The Comps Reading Project part 16

THIS IS THE WEEK I FINALLY FINISHED THE LAST OF THE PLAYS AND POEMS ON MY HISTORICAL LIST, AND OVER TWO-THIRDS OF MY SPECIAL TOPIC LIST, GUYS I AM SO FRICKIN CLOSE I CAN SMELL IT


Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity, Jonathan Goldman.

2011 study picking up where Jaffe and Glass left off.  Traces how style became conflated with celebrity as early as the Modernist period, following the examples of Oscar Wilde (for whom his writing became so identified with him that it was used as evidence against him at his Sodomy trial), James Joyce (who still consciously guides our readings of Ulysses to this day; Goldman's readings here are heavily indebted to Barthes and Foucault), Gertrude Stein (with a heavy emphasis on her later work, wherein she "democratizes" style, only to then undercut the democratization to still emphasize the per-eminence of her own celebrity), Charlie Chaplin (as "uniquely revealing the commonalities of popular celebrity and modernist authorship," by how the very fact of his celebrity helped over-write the very characters he portrayed), Jean Rhys (as the abject object of desire who is both marginalized and centralized all at once), and concludes with John Dos Passos (who's style becomes inseparable from his celebrity--though, as always, we can never seem to discuss him without bringing up Hemingway).

The Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh.

My goodness, the endless whiplash of this 1996 play!  Just when you think these bitter characters could possibly get any worse...they do something to totally redeem themselves...only to then do something even worse...only to then give a glimmer of hope...only to the snuff that out, too.  This play had my mouth contorting in laughter, then in pain, then finally just agape in bewilderment.

Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation, John Harwood.

1995 anti-theory polemic that's been cited multiple times by other works on my Special Topics list, particularly for Harwood's insistence that the entire category of "Modernism" is a fictional construct invented by the post-war economy in order to artificially sustain an entire cottage industry of criticism and theory.  The irony here is that Harwood is actually a deep admirer of TS Eliot specifically and of that particular literary era in general; it is not experimentation he is opposed to, but the use of the generic term "Modernism" to try and enclose a very disparate and disconnected series of competing movements within the same insufficient rubric.  He attacks first the New Critics (those inveterate disciples of Eliot) for creating an astronomically, unsustainably massive corpus of criticism that in effect sucks all the joy out of reading; the theorists who followed in the '60s and '70s, initially formed to attack and deconstruct the New Critics, became no less authoritarian and suffocating as the ancien regime they were intended to displace.  Harwood sees the death of Eliot in '65 and the arrival of Derrida in '66 as a clear passing of the baton from the old boss to the new; yet while Harwood sees Eliot as largely a victim of circumstances, he has absolutely no patience for Derrida specifically, nor for Deconstructionism in general, classifying the latter as no more than a mystic art with no grounding, purpose, or insight.

He repeatedly punctures the pretensions of literary critics, by in effect saying that if you're goal is revolution and social change, then literary criticism is by far the least effective way to go about it, that the fate of human civilization certainly does not rest upon our interpretation of, say, "The Waste Land," that most readers in fact get along just fine without us.  He spends quite a bit of time on "The Waste Land" (since it is such a foundational poem in New Criticism, inviting exactly the sort of excessively close reading that plagues literary criticism to this day), by demonstrating Eliot's own deep ambivalence with the poem, especially since it was basically Ezra Pound's massive re-writes that produced it in its current form.

Anti-theory is not original to Harwood (he cites other contemporaneous screeds), and if anything anti-theory is even louder today within academia (Rita Felski is arguably the latest standard-barer--albeit less polemical than Harwood).  I had at least 2 professors at Utah trained at John Hopkins, who were likewise deeply anti-theory.  Nevertheless, he still appears to be the primary skeptic that everyone is still responding to, either in agreement or in argument.  There is a paradox about him, though; he rails against all the excessive scholarship in literary criticism, and he defends that assertion...through extensive scholarship.  He also seem, despite his British crankiness, to be a true lover of literature and scholarship, which leaves me wondering at the end: what exactly does he want us to do instead?  I'm certainly all for tearing down literary theories that force all texts into the same square peg--hammers that see everything as a nail--that subjugate the text to the theory instead of the other way around--that practice the very authoritarianism they ostensibly oppose.  But if we walk away from all this theory and close-readings, well then...what do we do instead?  Just sit around and read, refusing to comment about what books might have to say about the world at large?

The Weir, Conor McPherson.

1997 play staged in that most Irish of places, the local pub--and sharing in that most pub-ish of activities, telling ghost stories.  We don't see the stories acted, no--we see them told, which feels like a crucial difference, as the orality of the shared experience takes precedence, grants greater authority and sense of reality, than the textual or even dramatic elements.

And now, the final play on my list...

Translations, Brian Friel.

Famed 1980 play that takes place in 1833 Ireland, when England was mapping its nearest colony and Anglicizing all the local names.  Young bilinguial Irishman Owen is hired by the English to translate between the army and the local Gaelic-speaking villagers.  Things come to a head when a Romantic young English lieutenant falls for a local Irish girl; they can't speak each others languages, but, you know, the title of the play and all.  Things quickly fall apart when the lieutenant deserts and the English army assumes he's been kidnapped or killed, and threatens to first kill all the livestock then evict everyone unless he's found.   The play ends inconclusively and ambiguously, with an aged Irishman and veteran of the 1798 rebellion recites and translates the Aeniad from the original Latin, which was likewise a tale of a homeland decimated and languages lost in translation...

And thus ends the last of the plays on my Historical List! And now, the last of the poetry:

El Canto General, Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Pablo Neruda.

Pablo Neruda is the one Latin-American poet who requires no introduction; I'd previously read his 20 poemas de amor y una canción desesperada and 100 sonetas de amor, generally considered to be the finest love poems of the Spanish language in the 20th century. But in contrast to those far more famed short poems, 1950's Canto General is a much longer book-length work, treating a wide variety of themes.  For the purposes of my comps list, I only read "Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu."  My Spanish professor insists to me that 3 of the major "labyrinths" in Latin-American literature are the labyrinth of the jungle, the labyrinth of dictatorships, and the labyrinth of history.  All 3 are present in this brief section, as the speaker escapes the labyrinth of the autumnal dying city for the titular ruins of Macchu Picchu; he "scales the ladder of the earth/amid the atrocious maze of lost jungles" up to the "Towering reef of the human dawn/Spade lost in the primal sand," and questions of the beautiful ruins, "did you put/stone upon stone and, at the base, tatters?/Coal upon coal and, at the bottom, tears?/Fire in gold and, within it, the trembling/drop of red blood?/Bring me back the slave that you buried!/Shake from the earth the hard bread/of the poor wretch, show me/the slave's clothing and his window./Tell me how he slept when he lived./Tell if his sleep was/harsh, gaping, like a black chasm/worn by fatigue upon the wall."  Don't you mess with Pablo Neruda!

Antología Mayor, Nicolás Guillén.

Collected works of Cuba's national poet, 1902-1989.  His heritage is half-African, half-Spanish, which fraught identity is naturally a recurring theme in his poetry.  Other recurring themes: the ocean (obviously, given his island), love, women, food and eating (given the historic poverty of the island), Cuban expats in New York, Spanish fascism, and U.S. imperialism (lest we think that we had nothing to do with why the 1959 Revolution happened in the first place).  An early poem of his even calls North Americans "the new Spaniards." His poems have a very musical quality to them, with staccato phrasing and repetitions, like in a chorus; these are poems generally intended to be read out loud, orally, even sung.

Tuntún de Pasa y Grifería, Luis Palés Matos.

1937 collection by the Puerto Rican poet.  The musicality I referenced in Guillén?  Well Palés Matos' poetry could straight up be danced to.  "Asia dreams her nirvana/America dances jazz/Europe plays and theorizes/Africa grinds."  These are poems that claim sympathy with the jungles of Africa and Haiti, Havana and Zimbabwe, Angola and Congo, Jamaica and Uganda, Timbuktu and all the Antilles, a sort of Pan-African consciousness that includes "los negros" of Puerto Rico.   Yet despite all this noise and energy, silence and solitude are also recurring themes in these poems. For while there's obviously political critique underlying this Pan-Africanism (he eats white flesh at one point), there's also a yearning to feel less lonely on this isolated island. 

Discovering Modernism: TS Eliot and His Context, Louis Menand.

 

Menand is referenced repeatedly (and pejoratively) by Harwood, so it makes sense to see what the former actually wrote.  In this 1987 study, Menand tracks how that arch-modernist TS Eliot was responding to certain aesthetic issues raised in late-Victorianist England, beginning with Oscar Wilde, of all people.  Menand draws comparisons with that arch-Victorian Alfred Tennyson, and his poem In Memoriam, arguing that Eliot's early poetry finds itself working within the same vein only without the same assurances of poetry's efficacies (even though Tennyson had many of the same doubts).  Menand performs extended close readings of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to demonstrate the anxieties of professionalization (including the professionalization of poetry) that plagued not only Eliot but the Moderns in general.  As always, the Imagists loom large, who were likewise reacting against certain Victorian norms, trying to save literature from its own "literariness."  Menand also focuses upon the theory that poetry and art are not about the old Romantic notion of recreating an experience, but rather of creating a new experience that is accessible only within art, albeit ones that still have referents rooted in lived experience (this heavily informs Menand's readings of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "The Waste Land").  Menand also tracks how the Eliot disavowed many of his younger artistic theories (albeit not as thoroughly as Menand), leading him to be endlessly cited as the highest authority of ideas he had already either repudiated or lost interest in.  

Menand tracks by means of Eliots' wrangling with poetry how even though we can never really get outside of culture, we can never really get into it, either.  Menand's readings of "The Waste Land" is likewise influenced by Victorian anxieties about how authenticity must be attained by abandoning "literariness," which undermines the very category of literature; "The Waste Land's" manifold literary allusions are an expression of that wrangling with a tradition that is no longer up to the task of self-expression.  In the 2007 afterword, Menand discusses how his interest in Eliot is purely academic; he shares little of his similar tastes, takes as axiomatic that he was reactionary, a traditionalist acutely self-aware that fate had forced him to be a modern.  Menand claims his interest in Eliot resides in his fascination for how the latter came to dominate literary England for a half-century so completely, how this American came to be more British than the British.


Cinema and Modernism, David Trotter.

The automatism and impersonality of cinema, as opposed to specific cinematic techniques such as jump-cuts, montage, or close-ups, as the premier influence on Modernist literature, is the focus of this 2007 study.  Joyce mimicking not the montage quality of early cinema, but of its automatism, and its will-to-automatism; Eysenstein nevertheless explicitly drawing corollaries between cinema and Ulysses.  Critiquing Garret Stewart's methodology for being unable to conceive of the author, or author-function, in literature; and that it takes account only of avant-guarde cinema.  Attempting to re-situate cinema as one of those "popular entertainments" with which TS Eliot was "productively engaged," and "The Waste Land" as similarly obsessed with automation as Ulysses ("The Waste Land" and Ulysses apparently being Oedipus Rex and Hamlet of all literary scholars dealing with this specific era).  Performs sustained analysis of the purported "modernity" of the films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin (the latter is classified as Modernist due to his anti-mimesis, which is ironically portrayed by his hyper-mimesis--or mimicry for mimicry's sake, thereby demonstrating the impoverishment of mimesis).  Trotter acknowledges Virginia Woolf's intermittent interest in cinema, and how the medium's influence purportedly caused her to capture in To The Lighthouse that she hadn't in Mrs Dalloway--namely, how one no longer has to be present for beauty to persist. Lighthouse's 2nd portion is not cinematic, argues Trotter, but was nevertheless made possible by cinema.  Like apparently all New Media theory, this text is hopelessly afflicted with a certain dry, convoluted anti-clarity.

A Singular Modernism: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Frederic Jameson.

Book length 2002 essay by the famed Postmodernist cultural and Marxist critic who turns his attentions at last towards Modernism itself.  He discusses how contemporarily, the very term "Modernism" has been co-opted by the global capitalist system to signify to so-called "developing" countries that only the decrease in worker-protections and increase in corporate-pandering qualify as "modern," with all attempts to resist such exploitation classified as "anti-modern."  Yet Jameson also notes that during the actual "Modernist" art period, it was exactly these "less"-developed colonies and former colonies--the United States, Latin-American, and above all Ireland--who were considered the most "Modern," and were most exporting these cutting-edge aesthetic movements to Europe's colonial centers.  "Modernism," then, signifies a modernization that ends (or becomes "Postmodern") once said modernization process actually ends--Jameson's examples include Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which effectively ended and/or cut short the Modernist art movements within their respective countries, ironically under the auspices of turning to totalitarianism in order more fully "modernize" economically.

Part 1, or most the first half of this essay, involves a lot of heady historical preamble ("always historicize" is Jameson's axiom) centered around the philosophy Descartes, Foucault, Heidegger, and Paul de Mann; all of this historicizing is in the service of setting up four maxims for the "bon usage" of the term "modernity" as it relates to aesthetics, viz:
1. One cannot not periodize. [Indeed, Jameson offers that periodization is not an optional consideration, but "an essential feature of the narrative process itself" (81)].
2. Modernity is not a concept but rather a narrative category.
3. The one way not to narrate it is via subjectivity (thesis: subjectivity is unrepresentable). Only situations of modernity can be narrated.
4. No 'theory' of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.

Part II, or the final third of the book, then tracks how it is within this temporal tension betwixt the "pre-modern" and the "modernized"--or more precisely, between the agricultural, feudal-peasant countryside and the industrialized, urban city--that Modernist art situates itself, e.g. as in Joyce's Ulysses and Prousts' In Search of Lost Time.  Again, it is in the unfinished process of modernizing, not in the modernized, that "Modernism" is to be located.  As for Postmodernism, Jameson draws a parallel between the marketplaces of both commodities and ideas--beginning in the 1950s and '60s, Postmodernism felt itself unable to continue to fulfill Pound's Modernist injunction to "make it new," to be innovative above all else, for all available creative ideas seemed to have been already exhausted by the previous generation, much like how late-capitalism faces in the same era finds itself faced for the first time with the very real possibility of total market saturation, wherein no longer can new markets be opened, but only existing markets can be ever expanded with diminishing returns.  The goal of art, then, becomes to somehow at last resist commodification--or, become allegories of its own commodification.


Modernism (as we see clearly in TS Eliot) is all about resisting modernization, reacting against the modernizing process.

A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, Jed Esty.

2004 study that arguably picks up Jameson's thread about how "Modernism" is really defined as a reaction against modernization--but whereas Jameson is far more theoretically driven, Esty is actually the one who more concretely historizes.  Namely, he tracks how the collapse of the British Empire over the course of the Modernist period influenced the writing of this time.  It is borderline-axiomatic nowadays to note that most of the really vital English literature published throughout the 20th century came from England's former colonies: Ireland, the U.S., the Caribbean, India and Africa.  What happened to the home of the mother tongue?  Some blamed England's increased provincialism as they lost their overseas holdings--but Esty posits that this process really began before the process of decolonization.  (In the Intro, Esty cites Ezra Pound in 1910 as already noting that England itself is now largely irrelevant towards the development of English letters).  As Esty traces this history, he first notes that by the end of the Victorian era, England's sense of self-identity was very much rooted in a sense of being the central hub for a multi-national empire, from which it could mine endless new mythologies, folklore, and stories (as we see in the writings of Kipling).  Yet this self-conceptualization ironically had the effect of making England itself feel de-centered, hazily defined, and absorbing identities more than they exported their own (little wonder, then, that it was mostly Americans and Irishmen coming to London, rather than the other way around, that was increasingly driving literature).

Moreover, the profound laissez-faire capitalism of the era rendered most the English feeling all the more radically individualistic and therefore radically alone, without firm anchor in any sort of common culture, and therefore all the more subject to the ruthless power of market forces.  Likewise, the rise of fascism on mainland Europe had the effect of 1) cutting them off from further continental contact and sources of extra-literary cultural sources, and 2) forcing the English to band themselves into a common cultural identity in order to oppose a common foe, yet in a nationalistic formation that hopefully wasn't fascist as well. This process inwards was exasperated by the homerule movements in Ireland, India, Egypt, Canada, and Australia (each of which were granted greater and greater autonomy before seceding altogether), which cut off England from sources of Othered folklore.

This process, argues Esty, resulted in England turning inwards to mine their own countryside (in the 1930s there is a sudden boom in English tourist guides), searching for forgotten native folklore, traditions, and a sense of pre-modern unity; everything becomes retro, in other words.  (This is thus far the only study I've read so far to acknowledge JRR Tolkien's rise in English letters, as just the sort of retro-stylist that this English turn inwards would create--of course, Tolkien is still technically an outsider, being born in South Africa, as Esty notes).  Esty further notes how Virginia Woolf's first novel, 1915's The Voyage Out, involves sailing out to the colonies, while her final novel, 1941's Between the Acts, takes place in the provincial countryside; likewise TS Eliot's early poetry, especially 1922's "The Waste Land," has a very internationalist cosmopolitanism to it, while his latter poetry, especially 1943's "The Four Quartets," is very unapologetically Anglican.  Esty, however, is careful to argue that Eliot's was no mere reactionary nativism (though it is that, too), but rather a strategy for forming a sort of common cultural core within England that could resist both the isolating loneliness of free-market capitalism and the forces of European fascism.  Eliot's, argues Esty, is likewise a bottom-up approach towards cultural formation, eschewing the top-down tyranny of fascism.  Woolf, although far more liberal than Eliot, is likewise working within a similar common-cultural framework--and with a similar goal towards resisting fascism.

But intriguingly, Esty's primary leftist example is not even a literary figure, but the economist John Maynard Keynes, whom Esty argues was attempting the same difficult negotiation between an isolating free-market and totalizing government, by arguing for a common cultural sense of English identity that could undergird the emerging British welfare state, particularly as Britain transitioned into its current post-imperial identity.  Yet Esty is also careful to argue that none of these writers was under the delusion that they could simply move back to some pre-modern, pre-imperial England--that indeed post-colonial Britain was now diverse, heterogeneous, and multicultural, and the paradox is how contemporary England's retro provincialism now cohabitates with a cosmopolitan internationalism; again, as Jameson argues, English Modernism ends as soon as England finishes modernizing.

Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, Michael North.

1999 study on easily the most mythologized year in Modernist literary studies. It was of course the years both Ulysses and "The Waste Land" were published.  When Woolf wrote that the world changed "December 1910," she wrote that in 1922; when DH Lawrence said the same of 1915, he likewise wrote that in 1922.  Ezra Pound recommended starting a new calendar system, a Year 1, from 1922.  The English translation of Wittgenstein's Tractus Logico-Philosophicus was published that year.  Willa Cather at last won the Pulitzer, only to suddenly find herself suddenly out of favor; decades later, she would publish a short-story collection entitled None Under 40, for none under 40 would enjoy these tales, identifying 1922 as the break.  Yet F. Scott Fitzgerald identified 1922 as the high point of the younger generation.  Chapter 1 of this book focuses upon Wittgenstein's linguistic theories, the trouble with translation, the defamiliarization of language, and closely related to it the establishment of anthropology as an academic discipline roughly that same year.

Chapter 2 analyzes how Freud's theories of the unconscious were ironically front and center in the public conscious in 1922.  In fact, advertising was naturally the first to explicitly lay hold of these theories.  North then follows a circumlocutious route to track how this psychological infatuation influenced the writing of these books themselves, how stream-of-conscious in fact became a marketing ploy, which then brings us to how the pretensions of "High Modernism" that purportedly resisted commodification were in fact complicit with their own marketing all along, which then somehow gets us to how the rhetoric of self-consciously acknowledging our own prejudices still somehow resulted in utterly non-self-consciously reinforcing the era's dominant xenophobia, anti-semitism, eugenics, racism, and anti-immigrant politics.

Chapter 3 juxtaposes the Prince of Wale's Imperial Tour to India against DH Lawrence's own world tour to find himself; the former was attempting to clearly establish England's imperial dominions in the very moment when they were starting to fall apart (this was the same year, after all, of Irish self-determination, Egyptian and Indian self-autonomy, and of Gandhi).  Yet though Lawrence had no imperial ambitions per se, he nevertheless is driven by the same mythology of Englishman as universal citizen, one who can merge into any and all cultures, though the process cannot be reversed in this model.  Chapter 4 examines how the "great divide" between high art and pop art was by no means as wide as is now assumed, beginning with an anecdote about how the same Gilbert Seldes who helped published "The Waste Land" also wrote about Tin Pan Alley songs. Also discusses how the music hall influenced Ulysses, and how the film industry wasn't so much defending itself against censorship as much as proffering global cultural U.S. hegemony--censorship by other means. CHarlie Chaplin, as always, is a topic of focus, especially how he was a split figure.  Chapter 5 discusses gender issues, particularly the gendered manner in which Willa Cather was dismissed, and of Hemingway and Stein's complex relationship ("she was like a brother to me" and etc).