A Genealogy of Modernism; or How I Stopped Eating and Learned to Love the Text

BE WARNED. THIS POST IS LONG. IT IS DENSE. IT IS EXCESSIVE. I DID NOT EAT DURING THIS ALTHOUGH I WAS VERY CAFFEINATED. FOR DAYS. DAYS. THIS HAS CONSUMED ME. I AM MODERNISM. MODERNISM IS ME. THERE IS NO INDIVIDUAL SELF OR INDIVIDUAL SELF-EXPRESSION. THERE IS ONLY IMMEDIATE PERCEPTIONS. WE ARE ALL COLLaPSED. WE ARE MODERNISM. MODERNISM DOES NOT EAT. plzsendhelp.

Early modernism:

1. Development of the modernist consciousness: Transition to "a small world and a large self":

Important figures: Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley, and Walter Pater

Shift from focus on external truth to internal consciousness. The subjective individual experience is what applies meaning to the external event.

Joseph Conrad claimed that "the appeal of one temperament to all the other temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time." This approach to literature positions the tone/mood as the primary vehicle for establishing meaning--a shift in the western understanding for recognizing truth/significance in art.

The tone and the mood comes from the consciousness crafted by the text. That is, the individual perspectives establish the meaning of the plot. Leven defines this as psychologism, or life and art for the sake of a "consciousness as a source of value."

Thus, early modernism establishes the significance of the individual consciousness above the "factuality" of the event and so subjectivity becomes more meaningful than objectivity. The meaning of art is derived from its ability to establish a clear consciousness.

2. Establishing a modernist authority: How to form a network/synthesis of style and ideas

Definitely born out of classist anxieties about political control and changing social structures

Examples:

- T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

- Matthew Arnold's "The Literary Influence of Academies"

Arnold believed that the French literary tradition was stronger because the French Academy grounded the artistic movements to consciously develop strong ideas and styles. Arnold believed the Academy acted as a center at which ideas, tastes, virtues, and judgments could meet, fuse, and further grow while being intentionally pruned and refined.

Arnold, Irving Babbit, and others are responding to the rsing emphasis on individual perspectives. They believe that "[w]ith the spread of impressionism literature has lost standards and discipline." So there question becomes: how do we re-instill discipline, seriousness, and tradition (or what could also be called COHERENCE) into literary practices?

Agree and: Leven doesn't make this point, but I think one way modernist thinkers respond to this challenge is by creating literary magazines and reviews. Ezra Pound certainly locates himself as an authority who cultivates modernist voices and other individuals like Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and Wyndham Lewis construct cultural identities as literary and aesthetic mentors for other writers and artists.

Leven focuses on Conrad and how Conrad represents this struggle. He argues that Conrad's work reveals that "[t]he more intently self-aware one becomes, the more social obligation loses its reality and its hold." The struggle in these literary texts then becomes the tension between the significance of an individual consciousness and the desire for a sovereign order.

3-8. The timeline of modernism: Hulme as chronology?

Modernism develops and evolves so quickly that even a year marks a huge change in its ideology. T. E. Hulme "might be seen merely as the name of an intellectual site, a place where intellectual current converged." He provides a track for the two paths modernism takes as it develops.

1907: Hulme becomes a follower of Henri Bergson's ideas; asserts that "at the level of the superficial self, actions are analysable, automatic, spatial and casual; but for the 'deeper' self (le moi profond) such categories cease to apply."

1909 (?): Hulme claims modern poetry must abandon the structures of traditional poetry--meter, set syllables, standard forms, etc.--and favor free expression of smaller moments. The image becomes the predominant tool of the poet. The aim of poetry should be to represent a specific moment and clearly depict a physical scene, to avoid the epic but simultaneously resist the mundane. Poetry should also "be founded on a radical literary individualism." In many ways, Hulme seems to want a poem to create a poetic consciousness through using imagery to establish a mood rather than a narrative.

1844: Max Stirner publishes "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" or "The Ego and His Own." This essay claims that "the only reality was the individual ego whose needs and desires were their own justification." That is, it renounces any belief in any sort of attachment to a higher power and places all significance in the individual and his/her own aims.

1907: Pierre Lasserre publishes Le Romantisme francais which argued "late nineteenth-century intellectual decadence was the product of a romanticism whose principle tenets [were] optimism, individualism, sentimentality." Hulme and Babbitt are highly influenced by this article and adopt the stance as well.

1908: two ideas on how/why we enjoy art: 1) we enjoy art because we recognize ourselves and our own pleasures in the art and 2) we enjoy art because it abstracts human emotions to locate truth and beauty in the inorganic

1908-1909: all about the free verse and the Image

1909: Ford claims the age of "Great Figure[s]" has passed. He identifies Tennyson, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others as Great Figures. This "passing" marks a perceived disappearance of social and cultural stability and the emergence of a culture without a figurehead to denote what is appropriate or intellectually valuable. This can also be seen as the passing of the Victorian Age.

1909: Ford supports the move in modern poetry in which "the artist substitute[s] private expression for public declamation." That is, poetry no longer attempts to generalize morality but present individual expressions and experiences.

1910: Ford becomes concerned with the political state of affairs and believe society has become degraded and chaotic.

1911: Ford asserts society is "standardizing" which then eliminates extraordinariness (seems classist, tbh). He also expresses "contempt" for facts and support for "impressions." Overall, Ford believes that because society has become fragmented and because ideas have become de-centered, art must focus on the individual subject and individual impressions.

1911: Hulme argues that there is no such thing as one Truth but rather different forces pursuing different goals.

1912: Pound announces Imagism as a movement with H.D. and Richard Aldington as its only two followers.

1912: Futurism enters the London scene via lectures and performances.

1913: Pound and Ford still interested in art's function for social utility. That is, they both believed in various ways that poetry could provide "data" for understanding man and morality by providing accurate depictions of the human experience.

1913: Harriet Shaw Weaver founds the literary journal the New Freewoman with the goal of supporting Stirner's ideas regarding the ego and its primacy.

1913: Remy de Gourmont connects Stirner "Ego and His Own" to Nietzsche. This explicated the idea that the "wilful individual becomes the source of such truth as the world allows. . .the ego was the world's centre and its circumference."

1913: Hulme prioritizes "abstraction" over "empathy" in the creation of art.

1913: Pound adopts Allen Upward's ideas. Upward maintained, "When is the good not the good? When it is an abstract noun." In other words, Upward was committed to the idea that individuals and their experiences are the only thing that matters. There can be no generalizing.

1914: Ford announces "we of 1913 are a fairly washed-out lot" and poets and artists "need a new formula" that radically and violently resists traditional and societal norms.

1914: "classicism . . . is abandoned as insufficiently radical."

1914: Pound takes over the New Freewoman and changes its name to the Egoist.

1914: Pound becomes anti-realist and becomes increasingly interested in the fine arts in developing an aesthetic philosophy.

1914: interest in cubism and other radical experimental arts dramatically increases. Modernist thinkers stop considering the social function of art--that is the humanistic influence--and start proclaiming the need for art that is antagonistic and resists all social institutions, traditions, and norms. "The fundamental and recurrent principle was the self-sufficiency of the artist."

1914: Hulme becomes "the severest critic of [the notion that art is subjective, tentative, and relativist], which he now identified as part of the Renaissance and romantic legacy."

1914: Pound "closes ranks with Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska" to make the avant-garde an exclusive club. English avant-garde becomes its own sort of institution with growing numbers, momentum, financial investments, and influence.

1914: AROUND THIS TIME Ford and Conrad conceive time not as a linear cause-and-effect system, but rather believed that "Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains." That is, the human brain constructs a narrative using the individual perceptions and responding stimuli to objective environments.

1914: Vorticist journal Blast is first published. It claims its goal is to appeal to the individual and has no interest in social reform or nature.

1914: Richard Aldington--in the Egoist--declares that aspiring poets should ignore the existing canon and forget the influence of tradition.

1914: New conceptualization of history and world timeline: "History should move forward by glancing backward." This idea was influenced by Lasserre. (Second Modernism?). Hulme furthers this understanding and "relinquishe[s] a linear view of history in favour

of a cyclical theory, but the cycles have steadily enlarged."

1914: T. S. Eliot moves to England and is introduced to Pound. Pound becomes a major mentor and proponent of Eliot's work.

1915: Hulme and other thinkers start to argue that logic is a self-contained, autonomous discipline; this then leads an "attempt to prove the non-psychological, non-naturalist, non-subjective character of ethical value."

1915: "For Pound, then, [modern art] is a formal structure whose components nevertheless are essentially psychological constituents: energy, emotion, idea."

1915: Ford publishes The Good Soldier

1915: Issue 2 of Blast tries to transform "the military struggle into a conflict between opposed aesthetics." The Vorticists increasingly have to defend themselves and their art as the growing violence of the War lessens the prestige and status of their own violent aesthetic.

1915: Ford publishes When Blood Is Their Argument which asserts that art must be committed to maintaining social stability and condemns art that is rooted in "organised, materialist egoism'--a huge departure from his earlier stances.

1916: Pound publishes a biography for Gaudier-Brzeska in an attempt to recover Vorticism's reputation

1917: Eliot publishes "Reflections on Vers Libre." This essay asserts "metrical innovation as progress toward a new discipline, not a new freedom." The emphasis on discipline is important here. Eliot did not see free verse as a way to achieve unbridled self-expression; rather, it was a new form with its own set of criteria and attributes to master. To create a new form, as one would assume, is complicated as a new form must be the "realization of the whole appropriate content of this rhyme or rhythm."

1917: Eliot proposes the need for "regenerating example of past forms" rather than simply dismissing tradition or historical precedents. Eliot also starts hating sincerity and attacks those who he feels embodies it in their work. He uses irony to regenerate past forms. These ironies "open [the work] beyond the confines of the single perception" and to take "'variety and complexity' into account."

1918: Pound publishes "The Hard and the Soft in French Poetry." This led to an increase of modernists focusing on "efficient writing" and cutting anything considered superfluous or "emotional slither."

1922: Eliot returns to London and notes the tension between "poet and audience--in particular, the strain between a poet who cares to experiment and a culture which asks to be flattered and soothed."

1922: Eliot publishes The Waste Land. He himself would claim the poem embodied everything the modernist movement had worked for since 1900. The poem "stands as itself a doctrinal act . . . In overturning old norms so thoroughly, the work cannot fail to raise the critical question: what norms are now appropriate?

Levenson's argument regarding The Waste Land:

- boundaries of the self (narrator/consciousness/POV) begin to waver

- boundaries between life and death, past an present also begin to collapse

- fractured coherency becomes the aesthetic aim

- the poem rests on the tension between universality and egoism, cultural plurality and single image, immediate individual experience and developing external systems.

- "Meaning is no longer identified with presence to an individual consciousness . . . Nor is meaning considered autonomous and self-sufficient. .. It is the product of multiple perspectives"

- How do we find meaning/morality/significance in a world without a centered or absolute truth?

Large movements within the timeline:

• 1908-1913 modernist criticism is "largely apologetic in character."

• By 1912, the two strains of modernism had developed: one that emphasized "order, discipline and restraint" while the other championed "freedom, expression, individualism."

• 1912-1914: "Pure form was goal; individual will was its underpinning"

• 1913-1915 represents "the presence of a distinct train of thought, a radical egoism, which links the literary attitudes of early Hulme, Ford, and Pound." They also show "the extent that the individual was invested with pre-eminence [so] that tradition and society could be so thoroughly dismissed."

Claims that result from the timeline:

• In 1908-1914, the rise of Boy Scouts and Peter Pan represented the two competing political/cultural tensions: an appeal to the extension of authority and discipline as safeguards of moral (and imperial) stability; on the other hand, a desperate flight from moral complexity and political decline."

• "the coincident pressures of mass culture and technical culture put an unbearable strain on the culture of liberalism . . . In the face of working-class militancy, religious and philosophical scepticism, scientific technology and the popular press, there was a tendency--especially among the artists and intellectuals--to withdraw into individual subjectivity as a refuge for threatened values. Among this group, liberalism decomposed into egoism."

• The conceptualization of an artistic/aesthetic timeline shifts. No longer do modernists want to follow a timeline that moves from ancient to modern because this was seen as simply reviving the decadence associated with prior generations.

• "The only possible standpoint for contesting a decadent romantic tradition i to discard the tradition altogether . . . The 'geometric' replaces the 'classical' as the only possible salvation."

• How to resolve Ford's seemingly irreconcilable ideas regarding modernism: "impressionism is a realism." Ford thinks objective reality is perceived and recorded by subjective individuals. This allows him to simultaneously champion objective and subjective art.

• Three "large and related intellectual displacements": 1) spiritual -> humanist, 2) humanist -> subjectivism, and 3) subjectivism -> Impressionism

#modernism #genealogyofmodernism #michaellevenson #pound #eliot #timeline #chronology #ford