The New Old Guard

This week’s material intersects with some outside reading I am currently undertaking at work: Mark Conroy’s Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity. Conroy depicts the dissolution of the patronage system and the rise of mass culture, noting that the very industry of print media created the modern obsession with individual originality as a means of differentiation from the hoi polloi. He also observes, as many of us have in previous class discussions, that mass culture and the literary forms to which it appeals has been conventionally gendered feminine, as the more so-called “heroic” mode of pitting oneself against the commodification of art for public consumption has been gendered masculine. I suppose that the success of Pound, Eliot, and Hume’s treatises, and the very fact that we are currently studying them, marks the success of their particular struggles. Prestige, therefore, may indeed carry a cultural capital, a “soft power”, more permanent than the initial popularity of say, Pound’s rival Manelli.

Indeed, unlike the Wilcox/Schlegel dualism of Howard’s End, I ascertained that our reading instead presented the monism of the traditional modernist canon: masculine, heroic, elite, classics-inundated. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that Eliot, Pound, Hume, et. all themselves were subverting the Romantic/Victorian canon. It does not take a leap of “imagination” to on some level sympathize with their rally for a “harder, dryer” style after reading poetry that incessantly quested for an abstract “sublime” in a nature that most Londoners would never see throughout the course of a given day.

Thus, we should read Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as a rallying cry for change against prevailing Romanticist assumptions. His assertion that “criticism is as inevitable as breathing” displaces the usual favor that the “creative” or “artistic” faculty receives for its closeness to some sort of “natural” thought. Perhaps Eliot even anticipates Derrida’s critique of a Platonic obsession with “authenticity” here. Timothy Materer mentions Eliot’s binary between “Authority” and “Individual Judgment”; could Eliot be noticing the usual privileging of first-hand experience, or presence, leading us to fetishize individualism and inborn talent in literary endeavors? As we see in Hume’s polemic, the Romantic worldview also of course equates this authenticity with goodness under the assumption of an originally benevolent human nature. It is in this context that we receive Eliot’s claim that the critical faculty may be as spontaneous as the creative, signaling the need for a flowering of criticism alongside art.

However, we should, like Materer, take these Modernist appraisals with a grain of salt – far from encompassing an objective value system of literature (which would be impossible), their primary goal was perhaps to “make a place” for their “own revolutionary poems,” in other words to canonize their experiments through demoting the near past in grand Napoleonic form. Pound, for example, employs a tactic similar to his contemporaries, that of apotheosizing classical works in order to at once legitimize their own and delegitimize their immediate forebears. His references to “Caesar”, “Crassus”, and “Dante” also foreshadow the shadier side of preferring a Nuevo-traditionalism in politics and the arts: hero-worship, Mussolini-worship, and fascism.

Howard's End of the World as We Know It

Some (Tibby, perchance) "feel fine" as they face the end of the world they have known. Some, like Mrs. Wilcox, face its death with dignity yet without change. Yet others, the Wilcoxes, embrace modernity "steadily" only to find themselves clinging to "panic and emptiness." For E.M. Forster's Howard's End is not interested in belaboring the binary of past and present, but rather portrays the clashes and connections between his contemporary modernist camps or "types," brought dramatically to the forefront after the demise of Ruth Wilcox, a characterization of dying Victorian femininity and aristocracy.

Thus, the contradictions in the Modern English Wo/Man are best represented by a "family feud": the cultured, continental Schlegels depict "feminine" values by prioritizing passion, ethics, and personal ties, whereas the ever-practical, materialist imperialists the Wilcoxes are concerned with the "public" sphere of business, acquisition, and social strictures. Forster's ultimate message in his novel seems to ring loud and clear -- "only connect" the public and the private, the masculine and feminine, form and ethics, and a hopeful pathway to England's future may be made. It is, however, a paradigm only made possible by the capitulation of the hegemonic, dominant former categories and by a willingness of liberal English intellectuals to be flexible by associating with their complements, rather than withdrawing to Oxford or the Continent. In an obvious stand against hypermasculine values, Forster implies that the promise of Howard's End necessitates a feminine ability to empathize and compromise through the character of Margaret.

We should not forget, however, that the "other Miss Schlegel," as Mary Gordon notes in the intro of my book's version, has both the first and last word. Though we see the decline of Helen through Meg's changing perspective in Howard's End's central sections, objectively her courage is of a separate but equal sort. The eminence (or as some would say, the threat) of Socialism in early twentieth-century intellectual circles is represented by her hasty love affair with Mr. Bast and her ideas of wealth redistribution; concurrently, Helen's revision of gender roles is more radical than Meg's in her status as a turn-of-the-century single mother. Her arrival upon the scene brings about Mr. Wilcox's ability to "connect" as much as Meg's patient administrations. Helen's final word -- "never" -- also pinpoints Forster's "ironic self-criticism" (Martin and Piggford, "Queer Forster") inherent in his utopian pastoralism.

His revised domesticity, centered in a fading rural environment, may "never" occur, at least without serious effort on both "sides" of the equation. This recognition may very well be the meaning of the repeated "goblin" motif as seen through Helen's eyes. In a parallel fashion, Forster's detached, worldly cynicism continually encroaches upon the straightforward ideals he espouses, as do his reminders to the audience that what we are allowed to visualize, whether our distaste of Tibby and Charles or our preference for the Schlegels, is a product of so much literary "storm und drang".

Forster also focuses upon the motif of modernity's dehumanization, particularly through the symbol of the "motorcar." A part of the environmental background to current audiences, the fact that the invention was then-controversial (to the author at least) is nearly unimaginable. However, it represents the recurring problem Howard's End presents, that of mobility through space. Without a particular connection to a locale, a human connection is made even more improbable, as acquaintances as well as furniture may be translocated or disposed of with increasing ease. Charles Wilcox's attachment to his own, which must be "sold" nearing his manslaughter of Mr. Bast, signals further his impersonal nature, whereas the Wilcox patriarch's insistence on "walking" to see his wife foreshadows his redemption.

Therefore, Forster's "thundering good sort" of a novel is at once radical and reactionary as it situates human values and ideals in a "blurring" modern life.

20 Questions, 20 Answers

How, on earth, could one encapsulate the Modernist movement within the word count necessary for this blog post? Perhaps, in keeping with the writings of Monroe K. Spears, Christopher Reed, and even Bonnie Kime Scott, I should conceptualize the period in certain binaries -- Futurist fascism vs. Bloomsbury bohemianism, revolt from the past vs. repugnance of the future, or even time vs. space! My usual envisioning of the Modernist prior to this week's reading material involved a hazy conjuring of Metropolis's skyscrapers and social upheavals, at once radically forward-looking and highly dated. This paradox arises from what all of the aforementioned scholars touch upon as this era's self-consciousness, a certain navel-gazing aesthetic as writers, artists, and scientists attempted to define their times. However, the most accurate picture of Modernism is one that supersedes such categories, and such postmodern cultural chauvinism, in favor of noting the era's enduring intersections and complexities in "spacetime" as a single unit: itself an inherently modernist paradigm.

It is difficult to completely dissociate Modernist concerns from that of their target of rebellion, the Victorians. Like their ideological parents, they too debated and grappled over issues such as "God's" or religion's death, its loss of centrality in the social sphere, evidenced by T.S. Eliot's apocalyptic poetry. Science and technology, glorified or villified, gave the Moderns a sense of what Spears dubs a "disconnect" and disorientation from traditional ways of the past. However, such traditional concepts of Modernist issues should not distract from concurrent concerns such as colonialism, women's roles, and domesticity usually placed in the context of much later "cultural criticism."

Indeed, while Modernism certainly occupies the earlier half of the twentieth century, it tends to blur at the boundaries, with Scott including the era of "decadence" from 1870-90 and with New Criticism occupying a privileged space in academic circles far beyond the mid-century mark. Certainly, the "War to End All Wars" and the Second World War that followed it were watersheds, the former heavily influencing Modernism and the latter ushering in its direct descendant, Postmodernity. The literature of the "Lost Generation" and simultaneous reactions to experimental political movements from Communism to Fascism exemplifies the era. In Britain itself, these sociopolitical upheavals combined with a self-image of the colonial, industrial power resulted in a multiplicity of literary forms and values, from individualistic stream-of consciousness writing in Virginia Woolf to masculinist emphases on the neoclassical and the abstract.

Therefore, it may be said that Modernism was characterized by an atmosphere ultimately not very different from our own: that of "culture war". While its right-wing Futurists, which favored social and domestic hierarchy, might have voted Republican prior to the Christian coalition, the GOP's current rejection of scientific and technological progress at the cost of traditional moral concerns (i.e., stem cell research or evolution) may have been anathema to them. Perhaps a tough-talking social liberal such as Guiliani may have carried some appeal. Obviously, it is tempting to perceive the feminist Woolf and her fellow Bloomsbury comrades as dead-ringers for Hillary (or even Kucinich!), yet much of their work, while not anti-ideological, can interestingly be characterized as anti-government. Reed depicts their work as the "celebration of the individual" instead of a "hierarchy of values," promoting "radical democracy," so it is possible that some members may have found a certain cache to Ron Paul.

Campaign fever nonwithstanding, this post has hopefully removed the stereotype of Modernism's "phallic verticality" (Thacker), the image of the linear, stark skyscraper as fully representative of the era, in my mind and others'. Yet, its juxtaposition with, say, a bohemian home and garden may give a general picture, or shall I say spatial incarnation, of Modernism's differing views of its own progress, goals, and potential.