Monday, March 31, 2008

politics

I can’t decide which was more amusing, the zoo metaphor used by Leonard Woolf in which he compares, as far as I can tell, the literary censorship with the containment of many kinds of animals or Wayne Chapman and Janet Manson’s comparison of Woolf’s political work, the art of persuasion, as sport. I think that while both make me laugh, the former provides a greater degree of understanding regarding the politically tumultuous times under which Leonard, Virginia, and the rest of the Bloomsbury group produced their writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Coinciding with this week’s emphasis on the political seems to be a strong prominence on the personal, interesting insofar as political activism is readily associated with the operation of power in the social. If in this case the social is the Bloomsbury group, the writers, intellectuals, and academics, then any relevant discussion about the individuals who make up that group should yield a discussion which would include both biographical information and specific views on modernism and politics.
I find it comforting that the collective definition of modernism that we came to as a class in the first few weeks, and the one to which I most often return, is likewise stated in Sara Blair’s “Modernism and the politics of culture.” She declares, “Modernism has been notoriously inhospitable to definition” (157). I couldn’t agree more. I find, even after reading numerous texts and participating in many discussions on the topic, modernism resists easy categorization. It may be far more agreeable to develop a list of characteristics or to notice a specific tone, feel, or hallmark of literature of the time, but it is damn near impossible to come up with one concise and relevant definition. Perhaps this is because modernist literature was constantly changing, adapting and evolving to suit the times, and what active times they were.
However, Blair also acknowledges, regarding modernism, that “we are taught that its most notable – indeed, perhaps only - unifying feature was the attempt to transcend the political altogether?” (157). I tend to agree with Chapman and Manson rather than Blair on the matter. The political is inseparable from the social with regard to the great writers of modernist literature. If this were not so, there would be no “Fear and Politics.” The connection between literature and politics, I believe, is always present, but because the climate of the early twentieth century was full of events such as World War II and thus so over political, the literature and those who created it, Woolf and Eliot, for example, were that much more inclined to be active in their environment. Chapman and Manson point this out, saying, “Leornard had undertaken an international cooperation—projects that had just led to publication by the Fabian Society of his influential treatise on supranational councils for the prevention of war” (62). It is not surprising though that the Bloomsbury group had strong opinions about the war, specifically against it, for they were in the middle of it.
Distance can yield perspective, but in its absence, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, along with their peers, acted and wrote in protest of the war which threatened to come to their own backyards. They were in it at the ground level, had knowledge of the workings of the German machine well before the public as a result of inside connections. For instance, Leonard’s analysis forecasted “ the state of affairs that would precipitate the fascist takeover in Germany” (Chapman 62). The concern over the growing threat of Germany is clearly grounded in a political sphere, as war is nothing if not political, but I am interested in factoring in the close relationship between Leonard and his wife, “Leonard was Woolf’s most intimate and constant companion from their marriage until her death in 1941” (Hussy 372). Bloomsbury was a close-knit group, they even made a suicide pact regarding the Second World War, and Leonard was, according to Hussy, “always concerned about the reputation of Bloomsbury in general and his wife in particular” (374). This seems to echo the collision of personal and political, social and government, that appears to be the theme of this week.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Gender

What I find repeated and perhaps most disturbing throughout A Room of One’s Own and Marianne Dekoven’s chapter on Modernism and gender is the degree to which women in general were viewed as inferior to men or, even more troubling, were invisible altogether. Dekoven points out early in her essay that “Modernism had mothers as well as fathers” (175) and coincidentally, one of those named mothers, Virginia Woolf, explains the depressing attitudes of many at the time of her writing. Woolf’s inclusion of the line, “the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man” is troubling at best. I feel that the most optimistic thing that can be said regarding her other sentiments is that despite the lyrical language and beauty which saturates her words, the very existence of Woolf’s book proves that women’s roles at the turn of the century were vexed.
While the general consensus regarding women was that they were less than men, still second to them with regard to intellect, ability, and social standing, “it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare,” (46). For example, Woolf proves that these statements, one would presume made by ignorant men, men desperate to maintain some semblance of superiority, cannot be true. Included in A Room of One’s Own is the historical view of women in the past: “[s]he never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence” (45). This is not a blanket statement and it would be quite easy for one to make an intuitive leap which would marginalize women to the role of silent observer in a male dominated world, both in and out of any particular narrative. Curiously, and Woolf points to this as well, women occupy a precarious place within society, as they are in a social structure that at once situates them on a pedestal and in need of protection by men, yet also forbidden from obtaining the same rights as the men who protect them.
A second interesting commonality between these two texts is the level to which they discuss gender in modernism in several different ways. Each way allows for different problematic outcomes as well as varying ways of guarding against those said outcomes. First, Woolf refers to the ways in which one might approach the topic, “women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them” (3). Despite the lack of Dekoven to address this issue overtly, the discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness does lend itself to a discussion of male dominated narrative as the novella makes it nearly impossible for female readers to be initiated into the male story and further alienates them from the narrator, Marlow. Dekoven also addresses the misogyny which characterizes much of modernist literature, citing Eliot as a prime example. She explains that his “misogyny is often expressed as a sexual disgust conflated with both anti-Semitism and class hatred” (178). The class hatred or at least the presence of and discussion regarding class is nothing new. Many if not all texts thus far have approached the topic from “Prufrock” and The Wasteland to Howards End and, to a lesser extent, Mrs. Dalloway.
I find it interesting that the issue keeps coming up even when gender is the primary focus of discussion. I was unaware prior to this course how much class and modernist literature were intertwined, and similarly, was ignorant of the degree to which social standing and gender were linked, except of course that women would most often be considered lower than men. I find the greatest collision of this put most eloquently by Woolf when she says, “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other” (24). In reading these pieces, I realize how precarious a space women have occupied, as writers and as subjects, a space which I feel they will continue to be in until society can truly be as blind to gender and other forms of difference as they should be in a utopian, and highly unlikely, society.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

The Modern Novel

I have found, to this point, several similarities between Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Forster’s Howards End and what I have determined from reading the secondary materials assigned for this week is that this resemblance is a direct result of genre more than anything else. Yes, Forster and Woolf were similar in their personal demographic and both were writing in England, but what I find to be the most common thread is the focus on character which, as Virginia herself suggests in “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown,” is the cornerstone of successful fiction. She quotes, “The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else” (234). The importance of character creating is strongly linked with character reading, a skill which also finds manifestation in Mrs. Dalloway.
Woolf proves she not only endorses the importance of character driven narrative, but also practices it as is evident in reading her novel. Mrs. Dalloway begins by introducing the main character and speaking, ever so briefly, of her personality: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (3). This may seem insignificant, but as Woolf stresses the importance of character in her essay, we witness her elimination of any mention of setting. She says of the modern novel, “Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters” (234). By making the first sentence of her novel revolve around the main character, Woolf sets the tone for a character driven piece. Also present in this work is the notion of the readability of characters and importance in reading and understanding people. Woolf states that such is the “art of the young,” but aligns the skill with a character whom she prefaces as “[feeling] very young” (8). Woolf goes on to explain that “[h]er only gift was knowing people almost by instinct” (9).
Such commonalities between what Woolf thought necessary of the modern novel and what she included in her own Mrs. Dalloway are significant insofar as they speak to her savvy and foresight. Eliot expressed his view that “The novel had effectively ‘ended’” (Trotter 70), whereas Woolf felt it need only change. Trotter also expresses a changing focus on character in the modern novel, explaining that, “[f]igures in narrative fiction do tend towards cliché because they have to be made continuously recognizable despite internal and external alterations” (72). In having characters who must transcend across all lines in order to be accessible by the largest margin of readers, it seems proponents of such an approach would endorse sacrificing other narrative elements so as to concentrate on character.
Eliot endorsed making “the novel possible again by instilling into it a stricter form” (Trotter 74). However, I can’t help but read the example which Trotter provides, The Sound and the Fury, for instance, and see that the work tends much more towards the character driven fiction of which Woolf speaks, as Faulkner’s novel seems to focus exclusively on characters, sometimes at the expense of form, the former emphasized by the point-of-view of each section and the latter by the fragmented, at times convoluted, structure. That is not to say that only one, Eliot or Woolf, must be correct in their thinking; it is possible, in fact likely, that the success and longevity of the novel are a result of a sliding scale of emphasis between form and character. We know from Steinberg’s article, “Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land” that the two intellectuals did not always see eye to eye and that “Virginia’s early reactions to Eliot were rather negative” (4). However, we also read in this piece that commonalities exist between Eliot’s famed poem and Woolf’s novel. Perhaps her incorporation of elements of The Waste Land in her own work is the ur example of what she felt was at the heart of the success of modern fiction: “Art is somehow an improvement upon the old” (1). Possibly she saw Mrs. Dalloway as an improvement on Eliot’s work and, in turn, the inclusion of such ideas an improvement on her own novel.

Monday, March 3, 2008

The Wastland

Each time I read The Wastland I can’t help but see it as a catalogue of events that transpire in an environment where all meaning and presumed patterns have collapsed. Broken cyclical references and unsuccessful relationships among people, including the multiple speakers and the reader, pervade the poem. Part one, “The Burial of the Dead,” at first seems to situate readers in the somber mood of the narrative with both its titular reference to the death and the immediate juxtaposition of birth and death. The initial lines read, “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire.” It is important to note that April signifies spring, a time of rebirth and renewal, but the immediate invocation of the “cruelest month” quickly undermines any sense of optimism. The next stanzas follow in this vein as readers are provided a cyclical reference either to vegetation, familial life, or ensuing love and then almost instantly given a reason why these things are certain to fail or have failed already.
The death and resurrection is most clearly gestured to via vegetation in the beginning of The Wasteland, as we observe in the second stanza, “And the dry stone no sound of water.” The lack of water here is interesting in that it denotes an arid place not capable of sustaining life, a literal wasteland. However, shortly thereafter, Eliot uses floral imagery, specifically hyacinths, which are a perennial and thus occur over and over again. Perhaps this reinforces once more the cyclical nature of the poem. What remains curious though is the amount of references to reoccurring images, memories, like those we share with Marie, in stark contrast to the overall crux of the work, “A heap of broken images.”
The larger narrative finds the disruption of rebirth and renewal, the retarded cycle of death and resurrection of land and being situated among a fragmented framework.
This fragmentation expressed explicitly by the multivocality of the text and the “heap of broken images” is echoed in the breaks in the cyclical environments which saturate Eliot’s work. The poem invites a read that at once tries to make sense of a nonsensical world and to struggle to “only connect,” to channel E.M. Forster, the present to the past and future or, if you prefer, to fix the irregularities in the larger, in an all of time way context of time. The epigraphs invite readers to struggle to make sense of a fragmentation of language and time. The beginning of the poem, its initial epigraph, signals to readers the way in which to read the remaining narrative. The words are not accessible to most readers, a hallmark of Eliot’s. However, not only does this inclusion signify to readers that the poem will primarily focus on the destabilization of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, but it also illuminates the temporal and linguistic instability of the text.
The second book refocuses our attention on a more interpersonal cycle; a description of a wealthy couple and of a lower class couple illustrates the emphasis on class found in so much of modern literature. Also, this section, “A Game of Chess,” includes dialogue which I feel could be a verbatim representation of a reader’s thoughts upon exposure to this poem for the first time. Although on a more serious note, the lament present is also indicative of the struggle to make meaning out of the small disparate bits of information the poem provides, to, in effect, re-order a disordered world wherein the natural cycles no longer function. The lines, “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?” The woman presented in the second section has deliberately halted the renewal that The Wasteland so desperately seeks; by having an abortion, Lil exemplifies what Eliot hints. The remaining references to the past and the difficulty in producing a future become emblematic of the poem, the former illustrating a commonality between Eliot and HD, as her Trilogy renders visible similar historical reference upon reference and the latter speaks to modern concerns in general—uncertain fates and unknowable outcomes regarding death and desolation.