a Station of the Metro”, and by Lowell in her lesser-known but possibly better-crafted “Autumn Haze”. “Tradition” was a word that signified a wider landscape exceeding the legacy handed down to the artist by his or her recognisable predecessors. It could not “be inherited” but, as Eliot wrote in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Sacred Wood, it must be obtained “by great labour”: It involves, in the first place, the historical sense … [which] compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his

bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. (43–44) Literary texts, to these artists, were not merely representations of a single age, a society or a community. They were the living embodiments of entire human civilisations. This idea of civilisation for the artist encompassed the “mind of his own country” and the “mind of Europe” (Eliot, The Sacred Wood 46), a cosmopolitanism that was perceived as an essential feature of the emerging metropolises. Despite the belief that the English literary horizon was widening, the idea of the modernist’s world, however, remained largely Eurocentric. This is explicit in Eliot’s understanding of“the immense panorama of futility and anarchy” (Selected Prose 177), which he termed “contemporary history” and which was synonymous with European history. The waste land depicted in his poem The Waste Land (1922) is a portrayal of Europe as the world. The East, near or far, was accordingly viewed as the mythical land imagined by the young narrator in Joyce’s “Araby”: exotic, spiritual, and crucially, different from the West. The modernist artist, however, largely unconscious of the Eurocentrism inherent in his or her perception of the world, believed that the artist could transcend the confines of nationality, religion and language. Art could consequently speak across times, across cultures and across spaces. Thus Joyce escaped “from his native island to the continent of Europe” to “merge his private career with what he called the nightmare of history” (Levin Web n.p.), and the drunken Stephen Dedalus is helped to his feet by the Hungarian, converted Jew, Leopold Bloom, “with whom he has nothing in common but humanity” (Web n.p.). Woolf, speaking of all humanity, claims, “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” (Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown 5). Eliot writes of the dead poets who are an intrinsic part of the present through the tradition they have bequeathed to the modern

artist: “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know” (The Sacred Wood 46). This is a key difference between modernists and postmodernists.6 Despite a series of different, and sometimes conflicting, portrayals of their contemporary situation, the modernists struggled to wrestle universal principles from a situation that presented itself as totally new, a feature that appears impossible with postmodernism’s innumerable micronarratives. “Only connect” (194 ), E. M. Forster’s words in Howards End (1910), articulated the belief that art can connect humanity despite differences. The modernists widened the definition of English literature to include Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Franz Kafka,Thomas Mann and Tristan Tzara. English literature could only be understood in its entirety as part of European literature. Modern drama included Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco as much as Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward. The novel included Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre as much as Christopher Isherwood and George Orwell, and the British Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), a novel based in the troubled waters of prewar Berlin, viewed the current historical and political developments as concerns common to all Europeans. Understanding English poetry required one to read Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas, as well as the Irish Louis MacNeice, the Anglo-American Wystan Hugh Auden and the Americans Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams, thus linking the literature of Europe with that of the larger West.

THE ECONOMICS, THE NATION AND THE EMPIRE The registers within which this wider understanding of English literature may be located must include the matrices of economic and political conditions. In fact, English literature itself as an academic discipline became possible as a consequence of British imperialism.7 English as a language grew in stature internationally in the early twentieth century so as to incorporate the middle class into the ruling aristocracy of the imperialists. Though Britain and France, the two

major nations that witnessed the rise of European modernism, were also the two largest imperialist forces in the world at the close of the nineteenth century (and rapidly losing their colonies as the twentieth century progressed), the late colonial context of modernist literature has been raised only in recent postcolonial studies. The themes of colonialism and racism remain largely peripheral to the study of the literature of modernism and the World Wars, at best introduced through a few texts by Joseph Conrad and Forster.8 The surprised and indignant response to Chinua Achebe’s 1974 lecture accusing Conrad of racism suggests that despite the colonial context within which Heart of Darkness (1899) is read, some depths may have remained unplumbed. Paul Stasi draws our attention to Joyce’s short story “After the Race” as an allegory of the relationship between provincial Ireland and the Europe Joyce hoped it might someday join” (1). Saikat Majumdar similarly draws our attention to the “bodies of Dubliners, almost always male, whose desire for the energetic aesthetic culture of the metropolis is stifled by the paralysis that pervades the colonial periphery like dreary smog” (37). However, these matrices that together form the fabric of the times, such as the economics of the publishing industry or the context of imperialism, are not subjects that will necessarily be an explicitly articulated subject in literature. The politics or economics of a context enters forms of culture in indirect and implicit ways, revealing effects and consequences of the situation within which the cultural text is embedded. The only way of discerning these largely invisible matrices which direct and control literature would be through recurring ideas, motifs or symbols. One such idea that has been used to approach these conditions is that of the experience of boredom, which Patricia Meyer Spacks and Sara Crangle associate with modernity, or the classical ennui associated with Baudelaire and other modernists, the taedium vitae as Walter Benjamin said, or the banality that Saikat Majumdar associates with modern literature from the “semi-colonial” lands. It is interesting to note that the French word ennui, from the old French verb anoier or ennuyer, to annoy or bore, is from the same root as the English word “annoy”. Yet, though the

word “annoy” was naturalised into English in the early thirteenth century, it was only in the seventeenth century that the word ennui entered English. Entering the English language around 1660, presumably to give expression to an experience shared by the French and the English nobility, the word appears to have been nativised around 1758 to convey a blend of the English words “boredom”, “melancholy”, “listlessness” and “dissatisfaction”. While ennui remained a word restricted to the fashionable, rich and elite society, its more prosaic English near-equivalent, “boredom”, gained marginally greater currency in the nineteenth century. Hardy, whose novels explored the “ache of modernism” (Tess 140), refers to this other, more quotidian experience, boredom: ‘Does Mr. Julian come to see her very often?’ said she.

‘O yes—he’s always a-coming—a regular bore to me.’

‘A regular what?’

‘Bore!—Ah, I forgot, you don’t know our town words.’

(The Hand of Ethelberta 136) Sara Crangle points to the democratisation of boredom occurring around the late nineteenth century: “In Hardy, boredom – the desire for any desire at all – afflicts the leisured classes, and increasingly, the masses; in Tess, the narrator identifies ‘the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilised races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power’” (7–8). While Crangle goes on to situate the aesthetics of literary modernism in the small, urgent though banal, longings of everyday, it is the two phrases used by Hardy in the two quotations in connection with boredom and melancholy that arrest us: “town words” and “civilised races”. If boredom and ennui are indeed emotions that are closer to modernity, and are rapidly being democratised, the two phrases alert the reader to the intimate association that the idea of “modernity” enjoys with the Eurocentric ideas of civilisation, urbanity, culture, nation and progress. Elizabeth Goodstein’s Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity sought to explain the

boredom of the modern age in connection with the sweeping changes that were taking place at the time: In the mid-nineteenth century, as industrialization and urbanization transformed the European landscape, the problem of boredom emerged as a mass phenomenon … The discourse on boredom … mingles accents of gloom with boundless optimism – boredom appears on one hand as a response to fatigue, decay, depletion, and on the other, as a spur to freedom, innovation, renewal. (101) Hardy’s phrases also direct our attention to the economics underlying modernity, an economics that is linked with capitalism, imperialism and the nation-state. This is an emotion that hovers between the sophisticated emotion of ennui portrayed as the experience of the flaneur, the artist-poet of the metropolis, and that of the more trivial and common emotion of boredom. Patricia Meyer Spacks, in her Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, argues that “the dynamic of promise and threat” between a demand and its possible satisfaction “typifies the tension of all production and consumption” (3): an emotion brought on by “disruptions of desire: the inability to desire or to have desire fulfilled” (x). Spacks’s focus is on post-industrial, first-world societies, a focus that is echoed by Goodstein who believes “boredom” to be a post-Enlightenment term, a consequence of modernity’s secularism, industrialisation and urbanisation, leading to a “democratisation of scepticism” (99). The investment and expanse of capitalism had as much to do with modernity as did technology and science. The years of the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century, often called the “second industrial revolution”, saw the rise of monopoly capitalism, developments of instruments of credit and the spread of banking networks, new forms of mass production leading to standardisation, and the burgeoning of new forms of mass consumption with evolutions in retailing.9 By 1900, Tim Armstrong points out, “abundance, that is an economy driven by desire rather than need, was something which needed theorizing” (3) in the work of

economists and sociologists. The concept of Veblen goods – luxury goods whose demand falls with a fall in price, as the product is no longer seen as exclusive once its price decreases – needed to be introduced in economics. The impact of these circumstances upon culture was articulated by, among others, the Frankfurt School, who warned against the “culture industry”. The rise of capitalist consumerism, though frequently derided and denied in modernist texts, could not have left them entirely cold. Being part of the uneven economical context aggravated by the rise of capitalism and imperialism, the artists were participants, perhaps not always a knowing or willing participant but participants nevertheless, in the emergence of a culture of abundance, a culture of materialism and a culture of Eurocentrism. Discussing the different ways in which marketplace economics impacted male and female modernists, Alissa G. Karl quotes from Monique Truong’s Book of Salt (2003), where Binh, the Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, speaks of that other life veiled by the creative and avant-garde images of artists – their material and physical lives that he as a cook caters to. “The modernist,” writes Karl, “is imperialist not as a result of affiliation with imperialist nations, but through practices of appropriation and consumption, such that the imperial metropole serves modernist proliferation well” (3). The idea of the early-twentieth-century writers as exiles, rootless and detached from their particular nations, creates an image of disaffected rebels, often masking their powers to negotiate their identities and desires through commercial capitalism. This is an image that needs to be placed within the larger political and economic context so as to reappraise modernist literary and cultural mythology. Karl reminds us that the metropoles of Paris, London and New York were “not natural founts of creative enterprise”, but locations “shaped by, and formative of, the global moves of capital, the shifting terrain of empire, and the daily routine wherein gendered, sexual, racial and national identities are inscribed” (3). These discriminations and disparities in society, obscured by the overarching narratives of democracy and modernity, characterised

also the allegedly “free” market and the “democratic” nation-state. While the culture industry used the media and other advances of technology to homogenise a particular kind of culture, the development of a nation’s bureaucracy with its forms of management and surveillance were instruments of control that contradicted the ideals of liberalism and equality. Arguing that the culture industry offered a freedom that was illusory, Theodor Adorno saw capitalcontrolled culture as manoeuvring a drift towards not freedom but further integration and domination. With the increasing availability of technology-powered control in the hands of the state, and with capitalist modernisation leading to the rise of big corporate houses, the anxiety of powerful groups dominating and monitoring different aspects of an individual’s life was a real fear. Dread of possible dystopic conditions was conveyed in novels like Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949). The frustration of the individual fighting the system was expressed in Kafka’s The Trial (1925), as also in his unfinished novel The Castle (1926), published posthumously. Terms such as “Big Brother”, “doublethink”, “thought police” and “memory hole” gained currency in the urban space which was viewed increasingly as being controlled by an efficient and thoughtless machine and by a commodity culture which was becoming increasingly, as Karl Marx and, following him, Walter Benjamin said, a projection of the economy, not its reflection.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PICTURE There is, however, one erroneous conclusion that later readers of English literature have arrived at and which needs to be clarified at this point. Though the presence and contribution of the avantgarde Eliots and Woolfs may today appear overwhelming and dominant in the early twentieth century, at the time of their writing these writers were not always recognised as major artists. Gerald Bullett’s Modern English Fiction (1926) gives the modern reader an indication of the general state of contemporary opinion regarding the modernists. It mentions Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence and Richardson only in the final

chapter devoted to “Eccentricities”. This is despite the title and date of publication. Bennett, Wells, Galsworthy, Conrad and Forster, however, each have a chapter devoted to them. This is intriguing given the fact that by 1922, the magna opera of modernism had already been published: Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Eliot’s 1923 essay, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, comparing the method Joyce used in the novel Ulysses to “the discoveries of an Einstein”, had been published in The Dial. This introduces the issue of how the beginning of the twentieth century may have meant different things to different people. The changing face of the city itself denoted discrete realities to distinct communities of people. While the growing city spelt opportunity to the many streaming into the metropolis, the increasing numbers of people also spelt “crowds” and “unwanted crowds” to others. There was a phenomenal increase in the urban population. The urban population of England was calculated at around 25 per cent in the year 1801. But by 1901, this population had swelled to an immense 75 per cent ( Johnson, Whyman and Wykes 25). This twentieth-century urban audience that faced the writer was substantially different from that of the Romantic or earlier ages. It was a largely literate population, best described as the “reading public” (Webb 149, Altick, Silbey 49, Q. D. Leavis) because of its sheer size consequent to the rapid rise of mass literacy in the earlier century. Following the emphasis on “useful knowledge” (satirised by Dickens in the character of Pott, the editor in Pickwick Papers) and visible in that icon of knowledge, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which had grown impressively over the last century (from its three-volume beginning in 1768–71 to its twenty-volume fourth edition in 1801–10), literacy was a major historical factor in shaping the readership of the twentieth century. By 1893, 95 per cent of the labouring force of England could read, an achievement conveyed in the title of one of the best known working-class autobiographies, William Lovett’s The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1876). By 1914, literacy in England was universal.

The nature of literacy in 1914 was significantly different from that of the early-nineteenth-century generation which the historian R. K. Webb called “a potential reading public” (23). Literacy then had been minimal and “unequal to the task of regular reading”, unlike the twentieth-century reader who “enjoyed a near universal, functional literacy” (Silbey 49). This transition was drawn out over an extended period of two hundred years. The effects of literacy snowballed through the successive revolutions of the last two centuries – the printing press, the industrial revolution, the waves of democracy, the proliferation of the media – to bring to the twentieth century an extremely heterogeneous reading public. The impact of literacy was heightened immensely by other developments such as the postal system and the penny-newspaper. The 1874 Treaty of Berne ushered in the Universal Postal Union which led to a situation where “[…] every inhabitant of every country from Sweden to Greece, from Russia to Ireland, was to be linked together in a common system of flat-rate postage. Businessman could be connected to businessman, worker to worker, parent to child, lover to lover, through their common ability to read and write” (Vincent 1). The Times celebrated this as “the most practical which human ingenuity has as yet achieved of those floating aspirations towards universal brotherhood” (Vincent 2). The advent of the penny-paper, with all duties on the newspaper being entirely removed by 1855, increased the circulation of newspapers greatly. Between 1855 and 1870, newspaper readership more than doubled: a phenomenon that indirectly encouraged the public belief that there was a need for the populace to remain informed. According to Raymond Williams, the Daily Mail showed a phenomenal increase in sales over the last two years of the nineteenth century (Modernism/Postmodernism 203) and was predominantly responsible for first, doubling the newspaper-buying public in the period 1896–1906 and then with its competitors doubling it again by 1914. By 1920, the Daily Mail was recording sales of about 5,000,000 and on Sundays of about 12,000,000 (176). The impact of newspapers may be estimated by the power that media barons like Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook came to wield, prompting Stanley Baldwin to denounce Beaverbrook and Viscount Rothermere

as aiming at “power, but power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages” (Rubinstein 176). The increase in the literate population boosted the demand for books, and with the ready response of the publishing industry to this increased demand, literature became accessible to a public far larger than that of the earlier century. When looked at from a historical perspective, this phenomenon of the “mass” reading public was an undeniable cultural gain. But this revolution had other consequences which may be seen to have reached a climactic point around the time modernism emerged. In the attempt by the publishing industry to meet the tastes of the heterogeneous readership, the gulf between allegedly “highbrow” literature and “lowbrow” literature widened. The doors of literature, so long largely confined to the educated upper sections of society, were thrown open to the newly-educated working classes.10 These readers, largely comprised of first-generation literates to whom the printed word was still a novelty, demanded a literature that would not be too taxing. With this new audience being far greater in number than the early-nineteenth-century audience, the serious and well-educated readers found themselves in the minority and the neo-literate multitudes in the majority. The larger part of the audience displayed a general reluctance to place too much strain on intellect and time, triggering the need to provide reading material to cater to busy schedules and lighter tastes. Edward Bulwer-Lytton writes in England and the English (1833): It is natural that writers should be ambitious of creating a sensation: a sensation is produced by gaining the ear, not of the few, but of the many; … hence the profusion of amusing, familiar and superficial writings. People complain of it as if it were proof of degeneracy in the knowledge of authors – it is a proof of the increased number of readers. (Web n.p.) Many among the intellectuals tended to look upon mass-education, ushered in with the nineteenth century, as causing more harm than good to society. The disapproval of the established and traditional

intelligentsia to the “easy culture” is recognisable when Bulwer-Lytton adds, “The time is come when nobody will fit out a ship for the intellectual Columbus to discover new worlds, but when everybody will subscribe for his setting up a steamboat between Calais and Dover” (Web n.p.). This opinion was shared across the century by many writers like George Gissing who, more than a century later, spoke of the “quarter-educated public”. The other turn-of-the-century development that significantly influenced reading habits was the development of the metropolitan railway and the Tube. A phenomenal increase occurred in the number of railway journeys people took. The 200 million passengers carried by the British Railways in 1858 swelled to 1200 million by 1928 (Hobsbawm 338). The increased number of titles that crowded the railway book stalls spoke directly of the revolution in transport. Rail travel required a particular kind of reading: the kind that helped pass the time without undue calls on concentration. This perspective played a significant part in determining the changed attitude towards reading that occurred towards the fin de siècle, and reading, which had been unquestionably useful, now became habitual: “…clearly a new attitude to reading was on its way to a virtually fore-ordained triumph. Reading was unquestionably useful and it became habitual. Like walking, it was a skill to get from one place to another; only a few used it to scale heights” (Webb 202). Commercial circulating libraries mushroomed to fill the leisure hours; cheap “yellow-back” novels directed specifically at the traveller were sold on railway platforms, to be purchased just before the traveller boarded the train. This audience looked at literature as much as a source of entertainment as an instrument for intellectual enhancement. The gradual decline of literature as an intellectual stimulant was not limited to any one class, though the “quarter-educated” poorer classes were often blamed for it. It was a feature of post-industrial society as a whole. The conditions of social variation brought about after the end of the eighteenth century had increasingly produced a way of living that, in Raymond Williams’s words, gave birth to an “unfocussed restlessness” (The Long Revolution 193), which permitted neither rest

nor attention, yet somehow had to be appeased. This restlessness led to a body of literature which, Williams felt, was “characterised by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet co-existing propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth and hatred of vacancy” (Coleridge 48). Reading was increasingly considered an “easy drug” (The Long Revolution 193). Two kinds of literature were in great demand: the light, undemanding genre of the popular novels which flourished as paperbacks, and the newspaper or the periodical. The “new journalism” that was then current in newspapers was part of the metamorphosis which the newspaper underwent. It became both informative and entertaining. Gissing in New Grub Street (1891) writes, “They want only the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information – bits of stories, bits of foolery, bits of statistics, bits of jokes…. Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them; they want chit-chat” (496–97). Joyce had parodied this in his Ulysses: “Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy…. Our prize titbit. MATCHAM’S MASTERSTROKE. Written by Mr. Philip Beaufoy, Playgoer’s Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer…” (71). This light, frothy “chit-chat”, of course, did not form the totality of the newspapers. The best newspapers were improving rapidly in quality, keeping their readers well informed and in touch with contemporary intellectual currents. Richard Cobden, speaking at the Manchester Athenaeum around the end of 1850, says, I take it that, as a rule, grown-up men, in these busy times, read very little else but newspapers … the man who habitually has between his fingers 400 or 500 newspapers in the course of the year … and is engaged pretty entirely in business, or in political or public life – depend upon it – whatever he may say, or like to have it thought to the contrary, he reads very little else, as a rule, but the current periodical literature; and I doubt if a man with limited time could read anything else that would be much more useful to him. (qtd. in Morley 599)

A large fraction of the audience who, in the nineteenth century, would have gathered around the reader turning the pages of Dickens’s latest addition to his novel, now moved over to the newspaperperiodical world. An indistinct line now separated news-writing from fiction-writing as prominent media moved to blend “news” with the “human note”. O’Connor of the Star determined to do away with the hackneyed style of obsolete journalism: “the men and women who figure in the forum or in the pulpit or the law court shall be presented as they are – living, breathing, in blushes or in tears…” (The Long Revolution 221). This was the figure that came to be hailed, and valorised, as the “common man”.

THE AVANT-GARDE ARTIST AND THE COMMON MAN The printed word had become cheaply and profusely available, and with the journalist involved in that variety of narrative which has been termed “faction” – a narrative which attempted to capture the hitherto diverse appeals of fact and fiction – authors and poets too were seen as sellers in this market, selling their products of art. A reading population of thirty million that is growing daily is a market that may not be ignored. As increasing the number of readers for their publications became the compelling goal of publishing houses, the pressure upon writers increased to produce stuff that would be widely appreciated. It was in this context of a rapidly changing readership that the formulations of “minority” and “mass”, “quality” and “popular” (Williams, Modernism/Postmodernism 84) that delineated modernist literature came to be shaped. Andreas Huyssen argues that the resilient opposition between modernism and mass culture cannot be understood in the limited context of avant-garde modernist art (viii). Present through the nineteenth century, the avant-garde, Huyssen argues, was a concept more associated with political radicalism and less with art. Saint Simon had, in 1825, ascribed a vanguard messianic role to the artist in the construction of the ideal state (Huyssen 4–6). He attributes this link between the avant-garde artist and political radicalism to their common enemy: the bourgeois

society and its cultural conservatism. “As early as the 1890s the avant-garde’s insistence on cultural revolt clashed with the bourgeoisie’s need for cultural legitimation” (Huyssen 5), aggravating, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the alienation of the radical artist. The distance of the intellectual from the individual alleged as the “common man” was not a twentieth-century phenomenon and quotations in this chapter from nineteenth-century individuals as diverse as Bulwer-Lytton and Coleridge are proof of this. This distance of culture between the intellectuals and the commoners had probably always existed, but twentieth-century technological innovations succeeded in bringing their earlier disparate worlds into an uncomfortable proximity. The founding of Penguin Books in 1935 revolutionised the publishing industry with the idea that great writing ought to be made available for the price of a pack of cigarettes. Allen Lane, the man who revolutionised the reading industry with the introduction of the paperback, saw the reading of literature in simple terms with his three famous colour codes: orange for fiction, green for crime, and black for classics. Though it was Lane’s Penguin that was to bring out the uncensored version of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 and the reprint of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1969, the literature of the newspaper and the railway bookstalls usually belonged to a genre of literature different to that of avant-garde modernism. Yet they had palpable consequences on the serious writer. As a result of the radical changes that occurred in contemporary literature and in the reading public, the serious artist found his audience a smaller proportion of the whole than it had been fifty years before. This situation had its definite advantage in the fact that the artist found himself freer to address as he wanted the specialised public left to him. But it also had its disturbing side. This select audience within a select culture were fully aware of their minority position and of the threat that their culture faced from the culture of the majority. I. A. Richards spoke of “the gulf between what is preferred by the majority and what is accepted as excellent by the most qualified opinion” (31), adding that this difference between the popular and the qualified standard had come with the increase in

population and the crowds that were now an integral part of cities. The icon of the minority elite artist battling a rapidly growing philistine majority was one that was accepted by many artists and intellectuals. The members of this cultural group, though smaller, considered themselves as having a more significant role than the members of the “lower,” though larger, culture group. Echoing Arnold, who in Culture and Anarchy had consigned a distinctly educational role to culture, F. R. Leavis voiced the litterateur’s sense of responsibility in Scrutiny: that the moral, social and beneficent character of culture became manifest when culture began to be considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn a total and harmonious perfection, but also included the endeavour to make it prevail: “Many who deplore Arnold’s way with religion will agree that, as the other traditions relax and social forms disintegrate, it becomes correspondingly more important to preserve the literary tradition” (323). In many ways a legacy of the Romantics, this tenet placed culture very near the centre of society with the artist as a social intelligence. The emergence of this doctrine of art as a singular and special form of cognisance is traced by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society. He reasoned that the idea of the artist as an independent intellectual could emanate only after the disappearance of the patron and the rise of an anonymous multi-class audience (Culture and Society, chapter 2, 33–52). Only after this was accomplished could the literary imagination be looked upon as a creative, humanistic principle that possessed the power to guide society. Both Romanticism, which extended the claims of the power of art, and the nineteenth-century prophets – Thomas Carlyle, Coleridge, Arnold, John Ruskin and Dickens – had bequeathed a legacy of power to their successors. The modernists, who inherited a belief in the inherent value of aesthetics, entered the literary world confident of the relevance and importance of art. With the breakdown of the church’s claim of being a repository of spirituality and truth, there grew the belief that this was literature’s function (Sartre). Any consciously formulated artistic principle, however, if initiated with a degree of solemnity, was likely to have a precarious existence

when faced with the extremely heterogeneous and booming readership during this period. Literature had lost its confinement to the educated classes and the two most important features of the literary world were radically changed. The first was the character of the readership. And the second was the attitude towards reading. This prompted Eliot’s remark that in spite of the widespread literacy that was initiating thousands into readership, the modern literary artist had to address himself to one hypothetical intelligent man who “does not exist and is the audience of the artist”. He accused the prevailing education system of arming students with a less-than-perfect education: And we know, that whether education can improve and foster culture or not, it can surely adulterate and degrade it. For there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted. (116) With the belief that the onus to preserve and continue the “essentials” of culture was on the artist, Eliot spoke of the future, “the immense, the wonderful future” which was “theirs to create” (Ackroyd 55). The masterpieces that followed in the next two decades – The Waste Land, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Tarr (1901–11), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) – validated his claim. The negative attitude of many among the modernist writers towards the triumphs of literacy and the common man has sometimes been viewed as the explanation for the extreme obscurity of their works. The experimentation and innumerable allusions to classical literature that characterise their prose and poetry add to the sheer difficulty of understanding their works and has been read as a deliberate attempt to fashion a literature that would exclude the masses. The authoritarian Fascist society that developed in the 1920s in Germany and Italy, and the almost simultaneous wave of

“hyperdemocratisation”11 that was sweeping over Europe, were both extreme enough to provoke a reaction in any thinking mind. John Carey’s interpretation of high modernism as a reactionary movement shaped to deny entry to the less erudite subscribes to this thesis: “The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture… . Realism of the sort it is assumed the masses appreciated was abandoned. So was logical coherence. Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated” (16–17). Faced with a rapidly shrinking audience, the literary artist found his or her ties with society weakening. This sense of their own marginality appeared to be paradoxically coupled in the minds of some artists with the feeling that the onus of historical evolution lay upon them. It has been argued by other scholars that the institutionalisation of literature, which established the power of the literary canon, encouraged this development (Brown). This accusation of reactionary artists creating elitist literature too obscure for the masses was the same accusation hurled at modernists by later writers of the 1930s. While this accusation may seem to be vindicated by Pound’s subsequent support of the Fascists and by Lawrence’s distinctly anti-democratic utterances in The Plumed Serpent (1926), the claim leaves many questions unanswered. Joyce’s creation, Leopold Bloom, who stands head and shoulders over the innumerable other fictional characters created throughout the twentieth century, is portrayed emphatically and unapologetically as a common man. The same may be said of many characters created by Woolf, Lawrence or Katherine Mansfield. The feature of obscurity, therefore, possibly implies a more complex origin. When Woolf, in her 1924 essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, accused Bennett of having “never once looked at Mrs Brown in her corner”, and instead of having “looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window … but never at her, never at life, never at human nature” (16), she was articulating the modernist rejection of earlier conventions of the arts, not a simplistic rejection of the common man or woman. She goes on to claim that not only would the conventions be useless to modernists, but that “those

conventions are ruin, those tools are death” (16). This belief that the world was changing and that there was a need to seek new themes and their corresponding modes of expression, language and form, is a recurrent theme among modernists. The “modern world” had to be made “possible for art” (Williams, Country and City 178) because, as modernists believed, it had changed irrevocably. “On or about December 1910,” writes Woolf, “human character changed” (Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown 5). This claim differentiated the Edwardians of the first decade of the twentieth century from the modernists who spanned the 1910s, 20s and, to some extent, the 30s. The world and humanity had changed and therefore art, which expressed the world, had to be made anew. Raymond Williams, in his essay “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism”, suggests that the impetus towards modernism had been engendered through the experience of the metropolis: “the new kind of open, complex and mobile society” (91) made possible by artists and intellectuals, many of whom were immigrants to the city. The city, he writes, with its then unique social space “which in the course of capitalist and imperialist development had characteristically attracted a very mixed population, from a variety of social and cultural origins” (91), made possible newer communities of people, untrammelled by racial or class roots. Almost all the towering figures of modernism – Lawrence, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot and Pound – were outsiders to the city and therefore faced a reality which, in its novelty, promised newer realities that were theirs to forge. To these newcomers, the liberality and opportunity of the city meant possibility and potential. Unlike the Edwardian writers who saw their familiar city transforming before their eyes into a space increasingly populated by strangers, modernist writers were part of the transformation ushered in through democracy, increased mobility and accessible literacy. Irving Howe, in his essay, “The Culture of Modernism”, writes of the process through which, “over a period of time, literary history must be affected by the larger history of which it is part” and indicates that it is “when the inner dynamics of a literature and the large-scale pressures of history cross that there follows a

new cultural style, in this case, modernism” (14–15). A letter of Pound’s to Harriett Monroe, dated 18 August 1912, articulates this consciousness of being on the brink of a new style in explicit terms: that the literary renaissance initiated by Joyce, Lewis and Eliot would culminate in the Risorgimento which would make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot (Paige 10). Democracy was not a system that either predated or was imposed upon the institutions of the city. It was intrinsic to the vey formation of the city’s academies of higher education and its institutions of literature and culture. All that constituted the experience of humanity – relationships between men and women, potential for achievement, understanding of reality, and even the language which could express these – were all viewed through the lens of this doctrine that changed the very paradigms of thought and feeling. The writers, struggling to create a new language and new forms to convey this brilliant reality, saw no necessity to limit humanity’s aspirations to one of mediocrity. Many among them, most famously Joyce and Lawrence, had risen from the lower middle classes to the highest ranks of art and literature and were impatient with those who strove for any less. Woolf ’s criticism of Bennett and Galsworthy in her essays “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924) and “Modern Fiction” (1925) is not based on a difference of approach, but quite clearly on a failure by earlier writers to delve deeper into the human mind, remaining satisfied with merely scratching the surface of the exterior reality. The modernist struggle to innovate and their fierce championing of the classics may not have been born out of anti-democratic temper, but out of a striving for the perfection that they felt was attainable in the new century. By the 1930s, the impact of democracy had imbued the words “common people” and “popular” with meanings somewhat different from that of the 1910s and 20s. The primary sense of the word “popular” had moved from its early sense of “low” or “base” to the sense of “widely favoured”, in use in the eighteenth century, to the nineteenth-century sense of the word, “well-liked”. According to Williams, in the twentieth century the word admitted to yet another sense when it was increasingly used in the sense of presenting

knowledge in a generally accessible way (Keywords 237). The philosophy of socialism had attracted widespread support from writers and intellectuals, and to Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, Orwell, and Stephen Spender the words “popular” and “realism” became “natural companions” (Brecht 188). The extreme experimentation and search to realise a prefect form and language that would convey the new world appeared to be luxuries that the world could ill-afford at a time when humanity was riven by enmities among nations and classes. “We have seen that there are two styles”, wrote Cyril Connolly in his autobiography Enemies of Promise, “which it is convenient to describe as the realist, or vernacular, the style of rebels, journalists, common-sense addicts, and unromantic observers of human destiny – and the Mandarin, the artificial style of men of letters or of those in authority who make letters their spare-time occupation” (45). In the latter group Connolly counted Woolf, Marcel Proust and Joyce. These 1930s’ writers considered lucidity and comprehensibility the touchstone of good art. Good prose is like a glass pane, said Orwell, and Brecht in his essay “The Popular and the Realistic” writes of the claims higher than that of aesthetics: I shall never forget how one worker looked at me when I answered his request to include something extra in a song about the USSR (‘It must go in—what’s the point otherwise?’) by saying that it would wreck the artistic form: he put his head on one side and smiled. At this polite smile a whole section of aesthetic collapsed. (111) Brecht’s “Prologue” to “The Exception and the Rule” accordingly reads, We are about to tell you

The story of a journey. An exploiter

And two of the exploited are the travellers.

Examine carefully the behaviour of these people:

Find it surprising though not unusual

Inexplicable though normal

Incomprehensible though it is the rule.

Consider even the most insignificant, seemingly simple

Action with distrust. Ask yourselves whether it is necessary

Especially if it is usual.

We ask you expressly to discover

That what happens all the time is not natural.

For to say that something is natural

In such times of bloody confusion

Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrariness

Of inhuman humanity is to

Regard it as unchangeable. (Drain 110) The message of art needed to reach the audience. Their intense involvement with the politics of their age and their disillusionment with the earlier generation characterised the literature authored by Isherwood, Graham Greene and Orwell. The growing Fascism on the continent created a sense of unease in the 1930s and 40s. In an atmosphere hostile to democracy, liberalism and socialism, the modernist belief in the Romantic concept of the artist as the vatic poet, prophet and guide to the masses appeared dangerously close to the Nietzschean idea of the Ubermensch.12 The solitary figure of the artist striding the high, snow-covered peaks that had appeared so attractive to modernists did not hold any charm for these writers. Charges of elitism regarding the art of Joyce, though, have been looked at askance since the main subject of Joyce’s magnum opus is the common man, Leopold Bloom. Yet the fact remains that the common man as represented in Bloom would never willingly read the book Ulysses. Almost as if to prove this, Joyce shows Bloom buying the rather transparently titled The Sweets of Sin. It is possible that the growing distance between the artist and the masses was feared by Joyce too, and Bloom’s humane sympathy and consideration for the other Dubliners is an explicit pointer to Dedalus’s lack of understanding for “what the heart feels”. Though Dedalus leaves his home and nation to “forge … the uncreated conscience of (his) race” ( Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 276), this possibility

within the novel will invariably be qualified by the fact that Joyce’s work remained outside the reach of not only the common man but also many litterateurs. The philosophy of democracy, crucial to the twentieth century, was found wanting in modernists’ works due to their “frequent expense of democratic access” (Barth 202) and has remained a lasting indictment on them by their successors.

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New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Kenner, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985. Print. Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Leavis, F. R. “Arnold as Critic.” A Selection from Scrutiny Vol. 1: vii, 1939. Print. Leavis, Q. D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus, 1939. Print. Levin, Harry. “James Joyce.” The Atlantic Monthly Online, December 1946. Web. 11 September 2015. . Lewis, Wyndham. “Detachment and the Writer.” Enemy Salvoes. London: Vision Press, 1975. Print. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Print. Lovett, William. The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920. Print. Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. Majumdar, Saikat. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987. Print. ———. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. ———. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004. Print. Melzer, Arthur, Jerry Weinberger and Richard Zinman, eds. Democracy and the Arts. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Print.

Morley, John. The Life of Richard Cobden. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1881. Print. Paige, D. D., ed. Selected Letters 1907–1941 of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions Publishing Company, 1950. Print. Power, Arthur, and David Norris. Conversations with James Joyce. New York: Barnes and Noble; London: Millington, 1974. Print. Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. London, New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Rubinstein, William D. Twentieth-century Britain: A Political History. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003. Print. Russell, Bertrand. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. London: Unwin, 1975. Print. Sartre, Jean Paul. What is Literature? New York: Philosophical Library, 1949. Print. Silbey, David. The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War 1914– 1916. London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005. Print. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print. Stasi, Paul. Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense. Cambridge UP, 2012. Print. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, London: Duke UP, 2004. Print. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Print. Vincent, David. The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Themes in History). Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Print. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Webb, Robert Kiefer. British Working Class Reader: 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1955. Print. ———. “The Victorian Reading Public.” From Dickens to Hardy. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 6. Ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. 198–219. Print. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Penguin, 1958. Print. ———. Keywords. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print. ———. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. Print. ———. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Print. ———. “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism.” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. Peter Brooker. New York: Longman, 1992. 82–94. Print. ——— Writing in Society. London: Verso, 1983. Print. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, 1925. Print. ———. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. London: The Hogarth Press, 1924. Print.

Notes 1 The term “politics of the possible” is borrowed from Kumkum Sangari’s essay,

“The Politics of the Possible”, where she explores how Marquez, by opening up conceptual spaces through his non-mimetic narratives, legitimises the status of the possible as valid knowledge. 2 For a fuller exploration of the links between democracy and the cultural forms

of literature, films, architecture and music, see Williams’s The Long Revolution and Writing in Society. Also see Bru. For a discussion on the topic with regard to American culture, see Melzer, Weinberger and Zinman.

3 In this influential book, Lovejoy traces the life of the traditionally accepted

scheme and structure of the world through two thousand years, from its origins in classical thought to its diverse ramifications down the centuries. He explores how ideas become the driving forces and how human beings become the vehicles of these ideas. 4 The German word for “worldview”, usually attributed to the nineteenth-century

philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt, meaning the climate of beliefs and ideas that frame an individual or community’s world. 5 For a fuller discussion on the emergence of the socialist and communist

movement, see Gasper. For a discussion on the etymology and history of the terms, see Williams. 6 For a fuller exploration of the relationship between modernism and

postmodernism, a much-fraught subject, see Jameson; Lyotard; McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction, Constructing Postmodernism and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole. 7 For a fuller exploration of this area, see Viswanathan. 8 Remarkably few books exist on the topic of early-twentieth-century literature

and its imperial context. To name some of the few: Rigby and Booth; Stasi. 9 For further reading, see Veblen; Birkin. 10 For more details on the burgeoning popular press in this era, see: Altick;

Webb; Bulwer-Lytton 11 The term was probably first used by Jose Ortega y Gasset in his Revolt of

the Masses, published by Unwin Books in London, 1932. 12 Ubermensch, a German word used by Nietzsche in his book Thus Spake

Zarathustra, has been variously translated as “Beyond- Man”, “Superman” and “Overman”. The Ubermensch was an ideal that Nietzsche posited for humanity as one that contradicted the otherworldliness preached by Christianity.

T WO

SCIENCE The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

“A

“rtists are the antennae of the race”, wrote Ezra Pound in “The Teacher’s Mission”. “A nation’s writers”, he continues, “are the voltmeters and steam-gauges of that nation’s intellectual life. They are the registering instruments, and if they falsify their reports there is no measure to the harm that they do” (635). Similar comparisons between scientists and artists, often in comparably awkward and cumbersome language, may be found reiterated by a significant number of writers in the early twentieth century. Pound is possibly the most visible, considering he signed some of his essays “Helmholtz” after the German physicist and physician, and repeatedly used words associated with science – “energy”, “diagnosis” or “antisepsis”. Perhaps the most famous example of science-inspired discourse in early-twentieth-century literature is T. S. Eliot’s analogy of the catalyst, an analogy explicitly derived from the physical sciences. The mind of a mature poet, he wrote, differed from that of an immature poet by being a more finely perfected medium in which diverse feelings are “at liberty to enter into new combinations”:

When … two gases … are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. (Sacred Wood 48) As early as 1914, Joseph Conrad had, in his preface to The Nigger of “Narcissus”, compared the writer’s work with that of a man of science (7) and in 1922, James Joyce’s use of the mythic method in his novel Ulysses was likened by Eliot to a discovery as significant in literature as that of Einstein’s in science (“Ulysses, Order and Myth” 177). To a large extent, this inclination to associate the artist’s work with the scientist’s was simply a response to the spirit of the age. Scientific development and technological changes were central to notions of twentieth-century modernity. The great achievements of the previous century, electricity and steel, had led to the invention of the telegraph, the telephone and railroads, all of which played a significant part in determining lives. By the end of the nineteenth century, science had profoundly changed human lives, answering innumerable pressing demands and easing the daily experience. In 1908, Henry Ford succeeded in making the motor car a mass-produced product (though still largely limited to the wealthier masses) with the Ford Model-T, which came to be known popularly as the “Tin Lizzie”. This was the first affordable automobile, bringing to the upper middleclasses the luxury and speed of car travel which changed the world so drastically that in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Henry Ford becomes a messianic figure with Ford’s Day celebrations and the tops of Christianity’s crosses cut off to form T-s: “Ford’s in his flivver … All’s well with the world” (29). The telephone, though patented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, became commercially available at a feasible cost around 1900. The first successful transatlantic radio signal was received by Marconi in 1901 and on Christmas Eve, 1906, the wireless operators experienced

a technological miracle. Accustomed to hearing the “dits” and “dahs” of Morse code over transmitters, the crew on board the ship Sparks, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, heard for the first time a human voice singing “O Holy Night” on their radios. But the more palpable influences of science upon human lives and on literature – the language, the form, the content – were merely the outward signs of more complex responses occurring within the twentieth-century mind; the tip of the proverbial ice-berg. These responses would play a significant role in shaping the century’s values and ideas of progress. The impact of science may appear at first sight to be largely material, with escalators, telephones, safety razors, zippers, radios, colour photography, movies and cheap books, but these physical changes in everyday life masked a deeper transformation in the social and cultural climate of the early twentieth century. Changes in technology “necessitated other changes which worked to standardise and flatten out differences between places and people. … By the early twentieth century, the scientific worldview had become the most authoritative one for the Western world, undoing the previous authority of religion” (Wilson 41). Science, explicitly and implicitly, would influence the trajectory that the arts would take in the twentieth century, and the artist would remain acutely conscious of the man of science as he or she went about their work. The very definition of literature, as Gerald Graff writes, would be “shaped by a love-hate relation with Science.” (28)

ARTISTS AND SCIENCE As early as 1857, Gustave Flaubert had, in a letter to Marie- Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie, spoken of the spirit of the sciences that he believed would become core to the arts: “Art must rise over personal emotions and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to endow it with pitiless method, with the exactness of the physical sciences. Still, for me the capital difficulty remains style, form, that indefinable Beauty implicit in the conception and representing, as Plato said, the splendour of Truth” (195). This objective and dispassionate pursuit of

truth that was possible through art, as much as it was possible through science, was a belief that was echoed by Emile Zola in his literary movement of naturalism. In his 1880 book, translated as The Experimental Novel, Zola equated the field of the artist with that of the physiologist. Echoing the physiologist Claude Bernard, Zola believed that the scientific method “should also lead to the knowledge of the passionate and intellectual life” (2), since the novelist “is equally an observer and an experimentalist” (8). This scientific ethos of impersonality and precision was to have a significant impact on all areas of scholarship, in the sciences and the arts, in the coming century. With the advent of the First World War in 1914, the powers of science became all too visible, transfiguring forever the pre-war world of possibilities that humanity had known and irreversibly changing the equation between art and science. The altered circumstances after the war steadily gained ground through the 1920s and the 30s, making it difficult to bridge the divide, as the Romantics had once done, between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures”1 – the arts and the sciences. Such a situation made it difficult to identify the artist/literary intellectual as the harbinger of progress and the leader of society, a position that was increasingly being assumed by men of science. Though this phrase, “men of science”, was on its way to becoming archaic due to the steady increase of women in the domain of science (Ursula Brangwen, in Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow [1915], is a biology student at Nottingham University College), science was still to remain a “masculine” territory for many years to come. Its associations with intellect, technology, war, control, power and, not the least, higher pay, undermined all virtues (or vices) considered feminine and kept the domain of science “male”. Modernism’s relationship with modernity was therefore fraught with inner contradictions. The modernist author’s open hostility to the coming of a mass culture perceived as feminine in its appeal to masssentiment and lack of intellectual rigour was complicated by the modernist inclination towards myths, religious mysticism and “effeminate” detail.2

In the nineteenth century, the image of the artist had come close to that of prophet and seer, aided by literature such as Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” (written in 1821, published posthumously in 1840) and other Romantic works, culminating in Thomas Carlyle’s public lecture on 8 May 1840, “The Hero as Prophet”. In the twentieth century, having transcended the crippling “note of provinciality” (Lectures and Essays 246) that Arnold had complained of in English literature, the English poet now expected to interpret life for the world and to take up the mantle of religion. That this sense of a religious vocation was not considered archaic by the twentieth-century writers themselves is revealed by Stanislaus Joyce, the brother of James Joyce, who reports a conversation with the novelist in his book, My Brother’s Keeper: Don’t you think, said he (James) reflectively, choosing his words without haste, there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure … by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own … for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift, he concluded glibly. (103–04) Even if we allow for Joyce’s youthful idealism when he uttered these words, and also take into account the irony in which he couched the later narrative of his artist Dedalus in the novels Portrait and Ulysses, the words still manage to jolt the cynical postmodern reader. Having grown up with a belief in a profound onus upon the artist, the modernist writer was likely to view the changed situation in the thirties as a challenge. This unease between the men of science and the men of arts had a long history, provoking Wordsworth to devote one long paragraph in his preface to the relationship, a century ago: The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition,

slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. (xxxvi–xxxvii) More than half a century after this preface, Arnold pitted the arts and the sciences against each other explicitly when he wrote in his 1865 essay, “The Study of Poetry”: More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry ‘the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science’. (Complete Prose Works 161) With the widening of man’s knowledge in, among other fields, anthropology and psychology, such Romantic tenets associated with art were likely to recede in the minds of both its practitioners and its audience. The “natural”-ness and universality associated with art began to be seriously questioned and, as the use of technology in art increased, the very notion of the arts and the artist began to change. Walter Benjamin in his essay, “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), discusses differences occurring in the ideas and habits of the viewer towards art, as technology and machines entered this sphere. The physical component in the craft of creating beauty changed drastically through its association with scientific technology. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new technological tools of reproduction, like the camera, enabled a work of art to be reproduced, and then reproduced again, without any effort or skill. It became possible to create, copy and, by making many reproductions, to substitute “a plurality of

copies for a unique existence” (Benjamin 221). Science, with its marvel of mechanical reproduction, could “emancipate” the work of art from its original time, place and, frequently, rituals. It could now be copied easily, transported easily and anywhere, and thereby made accessible to the millions who had, down the centuries, desired to experience it but been constrained by economic or other limitations. This “liberation” of art from its authentic space and ritualised existence popularised art and helped endow many more lives with its significance than had earlier been possible. There were also other unexpected consequences. As Benjamin writes, “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated” (221). The magic of art and the aura that enveloped unique works of art “withered” within these new conditions. The artist’s instruments – his paint, brush, pen, charcoal and stone – lost much of the mystery and magic that had earlier imbued these tools. Benjamin compared the artist of the past to the wizard with his magic wand: distant and awe-inspiring to the multitude, reproducible only through another’s consummate skill and profound dedication. By enabling the work of art, albeit through its reproduction, to meet the beholder half-way in his or her particular circumstances, the manner in which that work was perceived changed radically. If the earlier artist had been perceived as a wizard, the artist in the new age was a surgeon: skilled and admirable, but hardly otherworldly and mystical. The significance of this development in art made possible through science, Benjamin reasoned, reached far beyond the realms of art. It pointed to a historical change in humanity’s relationship with art. It illuminated the process through which the “mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence” (222). The position that a work of art occupied in the human mind, the way in which the audience perceived a work of art, and the attitude that the non-artist had regarding the artist, were all consequences of how human sense perceptions were organised. The change in this “human perception” is also suggested by Paul Valery, whom Benjamin quotes: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal

effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign” (219). In these new circumstances, concepts such as “creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” (218), began to appear “outmoded”. Hailing the artist either as a prophet or a divinelyinspired being with “flashing eyes” and “floating hair” began to appear absurd and unnecessarily melodramatic.

THE AMBIVALENT PROMETHEUS As the man of science rapidly began to dominate centre stage in the twentieth century, the promise of poetry and the arts guiding man from anarchy to culture appeared increasingly to be out of touch with reality. The Romantic attitude towards artistic talent and divine inspiration went against the spirit of egalitarianism that was central to the understanding of modernity. This was the contradiction inherent in the idea of the artist bequeathed to the modernists. Despite Wordsworth’s creed of the poet being “a man speaking to men”, the amazing individual whose supernatural genius was further elevated by his divine visionary powers could aptly be depicted only by positioning him as alien to “men”, as being among the semidivine characters of mythology. This may have been one reason why Promethean legend is abundant in nineteenth-century literature. Though a passing reference in Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), the Prometheus myth is the central theme of George Byron’s Prometheus (1816), Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “On the Prometheus of Aeschylus” (1825), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s preface to her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Prometheus, the Poet’s Forethought (1858), Robert Browning’s Parleyings with Gerard de Lairesse (1887), Robert Bridges’s Prometheus the Firegiver (1883), and others. While in Longfellow’s poem, Prometheus, the Poet’s Forethought (1858), the Titan is clearly identified with the “bard” – a “poet, prophet, and seer” – the connection remains implicit in other writings. This legend served also to elucidate the almost inevitable

suffering that the hero had to endure, an aspect which may have echoed in the minds of many mortal artists who questioned society and civilisation, felt isolated from their fellow men because of their visionary powers, were misunderstood by critics, persecuted by governments or slandered by middle-class moralists. Many of the fictional artists portrayed in late-nineteenth-century fiction were shown as leading a doomed life, surrounded by an aura of pathos, disappointed in love and deprived in death.3 By the beginning of the twentieth century, the figure of the artist could approximately be summed up as that of a Romantic hero, rebellious in his refusal to conform to social morality or conventions, vulnerable and (often) inexplicably doomed.4 The image of Prometheus is, in fact, one that has been much contested, revealing the struggle between the arts and the sciences over the premier position in the hierarchy of knowledge. The giver of the supreme gift of knowledge to man has been identified variously throughout the nineteenth and the early twentieth century with either the artist or the scientist. As far back as the early nineteenth century, science had enthralled with her powers, offering through the man of science, a vision of the modern Prometheus who could “strengthen Man with his own mind” (Byron 96, 3.4). In the volcanic wintry Switzerland summer of 1816, the “year without a summer” as it came to be called, when Mary Shelley “sat by while Shelley, Byron, and Polidori discussed the new sciences of mesmerism, electricity, and galvanism, which promised to unlock the riddle of life, and planned to write ghost stories” (Moers 94), she created the character of the scientist Victor Frankenstein as the modern Prometheus (Shelley 1818). Possibly the earliest example of the mad-scientist subgenre of science fiction, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus depicted the scientist’s pursuit of knowledge as flawed. The scientist Victor is cold and incapable of human sympathy, an incomplete human being who cannot comprehend the entirety of human experience. The monster, his magnificent scientific creation, is consequently a failure, revealing the potential of science to be

dangerous and destructive. By withholding from the scientist the values of mercy and empathy, qualities recognised as “feminine” by postmodern feminists and ecocritics, the subtext in Shelley’s novel cautioned against modern science being an incomplete idea of knowledge. The novel voices a concern that would become increasingly strident in the arts as the century drew to a close: the sway of a science divorced from those values that literature and the arts strove to preserve through their pursuit of “sweetness and light” (Arnold, Culture and Anarchy). If poetry was, as Neil Roberts writes, increasingly marginalised as an arcane activity, poets continued to make Arnoldian claims that poetry “offers a way of seeing the world with more fidelity to human experience than science, and the ability to bind knowledge into the human subject where science disperses and objectifies” (Roberts 76). Despite these claims, the writers of the 1910s and 20s appear to have been aware of the paradoxical situation they found themselves in. On the one hand, their efforts were always in danger of being rendered redundant within a society that was striding forward with rapid technological advances. On the other, literary tradition assured them of the value attached to the arts for their educational and humane significance. Lacking the cultural centrality it had in the nineteenth century,5 literature sought to critique science even as it incorporated it. While for many this was a conscious defence of the weaker status of the arts in the new century, the futurist fascination with concepts of technology and speed appear genuine. It looked to science to energise society, to shake it free of its “native sloth” and leave behind the “mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal” (Marinetti, Web n.p.). The speed and energy associated with technology intoxicated these Italian artists, who believed the powers of science would purge, purify and revolutionise: 1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. 4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machinegun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. 5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit. (Marinetti, Web n.p.) Not only futurists, but many modernists too borrowed from science because of their honest appreciation of this amazing field.6 Scientific metaphors used in critical language and analytical strategies used in cultural investigation echoed the spirit of objectivity, inquiry and empirical research that characterised the sciences. So when in a letter to William Carlos Williams, dated 21 October 1908, Pound describes his poetic method in blatantly scientific terms, Pound is claiming for the arts the precision and truth of the sciences both because he desires to portray the craft of literature as an “intelligent” art and also because he admires the exactness and brilliance of the sciences: “I record symptoms as I see ’em. I advise no remedy. I don’t even draw the disease usually. Temperature 102⅜, pulse 78, tongue coated, etc., eyes yellow, etc.” (Selected Letters 4). Flaubert’s search for the mot juste – the exact word – in his portrayals of human emotions and relationships best exemplifies the modern artist who sought to borrow from science its “pitiless method” (Flaubert 195). The metaphor of a physician is one Pound uses repeatedly. Commenting on Henry James’s art, he writes of the “. . . the pages of diagnosis” (Literary Essays 297) and of “the art of diagnosis and the art of cure” in the arts as in medicine (45). Pound’s representation of the artist as physician, antennae and voltmeter is

significant because by doing so, Pound binds the arts in an inescapable bond to humanity and society. This makes it possible to judge the arts according to their “usefulness” to society even as it grants art a sovereign place in its own right. Situated between the art for art’s sake aestheticism and the politically committed literature of the 1930s, modernist literature was a literature of transition. For Pound, as with so many others of the age, it was necessary to be able to regard art and aesthetics as something that had a social value. The intellectual matrix of the age could no longer find art for art’s sake a sufficient argument. As Iredell Jenkins writes, in the twentieth century, the art for art’s sake doctrine undergoes a radical transformation … generating a more serious and systematic doctrine, and exerting a more positive influence upon [the] artistic…. The significance of this movement lies in the insistence that the work of art is an autonomous and self-contained entity…. [Yet] they also insist that the artist is a seer and a prophet, and that through his art he makes available both a truth and a mode of existence that are essential to human well-being. (“Art for Art’s Sake” Web n.p.) Artists therefore are the ones who watch over society, who are the first to diagnose signs of social disease, and who, in other words, can guide humanity away from pitfalls and problems. The artist and his art are consequently crucial to the health of any society. Like the scientist’s and the doctor’s vocation, which may be directly linked to the needs and well-being of civilisation, the artist’s role too was necessary. Literature was not, as the overwhelming churning out of paperbacks by many publishing houses appeared to proclaim, merely to amuse or a means by which to pass the time during railway journeys. Nor was it a sphere of work largely irrelevant to a society where lives were being touched and bettered by science every day. Confronted with this possibility of marginalisation, the Bloomsbury group of Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, welcomed the critique of utilitarianism led by

George Moore with his book Ethics (1912).7 Moore rejected the philosophy of a hedonistic utilitarianism and emphasised the value of human relationships and aesthetic experience. To return to Pound’s depiction of his role in society, one does not need to stretch their imagination to recognise this as a role that harks back to the Romantic role of the vatic poet, prophesying doom, steering the nonartistic masses away from darkness and guiding the common man towards light. Interestingly, when Christopher Isherwood, three decades later, used the same figures of speech in his 1939 book, Goodbye to Berlin, he identified himself with the camera: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking…. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed” (1). Unlike the thermometer, the voltmeter or the stethoscope, the camera is a tool that remains at a physical distance from its subject – the man, woman or community it “records”. It can document, but is not necessarily associated with the processes of healing or guiding. Isherwood emphasises this with the words “passive”, “not thinking”. Belonging to the later generation of the 1930s’ writers, Isherwood had moved further away from the Romantic idea of the poet as Promethean hero and guiding prophet. Believing in the ideals of egalitarian democracy and a follower of the socialist movement, he and like-minded writers found it difficult to view the artist as an individual possessing extraordinary powers that set them apart from the multitude. The earlier modernist writer was, however, just beginning to learn to live with the loss of “his caste-like status” as he found himself “in a climate of continuous scepticism” (Bradbury 16). The ambivalence in the modernist writer’s attitude towards science represents one of the keynotes of modernity. Among the many sciences which were important to modern man, the science that possibly had the greatest impact on literature in the twentieth century was that of psychiatry and its modern methods of psychoanalysis. The very idea of the individual and the collective human mind was transformed by the findings of Richard von KrafftEbing, Havelock Ellis and, later, Sigmund Freud, effecting not just the

language and form of literature but altering radically the content of all literary works created post–Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899). The impact of this science was accentuated by other features – political and social – of the times, initiating a game-changing approach to the human individual in Europe. Because of this, psychiatry and psychoanalysis merit a discussion in a separate and entire chapter (chapter 4).

SCEPTICISM BRED BY SCIENCE Positivism – which held to the view that society, like the natural world, operated according to laws–was that philosophy of science which believed that the only authoritative knowledge was that which was derived from logical and mathematical analyses or from empirical evidence through sensory perception. The new knowledge emerging through the works of anthropologists, psychologists, and scientists, however, was rendering this philosophy increasingly weak. The physical sciences were themselves witnessing revolutions in thought and concept. Max Planck’s quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, besides being major intellectual triumphs in their own right, were also “the maximum expressions of a way of thinking that laid stress on unstable, relational wholes rather than on permanent, aggregate conditions of fact” (Bell-Villada 133). The discoveries in physics suggested new forces beyond the scale known to mankind, presenting a new universe of invisible forces and energies against the known mechanistic world of Newtonian physics. In the fields of anthropology and natural science, the findings of Charles Darwin, James George Frazer and Claude Levi-Strauss challenged the hitherto established ideas of Christianity, bringing on the crisis of faith in the Victorian age. Together with the findings of Chambers, Huxley and Darwin, and with geology’s proof that the earth was at least a thousand years older than the Bible suggested,8 these sciences challenged both the significance of man in the universe as well as man’s ideas of religion and ethics. Frazer’s pathbreaking anthropological work, The Golden Bough (1890),

documented the similarities of myth and ritual between savage and civilised societies, between primitive cults and Christianity, changing forever the notions of morality and immorality. These developments made it impossible to continue considering concepts such as one universal reality, one natural morality or set of ethics, one appropriate genre to represent a particular kind of experience, or one correct point of view. Marvelling at the powers of the natural world which, as Darwin showed, was continually evolving new and surprising forms of life, H. G. Wells rejects positivism in his 1905 essay “Scepticism of the Instrument” as he realised “the inadequacy of the senses”, concluding that The senses seem surer than they are.

The thinking mind seems clearer than it is and is more positive than it ought to be.

The world of fact is not what it appears to be. (Web n.p.) The philosopher T. E. Hulme cited Nietzsche’s radical scepticism and accused the scientific positivists of trying to “hold water in a wire cage” (86). The possibilities and pluralities of human experience had increased manifold, making the artist suspicious of terms that had, even fifty years earlier, been accepted easily. Terms like natural/unnatural, reason/unreason, moral/immoral, reality/unreality were either treated with suspicion or found to have lost their meaning completely. If used, they were hedged by qualifiers, conditions, and placed within inverted commas to denote the particularly limited manner in which they were being used. The ideal of literary realism began to appear absurd in the new intellectual climate of the century, prompting James Joyce to entitle his fictionalised autobiography, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with the indefinite article clearly implying the many portraits that were possible. The nineteenthcentury American author William Dean Howells recognised the death of literary realism when in 1915 he wrote to Henry James saying, “I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cast down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight” (Campbell 92). His earlier definition of realism in the arts as “nothing more and nothing

less than the truthful treatment of material” (Howells 966) had little meaning in the modern age. This scepticism was part of the scientific climate of the age. As Robert K. Merton wrote in Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), unlike most institutions which demand “unqualified faith … the institution of science makes scepticism a virtue” (601). Doubts regarding the “rational and logical modes of making sense of the immense complexity of experience” (Graff 5) entered the twentieth-century mind, encouraging anti-positivism among writers and intellectuals. Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate physicist, commented that despite the strengths of positivism “their prohibition on any discussion of the wider issues … does not seem very useful to me”, and Werner Heisenberg, the quantum mechanics physicist and Nobel laureate, called it “a pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to less than nothing” (Jaeger 128). The growing research in the diverse fields of the sciences, both physical and social, supported the concept of a plural, multi-faceted universe. This was a world impossible to capture through the physical sciences alone. The arts responded by adapting themselves to the task through remarkable innovations in style and approach which gave birth to numerous art movements. In literature, the movements ranged from symbolism which, reacting against naturalism and realism, believed that absolute truths could only be represented obliquely, to the Anglo-American movement of imagism, which called for a return to the classical values of directness of representation and economy of language that would reveal the essence of the image through what Pound called “luminous details [which] remain unaltered” (Selected Prose 23) through time. Expressionism depicted a reality intensely subjective, foregrounding the moods and emotions rather than the physical context, while vorticism, like futurism, embraced the dynamism of technology and the machine age. To return to the character of Ursula in The Rainbow, Lawrence shows her as being unconvinced by positivism, instead representing the conventional outlook of the nineteenth-century scientific mind. In her final year of study, as she waits eagerly and nervously for Anton,

Ursula is thinking of a conversation she had with Dr Frankstone,9 a female doctor of physics and a materialist: “No, really,” Dr. Frankstone had said, “I don’t see why we should attribute some special mystery to life—do you? We don’t understand it as we understand electricity, even, but that doesn’t warrant our saying it is something special, something different in kind and distinct from everything else in the universe—do you think it does? May it not be that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the same order as the activities we already know in science? I don’t see, really, why we should imagine there is a special order of life, and life alone—” (438) Yet, as Ursula looked at the unicellular specimen that lay within her field of light under her microscope, she was unconvinced by this explanation: Suddenly in her mind the world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an intenselygleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity. (439) This was a dynamic and exciting time for art with movements like cubism, expressionism, futurism, Fauvism and surrealism emerging from continental Europe, and the art movement of Vorticism coming from England.

THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE IN THE ARTS

The inspiration for the Vorticist movement was explicitly modern science. Taking off from Hermann von Helmholtz and Lord Kelvin’s theory of the vortex, Lewis and Pound translated the idea of a vortex’s motion and power to create into the world of art and introduced to poetry the idea of “efficiency”. Vorticism put England on the avant-garde art map. Pound wrote, The vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency. We use the words “greatest efficiency” in the precise sense—as they would be used in a textbook of mechanics. You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of him as the TOY of circumstance, as the plastic substance RECEIVING impressions. OR you may think of him as DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance, as CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and reflecting. (The Visual Arts 151) As late as 1944, modernist William Carlos Williams insisted “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” (78). In many ways, the development of the ideas that finally culminated in New Criticism was a consequence of the scientific temper of the age. Claiming that a poem could be approached as a unit of analysis, and aspiring to scientific objectivity, I. A. Richards began his preface to Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) with the statement, “A book is a machine to think with” (viii). In his literature class, Richards removed authorial and contextual information from thirteen poems and asked his students to analyse them, thus encouraging them to concentrate on “the words on the page” rather than base their inferences on preconceived ideas about an age or an author. The writings of Richards, his student William Empson and of Eliot, laid the foundations for New Criticism, which drew heavily on the principles of formalism in its attempts to objectively determine “how a piece works”. They believed that the meaning of a work of art could be found through analysis of the text itself, just as a scientist would emphasise the methods of analysis to ascertain the value of any conclusions reached. This approach brought to the foreground of

literary studies the importance of the interpretive process. The movement was named after John Crowe Ransom’s book, The New Criticism (1941). This approach to literature dominated the AngloAmerican literary sphere, led by Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, Yvor Winters and Kenneth Burke. The New Critics “reacted violently against the impressionistic criticism of the previous generation, which favoured books like The Golden Treasury and A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry – such criticism longed for the moral suasion of art” (Logan xii). Though Ransom clearly separated science from poetry, arguing that poetry treats “an order of existence … that cannot be treated in scientific discourse” (281); he also demanded from criticism the precision of the sciences, insisting that criticism “must become more scientific, or precise and systematic” (329). One curious consequence of the intimate relation that art began to have with the machine was the way in which the machine made possible certain forms or page-designs of poetry. The symbolist Stephane Mallarme’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”, 1914), which originally appeared in the May 1897 issue of Cosmopolis, was a poem that owed its creation to Mallarme but its construction to the typewriter. Using a diversity of typefaces and spread over 20 facing pages, the poem used interlocking threads typed irregularly and scattered across pages. Later named visual poetry and concrete poetry, Guillaume Apollinaire used this form of “visual lyricism” (Apollinaire 228) in his Calligrammes (1918), where typography aided in the making of poetry that was as much visual as literary. This coming together of man and machine was seen as inevitable because “it is necessary that our intelligence become accustomed to understanding synthetico-ideographically instead of analyticodiscursively” (qtd. in Lockerbie 10). These were attempts to represent through art the multiplicity of sights, sounds, and sensations that the modern man experienced with new media and technology. It was born out of a mood of exhilaration

[that] stemmed ultimately from the rapid technological advances of the early years of the twentieth century and the general widening of horizons brought about by such inventions as the motorcar, the airplane, radiography, cinematography, and radio communication. Suddenly modern man seemed to be living in a totally different context from the older, slower world of the nineteenth century. His ability to manipulate the environment and his capacity for experience, had been infinitely increased. (2–3) The technique was famously used by E. E. Cummings in many of his poems which echoed modernism’s precise and spare use of words, jugglery with syntax and grammar, and succeeded “masterfully in splitting the atom of the cute commonplace” (Rosenthal 152). The introduction of technology into the arts also brought to the foreground the materiality of communication, giving rise to debates regarding the role that technology played in the creation and communication of the arts. Media theorists argued whether technology could become an extension of man or whether it possessed an autonomy which shaped the message communicated through it. As Friedrich Kittler in an interview said of exhibitions on the writer’s tools-of-trade: “These exhibitions take Nietzsche’s comment on his typewriter as their point of departure: ‘Our writing materials help write our thoughts’” (Griffin and Herrmann 731). These debates transcended the mere physicality of the writer’s form or technique, moving into spaces of language and subjectivity, areas which will be discussed in the chapters dealing with language and the human mind. Not all writers however shared such an enthusiasm for science. W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence both felt that the world of technology was inimical to the imagination. Yet Lawrence’s novels too reveal the impact of Darwin’s science, and the Darwinian idea of organic memory: My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my

nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. (Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation 149) Despite the mistrust, evading science was not possible. Steeped in readings of Darwin, Spencer and Huxley, Thomas Hardy’s ideas of evolution and heredity in his novels and poetry have been accused of pessimism because of the overwhelming dominance of the laws of nature over the individual will. In the poem “In a Wood”, a weary young man, “city-opprest”, escapes to nature, “heart-halt and spiritlame” only to find signs of the Darwinian struggles in the forest: Unto this wood I came

As to a nest;

Dreaming that sylvan peace

Offered the harrowed ease—

Nature a soft release

From men’s unrest.

But, having entered in, Great growths and small

Show them to men akin—

Combatants all!

Sycamore shoulders oak,

Bines the slim sapling yoke,

Ivy-spun halters choke

Elms stout and tall. (56) Post–1900, though, Hardy objected to the accusations of pessimism, calling himself an “evolutionary meliorist”, indicating his hope that humanity, through experience and awareness, would one day learn to live with nature. His allusions were more subtle than the representations of Darwin’s thesis in novels such as Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903) and Edward Gosse’s Father and Son (1907). The most unambiguous impact was of course in science

fiction, a genre that reached its peak in nineteenth-century Europe, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man (1826), and continuing with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Increasingly dominated by American writers, the most popular sci-fi writers were possibly Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov. In 1926, with the beginning of Amazing Stories magazine by Hugo Gernsback – the Luxembourgian who migrated to the United States at the age of twenty – science fiction may be said to have finally arrived as an established genre. These early sci-fi stories were marked by a simple-minded optimism in the powers of science, a feature that rapidly gained complexity and sophistication. The pulp magazine Astounding Stories began in 1937 and within a year changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction (Booker 8). This genre proved to be immensely popular, often illustrating the modern phenomenon of being a genre that could simultaneously identify itself as part of highbrow, middlebrow and popular culture. Time travel, especially, was one science fiction subgenre that cut across such divides. Eliot’s opening lines in “Burnt Norton”, may as well have been borrowed from a time-traveller in a science fiction novel Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past. … (13)

TIME AND MODERNITY The experience of time is an inescapable feature of modernist literature, from the time-traveller of science fiction to the “frozen time” of life during the world wars. The life-changing inventions of modern science transformed forever the experience of space and time in the twentieth century. Some cultural forms of this age, inspired by new technology, quite explicitly portray the different perspectives on time that were becoming possible. James Joyce, for example, was fascinated by cinema, and attempted to recreate through words in Ulysses the montage technique used by early filmmakers. The reader moves through a series of “shots” which show different people in

Dublin pursuing their occupations within the same time frame. Poets led by Tristan Tzara wrote “simultaneous” poetry in an attempt to capture the simultaneity of experience made possible by electronic communication. Paul Cezanne’s paintings focused on the particularities of space portrayed as unique in time, while also concentrating on those that were eternal: “the eternal form of Mont Sainte-Victoire and the arrangement of bottles and apples in his still lifes” (Kern 2). Stephen Kern explains the cultural revolution of the early twentieth century as involving changes in the essential structures of human experience and the basic forms of human expression. These radical shifts of sensibility, he argues, were supported by a series of new energy sources which had created a “crisis of abundance.” As artists like Joyce, Proust and Picasso subverted traditional assumptions about time and space, scientists and philosophers like Henri Bergson, Einstein, William James, and Hermann Minkowski were reordering relationships among time, space and experience. Two changes, Kern argues, underlie the twentieth-century forms of culture: one, the “affirmation of the reality of private time”, and two, “the levelling of traditional spatial hierarchies” (8). Kern’s logic of abundance has been echoed by Ronald Schleifer, who argues that the crisis of European culture at the beginning of the twentieth century was triggered by the “fulfilment and exhaustion of the liberal-secular Enlightenment project begun in the seventeenth century” (x). With the changes in social organisation, thought, and daily life that occurred in the nineteenth century, Schleifer posits that the marks of time took on three particular forms: a transformation in the canons of understanding, a transformation in the experience of time that conditioned the apocalyptic sense of the “new” – the “crisis consciousness” in modernism – and, lastly, a transformation in the understanding of history as continuous into a sense of history as the point of “collision” between past and present. Together, Kern argues, these changes helped condition an often unnerving sense of discontinuous subjective experience (10). The political and economic successes of the enlightenment project, he believes, were based

upon the double task of dominance and emancipation. This task was, to a large extent, served by the triumph of Empire and the second industrial revolution that the nineteenth century witnessed. It brought to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century an enormous abundance of commodities available for consumption in a world seemingly characterised by profusion. In this new situation of abundance though, the earlier classical definitions of wealth, use and production were compromised. Adam Smith’s differentiation between productive and non-productive labour, between wealth and consumption, and the Marxian opposition between use-value and exchange-value, lost their clarity in the modern horizon of plenty. Since “abundance” and “scarcity” are not absolute terms, but relative and therefore temporal, they are linked to a particular moment or period of time. Similarly, the ideas of abundance and scarcity – in the changed context of the surfeit of consumable wealth made possible by the second industrial revolution – foregrounded the moment, while simultaneously depicting the moment as the “new” and the modern. This placed the modernists in a problematic situation. Although they shared the enlightenment theories of Hegel, modernists could no longer access the “classical” Newtonian models of temporality. Such models would have been on the lines of: time is objective or time is simply a surrounding “ether” to events (Schleifer 6), models which were no longer relevant in the early twentieth century. It is of this historical moment, rather than that of Hegel, that Paul de Man observes that “modernity invests its trust in the power of the present moment as an origin, but discovers that, in severing itself from the past, it has at the same time severed itself from the present”, referring to the image of the chain that Nietzsche used when he spoke of history (149–50). Another way to say this is to note, as Schleifer writes, that “a significant difference between Hegel and Benjamin is the remarkable sense of dislocations in time and space occasioned by the second Industrial Revolution that cultural historians … chronicle” (5–6). Schleifer concludes that implicit in the difference between what has come to be called the “early

modernism” of enlightenment thinking modernism is the very conception of time.

and

twentieth-century

With the introduction of the concept of standard time and local time in the late nineteenth century, Europe entered the sphere of heterogeneous times. Time was no longer a firm and unquestionable aspect of existence. Knowledge of various lands existing simultaneously in different time zones complicated the concept of time, which lost its sturdy familiar robustness as the marking of a date or period became contingent to other parameters. The idea of being distant in space (and consequently distant in time) also underwent a radical shift, as previously distant worlds were yanked closer together through aeroplanes, telephones and televisions. Ancient concepts of speed, distance, power, and status were challenged and subverted by the new sciences, necessitating a reordering of relationships and a restructuring of experience. The intimate association that links time and space is reflected in the arts of this age as, what may be called, a “space of time”. Time no longer remains a sequence of seconds, minutes, hours or days but assumes an abstract shape that can squeeze or expand itself to fill diverse time-spaces. The plurality of time had an impact upon fields of scholarship too. In contradiction to the autonomous presence of time that the clock or the calendar assured humanity of, anthropologists found the concept of time frequently becoming handmaiden to other anthropological frames and issues such as descent, ritual, work, narrative or history. While the spatial and temporal dimensions of a ritual could be clearly marked out in an oral or written description, the experience of the ritual meshed them together in a subjective time. Time could not, as Thomas Mann’s narrator implies in The Magic Mountain, be narrated on its own: “Can one tell – that is to say, narrate – time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?” (541). Characterising as they did the physical world, could space and time be considered as substances in their own right, or as properties of some substance? As the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy says, “Neither option seems particularly attractive. Space and time seem distinct from substances because they are causally inert, causally

inaccessible—their aspects or properties cannot be altered by interacting with any other substance—and imperceptible” (Janiak, Web n.p.). Many years earlier, in 1770, Immanuel Kant, in his Inaugural Dissertation, had explored the question of the ontology of time and space. In the words of Kant, “Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally” (Janiak, Web n.p.). Bergson’s concept of durée and Emile Durkheim’s concept of personal time both suggest this aspect of subjective time, an aspect that will be dealt with in detail in the chapter on mind. The role of science has been so widespread that it can barely be contained within one chapter and will come up for discussion along with other parameters in the later chapters on war, mind and language. Enormous strides were made in the study of diverse sciences, making the twentieth-century writer and intellectual suspicious of the old gods and grand narratives that sought to either explain or impose an order and harmony on the universe. With the macro-narrative of a universalised European literary tradition that could incorporate the human world becoming an impossibility, the modern writer attempted to convey the myriad truths through a diversity of form, technique and philosophy that they sometimes borrowed from the Near and Far East. One such example would be Pound’s translation of Chinese poems and Japanese Noh plays which he had received from the American Oriental historian Ernest Fenollosa’s widow. These were appreciatively received by Yeats and put to use in his own works. Yeats himself, along with Eliot, looked to Indian philosophy and literature as repositories of knowledge and wisdom. Developments in the world of science had thus opened up to the twentieth-century artist the possibility of horizons unexplored and undiscovered, initiating movements into distinct spaces not restricted to the East and South, but also enveloping Europe’s folk and popular culture. These were engagements that would ultimately crystallise in

the postmodern crash of the macro-narrative and the celebration of micro-narratives. The postmodernist John Barth explains the modernist “antirationalist, antirealist, antibourgeois program” (200) as an “adversarial reaction” against the “rigidities and other limitations of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism, in the light of the turn-of-thecentury theories in physics, psychology, anthropology and technology” (202). This thesis though has been variously contested by debates set off by Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant Garde, where he defines avant-garde art as an attack on the position of art in bourgeois society. Though Burger himself deals explicitly with the idea of avant-garde art in history, his thesis has led to debates about modernist art being, or not being, avant-garde. Andreas Huyssen argues that modernists did not challenge traditional methods by which art and literature were produced, disseminated and received in modern society. Since these systems were never challenged by modernism, modernists cannot be called avant-garde, a term which refers to artists who attempt to subvert a system (Huyssen xx). Whether avant-garde or not, modernists, as Barth writes in “The Literature of Replenishment”, “taught us that linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote and middle-class moral conventions” were not the whole story. That the “disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-asmessage, political olympianism and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy” was “not the whole story either” (203) – was a realisation which writers would have to wait to appreciate a few score years more, till the age of postmodernism.

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Marcus, Laura. “The Great War in Twentieth-century Cinema.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Ed. Vincent Sherry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Marinetti, F. T. “The Futurist Manifesto.” The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. Web. 17 September 2015. ~inceogl4/thresholds/futuristmanifesto.doc./ >. Merton, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press, 1968. Print. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Print. O’Keeffe, Paul. Gaudier-Brzeska: An Absolute Case of Genius. London: Allen Lane, 2004. Print. Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts. Ed. Harriet Zinnes. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1980. Print. ———. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. Print. ———. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Ed. D. D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1971. Print. ———. Selected Prose 1909–1965. Ed. W. Cookson. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. Print. ———. “The Teacher’s Mission.” The English Journal 23.8 (October 1934). 630–35. Print. Ransom, John Crowe. “Criticism, Inc.” The World’s Body. New York: Scribner’s, 1938. Print. ———. The New Criticism. Norfolk: New Directions, 1941. Print. Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. London, New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Roberts, Neil. A Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print.

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Notes 1 The historian J. H. Plumb argues that the debate between F. R. Leavis and C.

P. Snow, following Snow’s 1959 Rede lectures, may be viewed as “part of a

larger social development, with the scientists as a new class threatening to displace the largely upper-middle-class literary elite that had held sway from 1910 to 1950” (Collini xxx). Stefan Collini in the introduction to The Two Cultures writes, “the germ of the argument and the tone of the lecture can be traced back to . . . facets of Snow’s intellectual development which were shaped and fixed in the 1930s” (xxii). Snow himself mentions Pound, Eliot and Lewis specifically as examples of the backward-looking literary intellectual who was indifferent to human welfare (Collini xxvii). 2 The perception of detail as feminine is discussed in chapter 5, which

discusses language. 3 Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed (1890), Henry James’s Madonna of

the Future (1873), Walter Pater’s story, “A Prince of Court Painters”, included in his Imaginary Portraits (1878), George Moore’s story “Mildred Lawson” in Celibates (1895), are some examples of literature that depicts this obsessive fatalism that dogs the talented artist. 4 The clothes of some modernist artists often compounded this impression of

the alienated romantic misfit. For instance, Pound, with his garish trousers and velvet jackets. Wyndham Lewis too took great care to clothe himself in as unusual a manner as possible, with his sweeping black coat and hat pulled down over his eyes. As Douglas Goldring wrote in Odd Man Out, both Lewis and Pound, “in clothes, hairdressing and manner, made no secret of their calling. Pound contrived to look every inch a poet, while I have never seen anybody so obviously a genius as Wyndham Lewis” (100). 5 The hierarchy between the arts and the sciences could become so painful in

its implied, and frequently not too subtle, deprecation of a writer’s intelligence, that Eliot felt compelled to address it under the veneer of discussing literature, in Sacred Wood: Aristotle had what is called the scientific mind, a mind which, as it is rarely found among scientists except in fragments, might better be called the intelligent mind. For there is no other intelligence than this, and so far as artists and men of letters are intelligent (we may doubt whether the level of intelligence among men of letters is as high as among men of science) their intelligence is of this kind. (12)

6 This appreciation for the sciences was not a new phenomenon among poets.

Studies of Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others have disproved the myth of poets’ hostile attitude towards science. Wordsworth’s words, “we murder to dissect”, were used by critics like C. P. Snow to suit the “two cultures” argument. See Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, Sharon Ruston’s Creating Romanticism and Noel Jackson’s Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry. 7 “Pure art,” writes Clive Bell in his 1914 book Art, makes us aware “of the God

in everything, of the universal in the particular, of the all-pervading rhythm” (54), while also making the apparently contradictory claim that it has “a tremendous significance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life” (30). 8 James Hutton presented a paper titled “The Theory of the Earth” in 1785. See

Adelene Buckland’s Novel Science. The book makes for an interesting study of the close relationship between imaginative writings and the shaping of the science of geology over time. 9 Dr Frankstone is a name that calls up the name of Doctor Victor Frankenstein,

who imagined science could give humanity the power to play God, in Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein, which severely critiqued the aggressive and megalomaniac tendencies of science.

T HREE

WAR The precarity of life imposes an obligation upon us. Judith Butler Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009)

T

he world wars have, to a large extent, been the crucible in which the modern world was produced (Hendley). Over the decades of the twentieth century, the world wars have been repeatedly raised as experiences that determined ways of thinking and responding, becoming prisms through which concepts of civilisation, progress and the arts were viewed. Literature from the 1900s to the 1950s was caught up in the sense of eagerness, anxiety, fear, anger, horror, futility and absurdity with which people first greeted, and then experienced, the two wars. Samuel Hynes, in A War Imagined, writes that the Great War passed from fact to “myth” and was as much an event in the mind as it was in the political sphere. The Second World War, in which “every bond between man and man was to perish” (Churchill 15), surpassed the First in its destruction and its destructive potential. War-veteran Paul Fussell writes: Conveying an adequate idea of the Second World War is close to impossible…. For one thing, the sheer numbers defeat

attempts to flesh them out with actual, unique human beings. Killed and wounded were over 78 million people, more of them civilians than soldiers. Close to 6 million Jews were beaten, shot, or gassed to death by the Germans. One million people died of starvation and despair in the siege of Leningrad. Over 50 million young men and women worldwide were mustered into armies, navies, and air forces…. If the battle of the Somme constitutes a scandal because 20,000 British soldiers were killed in one day, twice that number of civilians were asphyxiated and burned to death in the bombing of Hamburg. Seventy thousand died at Hiroshima, 35,000 at Nagasaki, and the same at Dresden. (Norton Book of Modern War 307) World War I was perceived by many as a radical rupture with the past. Fussell echoes this in his The Great War and Modern Memory, writing that World War I ended the possibility of viewing wars as “taking place within a seamless, purposeful ‘history’” involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to future (19). Recent studies by scholars have questioned this conclusion. Matthew C. Hendley points to continuities both before and after the war in the form of pressure groups and associations – arguing for the impact that the messages of popular patriotism had on young minds. Jay Winter, another scholar, examined the continuities in the role that memory played in our shaping of the wars. Despite these continuities, the overwhelming sense of the war is one of a “great hiatus”, as the critic F. R. Leavis termed it (Bilan 92). “Before the world was given over to wars” (Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound 506) and “after” have become two distinct sections of human history. The wars redefined the contours of the unthinkable and the impossible, making cynicism intrinsic to the experience of modernity, and irony intrinsic to modern literature. Understanding literary history as a history of ideas requires viewing events through the lens of concepts and philosophies which emerged from that age. Physical, intellectual and emotional experiences of a time, when explained through ideas which have laid the

epistemological foundations of that particular age, enable us to comprehend both the events and their consequences. Yet at certain points of history, the expectation is reversed, and a historical event stands far taller than the ideas which surround it. In the profound impact that the world wars had on humanity’s thoughts, they transcended their chronological space to move into the realm of ideas, taking on immense proportions which can barely be comprehended within the discursive space of any one idea. The world wars affected our ideas of time, gender and science, among others. They transformed the “complex and heterogeneous aggregates” (Lovejoy 3) which comprised the philosophies of the age. It is not that these ideas were engendered by the wars – some of the ideas that this chapter deals with were ideas set in motion in England long before the wars broke out, or by movements and revolutions simultaneous to the wars, as in the Socialist Revolution which exploded in Russia in 1917. But the effects of these ideas and movements appear to have had greater compelling power in the minds of the people because of the more immediate, and often more horrific experience of the wars. The impact of the wars was momentous and had, within a few years, taken on the contours of a narrative which, like ideas and ideologies, runs through and colours all other events and experiences of the age.

CHALLENGE TO PAST MACRO-NARRATIVES In Paul Fussell’s obituary, The Economist introduced him as the writer who had: made a public career out of refusing to disguise . . . or elevate [War]. War reduced human beings to serial numbers, “quasimechanical interchangeable parts”, and their opponents to vermin who could be slaughtered with “crazy brutality and sadism”. The second world war, his war, was called “just”, though wars erupted only once all laws and rules had broken down; it was called “good”, and “necessary”, but for those on the ground (a quarter of whom admitted to vomiting or soiling themselves,

out of panic, before they went into battle) the war had no meaning, beyond the fact that the quicker they got it over [with] the sooner they could go home. (“Paul Fussell”, Web n.p.) With an increasing number of soldiers’ correspondence during the wars coming into the public domain, what has resurfaced repeatedly is the inability to give any “meaning” to the colossal waste of human lives between 1914 and 1945. Coming within decades of each other, the intellectual heritage of Europe and its earlier narratives of history strained to explain the experiences of the wars. The ideas of nation, nationalism, patriotism and martyrdom were challenged, as were the ideas of time, science and art. The never-before-known scale of destruction witnessed in the two wars, and the difficulty in justifying them, threatened the breakdown of every macro-narrative that man had based his universe upon: religion, morality, ethics or rationality. Past schematisations and macro-narratives were questioned and found wanting. Evan Luard, in his study of wars, describes how the First World War transformed traditional attitudes towards war: “For the first time there was an almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of a war could now no longer be justified” (365). Like the grand narratives of industrialisation and religion that had been upset in the nineteenth century, science, progress and patriotism were rendered uncertain and questionable by the wars. World War I, frequently called the “Great War”, resulted in over 16 million killed. World War II fatality figures range from a staggering 60 to 80 million. European history had witnessed anti-Semitic massacres intermittently since the thirteenth century, but the ruthless inhumanity of the Final Solution – the Nazi plan to annihilate Jewish people – was shocking in its calculated systematisation. Konnilyn G Feig in her book, Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness, writes of the “scientific” manner in which the camps were planned: At the core are the nineteen official camps with their similarities and differences. Each camp exemplifies a major aspect of the

system. Dachau is the creation of a model for scientific experimentation on human beings, while Ravensbruck illustrates the fate of Aryan and non-Aryan women in the Third Reich. Chelmno incarnates the crude, primitive killing phase; Treblinka, the victory of technology in achieving the efficient disposal of subhumans…. (xix) Disturbingly couched in terms of rationality and knowledge, the wars led to a questioning of the hitherto absolute trajectory of enlightenment discourse. By throwing into disarray almost every narrative of European civilisation, the wars together dealt their most crushing blow to that core of human civilisation which prevents things from “falling apart” (Yeats, Collected Works 187): humanity’s concept of faith. The Manifesto of Futurism had, in 1914, eagerly welcomed the coming war. Loathing the “pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep” of contemporary Italy, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti glorified war, viewing it as “the world’s only hygiene”: War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…. Poets and artists of Futurism! … remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art … may be illumined by them! (qtd. in Benjamin 241–42) Intended by the futurists “to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap”

(Kolocotroni 251), their words today appear naïve, almost juvenile in a post-war, postmodern world. The phase when “Ezra and his gang of young lions raged through London” (Ford 312) was brief. Ford Madox Ford’s memoir of these years, Return to Yesterday, talks about how “louder blasts” drowned out the “blasts”1 of the vorticists and the futurists, forcing the artists into an awareness of the powers of science. Yet the “subjugation of machinery” and the “dreamt-ofmetalization of the human body” were (and still are) snippets of the discourse of modernity: of a scientific, secular world-view of enlightenment discourse which actively promoted “the discourse of rationalization, progress and autonomy; the abolition of superstition and the mastery of nature” (Armstrong 2). Some years later, in 1936, Walter Benjamin, amidst the ambience of rising fascism, claimed that the destructiveness of war furnished proof that “society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society” (242). His words belie the faith in the scientific discourse that persisted in Europe, a faith disturbed by the First World War, and badly shaken by the Second. Scepticism regarding macro-narratives, the “global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience” (Stephens and McCallum 4), had been hinted at in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto; how the “simplifying” of class antagonism by the bourgeoisie would eventually usher in the sweeping away of time-honoured relations, apparently carved in stone, with their “train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions”: The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation…. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life…. (37)

Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche were famously called the three masters of “the school of suspicion” by Ricoeur, who saw them as expressing a “common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred”: … these three figures all contest the primacy of the object in our representation of the sacred, as well as the fulfilling of the intention of the sacred by a type of analogy of being that would graft us onto being through the power of an assimilating intention. It is also easy to recognise that this contesting is an exercise of suspicion … “truth as lying” would be the negative heading under which one might place these … exercises of suspicion. (32) Ricoeur identifies these masters of suspicion as “destroyers”, who would lay the basis of a new foundation, clearing the horizon “for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth … by the invention of an art of interpreting” (32). This tradition of critique is recognised as a salient characteristic of modernity and, by the twentieth century, sufficiently complicated Marx’s “real conditions of life” with diverse narratives of naturalism, psychological realism, social realism, and other representations of “reality”. Jean-Francois Lyotard was to talk about this later in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge which describes the collapse of the metanarratives following the transformations which had, since the end of the nineteenth century, “altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts”: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives…. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (xxiv). Essentially seen as culminating in the postmodern condition, the crisis of the grand narrative was hastened by the two world wars, which threw into doubt pre-texts that furnish the necessary bases of the narratives. Through poetry and memoirs, war writers narrated experiences that stretched the limits of human comprehension and

human imagination, bringing to the fore the limits to the discursive flexibility of metanarratives which had earlier appeared untouchable and unquestionable. The Great War created a disruption powerful enough to end avant-garde movements such as futurism and the famous modernist group, “Men of 1914”, comprising James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Carl Krockel, in his book War Trauma and English Modernism, sees the “Men of 1914”, the epitome of avant-garde modernism, as both emerging out of and being obliterated by the Great War. Lewis himself saw the war as putting an end to art and civilisation as he had known it. It brought to an end the vorticist literary magazine, Blast, obliterating the new age that he and his peers had believed they would herald: “It was, after all, a new civilisation that I – and a few other people – was making the blueprints for…. Then the war came, and that ended chapter 1 of my career as a writer and artist with an unceremonious abruptness” (Rude Assignment 135). The war as a “rupture” of historical continuity is an idea shared by most writers of this time, as is the belief that the war destroyed the promise of the age. This is paralleled in the history of literature where a clear line of demarcation is drawn between avant-garde modernists and other writers.

IDEAS OF NATION, IDENTITY, “THEM” AND “US” “One of the legacies of our last, violent century”, writes Krockel, “is the split in our reading of its formative period, the First World War and the rise of Modernism, between history and aesthetics, the ‘Georgian’ war writers on one side and the Modernists on the other” (1). This separation of modernists from other writers: those who began their careers in the late nineteenth century and younger writers whose works were prompted by the Great War, is a separation that has arisen from the perception of snobbery and arrogance regarding them. The perception was expressed in the explicit rejection of their works by the post–1930s’ group of writers who found modernist writings both elitist and anachronistic. Modernists’ writings, or lack of

it, on the Great War, make them different from the other writers of the age. Joyce’s name figures exactly four times in Vincent Sherry’s book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, twice as adjectives for other writers’ prose – “quasi-Joycean prose” (29) and “unspeakable diction, `a la Joyce” (208) – once among the list of writers known as the “Men of 1914” (30), and once as cited with Stein by Dos Passos (156). The “cosmopolitan” nature of modernist writers may be pointed to as one of the reasons behind the seeming detachment of avantgarde modernists from the agonising realities of war. Eliot, Pound and Lewis were from America, Yeats and Joyce were from Ireland. Katherine Mansfield, though English by birth, had spent her childhood and adolescence in the colony of New Zealand where she had been disillusioned by the British government’s repression of Maori people and its support for European immigrants’ demand for land. Lawrence, though English, married a German. Lawrence’s openly expressed contempt for militarism and his wife’s German parentage meant, in fact, that he was hounded in wartime Britain by the armed-forces authorities. He was forced to leave Cornwall with three days’ notice under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act – traumatic years that made Lawrence go on his “savage pilgrimage”, a voluntary exile. In 1921, Lawrence responded to the German publisher Anton Kippenberg’s proposal to create a “Biblioteca Mundi”, a world library to be marketed internationally, with a bitter analysis of the nationalism that underlay the alleged cosmopolitanism of the modern age: Mentally, we are all cosmopolitan nowadays. But passionally, we are all jealous and greedy and rabidly national. For my part, I prefer to live abroad and escape as far as possible from the stigma of national interest…. At the bottom of all European hearts a rabid, jealous nationalism of hate-your-neighbor is the basic feeling. Along with it goes a good deal of superficial curiosity concerning that detested neighbor or neighbors …. But the old internationalism of human interest, the old philanthropic internationalism is dead or gone quite silly. In its place is a

fizzing, acid internationalism of detestation and spite: not even hatred, for hate is too grand a passion: but spite, jealousy, and acid dislike. (679–80) The emotion of disgust reiterated in the writings of these writers with regard to the war is not directed towards any particular nation or nations, and in this feature the modernists come close to their ideal of impersonality. “It cannot too often be emphasised,” writes Raymond Williams, a modernist who experimented and innovated with literary form, “how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants” (91). “Nation,” “nationalism” and “inter-nationalism” were successfully complicated by the avant-garde modernists with their “exiled” lives and their endeavours to articulate the universal through their arts. One consequence of an English literary movement being spearheaded by immigrants and exiles was that the Anglo-centricity of English literature could be questioned and disagreed with. The most controversial utterances regarding the 1914 war probably came from Yeats who, in his letter to Henry James, termed it a “bloody frivolity” (Letters 600). “The war,” writes Yeats in a letter to Pound in November 1919, “(which was to give us all better morals & better art) has produced nothing besides much clotted ejaculation & Kiplinglike facility” (Collected Letters InteLex: #3679). In his position as an acclaimed English-Irish poet, and in his involvement with the nationalist movement against the Empire, Yeats embodied many of the complexities that cast such intricate shadows over twentiethcentury literature’s representation of the wars. His starkly different position on war-poetry serves as a case-study to help understand the complexities of the “British” identity present in the early twentieth century and needs to be read keeping in mind the colonisation of Ireland, and the ongoing nationalist movement there.2 His position, and that of many other Irish writers writing in English including Bernard Shaw, Augusta Gregory, Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett and Padraic Colum, may find explanation in their Irish nationality and, for many of them, in their intimacy with the Irish anti-colonial nationalists. Pearse,

MacDonagh, Plunkett and O’Casey were members of the Irish Volunteers, a military organisation established in 1913 by Irish nationalists, which counted among its volunteers members of the Gaelic League, Ancient Order of Hibernians and Sinn Féin and Irish Republican brotherhood. As Fran Brearton suggests in her book The Great War in Irish Poetry, the European and Irish conflicts were “inextricably linked” in the Irish poets’ mind. For Yeats, the “elusiveness” characterising his treatment of the Great War in his poetry may not indicate that the War “passed him by, but that the war’s place in Irish memory, and in Yeats’s aesthetic, is considerably more ambiguous than is generally acknowledged” (49). Brearton also refers to Yeats’s complicity in positioning the war on the “English side” of an English-Irish opposition (45). The “us” and “them” was unavoidable for Yeats, a convinced Home Ruler, who had been accused by Edmund Gosse of not making his sympathies clear. Reacting to Gosse, who had suggested that Joyce’s pension may depend on Joyce expressing “solidarity with the Allies”, Yeats writes, “It never occurred to me that it was necessary to express sympathy ‘frank’ or otherwise with the ‘cause of the Allies’…. I certainly wish them victory” (Letters of W. B. Yeats 600–01/also in Haughey 167). The reference to the Allies as “them” was not peculiar to Yeats. Seamus Heaney in his poem to the memory of the Irish soldier-poet, Francis Ledwidge, addresses the irony that Ledwidge, who was an Irish Catholic, fought for the British in his “Tommy’s uniform” while his fellow Irishmen fought against the British for their country’s independence during Easter Week, 1916: “In you, our dead enigma, all the strains / Criss-cross in useless equilibrium…” (E-book n.p.). As James Haughey points out with regard to “In Memorium Francis Ledwidge”, “There has been a long tradition of Irish Catholic serving in the British army, so Heaney’s assumption that Ledwidge remains an “enigma” shows either a lack of historical consciousness on his part, or it implies another political bias: that Irish Catholic service in the British army was and is ideologically unsound” (253). Religion and culture were being recognised as elements that went into the making of nationalism, thus questioning the alleged naturalness of the

patriotic sentiment. Entangled with nationalist and anti-imperialist movements, a community like the Irish Catholic community’s response to the war was a contentious issue. Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Soldier”, similar to many other poems on the Great War, about English values and English ideals, could hardly find support with most Irishmen: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore…. (Walter 108) The Irish question had been pushed to the margins by the 1914 war.3 English politicians spoke of this “one bright spot” in the Great War: that it would “take the attention away from Ulster, which is a good thing” (Brearton 5). The Easter Rising in Dublin, 1916, suppressed ruthlessly by the English within six days of its beginning, would have been an event fresh in Irish minds. The Irish poets Pearse, MacDonagh and Plunkett had all been leaders of the Easter Rising, and all three were executed in 1916. That the rising and the Great War were simultaneous events to Yeats is revealed in his fear that imposing conscription in Ireland would bring back the “historical passion” aroused by 1916, (which was) “at its greatest intensity” (Letters 649). The poem “Easter, 1916”, written soon after the event, though published in 1921, mourned the loss of Irish nationalists who had been his peers in terms that echo the poetry of the Great War: Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is heaven’s part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death.

Was it needless death after all? (The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I 181) Other modernists too have been accused of displaying this apparent insensitivity shown by Yeats. About Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon recorded in his diary on 30 March 1922, that he went up to Eliot, whom he had spotted in the front row at the Queen’s Hall, but failed to thaw his “cold-storaged humanity” despite Sassoon’s own “all-embracing bonhomie”: “T. S. Eliot was sitting in his pale intellectual aloofness. He always has a chilling effect on me” (qtd. in Pearce, Literary Converts 122). Eliot’s “The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, with its intricacy and numerous allusions, published in the June 1915 issue of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, appeared strangely out of place in a continent emotionally and mentally ravaged by war. Despite its portrayal of a terrifying void and the poet’s desired identification with “a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas”, its complex aesthetic sophistication seemed unacceptable in a context where, in the same month of June 1915, H. G. Wells was writing to G. K. Chesterton that he was “absurdly busy” with the war: I’m absurdly busy in bringing together the Rulers of the country and the scientific people of whom they are totally ignorant. Lloyd George has never heard of Ramsey – and so on, and the hash and muddle and quackery on our technical side is appalling. It all means boys’ lives in Flanders and horrible waste and suffering. (qtd. in Ward 334) Many of the writers had, in fact, been requested to contribute to the war efforts. Joseph Pearce’s biography of Chesterton documents the investment of time and energy that the writers made:

At the beginning of September, 1914, barely a month after war was declared, C. F. G. Masterman, the new head of the War Propaganda Bureau, called a secret meeting of twenty-five leading writers to discuss how the literati could contribute to the war effort. Chesterton was one of those invited […] Others at the meeting included Arnold Bennett, James Barrie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, John Masefield and John Buchan. Kipling, unable to attend, sent a message of support. (Wisdom and Innocence 209) The war preoccupied everybody from Chesterton to the pacifist Shaw, whose writings foreshadowed the scepticism regarding the war that was soon to follow. “It is a great pity,” wrote Shaw to Chesterton, that “you were not born in Ireland. You would have had the advantage of hearing the burning patriotism of your native land expressing itself by saying exactly the same things about England that English patriotism now says about Prussia …” (qtd. in Ward 333). Shaw’s canny, cynical view of patriotic jargon may potentially be explained by the fact that he was, in 1914, approaching sixty, and had seen too much of the world to be moved by patriotic speeches. Distance from the rhetoric of the Great War may be detected in the writings of Yeats too, who was about fifty then, and in those of other Irishmen on the continent, including Joyce, who would have been about thirtytwo. This is despite the fact that Shaw, Yeats and Joyce occupied, among themselves, very different political positions. Joyce’s caricature of nationalism in the character of the One-eyed Nationalist Citizen in the Cyclops chapter and then again in the Circe chapter of Ulysses conveys his mistrust of “those big words” which, as Stephen Dedalus, the fictionalised representation of the author’s self, had said earlier in the book, “make us so unhappy” (Ulysses 33). J. J. O’Molloy’s literary rhetoric is dismissed ironically by O’Madden Burke in the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses as “divine afflatus” (148) and, through the other alter-ego of Joyce in the novel – the watchful, mildmannered Hungarian Jew, Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses of the novel,

the archetypal wandering Jew – Joyce articulates the absurdity at the heart of the idea of a nation: A recently discovered fragment of Cicero’s, professor MacHugh answered with pomp of tone. Our lovely land. Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply. (131) A few pages later, Joyce has Bloom speak of the futility of war and hostility: “But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred” (351). Joyce’s linking of nationalism, ideology and history belies the commonly held belief that modernists were apolitical and indifferent to the contemporary history around them. An Irish Catholic in colonised Ireland, Joyce would have effortlessly linked violence and history. His letter to Francini in 1915 reads: “My political faith can be expressed in a word: Monarchies, constitutional or unconstitutional, disgust me. Kings are mountebanks. Republics are slippers for everyone’s feet” (Selected Letters of James Joyce 413). Living in Zurich, a city for the exiled and escaped artists who chose to flee the war, Joyce was not as indifferent to the contemporary political upheavals as is often believed. Switzerland itself, though a refuge from the war, had the looks of a “beleaguered town” (Budgen 30) and preserving her “perpetual neutrality” was hard work: “All frontiers and fortresses had to be manned, a task which involved keeping the fighting forces of the country on a war footing.” (32). Any simplistic explanation of the times runs the risk of negating the complexity of European politics during these years. The empire, at its zenith a few decades ago, was beginning to sense the rumblings of discontent and restlessness in many of its colonies. Accepting the myth of the white man’s burden was growing increasingly challenging and the ideas of nation, empire, and the machinery that went into their making was beginning to be looked into. Explicit expressions of cultural nationalism were being used not only to stir passions of nationalism, but also to shape passions of nationalism as emerging polities began the process of national self-definition in colonies like

Ireland and India. The organic naturalness of a national identity that was being proclaimed by the patriotic war-upholding statesmen was beginning to be viewed with suspicion. By 1932, the pacifist Aldous Huxley was confident that nations were “to a very large extent invented by their poets and novelists” (52). Citing Coleridge’s poem, “Fears in Solitude”, Huxley accuses the Englishman of having been the bearer of “slavery and pangs” and vices “whose deep taint, with slow perdition murders the whole man, his body and his soul! … Modern conscience was inclined to endorse Coleridge’s judgement,” he writes, adding that “hence the present policy in India, hence the white ruler’s new and altogether humaner attitude towards the African, the Dyak, the Melanseian” (166). Set against this context, the senseless destruction of the First World War and the Second compelled a more nuanced and critical understanding of nation and nationalism. The gap of incomprehension between the movers of the wars and those who fought in the wars was articulated strongly in both poetry and prose. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) crossed national boundaries of ally and foe as it voiced the human tragedy of war. Through the voice of the nineteenyear-old German soldier Paul Baüumer, Remarque wrote of “a generation that was destroyed by the war – even those of it who survived the shelling” (All Quiet on the Western Front, Epigraph). Describing Paul’s terrified killing of a French soldier who possibly, like him, had jumped into a shell-hole to escape the shells, Remarque describes the remorse that engulfs Paul and his feeling of human responsibility towards the dying soldier, the soldier’s family, realising in the process the lies that they have swallowed: Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell

us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? (195) The cynicism regarding authorities, both political and religious, that was to become a hallmark of post–1950s literature is evident in the reiterated use of the “us” and “them” found in the writings on the wars – words which echo Sassoon’s open letter, written in 1917 with encouragement from pacifists like Bertrand Russell, to his commanding officer. In this letter, entitled “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration,” Sassoon accused those in power of prolonging the war for ends that were “evil and unjust”: “I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest…. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them…” (Web. n.p.). The letter was a huge embarrassment. Sassoon was hastily declared to be suffering from shellshock to prevent a court martial, and whisked off to the hospital of Craiglockhart, where he met Wilfred Owen. It was a meeting that strengthened Owen’s belief that as a poet, his duty was to bear witness: But the past is just the same – and War’s a bloody game …

Have you forgotten yet? …

Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget. (Owen, “Aftermath”; in Walter 139)

THE EMERGING IDEA OF THE COMMON MAN World War I effectively destroyed the promise of high modernism, not just by killing many of its talented artists, but also by changing forever the concepts of “hero” and “artist”. Shades of this shift from pre–1914 ideals of modernism to post–1930s ideals, played out over the decade that followed the war, may be seen in conflicts over what constituted the “proper” narrative of war. Emotions more complex than the

feelings aroused (or not aroused) by racial identity were at play. The subject of the artist and the common man – an issue that assumed huge proportions in the 1930s when the modernist canon was accused of elitism – was foreshadowed in the parameters used to select or reject writings on the war. This is visible in the bitter debate triggered by Yeats’s rejection of Wilfred Owen’s poetry in his 1935 anthology Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935. Despite the inclusion of lesser known poets like Manmohan Ghose and Oliver St John Gogarty, Yeats refused to include Owen in the book, an act which further separated modernist writers from Victorian, Edwardian and 1930s’ writers who appeared to be more attuned to the community and world around them. This encouraged the belief that modernists were inhabitants of an “Ivory Tower”, detached from the realities of life. Yeats did not, however, contrary to common perception, exclude all the poets of the First World War. He included Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Edward Shanks, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke. But the war poems he selected were significantly different. In Sassoon’s case, for example, the selected poems were taken from Sassoon’s decidedly post–war volume, The Heart’s Journey (1927). The Sassoon who emerges in Yeats’s book is the author of poems such as “Alone” and “The Power and the Glory”, both poems without any explicit mention of the war, offering “delicate post– war reflections on faith and heroism in solitude, after the great and terrible moments are over with” (Rubin 288). This was a different Sassoon from the brutally honest and angry poet who had penned “To Any Dead Officer”, about the “wounded and missing”; or “The Hero”, where the soldiermessenger, having delivered the news of a son’s death to the mother with “gallant lies”, reminisces as he leaves the mother, “He’d told the poor old dear some gallant lies / That she would nourish all her days, no doubt” (29), and the proud mother, believing that “Jack fell as he’d have wished” is, in her beliefs in the grandeur and nobility of war, utterly ignorant of its realities; or the poet of “Counter- Attack”, “Dreamers” and “How to Die”.

This apparently well-deliberated selection of Sassoon’s poems by Yeats is in accordance with the explanation that he offered for the omission of Owen from his Oxford Book. Remaining determined in his rejection of Owen, Yeats had declared that he considered Owen “unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper…. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick” (Letters 874). Writing of those poets who had, during the war, felt bound “to plead the suffering of their men”, Yeats appears to privilege the aesthetics of art over art as a representation of reality: In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his “Empedocles on Etna” from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. (Oxford Book xxxiv) Owen’s own preface for his intended book of poems, Disabled and Other Poems, appears to speak directly to Yeats. This was written weeks before his death in 1918 and it sharply contradicts Yeats’s idea of poetry as a stylised, aesthetically crafted medium, emphasising the need for the contemporary poet to be “truthful”: This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. (Owen 101) Louis MacNeice agreed with Owen and for all purposes snubbed Yeats by observing that “the nineteen-thirty school of English poets, represented by Mr Auden and by Mr Spender, derives largely from

Owen” (qtd. in Heuser 63) and that “the pity of Owen, the Whitmanesque lust for life of Lawrence, and the dogmas of Lenin are now combining to make possible the most vital poetry seen in English for a long time” (64). The association of Owen, Whitman and Lenin by MacNeice is indicative of the different trajectory taken by the later writers in their response to the War. This difference is also hinted at in Yeats’s and Owen’s contrary stance to the War: in Yeats’s “great tragedies” and Owen’s dismissal of “heroes”. As Jon Stallworthy says, “What Yeats liked is heroic song, and he didn’t find heroic song in Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. You get, then, a very interesting clash between the old poetry and the new poetry” (Stallworthy 2005). The works of Owen and Lenin foreground the common man, as does Whitman’s. In his epic Leaves of Grass, Whitman attempted to reach out to the common man by deviating from the historic use of an elevated hero and assuming instead the identity of the common people. The overwhelming narrative of war as futile and of soldiers as mere cannon fodder was out of harmony with Yeats’s romantic sentiments. (His choice of some of Robert Nichols’s war lyrics for his Oxford Book, describing moments before the soldiers plunged into violence or moments after the guns stopped firing, can only be described as romantic.) A poem such as Nichols’s “The Last Morning” concludes with exalted sentiments and a lack of realistic detail: Come now, O Death,

While I am proud, …

Naked I stand to-day

Before my doom, … (Nichols 52) This appropriation of the Great War into poetry as laced with grandeur and magnificence is utterly unlike the realistic depiction by war poets and the poets of the 1930s. Closely involved with the Irish Dramatic Movement and Irish Nationalist Movement, the words “gallantry”, “patriotism” and “sacrifice” conveyed to Yeats ideas that were not just possibilities, but also necessities in Ireland’s anti-

imperialist movement. In 1907, Yeats had written: “I think that all noble things are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare the division of a mind within itself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man to himself ”4 (Essays and Introductions 321). Yeats spoke of the spirit the Irish Nationalists were endeavouring to arouse: … the great mass of our people, accustomed to interminable political speeches, read little, and so from the very start we felt that we must have a theatre of our own. The theatres of Dublin had done nothing about them that we could call our own. They were empty buildings hired by the English travelling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, because the nationalism we had called up – the nationalism every generation had called up in moments of discouragement – was romantic and poetical. (Autobiographies 410–11) The context and objective of the emotions raised in these writings are very different from those of war poets who spoke of the “pity of War”. Yeats distances from pedestrian lures of fame or dictates of duty the adventurous soldier of the skies in his poem “An Irish Airman foresees his Death”. The “lonely impulse of delight” romanticises the solitary soldier5 who is beyond the worldly politics of men and untouched by the petty politics of this war, fighting those he does not hate, and guarding those he does not love. Yeats’s soldier is not a victim. As Hynes writes in A War Imagined, Once the soldier was seen as a victim, the idea of the hero became unimaginable: there would be no more heroic actions in the art of this war. And if entire armies could be imagined composed of such victims – if indeed every army was an army of martyrs – then Victory too must fade from the story, and war become only a long catastrophe, with neither significant action or

direction, a violence that was neither fought nor won, but only endured. (215) To Yeats, the unheroic and the ordinary men he had passed on the streets were transformed by martyrdom in “Easter, 1916” into a strange and “terrible beauty”. To Owen and Sassoon, the unheroic and the ordinary men who were their fellow-soldiers had been used and victimised by those who were “deliberately” prolonging the war. The war which Sassoon had “entered as a war of defence and liberation (was) now … a war of aggression and conquest,” treating common soldiers with “callous complacency”, as though they were cannon fodder, making it impossible for their deaths to be glorious or heroic (Sassoon, “Finished with the War” Web n.p.). War literature as authored by Owen and Sassoon signified a shift of focus that reflected the changing history of the times, the transition from the avant-garde literature of the early twentieth century to the socialism-inspired writing of the 1930s. This literature viewed wars, nations and nationalism without romance, and was unable to find reason in the destruction of eight million people in a war triggered by the deaths of two (the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort). Edmund Blunden portrayed the “new awareness” brought to both sides by the first day of July 1916: “By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning” (38). It was not just the writers of the younger generation, but also those of the older, like G. K. Chesterton, who found their attitude to the war changing. Chesterton, who had authored books and pamphlets such as The Barbarism of Berlin and The Martyrdom of Belgium, and lamented that while “she [Belgium] saved France, she saved England – herself she could not save” (qtd. in Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence 209), voiced a bitterness and anger alien to his earlier writings in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”. In his later writings, the romantic

personifications of “England” and “France” make way for real persons, for soldiers and politicians: … they that fought for England,

Following a falling star,

Alas, alas for England

They have their graves afar. And they that rule in England,

In stately conclave met,

Alas, alas for England,

They have no graves as yet. (Palmer 65) Many among the avant-garde vorticists fought in World War I. They returned unable to hold on to their pre-war ideas of art after their firsthand experience of slaughter in the trenches. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the twenty-four-year-old sculptor, was killed. Hulme was killed in a battery next to Wyndham Lewis’s. Lewis himself did not have any illusions about his situation in Flanders: “a 2nd lieut.’s commission in the infantry is a death warrant more or less” (qtd. in Meyers 79). Jacob Epstein suffered a nervous breakdown. Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash returned shell-shocked. Lewis refers to the First World War as being “more than war”: “It put up a partition in one’s mind: it blocked off the past literally as if a huge wall had been set up there (Rude Assignment 148–49). Ideas held by artists regarding themselves and their art had been different on the other side of this “huge wall”. The chasm that had separated the artist from the common man no longer appeared as wide. The idea of the Nietzschean artist, as described in Lewis’s “Code of the Herdsman” essay (25–30) – who eschewed all clichés implying a herd personality, was himself his own caste, spent his time in the inimical heights of the mountains, and shunned the company of the “terrible processions beneath” (30) – now began to appear like a child’s fairy tale. Art and the artist could no longer claim their earlier eminence and power. The death of Gaudier-Brzeska, an artist “so preternaturally alive” (Blasting and Bombardiering 114), yet killed with

as much ease and finality as the common man, brought the artist crashing down from his elevated status. The death of this young man haunted both Lewis and Pound throughout their careers. It urged in Lewis a “hatred for this soulless machine, of big-wig money Government” (114–15), and Pound believed that his “serious curiosity” about politics and economics began with GaudierBrzeska’s death (Longenbach 131). Politics was now viewed as surpassing Art in importance because a painting “was after all a thing of paint and canvas” (Lewis, Revenge for Love 83). Lewis’s novel Revenge for Love portrayed the impotence of the artist before the oppressive and powerful political machinery, leading to the artist Victor’s unnecessary death. The lineaments of the artist had begun to change for, as Auden’s generation knew, “poetry makes nothing happen” (Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”). Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who had in the last lines of the Portrait (serialised from 1914 to 1915 in The Egoist) laid claims to the role of a saviour in society – “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (276) – discovers his need for the common man Leopold Bloom to “complete” his artist’s self in Joyce’s 1922 Ulysses (begun in 1914 and serialised from 1917). Dedalus memorably re-defines his vocation as an artist in Ulysses: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies” (38–39). Though Dedalus’s words place a significant emphasis on the “I” “reading”, his “signatures of all things” is a definite move away from the role he had envisioned for himself earlier in Portrait, words which were used by Joyce himself in a 1912 letter to Nora which reads, “I am one of the writers of this generation who are perhaps creating at last a conscience in the soul of this wretched race” (Selected Letters 204). At this point, we are closer to Isherwood’s identification of himself as an artist with a “camera with its shutter open” (3).

MALENESS, MASCULINITY, MODERNITY

Among the avant-garde modernists who went to war and returned alive was Wyndham Lewis. Having called for a dehumanisation of the arts in his 1914–15 Blast, Lewis now found himself recoiling from the shell-craters and burnt trees that he witnessed in the battlefield, a scene “so consonant with the vision of my younger days….And before I quite realised what I was doing, I was drawing with loving care a signaller corporal to plant upon the lip of the shell-crater” (Rude Assignment 138). Jacob Epstein illustrated his realisation of the immense destructive power of the machine and of man’s ineffectuality in the two rock-drill projects that he sculpted before and after the war. The first, made in 1913, was the towering figure of a man mounted on a miner’s real rock-drill. Over three metres tall, it impressed the viewer with its formidable authority and virile strength. Held between the man’s legs, the machine appears to be part of the man’s body, a phallic extension that tells of the twin myths of earlytwentieth-century intellectual thought: one, a view of science as empowering modern man which, as Armstrong writes of modernist technophilia, is “typically founded on the Aristotelian notion of the tool or instrument – an extension of the body and will” (5) and two, the maleness of “modernity”, with its science and technology. The man himself, seated on the drill, with his harsh, mechanical lines and armoured visage, is “a Faustian dream of technological power and transformation” (Jones, Web n.p.). After his return from the war however, in 1916, Epstein dismantled and re-did the sculpture. Having lost his “ardour for machinery” and keenly aware of “the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into” (Epstein 56), he cast the driller in an elegiac image. The triumphant poise disappeared and the man was shorn of his machine, hands and legs. The driller in the 1916 sculpture appears powerless and his head juts out at a plaintive angle. These two pieces of sculpture, taken together, epitomise the gendered nature of modernism. While the first embodies the triumphant, almost belligerently male discourse of avant-garde modernism, the second is an embodiment of the crisis of masculinity that was precipitated by the war.

A number of studies have emerged since the 1990s on masculinity and war (Roper, Meyers, Leese). Through a study of the wars’ private correspondence, diaries and condolence messages, researchers have attacked the unidimensional image of the brave male soldier, facing with humour and wit the rugged difficulties of the soldier’s life. Roper, for example, reread the correspondence with great sensitivity to uncover the “secret battle” of emotional survival waged by survivors as their comrades were shelled. He pointed out that proximity to events could sometimes prevent understanding. “What these men experienced was sometimes too disturbing to take in; the very ability to think was under attack”, and therefore experiences “were not wholly constituted in language” (20–21). Meyers discovered the persona of the dutiful husband, father and son coming alive in the letters home, while the diaries recorded the horror and fear that could not be articulated in the public social space: “If letters formed a space in which men attempted to comprehend their experiences of war in terms of their civilian lives, diaries formed an outlet for them to come to terms with the strangeness and horror of those experiences …” (49). That the wars fed on the ideologies of gender that were present in the age is a case argued convincingly by Hendley in his book Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War: Popular Imperialism in Britain, 1914–1932 (2012). He presented case studies of three patriotic organisations – the National Service League, the Victoria League, and the League of the Empire – to examine how ideologies of gender evolved and affected society both before and after the First World War. Paul Fussell’s view that “as long as there were 19-year-old boys, as he had been, and as long as those boys ached to prove their manhood by enlisting, there would be war” (“Paul Fussel”, Web n.p.), suggests the naiveté and gullibility of youth when faced with the lure of the image of masculinity. Gender ideologies are also articulated in the avant-garde movements of contemporary art. The futurists’ warmongering rhetoric, valorising the values of speed, violence and power, urging Italy to intervene in the War, and the vorticists’ prejudice for geometric planes and hard surfaces were both explicitly linked by the artists to a

masculinity of tone and temper. Lewis, writing about the “English Cubists” in The Egoist, stated, “The work of this group of artists for the most part underlines the geometrical bases and structures of life…. All revolutionary painting today has in common the rigid reflections of steel and stone” (“The Cubist Room” 9). GaudierBrzeska’s words in Blast No. 1, “We have crystallized the sphere into the cube. …” (O’Keeffe 234), echo this aesthetic inclination towards lines and planes. “Imagism stands,” writes Pound to Amy Lowell, “or I should like it to stand for hard, light, clear edges” (Letters 38). There was, in this new Poundian persona that combined the “enfant terrible and moral satirist” (Wees 65), a violent and belligerent masculinity that finds expression in his poetry. Pound’s passion for planes and lines appear, however, to have been affected in the immediate aftermath of Gaudier-Brzeska’s death. In his memoir on Gaudier-Brzeska, authored in 1916, Pound writes, “I am slowly getting convinced that it is not much use going further in the research of planes, forms, etc. If I ever come back I shall do more ‘Mlles. G …’ in marble” (Gaudier-Brzeska 68). Much of the vorticist and modernist obsession with hardness and angularity can be explained by the formative influence of the fin de siècle aesthetic movement. The sustained campaign against what was viewed as effeminacy by futurists and vorticists inclined them towards a language and style which was determined by values coded as masculine – precision, accuracy, hardness, severity, sparseness, angles, straight lines – all terms that eschewed softness, curves, femininity. This was in contrast to the image of the effeminate, physically weak artist parodied by Aubrey Beardsley himself in “Selfportrait in Bed”. It shows the artist almost hidden away under bedclothes, dwarfed by enormous tassels and ornamentations on the lavish bed, with his tiny face half-hidden in a nightcap. This image of artists as cocooned from reality, radiating weakness rather than power, was rebuffed by Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ezra Pound. Though in reality these artists shared much with the aestheticists – their high esteem for the artist’s vocation, opposition to popular culture as degenerate – the early-

twentieth-century artist viewed aestheticism as having surrendered the power and dignity of the artist’s position. Alan Sinfeld studies the Wilde trials in The Wilde Century to reveal the construction of a new stereotype. This was different from the earlier image of the rakish bohemian artist whose homosexual desires could imply other “degenerate” behaviour. The widely publicised trials made Wilde’s consciously cultivated veneer of the effeminate aesthete become recognisable as an essential part of the homosexual artist, a fop and dandy, whose homosexuality pervaded his entire being and was an essential part of his artisthood. Much of vorticism’s paranoiac reaction to homosexuality, effeminacy and femininity may be traced to this fin de siècle image. Miranda B. Hickman’s The Geometry of Modernism explores the permutations of the “vocabulary” of modernism which reiterated a language of geometric figures. This “preoccupation with geometrical patterns,” she argues, serves for them as a “vocabulary with which they imagine and figure ideal cultural conditions, bodily states, philosophical attitudes, and epistemological methods” (xv). She connects this inclination towards aggression and power, and its consequent mistrust of the “feminine” values of mercy and sympathy with the interwar years. In “an environment increasingly demanding decisive action and forceful responses to the brewing social and political crises”, the works of H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Pound and Yeats exhibit an “upsurge of geometric vocabulary” (247). As Pound’s attraction towards Italian fascism grew, he began again to incline towards geometrically clean lines. Yeats, who believed spiritualism could ease the troubled times when “the best lack[ed] all conviction, while the worst [were] full of passionate intensity”, began relying heavily on “geometric diagrams” that were communicated to him by his “Spiritual Instructors” (208–09). The recurring image of shell-shock repeatedly makes its presence felt in English Literature and was interpreted by Elaine Showalter as a crisis of masculinity. Found in the writings of Rebecca West, Ford Maddox Ford and Virginia Woolf, these references to shell-shock betray the vulnerability of the “masculine” soldiers who were expected to be at ease with the violence of the wars. Septimus Smith

in Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway moves through London, struggling to connect with the “ordinary” life to which he has become a stranger forever. He vacillates between the “real things” which he cannot handle and his visions of the war. Sitting in a park with his wife, he transforms a man in a grey suit to an image of a uniformed soldier, risen from the dead. Frederic Henry in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms speaks about how the words “sacred”, “glorious” and “sacrifice” embarrassed him: We had heard them … and had read them … and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had real dignity. (161) Neglected for many years was the other body of writing that problematised the set notions of masculinity: the writings of women who experienced the war first-hand, or those who were pacifists like the poet Margaret Sackville. Most of these writings spoke of the nonmasculine aspects of war – the senseless pain, the terrified young men, the deserted homes, the grieving mothers, the waste of youth – all aspects that affirmed the ordinary humanity of the soldiers, asserted the value of the domestic life of the home, and lampooned the lofty ideals of nation and patriotism that had desecrated this space. Contrary to the image of the war as a males-only scenario, many women were involved: running canteens, working as nurses, reporters, or in espionage departments. Many “went to the War with Rupert Brooke, and came home with Siegfried Sassoon”, as May Weddurburn Cannan remembers in her book In War Time (Khan 9), a statement that spoke of the change of heart that occurred to many during the war. Like Margaret Sackville’s poem, “Nostra Culpa”, which criticises women for their mute and passive acceptance of a system that they recognise as monstrous and destructive, many of the women’s writings attacked the hollow sham of masculinity. “Men worshipped pride” accuses Sackville (Khan 86), and Helen Hamilton

satirises the ideals of the patriotic soldier in her “The Savage Optimist”: So long live War!

May it never cease to visit

Beneficent, uplifting,

The torpid earth of ours!

Else shall man

Not know his splendour…. (Khan 12) One of the most powerful poems on war was perhaps May Herschel-Clarke’s response to Rupert Brooke’s poem, written in 1917, two years after Brooke’s death at the front. Brooke’s poem beginning “If I should die …” had been entitled “The Soldier”. Herschel-Clarke’s poem was entitled “The Mother” and read: If you should die, think only this of me

In that still quietness where is space for thought, …

One whom you loved has drained the bitter cup

Till there is nought to drink … (Walter 109) The American poet Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s poem, “He went for a Soldier”, of Billy the Soldier Boy, blasts the “masculine” ideals of the soldier having “braggart’s attitudes” and full of “tinsel platitudes” (Web n.p.). This was a different perspective, as Vera Brittain wrote in her Testament of Youth (1933): “I see things other than they have seen, and some of the things they perceived, I see differently” (Khan 3). One of the things many women saw differently was their inability to hate in accordance with national strictures. May Sinclair and Vera Brittain both record this inability: in a “Ward in France where the German Wounded Lay”, Brittain discovered “human mercy turns alike to friend or foe” (Khan 134).

WAR AND IDEAS OF TIME

If the wars were un-representable in language, they were also “uncontainable” in space and time. “Wars being global meant that it ran off the edges of maps” (308), writes Elizabeth Bowen in her novel Heat of the Day, implying the difficulty of comprehending wars within familiar registers. The chronological certainty of the duration of each unit of time made little sense in the experience of war – considering how time stretched during moments of heightened pain, such as when a shell blew up a line of soldiers. The myth of the war experience – that it separated the real men from the boys and was an initiation into manhood, would herald a personal and national regeneration “as swimmers into cleanness leaping” (Brooke, “1914: Peace”; in Walter 11), and the attendant beliefs of the cult of the fallen soldier, the ideal of camaraderie – appeared absurd before the apocalyptic experience of the First World War. Both at and away from the battlefront, people responded to the passage of time in terms of the war: a waiting, immobile Time which “seemed to burn brightly … riveting consciousness in an eternal present,” (Kern 294), or a “frozen time” (Armstrong 14–19), as if people were waiting for the war to end so that they could resume living. Time itself came to be seen as divided by the war: before and after. The event could not be seen as belonging to the usual flow of time, it was part of that yawning crack between the two worlds, pre-war and post-war. With these years being experienced as aberration, narratives appear unable to document them as part of a continuous reality. Experiences are imaged in short, broken fragments. Struggling to narrate and represent the wars, writing, especially poetry, was full of splintered images, broken sentences, and disembodied sounds: “stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle” (Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”; Walter 131), or Richard Aldington’s “gay girls” on the “frozen streets” in the poem “Interlude” (Marsden 172); or Harold Monro’s incoherent thoughts: I won’t be quiet. Sing too, you fool.

I had a dog I used to beat.

Don’t try it on me. Say that again. (Monro, “Youth in Arms III:

Retreat” 26–27)

Walter Benjamin draws attention to the unprecedented scale of this modern warfare in his Illuminations. Relating the overwhelming impact that technology-powered instruments of war had on human senses, he traces a trajectory of loss from World War I. Humanity’s oldest activity, of telling stories, would, he believed, be silenced. As human experience grew increasingly devalued, overshadowed by the sheer power of technology, man would be robbed of his storytelling powers: For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (84) Despite the references to bayonets in the war poetry, few were killed in face-to-face combat (Fussell, Sherry). Owen’s description of a stilled image in his poem “Strange Meeting” depicts killing in an oldfashioned way with bayonets, possibly because poets had no idea how to describe the reality they faced: I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. (Walter 160 ) In truth, soldiers had been blown to bits by shells, which desecrated the dignity of the human body. The destruction unleashed by shells – “Shrieking its message the flying death … / The brains of science, the money of fools” (Walter 123) – the terror unleashed by chemical gases, and the sight of mass graves could not be coded in language that used the familiar registers of space and time. Modern warfare

had little to do with the traditional expertise and strategy of war, and everything to do with science: The idea of war as fundamentally a game of hide-and-seek with the enemy was proved to the point of absurdity in those First World War earthworks where millions of men were entrenched and interred for four long years. With the appearance of what came to be called saturation weapons (repeating rifles, machineguns, rapid-firing field guns) firepower alone determined who would be victorious – rather than the disposition of troops, the strict geometry of their movements. (Virilio 69) Virilio highlights the surveillance apparatus – trench periscopes, telescopic sights, sound detectors – that, along with weapons, formed the arsenal of war: “Just as weapons and armour developed in unison throughout history, so visibility and invisibility now began to evolve together, eventually producing invisible weapons that make things visible – radar, sonar, and the high-definition camera of spy satellites” (71). The soldiers in this “bloody conflict” were “also the first spectators of a pyrotechnic fairy-play whose magical, spectacular nature” made it a “total war, a continuous performance, all day and all night” (70). It is not for nothing that war and cinema have been called “the twin technologies of modernity” (Marcus 280). There was a spectacular element to the war: images that were so startling that they could hardly be contained in the time and space that the physical dimensions claimed for them. This out-of-time quality and disjointed content was perhaps best captured by the science of still photography and the moving image, capable of representing time in broken unconnected fragments, or of holding time for a duration that was far longer than its original span, or recreating it at a later time, making the past and present blend into each other as it did for so many shell-shocked soldiers. The colossal impact of the experience may have necessitated a dissociation within one’s self, separating spectator from movie. It may

have been a need to step away mentally from the shock that introduced into war writing the binaries that Paul Fussell finds. Among others that he writes of are the binaries of past and present, known and unknown, memory and reality. He analyses the archaic rhythms of Edmund Blunden’s narrative in Undertones of War not as signalling an escapism from a harsh reality but as the civilised human being’s resistance to war: “engaging the war by selecting from the armory of the past weapons against it which seem to have the greatest chance of withstanding time” (The Great War 169). This idea of a persistent dialogue between the past and the present is in keeping with Bergson’s theory of qualitative time. Bergson, whose lecture at Columbia University in January 1913 aroused such enthusiasm that it occasioned a traffic jam, the first traffic jam in the history of Broadway, differentiated time and space, defining the immediate data of consciousness as being temporal, in other words, as the duration (la durée). In his Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1910) – the book which brought Sartre to philosophy – and then in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1934, translated in 1946), Bergson argues that time can only be grasped through intuition of imagination. We change into another state of mind without ceasing the “earlier” state, so that we pass from one state into another even as we remain in one state of mind, the transition is continuous. Thus the past and the present and the future that is constantly becoming part of the present cannot be explained as segregated time-spans, but as duration, durée, in flux and not as a series of points. Bergsonian time was disputed most fiercely by Wyndham Lewis, who feared that this sense of time was robbing modern art of its precision and clean lines while introducing “flabbiness” (Lewis, Time and Western Man 101). War literature and holocaust literature (mostly written a decade or more after World War II), however, often appeared to document experience in Bergsonian time. The trauma of the battlefront or the horror of concentration camps were narrated as events that had not seen a closure, even though the events themselves had ceased to be present temporally and spatially. As Harold Bloom writes of Elie Wiesel’s Night, “In this fifth decade after the collapse of the National Socialist regime, the

disaster still has not run its course. No closure is in sight: the contradictory imperatives of remembering and forgetting are no less strong than before” (1). Time is warped in the nightmarish experiences that are narrated in poetry or prose. Sometimes it is long-drawn-out, seemingly an endless stretch of time that mocks the few countable years in between: There was a time that’s gone

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It seemed unending then

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We look like strangers at the boys

We were so long ago. (John Collings Squire, “A Generation” in Walter 250) And sometimes it passes too quick: The trouble is, things happen much too quick;

Up jump the Boches, rifles thump and click,

You stagger, and the whole scene fades away;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It’s a queer time. (Robert Graves, “It’s a queer time” in Walter 128) Wiesel’s statement of his inability to forget can be understood only through Bergson’s idea of time being not only subjective, as Kant had argued, but also private, determined by the particulars of each individual: Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp that

turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children, whose bodies

I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. (Wiesel 34)

THE ABSURDITY OF THE WORLD The world wars, in many ways, rendered the world incomprehensible to humanity. Kathe Kollwitz’s portrayal of a grieving humanity attempts to convey this through her heartrending sculptures – Mother with Dead Child, Grieving Parents, Mother with Her Dead Son – sculptures which conveyed the anguish of her personal losses in the world wars: her youngest son Peter in the First World War and her grandson Peter in the Second World War. Language began to falter. Words had lost their meaning and become mere empty hollow sounds. Art and literature appeared incapable of conveying anything meaningful. Henry James wrote of the exhaustion of language in post–war Europe: The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor-car tyres; they have like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk. (qtd. in Lockwood 4) It was not only the millions of lives killed or crippled, both on and off the front, that had to be made sense of. The greater difficulty arose out of the struggle to accept the knowledge that it was not one Hitler or one general that could be blamed. For history to have taken the course it did, there was indeed the complicity of nations. In World War II, Hitler could not be held single-handedly responsible for all Nazi atrocities (Kreshaw). The task was too complex and widespread. Recent research has confirmed the fear that the Final Solution probably did not owe its genesis to Hitler alone, but was more a decision arrived at through the consent of many. Kreshaw possibly

arrived at a more correct, if more terrifying, truth when he wrote, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference” (186). The difficulty of accepting this was compounded by the fact that the idea of a “flawed” humanity could no longer be restricted to one nation. The decisive victory of the Allies in the “just” World War II was won by the Americans through the use of devastating nuclear bombs, which changed the idea of arms and ammunition. Newspaper reports confirmed that these deadly weapons had been quaintly referred to as “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” by those who had drawn up the plans for the attack. From the criteria followed for the choice of the targets – with the city of Kyoto removed from the list due to the intervention of the Secretary of War, who had pleasant memories of his honeymoon there – to the planning of the strikes with the “chosen” cities left unbombed till the final date so as to accurately assess the impact of the nuclear weapon (including preparation leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the dropping of leaflets across Japan warning civilians of imminent raids on a list of cities – with a disclaimer on the back that other unlisted areas may be attacked too), all the meticulously planned details of the event read more like an absurdist play than a page of human history. William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, presaged the incomprehensibility and absurdity of the world with its subtext of life being “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing”. The idea of the absurd in drama and fiction conveyed the incomprehensibility of man’s situation. Beckett’s character, Clov, questions Hamm in Endgame, ‘… You and I mean something?’ (40). Unable to find any order or sense in human lives, Albert Camus, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, compared humanity’s state to that of Sisyphus, condemned to pointless but ceaseless labour. The view that man is inhabiting a universe with which he is out of key and the meaning of which he finds indecipherable, showed human lives as without purpose, bewildered, troubled and obscurely threatened. Taking its cue from Odet’s 1935 play, Waiting for Lefty, a play about workers oppressed by capitalism and waiting for salvation in the form of union organiser Lefty, who never arrives, Beckett’s Waiting for

Godot (1953) made a far more bleak statement: it depicted man as waiting endlessly for some unknown Godot, with little hope of the wait ever reaching culmination. Eugene Ionesco’s claim, that the “absurd is that which is devoid of purpose…. Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless” (Esslin 23), viewed the human situation as overwhelmed by the yawning gap between human potential/yearning and ability/reality. When Martin Esslin famously termed such drama “Theatre of the Absurd”, Camus was goaded into reacting by saying it was the world that was absurd, and that theatre was only reflecting this absurdity. Man, with his ambitions, had been rendered absurd in the puny significance he commanded in a hostile universe where he was doomed to ineffectuality. As Beckett writes in his prose piece Worstword Ho, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Web n.p.). In the aftermath of the two terrible wars, Camus painted a dark and bitter picture of humanity in his 1956 novel, The Fall. A monologue with an imaginary listener, the novel is a long-drawn-out confession of a self-proclaimed “judge-penitent”, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Through the words of this suave gentleman, Camus telescopes the futile history of human civilisation: Paris is a real trope-l’oeil, a magnificent stage-setting inhabited by four million silhouettes. Nearly five million at the last census? Why, they must have multiplied. And that wouldn’t surprise me. It always seemed to me that our fellow-citizens had two passions: ideas and fornication…. still, let us take care not to condemn them; they are not the only ones, for all Europe is in the same boat. I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted. (6–7) The mindless destruction of the wars is articulated in Clamence’s rhetorical question, “Haven’t you noticed that our society is organized

for this kind of liquidation?” (7), and his living space described as: I live in the Jewish quarter or what was called so until our Hitlerian brethren made room. What a cleanup! Seventy-five thousand Jews deported or assassinated; that’s real vacuumcleaning. I admire that diligence, that methodical patience! When one has no character one has to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in history. (11) Searching for ways to comprehend the reality around them, the nineteenth-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s thought became popular among mid-century intellectuals. The term “existentialism” was coined by Gabriel Marcel in 1945 and adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre the same year in his lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism”. Distanced from all traditional figures and concepts, Camus placed man’s hope on man himself. Claiming to be an atheistic existentialist, Sartre asserted that man’s existence preceded any pre-determined essence or concept. With no God to conceive or define Man, “Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence” (Sartre 349). Driven to question life, and to question the possibility of suicide in the darkness and gloom that threatened the sensitive mind, Camus claimed that the fundamental subject of his Myth of Sisyphus was this: It is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate. Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the French and European disaster, this book declared that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism. In all the books I have written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction. Although “The Myth of

Sisyphus” poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert. (“Preface” v) The fraught relationship that modernism and the modern age had with science and democracy came to a head with the two world wars. Modernism’s schizophrenic reaction to its past – its self-proclaimed break with the temporal past coupled with its non-complicity with the socio-political “modernity” around it – was thrown into relief by the social upheaval brought on by the war. The explicitly avant-garde movements of futurism and vorticism died quite abruptly, their valorisation of speed, violence and aggression becoming untenable in an age wracked and wearied by the long-drawn out war. While the ideas of the sovereignty of art and the celebrated impersonality of the artist grew questionable in the context of emerging fascism, the growing industrialisation of the institution of art was another factor responsible for the failure of the avant-garde artists. By the end of the First World War, the Socialist Revolution had exploded in Russia, and in 1918, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was established. By 1923, the increasingly coercive nature of the socialist state in Russia was becoming visible, resulting in significant deviations from orthodox Marxism among European scholars. Though the majority of the thirties’ intellectuals and writers of Europe were socialists, the overwhelming emphasis in Marxism on the economic structure of a society began to be questioned as culture, entertainment, education and family began to be viewed and analysed as playing as significant a role in the oppressive system as the exploitative class structure. Literary artists, from the thirties, displayed greater political maturity and awareness as seen in Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. This accorded with the new role that art and artists took upon themselves during the wars: that of bearing witness. They did not view art as aesthetically determined and therefore corrupting reality, or worse, exploiting reality. In contradiction to Theodore Adorno’s belief that it would be “barbarism to write poetry after Auschwitz”, Geoffery Hartman upholds the role of art in his poignant and brilliant book, The

Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996). Hartman writes, After the Holocaust there is a spiritual hunt to de-aestheticize everything—politics and culture as well as art. As Adorno phrased in his harshest and most famous statement, it is a sign of the barbaric (that is, of lack of culture) to write poetry after Auschwitz. He refused the arts a role even in mourning the destruction, because they might stylize it too much, or “make unthinkable fate appear to have some meaning.” Yet art creates an unreality effect in a way that is not alienating or desensitizing. At best, it also provides something of a safe-house for emotion and empathy. The tears we shed, like those of Aeneas when he sees the destruction of Troy depicted on the walls of Carthage, are an acknowledgment and not an exploitation of the past. (157)

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Notes 1 The avant-garde journal of the vorticist movement was named Blast. 2 Yeats’s letters tell us that he had planned a lecture on “English War poetry

and Irish Rebellion poetry” (Collected Letters InteLex: #3436), ultimately discarded as unwise in the existing political climate.

3 For details on the conflicting arguments in Ireland regarding the War of 1914,

see Edna Longley’s Yeats and Modern Poetry and Fran Brearton’s The Great War in Irish Poetry. 4 Years later, in his Nobel Lecture, 1923, Yeats looked back at these tumultuous

years, when the Sinn Fein movement was being engendered in politics and a cultural nationalism was being stimulated through drama and literature. He traced the “modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought that prepared for the Anglo-Irish war” to Parnell’s fall from power in 1891, when a “disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived, and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation” (Autobiographies 410). 5 The poem is believed to have been written in memory of Robert Gregory,

Augusta Gregory’s only son who was killed in the War.

F O UR

MIND It’s all in the mind. George Harrison “Yellow Submarine” (1968)

V

irginia Woolf described Elizabethan drama in her essay “Notes on an Elizabethan Play” as being a “jungle, forest, and wilderness” (Common Reader, First 21), and Elizabethan prose as being “incapable of fulfilling one of the offices of prose which is to make people talk, simply and naturally, about ordinary things” (Common Reader, Second 9). By doing so, she voiced the twentiethcentury-mind’s perspective on the sixteenth century. Her words capture the two dominant themes of her century: the idea of the ordinary and the idea of the natural. Both these terms emerged as intensely contested terrain over the last century, and artists of the literary, visual and plastic media were caught up in near-obsessive experimentations and innovations as they aspired to capture these two ideas in their works. The status of the “ordinary” and the understanding of the term “natural” were changed forever through discoveries and developments that occurred in the sphere of the human mind at the turn of the century. The fabric of “ordinary” moods, emotions and times that had been generally brushed aside as either too dull or too trivial to be included in literature took on a richer hue in

the early twentieth century. These “slighter shades”, as Woolf calls them, which had been ignored by poetry, began to acquire unsuspected colours and complexities when viewed through the prism of Freud’s research. Being only the visible tip of the unseen and unknown massive iceberg that was the mind, artists documented with care every phase of the mind – ordinary and extraordinary – since a wealth of intricate minutiae underlaid the seemingly insignificant words, habits and thoughts of the men and women they portrayed.

THE EXTRAORDINARINESS OF THE ORDINARY “In an age of utilitarian prose like our own,” Woolf writes in “The Strange Elizabethans”, “we know exactly how people spend the hours between breakfast and bed, how they behave when they are neither one thing nor the other, neither angry nor loving, neither happy nor miserable” (Common Reader, Second 9). These indefinable, insignificant hours had always been present, but relegated to the margins of literature, in the scribbled words of Elizabethans like Harvey who “had the habit of making notes in the margins of books as he read. Looking from one to the other, from his public self to his private, we see his face lit from both sides…. We detect another Harvey lurking behind the superficial Harvey, shading him with doubt and effort and despondency” (20). The exaltation of the “ordinary” into the significant, ushered in by the increasing complexity of the “natural”, underlaid the “extraordinary discrepancy between the Elizabethan view of reality and our own” (Common Reader, First 22). The modernist epic Ulysses was created out of the passage of one day in the life of ordinary man Leopold Bloom. As Richard Ellman said of James Joyce, “Joyce’s discovery … was that the ordinary is the extraordinary” (James Joyce 5). In an epic effort to reach every single one of these “ordinary” moments through his memory, Marcel Proust withdrew from the social world for five years, attempting to document the past in his seven-volume book, In Search of Lost Time (1871–1922). Events were no longer necessary to create narratives

around an emotion or a character. A short narrative – such as Joyce’s “Araby”– without any singular external event could, as Ezra Pound writes, actually function better than a story: it could be “a vivid waiting” (Tryphonopoulos 226). The findings of Sigmund Freud, published in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, opened up the doors to a horizon that revealed “a complex of thoughts and memories of the most intricate possible construction” (195) within the minds of “ordinary” individuals facing a most “dull” reality. The twentieth-century writer found the human mind, with its “wealth of trains of unconscious thought striving for expression” (165) a fascinating and significant subject of study. This had been somewhat foreshadowed in the writings of Robert Browning, who made “dramatic” an emotional state through the dramatic monologue, though the presence of an event dominated the narrative of his poems, either within the frame of the work (as in “Porphyria’s Lover”) or without (as in “My Last Duchess”). With the idea of what constituted an event transformed in the post–Freudian world, the prop of any “incident” in the physical world became unnecessary. This affected the understanding of both plot and character which, if based on outer tangible events, appeared to reveal merely a shallow and trivial reality compared to the rich intricacies of thoughts and emotions occurring within. Woolf ’s “charge or grievance” against the mighty writers who had preceded modernists was that they had been “materialists”, concerned not with the spirit but with the body.1 In contrast, according to Richard Ellman, Joyce’s stories – structured around an epiphany, “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself,” expressing those “most delicate and evanescent of moments” (Joyce 81) – appear spiritual. In her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, Woolf accuses her predecessors of ignoring Mrs Brown, the elderly lady she met on a London night train in “that carriage which [was] travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, … and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her” (16).

The extraordinariness of the ordinary Mrs. Brown therefore comes not only from the intricacy of her thoughts on an ordinary day but also from the fact that she embodies not one single individual, but a community, a race, or a generation. In Richard Ellman’s book James Joyce, he notes how Joyce attempted to write a “chapter of the moral history”2 (251) of his country in Dubliners (1914), moving from the subjectivity of one mind to that of a collective. There was possibly in these portrayals the influence of Freud and Carl Jung’s findings on the collective mind of a group. The young boy in Joyce’s story “The Encounter” whose “heart [beats] quickly with fear”, or the voices inside the head of the narrator in Lawrence’s poem “Snake”, urging him to kill the snake, both display what we would call “typical” responses to situations they have never encountered before. Their responses, not mediated through thought, are immediately recognisable to the readers as “natural” or “expected” responses, signifying that both reader and fictional character draw from a shared and vast repository of experience and consequent knowledge that mankind has garnered through generations. Jung termed this the collective unconscious, and called the images or stories recurring in the collective unconscious “archetypes”, which were often conveyed in myths that endured through generations. He distinguished this sphere from Freud’s and Alfred Adler’s theory of the “personal unconscious”, which was shaped by the person’s experiences, memories and aspirations and was therefore “a personal acquisition” (Archetypes and the Collective 42). As Jung writes: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we take on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents. (43)

This collective consciousness, carrying remnants of “the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man” (Man and His Symbols 57) hence also indicated the existence of a “collective memory”, a term coined later by Maurice Halbwachs in 1925. The voices in the narrator’s head in “Snake”, “the voice of [his] education” saying “He must be killed”, are that part of the man which has passed through a long evolutionary history of civilisation, prompting the man into action that appears spontaneous and instinctive: And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter. (Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers 95) This was an area that had seen much work at the end of the nineteenth century by Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann Ebbinghaus, two of the founding fathers of experimental psychology. Richard Semon, the scientist whose work used tools of evolutionary biology to understand the concept of cultural inheritance or cultural memory, was influential in developing Jung’s idea of racial memory or the collective unconscious. Semon coined the term “mnemes” after Mneme, the Greek Muse of Memory, and also to rhyme with “genes”, indicating that the theory of inheritance witnessed in the natural world was also true in the case of culture. This approach perceived history as experiences that could hypothetically cause changes in the brain, leaving physical traces in the memory through the encoding of external stimuli. This view was instrumental in later theories of

“memory as reconstruction rather than retrieval, since in this theory experiences were seen to be broken into constituent units for storage, which are then reassembled (in new combinations) later” (Olick 12).3 A good example of this can be found in The Way of All Flesh (1903), the semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler, who was also a scholar of evolutionary thought. The character Dr Skinner reads the letters A. M. D. G. inscribed on the Roman Catholic Chapel as “Ad Mariam Dei Genetricem”, which translates as “To Mary Mother of God”. Enraged, he writes a pamphlet attacking the Church of Rome for being idolatrous. The local priest’s answer, however, revealed that Skinner’s memory had played tricks on him, making him interpret the letters in accordance with his experience/perception of the Church as idolatrous. The priest’s answer “solemnly declared that A. M. D. G. stood for nothing more dangerous than ‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam’” meaning, “For the Greater Glory of God” (91–92). This understanding of history and of collective memory became especially interesting after World War I with the construction of “nation” and “history” receiving attention.4 Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” discusses the making of the past: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory, as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. (247) By the 1920s, Halbwachs’s “collective memory” and the art historian Aby Warburg’s “social memory” shifted the understanding of collective memory, consciousness or unconscious, from the framework of natural sciences into that of culture. Culture was recognised as an institution. Halbwachs’s work combined the insights of Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim, scholars concerned with

“progress” in European civilisation. Many thinkers of this generation such as Proust, Freud and Bergson were preoccupied with memory because, despite the huge advances made in science and technology, they suspected the enlightenment’s logocentric view of the universe with its idolisation of rationality was somehow only part of the story. Rejecting objectivist accounts, Bergson argued that the actual source of any knowledge could only be subjective. This was reflected in his radical analysis of the experience of time, with memory as its central feature: Against accounts of memory as passive storage, he characterized remembering as fluid and changing. Against accounts of memory as the objective reproduction of the past, he characterized remembering as fluid and changing. His work drew … attention to the difference between objective … and subjective apprehensions of the past: whereas new forms of record keeping measured time and recorded history in increasingly uniform and standardized ways, individual memory was still highly variable, sometimes recording short periods in intense detail and long periods in only the vaguest outline. (Olick 17) The division between memory and perception emphasised the radical alterity of the unconscious, directing the modern writer to the importance of images, symbols and words used in describing experiences. Reflected in Woolf ’s “halo”, Bergson’s concept of durée as internal time – experienced time which would be too unwieldy to map on the registers of the world’s measures – introduced the idea of time as a lived phenomenon. The self was, over time, repeatedly expressed as diverse and plural selves, inscribing one self upon the other as an evolving palimpsest. Time-honoured concepts of reality and areas of knowledge were thrown open to question as one among many versions of reality propagated by those in power. Marx and Engels’s claim of a false consciousness that ruled a community’s sense of reality was strengthened by the work of Antonio Gramsci, who studied how power established itself not only by physically

shackling people, but more importantly, by manipulating their thoughts. Finding old forms restrictive and inhibiting to explore the diverse realities of the mind, young writers struggled with literary genres as they attempted to express the new world opened up by psychoanalysis. Dorothy Richardson published Pointed Roofs in 1915. Using a narrative technique that May Sinclair termed “stream of consciousness” (borrowing a term from William James’s writings) this was the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. These few years consequently mark a significant moment in the history of English Literature as writers and critics debated what was and should be the status and the future of the literary text, especially the novel.

ROLE OF THE READER AND CRITICALITY OF THE ACT OF READING The consequences of this insight into the human mind went beyond the writing of it in literature. It changed the perspective on the act of reading literature. Harold Bloom’s introduction to Proust’s novel offers valuable clues to the differences that had occurred. Proust’s novel, Harold Bloom writes, “is not an eventful book”: Superficially read, In Search of Lost Time is not an eventful book; it is better understood if the reader allows it to alter his or her notion of what an event is. Proust records and describes inner events, most often moments of intellectual or emotional understanding. To the astute and sensitive observer, a dull highsociety dinner proves to be as eventful as an historic battle, and as rich a food for thought. (30, emphasis added) Bloom’s words clearly indicate his disapproval of the lazy reader and suggest the need for the reader to play a more active role in literature. The acuity and seriousness that Bloom attributed to the act of reading echoed the modernist opinion that reading literature was a

business more serious than merely entertaining oneself or gathering information. According to Richard Ellman, Joyce claimed to his vacillating publisher that the course of civilisation in Ireland would be seriously retarded if the Irish people were prevented “from having one good look at themselves” through his polished looking glass (Selected Letters 90). Eliot, against whom the usual charge was that he “overintellectualized” (Richards, “The Poetry of T. S. Eliot” 113) literature, believed that culture could “be described simply as that which makes life worth living” (Notes 9). It was “the incarnation, so to speak, of the religion of a people” (11), and therefore needed a “body of priests”, presumably artists and writers, “who know what they are doing”, and also a “body of worshippers”, presumably the audience or readers of culture, “who know what is being done” (5). Reading could therefore not be “a superficial and swift gathering, as we loll on the borderland between inertia and attention, with the reader’s share reduced to a minimum … an easy-going collaboration, with the reader’s share reduced to the minimum” (Richardson, “About Punctuation” 178). An astute and sensitive reading imposed on the reader a significant role, a role in which the reader would actively participate in the interpretation of a text, rather than passively consume it. This emphasis on the reader’s mind and on the way words translated themselves into meanings in the reader’s mind was to ultimately crystallise into two conflicting approaches to literature: New Criticism and the reader-response theory. Trained originally in psychology, the critic I. A. Richards encouraged students in his class to concentrate on “the words on the page”, rather than rely on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. He collaborated with C. K. Ogden, the linguist–psychologist, to author the book The Meaning of Meaning which explored how symbols and language acted upon human thought. The understanding of the words on a page needed, they believed, to “form a context with further experiences other than sounds” (1923: 210), and therefore “all discursive symbolization involves … [a] weaving together of contexts into higher contexts” (The Meaning of Meaning 220). Richards’s work, along with the work of Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Louise Rosenblatt, emphasised close reading, dismissed visual imagery from literary

criticism, and insisted that the conjuring of mental images through words was an unconscious process. These intruded upon the earlier acknowledged objectivity of the text and disturbed the way we thought of the text, of reading and of the reader. Attempting to teach a generation how to read literature and to hone reading skills, New Critics believed that “the more or less unconscious process of making discriminations, comparisons, and judgments can be lifted into consciousness and, to a degree, systematized” (Brooks and Warren 16). Hence their emphasis on finding a linguistic formula within the work that would account for the reader’s emotional response. Eliot explains in his essay “Hamlet and his Problems”, The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Sacred Wood 92) They focussed on the words and on the form of the literary work instead of on the creator’s biographical details, or the historical context of the work, or its morality. Rosenblatt’s work, on the other hand, influenced by the philosopher–psychologists William James and John Dewey, strengthened what came to be called the reader-response approach. A poem, Rosenblatt wrote, is “what is apprehended under the guidance of the text” (33). According to this, a work of art could hardly be viewed as a finished work, served to the reader by the writer. Rather, much of the understanding of the text depended upon the reader, who entered into the creation of the art through his or her subjective responses to it. Brooks and Warren took for their reference point an ideal reader despite their knowledge that all literary works “are merely potential until they are read – that is, that they are recreated in the minds of the actual readers, who vary enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas” (Brooks

74), because New Critics were interested only in the work of art. But the reader-response theorists argued that since a text existed only through the experience of the reader, literary texts could have no fixed or final or correct meaning. There were a range of readings possible and literary meanings could only be dialogic, that is, created by the interaction of the writer and the reader. “There is no such thing as a generic reader”, wrote Rosenblatt in Literature as Exploration, “or a generic literary work” (25). The readings of any work of literature will be, he writes, “an individual and unique occurrence involving the mind and emotions of a particular reader” (25). Interpretations of literature could be one among a range of possible transactions between the writer and the reader. As Henry James had written in his essay “Art of Fiction” (1884), which presaged many of the issues of twentieth-century modernism, it was no longer true that a “novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it” (29). This drove a wedge between the writer and their writing, freeing the text from the interpretive tyranny of the author who was creator. Once the reader entered the arena of creation through the art of reading, the text was open to more than one interpretation. To give a text one author, writes Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author, “is to impose a limit on that text” (147). A text is made of “multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author” (148). The undermining of the omniscience of the Victorian author, and uncertainty regarding the author’s authority, had been voiced by Joseph Conrad, the predecessor of twentieth-century modernism. Marlowe’s narrative in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is narrated to the reader by yet another narrator. The purpose of this once-removed narrator is inexplicable till one recognises the myths of imperialism that colour the narrator’s language:

Hunters for gold, or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empires. (11) Over the course of his narrative, myths fall away from the narrator. The change in the authorial voice affects the narrator’s position. The narrator and his narrative, now open to interpretation by the reader, could no longer justifiably remain either omniscient or objective. In fact, the narrator may not even be reliable. As an individual voice, fighting his or her own demons, the acknowledged innocence or objectivity of the Victorian narrator appeared incongruous in the postFreudian scenario. David Copperfield, the narrator of his own story in Dickens’ novel which contains chapters titled “I am Born”, “I Observe”, “I have a Change”, and so on would, in the twentieth century, have resulted in more questions raised than answered. Presaged by the subversive irony exhibited in the works of Cervantes, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the loss of the narrator’s putative authority revealed to the reader a narrator who could be fallible, unreliable. In Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier, the narrator is a participant-character whose narrative begins to sound increasingly improbable as the story unfolds. By the end of the novel, the reader is left wondering if the narrative is a cleverly woven web of intrigue and falsehood used to lure and trap the reader. The literary device of an unreliable narrator has been frequently used in the twentieth century: a verbal literary narrative that implies a counter-narrative running along a trajectory different from that which is spelt out on the pages. Unlike most novels of the nineteenth century, the authorial voice and the narrator’s voice do not seamlessly collapse into each other and become one. An unreliable narrator, however, was not necessarily a lying narrator, as Wayne C. Booth pointed out in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1960). The narrator could simply be mistaken, for reasons ranging from an intellectual inability – as in Faulkner’s Benji in The Sound and the Fury (1930), to

a mental delusion regarding oneself – as in Camus’s narrator of The Fall, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. “It is most often a matter of what [Henry] James calls inconscience”, writes Booth, “the narrator is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him” (159). Unreliable or fallible narrators of the twentieth century did more than subvert the alleged claims of fictional characters. They foregrounded the strategies of writing. Sensationally used by Agatha Christie in her 1926 thriller The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the murderer draws the reader’s attention to the literary techniques in the narrative that have enabled him to hoodwink the reader: I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following:

‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.’

All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes? (283) This focus on the construction of the narrative had been anticipated by Laurence Sterne in his The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759), a novel about the writing of a novel, in which the narrator discusses his success (or lack of it) in narrating the story. Modernist, and then postmodernist literature, was to carry forward this interest with form as texts delved deeper into the mind.

GENDERING OF THE LITERARY FORM This new reality, with its diminished emphasis on external events and the prominence given to the mind, was regarded by some as characteristically “feminine”. According to Dorothy Richardson, the earlier form of the novel with its chronological structure, its causal

sequencing and its trajectory of beginning, middle and end, “dramatized life misleadingly” (Journey to Paradise 139). This maybe reality as “seen and depicted by men”, but it was largely a reality that was “somehow irrelevant” (Windows on Modernism 629). The contemporary view, for some time at least, appears to have been that the shift in form and content was a perspective introduced by female novelists. Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) by Reginald Brimley Johnson includes fourteen modern female writers whose work, he writes, is characterised by a concern with the exploration of the female consciousness: … the new woman, the feminine novelist of the twentieth century, has abandoned the old realism. She does not accept observed revelation. She is seeking with passionate determination for that Reality which is behind the material, the things that matter, spiritual things, ultimate Truth. And here she finds man an outsider, wilfully blind, purposefully indifferent … one may say that she is striving to see and express, all that part of life and humanity which formal Religion once claimed to interpret: whether or no she elects to be called religious … a new realism which, sternly rejecting the realist, looks through him to the Real…. (xiv–xv) The terms of Johnson’s analysis, that the old literature was too caught up with the material, had been voiced by Woolf earlier. But the suggestion that this divide was “also a gendered one, in which the ‘new’ realism is associated with a specifically female literary voice” (Parsons 92)5 is echoed by a reporter interviewing American poet Mina Loy for the New York Evening Sun, 13 February 1917: “[s]ome people think that women are the cause of Modernism, whatever that is” (Rudnick 159). This is striking since modernist canon has, in later studies, been considered as distinctively masculinist.6 It is not merely the physical dominance of the white male writer within this canon but also the spirit and temper of modernist writing that has strengthened this later conclusion. Modernity and the

movement it engendered, modernism, was characterised by a Januslike approach to the new and the old. Even as the modern spirit of scepticism challenged conventional differences between male and female, masculine and feminine writings, with the “Make It New” motto, modernism’s own neo-classicist inclinations compromised the challenge. Respect for tradition and a favourable disposition towards order and decorum, characteristic of the enlightenment, led artists to emphasise the more “masculine” elements of correctness, precision and order so as to locate the finest method and the appropriate form that would capture the “luminous halo” that life really was, while also searching for and finding a narrative for this “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit” (Woolf, Common Reader First 61). The ideal of impersonality accentuated the “masculinity” of the canon since the idea of impersonality was generally understood in terms of unemotionality, accuracy and detailed observation: all “virtues” considered indispensable in the field of natural sciences. In the artist’s attempts to get to what Stephen Dedalus, the budding writer in Joyce’s Portrait, called the “whatness of a thing”(229) the artist needed to remove his or her presence from the work so that the authenticity of the documentation was not affected by the contours of their individual, distinctive mind: … the personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself…. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (231) Dedalus’s words – taken almost verbatim from Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 letter: “An artist must be in his work like god in creation,invisible,and all-powerful: he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen” (195) – propounded the aesthetic principle of impersonality which was to dominate modern writing: a new realism that would strive to have little to do with the artist’s subjectivity. This was echoed by contemporary women writers too. “The true artist”,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes in The Man-made World: Or, Our Androcentric Culture, “transcends his sex, or her sex. If this is not the case, the art suffers” (43). Woolf ’s oeuvre suggests that she believed it possible to move beyond gender limitations to advocate an androgynous literary aesthetic. The idea of “naturally” gendered perspectives was explored in her fiction, and largely rubbished by Woolf in her 1928 biography, Orlando. Orlando’s sex-change is treated nonchalantly by Orlando himself, and almost as insouciantly by the writer: Orlando looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discomposure, and went, presumably, to his bath…. Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory – but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’ – her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. (67) It is as Orlando moves into “civilised” society that she finds society’s demands on her gender impeding her strides and feels the pressures of fitting into a pre-fabricated personality. Yet this emphasis on desexing arouses suspicion because the “sexconsciousness”, as Woof called it, does not appear to trouble most male artists. Lawrence, who repeatedly dealt with women protagonists, suffers from no anxiety when he represents Gudrun or Miriam. In his Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence emphatically declares, We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the

reverse men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do. (82) Acutely aware of the insidious gendering that a seemingly innocent narrative style was capable of, female artists were more conscious than their male counterparts of the predetermined, and therefore prejudiced, structure and idioms of language. They were alert to the fact that it was not a level playing field, and this led Woolf and Richardson to complain about the gender-based binary modes of thought embedded in language. They wrestled with the “language of men”, struggling to shape the standard form and sentence of the nineteenth-century novel which, according to Woolf, was “unsuited for a woman’s use” (Room of One’s Own 76) to their needs. Between the endeavours of Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, C. R. W. Nevinson and Augustus John to keep the modern arts “virile”, “masculine”, away from Fry’s “curtain and pincushion factory at Fitzroy Square” (Lewis, Wyndham Lewis 143),7 and the efforts of Woolf, Gilman, Roger Fry and Joyce to perfect its androgynous nature, gender in modernism emerges as an area fraught with anxiety and the dynamics of power. Reading early-twentieth-century literature in recent decades has meant moving beyond the “men of 1914”. It has meant including literature authored by writers whose presence and participation in the modernist canon, despite being well-documented and always visible, has been marginalised by narrow and gendered readings. B. K. Scott writes of this in her 1990 anthology The Gender of Modernism, arguing that our understanding and teaching of modernist literature till mid-century was only “halfway to the truth”, having been “unconsciously gendered masculine” (187). When the corpus of literature is viewed through unprejudiced eyes, though, the contribution of women to early-twentieth-century art is indeed striking. Besides the famous names of Woolf, Richardson and Stein are names of other female writers whose contributions encompassed the roles of writer (Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H. D., Willa Cather, May Sinclair, Mina Loy, Vita Sackville-West), artist (Vanessa Bell, Nina Hamnett, Dora

Carrington, Kate Lechmere, Helen Saunders, Jessica Dismorr, Dorothy Shakespear – the last four belonging to the notoriously “male” vorticist group), editors and journalists (Harriet Shaw Weaver, Rebecca West, Marianne Moore, Marjorie Reid), publisher (Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier of Shakespeare & Co.) and patron (Ottoline Morrell, Olivia Shakespeare, Nancy Cunard, Countess Drogheda, Kate Lechmere). There were many others and many among these women played more than one role. Both within the limited realm of modernism and across the wider one of modern literature, positing an over-arching feminist or misogynist narrative would be a narrow definition of the traditions of intellectual thought. Much that was aesthetically challenging, politically contradictory, and socially paradoxical in the culture of this age has been leached out of the image of modernism by later years. The bullying, blunt, combative maleness of vorticist modernism, contemptuous of “wayward” female artists, did simultaneously “bless” suffragettes and “blast” Otto Weininger, whose book identified masculinity with genius and women with childbearing and the unconscious life. These early years of the twentieth century saw performative aspects of gender loom large in the chronicles of this time, both in compliance and in challenge as gender and sexuality became important cultural topics. Judith Butler’s thesis of gender performativity was played out by many among the male modernists, who chose from “the wardrobe of gender … with deliberation” (Butler 22) and assumed, on occasion, an aggressive assumption of masculinity – sometimes bordering on a nearmasquerade,8 complicity with conventions of femininity, as well as explicit subversions of the gender-binary. These were the years of the first wave of the feminist movement and defiance of gender inscriptions appear to have been as much at the heart of the times as the anxiety surrounding them. The outbreak of World War I placed “conventional views about gender roles under strain” (Goldstein 320) and, as B. K. Scott wrote, encouraged gender to be viewed as “more fluid, flexible and multiple in its options than the (so far) unchanging biological

binary of male and female” (Literature in the Modern World 188). Even as the much-publicised trials of Oscar Wilde resulted in the paranoiac reaction of many modernists to the image of the homosexual, effeminate and feminine male artist (discussed in the earlier chapter), artists like Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley gave to the twentieth century transgressive models that challenged the well-delineated contours of the masculine and the feminine. The idea of gender could, in these changed circumstances, be seen as an identity constructed as much in the mind as by the body. Toril Moi in her essay, “What is a Woman?”, places the emergence of modern feminist theory at the time “when sexist ideology often grounded its claims about the subordination of women on appeals to the sciences of the body, particularly biology” (14). She argues that “gender emerged as an attempt to give to biology what belongs to biology, no more and no less” (15). The beginning of the twentieth century introduced Freud’s and Jung’s (by the 1910s) works on psychoanalysis to the public mind. This strengthened a revolution that faced the natural sciences: one that too often threatened mind over matter. The physicist–astronomer Sir James Jeans, one of the first scientists to recognise the universe as a creature of the imagination and to raise questions about the role of the observer’s mind in determining the outcome of observations, wrote: To-day there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter – not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts. (Jeans 139)

Albert Einstein’s thoughts on how sense experiences – the “real” given subject matter were influenced by man-made theory that interpret them – pointed to the significant role of the human consciousness. “It is the theory which decides what we can observe” (qtd. in Heisenberg 77), Einstein reportedly said, an opinion that was echoed later by Werner Heisenberg’s comment, “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our particular form of questioning” (Eddy 532). Challenging concepts of the allegedly “natural” or “eternal”, Einstein cautioned that concepts that have “proved to be useful in ordering things easily acquire such authority over us that we forget their human origin and accept them as invariable” (532). Jung’s concepts of the collective unconscious (that determines our histories) and the archetype of the Shadow (that determines our Others) were powerful tools in questioning such “concepts” and in dismantling the rigidities of the feminine and masculine binary. Even as these findings compromised the commitment of the natural sciences to the principle of causality, they challenged the lingering axioms and certainties of the enlightenment. The earlier chronological narrative made little sense, as did the gendered bildungsroman with the omniscient narrator’s voice centred on one character. That was not how “life” was: “not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” says Woolf (Common Reader, First 16). In narrating this “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit”, the novelist needed to rewrite the novel with such inventiveness that Richardson confessed her “astonishment when Pointed Roofs was greeted as novel” (Windows on Modernism 496). Could this form still be called a novel? Woolf was certain she was creating a new form that would supplant the novel: “a new -----by Virginia Woolf. But what?” (Diary 34).

THE OBSESSION WITH FORM

Terence Hewet, the potential novelist who bore shades of the author herself in Woolf’s The Voyage Out, speaks of the difficulty of finding the correct form: “I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” He sighed…. “I’m going to describe the kind of parties I once went to – the fashionable intellectuals, you know, who like to have the latest book on their tables. They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games. There’s no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put them into shape – not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was.” (chapter 16, Web n.p.) Modernists indeed exhibited a near-obsession with form leading to innumerable experimentations and innovations that frustrated and irritated later writers of the thirties with their socialist leanings. Richardson wrote of being awakened to a vision of an “independently assertive reality” (Windows on Modernism 431) after reading The Ambassadors (1903) and discovering that Henry James’s narrator told the story from a deliberately limited narrative point of view – an “absence of direct narrative, of the handing out of information, descriptions of characters and so forth” (595). “The art of fiction,” as Gilman wrote in 1911, “is being re-born in these days. Life is discovered to be longer, wider, deeper, richer, than these monotonous players of one tune would have us believe” (58). The “lonely track” that Richardson had ventured on with her 1915 novel was soon transformed into a “populous highway” (“Foreword to Pilgrimage” 186), with the presence of Proust, Joyce and Woolf. The endeavour to find a form that could delve into the subconscious and the unconscious led, inevitably, into the realms of symbolism and metaphor. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1911, initiated a discourse that could be used to probe the mind. The map, the sea and the ship came to function as multi-layered symbols for the many layers of the mind and for the complex cognitive frameworks through which individuals oriented themselves in space

and time. Fredric Jameson in his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism suggests that maps enabled “a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly un-representable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (51). While novels and poetry could incorporate symbols and motifs seamlessly within their narratives, the form of twentieth-century drama changed significantly. Plays of the time revealed dramatists’ efforts to render the relationship between theme and symbol concretely visible in striking ways. Moving beyond naturalistic drama encouraged by Emile Zola and realistic drama of (early) Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy, playwrights introduced both the real and the surreal as physical presences on the stage. This included the works of (later) Ibsen, Eliot, Yeats and later absurd dramatists. Yeats writes, Our unimaginative arts are content to set a piece of the world as we know it in a place by itself, to out their photographs, as it were, in a plush or plain frame, but the arts which interest me, while seeming to separate from the world and us a group of figures, images, symbols, enable us to pass for a few moments into the deep of the mind that had hitherto been too subtle for our habitation. (Collected Works 165) Space became a physical metaphor, encroaching on the consciousness of the characters in plays by Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov and onward throughout twentieth-century modernism, typifying what Raymond Williams calls … a repeated search for some means of defining the humanity that cannot be lived in these well-ordered rooms – the forces outside, the white horses or the seagull, the tower of the cherry orchard, which have meaning because there are forces inside these people in these rooms, which cannot be realized in any available life. (389) The rebellious nature of modern dramatic characters is illustrated by:

… an individual who is breaking away from what is offered as general truth: a uniquely representative figure (representative of ‘humanity,’ of ‘Man’), who is in revolt against the representative environment other men have made. The world of action, characteristically, is then the action of others; the world of consciousness is one’s own. Out of this separation, and out of its terrible tensions, these men trapped in their rooms make their only possible, their exceptionally powerful, drama. (389) Many of Ibsen’s dramas, as also Eliot and Yeats’s poetic plays, articulate realities of the mind rather than those of the society.9 This change in the form of drama should, Eliot believed, be necessitated by the subject and “no play should be written in verse for which prose is dramatically adequate” (On Poetry and Poets 75). Though seen as secondary, or even tertiary to the core modernist movement, modern drama struggled with the same ideas as modern prose and poetry did. Ibsen’s 1877 letter to King Oscar II, written in response to critics of his play Pillars of Society, foreshadows this descent of drama into the mind: to lead the vision and the thoughts of the public in a different direction and to show that untruth does not reside in institutions but in the individuals themselves within the community; that it is the inner life of the people, the life of the mind, which has to be purified and liberated; that it is not the external liberties which are to be desired but on the contrary a personal and cultural liberation, and that this can only be acquired and taken possession of by the individual himself, in that his conduct has truth as its basis and point of departure. (qtd. in Hemmer 76) Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, had at its core the spiritual struggle of its protagonist. The Family Reunion was a play built around the concepts of sin and expiation, and The Cocktail Party explored the corrupting deceit and delusions within a relationship. The physical space of the stage was used to portray both the forces that assail our lives: the real and the

imaginary. From Ibsen to Samuel Beckett, the “last Modernist” (Cronin), modern drama embodied the struggle “for self-realisation and freedom; the turn from declamatory speech in classical drama to the intimacies of interpersonal exchange (called the fourth wall) which include silence, pauses, and inarticulateness; and the exploration of anxiety and alienation, a feeling of waiting for something inscrutable” (Krasner 1). In novels and poetry, the careful detailing of surroundings were always mediated through a character’s perceptions, and were not included to present a mimetic representation of the tangible reality but to indicate the character’s states of mind. Thus Leopold Bloom moving around Dublin notices the “mockturtle vapour” and the “steam of newbaked jampuffs” around midday when hunger has begun to make its presence felt in his consciousness, and the “barefoot arab” who probably will not be able to afford a meal introduces a reference to details of cutlery: Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured out from Harrison’s. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr Bloom’s gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar, or they’d taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork chained to the table. (139) This was a radical departure from the earlier novel structured around the situation-conflict-resolution model and this departure brought concomitant changes to the form. The term “literary impressionism” was often used to denote the narrative strategies used by novelists Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. In his 1913 essay, “On Impressionism”, published in Poetry and Drama, Ford chose to explain impressionism by linking it to the process of his work: At any rate, I am a perfectly self-conscious writer; I know exactly how I get my effects…. if I am in truth an Impressionist, it must follow that a conscientious and exact account of how I myself

work will be an account, from the inside, of how Impressionism is reached…. Probably this school differs from other schools, principally, in that it recognizes, frankly, that all art must be the expression of an ego…. The difference between the description of a grass by the agricultural correspondent of The Times newspaper and the description of the same grass by Mr W. H. Hudson is just the difference – the measure of the difference between the egos of the two gentlemen. (34) Ford’s aesthetic principle was derived from the sceptical philosophical tradition of David Hume, the eighteenth-century empiricist who argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of that which they directly experience. Perceptions, Hume believed, were derived either from our “more feeble” perceptions or ideas, which themselves were ultimately derived from our livelier perceptions, and impressions. The concept of literary impressionism advocated by Ford was therefore one in which the author could not inform the reader of any events or thoughts, external or internal to the character. The author would have to show it to the reader, by making the character betray himself or herself into revealing all through his or her perceptions. As Ford describes it, the narrative would need to be “the record of the impression of a moment … not the corrected chronicle” (41). Delving into the depths of the conscious and the subconscious, novelists used the stream-of-consciousness narrative repeatedly to reveal the fears, anxieties and hopes of a character, even though they sometimes remained unarticulated in explicit language. Thus Mrs Dalloway’s mind, tortured with feelings of hatred and resentment, quietens and eases in the company of flowers and Miss Pym, who is obligated to her: Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you

were; … poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her…. It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! … this hatred … gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful … [appear] nothing but self-love! … Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists….There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations…. Ah yes – so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; … And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all…. (9–10) One of the most masterly of the stream-of-consciousness passages is possibly the one where, in Ulysses, Joyce narrates the thoughts of Leopold Bloom, who unexpectedly comes across his wife’s lover, Blazes Boylan, as he wanders through Dublin, aware that his wife has invited her lover home during the afternoon. This thought, scarcely articulated explicitly in his mind, is with him throughout the day: Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.

Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.

His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right.

Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.

Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his

eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?

Didn’t see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.

The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.

No. Didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate.

My heart! (192–93) This form of narrative served to convey the limitations of an individual voice, an aspect that was communicated in poetry through the use of fragmented images and disjointed voices. In Eliot’s “Preludes” the voices can hardly be contained within one picture, and the poet sets out to draw discrete images of isolated human beings: eyes that “watched the night revealing / The thousand sordid images” (The Complete Poems and Plays 12), and … eyes

Assured of certain certainties

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world. (13) In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, the disjuncture is more severe: Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo. (The Complete Poems and Plays 3) The extreme subjectivity of each voice that is articulated in the literature of these times speaks of the sense of alienation that came to be seen as characteristic to modern man.

Unable to reach a shared awareness, there seems for some time to have been “a failure of nerve” (Spender 18), prompting writers to attempt a return to the traditional institutions of religion and the great tradition of classicism in an endeavour to revive the sense of a shared world. Stephen Spender, in The Struggle of the Modern, describes the peculiar modern nightmare of the artist in the following words: … the artist appears to be working in circumstances where he is not only solitary in his exceptional awareness to the human condition, but where he feels, it seems, alone in being alone. He is operating on an awareness of being alive, in a world where people are encouraged in every way to identify themselves not with the other people around them, all trapped in the human situation, but with a whole machinery of getting through life which distracts them from the fact that they are spiritual animals. This produces the special kind of modern incommunicability. (18) It was no longer possible to speak as earlier writers had done, to rue common losses, to celebrate human delights, because there were remarkably few truths universally acknowledged (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice), for the older gods had been “dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out” (Swinburne, “A Hymn to Proserpine”). As Conrad wrote, the narrative could only be a micronarrative, born out of “scrupulous fidelity to the truth of [one’s] own sensations” (Collected Letters lxi), and not the ambitious impossibility of the metanarrative envisioned by earlier writers. The seed of Jean Francois Lyotard’s argument regarding the collapse of the metanarrative that postmodernism had ushered in, and its concomitant celebration of multiplicity, was sown in the early twentieth century.

Works Cited

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Eliot, T. S. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Print. ———. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. Print. ———. The Sacred Wood. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1921. Print. ———. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York/San Diego/London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1980. Print. Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Print. ———, ed. Selected Letters of James Joyce. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Print. Flaubert, Gustave. Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert. London: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1954. Print. Ford, Ford Madox. Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Francis Macshane. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1964. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Print. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Masculine Literature.” The Man-made World: Our Androcentric Culture. The Floating Press, 2011. Print. Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971. Print. Hemmer, B. “Ibsen and the Realistic Problem Play.” The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. Ed. J. McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. James, Henry. Theory of Literature: Henry James. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1972. Print. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Poetics of Social Forms). London: Verso, 1991. Print.

Jeans, Sir James. The Mysterious Universe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932. Print. Johnson, Reginald Brimley. Some Contemporary Novelists (Women). London: Leonard Parsons, 1920. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. London: Penguin Books, 2000. Print. ———. Ulysses. London: Minerva, 1992. Print. Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968. Print. ———. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Print. Krasner, David. A History of Modern Drama, Vol 1. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Print. Lawrence, D. H. Fantasia of the Unconscious. London: The Big Nest, 2013. Print. ———. Birds, Beasts and Flowers: Poems by D. H. Lawrence. Jaffrey: Black Sparrow, 2008. Print. Olick, Jeffrey K., Daniel Levy, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, eds. Introduction. The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print. Lewis, Wyndham. Wyndham Lewis: The Artist. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1939. Print. ———. The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. London: New Directions Publishing, 1963. Print. Moi, Toril. What is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Parsons, Deborah. Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Rado, Lisa. Ed. Modernism, Gender, and Culture. New York and London: Taylor and Francis, 1997. Print.

Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1930. Print. ———. “The Poetry of T. S. Eliot.” The Living Age, 10 April 1926. 112– 14. Print. Richards, I. A., and C. K. Ogden. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1923. Print. Richardson, Dorothy. “About Punctuation.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 6: The Twentieth Century and Beyond. Ed. Joseph Black et al. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006. 178–81. Print. ———. “Foreword to Pilgrimage.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 6: The Twentieth Century and Beyond. Ed. Joseph Black et al. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006. 185–86. Print. ———. Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches. Ed. Trudi Tate. London: Virago, 1989. Print. ———. Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson. Ed. Gloria G. Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. Print. Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. New York, Chicago: Noble and Noble, 1968. Print. Rudnick, Lois Palken. “Modernizing Women: The New Woman and American Modernism.” American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910–1945. Ed. Marian Wardle. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. University of Illinois, 2007. ———. “The Gender of Modernism.” Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 187–90. Print.

———. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Indiana UP, 1990. Print. Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P, 1965. Print. Strachey, Lytton. “Eminent Victorians.” Project Gutenberg. Web. 4 October 2015. . Tickner, Lisa. “Men’s Work: Masculinity and Modernism 1905– 1915.” Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Eds. Norman Bryson et al. New Hampshire: Weslyan UP, 1994. 42–82. Print. Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P., Stephen Adams. The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. London, Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. Print. Williams, Raymond. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. New York: Penguin, 1973. Print. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929. Print. ———. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. Print. ———. Mrs. Dalloway. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1996. Print. ———. Orlando. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995. Print. ———. “Review of The Tunnel by Dorothy Richardson.” Times Literary Supplement. Web. 4 October 2015. . ———. The Common Reader, First Series: Volume 1. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925. Print. ———. The Common Reader, Second Series. London: Hogarth Press, 1974. Print. ———. “The Common Reader, Chapter 13.” Ebooks. Web. 4 October 2015.
. ———. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942. Print. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925–30. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1980. Print. ———. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Print. ———. The Voyage Out. Web. 24 November 2015. . Yeats, William Butler. Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Years. New York: Scribner, 2007. Print.

Notes 1 “If we fasten, then, one label on all these books, on which is one word

materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring” (Common Reader, First 61). 2 Letter to Constantine Curran, August 1904, and to Grant Richards, 20 May

1906. 3 For a detailed exploration of evolving research on collective memory from the

nineteenth century into the twentieth, see the introduction to The Collective Memory Reader. 4 These forgotten debates of the late nineteenth century culminated in many

twentieth-century theses: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1992) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991). 5 This is not to say that all, or even most writers accepted the equation that an

insight into mind equalled a “feminine” perspective on reality. Lytton Strachey, deeply influenced by Freud’s findings and by Dostoevsky’s writings, chronicled

the lives of four Victorian men and women in Eminent Victorians (1918), using his psychological insight to approach his subjects. Instead of creating “two fat volumes . . . with their ill-digested masses of material”, Strachey adopted “a subtler strategy” to reveal “obscure recesses, hitherto undivined”, to “row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which [would] bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity” (“Preface”, Web n. p.). 6 See B. K. Scott’s The Gender of Modernism, Gender in Modernism and Lisa

Rado’s Modernism, Gender and Culture. 7 Lewis, Wyndham. Blast Volume 2. July 1915. Print. 8 See Lisa Tickner’s piece “Men’s World” from Visual Culture. 9 Written during the rise of fascism, Murder in the Cathedral has also been

interpreted as a political drama countering its rise.

F I VE

LANGUAGE [We] do things with words. J. L. Austin

I

n 1785, the enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder claimed language was humanity’s supreme achievement which had made everything else possible: “No cities have been erected by the lyre of Amphion, no magic wand has converted deserts into gardens: but language, the grand assistant of man, has done these” (420). The statement affirms a relationship between words and intelligence, words and civilisation, words and progress, claiming language has made such accomplishments possible. To state it another way: human beings could not have arrived at any of the frontiers of what the world largely recognises as “achievements” without language. One of the core assumptions of this thesis would surely be the belief that language enables cognition. We cannot see or think or understand our surroundings in their totality without linguistic signs. Language, therefore, lies at the root of our intelligence or imagination since we are unable to, without words, make sense of what we see, hear, smell, or touch. It is the instrument humanity uses, and has used, for thinking. Knowledge therefore does not pre-date language, simply because it cannot exist without words. While this is the general view of enlightenment writers on language, it

would be naive to not recognise the complexities within it, especially when we remember that awareness of the historicity of all forms of life was a mainstream enlightenment notion. Isaiah Berlin writes of a counter-enlightenment present during the enlightenment period – its champions including Giambattista Vico and Herder – that emphasised relativism and the irrational aspects of human nature.1 Enlightenment tenets of “universality, objectivity, rationality” were therefore not as universal as would be thought. Berlin, in fact, emphasises the debt that modern intellectuals owe to enlightenment thinkers who took care to establish that their ideas, “that all explanation, all understanding, indeed, all living, depend on a relationship to a given social whole and its unique past, and that it is incapable of being fitted into some repetitive, generalised pattern” (20–21). Modern doubts regarding language surfaced explicitly towards the late nineteenth century. “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (Magnus and Higgins 116), wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1873 essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”. This question was to rapidly develop into an obsession that preoccupied the modern mind in the twentieth century, threatening the foundations of the last bulwark of European enlightenment2 against the imminent chaos of postmodernity. With the citadels of reason, morality, religion and science undermined by Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Charles Darwin, James George Frazer and other thinkers of the nineteenth century, it was only to be expected that the questioning eye would turn to language, the material form indispensable for the articulation of such realms. Historicity, the key influence on nineteenth-century thought, had affected the deterministic theories of empiricism and rationalism, making them appear suspect, reductionist and out of touch with the complexities of reality. Hegel’s philosophy argued that the history of any sphere of knowledge was the history of man building upon earlier knowledge even as he reacted against it. Humanity did not move forward into the future, or backward as Benjamin suggests in his angel of history.3 Humanity struggled with a thesis and its antithesis to move to a third, wholly new, position: synthesis. It was surely with

this sense of the connectedness of history that Henry James wrote the following lines from the preface to The Golden Bowl: “… the whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in their turn, just so our behaviour and its fruits are essentially one and continuous and persistent and unquenchable, … and so, among our innumerable acts, are no arbitrary, no senseless separations” (21). No thesis or its antithesis or the consequent synthesis was, according to Hegel’s theory, final. It was only one point that would lead organically to another on the trajectory of time which humanity called “progress”. This zigzagging dialectical movement through time made all knowledge contingent to particular moments of history and caused the absolute nature of knowledge with a capital K to be besieged by relativism. Within this zeitgeist (Hegel’s term for “spirit of the age”) of the post-Hegelian century, diverse areas of knowledge were probed historically. This included language, the major and most flexible instrument of communication which had been the hitherto accepted vehicle of man’s thoughts, learning and experiences. Its position at the heart of all realms of knowledge made it impossible to unravel one from the other: the knowledge communicated from the words which carried it, the content from the form. So intimate was this weaving that all areas of man’s knowledge could be said to exist largely in language, be it morality, religion, science or reason. It was around the age of enlightenment that a transition from the older theory of language as “encoding” or mirroring our thoughts had begun. The traditional view, propounded by authors as diverse as Aristotle and Descartes, was that words expressed realities or ideas already existing. Till the eighteenth century, and into the nineteenth century, Western philosophy had been dominated by the view that “thought and language were separate activities: language was an activity with words and thought was an activity with ideas: words depended on ideas, but ideas did not depend on words. Ideas were treated as standing for objects, properties and relations in the external world, as perceived by the senses” (R. Harris 2). The question increasingly asked in the nineteenth century was: were thought and language truly separate activities? And the consequent

question: could language be trusted to be an unprejudiced carrier of ideas? To return to Nietzsche’s mistrust of language: The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The “thing in itself ” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one…. It is this way with all of us concerning language: we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. (Magnus and Higgins 116) The “original” lay beyond the seeking grasp of a language which was merely a string of metaphors designed by men and women, or more correctly, by those of a certain community belonging to one particular time. Roughly two decades later Arthur Symons, exploring symbolism in literature, concluded that without symbolism there would be no language, for words were, in reality, symbols: forms of expression which were “best but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until [they had] obtained the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness” (2). The insertion of the element of human arbitrariness into the understanding of language peeled from language the veneer of innocence that had been its largely unquestioned characteristic. The allegedly colourless medium was found to be deeply dyed in the myriad beliefs and

ideologies of class, race, community, gender, geography, history and other such lenses through which humanity viewed the world. This atthe-most-approximate congruency that language provided between things and their designations could lead man to a truth which was only a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” though it appeared “to be fixed, canonical, and binding” out of long usage (Magnus, Higgins 117). Language then was no longer a transparent and objective form of encapsulating ideas, but one that used metaphors which were questionable because they were born of subjective human experiences. A sentence was no longer seen as a string of words that were irreplaceable, capable of being translated only by using synonymous words from another language. Depending on who wrote the sentence, it could only be decoded by one knowledgeable of the culture and experiences of the writer’s particular community because every word or idiom used by the writer carried their community’s legacy. In Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease (1960) this phenomenon is depicted in the incident where the elders of the Nigerian Igbo community rue their society’s transformations as a result of Westernisation: “Many of his hearers whistled in unbelief when he told them that a man could not go to his neighbour’s wedding unless he was given one of these papers on which they wrote R.S.V.P. – Rice and Stew Very Plenty – which was invariably an overstatement” (10). Aristotle had had the idea that “the mental experiences, which these [words] directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images” (2). This however did not make sense in the context of a humanity who used hundreds of languages which differed substantially from one another in the mental affections or the objects they denoted with signs. The belief, then, that all ideas or objects pre-dated language and existed independent of their names appeared flawed, as did the corresponding theory that words followed thoughts in the natural progression of events. Wittgenstein’s statement in Philosophische Grammatik that we think in language articulated this and, more

significantly, drew attention to the centrality of language in our understanding of the world. Wittgenstein wrote, “When I think in language, there aren’t meanings going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions; the language is itself the vehicle of thought” (R. Harris 27). It was with the aid of language, the legacy handed to a child at birth, that the human mind grasped the world, and not the other way around. As Freud said, the mind connected the object with the word-presentation corresponding to it and arrived at a consciousness of the earlier un-nameable, and therefore uncategorised, un-comprehensible object. Communities saw, recognised and thought of things, ideas and practices that their languages had names or words for. A language could facilitate or thwart, encourage or discourage a person from thinking, imagining and comprehending those areas of knowledge that the language did or did not encompass. In these discussions, therefore, two distinct aspects of language were explored. One was the constructed and synthetic nature of a medium of communication that had earlier been accepted as natural (or a divine gift according to the Adamic thesis)4 as well as universal. The other was the understanding that language was not peripheral to human comprehension of the world, but central to it. It played a constitutive role, and not merely a representative role, in human cognition. Both these aspects underlay the modernist “Make It New” dictum, with its belief that with the world having changed, language would too.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE Possibly the most significant feature of modern thought on language is its emphasis on the collective, rather than the individual unit. This modern inclination may be discerned in a somewhat extreme form in Émile Durkheim’s thesis that the determining cause of a social fact needs to be sought among the antecedent social facts, and not among the consciousness of individuals who constitute that society. In the study of language too was followed the overwhelming trend of

viewing the individual as one constitutive unit of the larger collective – society. The climate of the age appears to have encouraged thinking in binaries. Freud, born 1856, revolutionised psychoanalysis with the twin concepts of the conscious and unconscious. Ferdinand de Saussure, born 1857, revolutionised linguistics with the twin concepts of the parole and the langue. Durkheim, born 1858, revolutionised sociology with the twin concepts of ritual and religion.5 One may add to this list Hegel’s binaries of the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, knowledge and faith, freedom and authority. Significantly, in these binaries, the relation between the two was along similar lines. The former of the two concepts, that of the conscious mind, the parole (usually translated as “speech”) and ritual were concepts that privileged the individual. The latter of the two concepts, the unconscious, the langue and the religion, referred to a larger sphere that was beyond the control of the individual. This latter realm functioned almost like a matrix within which the first concepts “lived”. Despite the apparent role played by the personal will in the conscious mind or the parole or the religion, it was the second concept that controlled and ordered the first. Saussure’s langue, usually translated as “the language” or “a language”, or as “linguistic structure” or “linguistic system”, is “both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty” (Saussure 9). The langue therefore is independent of individual speakers and yet at the same time dependent on each individual speaker because langue exists through the parole which upholds the system. The langue is “a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity” (Saussure 13–14). Any language spoken by an individual is engendered by and contained within the huge, predetermined and well-ordered matrix of the langue.

Language, therefore, is a realm within which is embedded the impression of the mind, the unconscious and the collective mind of the social community. Scholarship on the three subjects of sociology, psychology and linguistics thus come together in the twentieth century’s understanding of language. Decades later, the “French Freud”, Jacques Lacan, who campaigned for what he called “a return to Freud” in the 1950s and 60s, was to use structural linguistics to argue that the unconscious was, in fact, structured like a language. Accepting Heidegger’s notion that an individual experienced the world as a meaningful totality, Lacan saw language as instrumental to gaining this capability. A child’s learning of its mother tongue determined every aspect of its response to the world, he argued, for as the child began to interpret its surroundings through the media of words, it embarked upon a mode of experience that would be accessed linguistically. If language is a socially constructed tool of communication and thought, then a narrative should be analysed neither as a narrative detached from history nor as one universal to it, but as narratives that embody aspects of time and space. Forms of language bore within them values and ideologies as legacy. The meaning was not, or not only, conveyed by the words used. A word’s meaning was also embedded in the history that the word or the language had lived. It is for this reason that writers have felt the need to re-write languages when moving the language from one time, space or culture to another. Chinua Achebe in a speech entitled “The African Writer and the English Language”, said that in order to carry the weight of his African experience, the English language would have to be “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings” (102). Raja Rao, in his preface to Kanthapura, famously spoke of how “the telling [had] not been easy” because one had to convey in a language that was not one’s own the spirit that was one’s own: “One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language” (v).

The study of the philosophy of language has consequently been informed by the belief that it “is the fundamental basis of all philosophical problems, in that language is the distinctive exercise of mind, and the distinctive way in which we give shape to metaphysical beliefs” (Blackburn 211). Roy Harris illustrates this with examples of the differences between European English and Tzeltal, the language of the Mayan Indians. Most Europeans, he writes, would not see the relevance of having definite words for, say, what people utter on Thursdays, or for words spoken at night, or for talk that took place a year ago. To a Mayan Indian of Tenejapa, however, these questions would make perfectly good sense and accordingly, the Mayan language Tzeltal provides commonly used designations for all of these. While the European may, with the linguistic resources of his own language, make up terms such as “Thursday talk”, or “night words”, he does not see the point of drawing such distinctions. Since it is not part of his concept of a language that a language should provide you with “Thursday talk” or “night words”, there are no corresponding metalinguistic expressions either. However, he finds nothing strange about having specific words in a language for the clothes people wear on Sundays, or for the dress worn at night, or for a coat that one wears in winter. Harris concludes that for the European … concept of clothing, unlike his concept of a language, incorporates the notion of appropriateness to different times of the day, of the week, or of the year. Time is one of the important conceptual parameters in the European’s categorisation of clothes, food, and many other things; but a relatively unimportant one in his categorisation of words. Terms like archaism and neologism belong to the technical lexicon of the scholar, not to the everyday vocabulary of the ordinary language-user. (R. Harris 19) In the words of the eighteenth-century grammarian James Harris, “one may be tempted to call language a kind of picture of the

universe, where the words are as the figures or images of all particulars” (394). Saussure’s study of linguistics introduced the theoretical paradigm that came to be called structuralism. This was based on the theory that all elements of a culture are codes. For the understanding of language, this had two consequences. The first was that as in a code, a word had no association with the object in itself. It was an arbitrarily chosen indicator, meaningless to begin with. It only pointed to the idea or the object in the real world. It was a signifier which the language-user used to arrive at the signified. The meaning emerged when that indicator was set among other indicators, equally arbitrarily chosen, but each different from each other. In each indicator that was different, a certain value was, again quite arbitrarily, inscribed into each word. So the word “book” could begin to signify an object only when it was placed within the English language where other differentsounding signs were present. With each indicator being different, the meaning of a word emerged with the speaker’s use of the differences. The word itself therefore would be a successful signifier only if it was different, phonetically or visually, from other words. The second consequence of Saussurean linguistics to the understanding of language was that langue was recognised as the larger structure that was needed to present the differences among the words, thereby endowing each with its meaning. Just as a code is incomprehensible without a structure, a language is unintelligible without the interrelations of its words. To understand the meaning of the words or signs and their relations, one needed to recognise the larger structures within which they functioned, their contexts of a system, a design or a ritual. This understanding of a word would soon be extended to the entirety of texts because every text, like a word, has its particular context. No word or text exists on its own autonomously, because it is part of a larger arrangement that “holds” the smaller text or word in place. There is, consequently, an environment within which the sign or text exists, an environment constituted not by its own self, or even by other signs or texts directly connected with it, but by many other

signs and texts, from diverse areas which together create this milieu. Intertextuality, a term coined much later in 1966 by Julia Kristeva, may be useful here to understand the way words/texts “speak” to each other within a system, determining and defining meanings. As Woolf said in her 1937 BBC broadcast, “Craftsmanship”, the word “incarnadine” would always carry with it echoes of Lady Macbeth’s anguish.6 The power of a word can never consequently be entirely within the control of the author: Everyone who has ever written a sentence must be conscious or half-conscious of it. Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? (Web n.p.) The meaning of a word does not lie in itself. It lies in the multitude of relationships of difference and sameness that that word has with the other words surrounding it. Kristeva coined the term to relate Saussure’s semiotics to Bakhtin’s dialogism. Intertextuality therefore proposed that semiotics (the study that believed a sign got its meaning when placed among other signs) could be associated with dialogism (the concept that a conversation occurred within a text through heteroglossia and between texts of/by the same or diverse times/authors). This milieu within which texts existed may be said to be akin to what T. S. Eliot described in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as “tradition”: No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the

dead….The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new … work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (Sacred Wood 44–45) Possibly because of this two-way association between a word and its context, both Wittgenstein and Saussure used the analogy of a chess game to explain the functioning of units of the word within a language. The idea of language involving a series of coordinated moves was termed by Wittgenstein as language-games. Meaningful language happens when we recognise not only the word but more importantly the position that the word occupies in a familiar exercise or an identifiable pattern: Take a knight, for instance. By itself is it an element in the game? Certainly not, for by its material make-up – outside its square and the other conditions of the game – it means nothing to the player; it becomes a real, concrete element only when endowed with value and wedded to it. Suppose that the piece happens to be destroyed or lost during a game. Can it be replaced by an equivalent piece? Certainly. Not only another knight but even a figure shorn of any resemblance to a knight can be declared identical provided the same value is attributed to it. We see then that in semiological systems like language, where elements hold each other in equilibrium in accordance with fixed rules, the notion of identity blends with that of value and vice versa. (Saussure 110) This intermesh of the value and identity encapsulated within each sign gave each word a two-dimensional nature: it existed in the present, or at one moment in time, and it existed, perhaps even evolved, across moments of time. Like a game of chess, language

could be studied in two ways: the synchronic way – concentrating on a study of the game as complete and present at that particular time – and the diachronic way – studying the game as it has evolved through time over the ages. The synchronic study of signs (words) would seek to understand the relationship between various signs across diverse languages and the substitution of one sign by another equivalent sign (words). The diachronic study would involve analysing the evolving nature of signs. Raymond Williams, taking up the evolution of 110 words (and later, in the 1983 edition, 121 words) in Keywords, explored how an inherited vocabulary is subject to change as well as to continuity … not a tradition to be learnt, nor a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meanings which, because it is ‘our language’, has a natural authority; but as a shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view: a vocabulary to use, to find our ways in, to change as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own language and history. (24–25) Language therefore becomes the space where our sense of ourselves is constructed, our subjectivities are engendered. This sense comes not from the individual’s unique and personal being, but from social meanings and social institutions which are themselves constructed by a range of discursive formations. Extending Saussure’s semiotics of words and languages to texts and narratives, we arrive at the term “discourse”, a term of whose meaning Harold Bloom may have said, like reading, tends to become more underdetermined even as its use becomes more over-determined. Simply explained, discourses are forms of speech or writing that communicate a certain approach or ideology. As the twentieth century progressed, discourses began to be viewed as dominating our use of language.

THE POLITICS OF FORM

Dorothy Richardson, when looking for a model of the novel for her own work, felt compelled to reject previous styles of narratives which embodied, as she called it in the foreword to Pilgrimage (1912), “current masculine realism”. Despite the non-linear plotting, the stream-of-consciousness narrative and the innovations in prose, all of which were attempts born out of Freud’s research of the phenomenology of consciousness, a degree of intractability stubbornly clung to language. Dissatisfied, she set aside a “considerable mass of manuscript” (Richardson 430). This discourse, no matter how emphatically she shaped it to reflect the patterns of her mind, was an inherited one and not entirely in accordance with her individual understanding of the world. What Richardson was referring to in this passage as she detailed her frustration were not discrete words, but, as Bakhtin said, “forms of utterance” (The Bakhtin Reader 178) that struck her as conveying a masculine worldview. No matter how carefully she selected her words to express her individual thoughts, once she set those words in sentences and paragraphs, the end-meaning shifted to a space somewhat removed from her own. This had to do with the style and manner of prose used in earlier models of narrative. These styles and manners were already situated in a context and that context had endowed the words and sentences with its own ideology. So when words were strung together in a particular way, the form of utterance constructed would recall prior contexts and all their associated ideologies. Constructing a new discourse therefore was of primary importance to twentieth-century writers because earlier forms were dominated by the male point of view and deeply embedded within a patriarchal ideology. It was not only the words that were carrying the meaning of the sentence, but also the contexts that had become, with repeated use, welded to the words. This formed a discourse which had a predetermined colour of its own and hence tinted Richardson’s narrative when she used it. Two passages, drawn from novelists a little over a century apart, may illustrate this material presence that language possesses in a work of literature. Both these novelists are women and both are

describing, largely from a woman’s point of view, proposals of marriage being made to two women who remain unimpressed. The first is the hilarious and infuriating proposal to Elizabeth by Mr Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813): “May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter Elizabeth, when I solicit for the honour of a private audience with her?” Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise, Mrs. Bennet answered instantly, “Oh dear! – yes – certainly …” And … was hastening away, when Elizabeth called out, “Dear madam, do not go … Mr. Collins must excuse me. He can have nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear. I am going away myself.” “No, no, nonsense, Lizzy. I desire you to stay where you are.” And upon Elizabeth’s seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed looks, about to escape, she added, “Lizzy, I insist upon your staying and hearing Mr. Collins.” Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction – and a moment’s consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to get it over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again and tried to conceal, by incessant employment the feelings which were divided between distress and diversion…. Mr. Collins began. “Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty … adds to your other perfections…. But before I am run away with by my feelings on this subject, perhaps it would be advisable for me to state my reasons for marrying….” The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing, that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him further, and he continued…. (92–94)

A near replica of this episode occurs in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, where Orlando, now a woman, is suddenly confronted by the Archduchess, who reveals himself to be an Archduke disguised as a woman out of his mad love for Orlando: ‘A plague on women,’ said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to fetch a glass of wine, ‘they never leave one a moment’s peace … and now’ – here she turned to present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold – in her place stood a tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone with a man. Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness. ‘La!’ she cried, putting her hand to her side, ‘how you frighten me!’ ‘Gentle creature,’ cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and at the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando’s lips, ‘forgive me for the deceit I have practised on you!’ Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand. In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse…. Falling on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most passionate declaration of his suit…. As he spoke, enormous tears formed in his rather prominent eyes and ran down the sandy tracts of his long and lanky cheeks. That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when men

display emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was. (105–06) Even in these severely clipped quotations, the irony (and amusement) in both the authors’ voices is quite distinct. In both passages, the authors portray the woman as smart, intelligent and somewhat impatient of the behavioural codes expected of young women when subjected to marriage proposals. In both, the proposal is an unwanted one to the woman and, though a little upset or irritated, they are in control of their emotions. Yet despite these pronounced similarities, the feel of the language makes the experience of reading the two passages different. Austen’s Elizabeth emerges as a more conventionally gendered young woman than Orlando. This is despite Orlando being suddenly “seized with faintness” and being, as the author tells us, upset, frightened and conscious of her sex – all features usually seen in keeping with the stereotype of femininity. The difference, then, is due not just to the words used to describe either Orlando or Elizabeth (“blush”, “vexed”, “embarrassed”) but also to the tenor of the language. Woolf ’s language is more clipped than Austen’s, shorn of emotion and its sarcasm more pointed regarding the “acted” roles and the “natural discourse”. In short, Woolf ’s language, with its precision and irony, is what we would usually call more “modern”. She also places two simultaneous strands of narrative before the reader: one, of the events unfolding and two, of the stream of thoughts inside the character’s mind. The other difference in language comes from the very different modes of depiction. Austen depicts the scene such that the reader is forced to experience what Elizabeth experiences at the time: “Elizabeth’s seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed looks, about to escape” or “the idea … made Elizabeth so near laughing, that she could not….” Woolf ’s depiction, on the other hand, makes the reader feel as though he or she is watching Orlando from a distance. Her emotions are more clinically stated, as though by a dispassionate observer, and Woolf urges the reader to view Orlando’s femininity (and the Archduke’s masculinity) more as a particular gender role that is expected of her (and him), not entirely

extraneous but largely performative. Thus despite the situations depicted being very similar, the difference of language makes the impressions that the two make on the reader’s mind very different. That we often study the construction of the language in an undated passage to locate the period, or in an anonymous poem to locate the gender or class of the writer, showcases how languages change with context. This is because languages, or more precisely, groups of statements, derive from discursive formations that are a part of systems of thought and knowledge, and consequently carry coded within them the worldviews of the cultures from which they emanate. Years later, Foucault was to premise his method of studying discursive formations, or “epistemes” as he calls them, on the belief that “systems of thought and knowledge … are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period” (Gutting, Web n.p.). The earlier accepted forms of discourse in literature conveyed a reality that the modern writer felt was outdated and archaic. In order to portray their characters closer to what they felt was the new, changed reality that came about “on or about December 1910”, twentieth-century writers had to change their ways of seeing, experiencing and expressing life – the three activities which together shaped discourses. Foucault explored – in Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966) and finally in the explicitly titled The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) – the construction of discourses through history as a community’s ideas evolved. In Madness and Civilization, for example, he critiqued the discourses of history and psychiatry, revealing the hypocrisy and opportunism that underlay the allegedly beneficial and unprejudiced narratives that shaped European ideas of normalcy, civilisation and knowledge. Discourses constitute systems of thought which indicate certain ideas and practices as truth, knowledge, wisdom and tradition. Consequently, discourses tell us who we are, what or how we should think and what our beliefs should be, thereby in effect controlling our thought. When Walter Benjamin,

for example, began his essay “Unpacking My Library”, he drew upon words and idioms that were already associated with a context – a situation and a persona: I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood…. (61) The personality evoked here is that of the disorderly, eccentric and passionate booklover. It is only in such a context, as part of this familiar discourse, that a phrase like “the mild boredom of order” carries any sense, and images of “floor covered with torn paper” and “disorder of crates … wrenched open” carry any beauty. Next to this “innocent” discourse one may set others with more disturbing political implications. Charlotte Bronte’s references to the presence of the unknown living being in the upper parts of the house are deeply embedded within the Oriental discourse that perceived the nonEuropean Other as sinister, non/sub-human and fearsome. The first night Jane becomes aware of this presence is conveyed through phrases such as “a demoniac laugh – low, suppressed, and deep”, “goblin-laughter”, “something [that] gurgled and moaned” (173). The second reference is more explicit about the animal-like personality being described: The night – its silence – its rest, was rent in twain by a savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall. My pulse stopped: my heart stood still; my stretched arm was paralysed. The cry died, and was not renewed. Indeed, whatever being uttered that fearful shriek could not soon repeat it: not the

widest-winged condor on the Andes could, twice in succession, send out such a yell from the cloud shrouding his eyrie. The thing delivering such utterance must rest ere it could repeat the effort. (238) It is hardly surprising therefore that writers of the twentieth century have felt it incumbent upon themselves to examine, analyse and locate discourses. The overwhelming dominance of language in any written work caused them to focus much of their energies on the sheer materiality of the medium they used. Bakhtin, working in the 1920s and the 30s, added a crucial dimension to the idea that man’s consciousness and conceptualisation of reality is through language, since it is not possible to have a distinct consciousness of the world outside of the word. However, he adds, “[the] consciousness and cognition of reality is not achieved through language and its forms understood in the precise linguistic sense. It is the forms of the utterance, not the forms of language, that play the most important role in consciousness and the comprehension of reality…. We think and conceptualize in utterances, complexes complete in themselves” (178). Just as reality is refracted through language, the forms of utterances are articulations of the individual/community’s attitudes towards that reality. It is as if the human imagination possesses “a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality” (179). A particular way of viewing and understanding reality can only be represented through a certain mode of narrative. Certain genres therefore may be more powerful and greater in number depending on the ideological environment present in the society, while certain genres may fade away. Thus questions have been raised, from Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth of Tragedy to Joseph Wood Krutch’s 1929 The Modern Temper, to George Steiner’s 1961 The Death of Tragedy, on whether tragedy as a genre had died. The question essentially revolved around whether the genre could survive the triumph of rationalism and the secular worldview of the modern age, since both made it impossible to view humanity with the metaphysical dimension that the tragic genre demanded. The rationalisation and intellectualisation of the modern times had contributed to, as Max

Weber so eloquently put it, a “disenchantment of the world”.7 It was no longer possible for modern man to assume the dignity, the largeness, the magnificence of the tragic protagonist. The very concept of values had changed, and the terms “evil”, “transgression”, “shame” or “honour” had quite different meanings in the twentieth century. As Freud writes in Totem and Taboo, “The Hero of tragedy must suffer; to this day that remains the essence of a tragedy. He had to bear the burden of what was known as ‘tragic guilt’; the basis of that guilt is not always easy to find, for in the light of our everyday life it is often no guilt at all” (181). The guilt that lay in rebellion against a divine or human authority could no longer, in modern thinking, be comprehended as “sin” or a “fall”. The feelings of outrage at the rashness of the tragic hero, or the feelings of pity and terror at his fall, could hardly be evoked in the prosaic banality of modern life. The issue of the tragic genre dying out was, therefore, not an academic or literary question about a form of literature being practicable or not. It was an issue which questioned the consequences of science and progress and challenged the meanings of culture and civilisation. To accept that tragedy was dead in the modern age would be to acknowledge the mean and trivialised state of modern humanity. Wagner, like others of his age, believed that the disappearance of tragedy indicated cultural decadence and that such a state could ultimately lead to the dissolution of an entire state or civilisation. Arthur Miller’s reinterpretation of the genre of tragedy along socialist lines reveals how an earlier discourse could be reread, reinterpreted, and then shaped accordingly to fit the new reading and interpretation which have come with the changed world and which need conveyance in a different discourse. Miller sees the tragic hero less as a larger-than-life character, condemned with the tragic flaw, and doomed in his challenge with fate. In Miller’s reading, the tragic protagonist is one among common men, singular only in his “inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status” (4). Tragedy therefore becomes the story of rebellion against an unjust fate that places a person in a certain class, rank or social

position. The hero’s challenge consequently is a battle for the justice denied to him/her by destiny or, the socialist understanding of destiny, by history. The plot of tragedy exists, according to Miller, for us, “we who are without kings”, in “the heart and spirit of the average man” (7). Like Durkheim said of society, language too is more than the sum of its parts. It is not what language says, or claims to say, that encompasses all that is said. Every language draws upon unspoken and invisible resources, becoming an arena within which may be enacted games of power. One example of this layered nature of language being unpacked is the intense scene in Joyce’s Portrait when the Irish Stephen Dedalus resents the English dean’s ignorance of the word “tundish”, pointing the reader to the larger context of imperialism and language-politics in colonised Ireland: That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

What is a tundish?

That. The… funnel.

Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.

It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.

A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable may have turned on the prodigal […].

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will

always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (204–05) Fretting in the shadow of the imperialist’s language, Joyce goes on to invent for his writing an English that is imbued with the politics of decolonisation. Conditioned by a time when nationalist movements in Ireland were at their peak, and the majority of his schoolmates and peers part of the anti-imperialist movement, Joyce’s decolonisation is political even as it is discursive. It is for this reason that postcolonial studies, the critical domain that has gained much relevance and seen energetic research in the past few decades, has repeatedly turned to Joyce for examples of alterity, marginalisation and difference.8 Joyce constructs a materially different language with Dublin as the centre believing, as Attridge states Joyce’s texts imply, that “all versions of history are made in language and are, by virtue of that fact, ideological constructions, weavings and re-weavings of old stories, fusions of stock character types, blendings of different national languages, dialects, and registers” (Joyce Effects 80). This languagedriven reality of Dublin is one of the possibilities among the many possible realities, awaiting creation in the coloniser’s language. Born in the years when the sun was beginning to set on the British Empire, and flaunting immigrants from the periphery as the vanguard, literary modernism is suffused with political tension and anxiety. Colonialism and nationalism were among the most visible of ideological movements making their mark in different parts of the British Empire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of a national identity was increasingly being debated and discussed through the register of culture. The idea of the nation was defined increasingly in terms of language, myths, memories and history, resulting in movements of nationalism based upon cultural nationalisms. Language was one of the prime instruments used to construct the identity of a nation and the subjectivity of its people. This conscious use to which language could be put was reflected in Yeats’ statement: “Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my

mother tongue” (520). It is no coincidence that much of the experimentation and innovation that modernists ventured upon have a palpable degree of resistance to the canonical discourses of English literature. Received as a legacy by many who chose to write in English, the tyranny of the established hegemony is held at abeyance by writers who, like early modernists Conrad or Yeats, came from outside England. Exploring the themes of pride, arrogance, humiliation and corruption in his many novels, Conrad took English literature out of the English-speaking world and into its dark margins. Conrad’s “white” heroes like Tom Lingard, “black” heroes like Peter Willems, or those of morally grey shades like Jim and Kurtz, are all white men who move beyond the white man’s territory into areas where “the distinction of being white” (Lord Jim 12) gives them an easy and immediate access to power. Conrad’s critique of civilisation and history, engendered outside imperialist nations, approaches language with infinite hope and caution: Words, groups of words, words standing alone, are symbols of life, have the power in their sound or their aspect to present the very thing you wish to hold up before the mental vison of your readers. The things ‘as they are’ exist in words; therefore words should be handled with care lest the picture, the image of truth abiding in facts, should become distorted – or blurred. (Novelists on the Novel 319) His preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) famously read: “My task … is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see” (10). In this role, the written word is charged with the function of making visible scenes that have been rendered invisible, and making audible voices that have been silenced. The white man is rendered visible by placing him outside his habitual zone of privileged light. Positioned against the background of that vast darkness of a complex human history, the burden of his otherwise elusory past is discernible. In An Outcast of the Islands, the Malaysian Babalatchi bitterly rejects the arrogant and patronising “talk” of the white man, the language which is capable of

“investing their activities with spiritual value” (Leavis 199) and disguising the truths for so long that those truths eventually begin to elude the white man too: “This is white man’s talk,” exclaimed Babalatchi, with bitter exultation. “I know you. That is how you all talk while you load your guns and sharpen your swords; and when you are ready, then to those who are weak you say: ‘Obey me and be happy, or die!’ You are strange, you white men. You think that it is only your wisdom and your virtue and your happiness that are true … you do not understand the difference between yourselves and us – who are men.” (174–75) Within the context of fast eroding imperial power, it became possible for the discerning eye to belong to non-native and non-male writers and for those writers to shape a literary oeuvre from his/her off-the-centre viewpoint. These writers perceived the English language to be a more fluid and malleable medium and less a given rigid tradition. In Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History, Charles Armstrong explores Yeats’ prodigious investment in the past and in tradition through the poet’s dialogues with his literary precursors. He argues that the formal genres of tragedy, ballad and sonnet were viewed by Yeats himself as dynamic and fluid, and that his relation to the forms and authors of the past is a “fusion of autonomy and obedience” (1). Yeats, in his drama, Armstrong writes, is “very happy to unmoor the central experience of tragedy from its generic underpinnings” (80). Over time, Armstrong argues in his discussion on the Irish poet, genres provide a form of transtextuality that coexist with, and also relate to, extra-literary forms in literature. Providing a historically oriented reading of genre and allusion in Yeats’ poetry, he moves into questions that deal with the personal, political, linguistic and metaphysical to reveal how a poet’s autonomy and obedience makes his art more than a literary game as it “seeks to appropriate (or outbid) the knowledge of the traditions with which he engages” (140–41).

The high modernist “Make It New” brigade who came next were often, like Mansfield and Lawrence, either immigrants to the “centres” or, like Woolf, from the marginalised gender. Their innovations challenged earlier structures of power and sought to impose a new aesthetic. This arrival of the margins at the centre may have been in response to the lure of the magic that the centre promised. Paul Morel of Sons and Lovers and Stephen Dedalus of Portrait are keen to leave the mundaneness of their hometowns, “the dull inelegance” against which Little Chandler’s soul revolts in the Dubliners story, “A Little Cloud”. The desire to make that near-mythical journey in search of the land where there is “gaiety, movement, excitement” – the global metropolitan centre which embodies all that is “modern”, avant-garde and international – is voiced throughout modernist literature. Yet, having escaped stultifying provincialisms, they continue writing about banal life. Saikat Majumdar’s Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire proposes that the oppressive banality and boredom depicted in so many modernist narratives are a deliberate inclusion that shape the aesthetics of modernist fiction. He argues that the works of authors like Joyce and Mansfield portray the dullness and tedium of everyday life on the margins of empire, an ineluctable experience of colonial modernity that is marked by a desire for the empire’s metropolitan centre. The banality of the content indicates life on the margins of the empire in its “semi-feudal smallness and immediacy, caught in the troubled waters of a subaltern nationalism and imperial exploitation” (51). The aesthetisation of banality, however, is a device, chronicling an encyclopaedic abundance of ethnographic details of triviality and ordinariness, and marking the disenchantment present: “the lacuna created by the perpetually deferred arrival of Western modernity, which promises to capture successfully the excitement of history and progress” (14). To Joyce and Mansfield may be added the name of T. S. Eliot – arriving at the centre from the unsophisticated America – and the name of Virginia Woolf – of and from the centre, but inescapably marginalised by her gender. Eliot’s inclusion of banality in his poetry and plays is, quite unlike Joyce’s celebration, an accusation of the hollowness of modern civilisation. His people drink

coffee, idly chatter, “come and go talking of Michel Angelo”, and live their lives embedded in barren “stony rubbish”, with no recognition of the “third who walks always beside” them: Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

– But who is that on the other side of you? (The Complete Poems and Plays 48) Woolf ’s discourse, similarly, is characterised not just by its inclusion of the banal details of Mrs Dalloway’s flowers, Rumpelmayer’s men, Durtnall’s van and the boom of the Big Ben, but by it being, as it were, structured by these very banalities. Mansfield’s stories too abound in the trivial everyday details of the quiet, quotidian domesticity circumscribed by garden parties, sandwiches, and azaleas that become streaming pink and white flags as one dances by. One interesting perspective on this prominence of detail in modern art may be found in Naomi Schor’s book, Reading in Detail, which argues that the concept of detail, and consequently its rendering, is gendered. Schor explores how detail had not always revelled in its current status, but had gained legitimacy only after a prolonged and hard-fought struggle that had broad socio-political ramifications. Shaking off its century-old censure to assume its commanding position in the field of representation, the detail transcends the earlier semantic network within which it had remained embedded: “… bounded on the one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’ is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over by women” (xliii). According to Schor, detail, traditionally connoted as feminine and devalorised, is linked to “feminized labor, as against classical and neoclassical valorization of the ideal with no particulars, which shapes the masculine structure of Western literary and philosophical imagination” (Majumdar 50). By including the banality of detail and domesticity as a core part of the narrative, the form brings together the aesthetic and the political,

disrupting and challenging canonical discourses that valorised the great and significant.

FORM AND CONTENT IN THE NOVEL In the context of the changing understanding of language, it becomes necessary to look closely at the twentieth-century novel since no other genre of writing passed through as many diverse renditions as this particular form. It was through language that much of the innovation and experimentation of modernism was worked. With the modern understanding of language setting the form of the literary work apart from its content, it became possible to study the fabula (story or chronological plot) and the syuzhet (the arrangement of that story or the presentation) – terms coined by Russian formalists – separately. This introduced the thematic and the modal approach to literature which led to Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of narratology. In view of the immense dedication that modern writers like Gustave Flaubert, Knut Hamsun, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf gave to perfecting the form, this may be argued to be the more significant of the two. The modernist “Make It New” dictum, evident in their obsessive fascination and repeated experiments with form, had had far more to do with style and the form of representation than with content, despite their insistence on changed and inner realities. This was, to a lesser extent, reflected in poetry too. It was not the content of Eliot’s The Waste Land that Pound struggled with as he edited the poem to its published 434-line version from its original version, which was about twice the size. His “criticism of The Waste Land was not of its meaning;” writes Richard Ellman of Pound’s heavy-handed editing, “he liked its despair and was indulgent of its neo-Christian hope. He dealt instead with its stylistic adequacy” (Ellman 54). Modernists could not return to earlier discourses hallowed by tradition because those discourses upheld the idea of a coherence and a unity in the world around them. If they returned to these conventional forms of

narrative, they would have been endorsing a harmony and an order they no longer believed was relevant to modernity. Significant consequences to the novel follow the modernist thought and innovation with form. By the 1930s it was apparent that the determined modernisation and experimentation carried out by these writers had successfully rendered the material of language more pliable. It had freed the form of the novel from its restrictive moorings. Writers like Joyce Cary, Jean Rhys, Dorothy L. Sayers and Elizabeth Bowen found far fewer occasions to set aside “considerable mass(es) of manuscript” (Richardson 430) in despair at the intractability of the inherited language. As a consequence of diverse strands of innovation, the structures of narratives grew complex and increasingly self-referential, foregrounding the process of its own creation. The lines of the plot were minimal, the chronological unidirectional narrative was broken into, disrupted and made nonlinear, the characters no longer appeared to be stable subjects, the omniscient narrator was replaced by multiple and often unreliable narrators, and, most damningly for traditional fiction, closure became problematic. As the postmodernist American author John Hawkes famously said in a 1964 interview, “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, setting, character, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained” (149). In the course of this evolution of the form of the novel, the familiar traditions of past structures that positioned and held reader and writer in a framework began to disappear, and the novel moved into unmapped narrative forms. “The narrative begins,” as Maurice Blanchot writes in his The Book to Come, “where the novel does not go” (6). Discussing Elizabeth Bowen and the dissolution of the novel form, Ann Wordsworth writes about how the positioning of the canon and the accommodation of character and plot are so drastically changed that the architecture of the stable critical practices are denied, requiring of the critic “a different address, a mobility” (Bennett and Royle vii). The broad philosophical matrix of ideas, necessary to

the innovatory impulse, had been engendered in the nineteenth century through the questioning of the world and the word. This had been voiced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Mann, August Strindberg and many others. Christopher Butler, in his Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916, explains that modernist innovators responded to what they perceived to be a cultural crisis consequent to the widespread atmosphere of scepticism at the end of the nineteenth century. As the character Gilbert says in Wilde’s essay, “The Critic as Artist”: “It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the scepticism of which they were afraid” (159). By deliberately fashioning aesthetic conventions for their art that were in opposition to the traditional, they rejected the mimetic ideal of realism. The “true” reality, they declared, lay beyond the shared single-faceted understanding of surroundings. It was subjective, intuitive, unstable and dynamic. This rejection of traditional realism has remained a shared perspective between postmodernists and modernists despite postmodernism’s jettisoning of modernism’s search for unity and meaning. As Malcolm Bradbury wrote in his essay “Modernisms/Postmodernisms”, “What Modernism and postmodernism share in common is a single adversary which is, to put it crudely, realism or naïve mimesis. Both are forms of postRealism. They likewise share in common a practice based on avantgarde and movement tactics and a sense of modern culture as a field of anxious stylistic formation” (qtd. in Christopher Butler 1). Yet, that “leaky old boat”, as Alain Robbe-Grillet was to say in 1957 of the academic opposition between form and content, had not “been entirely scuttled” (42). Discussions on form and content were given a political dimension by Left-inclined writers of the 1930s who accused modernists of being excessively obsessed with form and consequently making much of their literature inaccessible to the majority. “If modernism cut exhilaratingly loose from exhausted national traditions,” writes Terry Eagleton, “it did so, after all, as a deracinated, disorientated elite…. One corollary of that was a virulently anti-democratic politics” (132). The verities and myths of the theory that the modernist movement was reactionary in nature and

that modernist artists were apolitical, or worse, that they were elitists (with some inclining towards the political Right), may be debated.9 Yet factual or illusory, this opinion significantly changed the way in which language was used by writers. The triumph of socialism in 1917’s Red October and the consequent sweep of its philosophy across Europe’s intellectuals brought back the sense of a “role” required of the arts. Modernism’s experimentation and innovation with form was viewed as unnecessary obscurantism by a self-indulgent dilettante. Socialist writers believed language should be “like a windowpane” (Orwell 395) and, despite their criticism of the Modernist obsession with form and their alleged focus on content, they proved themselves to be as exacting and particular when choosing the form for their works. When Brecht began his play “The Exception and the Rule” with the following prologue, he very deliberately chose one form of language over many others: We are about to tell you

The story of a journey. An exploiter

And two of the exploited are the travellers.

Examine carefully the behaviour of these people:

Find it surprising though not unusual

Inexplicable though normal

Incomprehensible though it is the rule.

Consider even the most insignificant, seemingly simple

Action with distrust.

Ask yourselves whether it is necessary

Especially if it is usual. (110) Much attention was devoted to the content of their writings too since, in accordance with Marxist thinking, literature had a function to fulfil, and form was important only to the extent that it made content accessible. That they attributed political efficacy to their works and to the formal modes used is voiced by Orwell in his essay “Why I Write”: What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a

feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. (394) After the First World War, returning artists appear unable to assume the earlier position of the prophet and guide. In an interview regarding his Tyro exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1921, Wyndham Lewis, a survivor of the War, referred to contemporary modernist art as one that needed “waking up”: “I am sick of these socalled modern artists amiably browsing about and playing at art for art’s sake. What I want is to bring back art into touch with life – but it won’t be the way of the academician” (“Dean Swift” 359). The experience of war and the absurdly powerless position of the arts when compared to the sciences combined to discourage modernist claims of significance of the arts, to render the complexities of form and the solemnity of the artist regarding his art incongruous to the larger reading public. It becomes important to note therefore that the hostile or indifferent response to modernist art was irrespective of class. Philip Larkin was to refer, in 1971, to modernism as an “aberration that blighted all the arts” and which was one of the reasons that “in this century English poetry went off on a loop-line that took it away from the general reader” (216). Closely linked with modernism, Larkin suggests, was another reason for this phenomenon: “the emergence of English literature as an academic subject with its consequent demand for a kind of poetry that needed elucidation” (216–17).10 This argument of the “EngLit” or art aficionados guarding their turf has been explored by Thomas Strychacz in his book, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. Strychacz approaches the politics of “elitism” from a different angle, examining how particular literary and aesthetic forms may bring prestige, power, and income to certain groups. Basing his study on sociological analyses of the early-twentieth-century phenomenon of a professionalisation of literature and literary

criticism, he argues that modernist obscurity may have been born out of a fear of being redundant with the rise of the masses and with the explosion of, to use Adorno’s phrase, “the culture industry”. This is the thesis presented by John Carey in his book, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, of the intellectuals and their resentment against the masses. Uneasy with the reality of the masses, they demanded, Carey suggests, “a cosmetic version of the mass” (38). This is a criticism Carey levels against both highbrow intellectual modernists and Leftist writers. He quotes Edwin Muir to support his case that the masses which the intellectuals had in mind were “dehumanized, formalized, throttled by an automatic ideology, which denies humanity except in great bulk, so huge that it has no immediate relation to our lives … dehumanized as an army” (39). The masses, concludes Carey, were a disappointment to socialist intellectuals: “wallowing in consumer pleasures, they refuse to take on the revolutionary role the intellectual ascribes to them” (40). This disappointment was both linked to, and a veneer for, the feelings of inadequacy that the intellectuals felt when faced with the culture industry and the burgeoning world of mass journalism. For those involved with the publishing industry, as writers or critics, maintaining their status in the face of a philistine public required special forms of knowledge and language. Modernist literature, these critics argued, served as that special language and knowledge. It differentiated itself explicitly from mass culture through its use of language which was distinct from the discourses used by the masses, particularly that of journalism. The implicit battle with journalism is perhaps best articulated by Pound in his ABC of Reading: “Literature is news that STAYS news” (29). This gives a different complexion to the modernist innovation of form. The modernist pursuit of perfection of form has usually been broadly explained in either of two ways: one, the need to have a changed form/language in response to the new world and two, as the persistence of a style beyond its time: an influence of their immediate predecessors, the aestheticists. But the arguments of Carey and

Strychacz,11 make the modernist’s unique use of language/form a reactionary enterprise. This alleged exercise of power through culture and literature was resisted by W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood and George Orwell, writers who, in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s, had moved beyond the earlier generation’s sombre and elegiac vision of the lost Edwardian world. In the “Devil’s Decade”, as British journalist Claude Cockburn called the 1930s, the pursuit of aesthetics and form could only be a profligate luxury. In accordance with this perspective, the 1920s were caustically described by Cyril Connolly as “a romantic, affected and defeatist epoch” living in “the last long shadows of the Ivory Tower” (56). In this epoch, action was discredited, for it had caused the war: “And as for goodness – listen to Freud. Truth? but what about Einstein? History? Have you read The Decline of the West? Nothing remains but beauty. Have you read Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems? Beauty and, of course, one’s intellectual integrity and personal relations” (56). These were the “emotional dud cheques” that flooded the Universities, writes Connolly, “stumers on the bank of experience forged in the name of Swann or Daedalus, Monsieur Teste or Mrs Dalloway” (55). They were deemed useless in Connolly’s changed political scenario where questions of commitment and engagement were paramount in a world divided by fascism and communism, socialism and nationalism, mass/class and individual identity. The post–30s writers validated their pursuit of the arts by moving away from the modernist “cult of the unique personal point of view” (Wilson 269). Stephen Spender describes the writers of the 1930s through his answer to the question “What is my responsibility?” For these writers, he says, their “responsibility [was] of a public kind: to make the reader aware of the contemporary historic situation and to imagine what [she/he felt would] be the correct response to it” (5). These critics recognised “the dependence of the individual on politics and authoritarian systems of thought” (16), shaped their art to convey that, and espoused the art in language that would be comprehensible to all.

Yet their ideologically positioned literature would have a difficult time in the post–1950s era which witnessed disillusionment, cynicism and the frustration of hopes. This atmosphere of despair tinged literature from the time of the First World War, creating, as the critic Piper was to say of the American writer Fitzgerald’s works, a “cult of disillusionment”. In Fitzgerald’s writing the war crystallised much of the despair that, in their earlier writing, had been vaguely atmospheric: “It looks as if the youth of … my generation ends sometime during the present year” (qtd. in Piper 76), wrote Fitzgerald to his cousin in 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany. Whatever hope and ideology that had been garnered by young socialist writers after the First World War was beaten down by the monstrosity of the Second World War. Any slender hopes raised after the Second World War of an equal and just Europe dwindled within a decade to bring to the 1956 London stage the impotent fulminations of the angry young man in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. By the time the immensely destructive Second World War ended, English literature had become a world phenomenon represented by diverse voices. By then also the institutionalisation of literature, the skilful critical apparatus that reinforced it, and the triumph of technological inventiveness were complete and the powerful publishing industry had been established. Whatever may have been the underlying reasons for modernist’s language and the reasons for its critique by the writers of the 1930s, the hegemony of modernist forms were rendered indisputable by the combined power of these new forces. For the late modernists the possibility of being anything other than “modernist” in form was, if not non-existent, minimal. Rod Rosenquist in his Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New, uses literary criticism, correspondence and memoirs to explore “questions of late modernist self-perception” (30). Pointing to the enduring institutional power of the high modernists, Rosenquist argues that the qualities associated with later writers may not have constituted a deliberate continuation of modernist style, but rather symptoms of their hegemonic power – as the arbiters of taste in their

varied roles of editors or reviewers of literary magazines, anthologies and publishing houses. “So nearly complete was this,” writes Raymond Williams of the modernist cultural reformation, that “the succeeding metropolitan formations of learning and practice – what had once been defiantly marginal and oppositional – became, in its turn, orthodox” (“The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism” 92). The state of “permanent novelty” (Lewis, Time and Western Man 123) that modernists aspired to may thus be seen as established through the institutionalisation of literature in the age of what has come to be called by various critics as “late modernism”. But to turn from the form-content debate and return to the use of form in twentieth-century literature, we find in the modern texts a repeated foregrounding of the language and techniques writers use. This is done sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly, showing the differences between society’s prescribed discourse – the acceptable speech as Judith Butler said (128) – and the other narratives that cannot be made part of this discourse. Joyce’s young artist, Stephen Dedalus, is keenly aware of the diverse field of discourses that lie before a writer: One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I HOPE I AM NOT DETAINING YOU.

Not in the least, said the dean politely.

No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean--

Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: DETAIN. (232) Saussurean linguistics, by introducing semiology into the study of narratives and emphasising the arbitrary and constructed nature of language, had undermined the authority of language. All language,

be it the hitherto acknowledged “fact-based” narrative of history or the objective and dispassionate narrative of science, were viewed as objects of study. More than what you wrote, it was how you wrote it wherein lay the crux of the matter. Roland Barthes believed that, with the consciousness of the overwhelming presence of language, “the whole of Literature, from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of language” (Writing Degree Zero 3). While Barthes might be, in the words of John Barth, indulging in “French hyperbole”, Barth does agree that “one cardinal preoccupation of the modernists was the problematics, not simply of language, but of the medium of literature” (199). Alert to the complexity and power of words, the older Stephen in Ulysses finds his blood is “wooed by grace of language” (148) and cautions himself against the next speech: “Noble words coming. Look out” (150). The nobly worded speech turns out to be what is generally called a “rhetorical” speech. Like all discourses, this speech too, when studied, is found to be in accordance with a structure – in this case, the structure of the rhetorical or the declamatory speech which may be constituted, as is here, by the inclusion of devices such as metaphors, allusions, repetitions, hyperbaton and climax: Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses … – and it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised…. (150) Or the popular romance discourse: “The eyes that were fastened upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave, and it had made her his” (386). Joyce’s 1922 text Ulysses stands out as the book which

explored the greatest range of discourses to indicate how language conditions our responses. Ulysses includes the epic discourse, the historical discourse, the scholastic discourse, the scientific discourse, the religious discourse, journalese, and others. Having experienced first-hand the dramatic and often tragic consequences of two formidable discourses, that of the Church and that of Nationalism, speaking in two divergent voices on the “good” of his colonised land, Joyce knew how loyalties could be bent and emotions twisted by words. In Ulysses he takes the reader through eighteen chapters, each written using a form of narrative different from the earlier and quite a few using more than one discourse (the Nausicaa and the Oxen of the Sun episodes, for example) to reveal how the discourses connect, echo and struggle with each other as characters cross each other’s paths. In the Cyclops episode, the citizen, with his prejudice and anger against “strangers”, uses the narrow discourse of xenophobic and racist nationalism with its bombastic rhetoric: And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty will be full again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O’Reillys and the O’Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when the first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to the fore, none of your Henry Tudor’s harps, no, the oldest flag afloat, the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue field, the three sons of Milesius. (345–46) This is contrasted with Leopold Bloom’s down-to-earth and pragmatic language regarding the nation: But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

Yes, says Bloom.

What is it? says John Wyse.

A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. (349) The narrative becomes an embodiment of the many worldviews that co-exist with one another in the minds of many people, a perfect example of what Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics calls polyphony: “The novel, as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice. In it the investigator is confronted with several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls” (Dialogic Imagination 261). By using diverse narrative genres, the text serves to explore the workings of language, revealing how each discourse is exclusive (despite the echo of memories and events that occur across the discourses of the characters who inhabit the same space and time) and is governed by its own structural rules. The use of many languages foregrounds and complicates questions regarding the authority and reliability of each narrative. “Had Pyrrhus not fallen … or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death?” (26) Stephen wonders as he teaches his students the narrative that is history. “Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted” (26). Each discourse ousts “infinite possibilities” that it cannot encompass. Even the ostensibly factual narrative of history could be, as Thomas Kettle, the Irish politician, said of Irish history, “a lie disagreed upon” (Spoo 4). “We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories,” writes Bakhtin in The Dialogical Imagination, “but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life” (271). The basic content of the language of verbal-ideological movements are conditioned by “the specific socio-historical destinies of European languages and by the destinies of ideological discourse, and by those particular historical tasks that ideological discourse has fulfilled in specific social spheres and at specific stages in its own historical development” (270). The two final lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” hit

hard because behind the words lie a legacy ancient and powerful, seldom challenged, accepted as axiomatic throughout centuries: If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori. (Walter 141) This is the “verbal conception” of the world to which Gramsci, in “The Study of Philosophy” drew our attention to. We inherit this/these from our past and absorb mostly uncritically. It remains present in our consciousness but not without consequences: It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of will, with varying efficacy but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of moral and political passivity. Critical understanding of self takes place therefore through a struggle of political “hegemonies” and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a higher level of one’s conception of reality. (333) The first step in reaching this conception, writes Gramsci, is the recognition and consciousness of being part of a particular hegemonic force. Dynamics of power and politics are, therefore, the warp and weft of every discourse. While discourses may or may not be wilfully made by the hegemony, the hegemony almost always appropriates and uses historically engendered discourses. This understanding of how discourses can be used as instruments of hegemonic power groups informs much of later research on gender, insanity, race, marginalisation, and other spheres susceptible to

power inequity and discrimination. Language becomes a complex site of struggle within which communities construct their sense of the real. It is a “thick” medium, with layers plastered one upon the other and between each other, constructed collectively by groups as individuals articulate their desires, anxieties and fears.

GAMES THROUGH LANGUAGE Language, and specifically literary language, began to be recognised for its radical potential to influence political and philosophical thought. With text and textuality beginning to occupy the centre of nationalistic and gender-based movements, literature became, as Julia Kristeva was to put it years later, a site to perform “writing-thinking”. Along with colonial and feminist “writing back” to the centre, some of these literary texts discussed narration and narratives. Sartre’s protagonist Roquentin in Nausea (1938) tries to understand the implication of the narrative end: This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales … and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story…. Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been travelling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go…. But everything changes when you tell about life; … things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Marommes.” And in reality you have started at the end. (39)

In her book The Novel After Theory Judith Ryan argues that “some of the most significant and subtle negotiations with theory have taken place in novels” (205). Though Ryan is discussing novels of the latter twentieth century, the trend may be seen to have begun with the late modernists. This suspicion and alertness regarding language, however, seems to have given way to a sense of the utter inadequacy of language with the onset of the Cold War following World War II. The explicit politicisation of 1930s literature, when socialism-inclined writers demanded that literary form and its language should be accessible to the common man, was followed by an age when the arts appeared overwhelmed with a reality too dark to bear expression. Auschwitz, followed by Hiroshima, were realities that made language appear limited and useless in its attempt to articulate the lives of men and women who were random ciphers in a senseless equation. Writers thus rejected the earlier forms of literature. Lawrence Langer, in his introduction to Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, writes, … the most compelling Holocaust writers reject the temptation to squeeze their themes into familiar premises: content and form, language and style, character and moral growth, suffering and spiritual identity, the tragic nature of existence – in short, all those literary ideas that normally sustain and nourish the creative effort. Just as the Holocaust experience crushed the structures of self that usually favoured survival, forcing victims to find new means of staying alive, so its literature sabotages the reader’s hopes for a durable affirmation lurking in the dusk of atrocity. Reading and writing about the Holocaust is an experience in unlearning…. (6) Theodor Adorno’s statement that it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz deserves to be quoted in its fuller, and more difficult, form: The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on

its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. (34) In the “open-air prison” (Adorno 34) which the world was becoming, satire was the chosen narrative genre. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and Huxley’s Brave New World depicted a world where, as Huxley wrote to Orwell in 1949, the world’s leaders would discover new instruments of control outside clubs and prisons. They would discover that “the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience” (Huxley 605). Leftist writers who had succeeded modernism may have accused their predecessors of an obscurity that defeated the purpose of language, but they had retained faith in the capability of language to communicate. In the post–War 1940s and 50s, however, texts began to foreground the impossibility of communication through language. Samuel Beckett, considered to be the last of the modernists, repeatedly holds up the idea of language as ineffectual. His 1953 play, En attendant Godot, translated by Beckett as Waiting for Godot (1955) and staged the same year as Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was posthumously published, highlights the failure of language to do much else than play a ritualistic role. Vladimir begins a conversation about four Evangelists, pauses, looks at Estragon and says, “Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?” And Estragon, who till then has been quite incapable of understanding what Vladimir is talking about, replies with exaggerated enthusiasm: “I find this really most extraordinarily interesting” (Beckett 5). Language is a social game, with well-choreographed moves. Using language therefore entails a set formula consisting of a routine of returns, passes, dribbles and feints. Human beings use this language either to pass the time or as an elaborate social game that elevates to

a dignified level the ordinariness of their gestures. Pozzo finds it difficult to take a seat unless he is expressly requested to by his companions: Pozzo: (He looks at the stool.) I’d very much like to sit down, but I don’t quite know how to go about it.

Estragon: Could I be of any help?

Pozzo: If you asked me perhaps.

Estragon: What?

Pozzo: If you asked me to sit down.

Estragon: Would that be a help?

Pozzo: I fancy so.

Estragon: Here we go. Be seated, Sir, I beg of you.

Pozzo: No no, I wouldn’t think of it! (Pause. Aside.) Ask me again.

Estragon: Come come, take a seat I beseech you, you’ll get pneumonia.

Pozzo: You really think so?

Estragon: Why it’s absolutely certain.

Pozzo: No doubt you are right. (He sits down.) (29) He finds it awkward to sit down again once he has got up, and attempts to prompt Vladimir into an articulated request: But how am I to sit down now, without affectation, now that I have risen? Without appearing to – how shall I say – without appearing to falter. (To Vladimir.) I beg your pardon? (Silence.) Perhaps you didn’t speak? (Silence). (21) But apart from its performative or ceremonial uses, language appears to serve no other use, failing miserably as a tool of communication. Vladimir’s succeeds in getting his question heard by Pozzo only when he abandons “meaningful” language: Vladimir: You want to get rid of him?

Pozzo: He wants to cod me, but he won’t.

Estragon: You want to get rid of him? …

Pozzo: In reality he carries like a pig. It’s not his job.

Estragon: You want to get rid of him?

Pozzo: He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I’ll regret my decision…. Well, that’s that, I think. Anything else? (Vaporizer.)

Estragon: You want to get rid of him?

Pozzo: Remark that I might just as well have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed otherwise. To each one his due.

Estragon: Youwaagerrim?

Pozzo: I beg your pardon? (24) Many years later, in 1979, Jean Francois Lyotard was to use Wittgenstein’s theory of language-games to argue that the postmodern age was witnessing the collapse of all macro-narratives. In the postmodern world, Lyotard argued, the enlightenment narrative in which the “hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-politico end – universal peace” (XX) can only be greeted with incredulity, suggesting the collapse of such metanarratives. Language, in its apparent naturalness and ease masks a highly organised and disciplined structure. Saussure’s theory, by highlighting the arbitrary and non-referential nature of language, draws our attention to the fact that no matter how exceptional an individual’s speech, all his or her words are choices made from within a pre-existing system. Within this hardly individual, eminently social framework exists the text, a “multidimensional space”, according to Barthes, “in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Image – Music – Text 146). Echoing, arguing, agreeing and disagreeing with one another, the texts are each a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). No text therefore stands on its own, permeated as each is by diverse ideologies traced through various texts. Being locations of ideology, the texts, through their narratives, participate in the power games played out within and among communities. It is also the reason why

language has been seen as a powerful, if not the primary, weapon of control in the postmodern age.

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