Monday, January 28, 2008

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.

Monday, January 21, 2008

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.

Monday, January 14, 2008

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.