Lecture-IV, Sem IV
Sambalpur University
Aspects of Modernism: Eliot and Joyce
Ashok K Mohapatra
In simple terms modernism is a cultural and aesthetic response to modernity. It is
manifested in the forms of visual, musical and literary art, conceptualization of
subjectivity, conceptualization of the subject and object, sense of history…
The response can either be in affirmation of modernity, or can be a rejection of it, or can
be a reconciliation with it.
Hence we need to understand what modernity is. In a very insightful essay titled
“Modernity, Modernism, Modernization: Variation of Modern Themes”(1993), Matei
Calienscu defines modernity:
Modernity … is a temporal/historical concept by which we refer to our understanding
of the present in its unique historical presentness, that is, in what distinguishes it from
the past, from the various relics or survivals of the past, and also in what it promises
for the future- in what it allows us to guess, rightly or wrongly, about the future and
its trends, quests, and discoveries.
Elsewhere Calinescu says that “modernity, meaning broadly the quality of being
modern-i.e. of being in tune with the present, with its unmistakable "newness "--
circulated in English since the seventeenth century”. He therefore provides a historical
account of the concept by tracing the history of the usage of the term from its first use
by Horace Walpole in the late 18 th century to up to the late 20 th century. Calinescu finds
modernity a concept not so much variegated but also beleaguered, with current and
countercurrents of ideas about the present.
How do we make sense of the present unless we relate it to the contemporary human
situation in social, economic, political and economic terms? So, it is an epistemological,
as I understand. Calinescu chooses to seize upon Baudelaire as embodying a distinctly
acute understanding of his times in aesthetic terms and clearly defining what modernity
should be in its function. Calinescu quotes Baudelaire’s comment on what a modern
artist should do:
His business is to separate from contemporary fashion whatever it may contain of
poetry within history; to extract the eternal from the ephemeral.... Modernity is that
which is ephemeral, fugitive, and contingent upon the occasion; it is half of art, whose
other half is the eternal and the unchangeable.... In short, in order that any /modernity
may be worthy of eventually becoming antiquity, it is necessary that the mysterious
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beauty involuntarily lent to it by human life should be distilled from it. (Baudelaire,
My Heart Laid Bare, 33-34)
Modernity has been theorized in developmental terms along the lines of the
Enlightenment, with the idea of progress as central to it. But Baudelaire and also Walter
Benjamin have turned their attention to the poverty, squalor and malaise as the
underbelly of the city or urban space as the locus of development. The city’s chaos,
exigencies, poverty etc. become the template of modernity to which the aesthetic
response of modernism is made, and Baudelaire becomes the proponent of the beauty
of the ugly in the city space. But this beauty is not the element of aesthetics, but poetics
that historicizes the spectacle, with a profound awareness of the moral quality. The
sense of beauty in modernity is predicated upon moral evaluation which is possible
through historicity, and the moral value has something universal about it.
Calinescu also traces the origin of modernism to the 19th century. He says that the use of
the suffix "ism" up to the nineteenth century had been mostly in the theological sensem
and bearing negative connotations. : Calvinism, Jansenism, Methodism and, quite
often, to heresies such as Arianism, Bogomilism, etc. In the nineteenth century, "ism"
suggested political movements like Jacobinism, socialism, liberalism, communism, and
artistic and literary movements such as romanticism, realism, naturalism, symbolism,
impressionism etc. The first part of the twentieth century is perhaps the golden age of
almost honorific "isms." In artistic and literary life we have: futurism, cubism, dadaism,
surrealism, ultraism, constructivism, modernism, and so on. Celinescu says:
Let us note in passing that the age of "isms" seems to have come to a close. During the
past few decades our periodizing terminology has shown a marked preference for the
prefix "post": meaning that we identify ourselves not positively, or in terms of a project
or a strong belief, but only as coming after the "isms." We speak of postmodernism,
post-Marxism, postcommunism, poststructuralism, etc
In the early twentieth century modernism acquired two specialized meanings, both of
them quite interesting to the intellectual historian. Aside from the generic
terminological opposition modernism/traditionalism, modernism came to designate the
new, innovative, anti traditional tendencies in the arts.
In a comprehensive introduction to Modernism, Michel H. Whitworth defines it “is not
so much a thing as a set of responses to problems posed by modernity. The recognition
that modernism and modernity are related but not identical is crucial to most recent
work in this area”. Indeed, if modernity involves the historical presentness, and
therefore its newness is historically defined, we need to talk about modernism also in
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the historical sense particularly how its newness is continuously defined and redefined
with the passage of time.
1. We need to identify the newness in terms of certain features such as
foregrounding an imaginative and ethical consciousness as against rationality.
2. We also need to look at how derangement of senses, disconnected experiences
and plethora of perceptions do not lend themselves to synthesis and organic
categories of truth which had, however, been valorized by the Romantics.
3. Problematization of the relation between the art work to its creator is another
feature of modernism. Modernist writers talk about impersonality of the text and
deindividualized author, which Eliot pleads for . This is what we have to keep in
mind.
4. We also notice that there is at the heart of modernist art a tension between the
aestheticism of non-referential pure form on the one hand and fidelity to the
sensory immediacy of reality and intense experience of life, which is in Joyce’s
Ulysses
TWO MORE POINTS WE NEED TO REMEMBER ARE:
5. Modernist art engages with the relation of art in the present moment to art in the
past. In this context T.S. Eliot’s tradition and Individual Talent’ becomes very
pertinent.
6. Modernism asks questions like what is the position of the artist in the society?
How does the artist relate to their audience or readers?
While pondering these issues in the context of literature we must bear in mind the fact
that the terms modernist and modernism are applied in hindsight to refer to a disparate
collection of writers who were not stylists themselves but searchers of distinctly
individualized art forms that would articulate and formalize the afore said issues and
questions. Therefore, Malcolm Bradbury and Richard MacFarlane have aptly said that
“modernism is less a style than search for a style in a highly individualistic sense.”
Whether it is Stravinsky in music, Braque or Picasso in painting, Conrad, Joyce or Musil
or Mann, Henry James or Marcel Proust in the novel, or Mallarme, Pound, Eliot, Rilke
or Apollinaire, Pirandello or Strindberg in drama, all these modernists have inscribed
their individual distinctiveness in developing a form that is autotelic in articulating a
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sense of crisis that would not have been possible by adopting an already existent form
or following a prevalent style.
It will not be wrong on our part that the modernist impulse is the impulse to express a
terrible sense of crisis in the relationship between the artists and history by choosing a
form that is novel and unique enough to articulate as well as, at least, make an effort to
resolve the crisis.
We will touch upon some major stylistic aspects of modernism as reflected by the works
of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.
Imagism, as is common knowledge, one of the most easily identifiable features of
modernism. It took shape in 1912 in the form of a movement launched by Ezra Pound
following three rules:
1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that didn’t contribute to the presentation
3. Rhythm to be in the form of musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome.
Pound defined image as an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. It
is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of
sudden liberation from time and space limits, a sense of sudden growth.
Pound’s ‘In a Station of Metro’ consisting of two lines:
The apparition of faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.
Heightened perception of a moment that is configured as a simile. Location given in the
title, without a verb. Picture like, static. Juxtaposition of very sharply visual images.
Deeply evocative. Apparitions of faces…Modern Parisian metro. Aesthetics of hell, as it
were.
Pound moved over to Vorticism in alliance with Wyndham Lewis, to bring dynamism
into poetry. In this new scheme an image becomes the node for a cluster of associative
images releasing energy. I will talk about vorticism in art tomorrow.
If we look at Eliot’s The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock, we cannot but notice his
unique use of imagery and allusion in this poem, Eliot deals with themes that revolve
around the themes of fragile and self-conscious human condition, touching on the ideas
of self-inadequacy, loneliness, sexual anxiety and fear of mortality. What is interesting
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is how these themes are explored through images that speak for themselves with their
own semantic contexts.
Epigraph: Guido da Montefeltro in the 8th circle of hell, stuck for eternity ( Canto 27 of
Inferno- Dante). Sin, Guilt and Shame are central to the subjective consciousness and the
setting is obviously Inferno.
City- Inferno. Suggested in modern terms.
Infernal palce. Unreal. Yellow fog. Cat, mysterious, silent.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
Suggestion of a banal existence rounded off by its own banality.
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
- Disembodied voices ( In The Station of Metro, The Waste Land,
Body parts only- metonymic and synecdochic images.
Perhaps to be desired and loved by mermaid and willingly accept perdition is a better
choice, to be reclaimed by human voice…
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
The disembodied human voice that we find in this poem and The Waste Land, which
was subtitled, He Do the Police in Different Voices
If we look at the philosophical views with regard to subjective consciousness and
language, Kant says that the phenomenal world is perceived through images within the
intuitive time-space framework of subjective consciousness, we find a breach between
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the world and the subjective self constituting a crisis. In the poetry of Eliot the imagism
with its emphasis on objectivism and immediacy of perception in a non-discursive
mode advocates for minimalist use of language on the one hand and the disembodied
self on the other that craves for totality and harmony in its relation to the external
world. But this desire is ironically oblique, never direct.
Eliot spoke about a new poetic creed of impersonal poetry in Sacred Wood saying that
the “emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality witouht
surrendering himself to the work to be done.”
Here a shift of emphasis takes place from the expressive and subjective paradigm of
artistic self as in Romantic poetry to the objective, formalist paradigm of modernist
poetry. While the subjective self is reduced to a voice, this helps the ARTIST to
manipulate the modes of expression through the rhetorical principle of irony that Eliot
learnt from Jules Lafourge. Who is this disembodied voice addressed to in Prufrock?
Who is the you? Does the ‘you’ is realized in the reader while reads the text? Yes. The
reader does not just act sympathetically at the psychological level, but also participate
in the hermeneutics of reading which is demanded by modernist poetry of Eliot.
Ss far as The Wasteland is concerned, the reader has to peregrinate into many settings,
be informed of the contexts, and not just be privy to the scenes but also participate in
them and interpret them so as to covert each unit of meaning to the larger meaning of
the poem about the need to cure the infertility of the land of the fisher king, restore
vitality and meaning to life and enrich the modern war-torn, highly mechanized
contemporary life with values of high culture and art of ancient civilizations.
Indeed, as Modernism raises fundamental questions about the quality of life at the
physical and spiritual life by Eliot, his persona and his reader are required to negotiate
vignettes of the past at epochal moments and the present in its most banal and everyday
moments and partake of the irony which James Joyce also works out in his Ulysses. If
we take, for instance, the first section the ‘Burial of the Dead’, the reader is to be familiar
with meanings of so many literary allusions and their contexts. the languishment of the
Sybil of Cumae in her loveless life and importance of vegetative fertility conveyed by
Chaucer’s April shower play out against the banal life of seduction of the people which
is out of sync with the rhythm of nature. The reader gradually moves through the
labyrinth of the myths and allusions to apprehend the meaning that cyclic regeneration
of life and the positive role of death have been replaced by a mechanically repetitive life
and sterile death that constitute the modern condition. The meaning expands and
extends with multiple layers and multiple as well as patterns of new strands of ideas.
What is added as a new strand idea is the spiritually fulfilling as aesthetically satisfying
idea of sexual love or Eros is necessary in human life. Eliot brings in Wagnor’s Tritram
and Isolde opera and the Christian myth of the Holy Grail derived from Morte de Arthur.
The ideas of fertility and regeneration inherent in these myths link these up to the
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earlier strands of ideas such as love and fertility. In this newly expanded context
productive death (sacrificial) and sterile death ARE CONRTASTED, and thus the title of
the first section which refers to the service of the
dead as mentioned in the Book of Common Prayers signifies. The World War I is
brought into the web of ideas to be juxtaposed with Roman war against the Carthage,
and if the deaths are futile or have any meaning.
The reader roams the contexts, all the imaginative spaces and times, in a densely
worked out discursive structure.
Paradoxical as it may sound, the linguistic minimalism and non-discursivity that
inaugurated imagist modernism gave way to hyper-discursivity of literary pastiche that
Eliot deployed in The Waste Land. This section ends with an address to the reader:
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Here the disembodied voice of the persona identifies himself with ‘the reader, who is
secretive, look-alike, my brother’, but the reader is not someone outside the poem, but
someone already inscribe by Baudelaire as a discursive presence, someone already
inhabiting his ‘unreal city’, partaking of the same degeneration and sterility. This is how
the poem demonstrates the theory of impersonality which he talked about in Tradition
and Individual Talent.
In his epochal review essay ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth' on Ulysses by James Joyce, in
which Eliot heralds the end of the novel form and anticipates the future of modern
literature. It was printed in the November 1923 issue of The Dial, a modernist literary
journal, a year after Ulysses was first published in Paris. It was a thorough endorsement
of Joyce’s novelistic craft, for Eliot was hugely inspired by what he called the mythical
method of Joyce.
Eliot draws attention to Joyce’s application of mythology to a modern, everyday subject,
‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’. Other
writers must follow this method, he argues. For Eliot, myth provides the writer with a
stable frame through which to view and analyse the modern world. It is ‘a way of
controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. In the same year as he wrote this
review Eliot published The Waste Land, a depiction of post-war society that draws
heavily on mythology and historic literary sources such as Dante’s Inferno.
Ulysses is to be tacked with reference to both its form and content. The novel follows the
life and thoughts of Leopold Bloom and a host of other characters – real and fictional –
from 8am on 16 June 1904 through to the early hours of the following morning. But this
very brief time frame contains voluminous details of everyday life interspersed with
mythical allusions following an associative logic and juxtapositioning method through
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the mode of the stream of consciousness which also influenced another modernist
Virginia Woolf to make the injunction that the novelist should “consider the ordinary
mind on an ordinary day.” She also experimented with form in her Jacob’s room (19220
and She wrote Mrs. Dalloway (1925), with borrowings from Ulysses at the level of form
and content.
Ulysses makes an exploration of consciousness or the inner life of Leopold Bloom and
his family members and also Stephen Dedalus. For Joyce this entails a preference for an
anti-hero, or at any rate a hero who does not resemble the heroes of earlier novels, as
well as an exploration of subject matter that, while a part of ordinary consciousness, is
often taboo in art, such as defecation and masturbation. As a notable experiment in the
rendering of time, Ulysses displays a modernist skepticism about the linear or
sequential arrangement of events into traditional plots. In contrast with the earlier
tendency to make the prose of novels generally referential, Joyce was particularly self-
conscious about the literary quality or style of novelistic language he used; he
experimented with narrative devices and combined the realist representation of the
world with esoteric symbolism. Finally, Ulysses called attention to its own status as
fiction and to its relationship to history
It is, in Woolf’s phrase, “an ordinary day,” although with more hours of daylight than
most because of its proximity to midsummer and Dublin’s northerly latitude. Along
with a seemingly endless cast of Dubliners, the novel features three major characters,
Stephen Dedalus (the protagonist of Portrait), Leopold Bloom (the advertising
canvasser), and Molly Bloom (Leopold’s wife). Through the course of the novel, the
attentive reader learns that Leopold and Molly have not had sexual relation since the
death of their infant son Rudy, ten and a half years earlier. On the afternoon of June 16,
Molly is expecting a visit from Blazes Boylan, who will become her lover. Bloom
suspects his wife of having had many adulterous affairs, but Blazes is the only clear-cut
case. According to the parallel with the Odyssey, Bloom spends the day in exile, like
Odysseus on his way back from the Trojan war, before returning home at the end of the
day. Where Odysseus slaughtered the suitors who had tried to seduce his faithful wife
Penelope, however, Bloom meekly accepts Molly’s unfaithfulness.
The novel’s other plot-line features Stephen as a modern equivalent of Telemachus, the
son of Odysseus. Like Bloom, Stephen is exiled from his home, a tower on Dublin Bay,
by a usurper, his sometime friend Buck Mulligan. Stephen’s mother has recently died,
so, like Hamlet, he wears black. Bloom too dresses in black, for the funeral of a friend,
Paddy Dignam, who has fallen off a ladder in a drunken stupor (paralleling the death of
a minor character, Elpenor, in the Odyssey). Stephen thinks of himself as Hamlet, but
Joyce casts him as Telemachus, in search of a father, and the “quest for a father” became
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a major theme of early criticism of the novel. The novel associates Bloom with Hamlet’s
father’s ghost as well as with Odysseus. Stephen’s real father, Simon, is quite
incompetent, and when Bloom rescues Stephen from a brawl near the end of the novel,
the two men return to Bloom’s home together. Their meeting is fairly brief, however,
and it is unclear whether or not Stephen has really found the spiritual father he needs.
(The encounter is loosely based on an occasion when Joyce himself was rescued from a
fracas by Arthur H. Hunter, one of the models for Bloom). The novel ends, after Bloom
returns to bed, with the unsurpassable interior monologue of Molly Bloom, a sort of
soliloquy that gives her account of her childhood, her married life, and her other loves,
as well as her views on matters such as war and music.
Joyce wrote Ulysses while living in Trieste, Zürich, and Paris, having gone into
voluntary “exile” from Ireland because of its conservative social and intellectual
climate. He was in close touch with avant-garde circles in all three cities, and their
experiments influenced his. The novel appeared in installments in The Little Review
beginning in 1918, but publication was interrupted in 1920 when its publishers were
prosecuted for obscenity, over an episode in which Bloom masturbates. Once complete,
the novel had to be published in Paris and was banned in England, Ireland, and the
United States for over a decade. English customs officials and the U. S. Post Office
seized and destroyed most copies of the first two editions. During the 1920s, the novel
was known in the English-speaking world mainly through some smuggled copies. After
1930, readers could purchase Stuart Gilbert’s commentary, which contained excerpts of
the novel that had not been judged obscene.
In order to make the novel easier to understand, Joyce gave his French and Italian
translators schemas explaining that each “episode” had its own distinctive time, scene,
style, bodily organ, art, colors, and symbol, and outlining the correspondences between
characters and their counterparts in The Odyssey and, to a lesser extent, Hamlet. (The
“episodes,” as the chapters are called, are known by the names Joyce gave them in his
schemas, although these are not usually printed in editions of the novel itself.) There are
also biblical parallels, but they have a somewhat different status; the characters
themselves are unaware of the similarities between their own lives and those of the
characters in The Odyssey, but they frequently invoke the Bible to explain their
circumstances.
The Homeric references in Ulysses raise a number of critical issues. The use of parallels
with one of the great classical epics to describe the humdrum and sordid marital affairs
of a reasonably intelligent but not otherwise remarkable lower middle-class hero can be
understood as a form of mock epic, in which high style is applied to low matter. Joyce’s
attitude would then be seen as satirical, like Eliot’s attitude towards such characters as
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Sweeney and the typist in The Waste Land. More frequently, however, readers have seen
Joyce as trying to represent what Baudelaire called the “heroism of modern life.”Bloom,
who appears merely comic at the beginning of the novel, seems to become more heroic,
more like Odysseus, as the narrative progresses.
Another debate concerns how much weight readers should place on the schemas in
which Joyce outlined the mythic parallels. Eliot praised Joyce’s “mythic method,” but
many critics disagree with Eliot and see the parallels as a kind of scaffolding, not
essential to the structure of the work, and interpret Joyce’s purpose as less unifying
than Eliot suggests. In other words, they see Joyce not as a high modernist, but as the
first postmodernist, discarding the unifying myths that Eliot wanted to maintain. The
reality is complex: both Joyce and Eliot did seek myths that could make sense of
contemporary history, but they both also recognized that, to be compelling, these
modern myths must be complex, ironic, and multifarious.
While Joyce and Eliot draw upon the myth unity and order, they dismiss history’s
unifying power. Eliot’s famous lines from “Gerontion”.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or is still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.
These lines elaborate what Eliot had meant by “a vast panorama of futility and
anarchy” as the nature of history. History cannot offer the promise of progress along a
unilinear path, show a telos towards liberation from sinfulness and sterility of life. Eliot
invoked religion to provide telos for working out schemes of forgiveness and salvation.
James Joyce, unlike Eliot, rebelled against Catholicism into which he was born. He
decalred a private was against the Catholic doctrines, and attended the mass of Greek
Orthodox Christianity. Even as he called himself a freethinking heretic, he could not
overcome the impact of the Church seen through his fictional characters. This is an
indication that he never could quite escape its hold on his own imagination altogether.
But definitely, epiphany as a visionary experience, which marks the development of
Stephen in The Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, reflects Joyce’s belief the power of a
heightened state of imaginative experience that becomes mystical.
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Fredric Jameson has made a valuable remark that “myth is nothing but an
organizational device, and his subject is not some fictive unity of experience which the
myth is supposed to guarantee, but rather that fragmentation of life in the modern
world which called for such reunification in the first palce”.
Perhaps, also through the use of myth and a sophisticated formalism of art, what the
modernists like Joyce and Eliot explored the limitless freedom of human imagination,
unfettered by rigidly held rules and doctrines.
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