1

Introduction: Modernism, Experimentation

and Form
Ulrika Maude

Literary modernism is characterized by dazzling experimentation,

perplexing narrative and poetic form, and often by contradictory aesthetic
and ideological tendencies. The desire to ‘make it new’ is combined with a
nostalgic yearning for a lost and at times primitive past; the admiration for
technology and science is paired with a suspicion of their dehumanizing
threat; and although modernist writing can often be radically progressive
and even revolutionary in political and sexual terms, it also frequently
expresses a fascination with and allegiance to far-right traditionalist and
even totalitarian ideologies.1 The temporal and geographical parameters of
literary modernism are similarly difficult to pin down. While modernism is
often considered to begin in the late nineteenth century and to end around
the 1940s or 1950s with so-called late modernism, there has always been
controversy about the movement’s temporal reach, and advocates of the so-
called new modernist studies argue both that modernist literature continues
to be written in the contemporary period and that it extends well beyond the
geographical parameters of the Anglo-American world.2 Despite
considerable efforts to establish modernism as a historical category, with
specific cultural, national and thematic boundaries, therefore, the movement
continues to defy easy categorization and maintains a vital relevance in the
twenty-first century.
 In this sense, modernism has often been considered a stylistic rather than
a temporal movement, and one of its most striking features is its salient
formal experimentation. The experimental, anti-narrative structure of
modernist writing is one of its crucial signifying features. The gaps,
omissions and ellipses that tend to characterize modernist discourse and the
overt challenge to narrative cohesion and closure that typifies the modernist
novel, short story and drama are carefully considered, meticulously wrought
traits of such writing. This lack of a traditional, cohesive structure in which
the different actions, events and tropes of a narrative are made to appear
purposive is problematized not only on the level of plot but also in the
manner in which the various events portrayed relate to one another – or
indeed fail to do just that. There are a number of reasons for this breakdown
in structure and form. Charles Darwin’s work on evolution, for instance,
‘took narrative out of nature’, as Paul Sheehan puts it (35), foregrounding,
instead, the chance and randomness of contingent cell mutations that cast
radical doubt over the purposiveness and design implicit in the biblical
theory of creation, which had firmly placed humankind at the centre of the
natural world. Medical discoveries, such as those in neurology, radically
questioned the principles of free will and agency by which the idea of
selfhood is conventionally understood, by demonstrating that many of the
functions of the human body operate independently from the conscious
mind and are governed by the autonomous nervous system, with
consciousness a mere by-product of vital bodily functions. And studies in
aphasia and Tourette’s syndrome in the second half of the nineteenth
century revealed that even language itself frequently escapes intention and
often seems to speak itself. A parallel but rather different model of the
human psyche was introduced by Sigmund Freud, who himself began his
career as a neurologist and only later redirected his attention to developing
the ‘talking cure’ for which he is famous. Psychoanalysis split the self into
two by introducing what, in Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud calls a
‘second consciousness’. In this theory, the ‘unconscious’, as he came to
refer to it, operates alongside the conscious mind, which, however, as a
result of repression fails to recognize the subject’s true desires. These
desires and ‘drives’ are said to reside in the unconscious mind and to
express themselves through various forms of body language – including tics
and nervous symptoms, hysterical convulsions and slips of the tongue. This
fundamental split in the self renders us strangers to ourselves and condemns
us to a life of perpetual frustration and dissatisfaction, as Freud famously
argued in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
As this might begin to suggest, modernism disrupts and disavows some
of the fundamental conceptions of what it means to be human. In this sense,
modernism doesn’t necessarily make for comfortable or easy reading. As
Frank Kermode argues in an influential book from 1967, there is something
inherently consoling about the sense of an ending that conventional
narratives present. Classical tragedy, for instance, is ultimately affirmative
and reassuring: by presenting narratives structured around Aristotelian
notions of peripeteia and anagnorisis (reversal and recognition), catharsis
(release or purgation) and resolution, tragedy (and conventional narrative
form more generally) offers a comforting return to what Tzvetan Todorov
calls a ‘new equilibrium’. The disrupted, aleatory or contingent, seemingly
inconsequential, often fragmentary and fragmented narratives that
characterize modernist writing, by contrast, are far more disquieting and
disturbing than any story matter might be, for they upset precisely our sense
of purposiveness, order and even ultimately signification.
One way to think about the disturbance and fragmentation of form,
structure and meaning in modernist literature is to consider the Euclidean
figure of the gnomon that famously features in the opening paragraph of
‘The Sisters’, the first story of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). In
geometry, a gnomon is the incomplete parallelogram that remains after a
smaller but identically shaped figure has been removed from it, or as
Bernard Benstock put it, ‘a nonappearance suggesting a presence made
palpable only by the concept of its absence’. (520) In Dubliners, the
gnomon becomes a figure for the short story sequence itself, with each of
the stories featuring striking absences or missing parts. In ‘The Sisters’,
which stages the death of Father Flynn, the gnomon makes its appearance in
old Cotter’s insinuating but ‘unfinished sentences’: ‘No, I wouldn’t say he
was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something
uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion … ’, he says, in a way that
specifically avoids presenting what should be the essential content of his
sentences (Joyce, 2000, 3). It also appears in the boy-narrator’s inability to
make sense of what he sees and hears, including, indeed, what old Cotter
has to say: ‘I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished
sentences’, the boy remarks, in a way that seems to reflect the reader’s own
predicament (4). And it is prominently apparent in the failure of religious
(and by implication literary) symbolism, including especially the ‘idle
chalice’, which Father Flynn breaks but which is anyway empty: ‘It was
that chalice he broke … That was the beginning of it’, one of the titular
sisters comments; ‘Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained
nothing, I mean. But still’, she goes on, ambiguously (10, 9). In ‘Eveline’,
the story of a young woman who contemplates leaving Dublin with her
suitor, Frank, for a life in Argentina, the word ‘home’ is repeated ten times
within the space of the story’s five pages. As Eveline dusts her home,
‘wondering where on earth all the dust came from’, she takes note of a
familiar object: ‘And yet during all those years she had never found out the
name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the
broken harmonium’ (25). Eveline’s apparent alienation from the objects in
her home – including her ignorance of the priest’s name – constitutes a
gnomon, but it also points to an even starker missing element in the story.
Eveline’s physically and emotionally abusive father, who fails to provide
the duty of care that he should to Eveline and his other children, renders
him a ‘father’ only in name. Her home, therefore, offers none of the
comfort, shelter and security that are conventionally associated with the
concept; it, too, is a ‘home’ only in name. The fact that the priest in the
picture is himself now in Melbourne constitutes another gnomon, for the
reader is never informed why he left. His ‘yellowing’ picture is suggestive
of decadence and decay, and may indicate that he left Ireland in disgrace,
which seems to link him with Father Flynn in ‘The Sisters’, whose
company, as old Cotter puts it, was ‘bad for children’ (4).3 Frank, Eveline’s
suitor, who tells her ‘stories of the terrible Patagonians’ – mythical giants
whose existence was known to be a tall tale – is himself ‘frank’ in name
only, for as Katherine Mullin has revealed in her striking reading of the
story, he is likely to be taking Eveline to a brothel rather than to be his wife
in ‘Buenos Ayres’ (27).4 But Dublin does not have much to offer a woman
of Eveline’s social class and background either, and the ‘pitiful vision’ of
her mother on her deathbed ‘laid its spell on the very quick of her being –
that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness’ (28). What
the reader is shown in the disturbing image of the deranged mother is
Eveline’s future, should she decide not to leave Ireland. The narrative points
to the deficiencies of ‘home’ as a national, domestic and gendered space:
home has little to offer its working-class female protagonist. Although
modernism has come under criticism for advancing a negative and
ultimately disempowered aesthetic response to social reality, Dubliners
attests to its early and persistent engagement in subtle but incisive social
critique.
Another way in which the gnomon makes its appearance in Dubliners, as
we have seen briefly in relation to the chalice in ‘The Sisters’, is through
Joyce’s deconstruction of conventional symbolism. ‘Clay’ focuses on
Maria, who works in a Dublin laundry. She is described as having a ‘very
long nose and a very long chin’, and it is noted three times that when she
laughed, ‘the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin’ (76, 77). The
story is set on Hallows’ Eve (Halloween), which reinforces the supernatural
connotations of Maria’s witch-like appearance. And yet, disjunctively and
somewhat perplexingly, she is named after the Virgin Mary and is known as
(and seems to pride herself on being known as) a ‘peace-maker’ (76). To
further complicate matters, Maria works in the ‘Dublin by Lamplight
laundry’, a ‘Magdalen’s home’ or ‘reform institution’ for former prostitutes
and women who have had children out of wedlock (based in Ballsbridge,
Dublin, at the time Joyce was writing ‘Clay’) (77, 239). Nothing quite adds
up in the story, or for Maria – who is ‘nice’ and a ‘peacemaker’ but who
seems to rub people up the wrong way; who is probably cheated by the
‘stout gentleman’ who ‘has a drop taken’ but who is charming to her on the
tram; and who signally fails to end the deadly, permanent feud between Joe
and his brother Alphy (78, 79). The story, in other words, is heavy with
symbolism, which invites the reader to approach it as a coded message
containing the key (the clé, as it were) to its own enigmas. And yet, try as
one may to crack the code, the symbolism Joyce uses intentionally fails to
add up. There is no key, or clé, in ‘Clay’, in other words, and even the title
word is notable for its enigmatic non-appearance within the story itself.
Samuel Beckett, who was profoundly influenced by Joyce, does
something similar with the hermeneutics of symbolism in his most famous
work, Waiting for Godot (1953). The play is notably sparse in props and
scenery, which makes the dead tree of Act I seem particularly significant.
At the beginning of Act II, the tree has sprouted leaves, in what is
seemingly a symbol of hope, regeneration and resolution. But Godot fails to
arrive. The tree’s sprouting is profoundly misleading if the audience seeks
to read it as a symbol denoting epiphany, annunciation or resolution. As
Daniel Albright puts it, rather than being an ‘asymbolic’ play (one that
would be uninterested in or indifferent to symbolic meaning) Waiting for
Godot is an ‘anti-symbolic’ play, one in which Beckett encourages us to
interpret words, actions and props as symbols only to frustrate us in our
hermeneutic urge; he exposes our ‘proficiency’ as readers and spectators as
precisely the thing that will prevent us from properly attending to his play
(53). Instead of offering us purposiveness, in other words, the play
foregrounds chance, randomness and contingency – or indeed, as Beckett
himself affirmed, the mere passing of time.
But we might discern a similar undoing of ‘symbolic’ meaning in Joseph
Conrad’s great novella Heart of Darkness (1899) – a work written half a
century earlier, as modernism is just beginning to emerge as a dominant
cultural force. The anonymous and shadowy narrator who reports to us the
telling of Marlow’s story warns us early that Marlow is not ‘typical’,
because
to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos
that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (Conrad, 18)

Meaning in the story, as the narrator warns the reader, does not reside at the
heart of the narrative, like a kernel, but is there only as something vague
and indistinct, like a haze, mist or vapour; it merely ghosts the narrative,
like a spectre. And yet, even for the experienced reader, it is nevertheless
difficult not to expect that Kurtz, who is the goal and purpose of the journey
that the narrative recounts, will provide answers to the numerous enigmas
and ethical questions that the story presents. Once we finally encounter the
elusive Kurtz, after three near-misses, he turns out to be nothing like the
impressive figure we are led to expect (in this respect, at least, resembling
that other early-modernist anti-hero, the Wizard of Oz, the titular character
in a famous children’s novel first published in the following year). As Peter
Brooks has persuasively argued, in spite of our expectations of narrative
closure and hermeneutic disclosure, Kurtz’s final words, ‘The horror! The
horror!’ (Conrad, 118), make a mockery of meaning, for they are ‘minimal
language, language […] on the verge of a fall from language’ (250).
Modernist poetry is similarly governed by what we might see as a
centrifugal rather than centripetal aesthetic. One of the most striking
examples can be found in Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) and
especially in the resonantly apocalyptic lines, ‘Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ (ll. 3–4). Yeats is
writing in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, which, with all
its devastation, had wiped out the sense of optimism that the rapid
technological and scientific advances of the nineteenth century had seemed
to offer.5 Responding also to a world turned upside down by the Russian
Revolution, and to the troubles and incipient civil war in Ireland as the
nation shook off its colonial chains, Yeats can furthermore be said to be
anticipating the rise of fascism – which, as his poem seems to prophesy,
would ultimately lead to the Second World War.
A similar anxiety and bewilderment over the breakdown of old ordering
systems is signally present in The Waste Land (1922), where it is brought to
the fore most strikingly in the apparently autobiographical lines, ‘On
Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing’ (ll. 300–2). Eliot
suffered a breakdown in 1921, and the lines are a reference to his personal
circumstances and the time he spent recovering in Margate. But they also
function as a more impersonal comment on the poem itself, in all its
perplexing imagery, ventriloquized voices and often wantonly obscure
references, citations and allusions. These and other modernist texts embody
and perform the condition of modernity in their disparate, disjunctive,
fragmented and often incongruently despairing formal qualities – a sense of
ruination articulated in ‘What the Thunder Said’, the final section of The
Waste Land, when the speaker talks of propping up the now-tenuous if not
untenable notion of a self with ‘fragments I have shored against my ruins’
(l. 431).
An analogy can be found in certain visual artworks of the early twentieth
century. The salient fragmentation of a high Cubist painting such as
Georges Braque’s Woman Playing a Guitar (1913) (Figure 1.1) can be read
in terms of the constellated fragments of an image seen from various
vantage points. This, in turn, can be interpreted in light of the philosophical
doctrine of relativism, which proposes that rather than universal ‘truths’ we
have different, conflicting, but equally valid perspectives on ‘reality’,
embodied in the fractured image on the canvas. Another way of thinking
about such paintings – which typically represent fragments of a face, a foot,
a few fingers and perhaps a pipe, newspaper or a musical instrument, such
as here, the guitar – is that the canvases self-consciously invite the spectator
to piece together the fragments in order to allow the full picture to emerge.
But no matter how long the observer spends looking at one of these
dazzlingly beautiful paintings, the missing elements fail to appear: the only
code that the observer cracks is that there is no code to crack – that
‘meaning’ is infinitely deferred.6
The fragmentation that, in a writer such as Eliot, is represented as a
source of deep anxiety can, however, present itself as a source of exultation
in other writers. One such is Virginia Woolf, who, in Mrs Dalloway (1925),
stages Clarissa’s sense of the unboundedness of the self in often ecstatic,
jubilatory terms: ‘sitting on the bus going up Shaftsbury Avenue, she felt
herself everywhere, not “here, here, here”; and she tapped on the back of
the seat; but everywhere’ (2015, 136). At the florist’s, where Clarissa buys
flowers for her party, she muses that
somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter
survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house
there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid
out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had
seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (Woolf, 2015, 8)

The self that the novel presents to the reader is not the singular, masculine
‘I’ that Woolf condemned in A Room of One’s Own (1929) – because, she
wrote, ‘in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shapeless as mist’ – but rather a
multiple and fluid self that is reflected in the prose and in the novel’s
overall structure (2000, 90).7 Clarissa inhales the fragrance of the flowers at
the florist’s and through their scent intermingles with them, just as she feels
herself intermingling with the trees, with her house, even with people she
has never met. Woolf’s prominent use of free indirect discourse – the
peculiar osmosis of third-person narrator and individual character-focalizers
– while not a modernist invention, itself offers an example of the most
intense form of intersubjectivity. In free indirect discourse, character and
narrator coalesce without, however, quite collapsing into one.