8 the word made fresh:
Modernism and the Revolution of the Word
There lies her word, you reder! The height herup exalts it and the lowness her down abaseth it. It vibroverberates upon the tegmen and proslodes from pomoeria. A widow, a hedge, a prong, a hand, an eye, a sing, a head and keep your other augur on her paypaypay.
In Chapter 4 of A Portrait Stephen, disaffected, gazes out across the Irish Sea and prophetically contemplates the distant prospect of Europe, unseen and only dimly felt. He stands between two opposing revolu-tionary impulses.
Behind him lie the forceful, importuning voices of the Celtic revival, rooted in Romantic culture which had alrcady long ago had its day in Europe and, on the other, through a language long suppressed and almost extinct. In terms of European mainstream letters Ireland is for Stephen a backwater – as it had been for Joyce too.
Instead, both look to the distant preluding of a different revolutionary phenomenon in European civilization and culture, beyond the sea and be-yond Britain, to the continent: to Paris, Berlin, Vienna and other centres where, amid widespread feelings of discontent and scepticism, a new movement was beginning to find shape and momentum: Modernism.
It is to the uncertain stirrings of Modernism that Stephen, like Joyce, flies at the end; though A Portrait is not a fully Modernist text (in the sense that Ulysses is), the novel appeared as a significant influence in the early days of the embryonic movement. Its subject and techniques of both Modernism and of Joyce himself, who became its prime mover. To fully appreciate these features in A Portrait it is vital to see it in the wider context of European artistic currents, and especially in the light of the crisis of values and uncertainties which took place during the period from 1890 to 1920, a crisis which occurred in the face of a widespread collapse of confidence in science, philosophy, religion and art.
To try to pinpoint the start of any movement with a specific date or work of art is inevitably a ticklish endeavour – Modernism more so since it was never a school, just a more or less simultaneous stirring
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
among intellectuals and artists as a common but independent reaction to the failure of science and religion to offer a convincing definition of the changing world. There was never any consensus or manifesto among the artists and writers who have since been grouped together under its umbrella by succeeding critics. Thus Modernism has no easily identifiable starting date and indeed no real starting date – it grew instead as a late nineteenth-century reaction to Romanticism and a response to the worlds social and intellectual changes. And while its achievements reveal its radically distinct approaches based on new perspectives, its initial rise was quite gradual.
While the break itself is difficult to pinpoint in time there is no question about the great divide in the terms on which art, literature, philosophical attitudes, social values, politics and science separated the Modernists from the age of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, George Eliot and Dickens.
But what differentiates the approach and style of Modernism from what went before? How can we identify the style of Modernism – its soul?
First of all, Modernism is not one style but many. Unlike Romanticism which was effectively a change of emphasis growing out of the unconscious reaction to Neo-classicism, Modernism is a concerted attempt to create a new artistic attitude through a new way of looking at the world and at the art which expresses it. This is typified for instance in the new styles of painting, such as Picasso’s Cubism, with its rejection of representationalism in favour of significant form and expressive style based on experience – a sort of introversion turning on scepticism and mannerism, in which technique and form are unmistakably foregrounded. But unlike representational art, which finds its pretext in a close physical correspondence between the image and the real world, Modernist art finds justification within itself; it is ultimately self-sufficient.
For Modernist art, there is not merely a crisis in reality but also a crisis in perception. On a wider scale, Modernism springs from and closely corresponds with the crises and anxieties of the age as a whole – industrialization and urbanization on a vast scale, rapid and uncontrollable change and chaos, together with the inevitable alienation the individual. And all this is mirrored in the splintering of art into diverse schisms and ‘-isms’.
But if Modernism is characterized by a preoccupation with style, what is the character of that style? As we have hinted, this is no simple task since paradoxically the movement is united by its own impulse for fragmentation, partly aimed at thwarting generalizations about itself. We can say, however, that it is typified on the one hand by flagrant artifice – it flaunts its technical underwear – yet also by a high level of abstraction, with a lack of piety for the conventions of language and form. It is characterized also by shock, crisis and discontinuity, ob-scurity and anxiety –all seking to break down old comfortable reader realitionsships and to substiute itsead new oncs,to plaace the reader in a postions of continual flus with artist- auther.At the same time there is a storng drive towards art which finds its form,the ultimate end,according to Nietzsche:
a book about nothng ,a book whithout external attaxhments,which would hold itself togethter through the internal force of its style.
This is an idea which is echoed in part by Stephen Dedalus in A Ponrait when he talks about the artist being above and beyond his creation; Joyce’s novel itself, though biographical in origin, finds its strength through internal referents as much as through correspondence with reality.
And yet, as we have seen in the previous chapter on epiphany, Modernism is also much concerned with time, especially with the transience of the moment, in particular the paradox that, while on the one hand the experience of a moment is evanescent, on the other its effects are permanent. Many writers struggled to capture the spontaneity and impact of the moment – in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, to catch ‘the atoms as they fall upon the mind’, to unfold its significance, and not only as the subject matter of their work. By exploiting it as the organizing function of the art form, they could also exploit its internal life. the inimitability of the moment is paralleled by the uniqueness of the form of the work in which it is reflected: the idea that for every work of art there is a uniquely individual form appropriate to its subject matter.
Fundamentally, the crisis in Modernism is underpinned by a profound intellectual readjustment, whose consequences strike at the formal conventions in art and literature, at the methods of characterization and the use of language and, as we have seen, at the very idea of the artist himself. Above almost all else it is associated with the idea of an avant-garde – in spite of the spirit of alienation, denial and scepticism.
There is thus an inbuilt elitist tendency among artists implied by such avant-gardeism, and this is naturally reflected among readers too since Modernism evolved as an arcane and private art addressing an audience with a shared, educated culture. The result is an overall readership
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
divided into those who regard Modernism as the ideal form of expression of the age, embracing even its hostilities, and those who find it marginal, temporary and above all incomprehensible.
It was in the beginnings of these stirrings that A Portrait first appeared in book form, almost unnoticed, and it was also during the horrifying abyss of the First World War and shortly after the Irish Easter uprising, two of the most critical and violent assaults upon British imperialism. It emerged into a world immersed in profound and far-reaching turmoil, through which many of the cosy assumptions and principles which bad gone before would be swept away. In one of the most remarkable periods of dynamic growth and turbulent change, the thirty years before the war witnessed decline and transformation in a wide range of the most profound areas of the social fabric – in science, technology, economics, social philosophy, and psychology, as well as the arts.
At the turn of the century London, Paris and Berlin were the triple hubs of the capitalist, industrialized world, together dominating almost the whole globe through a web of industrial, commercial and imperialist forces, controlling between the three of them over 60 per cent of the world markets for manufactured goods. Yet the period between 1890 and 1914 also saw a rapid boom in heavy industrial output in the three countries with, at the same time, a momentous technological revolution which resulted in a great number of key technical innovations: the emergence of electricity ad petrol as the new major power sources; the internal combustion and diesel engines, with the appearance of the motor car and trams and buses on the city street scene; the first powered flight; increased mechanization of industry and agriculture; the introduction of new synthetic fibres and plastic with a rise in the importance of the chemical industry; and in communications with the invention of the telephone, the typewriter and wireless telegraphy.
During this time the three major European capitals also underwent a massive surge in urbanization (in 1910 the population of London was almost 4.5 million, of paris over 2.5 million, while by contrast that of Dublin was only 304,802) continuing the flight from the land begun in the industrial revolution. And in the cities themselves the routines of urban life were becoming increasingly dominated by the rigid routines of the office and factory. The day of mass production had dawned with industry gearing up to generate and sustain vast mass-markets through economies of scale and advertising: thus, with the beginnings of cinema and mass-circulation newspapers, the modern mass media had bben born.
It is a picture of the individual overwhelmed and subjugated to colossal dehumanizing forces of industry, commerce and production. Yet, while the ancient aristocratic regimes of the imperial powers – Britain France, Russia – still remained intact, the new emergence of wealth as a key force was beginning to dislodge the hereditary lies on status, materialism, education and leisure with the rise of a nouveau riche – parvenus who derived their new-found wealth from profit and trade; some, like T.S. Eliot, in TheWaste Land, equated this new class with moral and social decline:
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
Polarization of the prosperous leisured class from the slum-dwelling poor increased as the latter came to be regarded merely as a pool of cheap surplus labour and degraded humanity. Gradually, however, although the rich had by and large isolated themselves from the lower classes, the voice of mass protest was already beginning to make itself heard – the workers had already begun to organize themselves and membership of socialist parties across Europe was rapidly increasing, while at the same time the women’s suffragette movement was gathering strength and momentum.
But, over this latent if awakening conflict there still sat a high degree of smugness about the middle and upper classes. In spite of the spectre of organized labour, there was, before the war, no real threat yet to the established order of society. For the leisured classes of the three major colonial powers, labelle epoque was characterized by freedom and security, grace, ease and privilege served by cheap and plentiful labour and material benefits, at the centres of empires equally untroubled by (and largely ignorant of) their deep social, racial and sexual inequalities.
But what of the intellectual life of the period? In 1895 Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of X-rays and the Curies’ discovery of the properties of radium heralded the onset of a profound revolution in physics. They were closely followed by the nuclear research of Thompson, Rutherford and Soddy whose immediate spin-off was the most profound reformulation of attitudes to physical matter since classical theories, the foremost concepts being Max Planck’s Quantum Theory of Energy (1900) and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905). In twenty years the whole image of the physical universe, previously regarded as the most complete and secure foundation of scientific thought, was shot through with doubt and attempts were made to replace it with a new model.
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Although we have an image of the individual beleaguered by the dehumanizing forces of industry on a huge scale, as a result of this we can see the social sciences beginning to make a closer, more scientific examination of him. Most renowned in this field is, of course, Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. One of the most pervasive influences on twentieth-century thought in general and literary theory in particular, he has been an immensely seminal force in the widest range of social contexts as well as in his own specialist fields. His involvement in psychology itself dates only from the 1890s when, with Josef Breuer, he published Studies in Hysteria (1895) a landmark in psychoanalysis. However, his ideas, which created a revolution in psychology by focusing controversially on early influences and childhood sexuality, also contain many contradictions, a feature which identifies his work as a herald of Modernism while at the same time containing the seeds of its demise. Although aware of his impact, Joyce never acknowledged any influence of Freud on his own early works which, nevertheless, show a remarkable parallel development with Freud’s concerns and reach similar discoveries by separate courses; for instance, Joyce’s emphasis on the crucial role and influence of Stephen’s mother and other early influences in A Portrait, and his exploration of father – son relationships in Ulysses.
By middle age though. Joyce had certainly studied some of Freud’s ideas in depth and finnegans Wake displays the undoubted influence – and inevitable parodies – of Freud’s and symbol theories (Joyce described psychoanalysis sardonically as ‘...we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on’ alices, when they were yung and easily freudened...’ (Finnegans Wake, p. 115).
A side effect of Freud’s early work, the role and importance of mythology, itself later became very much a central concern of psychoanalysis through the exploration of cultural archetypes; the most notable theorist in this area is Carl Gustav Jung, an early pupil of Freud, who later wrote an appreciative account of Ulysses and also became one of the many psychiatrists to treat Joyce’s daughter. Lucia, during her illness.
As traditional concepts of ‘fictional reality’ were overturned and new attitudes to time – personal as well as cultural – started to appear, artists too began to turn to myth to fill the gap which had been left, seeing in it also a means of bringing order to the contemporary world and discipline to feeling and experience. For Joyce, myth became one of the fundamental features of his mature work, exploited for both theme and form, though he used it extensively throughout all his writing: from his earliest published work (‘Et tu, Healy’), through Dacdalian and Odyssean fable in A Portrait and Ulysses, to the Celto-Christian myths (among many others) of Finnegans Wake.
But psychology very rapidly cast its attention across a host of human activities. In addition to mythology, Jung also worked on word association, an interest paralleled by the research of William James whose book, The Principles of Psychology (1890), not only anticipated many of Freud’s concepts but in addition, and most significantly, outlined the phenomenon of the ‘stream-of-consciousness’, one of the most characteristic narrative devices of Modernism as a whole and of Joyce’s mature work in particular.
At about the same time as these advances in psychology, the foundations of modern socilogy too were being laid from the theories of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber both of whose most original work appeared between the years 1895 and 1914. Both sought to find solutions to the crises in social living by confronting what they considered to be the heart of the individual’s dilemma: ‘a state of confusion in a rootless, incoherent world from which traditional values and rules had been dislodged’. And both proposed, among other things, a return to myths as a regenerative source of cultural values and coherence.
At the heart of many of these crises, however, is a deep philosophical scepticism – a profound sense of uncertainty. Hand in hand with new social realities, the early part of this century witnessed a revolution in philosophical perspectives and moral vision to cope with the widespread collapse of faith in monolithic systems of truth. Freudian theory, based though it was on a framework of nineteenth-century assumptions of determinism, rationalism and positivism, suddenly switched the emphasis on to the unconscious and causal factors which appeared outside the previously held views of personal responsibility. And the notion of absolutes in normal and abnormal behaviour was given a severe blast, with the concept that all individuals display neurotic symptoms in varying degrees.
It is difficult to comprehend now the hostility with which his theories were greeted, yet Freud’s sturdy framework maintained similarly deterministic evolutionary assumptions as those which lay behind Darwinism, Marxism, and the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Moore, Bergson, Russell and Nietzsche.
Against the view of the hapless citizen beset by oppressive megalithic forces in which he came to be regarded as the product of natural causal features and largely passive, philosophical outlooks began to react by redefining the nature of existence and the essence of the human
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Personality. Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas in the 1880s of ‘aristocratic radicalism’ and the myth of eternal regeneration were momentous landmarks in the swing towards the reassertion of the individual. Though he had been published before, Nietzsche’s views sprang to prominence in the last decade of the century through the popularization of his ideas be the Danish critic Georg Brandes, through whom they worked a powerful influence on the playwrights Strindberg and Ibsen and thus, indirectly, on Joyce. By believing firmly that mankind had reached a moment of destiny in which human ideas and values must become subject to radical reappraisal. Nietzsche prophesied and helped bring about the revolution in thought which would ultimately bring about Modernism itself.
Although many of his ideas have become discredited by a stress on his ‘moral nihilism’ and by their later annexation by the Nazis, Nietzsche’s perspectives herald a significant change of emphasis, a challenge to the nineteenth-century idea that true values were located in the society rather than in the individual. Taking this up, Ibsen gave full expression to the new thinking by insisting through An enemy of the People (1883) that the ‘majority is never right’, an idea which Joyce embraced to the full (see Chapter 4). But Ibsen was not alone; for instance, Hardy’s naturalistic Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles both present stark portraits of the alienated individual, outcast by society’s intolerance, and G.B. Shaw was beginning to grapple with the theme of social tyranny, while Joseph Conrad’s impressionistic world exposed the nihilism and moral bankruptcy of deeply accepted values.
The new thinkers and artists were turning their attention to the new arena in which flux, fragmentation and pluralism were key notions, in contrast to the fixed and stable positivist world of nineteenth-century thought. Reality was no longer limited by ideas of a fixed, palpable and solid world of phenomena; it could be evasive, evanescent, protean, like the fleeting, elusive images, mysterious associations and perceptions of the conscious and subconscious mind.
And just as late nineteenth-century aesthetics had come to explore confidently beneath the surface of reality, challenging traditional surface materialism, science blasted this view of reality and its materialism; to the dots, dashes and strokes of the impressionists were now added concepts of invisible particles and waves.
A concern for the abstract, a recognition of a special kind of subjective logic antithetical to the commonsense rationality of Naturalism and Utilitarianism, also emerged through the inspirational thinking of the psychologist William James and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson, an important influence on the young T.S. Eliot who attended his lectures in Paris, placed supreme emphasis on the intuition as the chief means of grasping reality, through ‘intellectual sympathy’ as he called it.
At once, ambivalence and imaginative philosophical speculation became respectable avenues of exploration and, consistent with Freud’s theories, the dream and man’s unconscious became germane areas of serious research. It was also soon recognized that the workings of deep structures of the mind offered radical new formulas for accumulating and shaping material into a distinctly special coherence which writers readily exploited to the full – opening the way for works such as August Strindberg’s A Dream play (1902) through expressionism, surrealism, and a range of experiments leading to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939, its ultimate expression. In his preface to A Dream play, Strindberg reveals his full cognizance of the new possibilities:
In this dream play, as in his previous dream play To Damascus, the author has tried to reproduce the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream. Anything may happen; all things are possible and probable. Time and space do not exist; against an unimportant background of reality, the imagination spins and weaves new patterns; a blend of memories, experiences, free ideas, absurdities, improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply; they evaporate, crystallise, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds dominion over them all: that of the dreamer.
By the beginning of this century the old values and certainties had been severely challenged; the stable predictable world of the nineteenth century was in increasing crisis as the forces which would ultimately wrench it apart gathered strength, forces which would eventually culminate in the stark cataclysm of the world war. It is against such a scenario that Strindberg’s statement needs to be set but, as his statement also implies, the vision of disintegration and uncertainty was too a powerful and exciting inspiration to the artist, a provocation to come to terms with it in a new order and a new sort of artistic order: Modernism.
When Joyce moved to Paris in December 1902, it was already the capital of progressive vitality and innovation in the arts, and Paris was to remain indissolubly linked with the Modernist movement throughout the rest of Joyce’s lifetime. Among artists already working there at the time of his arrival were Braque, Utrillo, Derain, Matisse, Duchanp, Vlaminck, as well as Picasso and Cezanne. Like Joyce, many others too were drawn to the city about this time – Brancusi, Modigliani, Mare,
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Klee, Chagall, Mondrian. In painting, the new vision is characterized by Matisse’s fauvist interiors, Seurat’s optical experiments in divisionism (for instance, in Afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte, 1884), and in the colour – sculpture experiments of Cezanne, Picasso and others who sought to model subtle surface effects through a rigorous discipline of form and space (e.g. Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1885-7, and Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907).
In Paris and elsewhere the early 1900s saw an exceptional flowering of artistic talent – for example, in Dresden Die Brucke group (early expressionists), and in Munich the Der Blaue Reiter group whose influential talents, Kandinsky and Klee, laid the foundations of the later Bauhaus group and profoundly influenced post-war Abstract art. Elsewhere, other related talents were beginning to blossom: Edvard Munch, Norwegian expressionist; Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian expressionist; James Ensor, Belgian painter and etcher; and the artists of Italian futurism who strove to assimilate into their art the images and forms of the world of mechanization.
And then in music there is Stravinsky, the most prominent, strident figure among the new wave of composers, in the wake of Mahler and Richard Strauss, and his best work dates from the period before the war. Drawing inspiration from the Romantic twilight, Stravinsky’s work heralds a neo-classicism in music, his ballet suite, The Rite of Spring, signalling the climax of his bold pre-war experiments in complex rhythms, fragmentary and repetitive melodies and polyphonal harmonies – its performance in Paris in 1913 provoked a riot in the audience. For twentieth-century music this is the most exciting period with Debussy, Ravel and Satic in France, Berg and Schoenberg in Vienna and Bartok in Hungary.
But it is in literature that there is the most prolific blossoming of Modernist talent – Gide and Proust, Paul Valery and guillaume Apollinaire in France; Henry James and Conrad in England – followed by Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence; Mann and Rilke in Germany; Chekhov in Russia; Strindberg in Sweden; Ibsen in Norway; as well as exiles such as the profoundly influential Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot from the USA.
With such a catalogue of diverse talents, a generalization of all their aims and characteristics, as if they were all pursuing the same ends, would be clearly unsatisfactory and probably impossible. Yet, although Modernism is not a school, many of its artists have shared attitudes and approaches, by chance as often as by design. For example, Modernist writers share among other things a deep concern with form and the problematics of language, but approach them not as obstacles but rather as an opportunity to be explored, through the use of irony, paradox and similar related tropes together with silence and obscurity, to express fragmentation and discord, absurdity and fear in the face of the contemporary predicament Though not a progenitor of Modernism, W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) catches the tension and uncase of the period:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
Among the achievements of Modernism two works stand out as its monuments, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses. The Waste Land (1922), the most significant verse work of Modernism, brilliantly evokes the crises of the age: spiritual collapse and death, cultural aberrancy, the crisis in communication, and the disintegration of traditional social values. Yet through all its broken and perfidious images roams the solitary figure of the blind seer Tiresias, ‘the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest’. Based on a mythological Greek figure of renowned percipience who existed as both man and woman, Tiresias is perfectly equipped from his unique point of view outside contemporary time to observe and comment objectively upon it. It is through him that The Waste Land confronts and comes to terms with the theme of chaos, chaos on the scale of both the private individual and the shared cultural stock of the community. Yet the poem does not make order of chaos. Though it clearly achieves an internal formal sort of order, it only dramatizes chaos, representing it through Eliot’s pervasive tone of resignation and, through the poem’s polemical ironies, attempts to fix or formulate it while at the same time acknowledging the helpless plight of the individual before the gathering tide of degeneration and nihilism.
Like The Waste Land, Ulysses is anattempt to come to terms with the dislocated individual in the Human Age and, like Eliot, Joyce exploits past cultural models and myth both for internal order and for theme itself, through a submerged commentary on the contemporary world. Both also come to terms with chaos by at first creating their own chaos, a chaos more easy to manage and to make sense of. In each, form and content achieve a fine calescence so that each work accomplishes an internal life of its own. There is too in Ulysses the figure of the blind stripling, drifting Tiresias-like in and out of view
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
across Joyce’s Dublin, though without either the formal or the moral force of Eliot’s figure.
As we have seen, many of these formal and thematic features are prefigured in A Portrait; we can also see prefigured there the area in which Joyce and Eliot differ most: in their attitudes to the revolution against nineteenth-century values – Eliot despondently regarding it as one of cultural despair and Joyce finding in it a qualified hope, an opportunity to redefine man’s relationship in the world by an assertion of enlightened humanistic values and working through a sort of new social contract rooted in fellowship and transcendent mythic values.
Because Modernism is in large part a reaction to nineteenth-century Romanticism it is tempting to see it as a revival of Classicism, whereas it is in fact an intense form of Romanticism which attempts to disguise its acute subjectivism by overlaying itself with obscurity – the obscurity itself a symptom of the age, a parallel and an acknowledgement of the positivist model. This is reflected too in an uncertainty about the use and efficiency of language to express anything other than language itself; language and material reality cease to be directly linked in a relationship of simple correspondence.
There is accordingly a dual attitude in Modernism: on the one hand, a sense of confidence in the self as the guarantor of reality (subjective perception as the only reliable source of truth), on the other, a deep anxiety and scepticism about this truth and the ability of language to express it.
Obscurity is thus a recurrent characteristic of Modernism, a sort of ‘negative capability’, exacerbated by the often esoteric esoteric areas of experience which writers began to explore; it is characterized by the frequent use of difficult and otiose cultural models and mythology, and of references from narrow erudite sources in the search for fresh perspectives among ancient ways. Eliot is a good example of this in his apparent use of dead books and etiolate references (side by side with everyday domestic images with which they are held in uneasy tension). In this way the anxiety of the writer is partially submerged since the obscurity of his sources accords him with a superiority in relation to his reader.
The reader’s unstable position is often further undermined by the uncertainties which arise from the absence of conventional plot sequence, from narrative silences, and the suppression of conventional pointers and the commentary of the narrator. In addition, other typical Modernist devices and strategies operated to unsettle the reader, often inducing the hostility of early critics: the absence of easily recognizable characters, the focus on narrative methods to create an internal intellectual discourse – writing about writing – and to vary the distances between the reader and the narrator (further obscuring the evasive author).
At heart, Modernism involves hiding, deceiving, dislocation and uncertainty brought about by the intrinsic failure of traditional reality and the rejection of the old methods of conveying it. Indeed the very resistance of the Modernist work to interpretation is often the source of its energy. Moreover, there is an awesome awareness, implicit if not actually articulated until later in the period, of the void lurking at the heart of modern living, a horrifying emptiness reflected in the Modernist author’s frequent silences and that, in this situation of absurdity, all that really matters is the relationship between the author and the reader in a sort of literary game.
Two central challenges have preoccupied the Modernist novel: exploration and expression of the subtle potentialities of consciousness, and a coming to terms with the perceived state of chaos and fragmentation of the real world. Although A Portrait is not a fully Modernist text, both of these concerns can already be seen in embryo in it: firstly, in the abandonment of the restraints of conventional chronological plot (in favour of expressive form with modulating styles and shifting author – character – reader relationships arranged through Stephen Dedalus’s consciousness); and, secondly, in the sense of awe and fear which Stephen feels in the face of the chaos behind received forms of order (that is, the imposed moral order of the adult world and the Church) and the void awaiting him in the uncertain future beyond the novel:
A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings...
At the start of this century it seemed that the novel might have exhausted its potential in terms both of form and of content (having fully explored different forms and narrative styles, inner and outer states, politics, religion, philosophy, sex as well as violence). The novel could confidently embrace any aspect of human affairs which public taste and the circulating libraries would permit, or so it was confidently imagined.
However, in England the three-volume novel’s interest in scientific realism had declined into a sterile preoccupation with plot, materialism and the naturalistic fallacy of surface effects – typified in the writings of Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett who, according to Virginia Woolf, could examine every physical aspect about a character and yet overlook its essential soul. To illustrate her criticism she used the analogy of a
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
railway in which a Mrs Brown might be travelling with them, while they observed everything in the background:
at factories, at Utopias, even at the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature... For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.
One of the immediate consequences of this apparent dead-end was a crisis of confidence, especially in the capacity of language to communicate, but there also followed a collapse of faith in the realist illusion (a scepticism which had been growing even as the novel itself had evolved, at least since the eighteenth century). The crisis emerged most characteristically in a new form of self-awareness, even in self-consciousness, doubt and a failure of confidence. But this was not new. Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-67) brilliantly epitomizes the novelist’s doubts about narrative conventions and exploits them through parody for comic effect. It is of course a witty display of authorial virtuosity, though it accepts the traditional authorial role and material content in order to parody them. However, Modernism goes further than authorial virtuosity, especially in first undermining and then positing new author – reader relationships, directly co-opting the reader’s active involvement but also, through its subtlety of form-play, examining and qualifying the very nature of the art form itself as the artist creates it, so that ultimately the reader himself is complicit in the form of the novel.
A Portrait focuses precisely on this and further anticipates later Modernist developments by focusing also on the theme of the artist – the growth of the artist becomes the theme of his own creation, and by extension if we grant the special relationship between Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce and novel eventually comes to discuss itself. For example, in Chapter 5 the villanelle and the art theory are the culmination of growing speculation about the nature of the artist’s relationship to his art, to his reader and to society in general:
The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others.
Because of this secpticism there also emerged in the early days of Modernism a distinct feeling of angst, a fear that the author of a novel creates nothing in fact but clearly fakes or forges the so-called reality in a work and that his search for form is partly to justify this (a clear symptom of this is the popularity of the detective story in the late nineteenth century especially among prominent writers such as Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Henry James and T.S. Eliot), forging a coherent pattern on to the apparent chaos. Stephen Dedalus too talks of forging in this way (p. 257) – imposing meaning on life through art, forging an order different from that in reality but creating a new aesthetic order. But he also uses ‘forges’ to highlight the sense that the Modernist artist is a confidence trickster, deceiver, con man like Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull. But who is fooling whom? Is Stephen deceiving only himself or, through Joyce, the reader too?
Further aspects of the Modernist novel can also be seen beginning to emerge in A Portrait. For example, the form of the novel, rather than being a more or less detached vessel into which the subject matter is poured and contained, actually partakes of the subject matter as later, in the mature Modernist work (such as Ulysses), the form actually became the content, united and radiant in appropriate wholeness and harmony: these works in this order. As Joyce told his friend, the artist frank budgen:
I have the works already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate.
It was a concern very much shared by other Modernist writers at this time, anxious to liberate the novel from its close dependence on external material realism (itself based on assumptions of a direct correspondence between words and reality) and to concentrate of probing the unutterable territory of the human consciousness and the soul, instead of finding their creative from within the artist’s uniquely private vision. Subsequently, the Modernist novel also became very much concerned with disrupting the traditional forward flow of narrative time by sudden leaps forward and backward along ‘timeless’ moments (or epiphanies), and setting up conflicts with, while also exploiting, the reader’s ‘real time’ progress through the text.
But one of Joyce’s profound innovations here is the use of multiple points of view. A Portrait has no single perspective: Stephen’s consciousness changes as he matures and, through the shifting modulating style, the perspective of the narrator also changes, setting up an implicit dialectic between the two. The idea itself of an implied narrator – a voice not wholly Joyce’s but a surrogate author and Joyce’s representative in the work – is a new development evolving through Flaubert, James and Conrad, and arising directly from the avowed aim of keeping the author’s moral presence out of the novel. As we have seen, A Portrait excludes any direct authorial moral comment but continues to exert contrl\ol over the reader’s response through the technique of the form – juggling the order, emphasis, theme and point of view.
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Time is also of crucial importance. In the Modernist novel time dominates, both as one of the key themes as well as one of the key organizing principles of the design. Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) is a paradigm of this preoccupation with time. An enormous undertaking, its scope is equally epic, its central ideal being that in moments of intense illumination it is possible to penetrate and recapture the long-lost past and to relive its emotions. Because of his special skills and sensitivity the artist, unlike the ordinary person, is able to record and prolong such isolated moments into eternity itself through the magic of symbolism and myth vision (stressing the elevated status of the artist).
But to be able to exploit such moments for the central experience of reality, it was necessary for the novelist to concentrate on pattern rather than plot in organizing his work. Both A la recherche du temps perdu and A Portrait display this emphasis, and Virginia Woolf made her plea for such novels in which, like A Portrail, the interplay of the consciousness of the writer and of his people work to create the form:
If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feelings and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, unknown and circumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexion it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
At the same time the capacity of the language and the novet form are pressed to new limits in attempting to make language approximate to the inner realities of such phenomena as simultaneity (Ulysses), sudden illumination or epiphany (Dubliners and A Portrait) and relative time and the unconsciousness (the techniques of stream-of-consciousness and ‘interior monologue’).
we have seen above already that this idea of the ‘moment’ was one which energized the work of so many Modernist writers – Woolf, Eliot, Proust, and others – but especially of Joyce, in his idea of the ‘epiphany’, the basic unit of the form in both Dubliners and A Portrait. Its use underlines vividly the fragmentariness of modern existence and its disintegration, at the same time deriving the form of the work from a principle of significant aesthetic pattern rather than from a conventional chronographic history.
The concept of the epiphany dynamically assimilates the Modernist idea of time as the moment to the special notion of truth as discovery. And the writer’s use of his own biography works in the same way, fusing the writer’s conception of real life with the need for pattern and coherence, as Proust reflected:
the true life, life at last discovered and illuminated, the only true life really lived, is that of the writer.
The theme of the artist's own biography (sometimes attacked as a form of introversion) is encountered again and again in the Modernist novel. Like Proust's masterpiece, A Portrait is both the portrait of the novel's creator and the revelation of the life principle on which the novel is written. It represents that reality which the novelist is most familiar with: his own life and his art. Combined with the epiphany as the most logical means of arranging and signifying experience, his own themes of personal exile and alienation parallel the exile and alienation of the age. In the best work of the period, this theme confronts and resolves one of the central crises in the Modernist novel - the struggle to express the new impalpable realities in the wake of the acute failure of confidence in the language. In A Portrait Stephen Dedalus is at the same time both the experience of the novel and its author; Joyce adapts his own experience, and his words are both the means of expressing them as well as being the subject of the expression themselves. The text ultimately forges its justification within itself, again perlectly fusing form and content, technique and subject.
In Joyce's time the 'portrait of the artist' theme occurs again and again: in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger, Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and in Proust's monumental work, as well as in submerged form in countless works, frequently involving exile or flight into the unknown - a correlative of the Modernist crises themselves - through which the artist confronts the problemarics of artistic creation and his own relationship to it.
Joyce's works expose and confront in full the crises of Modernism and so enter fully into the mainstream of the movement, Joyce becoming its primum mobile. His works span almost its complete range and parallel its development in microcosm, Ulysses representing the culmination and highest achievement of the Modernist phenomenon and its highest creative expression. Like A Portrait, it takes its starting point in the immediate reality of Joyce's own life and times but through its intricate processes (including the use of myth, multiple perspective, epiphany, variable planes of ironic meaning and linguistic experiment) he transcends and metamorphoses the here-and-now to embrace all time. from explicit representational biography (and some autobiography) in the
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
early pages of A Portrait, Joyce's career is an artistic odyssey progressing by succeeding phases of ironic detachment and displacement until, by Finnegans Wake, art itself has become the myth, the final stage of the search for a self-sustaining art image, existing only in and through the multiple uses of language, without reference to any world other than within itself, germinating and proliferating in ever-widening gyres of meaning and response.
But is Finnegans Wake the Big Bang or merely a black hole? As an attempted solution to the problems which Modernism tried to confront, Finnegans Wake is quite final. However, it is also silence. It is the silence which lies at the core of all Modernist works, perhaps all creation, a sort of taboo: the silence in the face of the realization that it may all have become a game. If Modernism found its ultimate logical expression in Finnegans Wake then it did not overcome the incipient scepticism about the relationship between the word and reality, but succeeded in transcending it by making the word itself the ultimate reality and consequently the word is silence, ironically. What need is there of more words? In the beginning is the word, and in the end.
For this reason some disparagers of Modernism claim that Finnegans Wake shows the ultimate folly of the movement: it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Others, however, suggest that the Wake took Modernism along only one of several available courses which had been open; the rest lie locked in the room of infinite possibilities which it ousted, perhaps. Certainly Wake was not the end and, though there has been a reaction in literature in its own wake - signs of a return to the traditional materialistic realism - the flow continued after Joyce and, under his considerable shadow, in the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett (for a time Joyce's amanuensis on Wake), Vladimir Henry Miller, William Faulkner, O'Brien and more widely in the theatre and Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and the post-Modern novels of William Burroughs, John and the French.
Modernism and the Revolution of the Word
There lies her word, you reder! The height herup exalts it and the lowness her down abaseth it. It vibroverberates upon the tegmen and proslodes from pomoeria. A widow, a hedge, a prong, a hand, an eye, a sing, a head and keep your other augur on her paypaypay.
In Chapter 4 of A Portrait Stephen, disaffected, gazes out across the Irish Sea and prophetically contemplates the distant prospect of Europe, unseen and only dimly felt. He stands between two opposing revolu-tionary impulses.
Behind him lie the forceful, importuning voices of the Celtic revival, rooted in Romantic culture which had alrcady long ago had its day in Europe and, on the other, through a language long suppressed and almost extinct. In terms of European mainstream letters Ireland is for Stephen a backwater – as it had been for Joyce too.
Instead, both look to the distant preluding of a different revolutionary phenomenon in European civilization and culture, beyond the sea and be-yond Britain, to the continent: to Paris, Berlin, Vienna and other centres where, amid widespread feelings of discontent and scepticism, a new movement was beginning to find shape and momentum: Modernism.
It is to the uncertain stirrings of Modernism that Stephen, like Joyce, flies at the end; though A Portrait is not a fully Modernist text (in the sense that Ulysses is), the novel appeared as a significant influence in the early days of the embryonic movement. Its subject and techniques of both Modernism and of Joyce himself, who became its prime mover. To fully appreciate these features in A Portrait it is vital to see it in the wider context of European artistic currents, and especially in the light of the crisis of values and uncertainties which took place during the period from 1890 to 1920, a crisis which occurred in the face of a widespread collapse of confidence in science, philosophy, religion and art.
To try to pinpoint the start of any movement with a specific date or work of art is inevitably a ticklish endeavour – Modernism more so since it was never a school, just a more or less simultaneous stirring
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
among intellectuals and artists as a common but independent reaction to the failure of science and religion to offer a convincing definition of the changing world. There was never any consensus or manifesto among the artists and writers who have since been grouped together under its umbrella by succeeding critics. Thus Modernism has no easily identifiable starting date and indeed no real starting date – it grew instead as a late nineteenth-century reaction to Romanticism and a response to the worlds social and intellectual changes. And while its achievements reveal its radically distinct approaches based on new perspectives, its initial rise was quite gradual.
While the break itself is difficult to pinpoint in time there is no question about the great divide in the terms on which art, literature, philosophical attitudes, social values, politics and science separated the Modernists from the age of Jane Austen, Wordsworth, George Eliot and Dickens.
But what differentiates the approach and style of Modernism from what went before? How can we identify the style of Modernism – its soul?
First of all, Modernism is not one style but many. Unlike Romanticism which was effectively a change of emphasis growing out of the unconscious reaction to Neo-classicism, Modernism is a concerted attempt to create a new artistic attitude through a new way of looking at the world and at the art which expresses it. This is typified for instance in the new styles of painting, such as Picasso’s Cubism, with its rejection of representationalism in favour of significant form and expressive style based on experience – a sort of introversion turning on scepticism and mannerism, in which technique and form are unmistakably foregrounded. But unlike representational art, which finds its pretext in a close physical correspondence between the image and the real world, Modernist art finds justification within itself; it is ultimately self-sufficient.
For Modernist art, there is not merely a crisis in reality but also a crisis in perception. On a wider scale, Modernism springs from and closely corresponds with the crises and anxieties of the age as a whole – industrialization and urbanization on a vast scale, rapid and uncontrollable change and chaos, together with the inevitable alienation the individual. And all this is mirrored in the splintering of art into diverse schisms and ‘-isms’.
But if Modernism is characterized by a preoccupation with style, what is the character of that style? As we have hinted, this is no simple task since paradoxically the movement is united by its own impulse for fragmentation, partly aimed at thwarting generalizations about itself. We can say, however, that it is typified on the one hand by flagrant artifice – it flaunts its technical underwear – yet also by a high level of abstraction, with a lack of piety for the conventions of language and form. It is characterized also by shock, crisis and discontinuity, ob-scurity and anxiety –all seking to break down old comfortable reader realitionsships and to substiute itsead new oncs,to plaace the reader in a postions of continual flus with artist- auther.At the same time there is a storng drive towards art which finds its form,the ultimate end,according to Nietzsche:
a book about nothng ,a book whithout external attaxhments,which would hold itself togethter through the internal force of its style.
This is an idea which is echoed in part by Stephen Dedalus in A Ponrait when he talks about the artist being above and beyond his creation; Joyce’s novel itself, though biographical in origin, finds its strength through internal referents as much as through correspondence with reality.
And yet, as we have seen in the previous chapter on epiphany, Modernism is also much concerned with time, especially with the transience of the moment, in particular the paradox that, while on the one hand the experience of a moment is evanescent, on the other its effects are permanent. Many writers struggled to capture the spontaneity and impact of the moment – in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, to catch ‘the atoms as they fall upon the mind’, to unfold its significance, and not only as the subject matter of their work. By exploiting it as the organizing function of the art form, they could also exploit its internal life. the inimitability of the moment is paralleled by the uniqueness of the form of the work in which it is reflected: the idea that for every work of art there is a uniquely individual form appropriate to its subject matter.
Fundamentally, the crisis in Modernism is underpinned by a profound intellectual readjustment, whose consequences strike at the formal conventions in art and literature, at the methods of characterization and the use of language and, as we have seen, at the very idea of the artist himself. Above almost all else it is associated with the idea of an avant-garde – in spite of the spirit of alienation, denial and scepticism.
There is thus an inbuilt elitist tendency among artists implied by such avant-gardeism, and this is naturally reflected among readers too since Modernism evolved as an arcane and private art addressing an audience with a shared, educated culture. The result is an overall readership
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
divided into those who regard Modernism as the ideal form of expression of the age, embracing even its hostilities, and those who find it marginal, temporary and above all incomprehensible.
It was in the beginnings of these stirrings that A Portrait first appeared in book form, almost unnoticed, and it was also during the horrifying abyss of the First World War and shortly after the Irish Easter uprising, two of the most critical and violent assaults upon British imperialism. It emerged into a world immersed in profound and far-reaching turmoil, through which many of the cosy assumptions and principles which bad gone before would be swept away. In one of the most remarkable periods of dynamic growth and turbulent change, the thirty years before the war witnessed decline and transformation in a wide range of the most profound areas of the social fabric – in science, technology, economics, social philosophy, and psychology, as well as the arts.
At the turn of the century London, Paris and Berlin were the triple hubs of the capitalist, industrialized world, together dominating almost the whole globe through a web of industrial, commercial and imperialist forces, controlling between the three of them over 60 per cent of the world markets for manufactured goods. Yet the period between 1890 and 1914 also saw a rapid boom in heavy industrial output in the three countries with, at the same time, a momentous technological revolution which resulted in a great number of key technical innovations: the emergence of electricity ad petrol as the new major power sources; the internal combustion and diesel engines, with the appearance of the motor car and trams and buses on the city street scene; the first powered flight; increased mechanization of industry and agriculture; the introduction of new synthetic fibres and plastic with a rise in the importance of the chemical industry; and in communications with the invention of the telephone, the typewriter and wireless telegraphy.
During this time the three major European capitals also underwent a massive surge in urbanization (in 1910 the population of London was almost 4.5 million, of paris over 2.5 million, while by contrast that of Dublin was only 304,802) continuing the flight from the land begun in the industrial revolution. And in the cities themselves the routines of urban life were becoming increasingly dominated by the rigid routines of the office and factory. The day of mass production had dawned with industry gearing up to generate and sustain vast mass-markets through economies of scale and advertising: thus, with the beginnings of cinema and mass-circulation newspapers, the modern mass media had bben born.
It is a picture of the individual overwhelmed and subjugated to colossal dehumanizing forces of industry, commerce and production. Yet, while the ancient aristocratic regimes of the imperial powers – Britain France, Russia – still remained intact, the new emergence of wealth as a key force was beginning to dislodge the hereditary lies on status, materialism, education and leisure with the rise of a nouveau riche – parvenus who derived their new-found wealth from profit and trade; some, like T.S. Eliot, in TheWaste Land, equated this new class with moral and social decline:
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
Polarization of the prosperous leisured class from the slum-dwelling poor increased as the latter came to be regarded merely as a pool of cheap surplus labour and degraded humanity. Gradually, however, although the rich had by and large isolated themselves from the lower classes, the voice of mass protest was already beginning to make itself heard – the workers had already begun to organize themselves and membership of socialist parties across Europe was rapidly increasing, while at the same time the women’s suffragette movement was gathering strength and momentum.
But, over this latent if awakening conflict there still sat a high degree of smugness about the middle and upper classes. In spite of the spectre of organized labour, there was, before the war, no real threat yet to the established order of society. For the leisured classes of the three major colonial powers, labelle epoque was characterized by freedom and security, grace, ease and privilege served by cheap and plentiful labour and material benefits, at the centres of empires equally untroubled by (and largely ignorant of) their deep social, racial and sexual inequalities.
But what of the intellectual life of the period? In 1895 Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of X-rays and the Curies’ discovery of the properties of radium heralded the onset of a profound revolution in physics. They were closely followed by the nuclear research of Thompson, Rutherford and Soddy whose immediate spin-off was the most profound reformulation of attitudes to physical matter since classical theories, the foremost concepts being Max Planck’s Quantum Theory of Energy (1900) and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905). In twenty years the whole image of the physical universe, previously regarded as the most complete and secure foundation of scientific thought, was shot through with doubt and attempts were made to replace it with a new model.
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Although we have an image of the individual beleaguered by the dehumanizing forces of industry on a huge scale, as a result of this we can see the social sciences beginning to make a closer, more scientific examination of him. Most renowned in this field is, of course, Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. One of the most pervasive influences on twentieth-century thought in general and literary theory in particular, he has been an immensely seminal force in the widest range of social contexts as well as in his own specialist fields. His involvement in psychology itself dates only from the 1890s when, with Josef Breuer, he published Studies in Hysteria (1895) a landmark in psychoanalysis. However, his ideas, which created a revolution in psychology by focusing controversially on early influences and childhood sexuality, also contain many contradictions, a feature which identifies his work as a herald of Modernism while at the same time containing the seeds of its demise. Although aware of his impact, Joyce never acknowledged any influence of Freud on his own early works which, nevertheless, show a remarkable parallel development with Freud’s concerns and reach similar discoveries by separate courses; for instance, Joyce’s emphasis on the crucial role and influence of Stephen’s mother and other early influences in A Portrait, and his exploration of father – son relationships in Ulysses.
By middle age though. Joyce had certainly studied some of Freud’s ideas in depth and finnegans Wake displays the undoubted influence – and inevitable parodies – of Freud’s and symbol theories (Joyce described psychoanalysis sardonically as ‘...we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bit on’ alices, when they were yung and easily freudened...’ (Finnegans Wake, p. 115).
A side effect of Freud’s early work, the role and importance of mythology, itself later became very much a central concern of psychoanalysis through the exploration of cultural archetypes; the most notable theorist in this area is Carl Gustav Jung, an early pupil of Freud, who later wrote an appreciative account of Ulysses and also became one of the many psychiatrists to treat Joyce’s daughter. Lucia, during her illness.
As traditional concepts of ‘fictional reality’ were overturned and new attitudes to time – personal as well as cultural – started to appear, artists too began to turn to myth to fill the gap which had been left, seeing in it also a means of bringing order to the contemporary world and discipline to feeling and experience. For Joyce, myth became one of the fundamental features of his mature work, exploited for both theme and form, though he used it extensively throughout all his writing: from his earliest published work (‘Et tu, Healy’), through Dacdalian and Odyssean fable in A Portrait and Ulysses, to the Celto-Christian myths (among many others) of Finnegans Wake.
But psychology very rapidly cast its attention across a host of human activities. In addition to mythology, Jung also worked on word association, an interest paralleled by the research of William James whose book, The Principles of Psychology (1890), not only anticipated many of Freud’s concepts but in addition, and most significantly, outlined the phenomenon of the ‘stream-of-consciousness’, one of the most characteristic narrative devices of Modernism as a whole and of Joyce’s mature work in particular.
At about the same time as these advances in psychology, the foundations of modern socilogy too were being laid from the theories of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber both of whose most original work appeared between the years 1895 and 1914. Both sought to find solutions to the crises in social living by confronting what they considered to be the heart of the individual’s dilemma: ‘a state of confusion in a rootless, incoherent world from which traditional values and rules had been dislodged’. And both proposed, among other things, a return to myths as a regenerative source of cultural values and coherence.
At the heart of many of these crises, however, is a deep philosophical scepticism – a profound sense of uncertainty. Hand in hand with new social realities, the early part of this century witnessed a revolution in philosophical perspectives and moral vision to cope with the widespread collapse of faith in monolithic systems of truth. Freudian theory, based though it was on a framework of nineteenth-century assumptions of determinism, rationalism and positivism, suddenly switched the emphasis on to the unconscious and causal factors which appeared outside the previously held views of personal responsibility. And the notion of absolutes in normal and abnormal behaviour was given a severe blast, with the concept that all individuals display neurotic symptoms in varying degrees.
It is difficult to comprehend now the hostility with which his theories were greeted, yet Freud’s sturdy framework maintained similarly deterministic evolutionary assumptions as those which lay behind Darwinism, Marxism, and the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Moore, Bergson, Russell and Nietzsche.
Against the view of the hapless citizen beset by oppressive megalithic forces in which he came to be regarded as the product of natural causal features and largely passive, philosophical outlooks began to react by redefining the nature of existence and the essence of the human
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Personality. Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas in the 1880s of ‘aristocratic radicalism’ and the myth of eternal regeneration were momentous landmarks in the swing towards the reassertion of the individual. Though he had been published before, Nietzsche’s views sprang to prominence in the last decade of the century through the popularization of his ideas be the Danish critic Georg Brandes, through whom they worked a powerful influence on the playwrights Strindberg and Ibsen and thus, indirectly, on Joyce. By believing firmly that mankind had reached a moment of destiny in which human ideas and values must become subject to radical reappraisal. Nietzsche prophesied and helped bring about the revolution in thought which would ultimately bring about Modernism itself.
Although many of his ideas have become discredited by a stress on his ‘moral nihilism’ and by their later annexation by the Nazis, Nietzsche’s perspectives herald a significant change of emphasis, a challenge to the nineteenth-century idea that true values were located in the society rather than in the individual. Taking this up, Ibsen gave full expression to the new thinking by insisting through An enemy of the People (1883) that the ‘majority is never right’, an idea which Joyce embraced to the full (see Chapter 4). But Ibsen was not alone; for instance, Hardy’s naturalistic Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles both present stark portraits of the alienated individual, outcast by society’s intolerance, and G.B. Shaw was beginning to grapple with the theme of social tyranny, while Joseph Conrad’s impressionistic world exposed the nihilism and moral bankruptcy of deeply accepted values.
The new thinkers and artists were turning their attention to the new arena in which flux, fragmentation and pluralism were key notions, in contrast to the fixed and stable positivist world of nineteenth-century thought. Reality was no longer limited by ideas of a fixed, palpable and solid world of phenomena; it could be evasive, evanescent, protean, like the fleeting, elusive images, mysterious associations and perceptions of the conscious and subconscious mind.
And just as late nineteenth-century aesthetics had come to explore confidently beneath the surface of reality, challenging traditional surface materialism, science blasted this view of reality and its materialism; to the dots, dashes and strokes of the impressionists were now added concepts of invisible particles and waves.
A concern for the abstract, a recognition of a special kind of subjective logic antithetical to the commonsense rationality of Naturalism and Utilitarianism, also emerged through the inspirational thinking of the psychologist William James and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson, an important influence on the young T.S. Eliot who attended his lectures in Paris, placed supreme emphasis on the intuition as the chief means of grasping reality, through ‘intellectual sympathy’ as he called it.
At once, ambivalence and imaginative philosophical speculation became respectable avenues of exploration and, consistent with Freud’s theories, the dream and man’s unconscious became germane areas of serious research. It was also soon recognized that the workings of deep structures of the mind offered radical new formulas for accumulating and shaping material into a distinctly special coherence which writers readily exploited to the full – opening the way for works such as August Strindberg’s A Dream play (1902) through expressionism, surrealism, and a range of experiments leading to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939, its ultimate expression. In his preface to A Dream play, Strindberg reveals his full cognizance of the new possibilities:
In this dream play, as in his previous dream play To Damascus, the author has tried to reproduce the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream. Anything may happen; all things are possible and probable. Time and space do not exist; against an unimportant background of reality, the imagination spins and weaves new patterns; a blend of memories, experiences, free ideas, absurdities, improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply; they evaporate, crystallise, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds dominion over them all: that of the dreamer.
By the beginning of this century the old values and certainties had been severely challenged; the stable predictable world of the nineteenth century was in increasing crisis as the forces which would ultimately wrench it apart gathered strength, forces which would eventually culminate in the stark cataclysm of the world war. It is against such a scenario that Strindberg’s statement needs to be set but, as his statement also implies, the vision of disintegration and uncertainty was too a powerful and exciting inspiration to the artist, a provocation to come to terms with it in a new order and a new sort of artistic order: Modernism.
When Joyce moved to Paris in December 1902, it was already the capital of progressive vitality and innovation in the arts, and Paris was to remain indissolubly linked with the Modernist movement throughout the rest of Joyce’s lifetime. Among artists already working there at the time of his arrival were Braque, Utrillo, Derain, Matisse, Duchanp, Vlaminck, as well as Picasso and Cezanne. Like Joyce, many others too were drawn to the city about this time – Brancusi, Modigliani, Mare,
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Klee, Chagall, Mondrian. In painting, the new vision is characterized by Matisse’s fauvist interiors, Seurat’s optical experiments in divisionism (for instance, in Afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte, 1884), and in the colour – sculpture experiments of Cezanne, Picasso and others who sought to model subtle surface effects through a rigorous discipline of form and space (e.g. Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1885-7, and Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907).
In Paris and elsewhere the early 1900s saw an exceptional flowering of artistic talent – for example, in Dresden Die Brucke group (early expressionists), and in Munich the Der Blaue Reiter group whose influential talents, Kandinsky and Klee, laid the foundations of the later Bauhaus group and profoundly influenced post-war Abstract art. Elsewhere, other related talents were beginning to blossom: Edvard Munch, Norwegian expressionist; Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian expressionist; James Ensor, Belgian painter and etcher; and the artists of Italian futurism who strove to assimilate into their art the images and forms of the world of mechanization.
And then in music there is Stravinsky, the most prominent, strident figure among the new wave of composers, in the wake of Mahler and Richard Strauss, and his best work dates from the period before the war. Drawing inspiration from the Romantic twilight, Stravinsky’s work heralds a neo-classicism in music, his ballet suite, The Rite of Spring, signalling the climax of his bold pre-war experiments in complex rhythms, fragmentary and repetitive melodies and polyphonal harmonies – its performance in Paris in 1913 provoked a riot in the audience. For twentieth-century music this is the most exciting period with Debussy, Ravel and Satic in France, Berg and Schoenberg in Vienna and Bartok in Hungary.
But it is in literature that there is the most prolific blossoming of Modernist talent – Gide and Proust, Paul Valery and guillaume Apollinaire in France; Henry James and Conrad in England – followed by Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence; Mann and Rilke in Germany; Chekhov in Russia; Strindberg in Sweden; Ibsen in Norway; as well as exiles such as the profoundly influential Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot from the USA.
With such a catalogue of diverse talents, a generalization of all their aims and characteristics, as if they were all pursuing the same ends, would be clearly unsatisfactory and probably impossible. Yet, although Modernism is not a school, many of its artists have shared attitudes and approaches, by chance as often as by design. For example, Modernist writers share among other things a deep concern with form and the problematics of language, but approach them not as obstacles but rather as an opportunity to be explored, through the use of irony, paradox and similar related tropes together with silence and obscurity, to express fragmentation and discord, absurdity and fear in the face of the contemporary predicament Though not a progenitor of Modernism, W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) catches the tension and uncase of the period:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
Among the achievements of Modernism two works stand out as its monuments, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses. The Waste Land (1922), the most significant verse work of Modernism, brilliantly evokes the crises of the age: spiritual collapse and death, cultural aberrancy, the crisis in communication, and the disintegration of traditional social values. Yet through all its broken and perfidious images roams the solitary figure of the blind seer Tiresias, ‘the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest’. Based on a mythological Greek figure of renowned percipience who existed as both man and woman, Tiresias is perfectly equipped from his unique point of view outside contemporary time to observe and comment objectively upon it. It is through him that The Waste Land confronts and comes to terms with the theme of chaos, chaos on the scale of both the private individual and the shared cultural stock of the community. Yet the poem does not make order of chaos. Though it clearly achieves an internal formal sort of order, it only dramatizes chaos, representing it through Eliot’s pervasive tone of resignation and, through the poem’s polemical ironies, attempts to fix or formulate it while at the same time acknowledging the helpless plight of the individual before the gathering tide of degeneration and nihilism.
Like The Waste Land, Ulysses is anattempt to come to terms with the dislocated individual in the Human Age and, like Eliot, Joyce exploits past cultural models and myth both for internal order and for theme itself, through a submerged commentary on the contemporary world. Both also come to terms with chaos by at first creating their own chaos, a chaos more easy to manage and to make sense of. In each, form and content achieve a fine calescence so that each work accomplishes an internal life of its own. There is too in Ulysses the figure of the blind stripling, drifting Tiresias-like in and out of view
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
across Joyce’s Dublin, though without either the formal or the moral force of Eliot’s figure.
As we have seen, many of these formal and thematic features are prefigured in A Portrait; we can also see prefigured there the area in which Joyce and Eliot differ most: in their attitudes to the revolution against nineteenth-century values – Eliot despondently regarding it as one of cultural despair and Joyce finding in it a qualified hope, an opportunity to redefine man’s relationship in the world by an assertion of enlightened humanistic values and working through a sort of new social contract rooted in fellowship and transcendent mythic values.
Because Modernism is in large part a reaction to nineteenth-century Romanticism it is tempting to see it as a revival of Classicism, whereas it is in fact an intense form of Romanticism which attempts to disguise its acute subjectivism by overlaying itself with obscurity – the obscurity itself a symptom of the age, a parallel and an acknowledgement of the positivist model. This is reflected too in an uncertainty about the use and efficiency of language to express anything other than language itself; language and material reality cease to be directly linked in a relationship of simple correspondence.
There is accordingly a dual attitude in Modernism: on the one hand, a sense of confidence in the self as the guarantor of reality (subjective perception as the only reliable source of truth), on the other, a deep anxiety and scepticism about this truth and the ability of language to express it.
Obscurity is thus a recurrent characteristic of Modernism, a sort of ‘negative capability’, exacerbated by the often esoteric esoteric areas of experience which writers began to explore; it is characterized by the frequent use of difficult and otiose cultural models and mythology, and of references from narrow erudite sources in the search for fresh perspectives among ancient ways. Eliot is a good example of this in his apparent use of dead books and etiolate references (side by side with everyday domestic images with which they are held in uneasy tension). In this way the anxiety of the writer is partially submerged since the obscurity of his sources accords him with a superiority in relation to his reader.
The reader’s unstable position is often further undermined by the uncertainties which arise from the absence of conventional plot sequence, from narrative silences, and the suppression of conventional pointers and the commentary of the narrator. In addition, other typical Modernist devices and strategies operated to unsettle the reader, often inducing the hostility of early critics: the absence of easily recognizable characters, the focus on narrative methods to create an internal intellectual discourse – writing about writing – and to vary the distances between the reader and the narrator (further obscuring the evasive author).
At heart, Modernism involves hiding, deceiving, dislocation and uncertainty brought about by the intrinsic failure of traditional reality and the rejection of the old methods of conveying it. Indeed the very resistance of the Modernist work to interpretation is often the source of its energy. Moreover, there is an awesome awareness, implicit if not actually articulated until later in the period, of the void lurking at the heart of modern living, a horrifying emptiness reflected in the Modernist author’s frequent silences and that, in this situation of absurdity, all that really matters is the relationship between the author and the reader in a sort of literary game.
Two central challenges have preoccupied the Modernist novel: exploration and expression of the subtle potentialities of consciousness, and a coming to terms with the perceived state of chaos and fragmentation of the real world. Although A Portrait is not a fully Modernist text, both of these concerns can already be seen in embryo in it: firstly, in the abandonment of the restraints of conventional chronological plot (in favour of expressive form with modulating styles and shifting author – character – reader relationships arranged through Stephen Dedalus’s consciousness); and, secondly, in the sense of awe and fear which Stephen feels in the face of the chaos behind received forms of order (that is, the imposed moral order of the adult world and the Church) and the void awaiting him in the uncertain future beyond the novel:
A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings...
At the start of this century it seemed that the novel might have exhausted its potential in terms both of form and of content (having fully explored different forms and narrative styles, inner and outer states, politics, religion, philosophy, sex as well as violence). The novel could confidently embrace any aspect of human affairs which public taste and the circulating libraries would permit, or so it was confidently imagined.
However, in England the three-volume novel’s interest in scientific realism had declined into a sterile preoccupation with plot, materialism and the naturalistic fallacy of surface effects – typified in the writings of Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett who, according to Virginia Woolf, could examine every physical aspect about a character and yet overlook its essential soul. To illustrate her criticism she used the analogy of a
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
railway in which a Mrs Brown might be travelling with them, while they observed everything in the background:
at factories, at Utopias, even at the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature... For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.
One of the immediate consequences of this apparent dead-end was a crisis of confidence, especially in the capacity of language to communicate, but there also followed a collapse of faith in the realist illusion (a scepticism which had been growing even as the novel itself had evolved, at least since the eighteenth century). The crisis emerged most characteristically in a new form of self-awareness, even in self-consciousness, doubt and a failure of confidence. But this was not new. Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-67) brilliantly epitomizes the novelist’s doubts about narrative conventions and exploits them through parody for comic effect. It is of course a witty display of authorial virtuosity, though it accepts the traditional authorial role and material content in order to parody them. However, Modernism goes further than authorial virtuosity, especially in first undermining and then positing new author – reader relationships, directly co-opting the reader’s active involvement but also, through its subtlety of form-play, examining and qualifying the very nature of the art form itself as the artist creates it, so that ultimately the reader himself is complicit in the form of the novel.
A Portrait focuses precisely on this and further anticipates later Modernist developments by focusing also on the theme of the artist – the growth of the artist becomes the theme of his own creation, and by extension if we grant the special relationship between Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce and novel eventually comes to discuss itself. For example, in Chapter 5 the villanelle and the art theory are the culmination of growing speculation about the nature of the artist’s relationship to his art, to his reader and to society in general:
The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others.
Because of this secpticism there also emerged in the early days of Modernism a distinct feeling of angst, a fear that the author of a novel creates nothing in fact but clearly fakes or forges the so-called reality in a work and that his search for form is partly to justify this (a clear symptom of this is the popularity of the detective story in the late nineteenth century especially among prominent writers such as Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Henry James and T.S. Eliot), forging a coherent pattern on to the apparent chaos. Stephen Dedalus too talks of forging in this way (p. 257) – imposing meaning on life through art, forging an order different from that in reality but creating a new aesthetic order. But he also uses ‘forges’ to highlight the sense that the Modernist artist is a confidence trickster, deceiver, con man like Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull. But who is fooling whom? Is Stephen deceiving only himself or, through Joyce, the reader too?
Further aspects of the Modernist novel can also be seen beginning to emerge in A Portrait. For example, the form of the novel, rather than being a more or less detached vessel into which the subject matter is poured and contained, actually partakes of the subject matter as later, in the mature Modernist work (such as Ulysses), the form actually became the content, united and radiant in appropriate wholeness and harmony: these works in this order. As Joyce told his friend, the artist frank budgen:
I have the works already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate.
It was a concern very much shared by other Modernist writers at this time, anxious to liberate the novel from its close dependence on external material realism (itself based on assumptions of a direct correspondence between words and reality) and to concentrate of probing the unutterable territory of the human consciousness and the soul, instead of finding their creative from within the artist’s uniquely private vision. Subsequently, the Modernist novel also became very much concerned with disrupting the traditional forward flow of narrative time by sudden leaps forward and backward along ‘timeless’ moments (or epiphanies), and setting up conflicts with, while also exploiting, the reader’s ‘real time’ progress through the text.
But one of Joyce’s profound innovations here is the use of multiple points of view. A Portrait has no single perspective: Stephen’s consciousness changes as he matures and, through the shifting modulating style, the perspective of the narrator also changes, setting up an implicit dialectic between the two. The idea itself of an implied narrator – a voice not wholly Joyce’s but a surrogate author and Joyce’s representative in the work – is a new development evolving through Flaubert, James and Conrad, and arising directly from the avowed aim of keeping the author’s moral presence out of the novel. As we have seen, A Portrait excludes any direct authorial moral comment but continues to exert contrl\ol over the reader’s response through the technique of the form – juggling the order, emphasis, theme and point of view.
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Time is also of crucial importance. In the Modernist novel time dominates, both as one of the key themes as well as one of the key organizing principles of the design. Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) is a paradigm of this preoccupation with time. An enormous undertaking, its scope is equally epic, its central ideal being that in moments of intense illumination it is possible to penetrate and recapture the long-lost past and to relive its emotions. Because of his special skills and sensitivity the artist, unlike the ordinary person, is able to record and prolong such isolated moments into eternity itself through the magic of symbolism and myth vision (stressing the elevated status of the artist).
But to be able to exploit such moments for the central experience of reality, it was necessary for the novelist to concentrate on pattern rather than plot in organizing his work. Both A la recherche du temps perdu and A Portrait display this emphasis, and Virginia Woolf made her plea for such novels in which, like A Portrail, the interplay of the consciousness of the writer and of his people work to create the form:
If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feelings and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, unknown and circumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexion it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
At the same time the capacity of the language and the novet form are pressed to new limits in attempting to make language approximate to the inner realities of such phenomena as simultaneity (Ulysses), sudden illumination or epiphany (Dubliners and A Portrait) and relative time and the unconsciousness (the techniques of stream-of-consciousness and ‘interior monologue’).
we have seen above already that this idea of the ‘moment’ was one which energized the work of so many Modernist writers – Woolf, Eliot, Proust, and others – but especially of Joyce, in his idea of the ‘epiphany’, the basic unit of the form in both Dubliners and A Portrait. Its use underlines vividly the fragmentariness of modern existence and its disintegration, at the same time deriving the form of the work from a principle of significant aesthetic pattern rather than from a conventional chronographic history.
The concept of the epiphany dynamically assimilates the Modernist idea of time as the moment to the special notion of truth as discovery. And the writer’s use of his own biography works in the same way, fusing the writer’s conception of real life with the need for pattern and coherence, as Proust reflected:
the true life, life at last discovered and illuminated, the only true life really lived, is that of the writer.
The theme of the artist's own biography (sometimes attacked as a form of introversion) is encountered again and again in the Modernist novel. Like Proust's masterpiece, A Portrait is both the portrait of the novel's creator and the revelation of the life principle on which the novel is written. It represents that reality which the novelist is most familiar with: his own life and his art. Combined with the epiphany as the most logical means of arranging and signifying experience, his own themes of personal exile and alienation parallel the exile and alienation of the age. In the best work of the period, this theme confronts and resolves one of the central crises in the Modernist novel - the struggle to express the new impalpable realities in the wake of the acute failure of confidence in the language. In A Portrait Stephen Dedalus is at the same time both the experience of the novel and its author; Joyce adapts his own experience, and his words are both the means of expressing them as well as being the subject of the expression themselves. The text ultimately forges its justification within itself, again perlectly fusing form and content, technique and subject.
In Joyce's time the 'portrait of the artist' theme occurs again and again: in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger, Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and in Proust's monumental work, as well as in submerged form in countless works, frequently involving exile or flight into the unknown - a correlative of the Modernist crises themselves - through which the artist confronts the problemarics of artistic creation and his own relationship to it.
Joyce's works expose and confront in full the crises of Modernism and so enter fully into the mainstream of the movement, Joyce becoming its primum mobile. His works span almost its complete range and parallel its development in microcosm, Ulysses representing the culmination and highest achievement of the Modernist phenomenon and its highest creative expression. Like A Portrait, it takes its starting point in the immediate reality of Joyce's own life and times but through its intricate processes (including the use of myth, multiple perspective, epiphany, variable planes of ironic meaning and linguistic experiment) he transcends and metamorphoses the here-and-now to embrace all time. from explicit representational biography (and some autobiography) in the
Critical Studies: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
early pages of A Portrait, Joyce's career is an artistic odyssey progressing by succeeding phases of ironic detachment and displacement until, by Finnegans Wake, art itself has become the myth, the final stage of the search for a self-sustaining art image, existing only in and through the multiple uses of language, without reference to any world other than within itself, germinating and proliferating in ever-widening gyres of meaning and response.
But is Finnegans Wake the Big Bang or merely a black hole? As an attempted solution to the problems which Modernism tried to confront, Finnegans Wake is quite final. However, it is also silence. It is the silence which lies at the core of all Modernist works, perhaps all creation, a sort of taboo: the silence in the face of the realization that it may all have become a game. If Modernism found its ultimate logical expression in Finnegans Wake then it did not overcome the incipient scepticism about the relationship between the word and reality, but succeeded in transcending it by making the word itself the ultimate reality and consequently the word is silence, ironically. What need is there of more words? In the beginning is the word, and in the end.
For this reason some disparagers of Modernism claim that Finnegans Wake shows the ultimate folly of the movement: it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Others, however, suggest that the Wake took Modernism along only one of several available courses which had been open; the rest lie locked in the room of infinite possibilities which it ousted, perhaps. Certainly Wake was not the end and, though there has been a reaction in literature in its own wake - signs of a return to the traditional materialistic realism - the flow continued after Joyce and, under his considerable shadow, in the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett (for a time Joyce's amanuensis on Wake), Vladimir Henry Miller, William Faulkner, O'Brien and more widely in the theatre and Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and the post-Modern novels of William Burroughs, John and the French.
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