MODERNIST LITERATURE: AN INTRODUCTION (Mary Ann Gilles, Aurelea Denise

Mahood)
Wilde"s adoption of the aesthete"s credo #art for art"s sake" drew attention to the
formal qualities of literature, contested what was seen as the over reliance of Victorian
literature on realism, and challenged his contemporaries and successors to pay close
attention to the art of writing. While he was pilloried in the press and jailed because of his
homosexuality, there is little doubt of the signicant inuence that Wilde exerted on the
literary scene of the #90s.
The 1890"s also witnessed the rst steps of writers whom we now associate with
modernism: Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and W.B. Yeats. Joseph Conrad began to
write the novels and short stories that were to bring him such acclaim, publishin Almayer!s
Folly (1895) and The Nigger of the "Narcissus! (1897). His short story Heart of Darkness,
rst serialized in Blackwood!s Edinburg Magazine in 1899, sounded a warning clarion not
only to those who had become complacent about the power and reach of the British
Empire, but also to those who had become complacent about the form and function of
literature. Conrad took one of the most popular literary forms of the 1890s -an adventure
tale set in an exotic locale- and transformed it into a major literary work. The texture of the
story is created by its layers of symbols and the counterpoint between the white man"s
experience of the Congo and the black man"s experience of his own country. He adds to
that a lush language that evokes an emotional response from the reader. To this base, he
injects a political commentary on the wrongs perpetrated in Africa in the name of
Imperialism. In the process of creating this masterpiece, Conrad was taking part in the
transformation of literature that was occuring at the turn of the twentieth century. Hardy
turned full time to poetry after the controversy surrounding the publication of Jude the
Obscure in 1895, publishing Wesses Poems in 1898. His poetry is more often thought of
as modernist than Victorian, a judgement rightly deserved given the poetry""s
experimentation with form and language. Yeats had begun to make a name for himself as
a poet, publishing three volumes of poems in the 1890"s -Poems (1895), The secret rose
(1897), and Wind Among the Reeds (1899). In them, he employed the techniques of
symbolism, blending them with Celtic myth and occultism, to establish his credentials as a
gifted new poetic voice. By the end of the decade, Yeats had returned home to Ireland,
where he took an active role in the Irish Literary Revival. Throughout the rst decade of the
twentieth century he wrote plays for the Abbey Theatre, including Cathleen Ni Houlihan
(1902), and continued to write the poetry that placed him at the heart of the modernist
movement.
George Bernard Shaw, another Irishman, is now regarded as one of the foremost
British dramatists of the twentieth century, but in the 1890"s, he wast just beginning to
explore drama as a viable outlet for social commentary. Like most writers of his period, he
wrote in a variety of genres. He was a noted journalis, writing art, music and drama
criticism for a variety of periodicals. He wrote political pamphlets and turned his hand to
novel writing. For Shaw, who founded the Fabian Society in 1884 with Beatrice and
Sydney Webb, drama was a means of disseminating Fabian beliefs. Yet Shaw"s skills as a
dramatist were such that when Harley Granville Barker took over management of the
Court Theatre in London"s West End and wanted to use it to mount experimental plays, it
was to Shaw that he turned. From 1904 onwards, Barker produced no fewer than ten of
Shaw"s plays. Shaw grew wealthy from the royalties he earned from the productions, but
at the same time, his socialist ideals reached wide audience, while plays such as John
Bull!s Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905), and perhaps his most famous and
successful play Pygmalion (1913), lled the theatre.
It is clear, then, that the 1890s were vibrant decade for literature; novels, poetry,
drama and journalism, indeed most genres, ourished. However, one genre in particular
emerged as central to not only the 1890s, but also the 1900s: the short story. The short
story became important for a number of reasons: the demise of the triple-decker novel and
the end to the monopoly on ction held by lending libraries such as Mudie"s is one reason
for the rise of shorter ction. The fact that a short story could be published in one issue of
a periodical and read at one sitting made it attractive to publisher and reader alike.
Publishers liked the short story because it reduced the difculties inherent in marketing
stories that were published serially, and it also caused fewer difculties with writers who
were often less than reliable in adhering to delivery schedules for multi-part serials.
Readers enjoyed short stories because they presented a complete story -no longer did
they have to wait a week, a month, or longer to nd out the hero"s fate. Audience demand
for shorter pieces of ction also pushed writers in the direction of the short story, with the
result that writers could frequently earn as much, and often mor, for two or three short
stories as they had been earning for full novels. Writers also found the short story provided
an outlet for aesthetic experimentation: its relatively short history and short length
permitted them greater freedom to experiment with form and themes. And, as the rest of
this chapter will demonstrate, the short story also played an important role in the rise of
modernism.
THE NEW WOMAN, THE YELLOW BOOK AND THE SHORT STORY
Sarah Grand, the English author of the best-seller Heavenly Twins (1893),
published an essay entitled #The New Aspect of the Woman Question" in the March 1894
issue of the North American Review. According to Grand, the #new woman" had #solved the
problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman"s-Sphere,
and prescribed the remedy. A tendentious claim such as this did not go unnoticed and
within a matter of months the pharse #New Woman" had become ubiquitous on both sides
of the Atlantic. Not only had the phrase become a commonplace, but so too had the image
of the cigarette-smoking, Girton-educated, bicycle-riding New Woman in rational dress
demanding emancipation.
Irrespective of stereotypes, the New Woman rejected the dominant ideology that
insisted men and women were meant to occupy different spheres -public and private
respectively- according to their biological sex. She insisted that the separate spheres
ideology was a social construct as opposed to a biological imperative, and demanded
women be given the same opportnities and choices as men. The New Woman"s dogged
resolve in drawing attention to naturalized gender roles and her willingness to transgress
social constraints served to align the New Women with the Aesthetic Movement and with
writers like Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Aubrey Beardsley who critiqued supposedly
natural standards of sexual behaviour. Little distinguished the general public"s response to
both groups: #the fear of deviance that was created by the perception that both groups
were crossing gender lines and rejecting what was supposedly natural created an anxiety
that is obvious in the many articles that appeared in periodicals during the 1890s". Essays
and short stories alike -whter for or against the #New Woman" -voiced concerns about a
wide range of issues related to marriage, education, female sexuality, and impediments to
economic independence.
The Yellow Book, a literary periodical stared by Elkin Matthews and John Lane in
1894, closely associated with the Aesthetic Movement, was favourably disposed towards
progressive female writers. The rst issue included stories by George Egerton and Ella
D"Arcy -two important writers of New Woman ction. In the Yellow Book work by women
writers appeared alongside stories by well-established male writers such as Henry James,
Arthur Symons, and George Moore. In addition to providing a forum for New Woman
ction, with its interest in Continental writers such as the French Symbolist, the Yellow
Book helped modernize the English short story. Henry James saw the advent of the Yellow
Book as an opportunity for the short story to #assume" and #shamelessly parade in, its own
organic form. James"s own career had begun almost thirty years earlier in 1865 with the
publication of #The Story of a Year" in the Atlantic Monthly. A writer of novels and short
ction, James was an important exponent of the modern short story. He was inspired by
the form"s power to combine richness with concision -its power #to do the complicated thing
with a strong brevity and lucidity. James did not see any limits to #the effects and tones that
could be achived, or to the subjects that could be treated, in an art form which was free to
explore depths and complexities precisely because it was restricted in length. (27 i 28 no)
This chapter explores the means by which the modern shor story"s tendency
towards formal dissonance produces stories that are simultaneously disruptive and critical
of the society from which they emerge. The ensuing discussions of short stories by
Somerville and Ross, Joyce, Lawrence, and Manseld assess the different ways in which
these writers challenged conventional wisdom with regard to gender, class, and nationality.
Every one of these writers explores the tension between outer and inner reality, paralysis
and change, past and present, as these themes relate to the construction of personal
identity. What follows will point to the means by which the short story emerges as an
effective vehicle through which writers (and readers) can side-step prevailing conventions
and beliefs to move beyond #our ordinary range of experience" Not only did the writers we
are examining challenge prevailing expectations regarding appropriate subject matter for a
short story, but they frequently wrote from the position of outsider whether on account of
sex, class or nationality. We will begin with a series of stories written by a pair of Irish
women who caught the attention of English publishers, critics, and readers.
SOMERVILLE AND ROSS
In 1898, the rst Irish R.M. story by Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (who wrote
as Martin Ross) appeared in London"s Badminton Magazine, a late Victorian equivalent to
Field and Stream. The immediate success of #Great-Uncle McCarthy" and the stories that
followed encouraged Longmans and Green, the magazine"s publishers, to commission a
collection of stories. Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899) was published the next
year. Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. appeared in 1908, bringing the saga of Major
Yeates, Resident Magistrate, into the twentieth century. Although the stories have been a
lonstanding success with readers, critics have proved less able to appreciate the merits of
the Irish R.M. stories, which are too often dismissed as #stage-Irish" tales or rousing
hunting yarns. In contrast, James Cahalan convincingly argues for the merits of examining
Somerville and Ross as the authors of stories that intermix #nostalgia for a dying way of life
[with] subversively gendered portraits of strong, vital women". Cahalan has suggested that
the male characters are #outmatched by women, who really control the Big House", which
is #parallel to [Somerville and Ross"] portrayal of the Ascendancy, in the person of
Yeates, as rather hopelessly powerless in the face of the lower class". In story after
story, gender and class relations emerge as anything but xed; the expectations of
Major Yeates and the reader are repeatedly subverted and undermined. The stories
expose a society in ux, a society in which the roles of men and women are in
question and societal values are being challenged on domestic and political fronts.
For instance, while Major Yeates is the latest Resident Magistrate -newly
arrived in Ireland as representative of Her Majesty"s goverment- he is not a gure of
unquestionable authority. Although a member of the Anglo-Irish AScendancy by
blood, Major Yeates has come to Ireland by way of England and, as such, he is the
uninitiated outsider who must learn the ways of the county to which he has been
appointed. The opening scenes of #Great-Uncle McCarthy" the rst story in the
collection, reveal a somewhat hapless Major Yeates caught between two women:
his absent ance, who is present as the acknowledged future inhabitant of his new
home Shreelane, and his housekeeper, Mrs Cadogan, who ministers to him in a
duplicitous manner. The story ends with the discovery that, with Mrs Cadogan"s
help, relations of the landlord Mr Flurry Knox squat in the Shreelane loft. The
house is under Major Yeates" control only in name. The whims of Mrs Cadogan and
the anticipated needs of Major Yeates" new wife determine what takes place at
Shreelane.
This is no only secret being kept from Major Yeates. Not only was he the sole
member of the household unaware of the squatters, but also with the assistance of
Tim Connor -the Shreelane gamekeeper- the McCarthy Gannons were catching
and selling the property"s foxes under the aegis of Major Yeates" name. As a result,
nearly everyone in the neighbourhood -with the exception of Yeates- knew about
the comings and goings of the Shreelane foxes. It takes the boycotting of a shoot
which Major Yeates attempts to host early in his tenancy and an anonymous letter
alerting him that his #unsportsmanlike conduct has been discovered. You have been
suspected this good while of shooting the Sreelane foxes, it is known now you do
worse" before Yeates becomes aware of the goings on under his very nose.
Everything is resolved in humorous and melodramatic fashion when the hounds
from the local hunt led by none other than Major Yeates" landlord and the local
chimney sweep converge upon the McCarthy Gannons, Tim Conner, and a fox
secreted away in the loft at the back of the house.
The ensuing mayhem and indignant words highlight the skill with which
Somerville and Ross handle the dialogue in all the Irish R.M. stories. This comedy
of contrasts in which different registers of language are caught on the same page -
the humour neither elevates nor romanticizes any one group. All of the stories are
lled with similarly diverse cross-section of characters. As a result, misadventures
on account of misunderstandings and secrets dividing characters generate much of
the collection"s humour. These are funny stories with a serious point. Keeping that
in mind, Cahalans"s work on Somerville and Ross draws attention to the work of
Regina Barreca who has argued that #Comedy is a way women writers can reect
the absurdity of the dominant ideology while undermining the very basis for its
discourse". Frequently, it is the characters who advocate the dominant ideology or
assert their superiority that come out worse for it in the Irish R.M. stories, whether
they are mothers who are adamant and unbending about whom their daughters
should marry, or private secretaries who have come from England to #collect
impressions of Irish life." In short, the humour in Somerville and Ross"s stories does
not depend on stereotypes or caricatures of drunken Irish and country bumpkins.
Much of the humour emerges from the reversal of expectations or a character"s
response to seemingly absurd situations.

JAMES JOYCE
In 1904, George Russell, editor of The Irish Homestead, offered James Joyce
1pound each for some stories with an Irish background. Three submissions -"The
Sisters," #Evelin," and #After the Race"- appeared in The Irish Homestead under the
pseudonym Stephen Daedalus before it was decided that Joyce"s work was ill-
suited to an agricultural paper. This edict did not deter Joyce, and he continued
writing his Dublin stories after eloping to the Continent whit Nora Barnacle in
October 1904. When he approached the London publisher Grant Richards in
October 1905, he had written twelve stories -including the three stories that had
already appeared en 1904.
After some wrangling, Joyce and Richards reached a publication agreement
by early 1906 that called for a thirteenth story from Joyce. The stipulation that
Joyce provide a thirteenth story proved unlucky. When Richards sent the thirteenth
story, #Two Gallants", to his printers, they declared it too obscente to print. The now
alarmed Richards responded by asking Joyce to make changes to #Two Gallants"
#Counterparts" and #An Encounter". Over the course of the summer, negotiations
went on between the writer and publisher. In the end, Joyce was unwilling to make
concessions and the manuscript was returned to jOyce on 26 October 1906. Three
years later, seemingly hopeful discussions with the Dublin rm Maunsel on the
subject of publishing Dubliners, which now included #The Dead" took a turn for the
worse when one of the rm"s directors, George Roberts, raised concerns over
references to Edward VII in #Ivy Day in the Commitee Room". Shortly thereafter the
frustrated Joyce wrote an open letter #A curious History" to the Irish press
bemoaning his difculties in publishing the collection. The letter left Roberts so
terried of legal action that he refused point blank to publish the book.
Joyce"s luck improved in 1914, when The Egoist began to serialize his rst
novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Encouraged by its reception, Joyce
re-approached Grant Richards and offered him the Dubliners manuscript a second
time. Limited complications aside, the book was nally made available to readers
on 15 june 1914, on the same terms as the original 1906 contract with the added
provision that Joyce take 120 copies himself at trade price. The timing could not
have been worse. Weeks later, tensions in Europe escalated and the Continent was
plunged into war by the end of the summer. For all practical purposes, the
publication of Dubliners went largely unnoticed. Nevertheless, decades later, the
collection is regarded as an outstanding example of the modern short story.
Inuenced in part by Joyse"s use of complex networks of mythological and
symbolic allusions in his later works such as Ulysses innumerable critics have
attempted to analyze the stories in Dubliners with reference to larger patterns.
Joyce himself, however, offers none of the most useful templates against which to
read the stories. In 1907, he said that he was trying to present Dublin in four of its
aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories assess how
men and women -at various stages of their lives- dene themselves with reference
to one another with especial attention paid to the role that social conventions and
expectations play in these relations. Joyce also investigates the ways in which we
interpret our lives, and the ways in which the version of events we privilege can
serve to preserve the personal ctions by which we live. The stories seek to expose
the complex machinations and forces -internal and external- which motivate an
individual"s actions.
All of the stories utilize a similar structure: each moves deceptively towards a
climax and each creates expectations of a readily identiable revelation which is
dispelled on account of the complexity of the... (34 i 35 no)
...ction is employed to describe the dockside scene with which the story
concludes. However, instead of using the swooning prose of romance to describe
the moment of liberation and happiness towards the story apparently builds, it is
used to describe the very momenti in which she freezes and cannot escape her
father and Dublin:
A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
-Come!
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was
drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with
both hands at the iron railing.
-Come!
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in
frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.
The prospecto of living with Frank has become synonymous with the violence
of submersion -a deathly choice in that Eveline cannot imagine a fate other than the
one she has witnessed in her own home. The emotions that overwhelm Eveline at
the railing embody the impossibility of escaping. She can do nothing less than
freeze: #She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes
gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition." Eveline never speaks her
refusal. Tongue-tied and helpless, the story ends with her clutching the rail unable
to leave with Frank because she does not and cannot believe her own story.
p36
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ON THE MARGINS OF MODERNISM: DECENTERING LITERARY DYNAMICS
Chana Kroneld
p21 Three logically distinct sets of difculties seem to have led to this impasse,
each at a different level of discourse: the sense of the term itself, the nature of the
category modernism constitutes, and the general conceptual map of literary
groupings of which it is part. Distinguishing among these three levels of discussion
is only a preliminary methodological gesture but -it seems to me- quite a necessary
one given the conceptual fog in which the debate over modernism is often
conducted.
The term. Modernism remains a complex and contradictory literary label
which, in the very process of naming, provokes some fundamental questions: Is
modernism by any other name (modernity, avant-garde) still the same? How
does the meaning of the label change when it is applied across media (literature,
art, architecture, music); across genres within the same medium; and, still more
problematically, across cultures, geopolitical centers, languages, even generations?
Since my focus is a on modernist poetry, the most relevant questions for muy
purposes deal with literature proper: Do the modernist labels Russian futurism
German expressionism or Anglo-American imagism actually refer to the same
literary phenomenon? And within the same subtrend or current, is there any sense
in which the modernist label means the same thing when applied to mainstream,
dominant European literary systems, as when it is used to describe Hebrew or
Yiddish (or Arabic, Latin American, Caribean, African, Japanese) poetry? Clearly,
there are reasons to expect an expressionist Hebrew poem whritten in Palestine in
1947 to be radically different in its expressionism from an expressionist poem
written in Germany in the mid-twenties. But are differences within a period or trend
all we are left, as deconstructive literary criticism would have us believe, with no
possibility of internal semantic cohesion of any kind?
My response to these problems will focus on the ways in which the various
senses and uses of modernism dene a dynamic semantic hierarchy. In part 1 of
this book I describe the shifting pragmatic contexts of the term"s use, its historicity
and tendentiousness, as well as my own bias (for I am yet another reader trying to
effect yet another change in modernism"s signication to t my own cultural -literary,
social, linguistic, political- conceptual scheme). In the process, I reject both the
extrem skepticism of focusing exclusively on difference, which may deny
modernism any signication at all, and extreme positivism of reducing the term"s
complexitiy and heterogeneity to the lowest common denominator. Specically, I
propose that the semantic structure of modernism -as that of other terms
designating literary groupings- be described as a fuzzy set of meaning horizons
determined functionally and contextually, and clustered in dynamic hierarchies of
degrees of salience. The salience of one modernist position (or set of positions)
over another is determined pragmatically by the particular aesthetic, social, and
political contexts in which it is used.
The category. The critical literature (as well as the manifestoes and other
meta-poetic pronouncements of the modernists themselves) exhibit a persistent
confusion about the categorization and classication of the concept modernism: Is it
a period, a trend, a style? Is it a literary, an artistic, a cultural, or a political
phenomenon? Is modernism, ontologically speaking, a process or an essence??
Do certain conditions need to exist in order for a work or a poet to be considered
modernist, or does modernism (or any of its subtrends, such as expressionism,
imagism, futurism) include simply all those poets who are afliated with one of its
international branches? And how is afliation determined?
Many of the methods of categorizing and classifying modernism run into
serious difculties. My job in Part 1 of this study will be to illustrate these difculties
and identify the extrem positivism or extreme nominalism behind them as
procedures for analyzing literary categories and classes. Subsequently, I provide
the rudiments of an alternative conceptual framework for the analysis of the literary
category modernism, a framework which does not need to suppress either
modernism"s special kind of cohesiveness or its uidity, opaqueness, and open-
endedness. I show that although categories such as modernism evade classical
criterial denitions, they are marked nevertheless by strong and salient features
about which readers, critics, and artists all have strong intuitions -and opinions.
The conceptual map. Scholars writing about modernism -as well as readers
and writers of modernist texts- do not, as a rule, have access to any viable
theoretical model for literary movements or trends as such. What, if anything, does
modernism as a literary movement or trend have in comon -in its conceptual
structure- with periodic literary groupings such as epoch, period, or generation?
What, if anything, does it have in common with typological literary groupings, like
genre, mode, style? Is the very distinction between periodization and typology a
viable one? By describing modernism as a transitional concpt between classical
notions of period and genre, I try to establish the motivation for a more pluralist
model of literary groupings, a model which treats trends and movements as
symptomatic of these categories" heterogeneity rather than as murky notions that
resist all analysis.
Where, as far as these three questions are concerned, have the last fty or
so years of theorizing about modernism left us? To the extent that critics have
attempted a conceptual analysis of modernism (and most of them have not), they
have usually been content with the questions raised in (a) above, acknowledging
the complexity and vagueness of the label and little else. Very few have gone
beyond this level to an exploration of (b), the special kind of category that
constitutes the concept modernism, and even fewer have examined (c), the
implications of modernism"s semantic and classicatory complexity for a general
theory of literary movements or trends. Accounts of modernism have never been
informed by a sustained comparative theory of literary groupings (genre, period,
school, generation, trend, movement) for the simple reason that no such theory is
as yet available.
It would be a shame, I think, to resort to extreme skepticism or nominalism in
order to address these questions if only because critics usually want to preserve
the intuitions on which literary consumers and producers have been acting for so
long -namely, that what they were engaged in was somehow, however vaguely, part
of a real international, cross-cultural movement (or period or trend). Indeed, such a
universalist feeling permeated much of the modernist experiment itself, even if at
times only in hinsight. At the same time, it would be a shame for the critical account
of the complex and contradictory label modernism to remain classicist and positivist
if only because many modernist trends themselves embraced contradiction,
antinomy, and antithesis in their implicit and explicit poetics, in a direct challenge to
traditional, set-theoretical notions of meaning and categorization. That modernism"s
contradictory tenets were enhanced, even determined, by the drastically different
hsitorical and geopolitical conditions of each modernist wave and center goes
without saying.
The salience of modernism"s own valorization of the universal and the
incongruous, the common and the contradictory, gives pause to persistent critical
treatments of difference and similarity as an all-or-nothing proposition. Moreover,
given alternative theories of meaning and categorization, such as frame and
prototype semantics, it no longer follows that if modernism is interpreted as having
a set of different senses, then the label ceases to signify altogether; and, similarly
for the other extreme, the term modernism can have meaning without being
reduced to a xed checklist of common and distinctive features. Thus, both
modernism itself and contemporary theories of meaning and cognition suggest that
critics may want to question their own methodological dichotomies and develop
exible procedures for determining the semantic structure of heterogeneous
categories such as modernism.
Given the three levels of discussion sketched out above and their attendant
conceptual confusions, it should be clearer now why discussions of modernism
have so often gotten stuck in one of two methodological extremes. When they have
followed the tradition of classical genre theory, accounts of modernism have tended
to provide inventories of modernist traits, styles, and themes, and to ignore the
difculties which modern genre theory has had to confront; Jrgen Fohrmann
(1988) asks how... changes [can]... be explained when the model is constructed as
essentially classicatory and he expresses skepticism about working in terms of
identity in temporal contexts (italics in the original). Indeed, the classical notion of
genre, according to Michal Glowinski (1969) is anchored so deeply in the literary
consciousness as a model for literary classication that it has been accepted
without reservations, as if it were a gift of nature. When, however, critics have
followed the period model, they have tended to reduce modernism to periodical
divisions which, as Ren Wellek and Austin Warren ([1949] 1963) realized a long
time ago devoutly respect the date lines but are unjustied by any reason save
the practical need for some limit This most common approach has traditionally
denied modernism even the unsatisfactory treatment that it received under the
typological model of genre. It would often result in the assimilation of the discussion
of modernism into period studies of twentieth-century literature or the interbellum
generation rarely providing an accounto of the many ways in which modernism as
a literary trend does not fully correlate with the total literary production and
consumption of the period.
Both the positivism of the classical model of genre and the extreme
nominalism of the dateline approach have proven quite useless for the analysis of
modernism. Among studies that do not abandon the categorization project
altogether, though abdicating the classical model, the most exciting advances have
ocurred in a variety of apparently unrelated systems-theory approaches to
literature. From formalism, through text and story grammar, to French and German
socioliterary and evolutionary-system models, researches have developed
differentiated, dynamic methodologies for dealing with the central issues of literary
history. However, little of this research has focused directly on the literary trend,
which is still subsumed for the most part under either periodization or a more
historically sophisticated version of typological genre studies. Within the genre or
the period model, the emphasis seems to be, almost exclusively, on transitions or
borderlines between periods or genres rather than on the internal structure of the
category itself. This emphasis also holds beyond the systems approach, as is
evidenced by the global, trendy, and voluminous dispute over modernism versus
postmodernism. This dispute, which, by the way, the present study carefully
sidesteps, may well prove to be one of the last vestiges of bipolar thinking in
modern critical theory, lagging behind the radical disruptions of conceptual
dichotomies with which both the modernists and the postmodernist are strongly
associated.
As literary trends go, modernism is probably one of the most heterogeneous
and fuzzy categories around. No list of common traits or goals can apply to all or
most versions of modernism even if we restrict ourselves to poetry alone.
Furthermore, as I suggested above, contradictory features can be found, and in
many instances were even self-consciously embraced, within the same modernist
subtrend, poet, or individual work. In fact, the tendency of these-isms toward shism
has been described by Bradbury and McFarlane (1981) as perhaps the
movement"s only unifying trait. Yet, this negative formula does not really provide a
way out of the impasse either because modernism is not the only trend to embrace
oppositions, contradictions, and schism (divisin), even though it may do so in a
way that is perceived as more radical. In other words, while schism may turn out to
be a necessary condition for membership in the category modernism, it cannot
claim to be a sufcient one: two of the trends that typically ank modernism -
romanticism and postmodernism- have also been construed as embracing
oppositionality in various ways.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that modernism dees reduction to
simple common denominators, one study after another, after asserting the
complexity and heterogeneity of the various manifestations of modernism, proceeds
to attempt the impossibly positivist task of providing a denition of modernism; and
this usually means, explicitly or tacitly, an attempt at what logicians call an
intensional denition -namely, a list of necessary and sufcient conditions for all
modernist trends. (See, for example, Gorsky 1981; and Leonar, 1957). It is no
accedent that this denitional drive is usually shared by critics who still uphold the
classical genre paradigm of literary classication -what Tzvetan Todorov (in, for
example 1981) describes as the organic model. While it would be nice for a theory
of modernism to have the explanatory power that an intensional denition can
facilitate (by showing clearly what makes all the branches of modernism part of one
distinctive movement or trend), such an approach would force us to restrict severely
the extension of what we could term modernist. Many important works, authors,
and even entire groups that identied themselves as modernist and that are
commonly perceived to be subsumed under this admittedly tattered and oversized
umbrella would have to be kept out. There simply is no set of distinctive features
that can apply to all the subgroupings of modernism (from futurism to surrealism)
and separate them from all nonmodernist groupings (classicism, baroque,
romanticism, and so forth).
Let me offer here one brief example to illustrate this point. For quite some
time it has been a commonplace belife among scholars, from Harry Levin"s seminal
paper What Was Modernism? (in Levin, 1966) to Paul de Man"s famous article
Literary History and Literary Modernity (1971), that modernism was fundamentally
antihistoriacal. This propoistion is centainly true for Italian futurists, whose call to
burn down museums and libraries and destroy the Latin past is well known.
However, antihistoricism is certainly not typical of other branches of international
modernism, such as Anglo-American imagism and vorticism, with their emphasis on
classical allusion and historicist (though unchronological!) theories about tradition
and the individual talent. Similar exclusions result from critical attemps to formulate
the differentia specica of modernism on the basis of any number of thematic or
stylistic features, from an aestheticist focus on the poetic function to the crisis of
the subject and the explosion of form. What critics present as a set of distinctive
features is actually always only a selective modeling of modernism, determined by
the critic"s special purposes and perspectives.
If a list of necessary and sufcient conditions for all modernist trends proves
to be too positivistic a methodological requirement, the second common approach -
which attempts to dene the scope of modernism simply by enumerating and
describing the various -isms that are conventionally associated with it- strikes me
as too relativistic. Beginning with symbolism and impressionism as early or proto-
modernism, these descriptions move through futurism, expressionism, and imagism
as representatives of high modernism, leading up to surrealism and dada as late or
neo-modernism. This practice, common in various periodization-oriented
handbooks on modernism and typical of the dateline approach in general, is
implicitly based on the logical concept of an extensional denition. It does end up
including everything one would want to include but preserves little explanatory
power since it cannot tell us what makes all these -isms part of one heterogeneous
yet oddly distinctive international movement.
The alternative which I outline in this study aims to set up a less positivistic -
and, I hope, more rigorous- rudimentary framework for the discussion of
modernism. While I believe this framework may be appropriate -with certain
modications- for the study of literary trends in general, it is particularly well suited
to the special needs of the modernist poetic trends examined in this book: two or
three waves of Hebrew modernism in Europe and then in Israel; and the two waves
of Yiddish modernism in the United States and their counterparts in Eastern
Europe. I explore the conceptual structure of the category modernism, its limits and
internal organization, and I treat these marginal poetries as emblematic and
symptomatic of modernist poetry rather than as historical anecdotes. In the
process, I also examine and call into question the poetics and politics of canon
formation in general.
The informal model which I am proposing here has three components, based
on theories developed within several disciplines. These three components are
extensions and fusions of Ludwig Wittgenstein"s concept of family resemblance;
Eleanor Rosch"s, Charles Fillmore"s, and George Lakoff"s work on prototype and
frame semantics and theory of categorization; and Itamar Even-Zohar"s and
Benjamin Harshav"s work on literary dynamics.
Lakoff has pointed out in his important book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things, that Wittgenstein"s theory of family resemblance was the rst major crack
in the classical theory of categorization (1987). To the classical conception of a
category as having clear boundaries and being dened by a common checklist of
properties Wittgenstein offers a more pliable alternative. Although family
ressemblance is the illustration that became synonymous with his approach as a
whole, Wittgenstein uses other illustrations, each of which sheds a slightly different
light on the ways in which a category such as modernism may be constructed. Here
I summarize briey only three of his major examples. First is the example of family
resemblance proper. Members of one family share a variety of similar features:
eyes, gait, hair color, temperament. But -and this is the crucial point- there need be
no one set of features shared by all familly members. The second example
concerns the concept of game. There is no set of features which all games share.
Some are forms of group play, without any winning or losing, others involve luck,
still others -skill; some have rigid rules, others are free form; and so on. While some
share some properties, no one feature is common to all (Lakoff, 1987). The nal
illustration, which Wittgenstein develops the least, may nevertheless be the most
applicable to diachronic literary categories such as modernism. It has to be known
as the rope analogy, even though Wittgenstein (1971) actually talks about a thread:
In spining a thread we twist bre on bre. And the strength of the bre does not
reside in the fact that some one bre runs through its whole length, but in the
overlapping of many bres.
Within this framework, modernism can remain one clear category even
though no two subtrends within it may share the same features. Although I do
suspect that few other literary and linguistic categories answer to lists of necessary
and sufcient conditions, I am not claiming here that all such categories are
constructed on the model of family resemblance. It does not trivially follow that if
modernism is a fuzzy category in Zadeh"s sense (1965), it is therefore necessarily
structured on the principle of family resemblance. As Lawrence Barsalou (1983)
has pointed out, ad hoc categories, constructed solely to achieve a certain goal, do
not even show family resemblance among their members.
While the model of family resemblance (in its three different formulations)
aptly describes modernism as a category with blurred edges (Wittgenstein) in
itself it cannot adequately account for the way the center of the category is
conceived. In other words, we need to understand not only why we are sometimes
uncertain whether a work is modernist, antimodernist, or postmodernist (the #blurred
edges) but also why particular works, poets, or positions have come to be
conceived as better examples of modernism than others. In their treatment of these
questions recent contributions to prototype theory of categorization and cognitive
semantics may prove useful. Briey, a prototype, in the technical sense developed
by Rosch and others, is a member of a category (for example, birds) which is
considered a best example of that category (sparrow, swallow, or robin, but not
turkey, penguin or chicken). Note that even though this example uses objects as
category members, the prototype model is neutral with respect to the ontological
status of its constituents. It is therefore possible for me to argue, in Chapter 2,
against any essentialist view of modernism and, at the same time, to advocate the
prototype model as a functional construct which allows people to zero in on relevant
segments of a heteregenous category.
The question whether a member of a category is mor or less prototypical of
that category marks a centrality gradience for the various members. In the example
above, sparrow has a higher centrality gradience within the category bird than
penguin does, although both are members of the class. When, as Wittgenstein has
already pointed out, the category itself has unclear boundaries (unlike birds but like
red or tall things), we can distinguis not just a centrality gradience within the
category but also a membership gradience markin degrees of membership in that
category (Lakoff, 1987). In other words, something either is or is not a bird (no
membership gradience), sut something can be kind of red and kind of not, tallish
rather than tall. It seems to me that modernism presents so many difculties for the
literary theorist partly because in its different constructions it involves both centrality
and membership gradience. Thus, a poet or a work may be more or less modernist,
or both modernist and anti- or posmodernist (in different aspects of his or her
poetics). Modernism, furthermore, is a category with diachronically and culturally
fuzzy foundaries, where best examples or prototypes of each subtrend are often
quite atypical. And yet they tend to (misleadingly and at times subversively) stand
for the whole.
A literary prototype, in my view,
LITERARY THEORY
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the
distinction between literary and other sorts of texts is of paramount
importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various
forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and
feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have
applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of texts, including
lm, non-ction, historical writing, and even cultural events.
Crucial distinctions among theories of literary interpretation
- intentionality (author)
- what is literature?
- what about the reader?
Most common schools of literary theory
Aestheticism - often associated with Romanticism, a philosophy dening aesthetic
value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary
critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values land those like
Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art!s sake.
Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
Americand pragmatism and other American approaches
Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
Cognitive Cultural Studies - applies research in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive
evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and philosophy of mind to the study of
literature and culture.
Frederick Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch,
David Herman, Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Ellen
Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule, Lisa Zunshine
Cultural Studies - emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John
Guillory
Darwinian literary studies - situates literature in the context of evolution and
natural selection
Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms
and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning
undecidable
Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri
Spivak, Avital Ronell
Gender (feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender
relations.
Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hlne Cixous, Elaine Showalter
Formalism - a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do
with structural purposes of a particular text
German Hermeneutics and philology
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach,
Ren Wellek
Marxism literary criticism - which emphasizes themes of class conict
Georg Lukcs, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton Fredric
Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin
Modernism
New Criticism - looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at
the goals of the author or biographical issues
W. K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn
Warren
New Historicism - which examines the work through its historical context and
seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
Postcolonialism - focuses on the inuences of colonialism in literature, especially
regarding the historical conict resulting from the explotation of less developed
countries and indigenous peoples by Western nations
Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
Postmodernism - criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often
with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari and Maurice
Blanchot
Post-structuralism - a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as
deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond structuralism"s aspirations to create a
rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other
discursive and aesthetic formations
Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
Psychoanalysis - explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in
literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Zizek, Viktor Tausk
Queer theory - examines questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and
sexuality in literature
Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault
Reader-response criticism - focuses upon the active response of the reader to a
text.
Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
Russian formalism
Victor Shlovsky, Vladimir Propp
Structuralism and semiotics - examines the universal underlying structures in a
text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any
structures
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Roland Barthes,
Mikhail Bakhtin, Yurii Lotman, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of
folklore
Eco-criticism - explores cultural connections and human relationships to the
natural world
Other theorists: Rober Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler,
Kenneth Burke, Paul Bnichou, Barbara Johnson, Blanca de Lizaur, Dr. Seuss
The concept of emergence has been applied to the theory of literature and art,
history, linguistics, cognitive sciences, etc. by the teachings of Jean-Marie Grassin
et the University of Limoges
MODERNISM WIKI
Modernism, here limited to aesthetic modernism (see also modernity), describes a
series of sometimes radical movements in art, architecture, photography, music,
literature, and the applied arts which emerged in the three decades before 1914.
Modernism has philosophical antecedents that can be traced to the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment but is rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of
the ninteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Modernism encompasses the works of artists who rebelled against nineteenth-
century academic and historicist traditions, believing that earlier aesthetic
conventions were becoming outdated. Modernist movements, such as Cubism in
the arts, Atonality in music, and Symbolism in poetry, directly and indirectly
explored the new economic, social, and political aspects of an emerging fully
industrialized world.
Modernist art reected the deracinated experience of life in which tradition,
community, collective identity, and faith were eroding. In the twentieth century, the
mechanized mas slaughter of the First World War was a watershed event that
fueled modernist distrust of reason and further sundered complacent views of the
steady moral improvement of human society and belief in progress.
Initially avant guarde movement conned to an intellectual minority, modernism
achieved mainstream acceptance and exerted a pervasive inuence on culture and
popular entertainment in the course of the twentieth century. The modernist view of
truth as a subjective, often intuitive claim has contributed to the elevation of
individualism and moral relativism as guiding personal ethics and contributed to far-
reaching transformations regarding the spiritual signicance of human life.
Philosophical and historical background
From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently
progressive and that progress was always good came under increasing attack.
Arguments arose that not merely were the values of the artist and those of society
different, but that society was antithetical to progress, and could not move forward
in its present form. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism.
Two of the mos disruptive thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin
and, in political science, Karl Marx. Darwin"s theory of evolution by natural selection
undermined religious certainty and the sense of human uniqueness, which had far-
reaching implications in the arts. The notion that human beings were driven by the
same impulses as lower animals proved to be difcult to reconcile with the idea of
an ennobling spirituality. Marx seemed to present a political version of the same
proposition: that problems with the economic order were not transient, the result of
specic wrong doers or temporary conditions, but were fundamentally
contradictions within the capitalist system. Naturalism in the visual arts and
literature reected a largely materialist notion of human life and society.
Separately, in the arts and letters, two ideas originating in France would have
particular impact. The rst was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially
focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plain air). Impressionist
paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light,
itself. The second school was Symbolism, marked by a belief that language is
expressly symbolic in its nature, and that poetry and writting should follow
connections that the sheer sound and texture of the words create.
At the same time, social, political, religious, and economic forces were at work that
would become the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. In
religion, biblical scholars argued that the biblical writers were not conveying God"s
literal word, but were strongly inuenced by their times, societies, and audiences.
Historians and archaelogists further challenged the factual basis of the Bible and
differentiated an evidence-based perspective of the past with the worldview of the
ancients, including the biblical authors, who uncritically accepted oral and
mythological traditions.
Chief among the physical inuences on the development of modernism was steam-
powered industrialization, which produced buildings that combined art and
engineering, and in new industrial materials such as cast iron to produce bridges
and skyscrapers -or the Eiffel Tower, which broke all previous limitations on how tall
man-made objects could be- resulting in a radically different urban environment.
The possibilities created by scientic examination of subjects, together with the
miseries of industrial urban life, brought changes that would shake a European
civilization, which had previously regarded itself as having a continuous and
progressive line of development from the Renaissance. With the telegraph offering
instantaneous communication at a distance, the experience of time itself was
altered.
The beradth of the changes can be sensed in how many modern disciplines are
described as being classical in their pre-twentieth-century form, including physics,
economics, and arts such as ballet, theater, or architecture.
The beginning of Modernism: 1890-1910
The roots of Modernism emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century; and
rather locally, in France, with Charles Baudelaire in literature and Edouard Manet
in painting, and perhaps with Gustave Flaubert, too, in prose ction. (It was a while
later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture). The
avant-garde was what Modernism was called at rst, and the term remained to
describe movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some
aspect of tradition or the status quo.
In the 1890s, a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push
aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of
current techniques. The growing movement in art paralleled such developments as
Einstein"s Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of the internal
combustion engine and industrialization; and the increased role of the social
sciences in public policy. It was argued that, if the nature of reality itself was in
question, and if restrictions which had been in place around human activity were
falling, then art, too, would have to radically change. Thus, in the rst 15 years of
the twentieth century a series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with
traditional means of organizaing literature, painting, and music.
Sigmund Freud offered a view of subjective states involving an unconsciious mind
full of primal impulses and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictionws, a view that
Carl Jung would combine with a belief in natural essence to stipulate a collective
unconscious that was full of basic typologies that the conscious mind fought or
embraced. Jung"s view suggested that people"s impulses towards breaking social
norms were not the product of childishness or ignorance, but were instead essential
to the nature of the human animal, the ideas of Darwin having already introduced
the concept of man, the animal to the public mind.
Friedrich Nietzsche championed a philosophy in which forces, specically the Will
to power, were more important than facts or things. Similarly, the writings of Henri
Bergson championed the vital life force over static conceptions of reality. What
united all these writers was a romantic distrust of the Victorian positivism and
certainty. Instead the championed or, in the case of Freud, attempted to explain,
irrational thought processes through the lens of rationality and holism. This was
connected with the century-long trend to thinking in terms of holistic ideas, which
would include an increased in the occult, and the vital force.
Out of this collision of ideals derived from Romanticism, and an attempt to nd a
way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the rst wave
of works, which, while their authors considered them extensions of existing trends
in art, broke the implicit contract that artists were the interpreters and
representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These modernist landmarks
include Arnold Schoenberg"s atonal ending to his Second String Quartet in 1908;
the Abstract-Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and
culminating with the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich; and the rise of
Cubism from the work of Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908.
Powerfully inuential in this wave of modernity were the theories of Freud, who
argued that the mind had a basic and fundamental structure, and that subjective
experience was based on the interplay of the parts of the mind. All subjective reality
was based, according to Freud"s ideas, on the play of basic drives and instincts,
through which the outside world was perceived. This represented a break with the
past, in that previously it was believed that external and absolute reality could
impress itself on an individual, as, for example, in John Locke"s tabula rasa
doctrine.
This wave of the Modern Movement broke with the past in the rst decade of the
twentieth century, and tried to redene various art forms in a radical manner.
Leading lights within the literary wing of this trend included Basil Bunting, Jean
Cocteau, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Max Jacob, James
Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Federico Garca Lorca, Marianne Moore,
Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf,
Yeats among others.
Composers such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, George Antheil represent
Modernism in music. Artists such as Gustav Klimt, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian,
and the movements Les Fauves, Cubism and the Surrealists represent various
strains of Modernism in the visual arts, while architects and designers such as
LeCorbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe bought modernist ideas into
everyday urban life. Several gures outside of artistic Modernism were inuenced
by artistic ideas; for example, JOhn Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and
other writers of the Bloomsbury group.
The explosion of Modernism: 1910-1930
On the eve of World War I a growing tension and unease with the social order, seen
in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the agitation of radical parties, also
manifested itself in artistic works in every medium which radically simplied or
rejected previous practice. In 1913 fame Russian composer Igor Stravinsky,
working for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed Rite of Spring for
ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky that depicted human sacrice, and young
painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their
rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings -a step that
none of the Impressionists, not even Czanne, had taken.
These developments began to givbe a new meaning to what was termed
Modernism. It embraced disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple Realism in
literature and art, and rejecting or dramalically altering tonality in music. This set
Modernists apart from nineteenth-century artists, who had tended to believe in
progress. Writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and musicians like
Brahms were not #radicals" or #Bohemians", but were instead valued members of
society who produced art that added to society, even if it was, at times, critiquing
less desirable aspects of it. Modernism, while it was still #progressive" increasingly
saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress,
and therefore the artist was recast as revolutionary, overthrowing rather than
enlightrening.
Futurism exemplies this terd. In 1909, F. T. Marinetti"s rst manifesto was
published in the Parisian newspaper LeFigaro; soon afterward a group of painters
(Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Luigi Russolo, and Gino
Severini) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto. Modeled on the famous Communist
Manifesto of the previous century, such manifestos put forward ideas that were
meant to provoke and to gather followers. Strongly inuenced by Bergson and
Nietzsche, Futurism was part of the general trend of Modernist rationbalization of
disruption.
Modernist philosophy and art were still viewed as being only a part of the larger
social movement. Artists such as Klimt and Czanne, and composers such as
Mahler and Richard Strauss were the terrible moderns -other radical avant-
garde artists were more heard of than heard. Polemics in favor of geometric or
purely abstract painting were largely conned to #little magazines" (like The New
Age in the United Kingdom) with tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and
pessimis were controversial but were not seen as representative of the Edwardian
mainstream, which was more inclined towards a Victorian faith in progress and
liberal optimism.
However, World War I and its subsequent events were the cataclysmic upheavals
that late nineteenth-century artists such as Brahms had worried about, and avant-
gardists had anticipated. First, the failure of the previous status quo seemed self-
evident to a generation that had seen millions die ghting over scraps of earth- prior
to the war, it had been argued that no one would ght such a war, since the cost
was too high. Second, the birth of a machine age changed the conditions of life -
machine warfare became a touchstone of the ultimate reality. Finally, the immensely
traumatic nature of the experience dashed basic assumptions: Realism seemed to
be bankrupt when faced with the fundamentally fantastic nature of trench warfare,
as exemplied by books such as Erich Maria Remarque"s All Quiet on the Western
Front. Moreover, the view that mankind was making slow and steady moral
progress came to seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter of the
Great War. The First World War at one fused the harshly mechanical geometric
rationality of technology with the nightmarish irrationality of myth.
Thus in the 1920s, Modernism, which had been a minority taste before the war,
came to dene the age. Modernism was seen in Europe in such critical movements
as Dada, and then in constructive movements such as Surrealism, as well as in
smaller movements of the Bloomsbury Group. Each of these modernisms, as
some observers labeled them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new
results. Again, Impressionism was a precursor: breaking with the idea of national
schools, artist and writers and adopting ideas of internaitonal movements.
Surrealism, Cubism, Bauhaus, and Leninism are all examples of movements that
rapidly found adherents far beyond their original geographic base.
Exhibitions, theater, cinema, books, and buildings all served to cement in the public
view the perception that the world was changing. Hostile reaction often followed, as
paintings were spat upon, riots organized at the opening of works, and political
gures denounced modernism as unwholesome and immoral. At the same time, the
1920s were known as the Jazz Age, and the public showed considerable
enthusiasm for cars, air travel, the telephone, and other technological advances.
By 1930, Modernism had won a place in the stablishment, including the political
and artistic establishment, although by this time Modernism itself had changed.
There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 Modernism, which
emphasized its continuity with a past while rebelling against it, and against the
aspects of that period which seemed excessively mannered, irrational and
emotional. The pos-World-War period, at rst, veered either to systematization or
nihilism and had, as perhaps its most paradigmatic movement, Dada.
While some writers attacked the madness of the new Modernism, others described
it as soulless and mechanistic. Among Modernists there were disputes about the
importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in
society. Modernism comprised a series of sometimes-contradictory responses to
the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles
from it. In the end science and scientic rationality, often taking models from the
eighteenth century Enlightenment, came to be seen as the source of logic and
stability, while the basic primitive sexual and unconscious drives, along with the
seemingly counter-intuitive workings of the new machine age, were taken as the
basic emotional substance. From these two poles, no matter how seemingly
incompatible, Modernists began to fashion a complete worldview that could
encompass every aspect of life, and express everything from a scream to a
chuckle.
Modernism!s second generation: 1930-1945
By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture. With the increasing urbanization
of populations, it was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with
the challenges of the day. As Modernism gained traction in academia, it was
developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. Popular culture, which
was not derived from high culture but instead from its own realities (particularly mas
production), fueled much Modernist innovation. Modern ideas in art appeared in
commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo being an early
example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.
Another strong inuence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/
irrationalist aspect of pre-World-War-One Modernism, which for many Modernists
precluded any attachment to merely political solutions, and the Neo-Classicism of
the 1920s, as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky -which
rejected popular solutions to modern problems- the rise of Fascism, the Great
Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalize a generation. The Russian
Revolution was the catalyst ot fuse political radicalism and utopianism with more
expressly political stances. Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, Andre Breton, Louis
Aragon, and the philosophers Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the
most famous exemplars of this Modernist Marxism. This move to the radical left,
however, was neither universal nor denitional, and there is no particular reason to
associate Modernism, fundamentally, with #the left". Modernists explicitly of the
right include Wyndham Lewis, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
and the Dutch author Menno ter Braak, and many others.
One of the most visible changes of this period is the adoption of objects of modern
production into daily life. Electricity, the telephone, the automobile -and the need to
work with them, repair them, and live with them- created the need for new forms of
manners, and social life. The kind of disruptive moment which only a few knew in
the 1880s became a common occurrence as telecommunications became
increasingly ubiquitous. The speed of communication reserved for the stockbrokers
of 1890 became part of family life.
Modernism in social organization would produce inquiries into sex and the basic
bondings of the nuclear, rather than extended, familly. The Freudian tensions of
infantile sexuality and the raising of children became more intense, because people
had fewer children, and therefore a more specic relationship with each child: the
theoretical, again, became the practical and even popular. In the arts as well as
popular culture sexuality lost its mooring to marriage and family and increasingly
came to be regarded as a self-oriented biological imperative. Explicit depictions of
sex in literature, theater, lm, and other visual arts often denigrated traditional or
religious conceptions of sex and the implicit relationship between sex and
procreation.
Modernism!s goals
Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically
new ways of making art. Arnold Schoenberg believed that by rejecting traditional
tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music which had
guided music-making for at least a century and a half, and perhaps longer, he had
discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based on the use of 12-note
rows. This led to what is known as serial music by the post-war period.
Abstract artists, taking as their examples from the Impressionists, as well as Paul
Czanne and Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that color and shape
formed the essential characteristics of art, not the depiction of the natural world.
Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redening
art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered
much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this
aspect of Modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the
depiction of material objects they helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist
phase of development.
Other Modernists, especially those involved in design, had more pragmatic views.
Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old
styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should functions as
machines for living in, analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for travelling
in. Just as cars has replaced the horse, so Modernist design reject the old styles
and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or from the Middle Ages. Following
this machine aesthetic, Modernist designers ty pically reject decorative motifs in
design, preferring to emphasize the materias used and pure geometrical forms. The
skyscraper, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe"s Seagram Building in New York
(1956-1958), became the archetypal Modernist building.
Modernist design of houses and furniture also typically emphasized simplicity and
clarity of form, open-plan interiors and the absence of clutter. Modernism reversed
the nineteenth-century relationship of public and private: in the nineteenth century,
public buildings were horizontally expansive for a variety of technical reasons, and
private buildings emphasized verticality -to t more private space on more and
more limited land.
In other arts, such pragmatic considerations were less important. In literature and
visual art, some Modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make
their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their
own preconceptions. This aspect of Modernism has often seemed a reaction to
consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in teh late-
nineteenth century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be
marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, High Modernists rejected
such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking.
Many Modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, rejected
mass popular culture from a conservative position. Indeed, one could argue that
Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded
the majority of the population.
Modernism!s reception and controversy
The most controversial aspect of the Modern movement was, and remains, its
rejection of tradition. Modernism"s stress on freedom of expression,
experimentation, radicalism and primitivism disregards conventional expetations. In
many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and
unpredictable effects: the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in
Surrealism, the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in Modernist music, and
depictions of nonconventional sexuality in many media. In the literature Modernism
often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the
creation of poetry that deed clear interpretation.
The Soviet Communist government rejected Modernism after the rise of Stalin on
the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed Futurism and
Constructivism; and the Nazi government in Germany deemed it narcissistic and
nonsensical, as well as Jewish and Negro. The Nazis exhibited Modernist
paintings alongside works by the mentaly ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate art.
Modernism ourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that
its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, High Modernism began
to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In
Britain, a youth sub-culture even called itself moderns, though usually shortened
to Mods, following such representative music group as The Who, The Kinks. Bob
Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd combined popular musical traditions with
Modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from Eliot, Apollinaire, and other.
The Beatles developed along similar lines, creating various Modernist musical
effects on several albums, while musicians such as Frank Zappa, Syd Barret and
Captain Beefheart proved even more experimental. Modernist devices also started
to appear in popular cinema, and later on in music videos. Modernists design also
began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplied and stylized forms
became popular, often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future.
This merging of consumer and high versions of Modernist culture led to a radical
transformation of the meaning of modernism. Firstly, it implied that a movement
based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Secondly, it
demonstrated that the distinction between elite Modernist and mass-consumerist
culture had lost its precision. Some writers declared that Modernism had become
so institutionalized that it was now post avant-garde indicating that it had lost its
power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformations as
a beginning of the phase that became know as Post-Modernism. For others, such
as, for example, art critic Robert Hughes, Post-Modernism represents an extension
of Modernism.
Anti-Modern or counter-Moderns movements seek to emphasize holism,
connection, and spirituality as being remedies or antidotes to Modernsim. Such
movements see Modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to the failure to
see systemic and emergent effects. Many Modernists came to this viewpoint; for
example, Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul
H. Ray and Serry Ruth Anderson, in The Cultural Creatives, Fredrick Turner in A
Culture of Hope, and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic
idea of Modernism itself -that individual creative expression should conform to the
realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make
everyday life more emotionally acceptable.
In some elds, the effects of Modernism have remained stronger and more
persistent than in others. Visual art has made the most complete break with its
past. Most major capital cities have museums devoted to Modern Art as distinct
from post-Renaissance art (circa 1400 to circa 1900). Examples included the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the centre
Pompidou in Paris. These galeries make no distinction between Modernist and
Post-Modernist phases, seeing both as developments within Modern Art.
THE ROOTS OF MODERNISM
The modernist thinking which emerged in the Renaissance began to take shape as
a larger pattern of thought in the 18th century. Mention may be made rst of the so-
called Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns a dispute that dominated European
intellectual life throughout the century. The crux was the issue of whether Moderns
(i.e. those living in 18th century) were now morally and artistically superior to the
Ancients (i.e. the Greeks and Romans). The argument introduces an important
dichotomy that is to remain fundamental to the modernist question. In it may be
recognized the division between conservative forces, who tended to support the
argumento for the Ancients, and the more progressive forces who sided with the
Moderns.
In the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment saw the intellectual maturation of the
humanist belief in reason as the supreme guiding principle in the affairs of
humankind. Through reason the mind achieved enlightenment, and for the
enlightened mind, freed from the restraints of superstition and ignorance, a whole
new exciting world opened up.
The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement for which the most immediate
stimulus was the so-called Scientic Revolution of the 17th and early 18th centuries
when men like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, through the application of reason
to the study of Nature (i.e. our world and the heavens) has made spectacular
scientic discoveries in which were revealed various scientic truths.
These truths more often than not ew in the face of conventional beliefs, especially
those held by the Church. For example, contrary to what the Church had
maintained for centuries, the truth was that the Earth revolved around the sun.
The idea that truth could be discovered through the application of reason was
tremendously exciting.
The open-minded 18th century thinker believed that virtually everything could be
submitted to reason: tradition, customs, history, even art. But, more than this, it was
felt that the truth revealed thereby could be applied in the political and social
spheres to correct problems and improve the political and social condition of
humankind.
The kind of thinking quickly gave rise to the exciting possibility of creating a new
and better society.
The truth discovered through reason would free people from the shackless of
corrupt institutions such as the Church and the monarchy whose misguided
traditional thinking and old ideas had kept people subjugated in ignorace and
superstition. The belief was that the truth shall set you free. The concept of
freedom became central to the vision of a new society. Through truth and freedom,
the world would be made into a better place.
Progressive 18-century thinkers believed that the lot of humankind would be greatly
improved through the process of enlightenment, from being shown the truth. With
reason and truth in hand, the individual would no longer be at the mercy of religious
and secular authorities which had constructed their own truths and manipulated
them to their own self-serving ends. At the root of this thinking is the belief in the
perfectibility of humankind.
The vision that began to take shape in the 18th century was of a new world, a
better world. In 1763, Jean Jacques Rousseau proposed a new society for the
individual in his Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract. Rousseau declared
the right of liberty and equality for all men.
Such declarations were found not only in books. In the 18th century, two major
attempts were made to put these ideas into practice. Such ideas, of course, were
not popular with conservative and traditional elements, and their resistance had to
be overcome in both cases through bloody revolution.
The rst great experiment in creating a new and better society was undertaken in
what was literally the new world and the new ideals were rst expressed in the
Declaration of Independence of the newly founded United States. It is
Enlightenment thinking that informs such phrases as we hold these truths to be
self-evident and which underpins the notion that all men are created equal. Its
worldly character is clearly reected in its stated concern for man"s happiness and
welfare in this lifetime, a new notion that runs counter to the Christian focus on the
alterlife.
The Birth of Modernism by Leon Surette
In a sense, the history of modernism is still dark and hidden, even now as we
abjure it. Modernism presented itself as the end, the conclusion -even the
fullment- of history and therefore as the end of historical writing. It would be
difcult to nd any modernist atly expressing such a claim, but the claim is implicit
in the echt modernist principle of the autonomy of the work of art, which has been
deployed within literary scholarship to liberate the work of art from the tyranny of
authorial intention and hence from the cult of personality.
The principle of aesthetic autonomy is even more rmly attached to the central
tenet of philosophical modernism, namely, the context-independence of knowledge.
Context-free knowledge is relieved of the burden of historical contingency but
without at the same time being placed in some metaphysical or ideal realm beyond
history. It is, in a word, positive knowledge, as opposed to historical, relative, or
subjective knowledge. Such knowledge has no history, no past, and no future but
enjoys an absolute status that Richard Rorty has dubbed incorrigibility
Although the term #modern" has been current in English with its present meaning
since at least the seventeenth century, no school of philosophy or artistic movement
took the term as a label before this century. To be modern is not just to be
postclassical, still less just to be up to date. To be modern in the modernist sense
is to have transcended history, to have climbed out of history into an unmediated,
incorrigible realm of knowledge, and in that sense to have fullled history.
Postmodernism -whatever this volatile force might eventually turn out to be- clearly
has a common element the rejection of the modernist fantasy of decontextualized
or positive knowledge and the adoption of a relativism or perspectivism that is most
commonly traced to Friedrich Nietzsche. The modernists have become adopted
as the self-assured, oppressive fathers of the postmodernists, just as the Victorians
were for the modernists themselves.
This study is not a postmodern critique of modernism. That is, it is not my intention
to unveil the errors, self-deceptions, and vices of those geniuses whose impossibly
great achievements oppress us all. Most particularly, it is not my purpose to expose
the folly of all claims to positive, context-free knowledge. While I share some of
postmodernism"s sense of the hubris of modernism"s fantastic claims to hae
transcended historical contingency, I do not share its conviction that to expose the
excesses of modernist positivism will reveal a highroad to wisdom. And although I
also share the postmodernists conviction that all knowledge is contingent and
relative, I cannot share their joy in the consequent liberation from the risk of
oppressive attributions of error.
Nietzsche"s oft-cited remark, nothing is true, everything is permitted is an
expression of the liberating effect of cognitive relativism that should give us pause.
Nor is the following discussion a New Historicist exposure of the unrecognized and
self-serving motivations endemic in the culture and society that produced them and
their capitalist, absolutist, or logocentric prejudices. Clearly, such forces must have
played on modernist artists as they do on all of us, and they may well account for
modernist style and theme as well as for the degree of success that modernism
achieved in competition with other styles and attitudes. I have no quarrel with such
Foucauldian or neo-Marxist analyses of cultural phenomena, but I am not currently
engaged in such an enterprise.
llegint a p. 7 introduction
There have been frequent suggestions in scholarly writing over the years that
modernists other than Yeats were infected by occult inuences. Occult inuence
on D. H. Lawrence is well documented and widely discussed (see Whelan 1988).
The attention Joyce gave to occult gures -especially George Russell- and the
occurrence of occult ideas in Ulysses have prompted speculation about his interest
in the occult (see Jenkins 1969; B. K. Scott 1978; Tedlock 1960; Tindall 1954).
Lindall Gordon has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that Eliot had a strong
interest in mystical literature, and it has been suggested that he was also drawn to
the occult (Materer 1988; Senior 1959; Surette 1988). Pound, it is now becoming
increasingly clear, shared Yeats"s interest in occult topics from early in his career to
the very end (Surette 1979; Materer 1984; Materer and French 1982; Logenbach
1988; Tryphonopoulos 1989) Joseph Conrad, too, echoes occult themes and topoi
(Henricksen 1978). Less controversially, the inuence of the occult on such
premoderns as Edagar Allan Poe and the Symbolistes is well recognized by French
scholarship (see Viatte [1928] 1965; Amadou and Kanters 1955). (...) Even Wallace
Stevens, the consumate sceptic, has been found to indulge in Hermetic ideas
(Woodman 1983).
The evident motive for its avoidance... Much of the literature exposing
occultism in canonized authors is of poor quality or on the margins of scholarship,
or is written by individuals whose enthusiasm for the topic often outreaches their
caution. At the same time, even with an author whose occult interest were as public
and overt as Yeats"s were, the scholarly community considers it poor from to dwell
upon such an aberration. Like Pound"s fascism, Yeats"s occultism has been a
subject not to be raised in polite company. To do so could only serve to discredit an
accredited genius of the modern age and give aid and comfort to the enemies of
the modernist enlightenment.
Cases in point here are Robert Burns and Rudyard Kipling, for whom there is good
evidence that both were Freemasons, and yet there are no clear manifestitions of
peculiarly masonic ideas in their poetry. (In the case of Masonry, there is geat
difculty in discovering what might count as a specically masonic idea.) In other
cases -such as Joseph Conrad and Wallace Stevens- there are ample indications
of occultlike themes and topoi in the ction or poetry, but there is not such good
evidence of contact between the authors and occult sources.
Clearly, to identify some belief or practice as occult is to discriminate it from
more acceptable beliefs and practices related to the transcendental. the occult
may share many beliefs and practices with Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus,
or Jews, but it remains distinct from institutionalized religions. One way of
formulating the relationship is to consider the occult as a pathological form of
religion like devil worship, voodoo, and witchcraft.
Occultism seems to be an exclusively Western phenomenon. The dominant
Western religious culture has long been monotheistic and doctrinally intolerant.
These features are shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in all their varieties.
The occult is often not theistic at all, and even when it is monotheistic it retains all
sorts of supernatural agencies in addition to God. These are features it shares with
Indian religious culture and all varieties of shamanism. An equally fundamental
feature of Western religions is a dualistic ontology -thas is, the postulation of a
spiritual and a material real. The occult is almos invariably monist, assuming a
single realm modulating from material or hylic thickness through mental or
psychic attenuation to spiritual or noumenal reality. Because of this monism,
the modern occult thought it had found an ally in materialist science!s
discovery of radiaton and th nonparticulate nature of quantum physics. Denis
Saurat"s is right to remind us that the occultist creates strange and monstrous
alliances of these various beliefs and doctrines -many of them known only in
fragments, and all of them subtle or obscure even when known.
Occultism, then, can reasonably be regarded as metaphysical speculation -
speculation about the nature of ultimate reality and of our relation to it. Typically
nontheistic and monistic, it is also typically mystical. All varieties of occultism of
which I am aware assume the possibility of direct contact between living human
beings and ultimate reality, the noumenal, the transcendent, or the divine. Contact
with ultimate reality can be achieved either through a spontaneous mystical
revelation or through some ritual initiation such as those of the mysteries at Eleusis.
The possibility of illumination through initiation distinguishes the occult from
mysticism and connects it to secret societies such as Masonry.
The touchstone for the occult is neither mysticism (which it shares with most
world religions) nor, of course, a belief in the divine (which it shares with all
religions) but rather a believe that throughout human history certain
individuals have had intimate contact with the divine and from this contact
have gained special knowledge (wisdom or gnosis) which they have preserved
in a for comprehensible only to the already enlightened and which is passed on in
texts whose esoteric interpretation is preserved by secret societies.
This was a part of the doctrine taught in the mysteries, whose divulgence to the
profane was forbidden. According to this doctrine of which sufciently strong traces
can be recognized in Plato, the Will exerting itself by faith, was abel to
subjugate Necessity itself, to command Nature and to work miracles. This
transformation is quite different from that of the ordinary mystic, which is moral and
emotional rather than cognitive and psychic. It also distinguishes the occult from
orthodox Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, none of which allow for a gradation of
human souls between mortals and God.
Palingenesis backward birth or rebirth. Metamorphoses in Circe"s palace
(Odyssey), Ovid"s Metamorphoses, and The Golden Ass of Apuleius can all be read
as accounts of palingenesis. An equally ubiquitous representation of palingenesis is
the hieros gamos, or divine marriage. Sexual copulation is literally a backward
birth for the male partner who synecdochically re-enters the womb of his partner.
The sexual motif in Yeats, Pound, and Lawrence is, I belive, best understood under
the rubric of palingenesis.
The topos of descent and death has been far more popular in the modern world
than that of metamorphosis, which was favoured in the ancient world. The motif of
descent and death is prominent in the Grail literature adopted by Tennyson,
Wagner, and Eliot. The descent invariably involves a journey -either to the mouth of
the underworld, as in Odysseus"s voyage from Circe"s palace to the River of
Ocean, or a journey within the underworld itself, as in Dante"s dream vision.
Obviously the descent has more resonance for a Christian culture than
metamorphosis. Christ"s passion, death, and resurrection ts the motif of descent
perfectly and is self-consciously mimicked in the Grail literature. D.H. Lawrence"s
Women in Love enacts several descents involving Gerald Crich, a coal mine owner,
and the Persephone gure, Gudrun Brangwen.
G.R.S. Mead describes the topoi of metamorphosis and descent quite clearly and
succinctly in the Quest (just two numbers after he had published Pound"s
Psychology and Troubadours). He observes that mind is spiritual intuitive mind,
the human counterpart of that Mind or Divine Monad in which we are to be dowsed
or baptised, and explains that among the higher Hellenistic religions gnosis was
operated by means of an essential transformation or transmutation leading to a
transguration. There was rst of all a #passing out through oneself", a mystical
death, and nally a rebirth into the nature of a spiritual being or of a god This
illumination is a return to God symbolised indifferently as a path, a voyage, or the
ascent of a mountain.
The relation between modernism and the occult is complex and intricate, but one
line of liation is clearly the importance of myth as both stylistic resource -as in the
mythical method- and as a source of inspiration and thematic enrichment.
Early studies -for example, Edmund Wilson"s Axel!s Castle (1933) and Mario Praz"s
The Romantic Agony (1948)- did stress the continuity between the overly occult
French symbolist movement and modernism, later studies tended to be almos
entirely explicatory. Examples of the latter are Lillian Feder 1971, Daniel Hoffman
1967, M.B. Quinn 1955, and Philip Wheelwright 1954. This shift from accounts of
liation of modernist mythopoiea with earlier varieties was no doubt prompted by
the New Critical doctrine of textual autonomy and New Critical hostility towards
scholarship itself -often dismissed as source hunting.
Mythology is not the only subject of occult speculation. The occult is equally
concerned with history. Occultists typically seek to establish a line of transmission
of the gnosis from high antiquity, through the classical and medieval worlds, to the
present. This line of descent is the secret tradition. Not like the dogmas of religion,
revelations that may be mysteries but are not secrets. The occult theme of the
secret tradition coincides and overlaps with broader trends in modern literary
and aesthetic culture: historicism, speculative philosophy of history, and
metahistory.
Historicism is ineluctably linked to Popper"s assault in The Poverty of
Historicism on the claim that large-scale historical movements can be brought
under general laws such as those governing physical events, a claim that he
attributes to the social sciences generally. However, the hermeneutical historical
relativism of Schleiermacher and Dilthey is also often called historicism, even
though it isolates the human sciences from the natural sciences precisely on
Popper"s point that no universal laws govern human behaviour. New Historicists
in literary studies appear to have adopted the term from Schleiermacher and
Dilthey, but they draw their inspiration more proximately from Michel Foucault.
Foucault"s theory is virtually the inverse of the German hermeneutical historicists in
that -under Hegelian and Nietzschean inspiration- he assumes that Weltanschau-
ungen largely determine historical event.
The term metahistory has recently been given renewed currency by Hayden
White (in his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(1973). For White, metahistory means the deep structure of the historical
imagination which formulates and guides the narratives which we call history. My
use of the term is divergent from White"s and applies to the structure of the past
rather than to the structure of accounts of the past. In this I follow the older usage
described by George Mosse in his introduction to Houston Stewar Chamberlain"s
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1968). Metahistory designates for him a
synthesis of all historical events and trends of the past -and on the basis of such a
truly cosmic construct... forms dogmatic conclusions about the future of man and
his world. Mosse"s sense makes metahistory much closer to Hegelian philosophy
of history than is the case with White. However, it is distinct, for metahistorian"s
preoccupation is to demonstrate the pattern displayed in recorded historical event -
a concern rather beneath the notice of Hegelian philosophers of history.
Nothing is more characteristic of post-Renaissance thinking than the notion
that cultural and political change through time is comprehensible and will yield its
secrts to scholarly or theoretical investigation. This supposition is shared by such
diverse theorists as Vico, Rousseau, Herder, Burke, Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche,
and Marx. It is what I would like to designate by the general term historicism,
recognizing that an almos inevitable corollary of such a belief is an epochal view
of historical event, because if the past is to be comprehensible it must be divisible
into components such as epochs. The epochal model is especially identied with
the hermeneutical historicists. Through Thomas Kuhn, it has invaded the history of
science, where the epoch is replaced by the paradigm (Kuhn 1970).
The origin of the modern occult is thus nearly contemporaneous with the birth of
Romanticism, with the triumph of Jacobinism, and with the early metahistorical
speculation of Rousseau and Vico. One might even consider theosophy to be a
pathological instance of philosophy of history, for in both the Fabrean and
Blavatskian versions it couches its teaching in a reformulated history of the world.
Both of Joyce"s major works -Ulysses and Finnegans Wake- are historical, an even
A Portrait of the ARtist as a Young Man has a strong element of historical and
mythical parallel. Ulysses might be considered as itself a contribution to
metahistory in that it applies the pattern of Achaea and Troy to England and
Ireland. But, of course the novel is satirical and comic, and the patterns elaborated
are deliberately factitious. Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, can be read as a
parody of modern philosophy of history and metahistory -explicitly invoking Vico,
the grandfather of metahistory. Such diverse modernists as T.S. Eliot, D.H.
Lawrence, W.C. Williams, and Virginia Woolf all devoted much of their energy to
the problem of history- of the relation between the present, the past, and the future.
However, of this group, only Lawrence engaged in anything that could be
considered philosophy of history -most notably in The Crown and Apocalypse.
(p.23)
Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience
MODERNISM, MODERNITY AND EVERYDAY LIFE
The ordinary and everyday in modernism remain relatively unexplored topics. In his
discussion of modern art and literature in the rst volume of the Critique of
Everyday Life, Lefebvre nds much of it, including Surrealism, devaluesj the
everyday through attempts to transcend or transform it through the strange,
marvellous and weird. In the past few years a number of articles on modernism and
the everyday have been published, several of which focues on the idea of #habit",
which constitutes one of the many suggestive ways in which the ordinary and
everyday might be approached in modernism. In her doctoral thesis Modernism and
the Ordinary, which focuses on the work of Woolf, Joyce, Stein and Wallace
Stevens, Liesl M. Olson explores what she argues to be these authors shared
preoccupation with #the habitual, unselfconscious actions of everyday life" Rather
than taking the ordinary and making it strange, as Lefebvre contends of the
Surrealists, or transforming it through symbolic, #spiritual, psychological or ethical
signication", Olson argues that literary modernism nds the #non-transformative
power" of the ordinary to be its most compelling aspect. While Olson"s thesis
constitutes a very important contribution to the elds of modernist studies and
studies in the everyday, her denition of the ordinary as habit is one I nd limited in
relation to an author such as Woolf, for reasons I will explain in the course of this
introduction.
While the #precise description and evocation of the daily, the diurnal, the
stubbornly ordinary" has recently been noted to be as central to modernism as
#exalted... moments of artistic transcendence", such evocations have been
underexplored. The historical tendency to overlook the everyday and ordinary as
subjects for modernism may be due, as Olson argues, to the fact that modernism,
particularly so-called "high modernism!, was traditionally viewed as an elitist
movement that celebrated interiority and formal experimentation at the
expense of the external and the realm of ordinary social and cultural life. For
example, in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric
Jameson claims that modernists thought #compulsively about the New", and sought
to escape the real, material world in favour of new Utopian ones. In his well-known
essay "The Ideology of Modernism!, Georg Lukcs criticized what he viewed as
an #attenuation of actuality" in modernist literature, arguing that material and social
reality were obscured by an obsessive subjectivism. A concern with subjectie
experience and the cult of the new are seen by these critics to be antithetical to the
realm of ordinary material life. This is a view that I will be challenging in the course
of my analysis of Woolf"s account of ordinary experience. It is surely inevitable that
every cultural period will reect its particular engagement with, and understanding
of, the everyday and a great deal of modrnist literature and art reveals a fascination
with that very sphere of experience. This, it would seem, is in part due to the fact
that the #everyday" and #ordinary life" were undergoing dramatic transformation
during the period of late nineteenth -and early twentieth century modernity.
In his inuencial study of modernity, All that is Solid Melts into Air,
Marshall Berman describes the primary condition in the experience of
modernity to be that of constant change. Berman argues that this condition has
united humankind during the twentieth century because of modernity"s global reach,
but also that this unity is a #paradoxical" one: #It pours us all into a maelstrom of
perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiciton, of ambiguity
and anguish." It is in the words of Karl Marx that he nds this experience of constant
change to be mos succinctly expressed:
All xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opiniosn, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all tha
is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face... the real condi-
tions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.
While, as Berman notes, modernity began in the sixteenth century,
individuals are inclined to feel that they are #the rst ones". Indeed, Woolf"s famous
dictum in her 1924 paper #Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown", that in or about December,
1910, human character changed", thereby marking the emergence of a new era,
reects such a feeling. The change that she observes presented itself as a shift in
#all human relations", the rst signis of which she locates in the latter stages of the
nineteenth century. When relations between people change -be they between
#masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children" -there is, she
writes an attendant change in all spheres of life: #religion, conduct, politics, and
literature". Woolf"s claim that the apparent shift in all human relations occurred
around 1910, however, echoes Marx who viewed such #xed, fast-frozen relations"
to have started melting a good deal earlier.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernity changed the patterns
and nature of daily life in much of Europe and America and these transformations
are reected in the art and literature of the period. Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane view the radical artistic innovations so integral to modernism to be a
product of these signicant social and cultural upheavals, which they deemed to be
of a "cataclysmic order". A brief overview will seve to indicate at least some of the
major areas of change, several of which I will return to in more detail at later stages
of this study.
The urban mass and the city, distinguishing features of modern life and the
modern condition, strongly inuenced the work of nineteenth century writers such
as Baudelaire and Poe, and continued to be a source of great interest for social
theorists, writers and artists into the early twentieth century. London, which was
Woolf"s home for most of her life and a continual source of fascination to her as a
writer, was the world"s biggest city in the early decades of the twentieth century.
London was therefore the quintessential space of modernity, making it an exciting
place to be, not only for British artists but the many Amercan and other expatriates
who moved there. Class relations, as Woolf observes in #Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown", continued to be redened, as did gender roles and relations, particularly
during the First and Second World Wars. Industry continued to develop and expand
and new technologies became more numerous in form and more ubiquitous in
nature; automobiles, the radio and the cinema were a particular source of interest
to modernists due to their impact on everyday culture and sensory experience.
More efcient modes of mass production, advertising and spectacle contributed to
ever-expanding commodity cultures which affected people"s relationship to objects,
as well as notions of art and artistic production, as Walter Benjamin!s essay "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction! famously argued.
Challenges to traditional ideas about the world and human beings, which were
initiated by radical thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Marx in the nineteenth
century continued into the twentieth century, particularly through the inuence of
Sigmund Freud.
Perhaps most crucially, however, it was the IWW that rendered daily life
for the early twentieth century individual more fragile and volatile than ever
before. Through the implementation of new technologies such as the machine gun
and tank, the IWW caused a level of destruction and carnage previously unknown
in Western history. As Walter Benjamin describes in "The Storyteller!, "a
generation that had gone to school on a horse-dran streetcar now stood
under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged
but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a eld of force of destructive
torrents and explosion, was the tiny, fragile human body". Arguably, the fragile
status of the everyday became more acute still during, and in the aftermath of, the
IIWW. Hence, given the radical chages that impacted upon all areas of life during
the rst decades of the twentieth century, it seems almost inevitable that the very
notions of #everyday life" and the #ordinary" would be ones of great interest and also
anxiety for modernists. Indeed, as I will show, the very conception of #ordinary
experience" is one Woolf wanted to open up for debate given her historical climate
of #adventure", #disintegration and renewal", and #struggle and contradiction."
A glance at representative authors of the period indicates the rich eld that
modernism presents for new historical perspectives on the everyday and ordinary.
A detailed engagement with the quotidian and everyday material world forms the
basis of James Joyce"s epic tale of ordinriness, Ulysses. It was, however, an
account of the ordinary that Woolf found to be somewhat confronting and base with
its focus on bodily processes and often macabre, abject or erotic themes. Dorothy
Ricardson"s multi-volume Pilgrimage (1915-1967) and Virginia Woolf"s Mrs
Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) carefully present the complexity of
ordinary experience in the present moment. Much of Gertrude Stein!s prose and
poetry, from Tender Buttons (1919) to Wars I Have Seen (1945), centres quite
obsessively upon the domestic everyday, carefully tracing its objects, people,
rhythms and speech. Vignettes of seemingly unexceptional moments form the basis
for short stories by Katherine Manseld, Woolf and Jean Rhys. In terms of
modern poetry, Imagism reects a preoccupation with the daily in its aspiration
towards an objective presentation of the concrete and particular thing through plain
language. Likewise, the subject matter of much of T.S. Eliot"s poetry expresses a
persisten, if somwhat vexed, relationship to the sphere of everyday, urban
modernity. For example, in #Preludes" he describes the coming to a consciousness:
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands-
Like many of her contemporaries, Woolf"s writing reects a fascination with the
ordinary and everyday. However, the ordinary not only comprises the subject of
much of her ction and non-ction; it also informs her implicit philosophy and
broader social and political views.