Modernism

Literary Modernism

focussed upon the subjective and the psychological, attempting to give expression to the dynamic workings of the mind, creating literary texts of compelling radical formalism.

This account of Modernism is divided into the following sections:

1. ‘The Will to the End’: The Context of European Modernism.
2. Modernism: Between Experimentation and Tradition
3. The Literature of Aesthetic Revival: Symbolism and Romantic Decadence.
4. Hearts of Darkness: The Self as Other.
5. Memory, Time and Consciousness: Modernism and the Epistemological ‘Breakthrough’.
6. Libido and Body Culture: Sexuality in the Modernist Novel.
7. The Transformation of Illusion: Modernist Drama.
8. Fragments of Modernity: Modernist Poetry

9 Modernism: An Annotated Bibliography.

 

 

 

1. ‘The Will to the End’:

The Context of European Modernism

 

In 1851, Charles Kingsley, cleric and popular novelist (Westward Ho! 1855, and The Water Babies, 1863), visited the Great Exhibition in London, where the showcase of the century had been organised for British and European technology. The visit gave him occasion to speculate upon the material achievements of the nineteenth century: ‘If these forefathers of ours could rise from their graves this day’, he later declaimed in a sermon to his parishioners, ‘they would be inclined to see in our hospitals, in our railroads, in the achievements of our physical science, confirmation of that old superstition of theirs, proofs of the kingdom of God, realizations of the gifts which Christ received from, vaster than any which they had dreamed’. In one sense, Kingsley was fully justified in viewing the nineteenth century as an era of prosperity and completion. Between 1800 and 1850, the population of Europe went from 180 million to 226 million, industrial capacity more than quadrupled, life expectancy increased, and major electoral reforms were undertaken in Britain, in 1832, and in France, in 1848. Such evidence of ‘progress’ (a key term in the self-image of this generation) seemed to bear out Kingsley’s quasi-religious enthusiasm, and lent support to others, such as the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who could, in spite of the growing asceticism of his life and person, still approach the energies and achievements of England’s mercantile class ‘under the strongest impression of awe, and admiration akin to wonder’.[1]

 

Such euphoria did not, however, outlast the century. By 1900, a mood, defensive and pessimistic had set in amongst many of the erstwhile pundits of progress. Not only had the negative impact of industrial and technological change upon the physical and moral constituency of the nation come increasingly under focus, in works such as William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), and Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1902-1903); but the very ethos of laissez faire liberalism, which had underpinned these changes, was beginning to seem to many a rigid, indeed repressive form of governance. These critics of industrial England were justified in feeling cynical about the values of Victorian society. For by the end of the nineteenth century, the ideals and utopian wish fulfilment that had fired the revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, had given way to a calculating pragmatism amongst successive liberal governments in Europe, many of which had sought to consolidate their political hegemony through alignments with the more flexible elements of the landed aristocracy (creating, for example, parties such as the National-Liberals in Germany). The result was the creation of a ruling élite, economically open, but politically closed, and fully prepared to use the techniques of the modern state to contain those groups that challenged its ascendancy. The events of the Paris Commune of 1871, in which more than 30,000 workers and disaffected soldiers lost their lives in a single ‘bloody week’, provided one instance of the ruthless determinism of reconstituted liberalism, as did the anti-socialist laws promulgated by a liberal-conservative alliance under Bismarck in Germany between 1878 and 1890.

 

One event, in particular, came to form a test case for the moral probity of statist liberalism: the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. Falsely sentenced to life imprisonment in 1894, the Jewish army officer Dreyfus became the most conspicuous victim of the Third French Republic (founded in 1875), his case, the most glaring proof that a progressive liberal state was fully prepared to align itself with the traditional power centres of the army, Church and aristocracy, in order to defend its interests. After spending six years in prison, Dreyfus did finally receive justice, but only after intense agitation by the socialist deputy, Jean Jaurès, and the writer, Émile Zola. The latter’s polemical broadsheet, ‘I accuse!’, drew attention to the double standards that prevailed within the French nation, which made much of its high cultural achievements and political tolerance, but which continued (as Zola argued) to ‘exploit patriotism for works of hatred’.[2]

 

But it was in the colonial sphere that the moral duplicity of Western liberal governments became most blatant. Between 1830 and 1900, every major European power launched itself into imperial expansion: England added to its already considerable empire Egypt (in 1882), Kenya (1886) and Uganda (1895); France acquired Algeria (1857) and Indochina (1859); Italy, Abyssinia (1889); Belgium, the Congo (1885); and Portugal Mozambique (1857). The governance of these colonies brought to light the darker side of the liberal ethos. Earlier talk of the rights of man, of liberty, fraternity and equality, a rhetoric that had inspired liberalism in its early days, now gave way, in the colonial fiction of, for example, John Buchan, to a new focus upon ‘the white man’s duty’, ‘the gift of responsibility’, and ‘the fulfilment of [the] task’ facing the colonising powers. That such words served to mask economic calculation and political expediency was recognised by many; not only by an emerging generation of Marxist analysts, such as Rosa Luxembourg (The Accumulation of Capital, 1913), but also by writers such as Rudyard Kipling (Barrack Room Ballads, 1892, and Kim, 1901) and Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, 1900, and Heart of Darkness, 1902), who saw in the colonial ‘mission’ not only heroic endeavour (although this indisputably forms an essential component of Kipling’s ideology), but exploitation and ‘the devil of violence, and the devil of greed’.[3]

 

Liberalism, and that constellation of values with which it had become associated: Utilitarianism, economic individualism, and the notion of the survival of the fittest, had attracted critics throughout the nineteenth century. Figures as diverse as Carlyle and Ruskin, in England, and Baudelaire and Flaubert, in France, had decried the philistine nature of its culture, and its deadening influence upon the creative life of the individual, its destructive effect (in Carlyle’s emotive words) upon those ‘primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion’. By the end of the century that critique had acquired a greater concern with the ethical and, increasingly, political tensions within the liberal-bourgeois tradition. This concern is evident in the work of writers such as Anatole France (see, for example, the novel series The History of our Age, published 1897-1901), Carl Sternheim, whose plays, such as Schippel, the Bourgeois (1913), satirised the manners of the nouveau riche, in Germany; and the Irish playwright, and perhaps the most important dramatist of social conscience between Ibsen and Brecht, George Bernard Shaw. In his plays and prefaces, Shaw held up to ridicule the ‘gratuitous millennium’ promoted by liberal ideology, drawing attention in plays such as John Bull’s Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905), Man and Superman (1905), and Heartbreak House (1920) to the existence of poverty, socialism, nationalism and female emancipation as forces poised to demolish the complacency of the established political order.[4]

In England, E.M. Forster sought to explicate the inner dislocations within the liberal ethos in his novels. Born in 1879, at ‘the fag end of Victorian Liberalism’, Forster remained aware throughout his life of the strengths and limitations of the laissez–faire worldview that had prevailed in his country since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his novels, such as The Longest Journey (1907), and A Passage to India (1924), he sought to explore the Janus-faced nature of the liberal ethos: the fact that its insistence upon freedom and the right to individual self-determination in the personal sphere stood at odds with the harshness of its business ethnic, uncompromising economic rationalism of which had culminated in the ‘capitalist jungle’ of modern society. Forster explored this contradiction in Howards End (1910), which deals with the tensions between mercantile opportunism and cultural sensibility in Edwardian society, sets of values represented in the novel by Mr Wilcox and the Schlegel sisters, respectively. The motto of the novel is ‘only connect’. For the sake of political harmony and national self-interest (the novel was written against the backdrop of the strengthening power of Germany) the liberal bourgeoisie should merge humanism and respect for the creative life, with financial and business pragmatism. Forster’s novel seeks to affect a marriage (quite literally) between these two fractions, who must not only overcome the internal divisions within their ranks but also resist the ‘continual flux’ and ‘eternal formlessness’ of a world dominated by rampant urbanism, technological advancement and social dislocations, represented in the novel by the social climbing of the ambitious Leonard Bast, and the feminism of Helen Schlegel. Forster’s optimism, however, gives way in the end to apocalyptic gloom, as, in the midst of personal rapprochement, the characters become aware of a ‘red dust’ creeping slowly, but inexorably towards the haven of the family home: it is a symbol of those inexorable forces of dissolution, against which traditional alignments in family and state will, ultimately, prove helpless.[5]

 

What Forster had identified in Howards End was, in fact, not simply an impasse within a particular political ideology, or a crisis within a particular class, but the emergence of a configuration of social, political and economic changes that we know as ‘modernity’ (a term first used by Baudelaire in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 1863). Certainly, the forces that Forster identified in his novel were not new. From the very beginning of the century, it had become increasingly evident that traditional agrarian Europe was being gradually replaced by a new type of society founded on urban, pluralistic, and commercial values, whose pace was being driven by technological change. Between 1870 and 1914, that process, starting in England, spread first to France and Belgium and then to Germany and Italy, gathering a startling momentum. During this period, transportation was radically improved through the invention of the electric locomotive (1879) and Siemen’s motor car (1885), the potential for communication expanded through Bell’s telephone (1876) and Marconi’s wireless (1887), and medical and geneticist advances accomplished through Behring’s discovery of a Diphtheria serum (1893) and Boveri’s work on chromosomes (1904). The social impact of these changes caused widespread consternation. In Germany, the sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, in his Community and Society (1887), described how the materialist, atomistic and self-interested priorities of a triumphant capitalist economy were undermining the spiritual and consensus-based values of older pre-mercantile Germany, producing a type of social organisation that was ‘transitory and superficial’, a ‘mechanical aggregate and artefact’. In France, Émile Durkheim argued in his Suicide (1897) that modern society, lacking any ‘limiting authority’ or shared values, had a tendency to produce rootless and directionless citizens (he called them ‘anomic’), who were increasingly linking their sense of self-worth to material acquisition, and were reacting to sudden economic deprivation with helplessness and despair.   A similar prognosis was offered by Max Weber in the concluding pages of his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Here, Weber showed how the ethos of economic individualism, which had once performed a positive and emancipatory role, had degenerated into the stultifying orthodoxy of economic rationalism and bureaucratic statism. Those caught within this nullity, ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’, were dominated by routine and mechanical habit, unable to escape (in Weber’s famous metaphor) from an ‘iron cage’ of their own making.[6]

 

Registering the human impact of these changes provided one of the pressing tasks for the literature of this period. German writers, in particular, living in a land experiencing the traumas of rapid industrial and technological expansion, revealed a pained awareness of the personal dislocations occasioned by modernity. This is the theme of Thomas Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), which tells how a once strong and self-confident mercantile family declines into bankruptcy and moral dissolution because it is unable to adapt to the grasping and arrogant materialist ethos that has come to reign in the new Germany. Only those, such as the arriviste family, the Hagenströms, who are ‘free from the fetters of tradition and ancestral piety’, are able to flourish in the cut-throat world of modern commerce, as if in vindication of the social-Darwinistic mentality that is the order of the day. Alienated from the modern world also is the hero of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), which registers the crisis of modernity on an internal and psychological, rather than on a social or cultural level, through a radical dislocation of the senses that brings Brigge (a Danish poet living in Paris) close to the ‘outlined edge of terror’ that lies beneath the surface of life in the modern city. The disfiguration of consciousness that Brigge experiences in Rilke’s novel is also charted in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927), but from an epic perspective capable of relating this particular mental configuration to a generation that has lost ‘the feeling for itself, for the self-evident, for all morals, for being safe and innocent’. As Harry Haller, the eponymous hero of the story, an introspective, asocial Einzelgänger, discovers: the secure world of the past has gone, and with it those rules which allowed us to distinguish between reality and illusion, the natural and the supernatural, sanity and madness. We must learn to live without these distinctions (Haller concludes), and adjust to a new ‘game’, whose rules are obscure and whose purpose is, ultimately, unknowable.[7]

These novels give voice to an unmistakably apocalyptic mood, ‘a constantly swelling unrest’, a feeling, as the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig noted, that the internal pressures that had accumulated in the years between 1870 and 1910 were now seeking ‘violent release’. Evidence for the latter was provided by the growing diplomatic tensions between the major European powers, who launched themselves from 1905 (the date of the first Moroccan crisis) onwards into increasing acts of belligerence and displays of military might. Power politics between Germany-Austria, on the one side, and England-France (the so-called entente cordiale), on the other, deepened into an open confrontational stance over Bosnia in 1908, over Morocco in 1911, and over Serbia in 1914. These diplomatic confrontations too place against the background of England’s declining, and Germany’s expanding, economic and industrial strength, and amidst clear signs that the impending competition for colonies would bring about a brutal and uncompromising conflict.[8]

 

This sense of an ending pervades the literature of the pre-war period. It is evident even in the work of more traditional writers, such as the English poets, A.E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad, 1896), Thomas Hardy (Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, 1914), and the Georgian poets, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke. All give voice to a gentle melancholia, to a nostalgia for a ‘land of lost content’ that hovers just beyond the consciousness, in a dimly remembered past. But their work also contains a distinct undercurrent of impending catastrophe, and it is this terminal mood that links them to mainstream modernist writers such as Italo Svevo, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann. Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), in particular, captures this mood. The experiences that the hero of that novel, Gustav von Aschenbach, goes through, from moral and erotic dissolution to psychological self-delusion, are part of a personal crisis, but they are also tied by Mann to the nervous and debilitating atmosphere that gripped Europe in those years of diplomatic uncertainty and ‘menace’ prior to the First World War.[9]

 

Amongst a younger generation of writers that ‘will to the end’ that Nietzsche had identified as the defining trait of fin de siècle Europe was even stronger. It is to be seen in the work of the German Expressionists and the Italian Futurists. The Expressionists cultivated an Untergangsstimmung (mood of decline or destruction), which comes to the fore most disturbingly in the work of the young Austrian poet, Georg Trakl (Poems, 1913, Sebastian in a Dream, 1915), whose hermetic, quasi-surreal lyrics hint at the perpetual presence of an indecipherable menace existing behind the phenomenal world of nature and things. This sense of an ending appears in a playful mode in Jakob van Hoddis’ poem ‘End of the World’ (1911), which announces the tragi-comic demise of bourgeois culture, and more brutally in the apocalyptic poem ‘War’ (1911) by Georg Heym, which conjures up, in the midst of a despairing urban vision, a moloch ‘who ‘stands in the dusk, immense and unknown/, and the moon he crushes in his black hand’. The Italian Futurists embraced the Nietzschean ‘will to an end’ openly, celebrating the purifying conflagration of war, which they felt alone could purge Europe of the stultifying conventions of an atrophied bourgeois culture. As the leader of the group, Filippo Marinetti, declared in ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), war was ‘the world’s only hygiene’, ‘militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for’, comparing, in his ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (1912), a ‘trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, a machine gun to a fatal woman’, in an aesthetic paradigm that elevated violence to the level of erotic fantasy and determined aggression to an artistic practice. It is here, perhaps, in the Futurists’ technocratic blueprint for the future, written barely two years before the cataclysm of the First World War, and in the first decade of a century that would attempt to undo, in the violent terms, the effects of liberal modernity, that energy and destruction, rebirth and annihilation, become fused into the most damaging of all modernist discourses: a playful nihilism. [10]

 

 

2. Modernism:

Between Experimentation and Tradition

 

Modernity called forth a mode of feeling that was alive to, indeed, seemed deliberately to cultivate the urgency of the moment. It is not surprising, therefore, that time, and the relationship between consciousness and time, formed a focus for much of the theoretical writing of the period. Such interests appear in the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (‘Ideas concerning a descriptive and analytical Psychology’, 1894), and of Henri Bergson (Matter and Memory, 1896, and Creative Evolution, 1907), and in science, particularly physics, Ernst Mach (Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, 1887) and Albert Einstein (‘The Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity’, 1916). All stressed the importance of perspective, the circumscribed ontology of the material world and the defining agency of subjectivity, frequently anchoring that subjectivity in a revitalised notion of current temporality (‘the now’), merging past and future in a process of heightened perception, in which (in the words of Bergson’s enigmatic, indeed almost mystical language) ‘our consciousness sums up for us whole periods of the inner history of things’.[11]

 

The literary culture of the period also took its name from this valorisation of immediacy (what Wyndham Lewis was later to describe as a ‘philosophy of psychological time’), and not, as previous movements in the arts such as Romanticism and Realism had done, from a specific aesthetic theory. It was called Modernism. Although the notion of ‘the modern’ found its way into a number of cultural studies in the late nineteenth century, such as Georg Brandes’ Men of the Modern Breakthrough (1883), and Samuel Lublinski’s Assessing the Moderns (1904), ‘modernism’ as a recognisable literary mode did not gain currency until the 1920s, when it found favour amongst writers and scholars alike trying to make sense of a new type of literature that represented not only aesthetic novelty and innovation, but also (for many) obscurity and ‘the divorce of advanced contemporary poetry from the common-sense standards of ordinary intelligence’.[12]

 

But the spirit of Modernism had been evident long before that date, both in the work produced by individual writers but also in the iconoclastic energies displayed by a generation of younger artists, many of whom belonged to small and highly radical cultural formations that are collectively known as the ‘Avant-Garde’. The Avant-Garde manifested itself in different ways in different countries: in Russia, there was Constructivism; in Italy, Futurism; in Germany, Expressionism; Britain had both Imagism and Vorticism; France and Belgium Surrealism; and Dada’s infectious energies crossed the boundaries of Switzerland, Germany and France. These were all theoretically sophisticated, cosmopolitan groupings, but all revealed traits of their national origins: the Constructivists were a product of the Russian Revolution; the Expressionists were able to draw on the Märchen tradition of German Romanticism; whilst the French Surrealists could trace their ancestry to the psychological obsessions and fantasy worlds of Gérard de Nerval and Lautréamont. Nevertheless, there were important converges, which allows us to think of them as individual contributions to the multiple phenomenon of Modernism. They shared for example, an irreverent and provocative attitude towards high art and its cultural elitism. The catch-cry was ‘épater le bourgeois’ (or Bürgershreck, in German), an iconoclastic strategy of provocation, antagonism, and dissension, which possessed both a social (soon to become political), and a linguistic dimension. As the German Expressionist, Ferdinand Hardekopf, explained (to those of his middle-class readership that dared to listen): ‘our psychology will scandalise you. Our syntax will asphyxiate you. We will observe your great confusions with a smile, observing them analytically and with premonition’. The German-Swiss movement, Dada, founded in 1916 by Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck, represented the acme of this mentality. From the vantage point of their Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, they debunked, satirised, parodied and lambasted high cultural institutions and its representatives. The Dadaists sought to provoke and antagonise, to ‘destroy the drawers of the brain and those of social organisation: to sow demoralisation everywhere, and throw heaven’s hand into hell’. As Tzara explained: ‘The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but those of a disgust’. Gestures of outrage, of targeted disgust, permeated the Avant-Garde. Alfred Jarry’s play King Ubu (1896), a pre-Dadaistic parody of Oedipus Rex, opens with the exclamation: ‘shit!’. A similar scatological irreverence is evident in Bertolt Brecht’s play, Baal (1918, published 1922), whose quasi-mythic celebration of sensuality and physical corruption was clearly influenced by the highly volatile and aggressive anti-establishmentarianism that was typical of the Avant-Garde mentality.[13]

 

The tactics of the Avant-Garde may have seemed nihilistic; but they were put into the service of a goal that was essentially constructive: the regaining of an authentic base for European culture. Attempts to reach that goal were diverse. Many, particularly in Germany, followed Nietzsche in returning to a revitalised notion of the primitive and the animalistic. Gottfried Benn apostrophised such forces in his ecstatic essay, ‘Primal Vision’ (1926), where he spoke of his own attempts to summon up through incantatory means the primeval layers of his being: ‘I sniffed in masks, I rattled in runes, I dove into daemons with sleep-craving brutality, with mythical instincts, in the anteverbal, instinctual threat of prehistoric neura’. Benn’s colleagues in the Expressionist movement might have been more restrained in their primitivism (which was eventually to bring Benn into the National Socialist camp), but they too possessed their own mysticism of self. Formed around journals such as Der Sturm (The Storm, 1910-1932), edited by Herwarth Walden, Die Aktion (Action, 1911-1932), edited by Franz Pfemfert, and the Die weißen Blätter (The White Pages, 1913-1921), edited by Franz Blei and René Schickele, Expressionism was governed by a visionary intensity whose voice was exhortation and invocation. As the poet Otto Flake asserted in 1915: ‘we are the moderns: it is we who recognise the vital, animal, dynamic facts of life’. What Expressionists such as Ernst Toller, Franz Werfel, Georg Heym and Georg Kaiser hoped to achieve was nothing less than a ‘break-through’ to a new cultural medium, a type of art that would allow emotion in all its forms (suffering, visionary, despairing or ecstatic) to express itself beyond the constraints of imposed form and the restraints of moral inhibition. The external world was to be posited (‘expressed’) as an emanation of the internal world of the poet. As Kasimir Edschmid (Verses, Hymns and Songs, 1911) asserted in one of the key manifestoes of the movement: ‘[the Expressionist artist] doesn’t see, he envisions. He doesn’t depict, he experiences. He doesn’t reproduce, he fashions. He doesn’t take, he searches. Now the chain of facts exists no more: factories, houses, disease, whores, tumult and hunger. Now there is only the vision of these’.[14]

 

Less visionary, but with an equal stress upon the rejuvenating energies of the irrational, was the British movement, Vorticism. Its leading light was Wyndham Lewis, a charismatic figure characteristic of Avant-Garde eclecticism, who combined the formulation of theoretical manifestoes and the elaboration of speculative philosophies with painting, design and novel writing (Tarr, 1918). But Lewis’ main contribution to the formation of an Avant-Garde in England lay in his editorship (in conjunction with the American poet, Ezra Pound) of the short-lived journal, Blast (1914-1915). Here Lewis lambasted the inherited culture of the nineteenth century, and he did so in trenchant expletives, from which none were excluded: ‘BLAST- years 1837 to 1900/ curse Abysmal inexcusable middle-class/ (also Aristocracy and Proletariat) … WRING THE NECK OF all sick inventions born in that/ progressive white wake’. In the place of this pusillanimous complacency, the Vorticists propounded a vitalistic philosophy, half Bergsonian, half Italian Futurist, whose focus was the ‘Vortex’ of a present shorn of all illusions and ideals: ‘we wish the Past and Future with us’, Lewis announced in the first issue of Blast (June 1914), ‘the Past to mop up our melancholy, the Future to absorb our troublesome optimism’. Into this vision of pure immediacy, the Vorticists sought to draw all who found themselves both fearful and excited by the advent of modernity. As a movement, it did not outlast the advent of the First World War, in which one of its leading supporters, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, was killed, forced to bear witness, perhaps, to the fact that the reality of martial apocalypse is frequently less rewarding than its theory.[15]

 

The French Surrealists, founded as a group in Paris by André Breton in 1924, and dissolved soon after 1930, were without the ecstatic mentality of the German Expressionists or the violent self-assertiveness of the English Vorticists, but they too sought to give form to the dynamic workings of the mind. If Nietzsche dominated the thinking of the Expressionists (his presence is evident in their rhapsodic and often hyperbolic positions of speech, and in the nihilism that frequently invades their worldview), it was Freud, the analyst of dreams and other epiphenomena of the unconscious, who acted as the presiding spirit of the Surrealist project. The latter’s influence is evident in the very first Surrealist manifesto of 1924, where, with a mock seriousness, Breton attempted a lexical definition of his aesthetic: ‘SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought, […] in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’. The Surrealists evinced a belief in ‘certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought’, through whose channels they hoped to effect (as Breton later explained) ‘the future transformation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak’.

 

The literary effect of these ambitions was varied. The members of the movement, Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault and Robert Desnos, experimented with dream analysis, hypnosis, and automatic writing (écriture automatique). Much ephemera was produced through this process: poem-objects, collages, posters, exhibition catalogues, but also major work, poetry such as Eluard’s Love as Poetry (1929) and, with a greater typographical radicalism, Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields (1920). This is writing whose elliptical syntax and improbable juxtaposition of imagery forces the reader to make connections between areas of experience and facets of the phenomenal world previously unconnected. Such devices were also used by Breton in his novel Nadja (1928) (a mixture of reportage and urban phantasy) which centres around the author’s amorous fixation with a stranger, and in Raymond Queneau’s The Bark Tree (1933), a work of metafictional playfulness and existential parody, which seeks to open up a ‘tridimensional reality’, forcing the reader to suspend the conventions of philosophical and literary sense.[16] Louis Aragon the greater mission of the Surrealist project in the transformation of the mundane world. Surrealism was to foster a ‘sense of the marvellous suffusing everyday existence’. In the preface to his novel, Paris Peasant (1926), he wrote ‘each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. A mythology ravels and unravels’. To appreciate this modern mythology (here the city of Paris going through a process of rapid topographical change), we must rid ourselves of ‘those hemp-seeds of the imagination’ which consign the fantastic and surreal to the private world of dreams, and prevent us from recognising the ‘admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies’, which are a distinctive and common feature of the modern experience. Aragon’s exhortation, that we should collapse the private and public realms into a single optic, was taken up by one of the most remarkable voices in the Surrealist movement: Antonin Artaud. In his plans for a Theatre of Cruelty (as formulated in The Theatre and its Double, 1938), Artaud sought to evolve a dramatic method based on the ‘idea of culture-in-action’, a dramaturgy which would allow him to abolish the distinction between ritual and reality, theatre and street. Here, performer and spectator alike would follow a ‘language half-way between gesture and thought’, giving themselves over to a drama of excess, in an effort to transform their inner wishes, phantasies and phobias into public spectacle. The result would be a theatre that would ‘allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognise when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty’.[17]

The radical energies of the Avant-Garde emerged most clearly, however, in the texture of their writing. As Marinetti argued in his manifesto of 1913, the Futurists were seeking nothing less than a ‘typographical revolution’, which would give vent to an ‘essential and synthetic lyricism, imagination without strings, and words-in-freedom’. The conventions of the page were to be redrawn, syntax dismantled, typefaces dislocated, to allow the written line to form a ‘chain of pictorial sensations and analogies’ that would cut across the artificial divide between the text as a semantic unit and the text as objet d’art. A similar tack was taken by the Dadaists. From the very beginning, Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Arp had sought to exploit the potential of their writing, combining in their performances at the Cabaret Voltaire song, mime, declaration, and nonsense verse, to produce what they called the ‘simultaneous poem’ (poème simultané). Such poems were for performance only, but the spirit of this work reappeared in Arp’s later volumes of poetry, The Cloud Pump, One Bird in Three, and The Swallow’s Testicle (all published in 1920), and in a more structured way in individual poems such as Hugo Ball’s ‘Karawane’ (1917) and Kurt Schwitters’ ‘Anna Blume’ (1919). Such poems exploited the free semantic play of language, allowing the reader (as Schwitters noted in 1924) to ‘evaluate word against word, concept against concept, within the context of verbal association’. The procedures and techniques of such verse strikingly anticipated the ‘concrete poetry’ written by Ernst Jandl and Eugen Gomringer later in the century.[18]

 

The Avant-Garde represented the most radical, and (some might say) the most progressive wing of literary Modernism. And yet the iconoclastic energies of its work had only a limited impact upon the major writers of this period, upon whom we now regard as mainstream Modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats, in England and Ireland; Marcel Proust and André Gide, in France; Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Franz Kafka, in German-speaking Europe; and Italo Svevo, in Italy. Although many of these writers were impressed by the innovatory nature of the Avant-Garde, and appreciated its youthful energies, they were also convinced of the need to absorb these energies into the traditions of their respective literary cultures. Virginia Woolf, for example, one of the first commentators on Modernism in England, as well as one of its first exponents, was impressed by the achievements of French Post-Impressionist school, seeing in the 1910 London exhibition of its works clear evidence that ‘human character [had] changed’ in the Western world. Woolf had, nevertheless, misgivings about the wider impact of the Avant-Garde revolution upon the ‘very foundations and rules of literary society’, and held herself apart from its more radical developments. T.S. Eliot (born in America, but a British citizen from 1927) showed the same ambivalence towards the Avant-Garde. He was happy to acknowledge his debt to the iconoclastic poetry of Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière, leading voices in the French Symbolist movement (an early version of the French Avant-Garde), whose startling imagery and ironic urbanity influenced Eliot’s first book of published verse, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).

 

And yet, like Woolf, Eliot was equally aware of the need to channel such disruptive energies into a productive relationship with existing literary forms, to incorporate them into a larger design. As he argued in his important essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), the writer is unlikely to produce a genuine piece of writing unless he or she ‘lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past’, that community of knowledge and values that constitutes a culture. And, in what was clearly a critical rejoinder to those amongst the Avant-Garde who had mocked and pilloried high-cultural attainments, Eliot cautions both a greater conservatism and a simple lesson in cultural modesty: the poet ‘must be aware that the mind of Europe – the mind of his own country – a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind – is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen.’ A similar balancing act between Avant-Garde radicalism and conservative tradition was made by Thomas Mann. As he frequently admitted, his intellectual outlook was formed by the late neo-Romanticism of Wagner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. And yet throughout his early work, most notably Buddenbrooks (1901), Tristan and Tonio Kröger (both 1903), Mann treated the claims of artistic sensibility in a sympathetic but, ultimately, ironic fashion, relativising them against the more stable values that he saw emanating from the family or, more generally, from the positive features of bourgeois society itself, such as health and sociability.[19]

 

The goal of the mainstream Modernists was, in short, the absorption of novelty into custom; they sought not the destruction of the latter, but the retention of its vital elements to enrich the traditions of their respective literary cultures. How this was to be achieved, Eliot himself showed in the poetry of his maturity, such as The Wasteland (1922). Here, the formal moment of Avant-Garde iconoclasm is exploited, but within a context alive to the mythic and religious structures which underscore the flow of history. An even more extensive attempt to exploit Avant-Garde techniques for Modernist purposes was made by James Joyce in his epic novel, Ulysses (1922). Joyce drew here both upon the French Symbolist tradition and upon the language games of Dada and Apollinaire, producing in his novel a complex text of shifting narrative positions and typographies that would have been familiar to any exponent of the Avant-Garde. But Joyce gives unity to his work by framing these diverse techniques within a larger narrative adapted from Homer’s Odyssey, and in such a way that the individual details of his novel are consistently related to the larger patter that underscores them. In a similar vein, Kafka availed himself of many of the techniques and themes of the German Expressionists, taking over not only their allegorising mode but also their focus upon the pathology of character and the psychic effects of generational conflict. These are all themes in Kafka’s work, particularly the stories, ‘The Judgement’ (1913), ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915) and ‘A Hunger Artist’ (1922). And yet these themes, and Kafka’s own pre-Surrealist optic, possess their own quite unique thematic depth. This is the result both of the personal intensity with which they are infused (whose sources were psychological and familial), and by Kafka’s exploitation of the Cabbalist tradition, whose spiritual depths allow the author to translate (as his friend Max Brod perceptively noted) the individual case into ‘the eternal, the transcendental’. In the work of main-stream modernists such as Kafka and Joyce, the dislocations and challenges posed by modernity are both registered but also overcome, integrated into aesthetic totalities and larger patterns of meaning, which ultimately prove capable of capturing ‘this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display’, which Virginia Woolf, at least, regarded as the ultimate achievement of the Modernist writing.[20]

 

 

3. The Literature of Aesthetic Revival:

Symbolism and Romantic Decadence

 

Even during the period of its greatest triumph, voices had been raised against the Realist-Naturalist aesthetic, against, as the English critic, Arthur Symons noted, its slavish adherence to ‘exteriority’, its uncritical acceptance of the unmediated données of the world beyond the self. In France, Baudelaire dismissed Realism as ‘a word, a banner, a joke’, and even Flaubert, who was thought by many to have written with his Madame Bovary (1856) one of the great Realist novels of the age, rejected it as ‘materialist’ and populist. In his later works (the novel, Salambo, 1862, the drama-narrative, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874, and the stories ‘The Legend of Saint Julian, Hospitaller’, and ‘Herodia’, both 1877), Flaubert moved away from his earlier realism and towards a different style that was both more erotic and more dramatic; indeed, towards an aesthetic which combined the two modes, confusing their boundaries through fantasy and parable. This new direction in his writing is evident in Salambo, whose narrative consists of a series of tableaux formed around the historical melodrama of the Mercenary Revolt against Carthage (just after the first Punic war). In spite of its antiquarian detail, however, Flaubert’s novel is really concerned with the larger than life passions embodied in the female figure of Salambo, and in the men who come into contact with her. A similar sensuality is evident both in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and in the stories published as Three Tales. Both works draw us into a world of lasciviousness, cruelty and unbridled egotism, and reveal a distinct macabre feel for the aestheticisation of suffering and death.[21]

 

Flaubert’s late work formed a central part of a movement in the arts known as Romantic Decadence. The writers of Romantic Decadence sought to explore areas of experience, illicit, marginal and exotic that had not only been neglected by the majority of Realist writers, but had positively been prohibited by the publishers and journals of conservative France. As Flaubert and Baudelaire had discovered in 1866 (the year in which they were both tried for offending public decency) the moral-judicial limits on poetic license were severe. Writing which attempted to push back the conventions of literary taste was forced into the shadow-world of private circulation and illicit publication. This was the case with one of the seminal texts of Romantic Decadence: The Songs of Maldoror, written by the twenty-two-year old Comte de Lautréamont (nom de plume of Isidore Ducasse) and published in serial form between 1868 and 1869. Composed in six long cantos, The Songs of Maldoror details the epic picaresque voyage of its hero through a world of evil and deviant malpractices, from Vampirism to sexual initiation. The tone of the text is one of sustained hallucination, and its ambit one that moves between myth and personal fantasy, as it details the vision of ‘man acting in all his stupidity, perverting souls by any means possible’. In its heightened sensationalism and macabre imagination, The Songs of Maldoror deliberately flaunted bourgeois standards, both moral and aesthetic. But the greatest shock to public sensibility came from the most iconoclastic of the poètes maudits (‘decadent poets’, named thus after the title of a volume of essays published by Paul Verlaine in 1884): Arthur Rimbaud. Younger still than Lautréamont, Rimbaud developed his oeuvre around a sustained confrontation with the mores of (what he regarded to be) a culturally bankrupt and atrophied society. His major poems, ‘The Drunken Boat’ (1871), The Illuminations (written in 1872 but not published until 1886) and A Season in Hell (1873), give voice to a rhapsodic, almost visionary engagement with reality. In a famous letter written in 1871, Rimbaud announced that his ambition was ‘to arrive at the unknown by the disordering of all the senses’. His work reflects this goal: extended narratives written largely in free verse combine religious, mythic and supernatural discourses with the profane and sometimes obscene iconography of the modern city. And throughout, Rimbaud withholds from the reader any clear idea of the enunciating subject: there is no lyrical self, no clear position of speech, simply a multitude of voices responding in pain, anger and delight to the needs of ‘a soul that is almost dead to goodness, in which the light rises severe as funereal tapers’. And yet the much-vaunted amorality of Rimbaud’s vision (an image sustained by his own aesthetic self-stylisation amongst the Bohemian groups of Paris) served to obscure the deep sense of sin and longing for redemption that is also discernible in his work, particularly in A Season in Hell. In this volume, the ecstatic epiphanies of The Illuminations give way to painful introspection and confession, almost as if the poet is assessing the final fruits, psychological and moral, of the journey made through derangement and the experience of evil. Fatigue and despair are the key themes here, and a new note of spiritual vulnerability: ‘I cannot defend myself! – I am hidden and I am not hidden/ The flame rises again with its damned soul’.[22]

 

Rimbaud positioned the poet (in the words of his contemporary, Nietzsche) ‘beyond good and evil’, conceiving him as a denizen of a realm where all may be experienced and forgiven, for the sake of a deeper penetration of those experiences that lie beyond rational consciousness and moral probity. Both Rimbaud’s exhortations and his example were followed by many from within the Decadent school. Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote his tales, The Diaboliques (1874), half-detective fiction, half horror, which figure incestuous priests and sorcery in their diverse narratives; whilst Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Cruel Tales (1883), and, most notably, his enigmatic play, Axel (1890), promoted a number of vices, obscure and less obscure. But the novel that transformed the Decadent position into a conscious and recognisable stance was Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature (1884). In Huysmans’ novel, we leave the street-wise youth-culture that Rimbaud had spun around the outcast, criminal and Lumpenproletariat in his poetry, and enter the realm of aristocratic panache, of that key figure in fin de siècle Europe: the dandy. Although no less amoral or hedonistic, Romantic Decadence here does not simply constitute a critique of bourgeois morality; it forms its alternative, providing a self-conscious counter ethos, which sets against that functional Utilitarianism of the liberal mind, an inward-looking, sensation-seeking sensibility, whose ultimate goal is not material acquisition or social utility, but the capturing of ‘erudite fancies, complicated nightmares, suave and sinister visions’. The aristocratic hero of the novel, Des Esseintes, is afflicted with the mal du siècle, that combination of boredom and satiety that Baudelaire and those that followed him called ennui. The victim of an over-developed sensibility, of a brain ‘shaken and sharpened and rendered almost clairvoyant by neurosis’, Huysmans’ hero tries to rid himself of the commonplace banalities of late nineteenth century commercial life by giving himself over to a systematic cultivation of the senses achieved with the aid of exotic flowers, potent liquors and bizarre pets. In Des Esseintes’ world, nature and artifice are transposed, imagination substituted for reality, and ethical norms relativised and displaced by those of an obsessive individualism that accepts no external check upon the exercise of its own privileged rights.[23]

 

Romantic Decadence became the dominant aesthetic of fin de siècle Europe. Arthur Symons called it ‘a new and beautiful and interesting disease’; Paul Verlaine provided the first poetic use of the term in his poem ‘Languor’ (from the volume Of Old and Late, 1884), whilst Gautier supplied its most complete definition in his famous preface written in 1868 to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, where he defined Decadence as ‘the refined thoughts of a dying civilisation, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intensive pleasures … it is made up of a mixture of carnal spirit and melancholy flesh, and all the violent splendours of the late Empire’. Walter Pater provided the locus classicus for the Decadent position in his work of art history, The Renaissance (1873). Here, in the conclusion to his study, Pater argued that the individual must break the bounds of habit by remaining alive to those moments in life in which ‘the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy’. At such times of heightened sensibility, the mind and the emotions become transfigured. ‘To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain [this] ecstasy, is success in life’. An entire generation, from Algernon Charles Swinburne to Oscar Wilde, agreed. It was Wilde who provided the most vital example of the new sensibility. He achieved this not so much in his plays (Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892, A Woman of No Importance, 1893, and The Importance of Being Ernest, 1895), where he playfully teased aristocratic society for its double standards, role playing and shallow sense of values, but in his sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The hero of this novel attempts to arrest the decay of years by means both magical and amoral, but fails, physically wasted and morally repentant. In spite of its strangely pessimistic and somewhat moralising conclusion, the novel devotes much of its space to a celebration of a ‘new Hedonism’, often dwelling in loving detail upon the body culture and the cult of youth celebrated by Romantic Decadence. Wilde achieved fame through his plays, and notoriety through his life; but his rare theoretical pronouncements on art are equally important, for in them he broke not only with the aesthetic desiderata of the Realist-Naturalist school, but with an entire tradition that sought to subject art to moralistic criteria. By reversing that equation (‘the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium’), Wilde not only provided a succinct formulation of the aestheticism that underscored his personal outlook; he also pointed the way forward for writers such as D.H. Lawrence, André Gide and Thomas Mann. These mainstream Modernists would later take such insights as their starting point, exploring in their work that pained but often liberating relationship between ethical transgression and individual self-fulfilment that Wilde had charted a generation earlier.[24]

 

The difference between the romantic decadence of Huysmans and the ethereal spirituality of the Symbolist poets, particularly of their guiding light, Stéphane Mallarmé, may seem great. But important affinities did exist: both groups viewed the aesthetic vocation with an almost religious intensity; both treated the phenomenal world purely as an extension of the perceiving self; and both were convinced that personal experience should be dislocated from habit and convention. Symbolism had its origins in poetry of the Parnassian school, a group of poets centred around the figure of the enigmatic Leconte de Lisle, whose promulgation of an ‘art for art’s sake’ (l’art pour l’art) became the catch-phrase for this generation. They published their work in the esoteric journal The Contemporary Parnassian (three volumes: 1866, 1869 and 1876), where they expressed their characteristic aristocratic disdain both only for the common themes and bourgeois predicaments explored by Realist writers, and for the heroic and often lachrymose rhetoric of French Romantic writers such as Hugo and Lamartine. In their insistence upon formal rigour and purity of diction, the Parnassians shared a common project with the Symbolists, who likewise sought to remove poetry from the banalities of the everyday world and the politics of the literary market place. The Symbolists, however, deepened the Parnassian aesthetic into a poetics of heightened insight, employing, as in the case of Stephan Mallarmé, images that were often ethereal and esoteric, and acted (precisely because of their hermeneutic inaccessibility) as signs of higher realms of being and consciousness. Although it was the literary critic, Jean Moréas, who supplied in his ‘Literary Manifesto of the Symbolist School’ (published in 1886) the public with an account of the Symbolist school, it was Mallarmé who provided the movement with its theoretical basis. In his letters and essays, Mallarmé argued that the Symbolist poem should cultivate connotation rather than denotation, should ‘retain only the suggestiveness of things’, in an endeavour to capture that pristine world beyond language, whose secrets have opened themselves to music but never before to literature. It is within this rarefied realm that Mallarmé wished the poet to move, in an attempt to create an ideal text where ‘everything will be hesitation, disposition of parts, their alternations and their relationships – all this contributing to the rhythmic totality, which will be the very silence of the poem’.[25]

 

Mallarmé’s output was slim (his major texts are ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’, 1876, ‘The virginal, living and beautiful day’, 1885, and A Dice Throw, 1897); but it was precisely the paucity of his writing that testified to his perfectionism and eclectic desire to refine the nature of poetic language to the point where it would prove capable of registering the ‘image emanating from the reveries which things arouse in us’. Mallarmé’s work, formally elliptical and semantically polyvalent, might best be understood as the poetic analogue of philosophical idealism; the mental states that he evokes (as in ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’) are the products of the indistinct workings of memory and dream, possessing a nebulous ontology that exists somewhere between memory and longing, between reality and wish fulfilment. They are, in short, like the nymphs and the natural world that envelops the faun, timeless representatives of ‘the visible, calm and artificial breath/ Of inspiration’.[26]

 

Mallarmé was the still point around which the Symbolist movement turned, his leadership being assured both through the uncompromising integrity of his verse and through the magisterial presence of his personality. The other major Symbolists were Leconte de Lisle (Antique Poems, 1852), Paul Verlaine (Wisdom, 1880), Tristan Corbière (Faded Loves, 1873), Jules Laforgue (Complaints, 1885) and Maurice Maeterlinck (Pelléas and Mélisande, 1902). Their poetic idiom was wide, ranging from the late-Romantic intoxication that pervades Maeterlinck’s play, through to the miniature conversation pieces of Verlaine, with their wistful evocations of the fleeting moment (see, for example, the famous ‘Clair de Lune’, 1869); whilst in the more robust colloquial verse of Corbière and Laforgue, whose use of argot, playful irony and polyphonic textuality, evident in, for example, Laforgue’s Complaints, combined to produce some of the first examples of vers libres (verse free of metrical norms and rhyme) in modern poetry, the Symbolist idiom acquired a more robust, indeed Modernist voice.

 

The impact of the Symbolist idiom on European literature was enormous. In England, Swinburne wrote, in the three volumes of his Poems and Ballads (1866, 1878, and 1889), a poetry, languorous and brooding, but also probing in its challenges to Victorian taboos on sexuality and death; whilst Pater expanded his classic statement of the Symbolist credo in his Renaissance study into the Bildungsroman, Marius the Epicurean (1885), whose early Roman hero strives towards ‘the very highest achievement: the unclouded and receptive soul’ that was for Pater the terminus ad quem of all intellectual endeavour Equally convinced of the mystical potency of the moment was the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins (‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, 1875). The Jesuit priest may not have sympathised with everything espoused by the French Symbolists; and yet in his theory of ‘‘inscape’ he produced a theory of poetic inspiration that paralleled the Symbolist (and, later, Joycean) notion of the epiphany. Like them, Hopkins saw in heightened consciousness the same ‘moulding force which succeeds in asserting itself over the resistance of cumbersome or restraining matter’, and which leads to the distilling of an experience in a single image or symbol. That the poet saw in this intensity of experience proof of the immanence of God only serves to establish his connection with the French movement, many of whose members, such as Huysmans, were to discover a religious vocation towards the end of their literary careers.[27]

 

In Italy, Germany, Spain and Russia, Symbolism interacted with the native literatures of those nations to produce a distinctive version of early Modernism. In Russia, Symbolism was the dominant literary movement in the years between 1890 and 1910, espoused by poets such as Alexander Blok (Verses about the Beautiful Lady, 1905, and ‘The Twelve’, 1918) and Andrey Bely (Ash and Urn, both 1909). Blok, who analysed the origins of his aesthetic in ‘On the Present State of Russian Symbolism’ (1910), drew out the mystical potential of the French tradition, fusing the feel of poets such as Mallarmé and Verlaine for mood and ambience with an at times ecstatic religiosity. In his most famous poem, ‘The Twelve’, which likens a group of Russian revolutionaries to Christ’s disciples, Blok’s visionary Symbolism comes to acquire the intensity of political messianism. Spain and Portugal also possessed their indigenous Symbolist poets in the shape of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Verse, 1871) and the later figure of Fernando Pessoa (Mensagem, 1934). Pessoa’s poetry took Symbolism into the discourse of Modernism proper, in writing that exploits multiple personae to give voice to themes of introspection and stoicism. In Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio published poetry (First Spring, 1879, and the five volumes of In Praise of the Sky, of the Sea, of the Earth and of Heroes (1903–1912) and novels (The Child of Pleasure, 1889, and The Triumph of Death, 1894), which combined the Symbolist appreciation of colour and music with a Romantic Decadent craving for sensuality. D’Annunzio soon, however, turned introspection into a more assertive idiom, making contact in volumes such as Alcyone, from the In Praise series, with a Nietzschean vitalism, where sensual display acquires a more virile pose. The same transition was made by the Swedish poet, Verner von Heidenstam (New Poems, 1915) and the German, Stefan George. George, in particular (a disciple of Mallarmé), subjected the Symbolist heritage to a firmer discipline, in which strict metrical form fused with a celebration of the values of hierarchy and order. These are the values that emerge out of The Seventh Ring (1907) and The Star of the Circle (1914). George appears in this verse as a quasi-messianic figure, the chosen one, the magister who ‘breaks the chains, and sweeping away the ruins/ Imposes order, bringing back those who have run away/ Into an eternal state of justice’. In this poetry, we come to the end of the Symbolist moment; born under the sign of Nietzsche’s superman, George’s verse seeks to transcend the hypertrophic aestheticism of the French school, replacing the ethereal dissipation of the latter with a new, more Germanic ethos, founded respect for charismatic personality, self-discipline and rigour of mind and body, on values that hover somewhere between neo-classicism and a new myth of the poetic founded on ceremonial ritual.[28]

 

 

4. Hearts of Darkness:

The Self as Other

 

Underwriting the poetics of the Symbolist aesthetic was a belief in the fluidity of selfhood, the conviction that individual identity was a fragmented and discontinuous thing, personality a meeting place for conflicting desires and mental dispositions. The Symbolist poet, Jules Laforgue, declared himself (in the first of his ‘Sundays’ poems, 1887) a ‘poor pale and paltry individual/ Who doesn’t believe in his Self except at his lost moments’. His contemporary, Arthur Rimbaud, put it even more forcefully in a letter written in 1871, where he attested: ‘It is a mistake to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought […] I is someone else’ (literally: ‘I is an Other’). These were sentiments shared by many Modernist writers, including D.H. Lawrence. Writing in 1914, he warned his sympathetic readers that the notion of the stable personality was simply no longer tenable. As he explained in a letter (whose very grammar seems to reflect Lawrence’s psychological relativism): ‘You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same radically-unchanged single element’.[29]

 

The writers of this period were supported in their belief in the manifold plurality and complexity of individual identity by philosophic investigations into the nature and workings of the unconscious. As early as 1869, Eduard von Hartmann had published his Philosophy of the Unconscious, which influenced writers throughout Europe. But it was the work of Nietzsche and Freud that made the greatest impact. In spite of their radically diverging perspectives (existential-philosophical, in the former case, psychoanalytic-scientistic, in the latter), both posited the existence of a residual, darker self within the human psyche (‘the primary man’, according to Nietzsche), whose Dionysian energies, excessive and unindividuated, belong to the realm of ‘dream and intoxication’. As if to stress the otherness of such energies, Freud grouped them together under the name of ‘das Es’ (the Id, literally ‘the It’), identifying them as that ‘dark, inaccessible part of our personality’. As Freud explained, this deeper part of our selves can only be accessed through metaphor or analogy: ‘we call it chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations […] it is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but is has no organisation, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle’.[30]

 

The view that the self is both fragmented and morally ambiguous informs the fiction of many of the major writers of the Modernist period, from Joseph Conrad through to Franz Kafka, Luigi Pirandello and Robert Musil. The theme appears as early as 1886, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The figure of the split personality had been familiar to the writers of the German Romantic Märchen, such as Tieck and Hoffmann, who had employed the Doppelgänger to give concrete shape to that duality of personality with which their heroes were often afflicted. Stevenson retains this device but refracts it through the more contemporary and infinitely more sinister discourse of medical experimentation; and what are unleashed here are not creative urges, capable of transforming banality into a world of fantasy, but rapacity, cruelty and murder. Stevenson’s story is a cautionary one, aimed both at those who cherish an optimism in a scientifically engineered future, and at the fin de siècle aesthetes, whose longing for ever more novel sensations and for a life enjoyed beyond the constraints of conscience and custom culminates here, not in the refinement of personality or artistic creation, but in ‘delirium’, in that ‘cold thrill of terror’ that attends Hyde as he stalks London during the moments of his bestial transformation.[31]

 

At one point in Stevenson’s tale, Dr Jekyll refers to the ‘unknown’ nature of the creature that he has unleashed within himself; ‘the state of my own knowledge’, he confesses, ‘does not pass beyond that point’ of simple recognition: the psychic forces that create evil resist categorisation. Joseph Conrad came to a similar conclusion in his Heart of Darkness (1902). Set in the Belgian Congo at the height of the imperialist exploitation of that region, Conrad’s story provides an early study of the ethos of colonialism that the author was to further explore, with varying emphases upon the political, in later novels such as The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). The story tells of the journey of Marlowe into the heart of Africa, and can clearly, on one level, be seen as a critique of the bankruptcy of the ‘moral purpose’ that adhered to the imperialist mission in the nineteenth century. But the darkness that Marlowe finds is as much spiritual as political, as becomes evident in his encounter with Kurtz. The latter, an enigmatic station manager, has surrendered himself to the ‘heavy, mute spell of the wilderness’, and in the process has abandoned all standards of decency in favour of a barbaric life twisted by ‘forgotten and brutal instincts, [memories] of gratified and monstrous passions’. As Marlowe discovers, in the face of such horror, conventional language, those ‘familiar, vague sounds exchanged on every waking day of life’, proves quite useless. The darkness that is the self-as-other cannot be described, but only invoked in metaphors, which perhaps will speak to the initiated, but will remain to others forever inaccessible.[32]

 

In Conrad’s story, the conventional self, sociable, practical and rational, confronts its opposite in incredulity and incomprehension. But that the two realms of reason and unreason are intimately, if obscurely connected, Conrad leaves us in little doubt, evoking in the final words of his tale that ‘tranquil waterway’ which allows light and darkness to flow, quite literally, into one another. Stevenson also in his story makes it quite clear that there is an inner connection between criminality and normalcy; the former not only dwells within the latter, but supports and, indeed, makes it possible. This was a theme explored by the Austrian, Robert Musil, in his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906). Here, those dark urges that Conrad had attempted to delineate within the alien climes of an African jungle are located within the very heart of respectable society: in a military academy run for the sons of Austria’s prosperous middle-classes. During his education here, Musil’s young hero discovers that behind the façade of academic and social respectability maintained by his teachers and parents exists a quite different world, one which possesses a raw and entirely amoral animalism that governs all but is never acknowledged. Törless is initiated into this brutal world by two co-borders, Beineberg and Reiting, who have chosen one of their colleagues, the abject Basini, as an object for systematic and sadistic mistreatment. What Törless learns through these experiences, into whose increasing homo-eroticism he is ultimately drawn, is that normalcy contains its own pathology, that ‘between those people whose lives move in an orderly way between office and family’, and the others, ‘the outcasts, the blood-stained, the debauched and filthy’, there was a bridge, ‘and not only that, but that the frontiers of their lives secretly marched together and the line could be crossed at any moment’.[33]

 

The psychological origins of the fluidity of self were also explored by the German poet, Gottfried Benn. In an essay written in 1920, Benn had argued that the modern self could no longer be thought of as coherent or unified; it is, on the contrary, an inherently unstable, fractured thing, surviving on ‘loss, frigidity, isolation from the centre, [being] without psychological continuity, without biography, without a centrally viewed history’. Both in his poetry (Rubble, 1924, Narcosis and Split, both 1925), and in his Rönne cycle of short stories (1915-1916), Benn depicted characters lacking a recognisable inner life, motivation, or consistency, being, like the hero of ‘The Conquest’, so dominated by external forces and stronger personalities that their very physical existence seems transitory and incidental. This loss of self into literal and metaphorical nothingness is the reality (Benn argues) that generations of humanists have tried to ignore. The character of the final story of the series, ‘The Birthday’, takes it upon himself to put the record straight: ‘What is the path that mankind has trodden until now?’, he asks in the concluding lines of that story. ‘It wanted to establish order in something that should have remained a game. But in the end, it did remain a game, for nothing was real. Was he real? No; he was a hotchpotch of possibilities; that’s what he was’.[34]

 

A more sinister account of what happens when the individual is stripped of the traditional defining categories of personhood is provided in the work of the Jewish-Czech writer, Franz Kafka. In his stories, Kafka explored the predicament of those who are forced to bend their personalities to the point where they become unrecognisable as individuals. This is the fate, for example, of the protagonists of ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1919), and ‘The Hunger Artist’ (1922). The ‘heroes’ of these stories find themselves reduced to pure passivity, not only literally (by an executioner’s machine and by a cage, respectively), but also psychologically in terms of their personal identities, as they are forced to internalise the alien legal and cultural norms of their ‘superiors’. In his letters and diaries, Kafka expressed the deep sense of alienation that he felt both from his family, particularly from his father, and from the stultifying routines of the monotonous work ethic that he was compelled, as a minor clerk in an insurance company, to experience on a daily basis. Kafka’s most famous story, ‘The Metamorphosis’ (1915), dramatises this sense of alienation. It charts the guilt, insecurity and growing inferiority complex experienced by Gregor, the son of a down-at-heels middle-class family, who awakens one morning to find himself metamorphosed into an insect. Inwardly unchanged, and deeply sensitive to his plight, Gregor finds first his status, and then his very physical presence, gradually disowned by his family. He is finally reduced to the status of ‘an enemy’ by his loved ones, who impatiently attend the death of the insect-son, disposing of his remains in the domestic rubbish bin.[35]

 

Kafka’s stories are structured around a tension between the repressive banality of the ordinary world and the introspective pain of those who feel themselves excluded from such a world (although it is also true that certain of his characters, such as the hunger artist, seem to cultivate their outsider status). Kafka’s novels, America (written 1911-1914; published 1927), The Trial (1915, published in 1925) and The Castle (1922, published in unfinished form in 1926) explore this tension further, describing the attempts of their shared hero, Joseph K., to find recognition and a place in the world. Throughout Kafka’s novels, the irrational appears not simply as an aberration of individual psychology but as an existential state. In this world, events often seem to float free of time and logic, possessing an openness and unfathomability that produces in Kafka’s characters (and often in the reader) a heightened sense of dislocation that often borders upon terror. This is certainly the feeling that pervades The Trial. Its hero, Joseph K., finds himself arrested one day without warning and by non-uniformed individuals who present no authority or warrant. Convinced in a quixotic way of the essentially rational nature of the law, Kafka’s hero spends the entire novel searching for ‘a clear answer’ to his predicament, trying to wrest logic and rational purpose out of a judicial system that not only refuses to explain itself but wilfully remains impervious to scrutiny. The quest is a hopeless one. The novel concludes with Joseph K. succumbing to the judgement that has been passed upon him, and accepting a guilt that has no apparent foundations. In the final grim scene, he willingly participates in his own abject execution, viewing the knife that will end his life as a part of that ‘ceremonial of courtesy’ which he has spent his entire case admiring, seeking to join.[36]

 

 

5. Memory, Time and Consciousness:

Modernism and the Epistemological ‘Breakthrough’

 

In the midst of the cruelties he witnesses in his cadet school, Musil’s hero, young Törless, experiences an intellectual crisis in his life, which takes the form of a radical questioning of the categories used by his ‘conscious mind’ to make sense of the world. ‘It was the failure of language’, he realises, ‘that caused him anguish’; mere ‘words’ cannot grasp those stirrings of the consciousness that slip between the gaps of discourse, and which lie ‘somewhere between experience and comprehension’. This focus upon knowledge, and the difficulties of achieving adequate means for its articulation and representation, formed a central problematic within Modernist literature. Hugo von Hofmannsthal provided an early discussion of the theme in his ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’ (1902), a fictional letter in which the young English aristocrat, Lord Chandos, tells his friend and mentor, Francis Bacon, of his sudden loss of faith in the ability of language to mediate between his consciousness and the world. No longer believing in the enticing myth of simple representation, Chandos succumbs to a process of mental dislocation, which brings him close to madness: ‘For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts’, he tells Bacon, at one critical juncture. ‘No longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void’. Other Modernist writers, such as Franz Kafka, had gone through similar crises. As he was writing The Trial, he too experienced a radical disjunction between self and language, an experience, as he explained in a letter of that year, 1914, that left him on the point of despair: ‘I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness’.[37]

 

But what oppressed some, liberated others. Virginia Woolf, writing in 1919, also recognised that the perceiving self, when deprived of those traditional cognitive categories used to filter and order experience could not easily make sense of the ‘myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic [and] evanescent’ which descend on the mind like an ‘incessant showers of innumerable atoms’ during our daily lives. But Woolf was also, at the same time, confident that the texture of these experiences could be captured in writing, transposed into a ‘pattern, however disconnected and incoherent’, and made to return as an aesthetic structure. Woolf followed this trajectory in her own novels (Mrs Dalloway, 1925, To the Lighthouse, 1927, and The Waves, 1931), in which she attempted to find a form capable of capturing the ‘fertility and fluency’ of the artistic response to life. What she created in the process was a ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, a process of narration that replaces the omniscient narration of the Realist novel with a discourse reflective of the musings, wish fulfilments and psychological projections of her characters. In To the Lighthouse, this technique allows Woolf to dramatise from within the two conflicting perspectives around which the novel rotates: the masculine perspective, which is rational, empirical and assertive in its demands on the present, and represented by Mr Ramsey, and the feminine, embodied in Mrs Ramsey which, whilst remaining open to the pressures of the unconscious, is nevertheless capable of divining ‘a coherence in things, a stability’, ‘that still space that lies about the heart of things’. Mediating between the two perspectives is the painter, Lily Briscoe. After Mrs Ramsey’s death, she succeeds in attaining a symbiosis between the external preoccupations of Mr Ramsey and the internal values of Mrs Ramsey. She is able to achieve this, not simply because she is an artist, but because she is able to objectify in her aesthetic vision of life that which had remained mystical inwardness in Mrs Ramsey. Consciousness can only grasp life as flux and indeterminacy; but becoming conscious of that consciousness, as Lily Briscoe does in her final ‘vision’ (which allows her to complete her painting as the Ramsey family finally reach the lighthouse) makes it possible for imagination, art and the values of inner life to transcend their limitations and meet reality on its own terms. [38]

 

Leonard Woolf called To the Lighthouse a ‘psychological poem’, feeling that, as an exploration of the processes of the mind, it remained unsurpassed in Virginia’s work. Her concern with time, memory and consciousness appear in a more self-conscious fashion in the work of other writers of this period, such as Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno (1923), and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). The former novel, written in the form of an extended dialogue between the hero and his psychoanalyst, has a greater epic sweep than any of Woolf’s novels. It lays bare the foibles, psychological, sexual and financial, of the eccentric and highly self-conscious Zeno against the backdrop of the crisis of the European bourgeoisie on the eve of the First World War. In telling his story, Svevo’s self-deprecating hero draws our attention to the unreliable nature of his memory, which rearranges the past, ‘analysing the mass of truths and falsehoods’ of his life to suit the needs of the present, effectively obscuring all distinctions between recollection and fabrication. This relationship between time, memory and personal identity is also explored by Thomas Mann in his The Magic Mountain.   The title refers to a Swiss sanatorium to which the guileless Bürger, Hans Castorp, has come to visit a sick relative. Once there, he finds he cannot leave, caught up in the clinical regime of the sanatorium and held spellbound by the many fascinating characters who have come to the mountain. The latter ostensibly seek health; but these representatives of the European aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie have brought with them to the sanatorium a spiritual malaise that is far more potent than their physical afflictions: a lack of moral values, spiritual anomie and, in the figures of Settembrini and Naphta, a political and philosophic extremism which offers the hero of the novel the beggar’s choice of shallow rationalism or profound irrationalism. On Mann’s magic mountain there are no absolutes of time, space, or selfhood, except one: ‘the billow, the lion’s jaws, and the sea’: death. It exists as a metaphysical presence throughout Mann’s novel; a vacuum waiting to be filled by the inmates of this privileged world, who may find the idea of a permanent solution, of any solution, to their personal crises, fatally seductive.[39]

 

As Mann makes clear in The Magic Mountain, the challenges posed by modernity to the psychological and moral health of the individual cannot be overcome by the tentative and partial solutions that the characters in that novel embrace. What is required is a perspective capable of registering the dislocations of identity and consciousness in the modern period, whilst integrating them into a coherent and structured grid. This is precisely the achievement of Marcel Proust’s epic novel, Remembrance of Things Past (published in nine separate, but interconnecting parts between 1913 and 1927, and newly translated as In Search of Lost Time). The theme of the novel is the recovery of the past through memory. As such, Proust’s novel had a parallel in Alain-Fournier’s The Lost Domain (1913), which likewise dealt with the evolution of personality through time, and with attempts to reach a past whose contours seem to exist just beyond the reach of individual recollection. But there are important differences between the two novels, which lie not simply in the scope of Proust’s work but, and above all, in its theoretical sophistication. For at the centre of Proust’s description of the personal and psychological growth of his hero exists an extended exploration into the form and nature of consciousness, and into the ways that are open to it for regaining contact with the past. The key (as the hero discovers in one trivial moment of taking tea) is involuntary memory; that mechanism of the mind that alone is capable of reactivating through a chance taste or smell those intangible experiences which are ‘more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful’ than the concrete memories that make up our conscious self. But, as Proust makes quite clear, such involuntary associations need to be ordered into a formal pattern if they are to reveal their true importance. Life is lived in terms of its experiential intensity, as insight and revelation; but it can only be made to offer up its deepest secrets when it is grasped as an aesthetic whole, as a pattern existing at the centre of apparent confusion and aimlessness. As Marcel notes in the final pages of the novel, ‘this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape’, but only through the agency of the creative mind, through the aesthetic will to form. [40]

 

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) likewise focuses on the transforming capacity of the aesthetic mind through its portrait of the young Stephen Dedalus, who struggles against family, country and religion in furtherance of his artistic vocation. But that consciousness (even artistic consciousness) has its limits in the age of modernity, Joyce made clear in his subsequent novel, Ulysses, published in 1922. Here the fledgling artist, Dedalus, is now seen simply as one personality amongst many, in a kaleidoscope of figures drawn from the urban environment of modern Dublin. In this highly-wrought, polyphonic, symbolically textured novel, Joyce attempts to describe a single day in the life of this city (16 June 1904), reconstructing its social, religious and even culinary and sexual mores with a concern for detail that reveals the author’s affinities with the Realist-Naturalist tradition. During the course of his peregrinations, the young hero of the novel charts an unsteady path through the imposing physicality of Dublin, now depressed, now liberated, now bemused, now enlightened by his recurring experiences, but never entirely able to escape from the plethora of details and events that surrounds him, that ‘ineluctable modality of the visible’, which frames both his actions and his consciousness.[41]

 

In the final analysis, the plenitude that Joyce constructs on the surface of his vast novel is held in check, not by Stephen’s vacillating grasp of the world but by the impressive formal structure of the novel which, through an elaborate system of repetition, cross-referencing and transposition, allows the apparently fragmented nature of the experiences undergone by Stephen and others, such as Leopold Bloom, to cohere into a pattern. Further securing the coherence of the novel are the frequent references to, and parallels with, Homer’s Odyssey, which infuse the minutiae of Joyce’s narrative with an archetypal significance. It is here that Joyce succeeds in bringing to a close the aleatory nature of the journey that the Bloom and Dedalus have embarked upon, bringing the several figures that they represent: father and son, the petit bourgeois and the artist, body and mind, together in a final act of symbolic reconciliation. But the novel does not end here. Consciousness may be contained within form, but it can also be released through the sheer intensity of its articulation. And this is where Joyce leaves us, not with the would-be artist Dedalus nor with the at times pedestrian Leopold Bloom, but with his wife, Molly. Bloom’s wife has been, perhaps, a marginal figure so far in the novel; but it is she who alone proves capable of overcoming the Modernist impasse of restrictive self-consciousness, giving voice in the extended soliloquy with which the novel ends to the sheer joy and plenitude of lived life, to ‘that awful deep-down torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes’.[42]

 

 

6. Libido and Body Culture:

Sexuality in the Modernist Novel

 

That sexuality is not simply a matter of biological inclination or physiological need but a complex psychic medium connected to personal identity, and through which social norms and ethical values are formed, challenged and even displaced, is clear from treatment of the theme in many of the major novels of the nineteenth century, such as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), and Fontane’s Effi Briest (1894). These novels engaged with the nature of female sexuality, adumbrating the fate of women in patriarchal society, in whose quest for self-fulfilment could be read a broader if indirect treatment of the predicament of alienated subjectivity in the increasingly power-oriented and unselfcritical society of late nineteenth century bourgeois Europe. The duplicity and double standards that lay at the core of male-female relationships in this period, particularly as consolidated through the institution of marriage, also engaged the interests of Modernist writers such as Frank Wedekind (Spring’s Awakening, 1891, Earth Spirit, 1895, and Pandora’s Box, 1904), plays which detailed the demonic but also liberating, power of eroticism, and Arthur Schnitzler, whose studies of the domestic mores of fin de siècle Vienna (the plays Anatol, 1893, and The Reckoning, 1895, and the ten dialogues, Merry-Go-Round, 1897) disclose the provisional and self-interested nature of the sexual behaviour of polite Viennese society. In this world of systematic deception, the notion of an ‘absolutely irreproachable life’ is shown to be an ideal that few follow but all employ as a smokescreen, seeking to dissimulate the unrestrained self-interest of their sexual goals.[43]

 

The characters who circulate on Schnitzler’s carousel negotiate their relationships through gamesmanship and with a mixture of coyness and panache that serves to diffuse the hostility that exists as a sub-current beneath this process of mutual, but civilised, exploitation. In Strindberg’s The Father (1887) and in Kokoschka’s Murderer, the Hope of Women (1909), however, latent aggression between man and woman is forced to the surface. These plays give voice to a more dynamic notion of female sexuality: self-assured, uncompromising, aggressive even, and fully capable of adapting masculine techniques to its own ends. Kokoschka’s play employs all the dramaturgic devices of the Expressionist stage, to produce a powerful allegory upon the theme of sexual struggle. Its two protagonists are depicted as elemental parts of ‘devouring life’, locked into a process of attraction and repulsion, whose raison d’être seems to be (as if in a grotesque parody of the Wagnerian Liebestod theme) union with the Other through the Other’s annihilation and dismemberment.[44]

 

The plays of Strindberg and Kokoschka pose in the most radical way questions that were to reappear throughout Modernist literature, questions relating to the relationship between sexuality and power, to the nature of sexual deviance and to the role of patriarchy. The French writer, Colette, in novels such as The Vagabond (1910) and Cheri and The Last of Cheri (1920 and 1926), described the efforts of women caught within, but also struggling against, the imposition of simplistic roles such as the mother, the mistress and the femme fatale. In the place of such clichés, Colette’s heroines (‘practical women of the world’ such as Léa in the Cheri novels) seek to enjoy the native sensuality that is their birthright, working within the limitations that the world of the male imposes on them but able to exploit that world, financially and erotically. Such female self-confidence was seen as a threat to the masculine self by the French novelist and playwright, Henri de Montherlant. His novel tetralogy (The Girls, 1936, Pity for Women, 1936, Demon of Good, 1937, and The Lepers, 1939) constitutes a sustained attack upon the liberated female. Montherlant’s narrating hero, the artist, Pierre Costals, is the mouthpiece for the author’s misogyny. He views femininity as a force that not only challenges and disrupts but, ultimately, undermines what is distinctively masculine within the male. Whereas Colette’s heroines come to a compromise with patriarchal society (but largely on their own terms), Costals sees the divisions between male and female as unbridgeable: contact is only possible at the level of sexual exploitation and control; all other options, including ‘the state of being loved’ are ‘suitable only to women, animals and children’. Costals’ denigration of the women in his life has its source both in the author’s much vaunted quasi-Nietzschean notion of dominio (in which the Other is both tamed and possessed), but also in a more general emotion, a fear of the ‘muddled, confused, impure, two-sided’ nature of the modern condition, which threatens the viability of all genuine values.[45]

 

Fear for the masculine self was also felt by an author whose treatment of personal relations was perhaps the most probing within main-stream Modernism: D.H. Lawrence. His novels (Sons and Lovers, 1913, The Rainbow, 1915, and Women in Love, 1920) explore the dynamism of male-female relationships, and the seemingly contradictory urges they give rise to, that ‘sort of perversity in our souls’, noted by Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, which ‘makes us not want, get away from, the very thing we want’. Lawrence outlined the crux of the problem in his essay on Thomas Hardy. Men and women embody two opposing types of life force: the male proclivity to ‘endless motion, endless diversity, endless change’ stands at odds with the inclination of the female to ‘infinite oneness, infinite stability’. What is required is a balance between these two principles, but this should be a balance forged on the basis of a common respect for what is unique about man and woman, and not on the basis of a desire to abolish such distinctions. This is the insight that Lawrence seems to be working towards in Women in Love. Here, the two couples, Birkin and Ursula and Gerald and Gudrun, represent contrasting types of types of erotic engagement. Gerald and Gudrun are bonded through a reciprocated exercise of power, the exertion of will, physicality and the manipulation and control of the other’s sexual needs (which is, in their case, associated from the very first moment of its consummation with emptiness and ‘the bitter potion of death’). In contrast, Birkin achieves true union with Ursula; desire in their case is linked not to need but to a mutual self-surrender to the Godhead of sexuality, whose presence dwells not within but across the libidinous pair. Their sexual bonding, depicted in one memorable scene becomes part of a ‘mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness’. [46]

 

In spite of his depiction of the mystical oneness of their union, Lawrence, nevertheless, leaves the relationship between Birkin and Ursula on a note of disharmony, the former resisting the possessiveness of his partner’s claims on him, the memory of his friendship with Gerald still alive. But Gerald is dead, the pure will of his self-assertiveness finding its apotheosis in the arid snow-fields of the Bavarian Alps. With his death, the opportunity for that second kind of love that Birkin had been seeking, that ‘eternal union with a man’, in which strength might be matched against strength, virility against virility, in an intense ‘oneness of struggle’ (which had briefly emerged during the famous ‘gladiatorial’ encounter between the two men earlier in the novel) has irrevocably gone. Birkin must now come to terms with the fact that his destiny lies with a woman. The clear admiration for masculinity evinced in Women in Love also emerges in Lawrence’s next novel, Kangaroo (1923); but even here, in a story set amongst the male camaraderie of Australian politics, Lawrence seems reluctant to dwell upon the homo-erotic tensions between his protagonists. Other writers of the modernist period, however, most notably André Gide and Thomas Mann, were more direct in their treatments of the ambivalent nature of the masculine libido. Gide’s short novel, The Immoralist (1902), occupies a central place in the literature devoted to the exploration of homosexuality. In his The Notebooks of André Walter (1891) and Fruits of the Earth (1897), Gide had celebrated the body culture of the fin de siècle Decadent movement. In these works, Gide’s homosexuality was neither clear, nor was it provided with a theoretical justification. In The Immoralist, it receives both. The story tells of the young French professor, Michel, who during a trip to North Africa is attracted to a local Arab boy. When he returns to France to care for his ailing wife and resume his career, Michel undergoes a transformation, which takes him from his earlier Puritan ‘craving for high-mindedness’ to an amoral existentialism that grants all to his new expansionist grasp on life. The novel concludes with Michel’s second trip to North Africa (in search of the boy), and with his decision to remain in a land that he regards as primitive and rejuvenating, his future committed to a further quest for those ‘untouched treasures somewhere lying covered up, hidden, smothered by culture and decency and morality’. [47]

 

The openness with which Gide allows Michel to accept his homosexuality was not chosen by all. For others, the illicit, the outré, excess and transgression remained (quite literally) unspeakable, allowed to emerge only in the margins of text and consciousness. It is in this fashion that T.E. Lawrence deals with sexual taboo in his The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). In the midst of his participation in the Arab revolt during the First World War, he tells of his capture by a contingent of Turkish troops, who include a notorious pederast, Hajim Bey. Lawrence’s account of the episode hovers around the subject of violation, leaving the ‘delicious warmth, probably sexual’ that he experienced during his beatings and degradation a mysterious side effect of his enforced passivity. As Lawrence would later note, his written account arose out of a clash between repression and confession, between the two impulses of ‘self-respect’ and ‘self-expression’, whose unreconciled tensions left the officer-author with a neurosis that he spent his life trying to overcome. That psychic health requires not the evasion but the acceptance of sexual truth is the theme of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912). Its hero, Gustav von Aschenbach, attempts to rid his life of the ambiguities, moral, aesthetic and sexual, with which the artist (Mann argues, following his mentor Nietzsche) must stay in contact as a necessary part of his vocation. Aschenbach refuses to make the existential journey undertaken by Gide’s hero, choosing repression to self-analysis, and leaving the fact of his own sexual ambivalence unrecognised. When the change does take place, through the ageing artist’s encounter with the youth Tadzio during a stay in Venice, sexual attraction is not openly admitted, as it was in Michel’s case, but obfuscated, displaced, transfigured through an elaborate system of Classical allusion, which allows Aschenbach to apotheosise the loved one in terms of the latter’s ‘godlike beauty’. That such a process of euphemism and circumlocution must lead to the grotesque return of the repressed in sickness and death, Mann makes clear to reader and hero alike. Aschenbach, on the eve of his death, is compelled in one final brutal dream to recognise that he has willingly exchanged balance for excess, the possibility of health for the certainty of disease, in a process that he has seen his much vaunted ‘moral law’ transformed into its opposite: an ethos of hope founded on ‘the monstrous and the perverse’.[48]

 

If Modernism involved a liberation from conventional notions of sexual selfhood, it also involved new ways of conceptualising the body and the libidinous force field of the body, whose energies slowly came to be seen as moving in an ambit between received notions of the feminine and the masculine. These more complex modes of bi- and trans-sexuality were explored by Jean Cocteau in his The Holy Terrors (1929). The story tells of the fluid and highly-charged relationship that exists between four adolescents: the brother and sister couple, Elizabeth and Paul, and their friends, Gérard and Agatha. Inhabiting the same domestic space, they play a multitude of games, in which roles are reversed, identities of loved ones confused and deliberately obscured, and gender stereotypes undone. Elizabeth and Paul, in particular, those ‘twin halves of a single body’, play ‘the Game’ (as they call it) with a degree of intimacy that borders on eroticism. The desires of which they dare not speak prove incapable of resolution, and finally bring about the inevitable tragedy of the double suicide: a desperate act embraced so that they can reach a realm where ‘incest lurks no more’.

 

Robert Musil, in his Sorrows of Young Törless, also explored the destructive nature of the energies released by confused and polyvalent sexualities. The journey of self-discovery that Törless undertakes is on one level driven by intellectual curiosity: his need to explore both the problematic status of referential language and rationalist discourses, and the tenuous nature of moral precepts, both of which are recurrent themes in Modernist writing At the centre of these explorations lies, however, the increasingly ambiguous nature of Törless’ sexuality, which moves from the bond of sensuality that he has established with his mother (and which he later rediscovers in the arms of the village prostitute, Bozena) to the ‘sexual excitement’ that he experiences as an observer of the sadistic debasement of his colleague, Basini. The novel concludes with Törless expelled from school, seeking, in a return of his Electra fixation, solace on ‘his mother’s corseted waist’. That Törless’ represents the revolt of youth against patriarchal society, Musil does not make clear; but this is exactly the theme explored by the German Expressionist playwright, Arnolt Bronnen, in his play, Patricide (1922). The play tells of a struggle between a father and his son (Walther) for authority in the family, a familiar theme in many German plays written after the First World War for a generation convinced of the moral bankruptcy of their elders. In Patricide, the son confronts the father, usurping his position in the family through the potency of his sexuality, which he demonstrates by entering into relationships with his friend, the precocious Edmund, his sister, and finally his mother. As Bronnen makes clear, Walter’s concluding words in the play: ‘I am free’; ‘no one is before me, no one is beside me, no one over me: father is dead’, represent both his liberation as an individual and the triumph of his own polymorphous sexuality.[49]

 

 

7. The Transformation of Illusion:

Modernist Drama

 

Naturalist drama, wedded to contemporary ideas on environmental determinism, biological conditioning, gender conflict and the bankruptcy of idealism, had taken European theatre to the point where it seemed to have no future. And yet it was precisely one of the foremost Naturalist practitioners, August Strindberg, who showed the way forward out of this impasse. His later plays, the trilogy To Damascus (1898–1904), A Dream Play (1901) and The Ghost Sonata (1907), retained much of the socially critical and anti-humanist, indeed misanthropic ire of his earlier work, and dealt with issues of betrayal, contestations within the domestic sphere and the power politics of personal relationships. Strindberg now in his later plays approaches these themes within a drama that is propelled by the psychology of its characters, by fears, hopes, phobias and fantasies, as in To Damascus, a play (for Strindberg himself) of pilgrimage and penance, of self-scrutiny and confession. Giving shape to such drama meant for Strindberg breaking with the Realist-Naturalist stage, where we assume that all is real, and that we can simply appropriate that reality, and creating a new theatrical idiom where, as he wrote in the preface to A Dream Play, ‘time and space do not exist; on a slight groundwork of reality, imagination spins and weaves new patterns made up of memories, experiences, unfettered fancies, absurdities and improvisations’.[50] In A Dream Play (depicting an Indian goddess, Indra, descending to earth to consort with the human race), there is a radical restructuring of conventional dramatic time in favour of a dream logic: there is no sense of causal sequence, seasons are condensed into minutes and the physical world is transformed through objects that assume different guises and functions in the course of the play. Without division into acts, plot and action flow into one another, moving through a series of forever changing and impossibly exotic locations, from the Mediterranean to Fingal’s Cave. The characters of the play are subject to the same fluidity, their identities subject to a process of formation and de-formation where, as Strindberg tells us in his preface, they ‘split, double and multiply; they evaporate, crystalise, scatter and converge’.[51]

 

Strindberg described his The Ghost Sonata as ‘chamber music transposed to drama. The intimate action, the significant motif, treated in a sophisticated manner’. The interiors of Strindberg’s plays were ‘stylised representations’ rather than literal settings, and his characters looked through the objects that surrounded them, seeing them as images that pointed elsewhere, to another world. This was a dramatic idiom that allied Strindberg with a new movement in the theatre of early Modernism: Symbolism, whose seminal works were Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (1890), and Pelléas and Mélisande (1902) by the Belgium playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. With their poetic language, atmospheric stage settings and languorous characterisation, these plays established Symbolism as the major idiom within early Modernist drama. Axël was published posthumously in 1890, one year after Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s death, and that sense of an ending, so cultivated by the writers of the fin de siècle, pervades the play, from its sepulchral imagery and arched spiritualism through to the world-weariness and double suicide of the two principal characters, Sara and Axel. W.B. Yeats described the play as a ‘sacred book’, and was moved by the intensity of its language at the première of the play in 1894. Axël is a dramatic prose poem, whose lengthy monologues give full range to the Symbolist penchant for heightened speech and arcane allusion (although the plot, which centres on the allure that treasure can exert on susceptible minds, also involves Gothic elements of the occult and violent transgression). The lyricism of the dialogues, the suave deployment of their emotion and their dignity of voice are articulated against a carefully delineated background (often described in impossible detail in the stage directions) of rooms bathed in moonlight and lamps that flicker in chiaroscuro unison. This is the most memorable dimension of the play: its aesthetic mise en scène of precious sensibility. Axël’s final words (famous for an entire generation of fin de siècle acolytes), uttered on the eve of his suicide, ‘as for living, our servants will do that for us’, represents the culmination of an ethos of chivalric honour with which he, and now his loved one Sara, have lived their lives: in disdain of bourgeois convention and of all things material, from which they now finally distance themselves.

 

As with Axël, Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande weaves its magic of suspense and foreboding not directly through action or assertion but through what is intuited by characters and audience alike. We must remain alive throughout the unfolding of the plot to the symbolism of the actions and words of the characters, because it is here that their true motives lie, in suggestive phrases, frequent pauses, questions asked but left unanswered, sentences half uttered, hints of what might be, expressions of muted desire, of postponement, of presentiment, of shapes dimly glimpsed through windows, of shadows: what is stated on the surface rarely reflects true motivation or intention. As in Axel, the dialogues of Pelléas and Mélisande are energised through poetic language, which allows its themes (as if drawing on the Wagnerian device of the leit motif) to be formed around a repertoire of recurring images: light and darkness (freedom versus confinement), the sun and the sea (motifs of regeneration), and water (the fluidity of emotions). All of these images and other devices, such as the brevity of the individual scenes (some a few pages long), reinforce the sense of a rapidly developing destiny for the two protagonists that sustains the central dramatic content of the play: the theme of unfulfilled duty (to fathers and husband), unrequited desire for personal and sexual liberation, desire and guilt, and the longing for extinction, for ‘the human soul is very silent. The human soul likes to depart alone’.[52]

 

Guilt, self-sacrifice and expiation are important themes in Axël and Pelléas and Mélisande. As such, they anticipate the work of the early twentieth-century French author, Paul Claudel, who like Maeterlinck was a devout Roman Catholic. Claudel’s plays, The Tidings Brought to Mary (1912) and The Satin Slipper (1931), are written in a heightened diction (the verset Claudien), and the contexts are often historical and, significantly, set in Roman Catholic countries: in The Tidings brought to Mary, it is fifteenth-century France and, in The Satin Slipper, the Spanish Empire at the end of the sixteenth century. Claudel’s themes are universal: the conflict between duty and passion, the importance of retaining spiritual integrity, the understanding of God’s purpose, sanctification and the imperative of faith in a world that is both evil and corrupt. In Russia, in the circle around the poet Alexander Blok, there were playwrights such as Andrei Bely (He Who Has Come, 1903, The Jaws of the Night, 1907), and Leonid Andreyev (The Life of Man, 1906, The Black Maskers, 1908), who drew upon the genre of the medieval Mystery play but framed it within the Symbolist idiom, with settings that were atmospheric and minimalist. Andreyeff’s brooding The Life of Man is paradigmatic. The play surveys the inexorable rites de passage of the life of mankind, from birth to death, ‘with its dark beginning and dark end’. This allegorical journey is narrated by a mysterious figure, the ‘Being in Grey’, who stalks the play, commenting upon the now victorious, now abject figure of Man. The latter spends his life in ignorance of the workings of fate, until the end of the play where he achieves insight into ‘the ruin and darkness and destruction that pervade everything about him’, recognising that he is a victim of a fate that he could never master.[53] In the German-speaking world, the writer who most successfully embodied the Symbolist ethos in drama (in a way that Stefan George embodied it in poetry – indeed, the two authors were close associates) was the Austrian, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal represents along with Paul Claudel what we might call the neo-classical impetus within Modernist drama. Although his major play was the social comedy The Difficult Man (1921), which centres on themes relating to marriage and honesty in relationships, his earlier drama cultivates an allegorical mode, as in as The Fool and Death (1894), which depicts a confrontation between Death and the world-weary aristocrat, Claudio, who is brought to see the vacuity of his life and accept death as a resolution to it. Other plays such as Electra (1903) and Everyman (1911), draw upon Greek and medieval subjects, and strive for an allegorical reading of human behaviour, particularly behaviour that is forced to confront fundamental moral issues.

Claudel and Hofmannsthal represent the conservative impetus within Symbolist drama. Both engaged with universal themes drawn from the historical past, used stylised language, and the form of their of plays was highly structured, as if in observance of an aristocratic will to form. But as the late plays of Strindberg had already shown, the modernist break with the dramaturgy of Naturalism contained within it a more explosive, disruptive energy that could not be contained within any conservative form, and would see Modernist drama merge with the Avant-Garde. Representative, indeed seminally creative of this direction was Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu (1896). Its opening excremental expletive, ‘shit!’ provoked a scandal at the first performance and announced a new iconoclasm in the theatre. Ubu is the first great anti-hero of modern drama: and set the tone for a play that seeks to undermine all traditional notions of civilised behaviour. Pugilistic, flatulent, studiously ill-mannered, and egged on by his strident wife (in a parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth), Ubu abuses, cajoles and contemplates murder with everyone he encounters to achieve his dynastic goals. Jarry elaborated the Ubu character in subsequent plays: Ubu Cuckolded (1897) and Ubu in Chains (1899). Ubu in Montmartre (1906) was a reworking of two acts from the original play for a local marionette theatre. In all cases, the same exuberant, irreverent figure of Ubu asserts himself, a pastiche of the hero and the bourgeois, the truth-sayer and shameless manipulator of ideas for his own purposes. Jarry’s energetic mockery of bourgeois conventions and clichés regarding social and gender stereotypes was taken further into previously unseen realms of absurdist extravagance by Guillaume Apollinaire in his The Breasts of Tiresias (1917) (in whose preface the term ‘surrealism’ first makes an appearance). The main protagonist, Therese, becomes a man (in a process that sees her breasts being disengaged and floating away as balloons) in order to acquire power and transform the customs of patriarchal oppression.

 

The influence of Jarry and Apollinaire on French theatre lay as much in their experimental dramaturgy as it did in their iconoclastic themes and provocative characterisation: in their use of pantomime conventions, vaudeville techniques, music, indeed, pure noise, and garish and improbable settings. The full extent of this influence would only be felt much later in the Postmodern period, in the work of the theatre of the Absurd, but that such techniques could be integrated into the theatre of mainstream Modernism was shown by the French playwright, Jean Cocteau, who made use of the flexibility that earlier avant-garde dramatists had made possible in plays such as The Human Voice (1930) and The Infernal Machine (1934). The former is a monodrama, which consists of a single extended monologue delivered over the phone by a woman to her ex-lover; the latter is a rewriting of the Oedipus myth. In both plays a universal predicament is made relevant to the present through a modern psychologising of the characters.

 

The German Expressionists were without the aleatory playfulness and comic sense of their French counterparts, but playwrights such as Frank Wedekind (Spring Awakening, 1906), Georg Kaiser (Burghers of Calais, 1917), Walter Hasenclever (The Son, 1916), Reinhart Sorge (The Beggar, 1917), Arnolt Bronnen, (Patricide, 1922), Hans Johst (The Lonely One, 1917) and Bertolt Brecht (Baal, 1923) brought to life a more intense world, depicting extreme characters in extreme situations, elemental states, who were amoral and some vicious, but all possessing an intensity and vitalism of lived life. In terms of the chronology of these plays, Wedekind and Brecht provide the outer limits. Both shared a desire to dramatise the instinctual core of selfhood, a desire that is post-Nietzschean in Wedekind’s case; anarchistic in Brecht’s. Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and the subsequent ‘Lulu’ plays (known thus because of the female protagonist who links both plays), Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), depict the course of unrestrained sexuality. The sexual urge emerges in these plays exist almost independently of those who nurture it, forming an impersonal life and death force (the latter gruesomely represented in the figure of Jack the Ripper in Pandora’s Box, linking Eros and Thanatos both for those who embody it and for those upon whom the power of the visceral is exercised. The same amoral energies were celebrated by Brecht in his first full-length and only Expressionist play, Baal. Written as a riposte to Hanns Johst’s The Lonely One, which sentimentalises the poet Christian Dietrich Grabbe as a lonely romantic genius, Baal debunks all claims to artistic idealism, depicting a character whose exercise of drunken artistic self leads him to violence, the mistreatment of women and finally murder. But these are experiences that Baal, who embodies a curious mixture of rampant hedonism with his own type of puritan integrity, takes in his stride, for ‘where the sinners herd in shame together/ Baal lies naked, soaking up the calm’.[54]

 

The Spanish poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca, engages with the same elemental forces in his plays, but here such energies are seen in more universal terms as part of a destructive and regenerative lifecycle, and belong to an ethos in which individuals within a community live their lives. Lorca’s ‘rural trilogy’, Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), are set in his local Granada, and draw their energy from the customs, rituals and rites de passage of courtship, betrothal, marriage, dynastic ties and family honour in rural Spain. The coherence of this world is continually at risk, as they are in Blood Wedding, of being undermined by deeper psychic and sexual forces. As the bride says in that play, ‘your son [her betrothed] was destiny and I have not betrayed him, but the other one’s arm dragged me along like the pull of the sea’.[55] And the bride speaks for all of Lorca’s characters, for whom nature acts both as a vitalist source, (and one that is present, almost in Magic Realist fashion, throughout these plays in the archetypal imagery of sun, moon, earth and water), but also as something inscrutable that governs and destroys the lives of those who are unmindful of its darker power (and represented above all in this play by the redolent trope, ‘blood’).

 

Lorca’s plays are attempts to recreate the residual values that underscore the popular mind, and in giving shape to that mind he draws upon folk symbolism, iconography of rivers, forests, stars and the moon. In Ireland, W.B. Yeats wrote plays based on Irish legends and myth, the most notable being The Countess Cathleen (1892), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and Deirdre (1907). Cathleen ni Houlihan is a play of nationalist sentiment, centring on the decision of a young bridegroom to forgo his wedding so that he can go and fight with French troops against the English. Cathleen herself is the Old Woman (a personification of Ireland and its conscience), who reappears like a Greek chorus throughout the play, invoking the memory of past Irish heroes whose words and deeds must continue into the mind of the present, their dead voices, as she exclaims in the concluding scene, ‘speaking forever’.[56] John Millington Synge, a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, also sought to promote Irish identity by returning to peasant culture, which he found amongst the fishermen of the Aran Islands, whose resilience in the face of suffering he celebrated in Riders to the Sea (1904). Synge was sceptical about creating drama out of an idealised past in the manner of Yeats, and his most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World (1907), a comedy about the putative patricide committed by its protagonist, Christy Mahon, draws as much upon the conventions of the well-made play (confused identities, fortunes revered, and the deus ex machina – in this case, the return not once but twice of the supposedly dead father) as it does upon indigenous Irish culture, although the latter is certainly represented in its vitality of language, its residual good humour and healthy disrespect for the law. Christy himself is much more than a play-acting buffoon. He sees shrewdly (and for the pro-nationalist theatre-goers at the time too shrewdly) into the hypocrisy, self-seeking values and shallowness of provincial Ireland. Christy because of the venial sin of the crime he has supposed to have committed, patricide, may be an outcast from mankind, but as he observes ‘if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse, maybe, to go mixing with the fools of the earth’.[57]

 

The most famous playwright of the modernist period in Italy was Luigi Pirandello. In his plays, The Rules of the Game (1918), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), Pirandello sought to find a form that would capture ‘the multiple personality of everyone corresponding to the possibilities of being to be found in each of us’. In Henry IV, he deals with a character who has apparently convinced himself that he is the reincarnation of a Hapsburg king, and assembles around him a retinue to support him in this allusion. But that this is no conventional madness, Pirandello demonstrates in his denouement, where the ‘mad’ king reveals that his imperial role has been the product of a ‘conscious madness’, part of an elaborate charade masterminded in order to revenge himself upon friends and family. That such a tactic might itself be the product of a genuine insanity is one of the tantalising possibilities muted in the final scene of the play. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the author developed this theme even further. The entire play takes place in the space between illusion and reality, the stage and the real world, with actors playing at being actors, caught in the act of rehearsing one of Pirandello’s plays by a group by six characters whose dramatic status forever hovers between fiction and reality. The protagonists of the play act out their ‘real-life’ melodrama on the stage, convinced that the theatrical medium is ‘less real perhaps, but truer!’. The result is a play whose playful self-referentiality and wilful blurring of the boundaries between art and life strikingly anticipate the Absurdist direction that drama was to take later in the twentieth century.[58]

 

 

 

 

 

 

8. Fragments of Modernity:

Modernist Poetry

 

The Modernists focussed upon the nature of consciousness and upon the ways that it engaged with the world, emphasising the problematic nature of language, which had lost for many its power either to express new forms of experience or to reflect processes within the external world. Those who argued thus received support from the writings of linguists and philosophers of language such as Fritz Mauthner (Contributions to a Critique of Language, 1901-1903), Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921), and Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916). All drew attention to the non-representational valency of language, the fact that it consists (as de Saussure argued) of signs, which possess a meaning only in terms of the internal coherence within specific signifying systems; that (in the words of Wittgenstein) ‘a proposition is a model of reality, [but only] as we imagine it’. To a large extent, these theorists of language were simply consolidating the apercus made more than a decade earlier by poets such as Mallarmé.   In his essays and letters, the Symbolist poet had argued that the gap existing between language, self and world provided a new task for poetic agency; it would free language from simplistic denotation and open it to the infinite play of connotation. In the modernist period, Mallarmé was followed by a generation of poets who sought, in T.S Eliot’s words, to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’, establishing new associations between words and concepts that had been exhausted of meaning through quotidian use. Paul Valery was one such poet. In his poem, ‘The Young Fate’, 1917, and in the volume, Charms, 1922, he charted in his finely tuned style the graduations of poetic consciousness, which moves (according to Valery, in his ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’, 1922) ‘between emptiness and the pure event’. Valery’s verse gives voice to an unerring feel for stasis, mood and the passing of time, whose modulations are structured through a neo-classical control of rhythm and metre, a poetic form which is sensitive to the flux of experience, but has no place for chaos, disorder or distracting sentiment. Valery supported his poetic output with an extensive body of theoretical work, essays such as ‘Problems of Poetry’ (1936), ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (1939) and the more autobiographical ‘Memoirs of a Poem’ (1938). In these essays, he defined the sublime functionalism which underscored his project, elaborating upon that ‘combination of ascetics and play’, which was at the centre of his hermetic life and work.[59]

 

Valery represented the Orphic strain in Modernist poetry: following Mallarmé, he construed poetry as a pure product of the controlling self, and used incantatory words, multiple poetic personae and myths to capture those nuances of meaning which exist at the far reaches of hermeneutic intelligibility. The scope and intensity of Valery’s writing was matched and possibly exceeded by the major German-speaking poet of this period: Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke attempted in his poetry (The Book of Hours, 1899-1903, The Book of Images, 1902-1906, New Poems, 1907, Duino Elegies 1922, and Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922) to break through to increasingly more oblique forms of expression, a process which reached its apotheosis in his Duino Elegies. But even the earlier volumes contain moments when the poetic gaze approximates an intensity that borders upon the mystical. This is particularly the case in the so-called Dinggedichte (literally, ‘thing-poems’), such as ‘The Bowl of Roses’ and ‘The Inwardness of the Rose’, from New Poems. In these poems, the object-world becomes transfigured through the poet’s aestheticising vision, invested, indeed, with an ontological plenitude that displays ‘beyond all power of giving, presence, / that might be ours: that might be our extreme’. The objects depicted here have attained a unity of being, a self-sufficiency that is withheld from those burdened with consciousness, those who (in the famous words of the first Duino Elegy) ‘don’t feel very securely at home/ in this interpreted world’. The latter must find meaning the best they can, accept the ‘once and no more’ of life, brute contingency and death, ‘pressing on and trying to perform it, / trying to contain it within our simple hands, / in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless heart’. The Duino Elegies are a record of this process, and the poetry in that volume, with its dislocated syntax, shifting metrical forms, and abrupt changes of mood, reflects the pained terms in which the individual attempts both to come to terms with existence (‘Dasein’), and to achieve transcendence from the same.[60]

 

Rilke’s existentialist symbolism represented a dominant mode within the poetry of European Modernism. In Spain, poets such as Antonio Machado (Solitudes, 1903, The Land of Castille, 1912, second volume, 1917) and Juan Ramon Jiménez (Spiritual Sonnets, 1916, Stones and Sky, 1919), produced a verse that was symbolist in inspiration, but sui generic in its often intense religiosity; whilst in Italy, Giuseppe Ungaretti (The Joy of Shipwrecks, 1919, and Feeling of Time, 1933), Salvatore Quasimodo (Waters and Lands, 1930, and Sunken Oboe, 1932), and Eugenio Montale (Bones of Cuttlefish, 1925, and Occasions, 1939) found inspiration from Dino Campana (Orphic Songs, 1914), whose famous ‘The Window’, with its syntactic dislocations and Symbolist epiphanies, provided one of the earliest examples of the Modernist idiom in Italian poetry. These poets converged on a style known as Ermetismo (hermeticism). Their poetry gives voice to a cryptically encoded world of private associations, memories and desires, in poems in which the superfluous, the decorative, the qualifying is pared away to a radical minimalism. Noted examples include Ungaretti’s two-line poem ‘Morning’: ‘M’illumino/ d’immenso’ (‘I am illuminated/ by immensity’), and Quasimodo’s ‘And suddenly it is evening’, where a union of light and time is achieved precisely through the audacious brevity of the poem’s three-line form. Montale made this idiom his own in his volume, Bones of Cuttlefish, exploring (as in the famous ‘The Lemon Trees’) those ‘silences/ in which things yield and seem/ about to betray their ultimate secret’.[61]

 

Spanish Modernism possessed a literature of equal depth and resonance. It included the work of the playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán, whose theory of esperpento (poetic de-formation), evident in plays such as Bohemian Lights (1920) and Don Friolera’s Horns (1921), represents the most sophisticated theory of the Modern stage outside the epic theatre of Brecht, and the great novelist-philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, the author of fiction such as Mist (1914) and Abel Sánchez (1917), but who is perhaps best remembered for his religious-existential study, The Tragic Sense of Life (1912). The major work of this period came, however, from the poets, Juan Jiménez and Antonio Machado, whose deepening of the heritage of French Symbolism helped produce the finest poetry in Spain since the seventeenth century. Behind much of their writing lies a native mystical tradition, a sense of being embarked on a spiritual quest. This is evident in the work of Machado, whose best poems, such as ‘From the Road’, ‘Passageways’, and ‘From the threshold of the dream they called me…’, give voice to a determination to win through to spiritual insight even in the face of a world that is ‘empty, transparent, voiceless, blind’.[62]

 

In Russia, a similar exploration of the transcendent was undertaken by a group of young poets known as the Acmeists, who wrote between 1910 and 1922. As with the Italian hermeticists, the Russians also wanted to move beyond the evocative musicality of the Symbolist style, hoping to create a poetic idiom that would be responsive to the emotional and spiritual needs of the poet and reader. The leading representatives of the school were Anna Akhmatova (Evening, 1912, The White Flock, 1917, and Anno Domini MCMXXI, 1922), Osip Mandelstam (Stone, 1913, Tristia, 1922), and the founder of the group, who provided its manifesto in 1913 with ‘The Tradition of Symbolism and the Acmeists’, Nikolai Gumilev (Pearls, 1910, Foreign Sky, 1912, and The Pyre, 1918). The Acmeists focused on matters of personal and metaphysical import: in Gumilev’s words, on ‘God, sin, death, immortality’. Such concerns dramatically come to the fore in the poems ‘July 1914’ and ‘Everything is Plundered…’ by Anna Akhmatova, in which the violence of history (here, the outbreak of the First World War and the ensuing Russian Revolution), is evoked through imagery of desecration and natural disaster, only to be finally if tentatively overcome through the symbol of the ‘deep transparent skies’, which represent continuing life and hope. These poems give intimations of a religious faith that Akhmatova was only fully to express in Anno Domini MCMXXI. The poetry of Mandelstam also looks out to history; but now the apocalyptic note is stronger and the feeling of transcendence weaker, as in ‘My Time’, in which the poet evokes his age as a ‘savage beast’, a ‘wounded animal’ whose back has been broken by the impact of historical and political change. In his later poetry, much of which remained unpublished, an even deeper pessimism emerges, as in ‘January 1, 1924’ and ‘But a Sky Pregnant with the Future… ‘, which give voice to a new idiom capable of registering a Russian society changed through war and revolution, a sombre world where ‘the great lime-trees smell of death’, and where human aspirations must remain unfulfilled.[63]

 

Those who wrote within the late Symbolist idiom, such as the poets of the Hermetic school in Italy and the Acmeist school in Russia, tended to form their poems around a powerfully evoked single image, which served both to organise the themes of the poem whilst acting as a signifier of a higher, transcendent realm. In Britain, the Anglo-American Imagists, whose leading representatives were T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, developed this practice into a self-conscious aesthetic. For Pound the poetic image possessed an almost mystical potency, presenting ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, offering the reader ‘that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth’. The Imagists were probably less important for their theories than for their influence upon one of the major poets of the modernist period: T.S. Eliot. His early poems, such as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), however, go well beyond the pointillist discourse of the Imagists, being structured around images, unsettling and enigmatic, that were part of Eliot’s wider vision of the fragmented and degraded nature of modernity, the literary origins of which lay in a tradition that stretched from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Tristan Corbière and Jules Laforgue. From them, Eliot took a certain cultural pessimism (however ironically expressed), and a variety of formal procedures: the use of multiple personae, which allowed the poet to adopt masks and other guises in his work; a corresponding impersonality, which is the result of the abolition of the lyrical subject; extensive employment of non-poetic terminologies; and the metrical freedom of vers libre. These procedures came to the fore most effectively in Eliot’s magnum opus of his modernist period: The Wasteland (1922), a kaleidoscopic text in which Eliot invokes past cultures of the East and West, from Dante and Shakespeare to the Upanishads, to throw into relief the shoddy materialism, gross sexuality and philistinism of the modern world. In five extended tableaux, Eliot maps out the contours of this world, through allusions, archetypes and tongue-in-cheek citation. These are all framed within a narrative that enacts no general solutions to the crisis that the poem identifies; all that can be achieved (Eliot seems to suggest) is a partial and temporary reprieve from modernity: the attainment of a cultural shelter for those who have shored up the ‘fragments’ of the past against the ruin of the present.[64]

 

The same tension, between invoked tradition and the recognition of the fragmented nature of modernity, characterises much of the poetry of this period, including that of two Greek poets: Constantine Cavafy (Poems, 1904, revised 1910), and George Seferis (Turning Point, 1931, and Mythistorima, 1935). They were the foremost exponents of Modernism in their country, their reputations extending well beyond those of Kostis Palamas (Life Immovable, 1904) and Angelos Sikelianos (The Light-Shadowed, 1909) and other Greek writers of the period. Cavafy returns to the past to speak in a language which is both conversational, and yet precise and even detached, of the ways in which ritual, ceremony and symbolic deed are able to shape both the identity of the individual (in this case, Cavafy as poet) and a nation (and Cavafy identifies himself as a Panhellenist, writing for a people undergoing radical cultural and political change). To regain contact with this past, he employs in his poetry a multiplicity of personae, speaking as the text demands as a Byzantine noble in exile, a sculptor in Tyana, the poet, Pharnazis, or as Julian, the Roman Emperor. These diverse characters emerge through experiences, military, artistic and erotic, out of the past-as-continuing-present, to find their lyrical destination in the ‘thousands of objects and faces’, recreated in the mind of the poet, who is proud, like the ‘mirror in the hall’ (in the poem of the same name), to be able to receive unto himself ‘for a few moments an image of flawless beauty’. The same dual perspective is evident in the writing of Cavafy’s younger and more self-consciously Modernist compatriot, George Seferis. Like so many of the other great poets of the period, such as T.S. Eliot, whose works he translated into Greek, Seferis’ verse balances scepticism and irony with a desire to see patterns, morphologies and continuities working through history. As with Cavafy, Seferis seeks to regain the past for the sake of the future; but, in his often hermetic and allusive writing, this attempt involves a struggle both of imagination and interpretation. This is particularly true of his major work, Mythistorima. Here, Seferis undertakes a journey through Greece’s recent past, ‘to find again the first seed/ So that the immemorial drama might begin once more’.  But it is a theogony without end; its culmination lies not in resolution or in the triumph of the present, but in a grim commitment to keep alive the struggle for individual and national identity. In an otherwise pessimistic conclusion, this remains the sole positive note: the poet’s exhortation to a future generation, ‘those who one day shall live here where we end’, that ‘their dark blood should rise to overflow their memory’, keeping alive the traditions of the poet and his nation, those ‘strengthless souls amongst the asphodels’.[65]

 

A similar struggle to retain the cultural achievements of the past as a security against the fragmentation of the present takes place in the work of the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. Nostalgia for a past governed by ‘custom and […] ceremony’, for a culture governed by ‘innocence and beauty’, pervades Yeats’ work, particularly his early poetry such as Crossways (1889), The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which invoke an enigmatic world of Celtic myth and arcane symbolism. Yeats was later to distance himself from the fabricated nature of this mythology, as in ‘A Coat’ and with a greater sense of historical urgency in ‘Easter, 1916’ and ‘A Meditation in Time of War’, from the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). In these poems, which are partly confessional, partly politically informed, Yeats gave up his early nostalgia for an increasingly frank engagement with a present dominated by anarchism and cultural decline. In his later work, the poet attempted to come to terms with this crisis through his theory of the ‘gyre’, outlined in his tract, A Vision (1925), which allowed him to argue that history was a cyclical process, constantly oscillating between ‘discord’ and ‘concord’, and that the present was simply a connecting link between the far greater realities of past and future. The transcendental quietism of the gyre theory is discernible in the poetry of his later period (The Tower, 1928, The Winding Stair and other Poems, 1933, and Last Poems, 1939), where a new note of irony and stoicism can be heard. Where once consternation and perturbation reigned, as in ‘The Second Coming’, there now comes a certain Olympian distance to matters, as the poet looks down on his life and history from a position that is the product of a deeply-held conviction in the continually creative, continually renewing forces of history-as-mind, particularly as they find expression in art. Yeats wrote some of his greatest poems, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Byzantium’, and ‘The Gyres’, in support of that conviction, winning through to the ‘tragic joy’ that permitted him in Nietzschean fashion both to accept and to overcome the cultural pessimism that seemed inherent within the Modernist response to modernity.[66]

 

 

Modernism

An annotated bibliography

 

‘Modernism’ is a recent term in literary history, the result of attempts to bring the heterogenous literary movements and writers of the period between 1880 and 1925 under a single rubric. When contemporary critics of this period, such as the Danish critic, Georg Brandes, in his The Men of the Modern Breakthrough (1883), the German, Samuel Lublinski, in his Assessing the Moderns (1904) and T.E. Hulme in his lecture ‘Modern Poetry’ (1914), used the epithet ‘modern’ to describe their contemporary literature they typically had in mind Realist and Naturalist writers rather than those whom we now regard as ‘modernist’. The ambit of the term ‘modern’ in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature is charted by Monroe K. Spears in his Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 3–34) and Douwe W. Fokkema in his Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984). Fokkema draws upon Harry Levin’s ‘What was Modernism?’, first published in 1960, and reprinted in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), to establish the central features of the Modernist aesthetic: its foregrounding of perspective, its scepticism regarding veristic notions of representation, its use of metalingual devices, and its refusal to give guidance to the reader (Fokkema, p. 19). Other important discussions of the Modernist typology include Joseph Chiari’s The Aesthetics of Modernism (London: Vision, 1970), Ricardo J. Quinones’ Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983) and Astradur Eysteinsson’s The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Useful introductions to Modernism are provided by Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London: Methuen, 1977), Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995), Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2008), and the volume of essays edited by Pericles Lewis in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Finally, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), provides a wide range of primary documentation, literary and non-literary, that maps the intellectual and aesthetic parameters of the movement.

Symbolism is regarded by many as the seminal movement within literary Modernism. In English, two near-contemporary studies are of importance: Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: William Heineman, 1899) and Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (first published in 1913, and reprinted in 1972, Alfred Knopf; New York). To these must be added Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (London: Fontana, 1961, but first published in 1931), which stresses the ‘revolutionising’ impact of Symbolism, the way that it indicated relations ‘which, recently perceived for the first time, cut through or underlie those in terms of which we have been in the habit of thinking’ (Wilson, p. 234). Subsequent studies (with an understandable French focus) include A.E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830–1900 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1958), A.G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885–1895 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950) and Henri Peyre, What is Symbolism? (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980). With a broader focus upon European literature in general are John Porter Houston, French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement: A Study of Poetic Structures (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), and The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages, edited by Anna Balakian (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982).

In their studied rejection of the cultural norms of bourgeois society, and in their elevation of the role of the artist and artistic practice to a autotelic creed, the Symbolists and their confrères, the Romantic Decadents, anticipated the full-blown iconoclastic stance that later groups, such as the Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists and Expressionists, were to promote in the years immediately prior to and after the First World War. This radical wing of the Modernist movement is conventionally brought under the rubric of the Avant-Garde. Studies of this movement include Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and the essays in the volume edited by Jean Weisberger, Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle, 2 volumes (I: Histoire; II: Théorie (Budapest/Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Akadémiai Kiadó/ John Benjamins,1986).

The literature of mainstream Modernist writers, such as Proust, Gide, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka and Thomas Mann, continues to receive the greatest focus in the scholarship on European Modernism. Some of the major titles include the anthology Modernism, 1890–1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), Modernism and the European Unconscious, edited by Peter Collier and Judy Davies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), with reference to the influence of Nietzsche and Freud respectively, John Burt Forster, Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Rebecca Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme (2007) and the essays collected in the volume edited by Astradur Eysteinsson, Modernism (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007). Michael Levenson’s The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999, second edition 2007) is largely concerned with Anglo-American writers, as is Sarah Davidson’s Modernist Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2014).

These studies view the Modernist aesthetic as a response to the experience of ‘modernity’, an articulation of being located in a ‘maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish’, which Berman sees throughout the literature of this period (Berman, All That is Solid, p. 15). The intellectual, political and socio-economic parameters of that condition have been variously mapped. Works include David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), the volume edited by Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia Smyers, Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910-1940 (London: Women’s Press,1987) and Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). These studies collectively designate the paradoxical nature of the Modernist project: the fact that its writers helped give voice to a widespread process of change and disruption that they came increasingly came to despise, and which they sought to overcome through integrating aesthetic structures, creating, as in the great novels of Proust, Mann and Joyce, a ‘unity of disunity’ that was only achievable at the level of text, but rarely at the level of historical or personal experience (Berman, All That is Solid, p. 15). Such crucial ambivalences within the Modernist ethos are explored in David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) and Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2005).

 

[1] Kingsley, Letters and Memories [1876], ed. Fanny Kingsley (London: Macmillan, 1890), p. 113; and Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State [1830] (London: Hurst and Chance, 1839), p. 63.

[2] Zola, ‘J’accuse’ [1898], in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Henri Mitterand, 15 vols (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1970), vol. 14, p. 929.

[3] Buchan, Prester John (Nelson; London, 1910), p. 276; and Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 25.

[4] Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’ [1829], in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 72; and Shaw, preface to Plays Unpleasant [1898] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p. xxiv.

[5] Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951), p. 57; and Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 184 and 329.

[6] Tönnies, Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper Row, 1963), p. 35; Durkheim, Suicide, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: The Free press, 1951), p. 255; and Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), pp. 182 and 181.

[7] Mann, Buddenbrooks, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 315; Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. John Linton (London: Hogarth Press, 1969), p. 70; and Hesse, Steppenwolf, trans. Basil Creighton, and revised by Walter Sorrell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 28 and 252.

[8] Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (London: Cassell, 1943), p. 155.

[9] Housman, A Shropshire Lad (London: Richards, 1896), p 57; and Mann, Death in Venice, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 7.

[10] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner [1888], trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 55; Heym ‘War’, in Twentieth Century German Verse, trans. Patrick Bridgwater (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 106; Marinetti in Futurist Manifestoes, trans. Robert Brain et al, and ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: The Viking Press, 1973). p. 22; and Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R.W. Flint (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), p. 85.

[11] Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1911), p. 276.

[12] Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), p. 102; and Laura Riding and Robert Graves (eds), A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heineman, 1927), p. 9.

[13] Hardekopf in Expressionismus: Literatur und Kunst, 1910-1923, ed. Bernhard Zeller (Marbach: Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1960), p. 125; and Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestoes and Lampisteries, trans. Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, 1977), pp. 8 and 112.

[14] Benn, Primal Vision: Selected Writings, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 37; Flake in Expressionismus: Der Kampf um eine literarische Bewegnung, ed. Paul Raabe (Munich: dtv, 1965), p. 65; Edschmid, ‘Über den dichterischen Expressionismus’ [1917], in Edschmid, Frühe Manifeste (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1957), p. 32.

[15] Lewis, Blasting and Bombadiering: An Autobiography, 1914-1926 [1937] (London: Caldar and Boyers, 1967), p. 41; and Lewis, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: From ‘Blast’ to Burlington House [1939] (New York: Haskell House, 1971), p. 128.

[16] Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 26; Breton, ‘What is Surrealism?’ [1934] in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 414; and Queneau, The Bark Tree, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Caldar and Boyars, 1968), p.59.

[17] Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p.24; and Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 8, 89 and 86.

[18] Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax-Imagination without Strings-Words in Freedom’, in Futurist Manifestoes, pp. 105 and 95; Schwitters, ‘Konsequente Dichtung’, in Das literarische Werke, ed. Friedhelm Lach, 5 vols (Cologne: DuMont, 1981), vol. 5, p. 191.

[19] Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ [1924], in Collected Essays, 4 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 320 and 334; and Eliot, in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 44 and 39.

[20] Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography [1937] (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), p. 195; and Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ [1919], in Collected Essays, vol. 2, p. 106.

[21] Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: William Heineman, 1899), p. 10; Baudelaire, ‘Since it is a Question of Realism’ [1855], in Baudelaire as a Literary Critic: Selected Essays, trans. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1964), p. 86; and Flaubert, letter to Turgenev, 8 November 1877, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880, trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP; 1982), p. 242.

[22] Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, ed. Daniel Oster (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1977), p. 6; Rimbaud, letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871, in Rimbaud: Collected Poems, trans. Oliver Bernard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 6; and Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, in Collected Poems, pp. 309 and 317.

[23] Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), pp. 63 and 65.

[24] Symons in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ [1893], as quoted by his contemporary, Holbrook Jackson, in The Eighteen Nineties [1913] (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972), p. 55; Gautier, in Théophile Gautier: Souvenirs Romantiques, ed. Adolophe Boschot (Paris: Garnier, 1929), p. 286; Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Collins, 1961), p. 222; and Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891] (New York: Lamb Publishing, 1919), pp. 47; Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray , p. 6.

[25] Mallarmé, ‘Crisis in Poetry’ [1895], in Mallarmé, Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1956), pp. 40 and 41.

[26] From ‘The Evolution of Literature’ [1891], in Mallarmé, Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, p. 21; and Mallarmé, Selected Poems, trans. Anthony Hartley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 52.

[27] Pater, Marius the Epicurean (New York; Boni and Liveright, no date), p. 380; and Hopkins, letter to Coventry Patmore, 24 September 1883, in Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956), p. 306.

[28] Stefan George, Werke, 2 vols (Munich and Düsseldorf: Helmut Küpper, 1958), vol. 1, p. 418.

[29] Laforgue, Poésies, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Armand Colin, 1959), p. 264; Rimbaud, letter to George Izambard, 13 May 1871, in Rimbaud: Collected Poems, p. 6; and Lawrence, letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1981), vol. 2, p. 183.

[30] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1871], trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), pp. 8 and 19; and Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1933], trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 105-106.

[31] Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Dent, 1968), p. 56;

[32] Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde p. 50; and Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 50, 112

[33] Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 132; and Musil, Young Törless, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Granada, 1971), pp. 61-62.

[34] Benn, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff, 4 vols (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1961), vol. 1, p. 436; and Benn, Primal Vision, p. 9 [my translation].

[35] Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer [various translators] (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), pp. 144 and 122.

[36] Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), pp. 18 and 250.

[37] Musil, Young Törless, p. 86; Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), pp. 134-135; and Kafka, letter to Ottla Kafka, 10 July 1914, in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 109.

[38] Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in Collected Essays, vol. 2, pp. 106 and 107; Leonard Woolf, quoted from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 3 vols (London; Hogarth Press, 1980), vol. 3, p. 59; and Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 121 and 237.

[39] Leonard Woolf, quoted in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, p. 123; Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, trans. Beryl de Zoete (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 25; and Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 477.

[40] Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 61; and Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor (London: Chatto and Windus; 1972), p. 451.

[41] Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 42.

[42] Joyce, Ulysses, p. 704.

[43] Schnitzler, Merry-Go-Round, trans. Frank and Jacqueline Marcus (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), p. 38.

[44] Kokoschka, Murderer, The Women’s Hope, trans. Michael Hamburger, in Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, ed. Walter H. Sokel (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 19.

[45] Colette, Chéri, trans. Roger Senhouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 29; and Montherlant, The Girls, a tetralogy in two volumes, trans. Terence Kilmartin (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 45 and 111.

[46] Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), p. 345; Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1955), p. 68; and Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), pp. 388 and 361.

[47] Lawrence, Women in Love, pp. 541 and 305; and Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), pp. 15 and 137.

[48] T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 454; Lawrence, letter to Charlotte Shaw, 26 December 1925, in T.E. Lawrence, British Museum Additional Manuscripts, 45903; and Mann, Death in Venice, pp. 34 and 77.

[49] Cocteau, The Holy Terrors, trans. Rosamond Lehmann (New York: New Directions Books, 1957), pp. 40, 181 and 64; Musil, Young Törless, pp. 94 and 189; and Bronnen, Vatermord in Stücke (Kronberg: Athenäum, 1977), p. 53.

[50] August Strindberg, Twelve Plays, translated by Elizabeth Sprigge (London: Constable, 1963), p. 521.

[51] August Strindberg, Twelve Plays, p. 521.

[52] Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas and Mélisande in Théâtre Vol. II (Paris, 1904), p. 112.

[53] Andreyeff, The Life of Man. In Plays of Leonid Andreyeff, translated from the Russian by Clarence L. Meader and Fred Newton Scott (London, 1915, pp. 67 and 155).

[54] Bertolt Brecht, Baal. In Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London, 1970), Vol. 1, p. 1.

[55] Lorca, Blood Wedding, in Lorca, Three Tragedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 93.

[56] W. B. Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan. In W.B. Yeats: The Major Works, ed. Edward Larissy (Oxford Univerasity Press, 2001), p. 220.

[57] J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 105.

[58] Pirandello, preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author, in Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Dutton, 1952), p. 367; Pirandello, Henry IV, in Naked Masks, p. 206; and Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in Naked Masks,

217. 217.

[59] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London; Routledge, 1961), p. 37; Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 218; Valery, Poems, trans. James R. Lawler (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), p. 215; and Valery, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), p. 108.

[60] Rilke, Selected Works, 2 vols, trans. J.B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 195, 225 and 244.

[61] Ungaretti, Selected Poetry, trans. Patrick Creagh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 9; and Montale, Selected Poems, trans. Ben Belitt i.a. (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 3.

[62] Machado, Selected Poems, trans. Alan S. Trueblood (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard U.P, 1982), p. 163.

[63] Gumilev, ‘Acmeism and the Legacy of Symbolism’ [1913], in Selected Works, trans. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972), p. 248; Akhmatova, Poems, trans. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), p. 73; and Mandelstam, Complete Poetry, trans. Burton Raffel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973), pp. 130-131 and 297.

[64] Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 4; and Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 79.

[65] Cavafy, Complete Poems, trans. Rae Dalven (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 165; and Seferis, Poems, trans. Rex Warner (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), pp. 11 and 31.

[66] Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 214; Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. 68; and Yeats, Collected Poems, p. 337.

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