Modern European Intellectual History

Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 18 The Fate of British Modernism April 2, 2008

outline • intro: Britain and positivism • Two paths: English and cosmopolitan Modernism • Bloomsbury • T.E. Hulme and “The Men of 1914” • Eliot and The Waste Land

Fin-de-siècle Britain: “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” • Constitutional stability and the “nation of shopkeepers” • The nature of British socialism: Fabianism and Evangelicalism • Modernist sources: mass suffrage, empire, war

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and analytic philosophy • Grandfather: Prime Minister John Russell. Godfather: John Stuart Mill. • Principia Mathematica (1910-1913)

Russell and Orientalism • “Are you finding the Great Secret in the East? I doubt it. There is none – there is not even an enigma. There is science and sober daylight and the business of the day – the rest is mere phantoms of the dusk.” (letter, 1913)

“Only Connect”: The Bloomsbury Aesthetic • Primary figures: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes • G.E. Moore: Ethics as a “scientific study” • Principia Ethica (1903) • Aesthetics, intimate friendship, the rejection of politics • Break with Victorianism: Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians • “I have attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian visions to the modern eye.”

Bloomsbury and politics • Forster: “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” • WWI pacifism • Bloomsbury as modified positivism: happiness, friendship, and the absolute value of the individual - retreat into the individual sphere • For them, positivism is not individualistic enough • A very English Modernism - the “intellectual aristocracy”

The Break • The Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910 • The Omega Workshop, Wyndham Lewis, and the Rebel Arts Centre (1913) • Lewis: “Cézanne into chocolate boxes” and the “tittering old maids of Bloomsbury.”

Cosmopolitanism and the “Men of 1914” • T.S. Eliot: United States • Ezra Pound: United States • Wyndham Lewis: Canada • James Joyce: Ireland • Others: W.B. Yeats (Ireland), Joseph Conrad (Poland)

T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) as catalyst • “Cinders” (1906-7) • “The flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any single theory […] There is difficulty in finding a comprehensive scheme of the cosmos, because there is none.”

Hulme and Bergson • On reading Bergson: “I had been released from a nightmare [materialism] which had long troubled my mind.” • Bergson’s massive popularity around 1910, largely via Hulme • Russell’s campaign against Bergson: • Bergson’s philosophy “in the main incapable of proof or disproof.” • “In the main intellect is the misfortune of man, while instinct is seen at its best in ants, bees, and Bergson.”

Hulme and Classicism • Pierre Lassere, Le Romantisme français (1907) and Action française • “A Tory Philosophy” (1912): “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.” • “Romanticism and Classicism”: Original sin and rebellion against Romanticism • Eliot: “He appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) • Early enthusiasm for Marinetti • Blast (1914): “There is one truth, ourselves, and everything is permitted.” • Marinetti: “Time and space died yesterday […] We want no part of it, the past.” • His early avant-garde period as “a little narrow segment of time, on the far side of world war I. That first war, you have to regard, as far as I am concerned, as a black solid mass, cutting off all that went before it.” • Rejection of Marinetti’s eternal present: “A space must be cleared … round the hurly-burly of the present. No man can reflect or create, in the intellectual sense, while he is acting – fighting, playing tennis, or making love. The present man in all of us is the machine.”

Lewis’s development “Composition” (1913) To “Battery” (1919)

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) • From tradition (A Lume Spento (1908)) • “Sestina: Altaforte” (1909) • To innovation (imagism) • Back to exploded tradition (the Cantos) • “Make it New” reinterpreted: free the past instead of rejecting it

Pound’s development “In A Station of the Metro” The apparition of these faces in a crowd; Petals on a wet, black, bough. (1913) And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: "A second time? why? man of ill star, Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?” (1924, from Canto I)

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) • “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) as another strategy for effacing the bourgeois self • “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” • “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” • So we escape not to a deep self, but to tradition. But: “The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”

Politics and “The Men of 1914” • T.S. Eliot: “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” (1934) • Wyndham Lewis: Hitler (1931) • Ezra Pound: Anti-Semitism, Mussolini, and the cage

The Waste Land and Ulysses • Both 1922 • F.O. Matthiessen: “Faced with so great a range of knowledge as a part of the modern consciousness, he [the artist] can bring it to satisfactory expression in one of two ways, either by expansion or compression. It can hardly be a coincidence that each of these ways was carried to its full development at almost the same time, in the years directly following the war. Joyce chose the first alternative for Ulysses […] Eliot concentrated an interpretation of a whole condition of society into slightly over 400 lines.” • Eliot: “Other cities decay, and extend a rich odour of putrefaction; London merely shrivels, like a little bookkeeper grown old.” (1922)

The Waste Land • Pound: “justification of the movement” • Both instance of, and constitutive of, High Modernism • Strategies of reading: Formalist, Mythic, Allegorical (“Mind of Europe”), Personal (“Mind of Eliot”), Marxist, Freudian, Deconstructionist • Controlling myth of the Fisher King • Cf. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”

I: The Burial of the Dead • Fragmented memories and terror of the spring. • “April is the cruellest month” (1) • “What are the roots that clutch?” (19) • The Waste Land introduced as “a heap of broken images”. • Past, present, future interpenetrate • Madame Sosostris’s cards • The ghosts of the past, in modern London, ciphered through Dante, • “You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable,--mon frère!”

II: A Game of Chess • The beginning of the indictment - this section and the denial of nature • Chess and the impotent king • Cleopatra as Des Esseintes (77-110) • Myths as “withered stumps of time” (104) • The women in the pub • Dentures (144), abortion (159) • HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

III: The Fire Sermon • The Thames without its nymphs • The poet intrudes on 182 • “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept” • Fisher King behind the gashouse, hearing motor cars (187-90) • The horrific sexual encounter (215-56) • 252: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over” • 266: The nymphs return and sing, morphs into the poet who “can connect nothing with nothing.” The possibilities of the poetic consciousness. Cf. “Dada signifies nothing.” • Ends with mixture of Augustine and Buddha - the resources of the past. Fire as desire. “O Lord thou pluckest me out.”

IV: Death by Water • Shortest section - drastically cut by Pound. • Phoenician sailor as the symbol of corruption, impotence. Associated with Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrnan merchant. • 314: “the profit and loss” • Death: the Phoenician is truly dead • 315-6: “A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers.” • The first death: we’ve seen ghosts, the immortal Tiresias, the sprouting corpse in part I, and (in the epigraph) the Sybil who wishes for death • With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: "Sybil, what do you want?" she replied, ”I want to die."

V: What the Thunder Said • Back to the Waste Land of part one and “thunder without rain” (342). • Speaker yearns for water (life or death?) • Modern society as purgatorial - unable to live, unable to die • The cock crows on 392, signaling the end of our denial. Immediately followed by rain, bringing both life and death

Two versions of “DA” • Freud: Personal trauma and the language of childhood. Every “Da” is followed by a “Fort” - every presence followed by an absence • Eliot: Human trauma and the language of the Upanishads. The possibility of presence/salvation if we allow the past to speak. • Give, sympathize, control • The denial of “Fort”. • “Shantih”: “The peace with passeth understanding.”

Conclusion • British Modernism presents a different way out of the death of art • But perhaps equally a dead end?

Modern European Intellectual History