Stories About "Nothing"

To really get into this week's Woolf, I feel that a meditative, Zen-like, haiku-appreciating state of mind is helpful to navigate the short stories' startling images and labyrinthine sentences. For example, in the first sentence:

"From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom..."

I found it at first difficult to navigate between subjects and their adjectival descriptors, a difficulty increased by the passive-voice construction in the first line. This phenomenon, however, I find to be far-from-accidental on Woolf's part, particularly given her pun on "rose" in the first verb. This word choice creates a dualistic parallel in the audience's mind, of both the rose flowers that may be blooming in "Kew Garden" and the plants' action of life and growth. Sandra Kemp states of Woolf's short stories that "time, space, and the habitual association of things are erased by this potential of the imagination"; likewise, I find that the dichotomy between "thing" and "action," or "subject" and "being," to be playfully blurred here.

Perhaps this strategy lends the sense of timelessness many sections of both "Kew Gardens" and "Mark on the Wall" contain. There is no traditional narrative with its linear progression of time in either story, but the narrative instead switches back and forth between past, present, and perhaps even future. "Kew Gardens" shifts between the present and a memory of "fifteen years ago," in which what is ostensibly marginal, unrelated background detail reigns over the bulk of the actual occurrence (40). Simon mainly recalls a "dragonfly" circling and the impatient motion of a shoe rather than, say, his lover's words or facial expression as per conventional expectations. Woolf here captures the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind, particularly, as Kemp notes, in regards to recollections (68) -- we often remember the past as a snapshot, and indeed remember minute details while faces and words grow hazy and diluted. There seems to be a tension between the thoughts that relate to the social sphere, socially acceptable thoughts about the weather or events in the "Times" ("Unwritten Novel", 19) and those eccentric flashes of perception that constitute a large part of our waking lives and often lend them meaning. (People ask what I am thinking often, and my answer is always, always censored somehow.)

To return to "Kew Gardens," I am unsure how to "interpret" Simon's "perception" (Kemp, 76), if even that is what Woolf intends, that the "whole" of his beloved "seemed to be in her shoe" (40). There is a hint of Prufrock here, of the fragmentation of the human Self, and particularly men's fragmentation of female syntactic/literary "objects," or bodies. However, given Woolf's love affair with detail and imagery in her short stories, perhaps remembering another by their shoe is not an insult, but merely a method by which Woolf imaginatively penetrates an"other"'s mind. Perhaps transferring preferred body parts from hands to shoes is Woolf's way of playing with and subverting Eliot's device. Furthermore, Kemp seems to view the old woman's "kiss" as mocking R/romantic conventions, yet I thought of a matriarchal transference and blessing upon artistic endeavor (to oppose Harold Bloom!), given that it was received in the company of six painting girls.

Speaking of connections with visual art, the finale of "Kew Gardens," in which "wordless voices" were "breaking the silence," only to be countered by the assertion that, in modern life, there are "omnibuses" and no true silence, paralleled the use of vibrant color at the expense of "shadow" in domestic painting. In fact, the flowers' "colours" (45) is our final remaining image. Woolf, in perhaps her only similarity to the Futurists, seems here to be embracing the dynamism and vitality of modern life rather than bemoaning its lack of silence; I recall a scene from The Hours in which Virginia feels an incurable draw back to her frantic-but-invigorating London lifestyle.

In "A Mark on the Wall," Woolf characterizes the act of interpretation (and indeed, the sense I get interpreting her short stories) as a "swarm" of "thoughts," a multitude like a group of ants or insects, each perception individuated and yet part of the whole (47) . She explores this mode of thought thematically throughout the piece, before her thoughts must be defined, pinned, and fixed by the "mark's" literal definition. I'm wondering if she is presciently hinting at our current analysis of language, in that agreeing upon a central "definition" of a word or even a work of literature necessarily prohibits that word/work's "play" and infinitude of possibilities. Woolf subtly takes issue with the masculine modernists' obsession with "hard, dry things" and specificities, exclaiming that "I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts" (49). Retaining the hard and the dry as sole literary obsessions, she implies, leads to a certain shallow vacuousness. Later, she returns to the problem of "standards," whether of "things" or of perhaps linguistic definitions, stating that "Man" has taken their place -- for now. What will follow, she hopes, is a sort of freedom, of expression and of thought, the feverish freedom to which she strives in her stories. However, the "Mark's" definition as a "snail" throws this reverie into question, perhaps displaying that for all our experimentations, the minute and the concrete, the small, slimy things, still matter in a narrative.

A General Impression

At the moment overcoming my apprehension of crossing into the visual arts genre as a novice (this apprehension to be channeled in the near future into making a visual journal), I will begin by assessing the Modernist experiments in the literary realm as in many ways clinging to the coattails of the various radical, avante-garde movements in visual art also underway. To name the most obvious example that comes to mind, Ezra's Pound "imagist" movement seems to attempt to do for literature what the impressionists or even surrealists did for art -- to capture an ideosyncratic moment in time, favoring the expression of emotion over obvious representationality. Both the impressionists and the surrealists, indeed along with all pioneers of absract art, operated as "first responders" to a Western crisis of the subject and its representation, deriving from Christian humanism (CCM, 204), that resulted from the works of Freud and Darwin. The latter removed humanity from its centrality to the world order, and the former served to complicate notions of free will and objective truth: these new philosophies that would come to define the modern world had an obvious impact on art, later on literature.

For me, the Surrealists' (and magic realists') theoretical and visual combination of Marxist and psychoanalytic thought presented a highly creative (and bizarre) new form. Though we still have a legacy of perceiving art as primarily consummed by an elite for the sake of decoration and cultural capital, (particularly even in terms of more abstracted art) it is obvious through this genre that art can also operate as an incitement to revolution or an indictment of a given society. I'm no Marxist, but the idea that unconscoius connections can be channeled by visual media/images in order to disrupt a hegemonic or stagnated worldview is highly intriguing.

To retrace the links between literature and art, what seems to be endemic in both spheres during the Modernist era is a sense of warring schools, each seeking to be the dominant form (as opposed to our own, in which fragmented niche forms coexist simultaneously). It would take a seperate post to work out which groups and philosophies corresponded -- indeed, this week's readings seemed to complicate which areas intersected and which contrasted. For example, while abstracted art seems a more elite, mathematical/logical form on par with Eliot, Hulme, et. all, MacCarthy and Bell focus on its ability to take a snapshot of the artist's emotion, without having to sculpt this feeling into "cold" representational reality.

Furthermore, what Desmond MacCarthy observes as the post-impressionists' rethinking of traditional chiaroscuro in representation (99) appears to be a precursor to a post-structuralist, or at least an anti-metaphysical, understanding of binaries as they have historically operated in eschatological thinking, particularly in our CCM's depiction of the choice to throw our foremother Eve out of the shadows and into full color. With many of the assumptions of Western philosophy and spirituality thus critiqued, artists were also able to experiment in a more diverse, multicultural way than ever before; for example, Van Gogh's use of Japanese prints or Picasso's rendition of African masks. Surely, Modernist literary London must have felt concurrent exhileration and envy as they studied their artistic cousins.

Speaking of Michelangelo...

Like the modernist prose (Howard's End) and critical essays that have been assigned thusfar, Eliot's early poetry tends to dwell upon the vissicitudes of modern life, whether the crowd that "rubs and questions" the artistic "bloom" to its own diminishment, or the imagery of disposal and waste in old newspapers of his Prelude's first stanza. Indeed, T.S. Eliot's first works appear to already contain a sense of intimidation, or repulsion, by crowds or swarms -- for example, the horrofic glut of faceless "sirens" that Prufock perceives women to be, or the "trampling" of feet in the Preludes that implicitly buries the soul. Obviously, the flux of humanity Eliot depicts is always a part of his hard-boiled city vignettes, blending in with the atmosphere and presenting a homogenity and a soullessness that gives the early poetry its unique, dull pain. Nevertheless, it is quite interesting that Eliot's themes are similar to Forster's, a man who is starkly different in both personality and politics. Eliot's Portait of a Lady and Le Figlia Che Piagne strategically break with their homogenous environment in his use of second person, portraying at once a crucial, potential connection and that connection's failure to fully "bloom" or materialize.

While all of our reading excluding the Preludes could be interpreted as love or courtship poetry, Eliot transcends this category by postulating heterosexual romance as a method to heal the fragmented isolation endemic to modern life rather than an ultimate and monothematic end unto itself. For this reason, as well as his sensitive Portrait of a dying woman who quietly and heroically "serves tea to friends," I cannot peg T.S. Eliot or even Prufrock as one-dimensional, "conservative" misogynists. The female gender is not the "Other" to Prufock: all of humanity is.

It is apparent that Eliot was already conceptualizing his theories on poetry, and the direction it should take in the Modern world, in his early works. For me, La Figlia Che Piange most visibly demonstrated the ideas Eliot expressed in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent": the love-interest that "weaves the sunlight" into her hair almost insidiously invites a conventional reading of the poem, which is soon disrupted and skewed by the metaphor of the "fugitive" with its contemporary, near-politicized diction. This sort of ambivalent or contradictory reading that such a work invites is obviously a New Critic's dream, particularly in the last line where the weeping girl disturbs both the "troubled midnight" and "noon's repose" -- because of his failed connection with her, he cannot have the comfort of sinking into either complacency or despair. Beginning with Eliot, the New Criticism is by necessity wedded to a particular form of a particular era, removing the poet from his (yes, in this era of criticism, his) poetry in a manner that may have been freeing to an antiromantic, yet emotional individual.

We should not forget that Eliot and his critical posse were once avante-garde, with a new style to purify and canonize. And yet, for all his talk of rebellion from the near-past of Romanticism and Victorianism, this week's selection of Eliot appears to borrow extensively from Robert Browning's experiments with dramatic monologue. Eliot incorporates this technique to both draw in and distance his audience, leaving it ambiguous whether the "you" in his poems is the reader or is another character with whom his speaker is conversing. This method intriguingly mirrors his commercial strategy of catering to an elite, "select" audience, increasing his poetry's premium artistic value while still, of course, selling poetry. I would not categorize Eliot's style as a commercial formula, but I would also not rule such considerations out altogether: indeed, such an interpretation would lend a layer of irony to the "rubbed rose" of the private Chopin concert in his Portrait or the discarded newspapers of his Preludes. Furthermore, Eliot reflects upon modern life's commodification of both artistic and human relationships in his censored Pervigilium and in Portrait of a Lady's epitaph and very title. The latter perhaps refereces Manet's Olympia, in which the sexualized subject of an artistic elite's private consumption gazes back.

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.