Modern European Intellectual History

1
Modern EuropeanIntellectual History

• Lecture 18
• The Fate of British Modernism
• April 2, 2008

2
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

3
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

4
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and analytic
philosophy

• Grandfather Prime Minister John Russell.
  Godfather John Stuart Mill.
• Principia Mathematica (1910-1913)

5
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)

6
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.

7
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

8
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.

9
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)

10
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.

11
Hulme and Bergson

• On reading Bergson I had been released from a
  nightmare materialism which had long troubled
  my mind.
• Bergsons massive popularity around 1910, largely
  via Hulme
• Russells campaign against Bergson
• Bergsons 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.

12
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.

13
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 Marinettis 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.

14
Lewiss development
Composition (1913) To Battery (1919)
15
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

16
Pounds 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)

17
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.

18
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

19
(No Transcript)
20
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)

21
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

22
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 Sosostriss cards
• The ghosts of the past, in modern London,
  ciphered through Dante,
• You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable,--mon
  frère!

23
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 ITS TIME

24
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 thats done and Im glad its
  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.

25
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 weve 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."

26
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

27
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.

28
Conclusion

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