Impressions on Four Quartets

Buoyed by the knowledge that even our illustrious professor spent some little time with this text before actually understanding it, this post is basically going to be a collection of my impressions after reading the Four Quartets through a few times. These observations are likely to range from the intuitive to the inaccurate, but I am nonetheless confident that Tom, were he living, would take comfort in knowing that time doth not wither nor custom stale his infinite variety. Besides, every time an English student is baffled by Eliot, an angel gets its wings. Or something.

As I leapt into “Burnt Norton,” I was reminded forcefully of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” There is a theme, not just of time (which I’ve beat to death all semester, but hey, so did the modernists) but of an interrelation of the past, present and future. They are bound up together. In the essay Eliot claimed that as the past shaped the future, so the present reshaped the past. The lines “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past” seem to say much the same thing to me.

There seems to be a great deal of play with binaries in the work. In particular the concept of the finite versus the infinite is played with over and over. The infinite, represented by the circle (an image repeated throughout the whole piece in various ways), is also connected intimately with… surprise! Time. Comparisons are drawn between the fluidity and circular (also seasonal) nature of time and the finite ideas of beginning and ending. The poem, in my opinion, favors the infinite as it often link beginning and end together – thus the circle again.

Other binaries that are explored at length are motion versus stillness, light versus darkness and sound versus silence. The references to sound caught my attention most as they included a host of different representations: singing, sounds of water (voices of the sea), clanging bells, et cetera. I think it’s interesting that while Eliot used onomatopoeia in other works, here he mentions noise without describing it in that way.

The whole poem was much more pleasant to fall into than The Wasteland. There certainly are some changes to his general philosophy. For example after his wicked lashing of marriage in The Wasteland, here he describes matrimony as “a dignified and commodious sacrament” in a better temper about that particular subject, certainly…

Eliot does use some interesting techniques. Sometimes he rhymes, mostly not. Here and there the poem feels like it speeds up. During a portion of East Coker he even slips into Middle English-y spelling. I don’t pretend to understand the significance of any of this beyond the fact that it looks and sounds pleasing to me. Obviously I have many questions. Not least of which is what in blue blazes did I read? I’m certain that with the help of some outside material (I intend to read more of the selection provided before Wednesday) we will leap into the meat of the work at length in class.

Recording Patterns of Thought

I think I’m really benefiting from reading a variety of Woolf’s work. In some ways I feel like To the Lighthouse displays elements of the styles and messages of Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own. I realize that A Room of One’s Own was written after To the Lighthouse, but my point is not to suggest that one was a product of the others, but that Woolf herself clearly displayed particular trends in her writing that have leapt out and danced in front of me.
One such line that seems to suggest things to come in A Room of One’s Own is this: “He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession.” Woolf is noting that men clearly associate themselves with scholarship and scholarship with success. This reminded me of the in class lecture two weeks ago regarding comments Woolf made about how ridiculous men in procession, accoutered in cap and gown and observing archaic traditions were to her. The reason it was significant to me was that as Lighthouse (at least part I) hasn’t an omniscient narrator, the line is actually referring to Tansley’s own conception, conscious or not. Men, Woolf says here, really do place this kind of inordinate importance on procession. On a side note relating to the topic of academia, it occurs to me to wonder if the name Cam (Camilla) was chosen to reflect some connection with the river Cam that runs through Cambridge. I’m not certain what the significance of such a connection might be, but it is interesting none-the-less. If there is a connection there (and in my opinion, Virginia Woolf was far too clever and deliberate no to have made that connection intentionally on some level), how does it connect to Mrs. Ramsay’s opinion of her children: “Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense.” This passage would seem to say that Mrs. Ramsey resents her childrens’ engagement with issues and their predilections toward argument and debate. Does she not want her children to be active intelligent people, involved in the global discussion? Am I placing too much contemporary sensibility onto the work?
Of course the narrative continues the style adopted two years earlier in Mrs. Dalloway. There is no question that Woolf is concerned with recording patterns of thought and the nature of human consciousness far more than she is with constructing a “story.” I can only imagine, though, how tiring it must be to write this type of narrative. It isn’t as though Woolf is simply recording her own thoughts and plopping them into a book. Her work is so finely crafted, every word chosen with incredible care. Since she has to construct each sentence in the narrative, she must therefore invent the patterns of thought that she shows. My question at this point on my Woolf learning journey is what is the difference between meaningful and intentional? Basically, she writes thoughts both profound and mundane; she has to in order to succeed with this type of narrative. Does she believe that the mundane paths that the mind flits down are necessarily meaningful? If not, how does one go about crafting a piece of writing that contains intentionally meaningless elements? If so, well, no wonder she went a bit mad sometimes! There were a couple other things that struck me that I just wanted to mention briefly. I noticed how often in the course of the narrative the large number of children in a particular household was mentioned. At least four times in the first twenty pages or so, “eight children” or “nine children” were brought up for some reason or other. I haven’t any conjectures on the significance of such a repetition, but I’ve always been trained to consider repetition as an important stylistic element, so, there you have it. I was also curious about the line “Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow.” Taken in isolation the line might be suggestive of a comment on the future in general. Obviously it takes ten years for them to actually get to the lighthouse, but as a larger metaphor, it may refer instead to the state of the family or even of Britain itself. From what I know of Woolf herself I’m not sure if I believe she necessarily thought that everything would be fine tomorrow. Perhaps years down the road, through war and death and tumult, it would be though. Maybe not tomorrow, this whole book said to me, but eventually, it will all be fine.

No Influence? Please...!

I am desperately sorry that An Anthology of Human Wisdom was never made. It sounds like precisely the sort of book I should have both loved to read, nay devour and the sort of book I would have loved to display pretentiously in a very visible location in my home. I’m curious to know just how many bots and pieces were stored away by Leonard and Virginia before the project was abandoned and if much has been done with them.

I find it astonishing that people (such as Gottlieb) would suggest that the marriage between Leonard and Virginia was not a successful one based on mutual respect and a congress of ideas. I admit that I know very little of them, either as individuals or as a single matrimonial entity. However, What I do know is this: Both were incredibly intelligent people. Both were outspoken on many issues. Regardless of Leonard’s oft repeated assertion that Virginia was not a political animal (or some such), it is abundantly clear from even a cursory perusal of her work that she had many concerns and was passionately outspoken about them. Now, it is possible, even likely that they weren’t activists in the same causes all the time, but their must have been a meeting of minds on many issues in order for their marriage to have functioned as it did. I must therefore agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Chapman and his colleague on their three fundamental assertions: that “influence in the context of intimacy implies a congress of ideas,” that “the issue of such congress is complex,” and that “complexity is detectable in acts of collaboration or collaborative texts.” They go on to show that such collaboration existed and that by logical extension, Leonard and Virginia each influenced the other. I can see no reasonable argument to the contrary; indeed I would consider it an almost absurd suggestion to imply that the two, who obviously valued each other as critics and as authors, wrote without reference to one another. Actually, I would really enjoy reading an article by a scholar who holds that opinion (they must be out there, otherwise why should Chapman and Manson go to the effort of setting out to prove the opposite assertion?) Of course proving a negative is a logical fallacy, but I would like to see someone try none-the-less.

One argument, I suppose, is that they lived and worked “in separate spheres.” That seems to me an argument lodged firmly in a great patch of logical quicksand. Just because they didn’t write on the same topics, or that Leonard wrote and moved in the realm of politics, Virginia in that of the arts, it does not follow that they were unaware or uninfluenced by one another. I confess I haven’t read any Leonard Woolf. From what I have read of Virginia, though, I would say that her art benefits from a political footing. She understands world affairs, she has opinions and the desire to express them, in short, she knows what’s going on in the realm of politics. She may not live in it, but she definitely looks in the window often enough to speak intelligently on world affairs. Is that necessarily because of Leonard’s own involvement? Of course not. I would be completely dashed if it wasn’t touched by his involvement though.

Whatever the case may be, I’d like to register myself on the “influence” and “successful marriage” side of the debate at this time. I hope my membership card is in the mail.

Should Womankind Visit a Psychiatrist?

There are obviously many questions addressed (though not necessarily answered) throughout A Room of One’s Own. I think perhaps the purpose of Woolf’s narrative is to cause the reader to ask these questions of herself outside of the context of the work. I found her to be successful, as several of these questions stayed with me after I put the book down, indeed, several times I put the book down for the express purpose of contemplating the questions in personal self-reflection. The first of these questions was “Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” The question seems obvious, though I don’t believe I’ve even asked it of myself before. I suppose the contemporary answer would be a tongue-in-cheek comment about women being more interesting to both sexes because they are simply the more interesting gender. Women are frequently baffled by their own minds, actions and emotions, and that's to say nothing of how baffling women are to men in practically every respect. Both sexes seem to be content to wave men off as “essentially simple creatures” (I’m not suggesting I agree with this statement, but it does tend to be a prevailing social conception). What does this mean for the ability of women to contribute to the body of literature, art and history? Well, if men believe they have already said what there is to say about women and they believe they’ve said it better than any woman could, why should they invite reciprocal observation? Why should men, in other words, bother to listen? A discouraging thought, to say the least, and one that squeezed women out before Woolf’s time and probably (even in today’s enlightened times… right) continues to do so today. After all, it's so frustrating to speak if nobody will listen.

Chapter 2 is devoted to research into what OTHERS think of women. For me, this begs the question, why should the opinions of Napoleon and Dr. Johnson and Pope and Mussolini matter more than what Woolf herself, as a bright and capable woman, can bring to the conversation? The intentionality of her research seems to say something of the nature of and need for self-reflection rather than reliance on the observations of others. After all, modern psychology suggests that a person who basis their self-image entirely upon the opinions of other is more likely to suffer self-esteem issues than a person who has a strong personal sense of self based upon their own perceptions mingled with those outside opinions. Does the female sex suffer from low self-esteem? I can’t imagine that those trying to make a meaningful contribution to a male dominated field, particularly one so guarded as literature or art, would not, to some extent.

I found several instances in the piece that seemed like Woolf was deliberately playing off the self-conception of women in general. The most glaring was the use of capital letters for the title of Professor von X’s work: “THE MENTAL, MORAL, AND PHYSICAL INFERIORITY OF THE FEMALE SEX.” Writing it like that seemed to be a technique for commenting on the idea that that concept is shouted into the ears of all humanity through the mouth of culture (Sorry, I’m borrowing a metaphor from a favourite book here - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn - you should all read it) While it is rare that a person would sit another down and tell them, “now listen, you are mentally, morally and physically inferior,” that does not mean that the construction of our culture doesn’t teach that message, indeed, scream it to us constantly from the day we are born.

I also have to mention the concept of Judith Shakespeare. I had heard the theory before, told elaborately, though I’m dashed if I can remember where. Quite possibly from Jasper Fforde, but I can’t say for certain. What I can say is that I shamefully had no idea whatever that it was of Woolf’s invention. I’m glad I know the provenance of the tale now, as I think it’s a fascinating and instructive one.

On a closing note, I think the line “Women have served all these centuries as looking–glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” may be one of the greatest damn things I’ve ever read. I love that Woolf may speak passionately about a serious topic and never loose her incredible capacity for sly wit. A new favourite quote, to say the least.

What time is it? It's TIME!

What is it with time, anyway? The modernists are positively obsessed. Not in a science fiction-y Doctor Who H.G. Wells sort of way but in a how does the actual passage of time define our lives on Earth sort of way. Eliot repeats the theme endlessly in Prufrock and The Wasteland. Woolf plays with it just as much. I recall being struck by the use of time in Orlando when I read it and it was no less important in Mrs. Dalloway. It’s as though time doesn’t merely exist, but is an actual character, capable of influencing and interacting with others in all of these stories. Clearly this plays into the very fabric of modernism, which I am still too much of a Modernist-newbie to fully comprehend. I can see the themes, but I’m not certain how best to engage with them. So what about time, then. I would be lying if I said I never considered the unique place that time plays in our culture. We remember personal events by their place in our individual timelines and we study history as a chronology. Time matters. 11am 11/11/1918. 12/07/1941. 02/09/1964. 9/11/2001. Everything is defined by time. Did modernism represent a change in the way time was conceived? I think of pre-modernist writing as dealing more in space, so maybe they just though about things in a different way. This five minute read brought to you by Tom and Virginia.

Steinberg believes that Septimus is a derivation of T.S. Eliot. Interesting. I can’t fault his logic and he does make some solid connections. As I was reading, though, it struck me that he wasn’t taking Woolf’s own illness into account. He devoted a single line near the end of his essay to the idea in passing to say that perhaps Woolf’s own illness was an influence as well. Having had very close dealings with bipolar disorder (which I didn’t realize Woolf suffered from until our discussions last class) myself, I would be interested in reading up on how much of Septimus’ madness is derived from her own experience. I know there must be oceans of scholarship devoted to it. Can the character be an amalgamation of Woolf and Eliot both? How deliberate were the parallels, do you suppose? The thing is, that from my experience, I’ve found that manic depressives are not self aware enough to conceive themselves as mad. I know Woolf had an uncommonly brilliant mind, but how mad can a person be if they recognize their own madness? How capable was she of engaging with that facet of her life. For truly, find me the madman that is categorically, logically and creatively aware that he is mad. Is he out there?

I also wanted to mention a phrase. I don’t know how important it is or if, indeed, it holds any importance at all, but it kept cropping up so I feel obliged to comment on it. “Is that it?” It seems like such a paltry thing and yet it leaped from the page and stuck in my mind. Why, I wonder, does she use this phrase so frequently in the text? Maybe I’m rolling a bit too “new critic” here, but there must be a reason. It speaks of uncertainty and a particular kind of frustration. Perhaps even a bit of an accusatory undertone, which, as it is found prominently in inner monologue, speaks volumes about the character.

Innocence and Experience in The Garden Party

The Garden Party intrigues me. It intrigues me further in light of Atkinson’s article “Mrs. Sheridan’s Masterstroke: Liminality in Katherine Mansfield’s Garden Party”. Atkinson spends a great deal of time defining the elements of the story that set the narrative in a “carnival”-type atmosphere of defying expectations and topsy-turvy situations. What interests me is the quote from Nicholas Nownes that Atkinson refers to several times, namely that “Garden Party is “the story of a young girl’s initiation from experience to innocence”. I am interested in the state of innocence and the state of experience, which characters fall into which categories, what the opposing states mean for Laura, which state she is in at the beginning versus the end of the story and what that means for the message that Mansfield is trying to convey through her narrative.
Innocence and experience could be defined in several contrary readings of the story. It is possible that Laura, seemingly more enlightened than her siblings (she is, after all, the one who is sent to liaise with the workmen setting up the marquee) began in experience and through the machinations of her mother and the chance events that brought her to the Scotts’ cottage, was “purged” of her liberal sentiments by the trial and was thus purified into a state of innocence at the end. It is equally possible that she began the play in a state of innocence and was transformed through one or more of several experiences. I would argue that if the second interpretation is to be expounded upon, it was the moment when she apologized to the corpse for her hat that wrought the change from one state to the other. In the face of death, all seem equal and the distinction of her hat, so important hours before in the context of the party is rendered not only ridiculous but positively offensive. The brilliance of the narrative is that the story lends itself to both interpretations. It is equally true that both interpretations are indictments of the bourgeoisie.
Extrapolating from the first interpretation, the bourgeoisie is indicted through their corruption of the fair-minded Laura. Her foil, tellingly give a name remarkably similar to her own, Laurie represents this corruption in my mind. He is the “ideal” of bourgeois social innocence. In order for Laura to become acceptable to her class, she must be purged of her social awareness and worse, sympathy and become like Laurie. This reading is supported by the fact that it is Laurie who accompanies her on jaunts into the poor district. He remains, according to his class, “uncorrupted” by sympathy. The fact that it is he who goes to collect Laura after her ordeal and that he seems to have a tacit understanding of her feelings suggests that she has emerged like him. Mansfield seems to be saying that the reader ought to be slightly revolted by this. I was. Incidentally, I slightly resent Atkinson’s comparison of Laurie to Bertie Wooster. As a major fan of Wodehouse, I can see a resemblance in character, but Laurie’s function, in my opinion, distances him from a parallel with Plum’s frequent protagonist. Bertie would have cared. So there (insert childish harrumphing here).
The second reading is an indictment also. If Laura travels from innocence to experience, we are confronted by the absurdity of everything that occurred before the death of the carter. If it is absurd than the class distinctions, so fundamental to the very idea of a garden party, are also absurd. We are invited to witness Laura’s transformation and decry the ease with witch she reintegrates herself into her former lifestyle via her short conversation with Laurie at the end.
As a final aside, ever since I was a small child my favourite sandwich has ALWAYS been egg and olive. This is the first time I have ever heard it mentioned anywhere outside of my own family, and to hear it so derided, well, I must confess I was a bit hurt. That is all.

Whatever Did She Mean by it All?

This post comes with a very important disclaimer. I have the flu. I refuse to allow it to keep me from updating my blog on time, but I beg that any bizarre tangents, blatant errors or inexplicable non-sequiters may be processed by the reader through the knowledge that my mind is currently in a most disreputable state. Therefore, read on, MacDuff.

The foregrounding of the snail is an intriguing device. I am irretrievably reminded of Dead Poet’s Society when Mr. Keating forces his students to stand on his desk to view the room at a different angle. Far from a pointless exercise, it allowed them to readjust, if only slightly, their perspective on the classroom, if not the world. The suggestion that Kew Gardens has no “moral,” as John Oakland claims E.M. Forster believed, therefore fall flat, in my opinion. The very choice to offer the snail’s perspective of the garden and the people who pass through it is some kind of lesson at least.

Perhaps I’m reading this in an odd and unintended manner, but the opening of Kew Gardens sure sounds a bit “Romantic” to me. After spending a class drawing up the differences between the romantics and the classicists, and in particular placing the latter above the former in general, I cannot help but wonder if, like the distinction between heroic and domestic modernism, Woolf may have entertained a higher opinion of romanticism than did many of her contemporaries. The work is, after all, heavily laden with nature imagery and in particular, the repetition of “heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves,” connects flora and fauna in a, dare I say it? Wordsworthian sort of way.

That said, I was struck by the sheer freshness of the piece. Self-aware is the word I would choose. It was as if Woolf wrote it chiefly as a study of itself. There was the fabulous and intentional study of metaphor with the shoe and the dragonfly as well as the couples under the trees as the ghosts of the past. The heavy imagery, the symbolism of the snail’s journey and the futility of vocal silence, the exploration of inner monologue and outward dialogue, directly spoken and indirectly overheard… It was as if it was written as a challenge: “Write a story about how to tell a story, but don’t let anyone know that’s your aim.” Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps it’s my addled brain.

If that whole idea seems a bit far fetched, consider that the last paragraph presents a directed interpretation of her own work: “Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children…” she has returned to the intense description of the opening of the story, but has included in the shades of colour the people in the garden as well. It seems that Woolf is actually making a very real statement about the place of people within the world – no more, but no less important, diverse and beautiful than any other element of nature. In addition, the observation that voices are not breaking in upon silence because there is no silence, is a point I’d like to discuss in class as I consider myself ill-equipped to tackle it alone in my present state of mind.

As to The Mark on the Wall, I agree with the string of scholars quoted by Marc D. Cyr in the beginning of his article, particularly. Woolf makes an interesting point in her story, namely, that the burning desire for concrete evidence of all things can be a detriment to the faculty of understanding. I return to a point I have made a few times this semester: the distinction between Truth, which the modernists rejected, and truth, which they sought. What makes The Mark on the Wall is that at any given moment in the story the mark actually was whatever it was speculated to be at that moment. The definite pronouncement at the end that it is a snail denies those truths and instead puts forward a Truth. The presentation shows that Woolf intended for her reader to rebel at the conclusive proof of the mark’s nature. I, at least, was disappointed, for the speculation was the joy of the story, not the answer. To spout a cliché, it is the journey, not the destination from whence the pleasure is derived. This reversal of expectations – to ask “what is the mark?” to wonder and consider and learn and then to be disappointed with an actual answer, well, that is an impressive feat indeed. Woolf manages in The Mark on the Wall to achieve something incredible; she actually alters the reader on an intrinsic level. From “I must know” to “I am happy just to wonder” in a few short pages.

Reclaiming the Feminine: Gendering Post-Impressionism

The first question that leaps to mind when trying to understand a shift in schools of art is this: Is post-impressionism a reaction against impressionism (as post-modernism is to modernism) or is it the next step in the logical progression of interacting artistically with the natural world? First we observe, then we record, then we interact, then we record our interactions, then we observe and interpret those interactions. Impressionism is step two. Post impressionism is step five. This is true, however, only as far as post-impressionism was defined in its infancy. As Clive Bell in particular began to evolve the definition, post-impressionism ceased to represent the next level of interaction with an object and instead rejected the object altogether in favor of the nature of the interpretation. As an artist, I have always been grounded in realism with elements of impressionism entering my work on occasion. I tend to view the act of creation and the technique of representation as a means to an end. As the concept of post-impressionism evolved, it seems that the “end,” a word whose definition as it applies to art would include the word “rendering,” became, itself, redefined. Rendering was not the function of art, but rather the nature of the art itself as a thing essentially unrelated to the object it initially was to represent, became the end. The bohemian part of me is in love with the idea of art for art’s sake and the idea that art exists to interact with the mind rather than the outside world, but I can’t help feeling that striking the importance of “rendering” from art is a dangerous practice that could lead to the dissolution of art as it serves society. Perhaps the post-impressionists didn’t feel that it ought to be a function of art to serve society. Perhaps they just wanted to redefine that service.

When Goldman suggested that we “consider the gender implications” I was hoping that she would outline several. Instead, we are left to consider them on their own. As a television/film student, my gender studies background is couched in terms like “male gaze,” which was introduced by pioneering feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her ground-breaking essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema. The idea that Goldman seems to dance around is that if the artist is gendered male and “nature” and the “natural world,” which serve as the focus of objective study for that artist, is gendered female, then impressionistic art is by definition voyeuristic. Mulvey uses the idea of male gaze, which in essence means that the camera is gendered male and therefore film is constructed as a voyeuristic endeavor even if the director and or the audience is female, to show that film operates as a medium to objectify women. If I may be so bold as to take the leap, the impressionists functioned under the same blanket, employing a similar male gaze. That is to say, the artist, or male, observes, records and objectifies the natural world, the female. Regardless of how a woman my try to interpret the finished work, she must adopt the male gaze by necessity. The conclusion is that impressionism, like the cinema that Laura Mulvey described years later, has, at its core, an anti-feminist construction. What does this mean for post-impressionism? Because post-impressionism does not seek to convey the reality of an object, but instead endeavors to interact with it on a personal, individual level, it perhaps escapes the male gaze. The fundamental difference is between objectivity, which seeks to define Truth and therefore can hardly help objectifying its subject matter, and subjectivity, which concedes no Truth, only truths to be discovered by interacting emotionally with the subject matter. By eschewing objectivity, post-impressionism moves beyond the boundaries of male gaze and phallocentric art into a realm that admits far more possibilities, including art that has a feminine construction.

I also cannot let pass without comment, Gauguin’s redefinition of Eve and by extension, woman. As civilization has developed, the shamelessly beautiful, exposed but ultimately damning figure of Eve has been raised as a representation of the duel nature of women. Exceptional beauty hides a monstrous evil suggests every source from classical sources and religious texts to all manner of art, music and literature. By discarding Eve as she resonates throughout the consciousness of mankind, Gauguin rejects the pigeonholing of woman as they are traditionally viewed, particularly in art. By forcing Eve into the light and dismissing the rendered light and dark that define her inherent oppositions, Gauguin reclaims her not for himself, but for her. Bold and colorful and lit, she is not an archetype, but an actual woman.

There is a great deal more to be said about the evolving sense of what post-impressionism means as both an artistic and a social movement. It represented a shift in the way people view the world. There is a great difference, for example, in considering an argument in black and white or light and dark and opening your mind to not just the suggestions of right and wrong on a two dimensional plane, but incorporating the infinite hues and tones of color into how you view the situation. If art, as I believe, tends to represent and even document the nature of thought at a given time, it is possible to recognize why the post-impressionist movement is so vital to understanding modernism as a whole. Like walking from a moodily lit alleyway into a field of infinite color and motion, post-impressionism depicts modernist thought.

The Immediacy of Eliot

The only knowledge and experience I have of Eliot is his general disposition and his essays. I confess that I had conceived of a person so detestable in nature that while I respected his body of work and contribution to literature, I had all but given up on actually liking him. I’m stubborn, but not foolish. Eliot’s poetry is astounding. Every word resonated like a drum beat in a tin room. For this post, I’m going to focus on what struck me most about Prufrock as well as some dissection of the Preludes and a short foray into etymology, just for the sheer joy of it.

The one word that hovered in my mind all throughout reading these poems was immediacy. I will get to the imagery in a moment, but in reference to this point, I feel that the use of images of the city instead of nature (as the dreaded Romantics employed) grounds Eliot’s work in the present. Rather than allowing it to float in the timeless ethereal, it is situated in the here and now. This immediacy is also aided by directly addressing the reader (or an otherwise unnamed second person) in line 31 of Prufrock: “Time for you and time for me”

The imagery I mentioned is all important when making a distinction between the modernist poetry of Eliot and the work that came before him. He works from a different standard of imagery, eschewing images of the beautiful, unquantifiable and unexperiencable an instead embracing the vulgar (in the original sense of the world vulgar, meaning relating to the common people). Images such as “like a patient etherized upon a table (ll. 3) and “One night cheap hotels” (ll. 6) are images for a new generation of people. They speak to a quality and an understanding that in years before Eliot, people would deny even admitting they possessed. Modernist indeed.

Prufrock speaks to the lingering doubt in everyone. It isn’t about some magnificent concept. It doesn’t refer to some great “out there,” it is real, it is immediate and it is universal. THAT is what makes it great. As much as Wordsworth may have talked a big talk about poetry for every man, his words were only for those who had the luxury to contemplate them. Eliot may have been an elitist jerk, but his words can speak to feelings in everyone.

Of all the other poems on the list for this week, none spoke to me as much as Preludes did. Again, the word that distinguishes the work is immediacy. The detail is such that the reader is placed in the location of the poem. Eliot sets us to feel the wind blow discarded newspapers past our feet and into the road. We are there. The binary I would posit, it there is one, is immediacy versus reflection.

A short close reading of the poem shows that the whole nature of city life is condensed into a few lines. Of particular interest is the word “masquerade” (ll. 19) which, when used to describe the everyday comings and goings of a city of people suggests a very cynical worldview. By suggesting that our public selves are not who we are, Eliot wordlessly raises the question of ‘who are the people behind the masks?’ Who are the people who are “raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms” (ll. 22-23) before they raise the shades? Clearly, the shades are drawn on our lives as well as our homes and we are lead to wonder what these thousands of people do behind closed doors. Who are they? Who are we? For if we do not know them, they do not know us either…

In the third stanza it’s important to note that Eliot switches to the second person to address the reader or else a specific unknown person. When implying that in sleep and in dozing the person contemplated who they were, reflected upon the life behind the mask, Eliot uses the word “sordid” (ll.27). With conflicting images, I began to wonder whether Eliot viewed the elaborate deception of the human dance as devious or necessary. We are dishonest if we hide ourselves, promiscuous if we show ourselves. All of human interaction is a war between these two sentiments.


I also had to add one more reflection which struck me. The word “Pervigilium” is both incredibly distinct and incredibly obscure. When I first saw it I wondered whether Eliot himself made it up I looked in dictionaries and thesauruses to no avail. Finally, online, I found it in a medical dictionary, which is interesting. It means wakefulness or sleeplessness. The Pervigilium was also a Roman nocturnal festival. Both uses fit with Eliot’s purpose. In trying to study the word myself I first focused on the root “perv” is, as we use it, the base off two modern words – perversion and pervasion, also linked with Eliot’s concept. Knowing now, as I do, the medical definition and the historical provenance, I can see that the English word “vigil” is clearly a descendant of Pervigilium as well. The word has a great deal to recommend to the interpretation of Prufrock’s Pervigilium. Eliot obviously chose it with great care.

Chasing Hamlet

Eliot’s comments regarding the artistic struggle between the desire for individuality and the pull of traditional forms or ideas from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” interested me strangely. As a matter of fact, the whole series of essays I read offered some interesting insights. As much as the content of the essays themselves suggested a modernist view point that shed light on the opinions of the movement, the nature of the essays suggested some things about Eliot himself that I found equally useful and interesting. I confess to having almost no exposure to Eliot whatsoever. I know almost nothing about him and have read practically no of his work. He inhabits, in fact, a very particular part of my academic world, for in my ignorance I fear him slightly.

I think I’ll begin with Hamlet. I have studied the play several times and have never heard it described as a failure. Eliot clearly has a very narrow perspective of what qualifies as art. From what I gathered from comments such as calling the play “’the Mona Lisa’ of literature,” he considered it to be what today we might call bubble gum (do people still use that term?) In other words, just because something is lauded by the masses, that does not alter its intrinsic value. Something is the quality that it is, and that quality is objective, not subjective. Eliot seemed almost frustrated by the consideration that emphasis should be placed on the character of a piece rather than the work as a single cohesive unit. Can Hamlet as a character, with his motivations, words and actions be taken outside the context of the play? I realize that this may seem like a bizarre aside, but I personally think it interesting none-the-less. I’m positively in love with the works of an author called Jasper Fforde. He is without question a post-modernist and the books he write (in the fantasy genre) take place in an alternate universe where the “bookworld,” a real place inhabited by the living characters written into fiction, coexists with the real contemporary world. In one of his books, in the equivalent of a foreign exchange program, the character of Hamlet comes to stay with the novel’s protagonist. In a whirlwind of intertextuality, he is simultaneously real and fictional. He has the same traits and flaws that Shakespeare (or Kyd if we trust Eliot) imbued him with, but interacts with people outside of the context of the play. What would Eliot have to say about that, I wonder? Does the character have value as an isolated element of literature? Can the character even exist as it was conceived when it falls outside the framework in which it was meant to inhabit?

All these are questions that relate back to how Eliot envisaged the nature and purpose of art. The unified whole obviously mattered a great deal and getting back to “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a successful composition must itself be a mesh between the isolation of unique ideas and presentation (individual talent) and the rich tapestry of influences that interweave the work with meaning. Perhaps it is that which bothered him so much regarding Hamlet – the individual talent of Shakespeare didn’t shine through the ideas of Kyd and the trappings of his own personal “crisis” (as Eliot calls it) and the traditions of theme and structure that made his other works so successful were ignored in favor of a character that receives much more attention than he deserves.

Howards End: Realm of Paperclips

Before the close of the second chapter of Howards End I already had my mind attuned to the metaphorical imagery of travel that pervades the whole book. I had only been reading for twenty minutes and I was already cursing the absent-mindedness that had conspired to herd me onto the airplane, where I planned to settle down to three or four hours of peaceful attentive reading, without my highlighter pens. I tried to make a mental note whenever the theme resurfaced, but I’m sure to have forgotten many interesting instances. The metaphor is set up as Margaret broods upon railway stations when she sees her aunt off to Howards End in the beginning of the novel. Each station acts as a gateway to the destinations of its trains. The present is left at the station as the trains progress to any number of possible futures. Throughout the story Forster employs all manner and methods of transportation and each one set up a red flag for me. From the dusty broughams and hansoms that move at a slower pace to the motor cars that seem to increase in number at every mention until they fill the city with an unearthly din and clouds of exhaust. It seemed to me, and I suppose this may be one reader’s erroneous theory, that the concrete subject of the physical manifestation of progress, of the change from the “old world” to the “modern world,” is shown through the physical transportation of the characters. Motion, in a crude sense, representing progress. My paperclips would cover the pages that support this claim; in fact, so would my highlighters, had I not left them sitting sad and lonely upon my desk at home.

An element of modernism (one of the few solid elements I’m capable of pinpointing at this moment) is the non-linearity of the narrative structure. It’s as if Forster is not ready to jump into it with heart and soul, but has, none-the-less, waded in up to his waist and started splashing around a bit. There were time when I found the chapters a bit hard to follow as he often placed chunks of time and major events between the final words of one chapter and the opening line of the next. Overall, I felt that my own shortcoming not withstanding, this structure worked admirably in Howards End. It felt as though Forster sought to place the reader right along with the characters, forgetting the trivialities and acting too busy during times of moment to stop and narrate the circumstances of the major events. Last week I spoke of truth versus Truth. The Truth of a story demands that the salient details be described so that a firm understanding of the message can be appreciated. The truth of life is that no person declares a message or a moral based on every piece of evidence their life has produced. So it is with Howards End, and, I would deduce from the structure of the story, much of modernist writing.

Coming as I do from a background of television and film studies, it is there that my foundation of theory and criticism is based. My knowledge of Queer Theory is much less spotty than my knowledge of modernism in general, but I found that reading literature through that lens seemed as forced as I had always found it to be in film. I don’t doubt that Forster’s sexual orientation influenced his writing. All writing is informed by the experiences and dispositions of the author. I somehow feel, however, that to reprocess, so to speak, Forster’s work through the Queer Theory machine, strips it of a quality of complexity and completeness. To assign more elements of his work to his homosexuality than actually germinated from that seed is, in my opinion, somewhat of a disservice to the author whose work should function as a unified whole. I admit to a preexisting bias, in my film studies classes I always felt that Queer Theory tended slightly toward the self-indulgence of the movement. I’d like to read more and have the opportunity to shatter my bias, if I can.

Modernist London: Genesis

As far as I am able to deduce, Modernism is the movement that evolved as a reaction to the ideas and attitudes of the Victorian period. When I was studying in Scotland I hung out with a group of Englishmen who, when presented with any element of culture that was shocking, grotesque or otherwise unsettling to their grumbling English sensibilities, always responded with the line “This would never happen under Queen Victoria.” I once asked exactly why they were so nostalgic about Victorian England and the answer was “Because life was great then. Unless you were poor… or female… or foreign.”

The freedom exhibited by the modernists is exemplified in the style of their work. Up until it came about, the prevailing style was realism. Everything was ordered. Things were in their places and art and literature told The Truth. Modernism veered away, not from the truth, but from The Truth. It began to explore new ways of viewing the fundamental realities by offering them in a different way and also offering new “truths” to contemplate. Time, for instance, was an element of modernist work that received a major revamp. In Woolf’s Orlando (the only work of modernism that I’m intimately familiar with and therefore likely to show up often in my work. Soon My repetoire will be larger...) the play with the concept of time is incredible. The book is not about “time travel” and the Methuselah-like nature of Orlando to go on and on in age is never a major plot point. He/She just does. Orlando lives for centuries because that allows Woolf the freedom to tell her story the way she wants while including all the elements she wants to include. This would never have happened under Queen Victoria.

Politics are always a touchy subject, though it is, perhaps, easier to consider the politics of those who exercised them in different circumstances than the present political climate. The very nature of modernism suggests liberality. It was a reaction against repressive attitudes and a culture that stood for maintaining the status quo rather than striving for progress. The term avant-garde, which is often bandied about in texts concerning modernism, Reed’s included, comes from the French military term for the soldiers who move ahead of the rest of the infantry. It is no wonder that artists whose work is considered “avant-garde” would position themselves as liberals politically.

Liberals stand for progress; they are the avant-gardists of the political field, theoretically. As for placing the Bloomsbury group into today’s climate, well, I think they’d frankly be appalled. Not appalled at the state of our conservative-run repressive nation (though goodness knows it’s enough to set a genuine liberal’s teeth on edge), but at the state of the politicians who consider themselves liberals. Voting for Mitt Romney would never do, but Hillary? No, I don’t think Hillary either. Avant-garde means pushing forward, even if it forces you into a position of personal exile. Liberals in politics, no matter how much they may think they stand for progressive ideas and attitudes, are moderates, just as the conservatives are. Everybody has to work within the system in order to succeed in the political world. That is precisely why the liberalism of the modernists cannot be held in comparison with the liberalism of contemporary politics. They allowed themselves to become outsiders. They really were avant-garde. They stood not only ahead of, but apart from the majority. Bless ‘em.

As one who has never studied modernism in any incarnation, I found the chapter from Chris Reed to be illuminating. I discovered to my shame that I fell into the category of woefully misinformed as far as what constitutes modern art. Sleek lines, efficient use of space, angles, geometry – the complete antithesis of what Reed calls “domestic” is what I, and I suppose most people think of when the word “modernist” is used. Reed wrote one sentence that leapt out at me: “Various would-be avant-garde contingents competed to define the look of the modern.” I never thought of art as a war to define a style, but I can see now that it is, and probably not just in the case of modernism, though that may warrant some additional research into “art wars.” It is interesting that for all their longevity, for all their fame and yes, even a touch of infamy, the type of modern art that Bloomsbury sent into the battle was defeated. And history, as they say, is written by the winners.