James Joyce And Modernism (Jan, 2022)
This essay will refer to both Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Eliot’s The Waste Land in its exploration as to why context - the tripartite study of both the historical, literary and social factors that cloud a modernist text - aids our interpretation and can help elucidate the complexities of, not just these singular texts but, modernist literature at large.
Readers entering the world of modernist literature for the first time may find themselves doing so with trepidation. Modernism, a global artistic movement of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, saw the traditional beliefs of a bygone era re-evaluated for a changing world. For the contemporary reader or one acquainted with the realism and romantic style, the modernist aesthetic can feel fragmented, cryptical and dislocating. modernist writers were not encumbered by the parameters of their predecessors but rather it was in their imagination, in their rejection of these traditional values, of what novels ‘should be like’, that saw these novelists and poets seek new sensibilities in a time of great technological and cultural advancements.
Modernist prose cannot be discussed without first mentioning the American-English essayist, critic and poet, T.S Eliot. The Waste Land, often considered to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century, is notoriously abstruse. In his essay on Eliot’s poem, literary critic, Cedric Watts, writes: ‘One easy way of dealing with the difficulties of The Waste Land is to condemn the whole poem as elitist and stroll away from it looking politically self-righteous. That’s also a daft way of dealing with them, given that much good poetry is cogently difficult’.[1] However, patience alone won’t enlighten understanding. Watts notes that all good literature requires a degree of attuning to the historical and biographical context of the author.
Published four years after the end of World War I, this multi-faceted poem is often viewed as an expression of post-war disillusion; as an insight into the human experiences and a lamentation of his own battle with depression (‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing’[2]). This four-hundred lined poem is a field of experimentation consisting of: a disjointed structure that represents the disfunction of a western society, a digressive narrator and several peculiar characters (some employed from literary works and Arthurian and Greek mythology) interweaved to produce an almost impenetrable text that does not conform to the preambles and meticulous descriptions used by writers of the nineteenth century such as Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.
However, we can elucidate some of this impenetrability once we understand that the poem was part of a radical, new art form that sought to better reflect modern civilisation. ‘History was a fraught and unstable term for modernists’, asserts Varndell, ‘and what they were trying to do [in their works] was to illustrate how history was [becoming] more uncertain.’[3] The arrival of a new century brought forth inventions and technological advancements, such as the automobile, the phonograph, and the aeroplane, which had created a sense of optimism for a society just emerging from an era of industrialisation and harsh living conditions. Modernists were now flirting with a new way of writing; breaking away from the constraints of the past in a manner as to not appear anachronistic.
Although science and technology were thriving, modernists like Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf saw that literature had remained stagnant and was no longer reflective of a changing modernity. Art was meant to be mimesis - to be reflective of the real world - and so this new style would feel cerebral and foreign to whoever beheld it. It is in Virginia Woolf’s essay, Modern Fiction, that she polemicises against writers such as John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett by stating that they were too concerned with detailing the ‘trivial’[4] natures of their period. Woolf advocates that fiction needs to go through a revitalisation and calls on writers of the twentieth century to break away from the traditions of old. She writes:
If he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style...[5]
In effect, Woolf’s essay serves as a manifesto for a new literary style with Woolf advocating that fiction needs to break from the characteristics of the realist and romantic novel and become introspective and self-aware. Where the thoughts and feelings of an individual - of what Freud called ‘the unconscious’[6] - takes precedence over the representation of a collective society.
When the essay was published in 1919, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis had already been released to the public and were beginning to revolutionise our understanding of time, space, the universe and also the mind. “[Modernist] poetry [was created] in the light of the climate of opinion...”, Leon Surette writes in The Birth of Modernism, “...Which includes not only Blavatsky’s theosophy, Mead’s Gnosticism, and Myer’s psychic phenomena but also Freud’s subconscious...”[7] With psychoanalysis, in particular, Freud was theorising that repressed thoughts, memories and urges reside in the unconscious and can be released through forms of therapy such as free association. The influence Freud had on early modernist literature can be seen not only in The Waste Land, through its exploration of the individual and collective thought, but notably so in the works of James Joyce, one of the most central figures in the history of the modernist novel.
Published during the year of the Easter Rising in Dublin, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a künstlerroman-style novel that charts the holistic journey from childhood to adulthood of a Catholic Irishman, Stephen Dedalus, and details his transformation from a young, conflicted boy, living in the constraints of the Catholic Church, to a man who has begun to reject religion amid a sudden ambition to become an artist. With Dedalus serving as the literary alter-ego for Joyce, an insight into the social conscience at the time of the book’s publication can help us in understanding Joyce’s reasoning for the theme of individual consciousness and rejection of Irish Catholicism within the text.
In the aftermath of World War I, religious scepticism and atheistic views increasingly became more common. The idea of God was now viewed as an impediment on to the human spirit, and modernist writers were now beginning to reject religion and its moral guidelines and turn inwardly. ‘The First World War, and the years immediately before and after it, brought about the demise of many institutions and beliefs...’ writes Peter Childs, ‘The war produced a deep distrust of optimistic secular [...] understandings of history and seemed a climactic, severing event that showed conclusively the failures of nineteenth-century rationalism.’[8] Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was one of the most prominent philosophers who influenced modernist literature in his rebuttal with the certainty of truth. Nietzsche believed that truth was not absolute but was a matter of interpretation produced on an individual basis. His most famous statement, ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’[9] encapsulates the criticism of the traditional and conversative values and the rising secularism that was manifesting around the period of Eliot and Joyce. In particular, the statement influenced the abandonment of the traditional mode of writing literature in favour of a streams of consciousness narrative style within A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The novel acts as a living entity in the sense that it has an insistence to grow with Dedalus’ experiences and interpretation of life. Joyce’s technique is to describe the macrocosm of a character: to mirror the unfiltered nature of a character’s thoughts onto the page without the accompaniment of descriptive bridges that were common practice with the literature of his predecessors. Joyce was aiming to, as Harry Blamires writes, ‘equate the fictional world, and the living world more convincingly’[10] through the process of economical writing, grammatical complexity and mimicking the fluidity of the character’s mental state. However, through the process of omission, the novel is void of the articulate preambles that we are accustomed with in, for example, Jane Austen’s Emma (1815). Instead, the action is delivered within the infantile consciousness of the novel’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, recollecting a bedtime story told by his father.
The destruction of World War I and the uncertainty of life returning to ‘normal’ (something one-hundred years later, we can relate to) also influenced the novel. Notably when Stephen visits the infirmary, he begins to ponder his fate (‘He wondered if he would die’ [11]). This uncertainty would, of course, be a common thought for the modernist reader in a period when life seemingly could not offer a better alternative. Yet, what follows this is quite interesting. The omniscient first-person begins to narrow in on Stephen’s fascination with his own mortality (‘Then he would have a dead mass in the chapel like the way the fellows had told him it was when Little had died...’[12]). What we are given is a notably romanticised description of Stephen’s funeral that holds as the antithesis to romantic literature’s sense of idealism and celebration of nature.
Reading modernist texts, which are enriched with many allusions and references, through the lens of practical criticism would make for a strenuous discipline due to its emphasis on texts being ‘self-contained’, autonomous entities that require no external information. With modernist literature, however, this style of close reading would limit not only the fruitfulness of tracking the many allusions to early literature and mythology employed by Eliot and Joyce in their work but would prohibit our leaning on their biographies to extract deeper meaning.
Eliot himself was conscious of the poem’s difficulty. In the Notes on The Waste Land, Eliot suggested that the reader may want to read Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance to, as he writes, ‘elucidate the difficulties of the poem [more] than [his] notes can do.’[13] Eliot was a student of a private education and a graduate of Harvard University. He was a well-read, educated man - testament to him using seven languages within the poem - and there was a slight, elitist presumption that the reader would be educated in a similar way so as to better understand the same references.
There is a paradox to understanding modernist literature: ‘Brief lines allude to complex ideas’[14], wrote Peter Childs. And thus, the more one believes they have got closer to finding the meaning, several more appear. These texts were not created out of a vacuum but hold their history in weaving obscure allusions and references from the past.
The Waste Land and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have remained in the literary conscience for the last hundred-years. Possessing qualities that captivate, intrigue and make the reader rely heavily on their patience to get through the initial puzzlement before they can begin to get through to the epicentre of meaning. However, it is important that we do not simply enter modernist literature too preoccupied in attempting to interpret meaning from the economical lines that we neglect the role of ‘experiencing’ or enjoying the texts. It was Archibald MacLeish, the American modernist poet, who asserted that ‘a poem shouldn’t mean, it should be’[15]. MacLeish is expressing that good poetry does not have to be relational or referential but can exist as its own island and should be enjoyed as such.
Word Count: 1650
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blamires, Harry. York Notes on: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. Singapore: York Press, 1984.
Chase, H.W., ‘Freud’s Theories of the Unconscious’. University of North Carolina Press. 2.3 (1911): 110-121, accessed 21 January 2022, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43822402.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Childs, Peter. Modernism. 2nd ed. Great Britain: TJ International, 2008.
Modernism is a concise yet authoritative exploration that serves as an introductory into one of the most significant global, artistic, movements of the last hundred years. At the time of the book’s publication, Peter Childs was a professor in Modern English at the University of Gloucestershire and a publisher of more than twenty books on literature post-1900s and post-colonial theory.
As opposed to Richard Weston’s Modernism and the numerable sources dedicated in unravelling such a contentious term, Child’s book does not adopt a comprehensive approach to modernism but rather whittles out the unnecessary and focuses solely on modernist literature and its significance. The text keeps a focus on the genres of modernism (novel, short story, poetry...), international Anglophone modernists such as Mina Loy (1882-1966) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the tripartite of the texts, contexts and intertextual references that collectively compose modernist literature. In the context of the essay, Modernism has been an invaluable research material and served as a ‘gateway’ into making the cryptic, allusive and fragmented nature of modernist literature become coherent and accessible.
In Periods, Genres, Models, Child’s brings in a slight philosophical lens as he piques the question of what the term ‘modernism’ actually refers to. Investigating whether it is a precise label dictated in a ‘time-bound’ concept, situated between 1890-1930, a ‘genre-bound’ concept, or both. He argues that, whilst most modernist literature was indeed written during this period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, most literature published during this timeframe was in fact not modernist but of other aesthetic, literary styles. Notably the continued hegemony of the realist movement, and its role in literature, into the early twentieth century.
Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, is the succeeding chapter which focuses on the stylistic and thematic shifts from the realist and romantic novel to his changing artform. Childs puts a spotlight on the works of fifteen, notable, modernists, the depiction of time in modernist literature and its importance of expressing a fast-changing world.
However, a glaring oversight of the text is that there is no substantive mention of Kristeva, nor her theory of intertextuality. Despite Child’s acknowledgement of textual references and allusions within Joyce and Eliot’s texts and a brief mention of her within an extract of a literary text, Sexual/Textual Politics, the relevance of this theory and the artistic movement seems to be amiss. Whilst the term intertextuality did not formally exist, the practice of ‘borrowing meaning from other texts’ was a characteristic of modernist literature. Child’s book was published in a postmodernist, twenty-first century society, and would have been able to bridge together the former with the benefit of retrospection. Yet, despite this, the text is succinctly written and was of benefit when writing this assignment. Childs is able to extensively examine the literary, historical and political contexts surrounding modernist literature and the characteristics of this experimental style of writing by tracing its workings in, not only, notable, British modernist figures such as T.S Elliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf but also in twentieth century Anglo-American literature.
Word Count: 500
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. London: Faber & Faber, 2019.
Joyce, James, ed. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. England: The Penguin Group, 1992.
Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism. Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.
MacLeish, Archibald. ‘Ars Poetica’. Date accessed 23 January, 2022. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science; with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Pinsent, Pat, Tony Pinkney, John Saunders, Claire Saunders, Christopher Mills, Sam S Baskett, Robert Wilson, David Seed, Andrew Gibson, John Cunningham and Cedric Watts, eds. Critical Essays on The Waste Land. Great Britain: Bell & Bain, 1988.
Varndell, Dan. ‘Portfolio Workshop’. Seminar. University of Winchester. 2021.
Woolf, Virginia. ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4. 1925 to 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Cedric Watts, ‘The last 10 ½ lines of The Waste Land’, in Critical Essays on The Waste Land, eds. Linda Cookson, Bryan Loughrey (Great Britain: Longman Group UK, 1988), 128.
[2] T.S Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. (Great Britain: Faber & Faber, 2019), 5.
[3] Dan Varndell, ‘Portfolio Workshop’, Seminar, University of Winchester, 2021.
[4] Virginia Woolf, ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4. 1925 to 1928. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984)
[5] Virginia Woolf, ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4. 1925 to 1928. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984)
[6] H.W. Chase, ‘Freud’s Theories of the Unconscious’. University of North Carolina Press. 2.3 (1911): 110-121, accessed 21 January 2022, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43822402.
[7] Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism (Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 95.
[8] Peter Childs, Modernism, 2nd ed. (Canada: Routledge, 2008), 21.
[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science; with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). 199.
[10] Harry Blamires, York Notes on ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. 9th ed. (Singapore: Longman Singapore Publishers, 1993), 53.
[11] James Joyce, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. England: the Penguin Group, 1992), 21.
[12] James Joyce, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. England: the Penguin Group, 1992), 22.
[13] T.S Eliot, The Waste Land (Great Britain: Faber & Faber, 2019), 35.
[14] Peter Childs, Modernism, 2nd ed. (Canada: Routledge, 2008), 7.
[15] Archibald MacLeish, ‘Ars Poetica’, date accessed 23 January, 2022. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica
