DRANG, vol. III

SPECIAL CENTENARY ISSUE DEDICATED TO MODERNISM

&DRANG LITERARY ARTS JOURNAL ISSUE THREE

SUMMER

2022

Contents Poems Isaac Worthington – words; The Fantods; Pang; Stomp; Sunday Adam lee – Abide with me after the hymn; Adam; I Have Not Seen Sarah; Last Call for Justine; Your Session Timed Out; Out of Order Alba rodriguez – The Well Below the Valley; Sundown; Tóg go bog é; Mo chuisle Max Gregory – For you Tanya Nightingale – Sound, as Water Debarati Choudhury – The Minute That Screams

Mr. LAZENBY'S COMIC INTERLUDE – Lending Pens to Strangers

Essays Charles eager – 1922 Edwin black – The Swirling. Vortex Wyndham Lewis' Blast in Context Vlad condrin toma – Visible and Invisible Bodies Exploring Urban Space. Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway Max Gregory – 1922 in Music Adam lee – From the "Anguished Diminution" to the "Utter Showing".

The Metropolitan Existence in T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane Iliana gutch marinov – 'Beginning Again and Again'. Series Production and Machinic Hybridity in Gertrude Stein Debarati Choudhury – Between Perceptions and Words. The Theme of Communication and Language in Ingmar Bergman's The Silence

Project Coordinator: Vlad Condrin Toma Illustrations: Condrea Toma Editorial Consultants: Elena David; Charles Eager

POEms

Isaac worthington

WORDS

THE FANTODS

BD read me a poem he’d written.

I have the fantods behind my eyes again

it was 5am and we were stood

and some kind of massive alligator in my stomach

in a little side street outside a Baker Hansen

it’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

and it was a very beautiful poem. he said he’d been walking under a bridge

somewhere, beyond a sun-crested heath

and the right words had just been sat there

in between all the little big bits

lost, and he’d scooped them up and put

a happy mouse sleeps in a discarded chocolate wrapper

them in his pocket, saved them from the rain.

and doesn’t know too many big words.

the sincerity had crushed me like owl talons round a peach and as such all this sweetness gushed out of me on the way home. heading back to my apartment I looked for more words to save finding some very pretty ones under the tapered autumn leaves and an extremely handsome one in the blackened tip of a half-smoked cigarette on a zebra crossing. then the most beautiful word of all flew out of a moon-filled puddle like a moth trying to get away from me but I caught him carefully and took him home and now I keep him safe and sound in a cage just behind my eyes. one day, at exactly the right moment I will let him out again.

POEMS | 1

PANG “There’s a romantic bit coming up,” you said as we approached an empty bridge swathed in moonshine and to your blue-eyed swishy-haired credit you were dead right.

SUNDAY

afterwards, I made you laugh

At noon-thirty it was sunny

dancing to a car alarm

at noon-thirty-two a torrential downpour

and the day after that

and at noon-thirty-four bright and cloudless again.

you bought me a chocolate rabbit

what a funny button in time we witnessed

which I refuse to eat.

me and an old couple under an awning in an empty Sunday sidestreet

there are many romantic bits

that the sky should undo itself

and we keep tucking them

for a mere moment of chaos

into little crevices around the city.

just to show us that it could.

whenever you crave a pang walk around and simply toothpick them out.

STOMP Forego the Yeatsean temptation to tread softly in the name of love – stomp, woman! stomp about all over my heart like a wild thing won’t you; this little red receptacle could use some excitement and aren’t you just the exciter?

POEMS | 2

ADAM LEE

ABIDE WITH ME AFTER THE HYMN

ADAM When the darkness closed over Eve’s face, then, then, did I begin my second life

On the shore, the faces of the loved

of wandering dark, windswept hills, cold

recede.

under the sky’s imperishable fires.

Fast falls the eventide;

For years, until even the Ancient One

purple dusk on the promontory. . .

came to overlook my existence and

But there is some kind of presence here

I survived, deathless, passing through

that grows with each passing hour.

the stinking towns and cities of eras

Who can it be but you,

uncounted until I reached the machine

who have been away so long

age; and bitter was my pilgrimage

I can barely remember who you

to the feet of its towers of blue steel, its

are, who you were, who I am.

streets of empty people and eyes without

Shining through the gloom,

light, its flashing devices, its smoke, its roar,

the image of your face drifts

its shouts of protest and the pop pop of gunfire.

on the surface of the waters.

But I know that night is coming: that it is too late for us, that it always was.

I HAVE NOT SEEN SARAH

O thou, who changest not, who is like unto thyself?

I have not seen Sarah since the day she walked into the bar then disappeared around the back before coming up the stairs.

She was always too distant from us, like an exoplanet whose attributes can only be glimpsed in a secondary way, including the dimming effect it has as it passes across its host star.

I am like an astronomer looking for Sarah

POEMS | 3

LAST CALL FOR JUSTINE

OUT OF ORDER When will someone hang

When she wades through the room, collecting glasses,

an ‘out of order’ sign

everyone stares. Or sips their drink with increasing

over my shoulders?

bitterness. We know what it’s like out there,

I am so tired that, like a

where everything flames in multi-colour

horse, I sleep standing

and is speeding further and further away.

up. When will someone

So how can anyone keep their instincts under sway?

hang an ‘out of order’

Or not feel empty at the sound of tinkling

sign over this horse?

glasses being scooped up by a beautiful bar

Whose legs are broke;

maid who, with every unit we consume,

who has nothing left.

seems to advance and fly like a galaxy into a distance we can’t comprehend, though we understand inaccessibility.

YOUR SESSION TIMED OUT Evening has settled over the city like a dark silk thrown down by a beautiful female deity asserting the futility of trams, trees, coffee shops.

I am lost. Under the increasingly convincing lamps, I attempt to walk home, scanning the concentrated, tired, eternally anonymous faces that continuously stream past in the windows of passing cars. Until I realise I’m looking for you, then I quickly rebuke and correct myself and remember how many stars there are, and how many galaxies and possibilities; and, then, convinced of the ultimate pointlessness and selfishness of my own desires, I lapse back into the most perfect, dream-like state; the one in which I am alone, and expect nothing from this tragic universe.

POEMS | 4

ALBA RODRIGUEZ

THE WELL BELOW THE VALLEY

SUNDOWN

I don’t know of any gentleman passing by,

I feel just so down at dusk by myself

or asking for a drink as he got dry

I could drown in a tear when the sun’s nearly set.

at the well below the valley-o.

Impossibly lonely, nostalgic as well, Green grew the lily-o,

no starry-eyed madness is keeping me well.

right among the bushes-o.

I climb once again out the well of my sadness I know of a lass with a heart of glass,

to be met again by a passive bystander,

who tried to laugh when she was sad

my heart,

at the well below the valley-o.

who painfully watches and leaves once again

Dead grew the lily-o,

to try healing all these patches.

right among the bushes-o.

I’m left on my own and I’m flying no more, If I were a girl of noble steed

for good or for bad my wings are just gone,

I’d not done to you what I’ve done to me

& I’m learning to walk

at the well below the valley-o.

as I’m starting to talk.

Green grows the ivy-o,

My beak, once again,

right among the bushes-o.

covered mostly by blood.

I’m here to play, I’m here to pay the price of the pain of going away at the well below the valley-o.

Strong grows the ivy-o, right among the bushes-o.

I’ll spend all my life roaming this Earth, & it won’t be enough to teach me strength, at the well below the valley-o.

Green grows the lily-o, right among the blushes-o.

POEMS | 5

TÓG GO BOG É There’s another stage & tonight’s show is Carnage, this thing doesn’t age and it only brings heartache.

MO CHUISLE

There’s another door & the sign just reads “danger”,

I miss you like I miss breathing

I’m trying to walk

In the nights when I’m awake

& I can only wager

And all my demons are roaming free.

whether or not the tables are turning

I miss you like I miss childhood days,

& where will I end

Clutching my heart to my chest,

when you’re done with your yearning,

Tears dripping down my face.

& whether or not this cool shade of grey

I miss you like I miss the moon

will rip me apart

When she’s hiding behind the clouds

of just lead my way

And all I have left to stare at is just a black void.

to making the goldfinch that lives in my heart

I love you without restraints,

start singing & chirping & not fall apart.

Without reason or logic, Without measure or fear.

There’s just this one stage, & tonight’s show is daring,

I love you like I love some sunsets,

so I’ll meet you there hand in heart,

Or I like I do the sorrows of the moon,

and heart, ready.

Or like I do my favourite memories.

I love you like I missed home, Mo chuisle, Because I’ve found home in you.

POEMS | 6

MAX GREGORY

FOR YOU A splintered sphere dips solar glory into azure blue, deep, fulfilling entombment of seaweeds and diaphanous ribbons of mermaid's allure.

Dancing in the beams of these mermaid's hairs, they are one and the same, Symbiosis grown in the Temple of Delight.

Overhead, the birds of Youth, their echoed cries of faded summer light and early spring promise, woven into the wind that stretches and sparkles, shimmering, over the silken tapestry of reeds, grasses, buzz and hum of insects, like the buzz and hum of neurons, synapse, flurry of snow.

Those reeds that dance and glisten in the diffusion of a warmth, iridescent in its touch, but as fleeting, as the electricity as four eyes meet, as transient as the muted fortissimo’s woodland musk, and breathing; pulsating Pure Life, like jellyfish on those gnarled branches, along this gnarled skin, like these cuts, indentations of sorrow, that run likewise, over the granite cool of chiselled past.

In the dust of crimson hue, the woodland sleeps, in the murky amber pools of night, it weeps.

That splintered sphere, still dipping solar glory, now dimmer, lesser, faded into a crimson, its ephemeral dying radiance noble in its demise, exploring that entombment of a once-azure blue – now more lilac green, the swaying beams of maidens’ hairs and mermaid’s delight, now an Elegy, for those yonder rippling shores.

Those birds of Youth, still dancing, playing, crying, in their own faded summer light, now darker, reddened by that lamenting incandescent sphere, like our faded summer light, your cries of laughter echo in the winds of time that stretch and sparkle, shimmering, over the silken tapestry of my neurons, synapse, in you.

For you.

POEMS | 7

TANYA NIGHTINGALE

SOUND, AS WATER Six sirens stand ankle-deep.

It seeps under the ancient door, washes the nave of dust.

Mists rise from their mouths, form clouds in the rafters.

Mosaics become see glass, abalone, pearl; pews turn longboats as candles die, fall, float.

We see angel fish in the stained glass.

They sing our escape.

As levels rise, we test our fins, dive, breathe.

n.b. This poem was published originally in Dreich, s. 3, no. 9, Sept 2021.

POEMS | 8

DEBARATI CHOUDHURY

THE MINUTE THAT SCREAMS At times, after I hear your voice,

Now, in these hours, when I sit alone

The ache of a memory takes shape.

Your voice still fresh from the truncated call,

It is a murmur at first, through which you then stare

When you do not remember the water or the scream

—With your gazelle eyes.

Or the fear that I saw in your eyes then,

But then your eyes startle and clamour,

That scared me and made me fear myself—

My mind runs wild from grief—

I only hope years of psychology prove wrong

You, a three year old, playing with and spilling

And your mind is not forever scarred

What you think is only water—

From what it remembers in spite of you.

But what reminds me of wastes of other days.

If I believe in sins,

Then a minute of madness seizes me

In my mind there is no greater sin.

And I holler at you for being what you are.

If the hurt you felt then would pour,

You stare back quizzically for you don’t know

I would cup all the hurt in my palms

How you had wronged—

And bathe in it and absolve the minute

To be screamed at by the person you trust,

That won’t stop screaming.

By the person who rocked you to sleep.

POEMS | 9

MR. LAZENBY'S COMIC INTERLUDE

LENDING PENS TO STRANGERS

I am a victim of crime. I’m also the victim of my own charity. At approximately 11.30 I was approached at my table in the library by a charming female with a middle-England accent, who very politely asked if she might borrow a pen.

Attempting to be a good Christian soul and always happy to foster a sense of community in this temple of study – a community that ideally will not steal my laptop when I leave it in situ on visits to the lavatory – I reached into my bag and presented her with the pen from my diary. Disturbingly, however, It’s now 16.40 and the writing instrument hasn’t come back. Moreover, I haven’t seen the lady since handing it over.

It’s not an expensive pen by any stretch of the imagination – indeed, I believe it was free – but we’ve been through a lot together and when times have been tough this red plastic companion has never eluded me. We’ve been on train journeys together as far as Inverness to the north and London to the south. It’s been the most reliable writing implement imaginable, having always started first time and never run out of ink. It’s been tolerant with all its senses, listening from my music bag as I’ve played the organ each week and experiencing acute pain on the occasions I’ve nibbled its end while pondering diary data. It has expended a disproportionate percentage of its life in the dark. On occasion it has even been subjected to underwater submersion in the event of bottle tops betraying the liquids in their trust. Despite this apparent neglect, I have always endeavoured to keep my pen from harm, storing it in the cushioned environment of my various satchels, safely secured to my diary. I’ve also rescued it from the depths of countless organ pedalboards and, during one particularly adventurous episode, a hamster’s cheeks.

Except now, of course, I’ve ended up letting it go. I was seriously letting my guard down when I recklessly lent it out without vetting the recipient but I was put on the spot and was somewhat naïve about her intentions. When she towered over me and asked if she could ‘borrow a pen’, I assumed she wanted to sign her name on a pressing document or complete some other sort of sixty-second chirographic procedure. She thanked me profusely and then said ‘I’ll bring it back’, leaving me making cynical noises about people who borrow things and make a point of clarifying that they will return them, as if this is a lavish gratuity beyond reasonable expectation. However, in her case it obviously is and she’s decided that the pen doesn’t warrant this non-obligatory gesture of appreciation. She made off with it and hasn’t happened within my vicinity since.

Naturally, I find myself grappling with what could have occurred here. The first possibility, meditated on at around 12.30, was that I had misunderstood the nature of our arrangement and that this was a longer-term loan than I had realised. The obvious course of action was to play detective. I hadn’t quite gauged as to where she’d removed herself but assumed it was to a table on the same floor. The tables on this floor are arranged in a line along the window near the bookshelves and so, in a casual manner, I rose from my seat and ‘browsed for the books I required to complete my work’, which just so happened to be in the vicinity of a female matching the Pen Snatcher’s description. Regrettably, my 5’9 stature was insufficient as to be able to see over the top of the desk partition to view her writing instrument. In any case, my cover was compromised when I realised that I was being observed faux-pursuing a section of literature written entirely in Mandarin followed by an extremely attentive gentleman offering to provide a stepladder enabling me to reach down a copy of 上课 不要烤香肠 by 九把刀 without having to stand on tiptoes. I thanked him profusely for his concern but had decided at this remove that 圍城 by 錢鍾書, situated on the second-to-bottom shelf, was in fact more my bag. I demonstrated my sincerity by tugging the book from the tightly packed shelf and liberating several chunkier volumes, including the locally acclaimed 国富论(全译本) by 亚当·斯密, which came abundantly tumbling to the floor with a report loud enough to terminate my incognito status. I need hardly clarify that I was no further forward regarding the fate of my pen. With a crushed spirit and crushed feet thanks to the density of 这个历史挺靠谱3:袁腾飞讲世界史, I retired to my seat.

1

It is not in my nature to be melodramatic but I was starting to feel imprisoned. It was 13.00 and I wanted some lunch. What was I to do? If I got up and went out for a sandwich and the provoker of injustice returned, I might miss my chance. She would perhaps interpret such a departure as indifference towards a reunion with my biro. She might even regard my treasured pen as a gift. Perhaps she would leave it at the desk with my other possessions but equally, based on the character traits thus far revealed, she would probably assume ownership of the ballpoint and pocket it before fleeing to her native Budapest (to speculate but one destination to which it would not be worth giving chase), cackling richly while writing postcards to all her pals. Shuddering at the thought but nonetheless resigned to it, I went for lunch and returned to discover that there had been no development.

When I got back, nourished, I was renewed with a fighting spirit and took to voicing my hassles on Facebook, where I was scorned with alacrity for being so foolish as to have lent a useful possession out to someone I didn’t know. ‘This is the very reason I do not lend out tools or equipment to anyone. If they fail to return things or return them damaged, I am out of pocket or inconvenienced,’ the first man confided with once-bitten hindsight, before admonishing me to ‘get the next one to sign a contract, in blood’. It would have to be blood, I responded bitterly, owing to my preferred writing device having been seized.

The mystery deepens when one considers the circumstances that could have led to this extraordinary event. ‘What on earth was she doing here in a university library without a pen?’, I wondered in exasperation before realising with a grunt of wry laughter that thanks to her I too was now here in a university library without a pen. Her pen-less state was remarkable for two reasons: for one thing, we all tend to carry basic stationery around with us in academic institutions during the course of the working day – why was she not equipped with such fundamental things? Secondly, she carried a handbag with her and so let us consider for a moment the volume of merchandise the typical handbag proprietor typically carts around. The conveyances they carry are frequently furnished with smaller bags, pouches, cases, etc., containing the resources to respond to any imaginable disaster.

If you have such a such a person with you when shopping, you can be assured of readily available medication in the event of a headache, or grooming tools lest you suddenly take a turn for the unsightly whilst out in public. In case you should nosedive into any sneakily positioned concrete, there will be sufficient variations of wound dressing (adhesive or otherwise) to hold your insides in until you get home. There will be a purse archiving receipts of all joint purchases over the last five years, should you fancy a trip down memory lane. In the event that the pigment should take leave of either of your faces upon beholding the price of your coffee, there will be a small holdall of tubes and bottles containing the substances to simulate it. There will be somewhere you can store your wallet, glasses and smaller items of shopping. There may often be much else, but my point here is that there will also be a notepad full of lists of things you need to buy and jobs you need to complete, in addition to a pencil case or a single pen at the very least. So why, pray, did this opportunist in the library this morning not have one? She seemed very composed for one who had just been mugged. If I could face the notion that I had been well and truly defrauded, I might think she had intended to swipe my pen to equip her handbag to the highest expected standards.

It looks like I am going to have to regard this incident as a salutary lesson and have my wits about me when asked blindly to loan equipment out in the future. I’m going to have to write the whole business off, though not literally of course – because I don’t have a pen. Ah well. Just remember that, as the Chinese would say, 它是平等不信任每個人，也不信任任 何人.

Matthew Lazenby

2

JAMES JOYCE

EZRA POUND

T. S. ELIOT

WYNDHAM LEWIS

VIRGINIA WOOLF

ESSAYS

1922 Charles Eager

ARS It was, of course, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land; but of much more besides. Woolf published her third novel, Jacob's Room, the most modern of hers to date; it is considered a turning point in her career. This was also the year in which she read Ulysses, with famously mixed feelings, and in which she began, with unalloyed joy, her reading of Proust. She wrote to Roger Fry on 3 October of the year: My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? I'm only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses.

Nor was Woolf alone in her love for and adulation of Proust. E. M. Forster read him throughout the year as he worked on A Passage to India, finding himself both inspired by and somewhat in the shadow of the French author.

Proust died late in the year, on 18 November, at about half past five in the evening. Truly a light left the world at that time. He had been feeling that he was nearing the end by September and, rather than rest, threw himself into a fury of revision. In early November he supposedly remarked to his servant Céleste Albaret that 'November has come, November that took my Father'. The day after his death, Man Ray took his famous deathbed photograph of Proust and, on the 21st, the author's funeral was held at SaintPierre-de-Chaillot in Paris. He was awarded full military honours, had absolution pronounced by the Abbé, and Ravel's Pavane was played, which one imagines might well have pleased Proust. Joyce attended, as did Ford Maddox Ford who, inspired by the funeral, began work on Parade's End. It was a year both of declining and rising stars. F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and the Damned and Tales of the Jazz Age, the latter including 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'. E. E. Cummings published his first book, The Enormous Room, much liked by Fitzgerald, among others. Nabokov, in a year of affliction—his Father was assassinated in Berlin and he persevered with what would ultimately be a painfully unsuccessful engagement to Svetlana Siewert—prepared a Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland; reportedly it is a masterpiece. T. E. Lawrence—at this point established, but as a soldier rather than a writer, in which latter capacity he felt himself much the amateur—published his Seven Pillars of Wisdom privately in Oxford, restricted to a mere eight copies. Its public release would be some years later.

There was space, too, for older voices. A. E. Housman brought out his Last Poems in October of the year, while Yeats published his second autobiographical volume, The Trembling of the Veil, and had Later Poems and Plays in Prose and Verse published handsomely by Macmillan. He began drafts for A Vision in December, and had the curious honour of being elected to the Senate of the Irish Free State, which came painfully to birth during the year. He was also awarded a DLitt by Trinity College. Pound shared his Eighth Canto, but really spent most of the year writing articles, in addition to spearheading the 'bel esprit' project designed to liberate Eliot from his job at Lloyds bank. Much of Eliot's energy meanwhile went on The Criterion, whose first issue was released on 16 October, with The Waste Land at home within its pages.

There was much great poetical writing outside of English, too. Rilke began and completed the Sonnets to Orpheus early in the year and, in a stream of inspired composition, picked back up his neglected Duino Elegies. (Later in the year, Werner Reinhart would buy Rilke the Château de Muzot, making 1922 a good year for the poet.) In Russia Akhmatova published her Anno Domini MCMXXI. César Vallejo published Trilce in Peru and the great Brazilian poet Mário de Andrade released Paulicéia Desvairada. In the same year

ESSAYS | 1

de Andrade also spearheaded Brazil's 'Week of Modern Art', in which the works of the Brazilian avant-garde were featured and celebrated, the biggest name among whom was probably the great composer Villa-Lobos.

Perhaps the big commercial success of the literary year was Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt. It treats of a businessman plunged into an awareness of meaninglessness; the word Babbitt, used to describe such a man, quickly entered the parlance of the time, and can still occasionally be heard today. Sinclair's writing is elegant and beautiful, if his point in Babbitt not especially insightful. Another novel not well known now but lauded with prizes at the time was Lady into Fox by David Garnett; Woolf admired this novel too, writing to Garnett to say so; and it gets a mention in Brideshead Revisited. Its central idea of a marriage troubled by the wife's transformation into a fox ought to appeal to twenty-first-century, magical realist and fairytale tastes; but it is perhaps its somewhat overwrought style which now makes it seem rather old hat.

Further afield, Ryunosuke Akutagawa published his tale 'In a Bamboo Grove' in Shincho. Like so much literature of the time, it gave a 'modern' treatment to classic material, telling the same story—based on a folk tale—from numerous angles. To Europeans it is better known as the source for Kurosawa's film Rashomon, but the original ought to be read for its own considerable merits.

Lovecraft wrote his 'What the Moon Brings'. And it was a good year for the short story in Europe, too. Besides F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales, mentioned above, there was D. H. Lawrence's England, My England; and the dying Katherine Mansfield left the world The Garden Party and Other Stories. (D. H. Lawrence also completed his manuscript for Studies in Classic American Literature, in addition to finishing Kangaroo, a novel treating of his time in Australia.)

Nor was it a bad year for theatre. Brecht came to enthusiastic public attention with Baal and Der Trommeln in der Nacht.

Other important theatrical events of the year included Shaw's Methusaleh early in the year and, at its end, Cocteau's Antigone, together with Pirandello's Il Piacere dell'Onestà. Cocteau's piece featured sets painted by Picasso and costumes by Coco Chanel.

Eugene O'Neill received his second Pulitzer Prize, for Anna Christie, and Prague's Vinohrady Theatre saw, late in the year, the première of Karel Čapek's The Makropulos Case, which would inspire Janáček's opera of the same name a few years later.

Even if they were not published in 1922, a number of important or interesting works were begun or developed at the time.

Kafka, rather ill, began The Castle. Evelyn Waugh arrived for the first time in Oxford, an association that would bear much fruit later on. Hemingway, busy with journalism—which included two 1922 interviews with Mussolini—found and refined his 'telegraphese' style, particularly, it is said, at the Genoa conference in April. Wittgenstein worked throughout the year on his English translation of the Tractatus. Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church on 30 July, an event which he called the 'chief event' of his life. Pound was working on his Villon opera. (Jean Hugo later recalled Cocteau laughing at Pound's recitation of some of its extracts in January 1922. Indeed, his gifts were perhaps not best expressed through opera.)

It may have been the annus mirabilis of high modernism, but it was also one for children's literature. 1922 saw the publication of The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, Doctor Doolittle by Hugh Lofton, Child Whispers by Enid Blyton, and Just William

by Richmal Crompton. Nor was it a bad year for popular literature. Agatha Christie published her second novel, The Secret Adversary; P. G. Wodehouse published The Clicking of Cuthbert; and The Reader's Digest was born.

The year was perhaps as impressive for the still-young art of cinema. Probably 1922's greatest masterpiece was F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu. Hitchcock's first feature film, Number 13, was released; and the year also saw the first ever highly successful featurelength documentary film, Nanook of the North. Its beauty and ostensible simplicity are still affecting a century later. The great commercial successes were Rudolph Valentino's Blood and Sand, Douglas Fairbanks' Robin Hood, Frank Lloyd's Oliver Twist, and Tess of the Storm Country, starring Mary Pickford. Benjamin Christensen made and released his peculiar film about witchcraft, Häxan. The Toll of the Sea, an adaptation of the Madama Butterfly story, experimented with the two-tone technicolour process. The year also enjoyed the Biblical drama Salomé, featuring the dancing of Alla Nazimova. And, although Eisenstein was yet to make a film, he wrote an intriguing essay on cinema for the journal Ekko entitled 'The Eighth Art'.

The big comedians were doing well, too. Charlie Chaplin released his last 'two-reeler' for First National, Pay Day, after which he would set up and operate independently through United Artists. Late in the year he began shooting A Woman of Paris. This, released in 1923, would be a feature-length drama well-received by critics; however, Chaplin was to some extent already a victim of ESSAYS | 2

his own success, since crowds wanted the tramp rather than his serious work. Meanwhile Harold Lloyd released Grandma's Boy and Dr Jack, both successful five-reelers, and Buster Keaton released six two-reelers.

Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse, der Spieler, a four-and-a-half-hour film in two parts, each divided into some six acts, is probably the most ambitious film in terms of timescale of the year. But, for all Mabuse's scale and subdivision, it is not unwieldy. It is in fact a good rollicking crime story—Hitchcock before Hitchcock—with an ending lifted from Richard III. The film's first part is subtitled Ein Bild der Zeit. It is an accurate title. 'Kokain oder Karten?' the film's state inspector protagonist is asked upon infiltrating an underground club. The same character is later invited (and refuses to go) to a spiritualist evening, at which the titular psychoanalyst Mabuse waxes about 'der Willen zur Macht!'. Such interests seem to sum up much of the nightlife in western European cities at the time, and at least a part of their worldview.

If it was a time for the flowering of cinema, it was also one of those periods, like 1969 or 2017, when the dream factories show their darker side. There was the infamous Fatty Arbuckle scandal of 1921, which duly left the comedian's career in ruins. His reputation has never recovered. Then, as if to make Hollywood seem worse, William Desmond Taylor was murdered on its streets in early February of 1922. These scandals led, inevitably, to a crisis in public relations and indirectly to the rise of Will H. Hays. For better or worse, his Hays Code would go on to influence Hollywood's output profoundly and for decades.

Though less sensational than the above killings, Rudolph Valentino entered in May into a hasty marriage which led him straight into scandal, given that he was already legally attached to someone else. Then there was Germany. Fritz Lang wished in Mabuse to show 'a picture of the times'; but he showed it in his personal life as well. In 1921 or 22—sources differ—Lang's wife Lisa Rosenthal caught him in the embraces of his collaborator Thea von Harbou. The former promptly went to the upper room and shot herself in the chest—a difficult manner of self-execution which raised questions at the time, and has done so since. Lang would marry von Harbou on 26 August 1922. Although a popular couple in Berlin, the spark faded quickly. Von Harbou would later quip that 'we were married for eleven years because for the first ten we hadn't the time to get a divorce.'

While cinema was flourishing, radio was born. 9 January saw the first 'broadcast', as opposed to the 'narrow-casting' which had been ubiquitous until that time in the field of communications. On 11 May the Marconi Company would begin broadcasting; and on 18 October the British Broadcasting Company was born. It would become a 'Corporation', rather than a 'Company', in 1927.

Their broadcasts began in November, and on 14 December John Reith accepted the job of General Manager despite, in his own words, knowing nothing about broadcasting. (Though nothing to do with radios, 1922 brought another famous British company into being: the Swallow Sidecar Company, better known by its later name, Jaguar.) Radio Moscow was also launched.

It was a fine year for music, particularly for jazz. Like cinema, its youth seemed to lend it great energy. Bix Beiderbecke was expelled from his school for sneaking out to attend concerts late at night; the move promptly launched him on to his own glittering career. Perhaps even more important, however, was the rise of Louis Armstrong, who in August joined King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band at a comfortable $52 a week in Chicago, altering the course of music history.

The achievements in the field of classical music were perhaps somewhat more modest, though not at all bad. Ralph Vaughan Williams premièred his Pastoral Symphony in January of 1922 and his Mass in G Minor in December. On 28 August, Gershwin premièred Blue Monday Blues, later retitled 135th Street. Although it was a flop, Gershwin's meeting and collaboration with Paul Whiteman set the composer up for later successes. Hindemith also saw his career bloom. Stravinsky premièred Le Renard on 18 May, later that night going to the famous dinner party thrown by Sidney Schiff, at which Proust and Joyce were to meet and find little to speak about—besides their health problems. The composer also premièred his Mavra in June.

De Falla and Lorca worked throughout the year on their idea of cante jondo. Lorca also got to know, at the Residencia de Estudiantes (or 'Resi' to its students) Dalí and Buñuel; Dalí's beautiful Sueños noctambulos comes from this time, and perhaps conveys something of the friendship and the 'gaudeamus' spirit of their student days.

Architecture enjoyed a notable achievement, too. In the summer Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel had its official opening in Tokyo. Even if it was not completely finished, it was overdue and overbudget; indeed, it was completed by Irato Endo after

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Wright's sacking. It is quite an attractive building, in 'Mayan Revival' style; and its 'cantilever system', designed to protect the building from earthquakes, apparently allowed it to survive the earthquake of 1923.

As for the pictorial arts, 1922 saw, in February and March, an important exhibition for Matisse. In July, Kandinsky was appointed to the staff of the Bauhaus. And Picasso, after a health scare with his wife Olga, painted, one imagines in solemn mood, Women Running on the Beach. It is a piece he himself held in great affection; and it joined his small collection of paintings that he refused to sell.

INTELLECTUS You English intellectuals will be the death of us all!

—Ambassador to Drayton in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Artistically it was a lively time. But the art is overwhelmingly one of crisis. Modernism was an urbane movement; it was tragic in character. If a genre suffered in the twentieth century, it was the pastoral; and, if Joyce was nearly alone among contemporaries in writing a grand comedy, it was one shot through with darkness. There was a consistent preoccupation among the intellectual class with 'civilisation' in general and its more particular manifestation in cities. One of The Waste Land's simplest and most resonant moments is its oracular catalogue of them: Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal

Similarly, the last words of Ulysses are not Molly Bloom's streams of yeses but Joyce's inscription Trieste–Zurich–Paris, 1914–1921.

As the passage from Eliot suggests, the concern was always that 'civilisation' might not survive. The concept of 'civilisation'—more often assumed than defined or questioned—developed over the nineteenth century, during which Roman models served as the substance of political and humanistic education, and therefore came to define the frontiers of the general imagination. Rome became an intellectual framework through which to view contemporary history. This was so even if Gibbon recommended the avoidance of such loosely analogical thinking.

Indeed, while historians such as Pliny and Tacitus were important, perhaps none was more so than Gibbon who, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had described a tragic trajectory, but who had done so from a happier age. The intellectual life of the eighteenth century was, overall, comedic in character. It was from the felicity of that time that Gibbon could write of his confidence that what had befallen Rome would not recur in the case of modern western civilisation. But the haunting title and focal idea chosen

by Gibbon came to resonate ever more ominously in the nineteenth-century (particularly British) imagination—one much more given to anxiety than that of the century before. Even if things were going well for Victorian Britain, there was an underlying sense that the parade would have to end.

It was a sort of anxious confidence. There was still a feeling of British and or Western exceptionalism, and it is hard to say when confidence failed and anxiety gained the upper hand. The sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912, such a symbolic ship in itself, was a suggestion or a foreshadowing. A decade later, the Washington Naval Conference (November 1921–February 1922) would mark, both in practice and in symbol, the transference of world naval power from Britain to the United States. It is also easy, even inevitable, ESSAYS | 4

to reach for the Great War. The terms 'prewar' and 'postwar', used to describe cultural change, were and are too convenient; but it was that convenience that originally brought the terms into such widespread and assertive use. The prewar period attracted evocative names: 'The Gilded Age', 'la belle époque', 'the Wilhelmine era'. In Britain in particular, there came to be a myth of prewar confidence and postwar cowedness. The war challenged assumptions concerning the 'progress' of civilisation—and concerning war itself. To the nineteenth-century mind, war had been merely an arm of foreign policy and imperialism, albeit an important one; it was a tool and an expedient. The bleaker and more shambolic aspects of the Great War, however, changed this conception. The change in episteme more or less remains with us today.

But, even after the disasters of the First World War, civilisation had not collapsed. This strange fact led to decades of talks and publications speculating on symptoms and causes, results of and predictions relating to the 'disease' or 'illness' of modern western civilisation. Indeed, there was much medicalisation of language. Albert Schweitzer released in 1923 his The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, a writing up of lectures delivered in Oxford throughout 1922. Lothrop Stoddard entertained a racial pessimism which was popular enough to make his major book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man go through four impressions in a year in London. Meanwhile Ferdinand C. Schiller offered an intellectual pessimism in his Tantalus. Most famously, there was Spengler, whose second volume of The Decline of the West came out in English in 1922. Although his theories and generalisations were poorly received in academic circles, he enjoyed enormous popular success, which endured some way into the twentieth century; there are vestiges of its thinking about even today. He was more popular in the theory-loving mainland of Europe than in Britain, with its empirical tradition; but he did well enough in the latter, too. Patently there was a hunger for a grand, allaccounting theoretical explanation—and even for prophecy.

There was enormous energy in the air and, as always in energetic epochs, great misuse thereof. There were anxieties on the part of prognosticators about the future of the 'race' (a term with a somewhat different sense, or at least emphasis, at the time from what we mean by the word today). The anxiety was best summed up by Lloyd George who, with the abrasive brevity of the politician, said that one can't run an A1 Empire with a C3 population. (This terse scheme of evaluation came from military contexts, where it was used for assessing the physical attributes of recruits.) This led to the birth control movement, spearheaded by Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, and its corollary, eugenics. They are interesting women. Sanger was a paramour of H. G. Wells who first came to England while on the run from New York, where she ran the risk of arrest for the distribution of immoral literature. Stopes, meanwhile, stopped speaking to her son when he decided to marry a woman with glasses, whom she considered therefore to be genetically inferior. To read about their groups' fervour for racial improvement does rather turn the twenty-first-century, instinctively egalitarian stomach. But at the time the set enjoyed great success. Although the Malthusian League had been founded in 1877, eugenics boomed after the Great War. Luminaries of the eugenics movement included big names, such as John Maynard Keynes, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley, Cyril Burt (pioneer of intelligence tests for schoolchildren), George Bernard Shaw, and even the Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral, W. R. Inge (who ought have known better). To go into the complexities of the various radical beliefs which circulated in such a group, from compulsory sterilisation to the 'lethal chamber' proposed by Arnold White in 1901, requires more space than possible here; but it is instructive reading, much to be sought out.

There was also psychoanalysis, which at the time was really two distinct things. First of all, there was the fledgling 'science'; then there was its extension. This was common in a scientistic age. The success of science—an achievement of what intellectuals at the time termed 'civilisation'—worked an ironic effect. As said above, vocabularies of disease and decay were routinely and often uncritically applied by metaphor to nonscientific questions, such as that of the survival of civilisation. In the case of psychoanalysis, what was originally a method of psychological treatment for persons became a theoretical framework through which the entirety of civilisation could be diagnosed and, some hoped, treated. The development of 'civilisational psychoanalysis' from its original therapeutic version was gradual, but perhaps no publication marks it so aptly as Freud's pamphlet, Civilisation and its Discontents, released towards the end of the twenties. Its German title was Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which Ernest Jones thought might best be translated as the 'Dis-ease of Civilisation'.

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In Britain in particular psychoanalysis thrived thanks to Ernest Jones. He was so enthusiastic that even Freud himself found him off-putting when they first met. This was not helped by rumours of Jones' misconduct, which led to his changing institutions once or twice. After agreeing to some psychoanalysis himself, however, he seemed fit and ready to go. Big business was afoot. In 1913 Jones formed the London Psycho-Analytical Society, under his presidency. There were disagreements and schisms and in 1919 the society was replaced by the British Psycho-Analytical Society. A string of organisations and journals culminated in 1926 with the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis. It did very well. 'Cometh the hour, cometh the notion'. Psychoanalysis soared in the twenties with the demand for the treatment of shell-shock. And there was a thirst, again, for theoretical ways of accounting for the sense of crisis in civilisation. Routledge and Kegan Paul saw voluminous sales of books of psychology in the twenties. Titles included The Technique of Psycho-Analysis (1921) and the popular Outwitting Our Nerves (1922, on to a seventh edition by 1947), which latter sounds as though it could be useful to the people of 2022, too. 1922 saw the publication of Freud's Totem and Taboo and of Jung's theory of 'introverted' and 'extraverted' personality types, which has since entered popular parlance, where it has a decidedly firm place today.

Allen and Unwin, Freud's English publishers in the twenties, were similarly doing well—until a rift with Freud and Jones led to the future publication of Freud's works by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press. This was owing to Stanley Unwin's decision to publish Adolf Wohlgemuth's A Critical Examination of Psycho-Analysis. Wohlgemuth's principal criticism of Freud was that he did not use the scientific method but rather loose analogy. Indeed, Freud was always closer to being a poet—a dark and complex maker—than a scientist. There were other criticisms from the medical establishment. Both Wohlgemuth and William Brown (of Bethlem Hospital) had great distrust for the supposedly therapeutic treatments offered by psychoanalysis, in which patients were made, as Brown said, 'very suggestible' thanks to an environment which put them in a state marked by 'passivity, receptivity and lack of criticism'. With such strange proliferations of ideas as John Rickman's that photography was a 'pseudo-perversion', one Dr J. S. Manson of the British Medical Association, echoing W. H. R. Rivers—loved by Sassoon and Graves (vide Pat Barker's Regeneration) and who had died suddenly in 1922, to widespread grief—was moved to say that, thanks to the sexual preoccupations of psychoanalysts, the discipline amounted more to a 'contribution to pornography' than to medical science. The British Medical Association were also sceptical about the unconscious. Was it useful to consider a separate conscious and unconscious? Was it true? Wohlgemuth considered the unconscious a 'dangerous term', and another member of the association poked fun at the idea, calling it a sort of 'lost property office of the mind'.

But for now these critical voices were drowned by the wave of popular interest, even if they would prevail later in the century.

Freud himself wrote in his article on psychoanalysis for the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he thought the unconscious would finally be the most enduring and useful contribution made by his discipline. In a sense, he was correct. The idea that the human person was not the purely rational being imagined by the Enlightenment and happily subscribed to by much of the nineteenth century was one of the great cultural, epistemic ruptures of the early twentieth century. And, needless to add, the unconscious is routinely invoked today, albeit chiefly as a useful metaphor rather than as a part of creation in which we really believe.

The popularity of psychoanalysis was strange, however, since its literature generally pretended to a dry, technical style replete with complex ideas; and its Freudian version was greatly pessimistic. Indeed, Jung criticised this in Freud, remarking that his old mentor was influenced to too great an extent by the Zeitgeist, which rendered him preoccupied with finding the 'sick man'. He contrasted this with his own interest in finding what was 'healthy and sound' in civilised man. But this popularity and so much else suggest a widespread appetite for pessimism.

There was much fretting over the death of capitalism. Marxists and socialists felt vindicated as early as the General Strike of 1926, even before the Wall Street Crash, in their claims that capitalism was unsustainable. In the end, the capitalist system would prove robust, but it did not seem obvious at the time; and there was, as today, much opposition to it on moral grounds. Then there was pessimism about another war. Three-time Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin asked rhetorically in a 1927 speech, 'who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West, and the civilisation of the ages will fall with as great a crash as that of Rome?'. War— and its corollary, the collapse of civilisation—seemed a bleak inevitability. Again, Rome became the model both for success and for failure. Some on the left considered war to be a logical consequence of capitalism; and other intellectuals described the uncomfortable ESSAYS | 6

picture of 'determinist war', resulting from economic necessity. Lay Darwinists, taking careful science and applying it outside of its field, saw war as a result of biological laws. A notorious statement of this was made in 1912 by the Prussian General Friedrich von Bernhardi in a book translated into English in 1914 as Germany and the Next War. Sounding like Edmond in King Lear, the General wrote that there was a 'universal economy of Nature' in which war played a necessary and regulative part; the result of this is that, in this economy, the weak will perish and the strong prevail.

This 'morbid age', as a noted historian has called it in a book of the same name, might have seemed strange to the man on the street at the time, who, by the 1930s, could afford a car, a radio, a holiday, and his own house. And indeed another version of this history can be told in books such as Martin Pugh's We Danced All Night. But the morbid view was certainly and preeminently one that pertained to the intellectual background of the time. It was a view of theorists and speculators. They are a type. And, for all that such people could be often dreadfully and drastically wrong, their uncritical self-approval and energetic self-promotion led to a robust base from which they were able to shape the future in profound ways. It was a time, according to L. P. Jacks, the editor of The Hibbert Journal, during which Jeremiah had 'become a bestseller'. But we need to recall that Jeremiah sits, in our modern Bibles, near to the Book of Consolation, which says the Lord will have mercy on Zion, will have mercy on all her ruins; he will make her desert like Eden and her wastelands like a garden of the Lord. (Isaiah, 51. 3)

MUNDUS The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.

—Sir Edward Grey, 3rd August 1914

On 17 December 1922, Count Harry Kessler visited London for the first time since before the Great War. He noted in his diary that there was no longer the astounding amount of bustle and luxury as in 1914 and which was still to be found in Paris. It could be sensed that the country had become poorer and the shoppers rarer.

There is much to be said about Kessler's observation, but the contrast between London and Paris gives a point of departure. Indeed, it is platitudinous to remark on the centrality of Paris to the world of 1922—and particularly of 'Paris' navel', as it was called at the time, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, which summed up, as single places often do, so much of the cultural thrill and drama of the era. It was here that the creatives of the time could live out their dreams of artistic life—largely inspired by Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851), which also inspired Puccini's opera—prior to their own inevitable acceptance of convention as they themselves became the norm. But, as the date of Murger's Scènes suggests, there was a distance between London and Paris (and the continent) before the war, too. Indeed, there was a prewar efflorescence of culture across the continent, especially in its major cities. But London was the exception: it seemed a city more fixed on flourishing trade and economic growth. This is another cliché, but it has some truth.

The Bank of England held the stability of the world economy in its refusal (after the significant influx of South African gold between 1897 and 1898) either to build up its gold reserves or to diminish them. There was an air of global agreement on the gold standard which acknowledged the City of London as the centre of things—even if the economies of North America and Germany were growing fast and beginning to catch up. If, before the war, Paris stood for culture and London for commerce, then afterwards Paris remained the same while London was being, for all its relative cautiousness in the era, slowly undone and the world order changed.

Death is a great catalyst. The enormous numbers of war dead meant that European countries lost significant swathes of their populations (generally about 11–16%); and the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 took more. Then there were the wounded and disabled, ESSAYS | 7

who outnumbered those killed, and the lands themselves, the scars of the Western Front in Belgium and north-eastern France, and, even worse, the land in eastern Europe, where fighting had not had the confinement of trench warfare, and where scorched-earth policies and mass deportations had played a routine part in the war. The war also increased the presence of the state throughout Europe. This included the growth of state apparatus and bureaucracy as well as of state surveillance, coercion, and repression.

Furthermore, there was great state spending on, for example, the mass production of arms, research into weapons technology, welfare for war widows, and management of public opinion (propaganda) and of public knowledge (the press). There was new and extended taxation on the citizenry.

The economic cost was enormous. In 1922, Britain's national debt to the United States stood at $4.5 billion, ensuring the former's enduring reliance on American credit. The same was true, though to a greater extent, for the rest of Europe. Austria had the unenviable situation of being indebted to Germany. The world of postwar debt seemed to make such works as The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe, 1905) prophetic. It is intriguing that this delightful comic operetta—albeit with a melancholic undertow—was a favourite of Adolf Hitler's. If there were a good production available, it would well be worth the watching today. Perhaps the 1934 film is the best place to start. The story concerns the small ruritanian country of Pontevedro, which has accrued so much debt that the state is to go bankrupt if the titular merry widow, Hanna Glawari, who has inherited the larger part of the state's wealth from her recently deceased husband, marries a foreigner. The statesmen flock to solve the problem. Her old flame, the Pontevedrin Count Danilo Danilovitsch, is just the man. In the end, Pontevedro gets through the crisis by the skin of its teeth.

After the war, inflation was considerable everywhere, the most famous case being the hyperinflation which afflicted Germany.

The country had worked during the war on the assumption that it would be victorious, and therefore that it would be able to recoup its wartime costs from the countries it had defeated. The gamble was mistaken. The war had been funded through domestic loans, and so the country saw itself with huge public debt. Inflation offered the way out. At first, this worked well. Germany seemed to recover better than Britain, France, and America, with their policies of deflation. But inflation ran out of control in the early twenties, and the French occupation of the Ruhr industrial heartlands in January 1923 precipitated the disaster. The 1929 Wall Street Crash, which caused America to call in short-term loans—which Germany had been using for long-term building projects—deepened the country's financial trouble. Poland, sat between the Communist world and Germany, likewise suffered. Like Germany, it saw massive inflation, ruining entire life savings in a short space of time. There was extensive unemployment relief, and the eastern part of the country faced starvation. The country had been occupied by various armies and much had been destroyed in the Russian retreat of 1915. Nor was its political situation stable: Gabriel Narutowicz, for example, became President on 9 December and was assassinated on the 16th.

Indeed, the political tension of the times can be seen in miniature by surveying the year's assassinations. In Berlin, on 28 March, Nabokov's father was assassinated. Then, in the same city, Walter Rathenau was killed on 24 June. The event was seismic, for a single murder. It is said that his fate was sealed in April when the Treaty of Rapallo was signed, which registered the Weimar Republic's recognition of the Soviet regime and, naturally, speculations about German-Soviet alliances abounded. Bonhoeffer witnessed the murder, and Einstein was so appalled by it that he left Germany, later saying, in the measured language of the scientist, 'After the Rathenau murder, I very much welcomed the opportunity of a long absence from Germany, which took me away from temporarily increased danger'. Another political murder came in June, just two days before that of Rathenau, when the British Field Marshall Henry Hughes Wilson was killed by Irishmen Reginald Dunne and Joseph O'Sullivan, on the orders of Michael Collins. Collins was himself assassinated in August of the same year.

Meanwhile the German situation grew bleaker later in the year with what the Nazis redescribed as 'The Battle of Coburg', but which was really a thuggish riot. An addition to the sense of the country's—and continent's—turbulence was made by the collapse of the Soviet Republic of Saxony, a mere nine days after the events in Coburg.

The Devil had much ado. While the Great War created many pacifists, they remained a minority. Most were not as idealistic as that, but did prefer peace and would only go to war again reluctantly if need be. But there was a significant presence of those who glorified violence, seeing it as the solution, for instance, to the manifold disappointments of postwar life or to the problems of the ESSAYS | 8

Red Terror. Bolshevism and the fear of Bolshevism were rife and in conflict. The Industrial Revolution had left a patchwork Europe of highly developed cities and impoverished agricultural areas, a sense of scission between peoples and classes within states, and therefore simmering class hatred. When the situation exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was global consternation, but preeminently and understandably among the élite, the middle classes, and the landed peasantry. It is a cruel prank of Fate that their fears were played to by far-right propaganda. Generally at this time, right-leaning, Nationalist politics were seen as less pernicious than those that lent too much to the left. Thus Soviet communism worked to the advantage of the far-right movements of the 20s and 30s in that, even though the Russian experiment proved exactly unrepeatable elsewhere, it nevertheless worked to split the left, its extreme end being cut off from the centre. Its weakening resulted in a vacuum of competing factions who, unable to hold together, could offer no robust opposition to the rise of the right.

The categories of 'communist', 'socialist', and 'Jew' were rarely distinguished; musings about conspiracies abounded. Who can forget the excellent sending up of this tendency in The Great Gatsby in the person of Tom Buchanan when he embarks on an irrelevant, nearly rampaging excursus on The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard? (The Goddard to whom Tom Buchanan refers is Fitzgerald's parody of Lothrop Stoddard, mentioned above.) Ulysses' Mr Deasy furnishes another similar example. The worst result of this sort of thinking—for the time being—happened in Ukraine, where some 1,300 pogroms took the lives of 50–60,000 Jews.

Germany and Austria were, for now, free of such purges, but were not immune to the poison in the political atmosphere; and purges took place elsewhere, including in Hungary and in democratic Czechoslovakia. There was widespread killing—mostly between left and right—in a roughly cruciform shape, between Eastern Germany and Western Russia, and between the Baltic and the Balkans.

Rudolf Höß, who would later become commandant of Auschwitz, remembered the killings in the Baltic as worse than anything he had seen in the Great War. After 1923, things grew quieter; but the offenders, rather than retire, went underground, finding their way into violent organisations.

In the South of Europe there was the unhappy rise of Mussolini and the creation of fascist Italy, which really came to birth in 1922. Italy had suffered terribly in the Great War, particularly at Caporetto. The country had felt hard done by during the postwar signing of treaties. The war had cost them an enormous amount and brought them nothing. This aura of disappointment created ample opportunity for extreme politics, both left and right, with the latter carrying the day in 1922. Early in the year, Mussolini and 15,000 young fascists descended on 'red' Bologna. In July a general strike against fascist violence ensued, but it was quickly and summarily beaten down. Things culminated on 28th October with the March on Rome; and on the 29th Mussolini was invited by King Vittorio Emanuele III to form a government. The one that had been in place was so weak that it crumbled in the face of the March. The fascists topped the year off with a violent spree in Torino, targeted mainly at the left, in late December. Another curious event in 1922 consists of the defenestration of D'Annunzio—whether by himself, or someone else, or by the will of a higher power seems to be unknown. The accident (if that is the word) would ensure his inactivity in the noontime of fascist Italy which he did so much to generate, even if only through symbolic gestures and plentiful talking. In 1923 Spain, for now not quite so radical a country, would establish a military dictatorship.

The Greco-Turkish war also grew to a painful close late in 1922, culminating in the expulsion of King Constantine I from Greece and the mass movement of about 2 million Turks and Greeks from one territory to the other, among the largest migrations in history at that time. At the start of November, the Ottoman Empire fell, to be replaced by the Turkish Republic. It was headed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who had commanded the Turkish armies during the war. The affair included the bleak episode of the massacre of Greeks and Armenians by the Turks in Smyrna in September. Along with its great fire, the episode took perhaps around 100,000 lives. There is perhaps a trace of the disaster in The Waste Land's 'Smyrna merchant'.

The violence was also in Ireland. 1922 saw, as said above, the birth of the Irish Free State. But it did not stop the civil war there, or the brutal antics of the 'Black and Tans'. Even Nora Joyce and her children were caught up in a shooting in Galway, though not of course killed. As mentioned above, political instability increased when Michael Collins was killed in an ambush on 22 August, which happened just after the president, Arthur Griffith, had died—unexpectedly young, though in apparently unsuspicious circumstances—on the 12th.

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Things in Russia were bleak, too. What western Europeans think of as the Great War segued for the Russians into the Civil War of 1917. Over its course some seven million would lose their lives. 1922 was busy: it was the year in which Stalin accrued power to himself, becoming General Secretary, whilst Lenin suffered several strokes and came gradually towards the end of his life. He retained the energy to declare 'merciless war' on the clergy, in addition to the kulaks, whom he had targeted in 1918: 'the more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we manage to shoot, the better,' he said. The kulaks he called 'bloodsuckers' and 'leeches', recommending 'death to them all'. The Fates would cut his thread of life in 1924. In the meantime, tensions and hostility between Lenin and Stalin grew ever plainer. The year also saw the infamous famine on the Volga river. Bad harvests and Communist policies combined to create horrendous conditions; reportedly 5 million people perished, even despite attempts at assistance from the American Relief Administration, which Herbert Hoover had sent in response to Maxim Gorky's western press letter, 'To All Honest People', which detailed the miseries of the Russian people.

The insecurity of borders in the East of Europe made sure that the Treaty of Versailles would be fraught with contentions and difficulties. The Treaties of Versailles and Trianon were well-intentioned but faced insurmountable difficulties, especially when it came to the division of territories. Four empires had collapsed or would—that of Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the German—and left or were to leave awkward changes in their wake. Ten new nation states came into being, all (save Austria) with oddly displaced ethnic minorities. Three million Germans now lived in Czechoslovakia; three-and-a-half million Hungarians in Romania. It was like Ovid's flood, with dolphins swimming through trees. The Treaty also led to the high-minded but finally ineffective League of Nations. Much was made of Woodrow Wilson's ideal of 'self-determination'; but this meant different things to different people. (It had originally been a Bolshevik concept.) Germany suffered the loss of its territorial and military power as well as the humiliation of reparations, which were justified by the War Guilt Clause. The sum was high, but ultimately payable; but these bitterer aspects of the Treaty showed a failure of forgiveness, and a lack of recognition of mutual wrongdoing. They would enduringly poison German political life.

As this tour draws to a close, a narrow view is best. The newspapers of 1922 saw a few scandals, beyond those already mentioned. Firstly, in February, Henri Désiré Landru was guillotined, having been found guilty of eleven counts of murder. In April, at Piccadilly Circus, Martin Bateson shot himself in broad daylight; he was 22. Then there was the Hall-Mills murder case in America, which entertained many a reader with its mixture of mystery, morbidity, romance, and intrigue. In Britain, towards the end of the year, Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson, who had been having an affair which culminated in the apparently accidental killing of Thompson's husband, were sentenced to death. Something about this—the scandal, the harshness of the sentence, particularly towards Edith, the grizzliness of the circumstances surrounding her execution (which led the hangman, John Ellis, later to take his own life)—captured the imagination of the British public. Joyce was among those many who felt the sentence unduly harsh on Edith Thompson, while Eliot wrote to the Daily Mail applauding them for taking the unpopular, unsentimental line and condemning her.

There was also a lamentable natural disaster in the Shantou typhoon, which killed tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000.

Finally, a happier piece of news came in November, when Howard Carter's archeological team discovered and entered the tomb of Tutankhamen; it triggered years of 'Tutmania'.

Recommended Books Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939 (London, 2016) – primary historical research of the very first rate; there are just some minor stylistic flaws.

Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One (New York, 2012) – an exuberant book, but somewhat rash and irresponsible when it comes to details. Spirited reading.

Sir Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914–1949 (London, 2015) – a masterful survey; it just lacks notes thanks to the rules of the Penguin History of Europe series to which it belongs.

The above essay contains no original research; it is much indebted these fine volumes.

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The swirling vortex Wyndham lewis' blast in context Edwin Black

The Bodley Head was a publishing house used to controversy. In the 1890s it had played host to some of the most eye-raising, experimental, and downright taboo literary works of the decade. Oscar Wilde found his literary home there, and Aubrey Beardsley pushed the boundaries of the pre-Raphaelites into the realm of lurid illustration under the Head’s auspices, his Yellow Book aiding to define the aesthetic of the fin de siècle in our cultural zeitgeist. The man in charge was John Lane, a founding member of the company who had steered it through its avant-garde period. One day in 1914, Lane entered his office and sat at his desk. In his daily correspondence was a letter written by a young artist who had been making a name for himself in London’s art scene over the past few years.

Wyndham Lewis had been living in London since 1908. In that time he had been busily writing satirical pieces, as well as producing artwork that would come to define his visual style. It would be his friend Ezra Pound who would dub this style as “vorticism”, an artistic philosophy that contrasted greatly with the dominant Glasgow School and latter day art nouveau. Instead of the organic contours and muted colours that typified them, Lewis took to experimenting with simpler forms, jagged lines, and wild uses of colour. His figures lack the gentleness present in Mucha, the organic in Picasso, and instead revels in angular features, bodies that have been sculpted from concrete and painted over. In his prose works such as Tarr and The Wild Body it is made apparent that these figures were ones that populated his imagination, hanging back in the desolate social gatherings and contorting themselves in their physicality to make themselves as inhuman as their all too human forms could allow. By 1913 Lewis had established himself as an enfant terrible, a man who chose to live in a world of aggression and violence, all the in the cause of rebellion against the prior century’s emotionalism.

The London art scene was a hive of activity, innovation, and experimentation. Various groups were working simultaneously, reflecting the increasing cult of dynamism that was gripping the tail end of the belle epoque and would come to mark the Machine Age. With the arrival of the futurist FT Marinetti on a mission to spread his artistic creed to the nation with his ally, the future war artist Christopher Nevinson, came a fierce reaction. Rebel artists were both emboldened and threatened. The conservative world of cliques, clubs, and cohorts that made up the English art and literary world suddenly found itself in the midst of an uproar that only the avant-garde could provide. In the pages of the arts journal The New Age there are the remains of a vast battlefield of a culture war where the players range from the academe to a reactionary movement that was yet to find a name for itself. The artists in Lewis’ immediate circle came together and formed the London Group. The group initially included the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; the painters Kate Lechmere, Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth, as well as Nevinson, and came about from a dispute over a commission taken by the Omega Workshops. Between them, the Vortex began to stir.

In matters of history it is often impossible to pinpoint the precise moment in which events begin. However, it seems that the years of arguing in the pages of The New Age come to a head in a letter dated April 2nd 1914. The tone of the letter is best described as a weary, sardonic, exasperation toward its resident critics on Lewis’ part: We all admire Mr Sickert’s go, sense of fun, etc. very much. But I thought I would state publicly, for those who have been taken in or mystified by the proceedings in last week’s New Age, that it [NA] was not a real policeman. . . but only a genial malefactor, not from Kaepernick this time, but from Camden Town.

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It is clear that the London Group had finally come to recognise that the periodical that they all read and engaged with was stifling – that they had to carve out their own niche.

The Rebel Art Centre, from where Blast would be published and distributed, was founded in the Spring of 1914 at 38 Great Ormond Street. Like the Omega Workshops it would be a place for like-minded artists to come together and exhibit their work.

Lectures were to be given, demonstrations performed. In reality, it was deeply dysfunctional. Lewis was a reclusive character, keeping his paintings in a secret room so as to stop others from, potentially, stealing his work. There were two students who, allegedly, were not promising. One story tells of a female student who approached the Centre with some erotic pieces she would not allow Lechmere to view, leading to Lewis having to do so in a locked room. Nevinson managed to organise a talk by Marinetti there, only to cause a rift between himself and Lewis when he attached the Centre to the futurist movement. Though the former may have contributed the name of the journal he was excluded from it in its entirety. Ezra Pound also organised a talk by Ford Madox Hueffer on the topic of contemporary poetry, prefiguring both of their contributions to Blast. The Centre itself only lasted three months. The First World War stomped upon it, as it would all else. Whether it would have survived if War had not broken out, however, is impossible to say.

Work on Blast began in earnest. One of the letters Lewis writes in this period was sent to a subeditor for the Illustrated London News by the name of Alick Schepeler, where he states, ‘It is an awful business to get it out. I am not a business man, despite John [Augustus] twitting and my (alas!) political activity.’ Political activity or no political activity, this was a busy time. Lewis had to gather individuals from outside his immediate circle, making his friendship to Pound invaluable. Pound had been making his way through London’s literati just as Lewis had been the artistic circles, making his list of contacts long and varied. Through Pound, Lewis made contact with such as the radical feminist Rebecca West. Others, such as Hueffer and the other vorticists of the Rebel Art Centre, were easily contactable and ready to contribute. With a full page advertisement included in The Egoist, the eyes of the wider art scene watching, and monetary contributions made by Lechmere and Lewis’ mother, all that remained was for Blast to be released from the printer Leveridge and Co. What must be understood is that Blast is an objet d’art in and of itself and, as a result, the aesthetics of it are striking. The first thing to greet the viewer is the cover. At once subtle and vulgar, it is a shockingly bright magenta emblazoned with the word “blast.”

It is less an explosion but, rather, more akin to the colourful display in one’s vision that occurs when the surface of the eye is scarred by a bright light, reducing the bold Arial font to a shadow. Far from the sedate covers of the likes of The Strand or the newspapers, Blast cannot help but draw attention to itself with its silent onomatopoeia. Even from this initial display, the futurist influence cannot be denied. The bombast continues to the flyleaf which decrees that we are about to enter a “review of the Great English Vortex.” The layout is reminiscent of theatrical playbills. With a turn of the page the Ariel gives way to a stylised variation of Times New Roman, the serifs and voids between the component parts of individual letters (Such as that in the lowercase “i”) often bleeding into each other to create a font that is every bit as hostile as the content. Here in the Vortex these graphical errors add to the dynamism, in that this publication simply had to be rushed off the press as soon as possible, and chaos, giving the one the impression that every inadvertent ink splatter or typographical error is another piece of detritus that has been swept aside.

Outside of the typographical are the illustrations that pepper the work. Contributed by Wadsworth, Etchells, Epstein, Brzeska, W. Roberts, Cuthbert Hamilton, Spencer Gore, and Lewis himself, they are at once alien and familiar, masses of lines and geometry that touch the very boundaries of surrealism, whilst wearing their cubism on one sleeve and futurism on the other. Etchells’ “Heads” are portraits which put the human visage through the vortex, sheering it of the natural curves and contours and replacing them with angles. This creates a pair of faces that are caught in agony, the pain of their existence being worn in the flesh, as opposed to a vague internality. In many ways, they prefigure the later work of Francis Bacon, wherein the human form is contorted to impossibility. It renders them as cold as the characters that populate the written stories. In Epstein we see the dynamism of the human form, reduced to the motion of limbs and extremities, the lines representing, visually, motion. The figures become lost in this entanglement, assimilated in a world of speed, the very essence of modernity. Epstein is representing, in visual form, what Lewis means by the vortex – this subsumption of humanity in movement, that the collective is to be replaced by the motion of the machine. The same can ESSAYS | 12

be said of Wadsworth’s cityscapes, in that there is an idea of architecture. All the constituent parts that create a city are present: bricks, mortar, windows, roads, but it has become abstracted, broken down and deconstructed, and the city becomes lost in itself, just as much a victim of its own movements as those masses who inhabit it. The visual style of Blast exists as a critique of the dominant Glasgow School and arts and crafts style, demanding it to move toward its logical conclusion. Mackintosh was already experimenting with symmetry and the integration of the human form, but seems reticent to push it any further – the Rebel artists marry this with the post-impressionism of Picasso and find themselves foretelling the coming of art deco aesthetic. Indeed, the best word that comes to mind when looking at vorticist visual works is mathematical.

Prose is represented by Rebecca West, Hueffer, and Lewis himself. The stories of the former two are examples of an Anglomodernism that is in its adolescence, rather than the full realisation that is seen in the High period of the 1920s. In theme, however, they are most certainly part of its developing evolution from the vacuum left behind by the collapse of the Decadent movement.

West’s piece, “Indissoluble Matrimony”, concerns a doomed marriage wherein a husband, George Silverton, attempts to drown his wife, Evadne, in an effort to escape her sensuality. George is deeply misogynistic from the outset, his entire view of relationships between men and women being one of near existential dread: ‘This disgust of women revealed to him that the world is a place of subtle perils. He began to fear marriage as he feared death. The thought of intimacy with some lovely, desirable and necessary wife turned him sick as he sat at his lunch.’ This relationship dynamic is consistently hidden deep in petty politics – the argument they have before George’s attempt on Evadne’s life is about Evadne’s adoption of socialism over George’s radical liberalism. As this argument plays out it is clear that George wishes to control his wife, to have her contained in a domestic sphere that does not interact with his in the wider world. Indeed, the fact that Evadne is a political entity in her own right is something that George takes as an attack on his fundamental masculinity, making him ‘determined to be a better man than her.’ The argument spirals, the politics of liberal versus socialist quickly merging with the banal – the fact that Evadne’s friend Longton has a mistress, the idea that she wants George to prostrate himself before her, all finally culminating in him stating that he thinks of Evadne as being over-sexed.

Of course, this paranoia is completely unfounded. During the argument, Evadne storms out, only for George to follow until he encounters her bathing in the local park. The meeting George has with the harsh reality of his wife simply bathing, Evadne that George hates her completely. In a single moment, they decide to murder each other.

In “Indissoluble Matrimony”, West presents a bleak portrait of human relations. George is a hate-filled man, fuelled by his insecurities that stem from being infertile while married to a woman who he once considered beautiful. He drifts as a prototypical Prufrock, a Lord Chatterley whose lady never once considered an affair. Evadne is a free spirit, forced to drown by the forces of a parochial, patriarchal, system that wishes only to subsume her before she can affect any changes. Even her progressive friends ‘congratulate [George] on her brilliance’, as though she is a child. The story is one that takes the ongoing battles between men and women over the latter’s emancipation and throws them into a very literal fight to the death. George may very well have been the one to triumph physically, but it is Evadne’s will that prevails.

Ford Madox Hueffer’s first instalment of “The Saddest Story” is rather similar in scope. However, where West places the gaze over a couple, Heuffer casts it over a group of four. On the surface they are an image of bucolic bourgeois mores and gatherings.

‘Suppose that you should come upon us’, Hueffer writes, ‘all four sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house, let us say at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said, that as far as human affairs go we were an extraordinarily safe castle’. This is an illusion, however, one that is easily broken by Leonora when she admits to the narrator that she had once nearly had an affair, but changed her mind at the very last moment. This simple premise is one that is seen throughout modernist explorations of romantic relationships – their disposability and transience, their underlying meaninglessness. This single thread pulled loose starts a grand unravelling in regards to the narrator’s lifestyle, how he and his own wife Florence had put themselves through ‘poverty’ to maintain the illusion of being the Ashburnhams’ social equals, only to find that they are falling into a perceived moral degeneration. Even his ideas of his fellow clubmen are shattered, stating their hypocrisy at balking at the mere idea of their being improper even after sharing lurid stories. More than this, however, is a very definite sense

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of place. Surroundings are often carnivorous – consuming the characters and assimilating them into their wider being, making them become the very masses that modernism would come to despise.

At the end of Blast are a pair of articles, one written by Pound and the other by Brzeska, on the topic of the Vortex. The dynamic power of the magazine is concluded here. Though every bit as abstract as the articles seen in the introduction, they still manage to shed a clear light onto what the Vortex actually is. Pound writes that it is all about efficiency in art, that it is a visual extension to his own idea of the image in poetry, that “complex” of intellect and emotion that must be captured as quickly as possible, with the utmost accuracy. That is not to say that the movement would be minimalist in scope, as the illustrations and typography present in Blast already demonstrate, but that visual art is to be deconstructed, broken down to its barest essentials. Pound concludes, ‘The vorticist relies on this alone; on the primary pigment and nothing else’ – there is no need for the elaboration of style or, perhaps, even all that much substance. As always, Pound argues that the sole expression of the creator is that of an observer, the presentation of the image being their goal. Brzeska keeps the pace with his own piece, opening with the claim that ‘sculptural energy is the mountain’, thus establishing his theme. For him, the Vortex still represents that same efficiency Pound expounds, the sheer energy that Lewis threw forward, the paradoxical centring and disposing of the human form seen in the visual pieces, but there there is a truly important factor he adds. Perhaps it is apt that the final piece of volume one would be the one that hangs on the theme of totality. For Brzeska the vortex is a culmination, a singularity of art in which all becomes one. At the climax of the piece he speaks at length on the ‘vortex of blackness and silence’ followed by the ‘Semitic vortex’, listing civilisation after civilisation, ending it on ‘Vortex of a vortex!! Vortex is the point one and indivisible! Vortex is energy!’ In short, more than the destructive force of ‘blasting’ seen at the beginning of the periodical, the vortex represents a reconstruction, a sepulchre creating a new art.

The critical reception of the first volume is best described as mixed. Looking through the articles makes for an interesting microcosm of the politics of the London art world, as exemplified in the pages of The New Age and The Egoist. Indeed, when Blast was released the former’s very next issue is a testament to the scepticism the mainstream consensus had toward the avant-garde.

Where it is true that the 18th June 1914 edition does cover a talk given by Nevinson and Marinetti on the topic of futurism, with a full transcript, it is placed after a parody written by Charles Brookfarmer, entitled “Futile-ism”. It concerns the trials of a young art student who is trying to sample a noise-maker, only to the stymied by a series of parlour tricks, as well as the speakers being “barely” twenty minutes late. The futurists are characterised as being utterly childish, the vorticists as being little more than their English splinter. Lewis, Brzeska, and Epstein are each mentioned by name as “the great genius of the great Futurist painters or pioneers and advance forces of vital English art”. Irrespective of the Rebel artists’ attempts to detach themselves from Marinetti, opinion is well summed up by T. E. Hulme when he wrote “I noticed in signing a collection protest, published a few weeks ago, [Bomberg] had nothing whatever to do with the Rebel Art Centre – very wisely, in my opinion, for his work is certainly more individual and less derivative than the work of the members of that group”. However, the harshest comments are found in the review given by The New Age’s resident literary critic: Mr Wyndham Lewis’ “Blast” has been named a successor to the “Yellow Book”. But that… is of no great credit to it, for who… can admit that there was any philosophy in it?… “Blast” has the relative disadvantage of being launched without even a decadent genius to give it a symptomatic importance. It is, I find, not unintelligible – as most of the reviews will doubtless say – but not worth the understanding.

These comments are fascinating. It is true that the manifesto parts of Blast are somewhat garbled, with Lewis channelling futurist manifestos to present and demonstrate his idea of what a modern art ought to look like, and the illustrations are well outside the norm for the period. It is tempting to say, though, that to state that Blast is not worth the understanding is a deeply unfair estimation.

However, The New Age is not the only periodical writing about artistic matters. The Egoist had a very different view. Richard Aldington was a staff writer on the paper. As a major proponent of the imagist movement, producing his own Des Imagistes in the same year, he represented the other side of the debate surrounding the avant-garde. “The protest of the reviewers”, he writes, “is the time honoured, or dishonoured, way of the slavish against the free, the unenterprising against the original, of the sluggish against the active”. It is clear that the artistic establishment was torn on the points that Blast was trying to make. Unlike The New Age, The Egoist sees Blast as part of a wider evolution, clinging to the idea of a sort of cultural Darwinism of the same kind that gripped the

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imagination of various social planners of the period. It is rather ironic that though Blast purports to break away from what Lewis calls “Victorianism” it still acquiesces to an ideology that was born in the century before.

Between these perspectives, then, there is a picture of the wider cultural shift that was occurring by 1914. The adage of “art for art’s sake” was coming under fire as the younger generation began to think about art and its relationship to the nation state. If art nouveau was decorative and graphic then the newer art was set to shift the collective imagination – to ‘Blast first (from politeness) England.’ Instead of the view set out by The New Age, wherein art was reflective of the society in which it finds itself, the opposing view was that art was reactive, an integral social apparatus that could guide the social consciousness instead of being subject to it.

This radical change, this need to control, is a major contributing factor in the Anglo avant-garde’s affinity with fascism. Pound, Lewis, and Aldington each held fascistic beliefs, certainly the former two being particularly strong. Pound’s poetic contribution to Blast is an anti-Semitic diatribe. Lewis, though he wishes to “blast” England, calls to “Bless Britain” for the might of its Navy. Aldington, in his review, writes: It is true that “Blast” contains such alien names as Gaudier Brzeska, and Ezra Pound, that Lewis is half Welsh, and Mr Wadsworth half Scotch; but still the paper is an effort to look at art from an Anglo-Saxon point of view instead of a borrowed foreign standpoint.

At the core of Blast is a philosophical fascism, a force that had been developing since the early 1890s. It was the perfect bedfellow for such a publication – the fascist emphasis on political violence, the adherence to the cult of modernity, and call for conformity within an all encompassing synthesis of state and society is the stark reflection of the values that Blast espouses; strength over feminine weakness, the geometric over the decorative, the elitist over the egalitarian. Finally, the demolition of established culture in favour of a movement that is undefinable and, fundamentally, anti-human.

By the time war was declared, the Rebel Arts Centre had closed down. The personal relationship between Lewis and Lechmere had become fraught after Lewis accidentally introduced her to T. E. Hulme. Knowing that Hulme was a charismatic figure, he did all that he could to convert him to the Rebel camp whilst trying to keep him from meeting Lechmere. He failed. The initial meeting between Lechmere and Hulme led to a romantic relationship. Lewis decided to take action. It is recorded that Lewis, after a domestic dispute with Lechmere, made his way to a salon which Hulme was attending. Upon challenging Hulme to a fight, Lewis found himself partially conscious, and hanging from his trousers from the railings of Ormond Street. Lechmere withdrew her financial support not long after this episode, dooming the Centre. Vorticism itself collapsed with the coming of the War, where many of that generation of artists inevitably died. Brzeska and Hulme both fell, Nevinson and Lewis became commissioned war artists. However, the end of the Centre was not the end of Blast.

Though there was no money, no Rebel Art Centre, and the War was seriously affecting artistic output, Lewis began work on its second volume. Thanks to the sheer amount of networking done by himself and Pound, it was a simple affair to gather material for it. John Lane was still willing to publish the magazine. Issues were being sold in America through Pound’s friend, later Lewis’ patron, John Quinn, and a few subscriptions had been bought, irrespective of the critical backlash. The next issue of Blast was a slimmer affair, the cover monochrome, but was every bit as angry as its predecessor, making an attempt to make itself heard over the battlefield.

The composition of the War Number is very different than the last. There is more visual art on display from a variety of artists.

Lewis himself has a few pieces, Nevinson’s “Going to the Front” a drawing of a squad of men on the march, the motion of their limbs acting as a biological extension of themselves. Etchells makes a return with “Hyde Park”, an illustration showing some form of animated demonstration, a speech being made by a speaker who has merged with not only the microphone, but the very words they speak. Jessica Dismorr supplies “Engine”, a piece composed from the fundamental shapes of the components of an engine, and an abstract “Design.” Out of the others, however, it is Shakespeare’s “Snow Scene” which is the standout work. Being placed after the announcement of Brzeska’s death, it is a simple line composition that grants the reader with a full view of an empty, snow covered field. It is the only illustration in volume two that can be described as “peaceful” – the others being deliberately combative, loud, and crowded.

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Poetry is supplied by Pound, Lewis, Dismorr, and T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s poem “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is a very early piece, but displays the devices he later came to master in composing “The Waste Land”. His typical repetition, internal rhyme, and couplets are all present. It is also evident that he is already experimenting with piling image on image – the view of a woman opening her front door quickly turns to an empty-eyed boy playing in the street, then changes with the flickering of a street light. Though still a young poet, Eliot’s talent was still very much on display. Dismorr’s “Monologue” is also a fascinating addition. It is covered in birth imagery, mingled with a theme of mechanisation, told from the perspective of a child undergoing the process of being born themselves. There is something akin to Mina Loy’s work at play, the lines I poke my fingers into the middles of big, succulent flowers.

My fingers are fortunately tipped with horn

being ones that would not be out of place in The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Lewis’ poetry is just as ironic and satiric as his prose, and Pound continues to experiment in his pursuit of the image.

All prose works in the War Number, excepting one by Brzeska (written just before his death), are written by Lewis himself.

They represent his views on the arts, specifically what might emerge after the War. It may be strange to us now to think that Lewis reckoned he could work this out as early as 1915. Indeed, the stalemate on the Western Front had settled at that point, and any pretensions of a short war were dissolving quickly. Yet Lewis seemed to believe that the art world, though it had ground to a halt, would not simply pick up where it left off. Instead, it would have to align itself with the vortex, or something like it. Still trying to make sure that he was distanced from the futurists, and now the cubists, it certainly looks as though Lewis genuinely believed that the vortex would survive the War as a matter of course.

The critical reception of the second volume is considerably reduced from the first. The Egoist does not so much as mention its publication after the full page advertisement it ran the month before, and the War captured the entire attention of the media. Most comments, it is likely, were made in private salons while Lewis was packing his bags to go to the Front. However, there does exist a single review given in The New Age. Where before The New Age had pilloried it, its critical voice performs a sudden about face: The second issue of ‘Blast’ appears to me much better than the first. Except for the Balkan fragment the “Enemy of the Stars” by Mr Wyndham Lewis, the first number of ‘Blast’ contained nothing of literature that was even interesting. The present issue – largely, I suppose, because Mr Lewis is the main contributor – contains a good deal.

It is true that the second volume is far clearer than the first, Lewis especially choosing much less abstract language for his aims. The underlying ideology, with its reactionism and proto-fascism, is still the same, the denunciation of the art of the past is still there.

However, The New Age and those who fell on their side of the artistic spectrum finds itself allied with Blast – the critic goes as far as to state that they share commonalities such as the rejection of sentimentality. This review says very little about Blast itself as a result.

Rather, it says a lot more about the shift in the Zeitgeist that the War has caused.

Though there are many references throughout the War Number to another issue being put together, volume two would mark the end of Blast. It was another victim of the inferno that passed over Europe, which so few managed to escape. Though is this truly a sad end? The second volume was not nearly as visually daring in its presentation than the first, and, though its alternative fate is purely theoretical, it is plain to see that it was being reduced from the lofty ambition of being the voice of the avant-garde to the rather more prosaic written voice of Wyndham Lewis. The typographical experimentation was toned down and, though still somewhat different from its contemporaries, looked a little staid. The overall aesthetic is consistent and, perhaps it is unfair to say, lacking any idea of progression. The cityscapes are still geometric masses, the human figures still mechanised. Even if the swirl of the vortex had not been stopped by the War, it is entirely possible that it had already lost its momentum.

Summing up the artistic legacy of Blast is not an easy feat. On the one hand, a two-volume, small press publication can have only little impact in the wider history of modernism. On the other, it is an expression of one man’s views on the arts and literature of his period, a curio that is worth a footnote and a couple of marks on a student paper. Indeed, its critical reception is something to be desired, its initial direction largely lost by the second volume, and, in all probability, was something of a doomed project. Lewis, by ESSAYS | 16

his own admission, was not a man who was suited to a long-term project – his later Tyro also only lasted two volumes, and his wider corpus is overlooked by critics. Indeed, many of his visual pieces only exist in archival photographs or private collections. However, the argument can, and should, be made that Blast is more than that. Yes, its legacy is limited, but it managed to do something of significant importance. More than other periodicals of its kind, Blast brought together many writers of similar temperament, theme, and style and, in turn, brought each to the attention of a far wider audience. The transatlantic network that Pound and Lewis had been cultivating for years suddenly found a collective voice in London – these writers would go on to define wider modernism in the post-War period.

It is impossible to say what impact vorticism would have had if the War had not decimated the movement. Perhaps it can be extrapolated from the rise and fall of futurism – a movement based in permanent dynamism, the idea of impermanence and spectacle, which was, by nature, spectacular. Its partnering with fascism and its reliance upon the acts and interests of Marinetti, in parallel with Lewis and vorticism, lead to the same conclusion: that the Vortex would stop swirling, and something else would have taken its place. Movements of these kinds must constantly maintain some form of momentum, lest they become apathetic, atrophying in the Zeitgeist. Even as early as 1914, this creep was already present.

Perhaps it is right that Blast had such a short life. The ultimate, if accidental, artistic expression of its namesake, surely, is the personification of the onomatopoeia. Its echo lingers for far longer than the sound itself and the scarring on the surface of the eye, that nebulous purple blot that occurs after a bright flash, acting as a lasting legacy.

Bibliography

Before the formal bibliography, I wish to thank the faculty at Brown for making their extensive collection of modernist journals publicly available through the Modernist Journals Project, the staff of the University of Sheffield’s Weston Park Library for allowing me to access their collection as an independent scholar, and Sheffield Central Library for the stock they keep in the store. Without these resources this essay would not have been possible.

Lewis, W., Blast, Vol. 1, Lewis, W. (Ed.), Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara: 1980) ————, Blast, Vol. 2, Lewis, W. (Ed.), The Bodley Head (London: 1915) ————, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, Rose, WK (Ed.), Methuen (London: 1962) Meyers, J., “Kate Lechmere’s Wyndham Lewis From 1912”, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 10, Issue 1, pp. 158–60 Pound, E., The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, Paige, D. (Ed.), Faber and Faber (London: 1950) ————, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn 1915–1924, Maturer, T. (Ed.), Duke University Press (Durham: 1991) Pound, E. & Lewis, W., Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Faber and Faber (London: 1985) The New Age, Vol. 15, Issue 7, June 18th 1914 The New Age, Vol. 15, Issue 10, July 9th 1914 The Egoist, Vol. 1, Issue 14, July 15th 1914

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All images taken from the scanned volumes of Blast obtained from the Modernist Journals Project

Fig. 1. Typical detail from Volume 1. Note the symmetry and lack of organicism, with a definite note of proto-deco aesthetic. The typeface is also noteworthy for its austerity, as well as the absurdity of the full stop.

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Fig. 2. “The Enemy of the Stars” by Wyndham Lewis from Volume 1. Here is demonstrated the synthesis between the human body and machinery – a figure that has been amalgamated with a hammer, directed at the heavens themselves.

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Fig. 3. One of Etchell’s “Heads”. The biological disappears into the artifice, as seen in the line work of the hand. If in Decadence the human body is crafted, then in modernism it is manufactured.

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Fig. 4. “Snow Scene” by Shakespeare. Appearing in Volume 2 after the announcement that Brzeska had been killed in action not long after his last Blast entry, it is a sketch that carries a lot of pathos in its context. One of the very few vorticist pieces that is not all that combative.

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Visible and Invisible Bodies Exploring Urban Space Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway Vlad Condrin Toma

In this essay my aim is to look at how the main characters in Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway interact with their urban environment. In order to understand this process, a careful analysis of key episodes in both novels must be carried out. To aid in the interpretation of these fragments I will use the concepts found in Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life as well as the approach suggested

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. Other attempts at understanding this interaction between individual selves and their environment will be facilitated by relevant ideas borrowed from Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade, as well as Verena Andermatt Conley’s Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory.

The first important observation to be made is that both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were attempting to give their readers a sensory experience of urban life. In order to achieve this goal the writers set out to describe the events of a single day in June. This day is used to build upon a temporal framework with the function of forcing the flow of consciousness and of interior monologue into a fixed geometry of space. A mental mapping is performed both by the characters in the two novels as well as by the readers.

Thus, two real cities become the setting for unreal events.

Both writers knew the cities they were describing very well and as a result the main characters in their fiction are also skilled at this type of orientation. Clarissa Dalloway and Leopold Bloom know the spaces they inhabit and read them as familiar texts. This spatial awareness helps them achieve a level of coherent understanding in relation to their usual activities. London and Dublin serve as cultural and autobiographical maps: Walking is a key activity in Joyce’s fiction. Thus we discover the city by following Stephen not only in A Portrait but later in Ulysses where his peregrinations are paralleled by those of Bloom. Joyce himself, even as a schoolboy, was also an avid wanderer of Dublin streets; it was on one of these walks that his first sexual adventure seems to have occurred, not on the north side but off the South Circular Road. (Cullen 175)

Extreme difficulty lies in assigning relevant meaning to every small detail. A key feature of the modern city is that it is filled with technological modes of transportation which overlap with the simplicity of moving on foot. Distances change as a result of this orientation and it is significant that both Dublin and London were beginning to go through a process of modernization which made it all the more complicated to ‘read’ the vast content without a bird’s eye view: It is also a book about the modern subject’s interaction with the newly efficient urban world with its scheduled systems of rapid transit by tram, train and horse-drawn cart and communications by letter, telegraph and telephone; its class- and gender-coded sites of refreshment and repose, from the Lincoln Place baths to Bella Cohen’s Monto brothel; its alert policemen, obsequious waiters, tourists and tradesmen such as the piano-tuner, ever-ready to monitor even the city’s vibrations. (Duffy 91)

Michel de Certeau interprets these spatial stories as ‘written by footsteps’ (De Certeau 116) which are forced to compete with alternative modes of experience such as the relationship to public transportation and the ways in which this element changes lived experience. For this reason, individuals are compelled to re-create a private space by transforming places.

The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are the walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element

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signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. (De Certeau 93)

But this blindness also involves a sharing of senses. As individual walkers we are not alone in reading and interpreting our surroundings. A relevant example is to be found in Ulysses: The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing his cane back, feeling again. Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there? Must have felt it. See things in their foreheads perhaps. Kind of sense of volume. Weight would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he walk in a beeline if he hadn’t that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow going in to be a priest. (U 173)

The blind man’s ‘eyeless feet’ interact with Leopold Bloom’s ‘pedestrian speech acts’ in what becomes a sharing of flesh. Both characters meet each other on a horizontal plane of invisibility which expresses their consciousness as well as their bodily presence.

But the two men are also separated by the different ideas they have of Dublin as a space. Two different styles of walking are performed and “By choosing to ambulate where their feet lead them they turn the city-places into other spaces” (Conley 35).

These fragments of space coalesce in order to form a totality without a meaningful centre. The only centrality is derived from the body’s movement within and around this spatial unfolding of reality. But it is also a matter of perception, since the main features used to describe this reality are present in the consciousness of the individual. Senses take turns in feeding the walker’s mind with images which are meant to confirm a set of expectations. There is always a planned route which leads to a desired end. Whenever something unexpected occurs, a new level of meaning is added to a sequence of events. It is also useful to point out the role played by the simultaneousness of these occurrences: Since the habitation constitutes an imago mundi, it is symbolically situated at the Center of the World. The multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of the world raises no difficulty for religious thought. For it is not a matter of geometrical space, but of an existential and sacred space that has an entirely different structure, that admits of an infinite number of breaks and hence is capable of an infinite number of communications with the transcendent. (Eliade 57)

When Leopold Bloom decides to go inside a church he is doing so because “the cold smell of sacred stone call[s] him” (U 77). The irony is that we are not dealing with an act of worship but rather with a certain desire to break a habitual pattern. Entering the church makes sense only insofar as it breaks the homogeneity of the world. It is not a purely religious act, but in it there are elements of religiosity which cannot be neglected. According to Eliade, “[f]or a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands. The door that opens on the interior of the church actually signifies a solution of continuity” (Eliade 25). However, it must be noted that “the open backdoor of All Hallows” (U 77) serves an entirely different purpose for Bloom, who merely wants to be there. That is precisely what Heidegger describes in Being and Time: As something factical, Dasein’s projection of itself understandingly is in each case already alongside a world that has been discovered.

From this world it takes its possibilities, and it does so first in accordance with the way things have been interpreted by the “they”. This interpretation has already restricted the possible options of choice to what lies within the range of the familiar, the attainable, the respectable – that which is fitting and proper. This levelling off of Dasein’s possibilities to what is proximally at its everyday disposal also results in a dimming down of the possible as such. The average everydayness of concern becomes blind to its possibilities, and tranquilizes itself with that which is merely ‘actual’. This tranquilizing does not rule out a high degree of diligence in one’s concern, but arouses it. In this case no positive new possibilities are willed, but that which is at one’s disposal becomes ‘tactically’ altered in such a way that there is a semblance of something happening. (Heidegger 239)

‘Being there’ and ‘not-being-there’ represent life and death. The body of the deceased person is hidden from view. Only empty space remains to mark the absence of what was once a presence. “How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed.

As you are now so once were we.” (U 109) This is the scene at Paddy Dignam’s funeral which helps us grasp the meaning of Bloom’s earlier presence in the church. A graveyard is a place where orientation changes its significance and we are left with an image of the mourners moving “away slowly, without aim, by devious paths, staying awhile to read a name on a tomb” (U 108). The Dasein is forced to confront the death of the Other, a phenomenon which may also be viewed as the signifier detaching itself from the signified.

A different kind of wholeness is created:

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When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its “there”. By its transition to no-longer-Dasein [Nichtmehr-dasein], it gets lifted right out of the possibility of experiencing this transition and of understanding it as something experienced. Surely this sort of thing is denied to any particular Dasein in relation to itself. But this makes the death of Others more impressive. In this way a termination [Beendigung] of Dasein becomes ‘Objectively’ accessible. Dasein can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others. In that case, the fact that death has been thus ‘Objectively’ given must make possible an ontological delimitation of Dasein’s totality. (Heidegger 281)

Another interesting discussion of death is to be found at the end of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party – the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself – but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. (Woolf 201)

The party represents the final meeting point. All of the scenes of walking described in the novel lead to this mutual sharing of privileged space. Septimus Warren Smith becomes a presence because his suicide acts as a message: “Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death” (Woolf 202). The people who are at the party preserve an invisible link to all of the previous events of the day. Through Peter Walsh we are introduced to a belief system attributed to the young Clarissa: She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps – perhaps. (Woolf 167)

From my point of view, this is the key to understanding the novel in its entirety. Everyone survives in textual form. If walking is to be associated with writing, then the ‘text’ created is a form of permanence. Nevertheless, I feel that this process is best explained by what Merleau-Ponty describes as “not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen” (Merleau-Ponty 139).

There is a relationship at play between the body and mind with subjective time as the binding element. Every detail relates to it.

Every hour brings with it new states of mind, new openings and closings of multiple choices and possibilities. The beginning of each new day brings with it a feeling of renewal and regeneration. Both Clarissa Dalloway and Leopold Bloom begin by going outside.

They project themselves as parts of a larger whole and this gives them pleasure. This active participation in the life of the city is meant to preserve a sense of belonging as well as the performance of a social role. Thus, the complicated cultural signifiers used to express identity contribute to the creation of a feeling of invisibility: That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. (Woolf 11)

These two mutually shifting aspects of the self are interchangeable and it is interesting to observe this interplay between Clarissa ‘wearing’ her body and Leopold Bloom ‘visualising’ his: He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. (U 83)

The perception of the self is determined by a direct relationship with a significant Other. The mind is constantly shifting its perspective from one point of interest to the next. Everything serves to create a private movement through a geometric pattern of streets and fixed points of interest. These two dimensions combine in order to give an impression of real life. Verticality can be thought of as “seeing without being in the scene” (Saint Amour 224) whereas the horizontal can be linked to “the plane within which life and narrative unfold haphazardly, and which is less legible for the viewer’s usual immersion in it” (Saint Amour 224).

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We are directly linked to an unpredictable pattern of rapid decision making. A good example of such a sudden shift would be the moment in which the walker changes their mind and goes the other way. This means that we will constantly be stimulated by the unpredictable flow of the narrative. It is a type of suspense which focuses on the more mundane aspects of everyday life as they gradually encircle the reader with their richness. Words and thoughts are translated into actions very quickly and the feeling of simultaneity is enhanced by a motor car or air plane. A feeling of immersion is created and imagination becomes the key to understanding the way in which every aspect of daily life is enriched by something ineffable.

As far as I am concerned, the two novels create virtual realities in which time is isolated and contained in a fixed narrative which can be explored from different entry points. What I mean by this is that it is possible to revisit the place (going to Dublin for instance) but it is impossible to recreate the space in the absence of a text. That is because space is always linked to a certain time and is never separated from that interval: Emphasis is placed here on space and time as they are experienced in an individual’s consciousness of a landscape in which he or she happens to be. The invention of space belongs in part to a world of dreams and the unconscious that is in play with active experience.

Where space – or language – is lost the field of possible experience shrinks and limits human possibility. The existential practitioner uses stories and narratives to relocate the places where they are told. He or she inserts space into place. (Conley 36)

Reading Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway can be thought of as an experience of disembodiment. We lose our own corporeality and become invisible by allowing the characters to take our place. The mind thus recreates a sense of being-there through its capacity of discerning among various strands of mental imagery and illusion.

In order to get the most out of the novels, the reader must forget about their own spatial existence: My gaze falls upon a living body performing an action and the objects that surround it immediately receive a new layer of signification: they are no longer merely what I could do with them, they are also what this behaviour is about to do with them. A vortex forms around the perceived body into which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, my world is no longer merely mine, it is no longer present only to me, it is present to X, to this other behaviour that begins to take shape in it. The other body is already no longer a simple fragment of the world, but rather the place of a certain elaboration and somehow a certain “view” of the world. (Merleau-Ponty 370)

This Weltanschauung allows us to take part in the act of representation by bringing our own experience of walking through the city into focus. Pleasure is derived from the sense of familiarity with which we are able to perceive the descriptions foregrounded by the narrative. It is also true that there are many differences between these experiences. The Dublin of the past is no longer similar to the Dublin of today or of the future. This means that human beings will have to cope with a gradual loss of meaning as well as a change in the way in which spatial dimensions are used. There is a growing feeling of alienation in today’s world and we must keep in mind that both Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway were delighted to walk in the city precisely because they had the opportunity to meet other people: There is, between my consciousness and my body such as I live it, and between this phenomenal body and the other person’s phenomenal body such as I see it from the outside, an internal relation that makes the other person appear as the completion of the system. Others can be evident because I am not transparent for myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body along behind itself.

(Merleau-Ponty 368)

As long as the body remains there will also be a shared space. The experience of disembodiment must not take the place of life as it is lived in the two novels. These ‘slices of life’ remind us of who we are. We are all human beings with similar needs and concerns.

To conclude this experience, it must be argued that the knowledge of things as well as places is also knowledge of the self. A text is merely a metaphorical body and its name is a cultural signifier used to mark its spatial existence. A constant circular movement reminds us that both death and life are manifestations of a kind of eternity or timelessness. That invisible part of us will never disappear because it was never apparent to begin with.

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Works Cited

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. London: University of California Press, 1984 translated by Steven F. Rendall Conley, Verena Andermatt. Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory. Liverpool University Press, 2012 Cullen, L. M. Dublin, part of James Joyce in Context. Edited by John McCourt Cambridge University Press, 2009 Duffy, Enda. Setting: Dublin 1904/1922, in The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses. Edited by Sean Latham Cambridge University Press, 2014 Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. London: Harcourt Brace, 1959 Ehrlich, Heyward. James Joyce’s Four-Gated City of Modernisms. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002; part of Joyce and the City: the Significance of Place. Edited by Michael Bengal Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Blackwell Publishing, 1962 translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson Joyce, James. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. London: Oxford University Press Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968; translated by Alphonso Lingis ————. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2012; translated by Donald A. Landes Saint-Amour, Paul K. The Vertical Flaneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011; part of European Joyce Studies, 21: Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism. Edited by Maurizia Boscagli and Enda Duffy Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Penguin Books, 1992

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1922 in music Max Gregory

“Modernism”. That is certainly one applicable “ism” here; it would not be untrue to say that music, art, culture, society, science and mankind generally were not only on the frontier and precipice of something new, but also in the inception of an exponential increase of change and development in the aftermath of the destruction the First World War had wrought. A valid conflicting argument, possibly the most obvious opposing one, would be the notion that it is a bit of a cliché to describe any singular, particular point in time in this manner, for indeed, could one not also apply this idea to any moment in history if one so desired, including our own? It seems entirely possible. With that in mind, the present writer still feels it would be ultimately disingenuous not to attach this modernist blanket to 1922, and that the previous logic just outlined doesn’t detract from the relevance of doing so. From a musical and compositional standpoint, we find ourselves at what can only be described and visualised as a multi-pronged crossroad; one is struck at this time by an impression of the vast plethora of active composers seemingly choosing the path they would venture on, in a way that wasn’t as unpredictable or as varied as beforehand. A vault of new “colours”, if you will, had been unlocked within the compositional and musical painting box by the discovery and manipulation of new and different modes and scales around thirty years before: Asian folk music, as well as what one might then have called “Exotic” music (Javanese Gamelan bands and the like), folk music of different composers’ respective countries (in an ethnomusicological sense) and the 12-tone technique/Serialism (as well as other modernist tendencies). A large elephant in the room, for want of a better expression, is, of course, the ventures into territory away from what we now regard as tonally-centred composition. We find the gradual disintegration of tonality happening not only under the veil of the infamous compositional practice that became known as this aforementioned Serialist/12-tone technique, but also the effects and remnants of the straining chromaticism of composers like Mahler just over a decade before, which had itself been a continuation, in some ways, of Wagnerian chromaticism. Importantly, however, we would do well not to overstate the modernism prevalent at this time; we are, after all, in a merely modernist period here and not a particularly futurist one or post-modern one, if that is a distinction that may be made. Despite the fact that rudimentary electronic devices, instruments and effects had been deployed in the tail end of the 19th century, it would be a few more decades until things like electronic music were properly utilised within musical composition. Similarly, it would be another fifty or so years until the spectral compositional school and other more postmodern and futuristic schools of music composition would appear.

The reader will have already noticed that this text focuses on “classical music” of the time period, for a proper exploration of the numerous other genres active at the same time would be too lengthy and tangential. The reader will also notice the general nature of this text – indeed, this summary, as being one of merely walking through a gallery and observation, rather than any specific and focused discourse. One must, importantly, focus here on one area. What was happening in 1922? We find ourselves four years after the death of Claude Debussy, the “poet of mists and fountains”. Debussy, who had spent his entire artistic career forging a distinctly unique, personalised, utterly radical and identifiably “French” and Impressionist (despite his dislike of this “impressionist” term) sound world, had ironically died within ear-shot of German artillery towards the end of the war. With his whole-tone scales, pentatonicism, totally game-changing harmonic palate and off-the-beaten-track scale patterns, Debussy would influence later composers such as Olivier Messiaen. Mahler, who we have already mentioned, had been dead for eleven years at this point, having, for many people, concluded that long Germanic/Teutonic symphonic tradition stretching back to Haydn.

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Within a certain context, from mention of Mahler, must come mention of Schoenberg and the second Viennese school in general. In fact, within discussions concerning this period of composition in general, whatever one’s personal tastes may be, having no mention of Schoenberg and the “Emancipation of the Dissonance” seems very incongruous indeed. We find Schoenberg, in 1922, right on the cusp and beginnings of his exploration of the abandonment of tonality all together. It is around this time that the Fünf Stücke (Five Pieces) for Piano are completed, employing these new revolutionary serialist principles. It is absolutely fair to say that Schoenberg is still very much in the experimental, early phase of dodecaphony at this point and has only just begun, relatively speaking, to move away from the highly dense and chromatic, but ultimately tonal, musical language of his earlier years. We also find Schoenberg working on his intriguing Serenade (for clarinet, bass clarinet, mandolin, guitar, violin, viola, cello and baritone voice). In the 4th Movement, he sets a Sonnet of Petrarch. The Serenade wears the badge of being one of Schoenberg’s first attempts to apply the 12tone technique to anything large-scale, rather than smaller forces. Schoenberg is also working on his Suite for Piano (Suite für Klavier), essentially a collection of Baroque dances à la J. S. Bach. This piece wears a similar, but slightly different badge; it is one of his earliest pieces to employ the 12-tone technique in every movement of the work. Alban Berg, our next member of the Second Viennese School, had, the year before, finished the fascinating 3-act and 15-scene opera Wozzeck. Anton Webern, our third, had, again the year before, finished the Sechs Lieder (Six Songs), Op. 14, for voice, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin and cello on poems by Georg Trakl (1917–21). By 1922, our year in question, Webern had completed his Five Sacred Songs for voice and small ensemble, Op.15, employing what can only be described as an almost Pointillist, stripped-back Serialist Expressionism. Within the same sphere, Alexander Zemlinsky needs to be mentioned. His one-act opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) had been written the year before and premiered in our year in focus, 1922, with its neurotic, Symbolist amalgamation of Wagnerian, Straussian and Mahlerian chromaticism, tinged with the modernism of the Second Viennese School. Some composers, of course, were pursuing other modernist paths that weren’t 12-tone Serialism, William Walton’s Façade being an apt example from 1922. Whilst its author is not a composer one would necessarily label a die-hard, progressive modernist (the English composer’s oeuvre is, ultimately, tonal), Façade offers the listener an at times highly musically advanced, dissonant and avant-garde musical language, infused with spoken word.

Over in Hungary (figuratively, at least, for one of his many visits to the United Kingdom is in this year) Bartók writes his Violin Sonata No. 2, full of infectious, Bartokian, abrasive dissonances and echoes of Hungarian folk rhythms, all teetering on the precipice of tonality. In Russia, the 16-year-old Shostakovich hasn’t yet written his first symphony, and it will be another sixteen years until he writes his first string quartet; he is yet truly to “Shostakovise”, if you will. The numerous piano works that he engaged with at this time, however, are not to be dismissed. In the same country, Prokofiev is in between his first and second symphonies and had, the previous year, completed his third Piano Concerto. Thus, it is safe to say Prokofiev is already at this point very much “Prokofievising”.

Staying on the Russians, we find Stravinsky slowly leaving his early ballet period (responsible for the early masterpieces The Firebird and The Rite of Spring) and entering his neo-classical period with the one-act comic opera Mavra. He has also just finished the famous ballet Pulcinella, which premiered in 1920. It will be another thirty years or so until he enters his Serial phase. In 1922 we find Paul Hindemith between his 4th and 5th string quartets. In terms of the previously mentioned plethora of differing compositional styles active at this time, Hindemith is a case in point; we find Hindemith starting off in a late Romantic, somewhat Brahmsian manner, before adopting a Schoenbergian Expressionist rhetoric, before adopting a much more stripped back, contrapuntal, somewhat more detached, sort of Neo-Bachian vibe (Hindemith’s Kammermusik, for example, is a series of neo-Baroque concertos for individual solo instruments and chamber orchestra). Hindemith’s music at this time is ultimately tonal, but not really diatonic, as all twelve tones are used quite freely. Hindemith’s opera Sancta Susanna, centring around a nun’s erotic fantasies, having been written in in 1921, was premiered in 1922.

In France, Maurice Ravel is finishing the bleak, stripped-back, but rhythmically fascinating Sonata for Violin and Cello, which sits in stark contrast to his lush, rich, colourful and enchanting pre-war works such as the ballet Daphnis and Chloe. Ravel orchestrates Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition this year, too, and is also currently writing his opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges. Another ESSAYS | 28

Frenchman, and coincidentally Ravel’s old teacher, Gabriel Fauré, had written his second Cello Sonata the previous year, a subtly resigned nostalgia blurring with its French sheen and polish. Fauré is very much in his late period and has two years left to live, his music at this stage (the Barcarolles, Nocturnes and late chamber works particularly) containing a kind of strained, melancholy, wistful, but still very melodic weariness. We also find him working on the shimmering melancholy of his D-minor Piano Trio. Still within France, Jacques Ibert gives us his Escales for orchestra and the Histoires for piano, the former infused with a Ravelian exoticism and the latter a typically French exquisiteness and delicacy. The at times sardonic and witty, at others melancholic and reflective Frenchman Francis Poulenc this year gives us the tongue-in-cheek and jovial neoclassical whimsy of the Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone.

At the risk of forming an unnecessary fissure and dichotomy between the tonal and the non-tonal (for there are many more varied and subtle gradations of ways to differentiate compositional styles), some further mention needs to be made of others who, on the surface at least, weren’t engaging in “Modernism” within the parameters that we’ve so far considered, despite the fact that we have already mentioned some. The term “The Emancipation of the Consonance” strikes one here as very apt. Many composers clung to a more tonality-based compositional direction in the form of ethnomusicology, drawing on the folk songs of their native land. To illustrate this point, let us turn to England and what we may refer to as the English Pastoralists, for want of a better term (this slightly inaccurate term does, admittedly, lump them in together, but let us commit this faux pas for the purposes of convenience for this text). Holst, for instance, writes A Fugal Overture in this year. It will be another three years until he composes his Terzetto (for flute, oboe and viola). Holst is in what the present writer would like to call his “20s period” now, fitting tidily into this decade artistically as well as chronologically; The Planets Suite dominates the 1910s for Holst, whereas a varied, more stripped back, contrapuntal and wearied melancholy permeates some of the later works of Holst. A case in point is the late tone poem Egdon Heath, although that is six years away. The Planets Suite is far behind Holst in 1922. Ralph Vaughan Williams, the standard go-to alongside Holst, and that most quintessentially English of English composers, has recently completed his Pastoral Symphony (his third symphony), a war elegy in all but name, perhaps more so than The Lark Ascending. Gerald Finzi, a lesser-known name, but by no means an inferior one, completes By Footpath and Style, a deeply poignant song-cycle for baritone and string quartet, setting texts by Thomas Hardy.

Whilst the reader will notice there seems to be a fairly equal ratio of “tonal composers” to those exploring atonalism and compositional practises separate from tonality, for some reason those who generally still engaged with tonality and more traditional approaches after this time tend to stand out more the further one travels into the 20th century. This is probably because, for many, deviations from tonality, unconventionalisms, experimental explorations and avant-garde musical gesticulations tend to spring to mind more readily when considering 20th century composition. One is often struck at finding a perfectly tonal work after, say, the 1940s or 50s. In a very similar vein, we have what one may be permitted to call the Neo-Romantics, again for want of a better term.

Let us continue with these champions of tonality.

Let us head north. In Sweden, we have the Neo-Romantic Kurt Atterberg. His works, throughout his entire career, despite the obvious stylistic development therein, remain tonally-centred and traditionally-scored. This description fits many of the composers active at this time. Atterberg’s sumptuous Cello Concerto is written this year. If we stay in Scandinavia, we find the Dane, Carl Nielsen, conducting the first public performance of his dark, militaristic fifth symphony in Copenhagen, with its progressive modulation and the grinding of dissonant, but ultimately tonal gears within a dark and light soundscape. Nielsen’s substantial Wind Quintet is also completed this year. It would be another year before Sibelius completed the cold, pure spring water of his 6th symphony, the Finn also being a composer who liked to pit different tonal key centres against each other in gladiatorial matches.

Musically and stylistically related to these Norsemen, but not actually one himself, we also have Arnold Bax active at this time, his music full of faery myth and Celtic twilight. Bax’s first symphony dates from this year. Six more symphonies by Bax would follow over the next sixteen years, all tonality-based but infused in folk song, Irish dusk and the flitting of nymphs. The Italian composer ESSAYS | 29

Ottorino Respighi, an essential name to mention in this context, his music for some the epitome of lush, colourful, imaginative, chromatic orchestral magic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has his three-act opera La bella dormente nel bosco premiered this year. The opera had been written to a libretto by Gian Bistolfi based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. The opera proves to be an enchanted and vibrant fairy tale world.

We risk Eurocentricity by not mentioning composers like the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, who, whilst moving through different compositional periods over his career, blurred abrasive chromaticism with a still exotic tonal landscape, infused with the soul, soil and folk-song of his native land. Echoes of exotic Amazonian birds, Ancient Inca tribal rhythms and the flute-melody of a Gaucho horseman are all to be found in Villa-Lobos’ music, whether it be an orchestral, vocal, chamber or solo guitar work. That type of blurred atonalism whereby the music is not fixed to a tonal centre, but does not fully adopt any spectral, electronic or serialist techniques either, so that it cannot be described as overly “modern” in this sense, is a hallmark of Villa-Lobos’ work.

It is hoped the reader has enjoyed our foray through the gallery of this particular year in the compositional world.

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From the "Anguished Diminution" to the "Utter Showing" The Metropolitan Existence in T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane Adam Lee

The metropolis was not a new subject in the literature and poetry of the early 20th Century, but it was felt among writers at the time that a re-introduction was necessary, as well as a new mode of artistic expression to depict properly its internal activity and the lives of the inhabitants. In a 1938 poem called “O City City”, Delmore Schwartz described the modern metropolis, with its “tyranny” of office buildings, “catastrophe” of automobiles, and subways in which “death has his loud picture”, as the “anguished diminution” of “six million souls” in New York.

It is difficult to locate the inspiration for this imagery anywhere other than in the depiction of urban spaces, and their inhabitants, within the early to middle poetry of T. S. Eliot, who was one of Schwartz’s main influences, especially in certain passages of “The Preludes”, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, and, eventually, the grand culmination of “The Waste Land”.

In these poems of Eliot’s, the “diminution” of our existence within the metropolis is in the triviality, banality and meaninglessness of urban life experienced there. And the “anguish” which Schwartz conjures is, like Eliot’s, spiritual. “Death” is in Schwartz’s subway ride, and death has “undone” the morning commuters on Eliot’s London Bridge, trudging dejectedly to their office buildings.

As a spiritual remedy to this condition, Schwartz stated the need for an “utter showing” and an “actuality”; a kind of Platonic ideal form of knowledge, as an alternative to the brute aspects of city life and the kind of existence this entails. Eliot’s poetry is, in a sense, a journey from the consideration of “diminution”, specifically in the arena of the urban metropolis, to an “utter showing”, or spiritual answer which is strived for in the Four Quartets.

The contention of this essay will be that Eliot’s contemporary, Hart Crane (a poet he has consistently been placed in opposition with), shares this same trajectory. Crane’s attempt at an “utter showing”, his “Atlantis”, is born out of the depiction of the crises of the “spiritual diminution” of individuals in the urban metropolis. I hope to show that the attempts at spiritual fulfilment and synthesis which mark the final stages of these poets’ work cannot be understood without viewing their earlier positions as, ultimately, poets of the metropolis or urban cityscape, who depicted the effects of those surroundings on the “mental lives” of the inhabitants. I argue that this convergence can be identified in certain thematic elements, symbols and poetical strategies which are shared in the portrayal of metropolitan existence in both poets.

The first is the infernal, or nightmarish quality of the urban cityscape or metropolis, what Judith Hoover calls the “urban nightmare.” But the most crucial is the effect, portrayed by both poets (albeit in different ways), of aspects of the metropolis, especially technological and structural, on the individual consciousness of the inhabitants which are manifested in certain behaviours or personality types. However, I am aware that the second claim of convergence requires me to be a little more specific. And in order to bring this aspect of the effect of the metropolis on the “mental life”, present in both Eliot and Crane into sharper focus, I take as my guide Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolitan and the Mental Life,” written in 1903.

Whilst it is not the contention of this essay that these poets were influenced by Simmel’s ideas, his insistence on the “adaption of the personality,” to “the forces outside it,” (i.e., the conditions of the metropolis), appears to foreshadow much of the imagery in Eliot and Crane’s poetry which deals with the individual’s “mental life” in the urban setting.

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The Metropolitan Existence in Eliot Judith Hoover points out that the epigraph to Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” may be read as a disclaimer to indicate the spiritual situation the poet is writing from and the kind of life he intends to represent in his early poetry. For Hoover, Eliot’s early poetry is actually situated in Hell. The epigraph, from Dante’s “Inferno”, reads:

If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.

But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed.

The selection of this epigraph indicates that “Prufrock”, as well as the “Other Observations” of that collection, can be viewed as an intention to portray the lives of tormented and, perhaps, damned individuals. Essentially, the poet is speaking from the “depths” of an Inferno and he is not sure that a return to the world is possible. Crucially, Eliot’s location is the urban space; what Hoover calls “the anonymous hell of city life.”

In “Prufrock”, a comic state of paralysis and indecision (“Shall I say. . .”, “Should I. . .”) is reported by an individual consciousness which walks down “streets that follow like a tedious argument,” surveying “cheap hotels,” and “lonely men. . . leaning out of windows.” The effect often becomes more disturbing than comic. Prufrock’s state of mind is such that he feels “pinned and wriggling on the wall” and death, the “eternal footman,” is always present. Prufrock’s fraught consciousness can, to a degree, be attributed to the influence of the metropolis or cityscape. And this becomes apparent as he speaks of an escape to locations which are the antithesis of the urban. These are images of the sea: “the floors of silent seas,” and “The chambers of the sea.” The natural element of water, as distinct from the “yellow fog” of the urban is, of course, not separated from the possibility of destruction. Prufrock knows the sea will bring about his drowning and ultimate death: but this is preferable to the “etherisation” of the soul which the urban situation causes.

Arguably, however, this poem is less a focus on the physical aspect of the metropolis itself than on the troubled consciousness which, as Hoover describes, may be “projecting his own psychic condition” onto a neutral space. In subsequent poems such as “The Preludes”, however, the physical body and consciousness become more closely entwined and affected by specific aspects of the urban metropolis.

In “Preludes” a “soul” is “stretched tight across the sky,” which “fades behind a city block”. And Eliot’s insistence on the affectation of the soul as well as the physical body reminds us of Simmel’s reflection that in the metropolis: Every event […] comes into immediate contact with the depths of the soul

In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”, the narrator observes eyes “trying” to peer through window-shutters. The selection of the verb “trying” is a curious one, indicating a failure of vision or understanding on the part of the isolated automatons. But the most powerful, nightmarish insistence on the psychological effect of the urban space is surely the observation by the narrator that “Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum.” Crane himself, in a letter to Harriet Monroe (in order to justify his ‘logic of metaphor’), described this line as signifying “the emotional throbbing of the heart of a distraught man.” Indeed, there is a similar conjunction between the affected emotional state and the soul’s urban surroundings in one of Eliot’s French precursors, Jules LaForgue.

LaForgue’s poem “October’s Little Miseries” begins: Every October I start to get upset.

The factories’ hundred throats blow smoke to the sky.

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As in Eliot, we are left with the impression that the narrator is “upset” because of the aspect of the urban landscape he is recreating.

I have said that Eliot and Crane often echo Simmel’s statements on the effects of the “metropolis” upon the “mental life” and the behaviours these influences produce. But why, we might ask, must the urban space of the city or metropolis bring around this state of spiritual diminution? Or why is it a likely outcome of one’s living in such an environment?

Eliot seems to agree with Simmel that it is a result of the mind’s construction of a “protective organ” in order to deal with the chaotic and identity-shattering metropolitan existence. This “organ”, to adhere itself to the economic fact of the unemotional money economy, naturally “transforms life into an arithmetical problem”, suppressing “emotional” responses and promoting, Simmel argues, “punctuality, calculability and exactness”. From this, inevitably, the “quantification” of life ensues.

According to Simmel, this has effects on the perception of time. And there is, in fact, a startling convergence between Simmel’s vision and Eliot’s in this sense of calculation and time. In Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”, one acquaintance says to another: Let us…

Correct our watches by the public clocks, Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

To justify his assertion that in the metropolis the mind becomes a rational and calculating one, and obsessed by exactness in the aspect of time, Simmel observes that: If all the watches in Berlin suddenly went wrong in different ways even only so much as an hour, its entire economic and commercial life would be derailed for some time.

While the speaker in Eliot’s poem insists that the watches are corrected, he also allots a specific time-period for their leisure activity (only half an hour!). In a similar vein, Simmel talks of the “brevity and rarity of meetings which are allotted to each individual as compared with the social intercourse in a small city,” which is due to the self-distancing of individuals from each other.

I have mentioned LaForgue as one of Eliot’s French precursors, but a more potent inspiration for some of this imagery comes in the “phantasmagoria” which Walter Benjamin ascribed to the poetry of Baudelaire and the Parisian scene.

As Marit Grotta points out, Benjamin’s use of the term “phantasmagoria” is complex and multi-form. He speaks of its development as an aspect of modern life; as part of the “functions peculiar to the masses in a big city.” Benjamin’s exposition includes a treatment of the “temporal” phantasmagoria in Baudelaire’s poetry, his description of the illusions his characters project into their surroundings. For example, as Grotta points out, “the gamblers believe that the current game will differ from the last and he is only one move away from changing his game to his favour.” This “temporal” phantasmagoria seems most useful for understanding Eliot’s.

In Eliot’s “Conversation Galante”, we have, as in “Portrait of a Lady,” an interaction between an “I” and a female acquaintance. The “I” of the poem, noticing the moon, simultaneously “deflates the moon as a romantic symbol” and conjures a phantasmagorical image in which the moon “may” actually be An old, battered lantern hung aloft To light poor travellers to their distress.

Eliot’s use of the “battered lantern” revives Prufrock’s “magic lantern.” The lantern was, of course, the nineteenth-century device associated with “phantasmagorical” projection for entertainment. But in Eliot’s characters it is the mind which is creating and projecting its own illusions. It is perhaps only in the metropolitan scene that the moon could appear to be a “battered lantern,” distorted by air pollution and the “yellow fog” of the urban. Finally, the “I” of the poem uses a term which does well to serve as a summation of the types of characters Eliot is portraying from the vantage point of the metropolis in his early poetry, namely: “our […] vacuity.”

Finally, the infernal aspect of the industrial city in “The Waste Land”, with its Dantean “so many . . . undone” by death, represents the culmination of all we have discussed so far – the complete image of the “anguished diminution” Schwartz speaks of.

It is interesting, however, that it is in “The Waste Land” that the possibility of redemption for urban existence is broached. This only becomes possible after the cities of “London, Vienna,” are subjected to destruction as they “burst” and “crack” in the “violet air.” But amidst this destruction there is also the suggestion of “reform.” Spencer Morrison argues that in this “reform” Eliot suggests

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An impulse for potentially revolutionary reconstruction – not only spatial reconstruction but social, cultural.

It must be said, however, that this possibility of redemption appears to hinge on the levelling of the urban metropolis in its current form: the towers must fall in order for lands to be “set in order”.

The Metropolitan Existence in Crane Hart Crane, like his rival, T. S. Eliot, was a poet of the urban cityscape and the metropolis, especially in the vicinity of New York but also Cleveland, where he occasionally sojourned during periods of unemployment. Aspects of the character and experience of living in the metropolis feature in his most crucial poetry, especially “The Bridge”. Throughout his career Crane would, as Langdon Hammer puts it, “militantly identify himself and his work with the twentieth-century America taking place in New York City”, where Crane moved in 1916 and would spend much of his life. Crane’s modernism was expressed in his insistence that poetry should be able to understand and portray the increasingly technological nature of modern existence. As he says in one letter: Unless poetry can absorb the machine i.e., acclimatize it as naturally and casually as […] all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function.

In the same letter, Crane speaks of the need for a “surrender […] to the sensations of urban life.” Crane’s continual attempt to achieve this “surrender”, in his life and his poetry, means that the pathos and pain in his work are acted out in the urban space itself. And, as in Eliot, there is ambivalence; a simultaneous fascination with and a revulsion towards its elements.

In several of the lyrics in “White Buildings”, Crane’s metropolis resembles the “urban nightmare” portrayed in Eliot’s “The Preludes” and “The Waste Land”. In the poem “Possessions”, for example, Crane situates himself within the metropolis, specifically “Bleecker Street”. He identifies himself as a citizen “Wounded” among the other “stubborn lives” and “desires” of the inhabitants.

Here, the metropolis becomes an arena in which the poet is turned on “smoked forking spires” and “tossed on these horns.”

Identifying this piece with Baudelaire’s poem of the same name, Maria F. Bennett argues that the poet “speaks from an abyss” along with “the lost souls of […] Bleecker Street.”

As Harold Bloom has argued, the infernal imagery recurrent in Crane is often invoked to insist on the “caustic” nature of the poetic gift. But it is clearly the metropolitan setting which is most conducive to this state of agony in Crane. At the close of “White Buildings”, Crane has set out on a voyage into the “rimless floods” of the ocean and the concerns of “divers dawns” within the metropolis have been left behind. But before this Crane depicts a vision of escape from the metropolis in “Repose of Rivers”, in what Bloom describes as a “Primal Scene of Instruction” where Crane “accepts his fate” as a poet.

This primal scene is situated among “willows”, “marshes”, and “weeds”, i.e., away from the metropolis which flashes momentarily into view towards the end of the poem in a nightmare vision. Crane speaks of the “city that I passed”, which is identified with “scalding unguents” and “smoking darts”, an image, once again, of the destruction or “wounding” of the individual that the metropolis imparts. Bloom argues that in “Repose of Rivers” the balance of pleasure and pain is left ambiguous”; but we are clearly left with a sense that the pain and destruction is associated with the metropolitan. M. D. Uroff argues that the “steady sound” the poet is seeking is only perceptible “after he has been cut off from it”. “Repose” is clearly associated with the natural scenery the poem describes and its effect is transmitted to the reader through Crane’s onomatopoeic “seething”, and alliterative phrases, such as “slow sound”, “steady sound”, and “sun-silt”.

Crane, in poems and letters, often speaks of the effect of the urban cityscape on the aspect of the “mental life” which is crucial to the argument of Simmel. Speaking of his earliest experience of wandering New York, in a letter of January 1917 to his Father, Crane echoes Simmel’s reflection that the independence which the metropolis provides comes at the price of the dismantling of the individual identity: It seems sometimes almost as though you had lost yourself; and were trying vainly to find somewhere in this sea of humanity, your lost identity.

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In Crane’s “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, before the reader is offered an escape from the “world-dimensional”, the urban cityscape is identified with a kind of spiritual diminution of the individual. Phillip Yannella argues that the banal and trivial “Memoranda … Baseball scores|Stenographic smiles and stock quotations” demonstrate the “constrictions imposed on the ‘mind’ by the urban environment”. These “constrictions”, moreover, seem to suggest the kind of transformation of life from the emotional or personal to the quantitative (“numbers … crowd the margins of the day”), which Simmel argues must take place in the metropolis to complement the development of the money economy.

A moment of convergence: “the tunnel” In 1927, to Crane’s satisfaction, Eliot’s magazine The Criterion accepted a poem called “The Tunnel”, which was to become the penultimate section of The Bridge. Writing to Otto Kahn, his patron, that same year on the progress of the work, Crane boasted: I have been especially gratified by the reception accorded me by The Criterion, whose director, Mr T. S. Eliot, is representative of the most exacting literary standards of our time.

This episode is, in many ways, a fascinating point in the history of modernist poetry to examine. Eliot, with his famous disdain for Romanticism as a “short cut to strangeness without reality”, is surely not likely to have thought much of Crane’s work, and the latter reports various rejections from The Criterion for his earlier lyrics.

“The Tunnel”, however, a description of an “intensely hell-ish subway ride”, is undoubtedly Crane at his most Eliotic. Crane acknowledges this in a letter to Yvor Winters, stating that the poem “savours a little of Eliot’s wistfulness”. Characteristically, though, Crane goes on to distance the work from Eliot, reflecting that: “I drop off the Eliot mood quite a ways before Chamber Street”.

Indeed, perhaps because they have been taken in by Crane’s self-protective distancing of “The Tunnel” from Eliot’s imagery in “The Waste Land”, many critics have argued that “The Tunnel” is placed where it is within “The Bridge” to act as, in a sense, the passage from an Inferno to a Paradiso; and thus, by implication, argue that its hopeless elements are redeemed by “Atlantis” and its final images of synthesis. But, as Crane’s biographer Brom Weber argues, “The Tunnel” and its implications deserve to stand alone as a “foil to the triumph and light” of Atlantis. And the overriding image conveyed in the poem is one of the “complete helplessness of man in his mechanical jungle”.

In analysing this poem, then, I want to bring attention once again to the infernal and “nightmare” quality in Crane’s depiction of aspects of the modern metropolis. The phantasmagorical element also recurs here in the starling appearance of Edgar Allan Poe and a treatment of his final hours. And, crucially, I want to emphasize Crane’s description of the effect of metropolitan structures and technology upon the minds and physical bodies of the citizens which recalls Simmel’s insistence on the disintegration of the identity in the chaotic arena of metropolis. Overall, this “description of an urban experience” within the metropolis, whatever its intentions towards the magnifying of the light and splendour of the ecstatic and affirming final section, represents a startling convergence with Eliot: and allows us to view these poets as bards of the urban metropolis and its hellish qualities.

As with Eliot’s “Prufrock” a well-chosen epigraph sets the tone for the infernal images the poem will produce: “To find the western path. Right thro’ the gates of wrath,” taken from Blake’s Jerusalem. The Western Path we are seeking is, of course, Atlantis, whilst the phrase “gates of wrath” refers to the metropolitan, urban space of the subway.

At its most basic level the poem concerns an underground journey to Brooklyn via Manhattan and the “East tunnel”, ending at Brooklyn Bridge at midnight. Its traditional precedents, as Weber argues, hark back to the descent of Aeneas and Dante into their respective underworlds. Here, however, hell contains some rather less famous characters, including the ordinary citizens of the metropolis. The imagery is infernal throughout as the rider watches “The curtain lift in hell’s despite” to find “the garden”, an unreachable Paradise, “in the third act dead”. We also find Crane using sound and poetic structure to add to the nightmare quality of the commute. The “rattle” of the “gongs” initiates the unpleasant sensation as the commuter enters the subway, while the recurring rhyme “night / fright / light”, as Weber describes it, provides a “compressing, trapping effect”.

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Early on in the poem, Crane describes the effects of metropolitan technology on the minds and behaviour of the inhabitants and the rider of the subway considers that: A walk is better under the L a brisk Ten blocks or so before. But …

The subway yawns the quickest promise home.

It is striking here that the individual, possibly Crane himself, recognizes that he ought to walk home (suggesting awareness of the dehumanising elements of the subway as we will find below), but chooses to ride the subway on a calculation that it will provide the speediest means. It is difficult here not to reflect on Simmel’s assertion that the metropolis insists on the importance of “punctuality, calculability and exactness” and that these tendencies are Conductive to the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impulses which originally seek to determine the form of life from within.

One cannot help but notice that the “instinctive” impulse of the person to “walk home” has been overridden by the transformative potential of metropolitan space and its technology. Crane’s depiction of how this feature of the metropolis effects the physical bodies of the citizens is discussed by Sunny Stalter in “Subway Ride and System in Hart Crane’s ‘The Tunnel’”.

As Crane’s rider prepares to enter the subway, he is instructed to “be minimum”; in order to squeeze onto the packed carriage he finds himself “preparing penguin flexions of the arms.” Here we have a portrayal of the literal, physical diminution which takes place in the individual’s adapting their physical frame to the subway. Stalter argues that it is an “involuntary accommodation of self to the system.”

The effects of the metropolitan infrastructure on the individual, however, are most striking in terms of the implications for the mental life and consciousness. The infernal image of a body which “smokes along the bitten rails”, whose head is “swinging from swollen strap”, proceeds to become hallucinatory and phantasmagorical. It is the image of Edgar Allan Poe, chosen by Crane because of the fabled nightmare of his final hours “trembling…Through Baltimore”, and because it is a perfect literary symbol for his theme of hopelessness here. The warped consciousness of the commuter projects this image into his surroundings, meeting the eyes of Poe which are described as “Agate lanterns”, completing the phantasmagorical effect.

Stalter’s article attempts to move away from a view of Crane’s poem as “oppressive” in its overall quality, suggesting instead that Crane finds what he sees “hypnotic, empathy-inducing.” Hypnotic, surely. Yet in terms of Crane’s painting of the actions, behaviour and speech of the subway riders there is little empathy until we meet the “Wop Washerwoman”. Before this we have instead a sense of the “vacuity” and sterility that Eliot applies to his characterizations in “The Preludes”, “The Waste Land”, and elsewhere.

Crane’s “Finger your knees … Find yourself in bed,” is startlingly reminiscent of Eliot’s depiction of the impotent physical gestures in “The Preludes”: You … clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands.

As in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, it is in the reported speech and dialogue of the characters that the sense of vacuity, sterility and meaninglessness is achieved. A striking image, “the phonographs of Hades in the brain”, is invoked to describe the state of the individual consciousness and its speech products. In “Repose of Rivers” the descent into Hades was a danger that “almost” drew the poet in. But now, Hades is itself a condition in the minds of the inhabitants of the Metropolis. And Crane is surely implying here that the Satanic or Daemonic has greater potency or power to overcome the subject in this arena in comparison to the natural scene.

Bloom argues that the dialogue of the citizens resembles a “meaningless mosaic” which gradually increases in its “disturbing quality”. There are, also, mirroring episodes in “The Waste Land”, such as the encounter between the typist and the “young man carbuncular,” who makes a sexual advance which is “unrebuked if undesired”, an emphasis on sexual depravity. Love becomes “a burnt match skating in a urinal” during a conversation between a prostitute and her client:

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What do you want? Getting weak on the links?

Fandaddle daddy don’t ask for change.

And there is also a sense, as in Eliot’s poem, of speech in the form of meaningless blurting, exposing the vacuity of the speaker: If You don’t like my gate why didja Swing on it

This is certainly not far from Eliot’s question, “What is the wind doing?” which, though it is a reference to Webster, is meaningless when transmitted between the unenlightened speakers in the poem. G. S. Lensing in fact directly links “The Tunnel” to “The Waste Land” as a poetic influence, arguing that the “torpor and sterility” that Crane conjures here has its source in Eliot singularly.

One can choose how far one wishes to take the implications of “The Tunnel” as a reflection on whether Crane was uncertain about the viability of his ecstatic vision in “Atlantis.” Allen Tate, Crane’s sometime friend, insinuates that the, at times, “hyperbolic” striving of “Atlantis” is a desperate attempt by Crane to undermine the message of “The Tunnel” after constructing it and becoming “horrified by its implications”. However, whatever it means for Crane’s final vision, it is undoubtedly a striking convergence with Eliot in terms of the portrayal of the metropolis and its mental and physical effects on the inhabitants.

From the “Anguished Diminution” to the “Utter Showing” I have argued for the importance of analysing these two great poets in terms the following convergence: their situating of much of their important and significant poetry within the urban space, including the “metropolis”; and, overall, viewing them primarily as poets of the metropolis who, throughout their careers, and especially in their early constructions, depicted its infernal, nightmarelike or phantasmagorical quality.

Often in Eliot, at times in Crane, we are given a sense of the implications of these aspects of modern life for the mentality of the inhabitants (including, perhaps, the poets themselves). Crane is, of course, a vatic, romantic and Orphic poet who, we know, celebrated the metropolis and wished to “resurrect” hope after its “burial” by Eliot. But there are images of pain and destruction in Crane in terms of the metropolis. Also, at times, he echoes Eliot’s view of the spiritual degradation and “vacuity” of the citizens of the metropolis. He presents an especially hellish, Eliotic aspect of urban, metropolitan existence in “The Tunnel”, even if it is with the best of intentions. Thus, Delmore Schwartz’s “diminution”, his term to describe the character of our existence within the metropolis, seems to me a useful concept to bring these poets, who have always been placed in opposition, together.

Though the burden of this essay has been less on the destination of these poets, I also find the image of the “utter showing”, a spiritual fulfilment or Platonic path to knowledge, useful in terms of understanding the “Atlantis” section of The Bridge and “The Four Quartets”, and their grasping at fulfilment and consummation – in Eliot’s case, Christian; in Crane’s, secular or Gnostic at most.

My primary aim has been to show how this convergence is important since we should not attempt to understand the poets’ attempts at their “utter showing” without their portrayals of the metropolitan “diminution” which probably contributed in their minds to its necessity. And, by way of ending, let us consider a short extract from “The Four Quartets” which proves this to be the case.

On his way towards the consummation of the “Fire and The Rose” at the close of “Little Gidding”, Eliot resurrects the imagery of his earlier poetry in describing the spiritual “vacuity” of the lives of the inhabitants of the metropolis. In “East Coker” we find ourselves, once again, in the subway: Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long Between stations …

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.

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“Little Gidding”, the final section, ends with the affirmative “all shall be well|and all manner of things shall we be well.” In his last major work, then, Eliot has conjured an image of the metropolitan diminution characteristic of his earlier poetry in order to emphasize and affirm the need for the Christian salvation, of which the Dantean Rose is a symbol.

Though we cannot completely square the circle in the same way with Crane since, arguably, “The Bridge” was not intended to be his final major work, we should not attempt to understand the secular grasping at synthesis and fulfilment within “Atlantis” without a consideration of the infernal imagery of the preceding section. Nor without a consideration of the imagery of his earlier poetry which treats the metropolitan space as an area full of pain, nightmare and people “in search of answers”.

It seems fitting, then (considering the convergence we have discussed), that while the imagery in East Coker could be viewed as a return to Eliot’s earlier poetry, it is (ten years after Crane’s death), also, unmistakably, Cranian.

Bibliography

Almasalmeh, Bassel, “Transcending Boundaries: Modern Poetic Responses to the City.” University of Leicester. 2007.

Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans, Harry Zohn, Verso, 1983 Bloom, Harold, Bloom’s Major Poets: T. S. Eliot, Chelsea House Publications, 1998.

————, Bloom’s Major Poets: Hart Crane, Chelsea House Publications, 2003.

Crane, Hart, The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Liveright, New York, 2001.

Davidson, M, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World, University of California Press, 1997.

Eliot, T. S., Essays Ancient and Modern, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1936.

————, Collected Poems 1909–1962, Faber & Faber, 2002.

Hammer, Langdon & Brom Weber, O My Land, My Friends: Selected Letters of Hart Crane, Four Walls Eight Windows New York/London, 1997.

Hoover, J. M., “The Urban Nightmare: Alienation Imagery in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz”, Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1978.

Dushiant, Kumar, Poetic Theory and Practice of T. S. Eliot, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 1996.

Morrison, S, “Mapping and Reading the Cityscape,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land, ed, G. McIntyre. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Schwartz, Delmore, Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz, reprint by Delmore Schwartz, Craig Morgan Teicher, John Ashbery, W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition. 2016.

Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York: Free Press, 1976.

Stalter, Sunny. “Subway Ride and Subway System in Hart Crane's ‘The Tunnel.’” Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 33, No 2, Winter 2010.

Tate, Allen, Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas, New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1936 Uroff, M. D., Hart Crane: The Patterns of his Poetry. Chicago; London; University of Illinois Press, 1974 Weber, Brom, Hart Crane. A Biographical and Critical Study. New York. Russel & Russel. 1970.

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'Beginning Again and Again' Series Production and Machinic Hybridity in Gertrude Stein Iliana Gutch Marinov

Fig. 1. Illustration from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook by Sir Francis Rose, 1954.

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein writes that when first asked to speak to the literary society at Cambridge, she was ‘quite completely upset by the very idea quite promptly answered no’ (Gertrude Stein, p. 254). However, while waiting in a garage for her beloved Ford ‘Aunt Pauline’ to undergo maintenance, Stein produced ‘Composition as Explanation’, which she delivered as a lecture at Oxford and Cambridge in 1926 (Ryan Tracy, p. 2). Named after an aunt who ‘always behaved admirably in emergencies’, Stein watched her Ford as it was deconstructed and put back together again, whilst considering the mechanics of series production.

Stein often found the garage to be a place of intellectual stimulation. In Paris France, Stein recounts returning from the country to find that as the garage where she usually kept her car was full, ‘the man in charge’ moved the other cars outside in order to place Stein’s car inside. This revealed to her that in France ‘even in a garage an academician and a woman of letters takes precedence’ (Stein, p. 21). Ryan Tracy suggests that Stein links automobile production to her search for a ‘continuous presence’ described in Everybody’s Autobiography, which she refers to in ‘Composition as Explanation’ as a ‘continuous present’ (my italics) (Ryan Tracy, p. 20). Stein’s ‘continuous present’ was captured by ‘beginning again and again’ (Stein, referenced in Ryan Tracy, p. 20).

In Stein’s work, automobiles are used to portray the irreversible changes brought about by the rapid mechanical and technological advancements that characterised artistic production in the twentieth century. They are used to model series production, developed by the burgeoning media, mechanical, and technological industries. This essay explores how series production features in Stein’s texts to serve as an allegory for the changes brought about by technological innovation and its effect on conceptualisations of the self during the modern era. By depicting the effects of serialisation in art, a hybridisation takes place, as the human and the ESSAYS | 39

mechanical work together to produce and reproduce art in a series. Blending the human and the mechanical, Stein’s hybrid texts become a means to explore the effects of the technological revolution on modernist cultural production.

Approaches to technological development in the modernist era became a topic of debate amongst critical schools of thought.

In ‘When Was Modernism?’ Raymond Williams critiques the predictability of the ‘heartless formulae’ of bourgeois mid-century modernist writings. However, he also identifies ‘a series of breaks’ with ‘forms’ and ‘power’. These, he indicates, were created as a result of ‘defensive cultural groupings’ forming in response to the ‘decisive advances’ of ‘[p]hotography, cinema, radio, television reproduction and recording’, causing a political divide amongst modernist schools of thought (Raymond Williams, p. 50). In his 1960 essay ‘What Was Modernism?’ Harry Levin criticised the incorporation of technology and media into artistic practise. Levin writes that using technology to enhance fine art was ‘reproduction, not production,’ making ‘art a business’, and artists ‘mainly consumers rather than producers of art.’ (Harry Levin, p. 615) Later, in 1980, Andreas Huyssen regarded emergent technology as a ‘pivotal factor in avant-garde’s fight against an aestheticist modernism, in its focus on new modes of perception’ (Andreas Huyssen, p. 10). The polarising nature of technology’s impact on the fields of art and criticism display its contentious place in modernist commentary.

Meanwhile, the possibility for cultural innovation offered by technology enabled modernism to pave the way for the avant-garde.

The anxieties surrounding the impacts of technological advancement arose from what Alberto Toscano identifies as the threat of replacement that technology posed to modernist authors. Using technology to create art had the possibility of greatly reforming the conventions of artistic creation by pluralising the possibilities of production. However, Stein’s fascination with mass-produced phenomena such as automobiles and cinema was often represented within her texts, enabling her work to navigate both ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms. In this light, Ellen Berry regards Stein’s work as a dismantling of the ‘cultural hierarchy’ caused by ‘the modernist repudiation of mass culture’ (Ellen Berry, p. 134).

Responding to what Huyssen terms as the ‘great divide’ between high and low art forms, Lisi Schoenbach also regards Stein’s engagement with mass culture as a deviation from modernist convention. According to Schoenbach, Stein’s work is an attempt to ‘bring modernism into contact with commercial culture’ owing to her ability to ‘see in the mechanized and repetitive forms of “cinema and series production” a metaphor for her own work’. This in turn demonstrates ‘her ability to insert herself into historical narratives – literary, cultural, technological – in order to fortify and reinscribe her own position as a public figure and famous author’ (Lisi Schoenbach, pp. 246-247). Stein’s engagement with commercial culture through series production displayed the possibility of creating experimental art which embraces the impact of technology on artistic production. The theme of series production not only provides a metaphor for Stein’s work, but creates the possibility of redefining the self in relation to a world transformed by war, in which technology was the impetus for rapid global change.

In ‘Composition as Explanation’, we see precisely this. Often described by critics as deconstructive, this essay follows the motions of mechanical serialisation and replication. Through mimicking the process of serialisation by ‘beginning again and again’ this essay shows, as Johanna Winant suggests, that ‘understanding Stein’s explanations is not a goal of reading her work’ (Johanna Winant, p. 95). Through imitating series production in order to confound the principles of explanation, Stein proposes that production in a series is the only possible way to aestheticize global change and notions of contemporary selfhood.

In the opening of the essay, Stein indicates that ‘composition’ is the only thing which differs from one generation to another.

The ‘present’ composition of the time was distinguished by ‘everything being alike’, or being a series. That which distinguishes one composition from the next is ‘what is seen’, which is dependent on ‘how everybody is doing everything’. This alters from generation to generation but remains constantly present. What differentiates composition from one generation to the next is down to the subjective interpretation of ‘what is seen’. Habitual, repeated behaviours establish the conventions for artistic production: ‘this makes what those who describe it make of it’ (Stein, p. 516). Therefore, although composition itself is abstract, it is something that is replicated from one generation to the next, and is determined by the habits, or repeated behaviours, of the people living in it. This,

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finally, is reflected by the artists describing it. All these processes collectively constitute composition. In this way, composition takes the form of a series; it is replicated and reproduced in constant succession.

Stein describes composition as elusive and confounding: ‘it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes and it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.’ Here, the multiple descriptors of composition can be broken down into a series of mostly regular anaphoric units of syntax. This syntactical structure illustrates that Stein is not explaining composition, but showing its pluralistic form by creating a series of characteristics that reveal or obscure it. This confounds Stein’s definition of composition, and subverts the act of explanation. From this it can be gleaned that, albeit polymorphic in nature, composition exists as a continuum which takes on a series of differing forms. Each form the composition takes ‘make[s] what is seen as it is seen’; it creates the lens through which composition is looked through (Stein, p. 516). Much like the automobile in Stein’s garage, defining composition involves a process of constant production and reproduction. Although there is no way of knowing exactly what is seen, it is perpetually seen.

Later in the essay, Stein describes her realisation that production in a series is ‘how everybody is doing everything,’ thereby making it ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ (Stein, p. 516). Writing in a series is a way to ‘create’ a twentieth-century ‘time-sense’. This ‘timesense’ is in turn produced by ‘creating a more and more continuous present’ through ‘beginning again and again’ (Stein, p. 514). The perpetuality of the ‘time-sense’ is demonstrated through this ‘continuous present’ which is created through series production. Stein regards series production as the modern Zeitgeist, and by recreating it in her work, she proposes that the conditions in which art is created are subject to the present developments of the time. The ambition of creating a ‘time-sense’, in the form of a ‘continuous present’, indicates Stein’s ambition to create art on a large scale, and in the essay, she reflects on her repeated attempts to ‘capture everything’ in her written work (Stein, p. 519). In this way, Stein’s writing methodology in ‘Composition as Explanation’ becomes an exploration of the motivations behind the desire for widescale production taking place in the twentieth century.

In Paris France, Stein also explores the interplay between cultural production and the world around it. Written 14 years later, Paris France is a commentary on French culture which complicates the notions of fact and observation. In the text, Stein outlines the reasons why France was an ideal place for artistic production. Series production is demonstrated through the daily activities of the French, making France the ‘background of unreality […] necessary for anybody having to create the twentieth century’ (Stein, p. 13).

This is evoked in Part III, when Stein recalls the story of the ‘wife of the local doctor’ who goes out in her car to witness men cutting the road to discover ‘lots of bones’. Stein comes to the realisation that ‘[i]t was always there life and death death and life and the earth and it is never anything to be remembered or even talked about’. (Stein, p. 62) The lack of connective means that the sentence reaches its climax around the oscillation between the words ‘death’ and ‘life’. The words fall into a soft rhythmic lull, punctuating the recurring cycle of creation and destruction.

In this way, Stein’s portrayal of French attitudes of life and death demonstrate the inevitability of series production, and through this, the intertwining of external event and internal rhythms and modes of production takes place. This rhythmic distribution of syllables in the sentence represents the mechanical motions of machines, and the incessant process of producing in a series, material which is both proliferate and alike. The banality of the life-death sequence, something which ‘was always there’, replicates the passivity of the composition – something that is ‘happening’. This creates a sense of acceptance of the changes which are taking place over time. This passage thus enables the reader to consider the proximity of death and life and their inevitability. The continuous act of destruction and creation creates a ‘continuous present’ and, in the same trivial manner, performs the multiple acts of creation and destruction involved in the process of mechanical production.

French indifference to life and death is, however, not the only form of series production generated in the novel. The daily practices of characters mimic mechanical repetitions, giving them an inhuman quality. John Dewey describes habit as taking the form of ‘machinelike repetition’, a daily activity which is reproduced time and time again. Yet, for Dewey, habit is transformed when it encounters ‘conflict’, which produces a ‘release of impulse’ and a ‘conscious search’ (John Dewey, p. 242). Although people in Paris France perform repetitive habits, when a character encounters conflict in the form of war, they engage in a ‘conscious search’ (Stein, p. 80).

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In this way, the daily activities depicted in Paris France present another form of hybridisation, as the mechanical habit intertwines with the human ‘conscious search’. Although descriptions of daily activities appear trivial, they are used to engage with a wider concept, and Stein uses these depictions to aestheticize human responses to war. These daily activities are repetitively performed, and through this Stein constructs a ‘continuous present’, and they take the form of a series. In Paris France, Stein demonstrates this through a series of narratives depicting the lives of French children. In order to gain an understanding of ‘just what a child’s feeling about war-time is’, Stein looks at France through the eyes of a child named Helen Button (Stein, p. 80).

Helen Button and her dog William have a series of recurring experiences from which they are able to infer that they are living in wartime. Helen and her dog William walk ‘out every day’ (Stein, p. 83), and Helen has several experiences which reveal to her that it is war-time. These realisations take place at liminal times of day and initiate repetitive behaviours. In one example, in which Helen ‘dreamed that it was war-time’, she woke up and ‘stood perfectly still and listened’: She thought she heard it but did she. She listened and listened. It was war-time and so she listened and listened. She heard weather, she heard water she heard snow, she heard water everywhere, it was that kind of weather. She heard snow around she very nearly heard the moon and she heard the rain and she heard the mountains. (Stein, p. 90)

Although the tense has moved to the past simple, the repetitive use of the verb ‘listened’ creates an ongoing linear action in the past.

The rhythmic fluidity of the sentences build momentum to create a kinesthesis that recreates the whirring of a machine, perhaps an automobile. However, Helen is able to hear everything but war-time.

Helen uses the sensory experience of listening to fathom the world around her and attempt to locate and identify war. She then converts this act into a repetitive activity by repeatedly listening, and the sensory and mechanical combine. In her attempt to ‘hear’ the ‘war-time’, Helen is striving to recreate the reality that she had imagined in her dream. Although she ‘heard’ the landscape around her, she did not hear what she was listening for, and engages in a ‘conscious search’ (Stein, p. 90). Helen is an inseparable part of the landscape, embedded in the composition, performing a series of attempts to understand the world around her. She is limited by her humanity and unable to transcend it. The event of war, disseminated in proliferate forms across space and time, only exists in her fantasy, yet contradictorily, she is sure of its existence.

The everydayness of Helen’s war is also apparent in these narratives. In a second anecdote, Helen has another indirect encounter with war. Here, when Helen and her dog William are walking, they see a ‘bottle’ in the ‘middle of the road.’ Disregarding the bottle, they go on. ‘They did not look back at the bottle. But of course it was still there because they had not touched it.’ ‘That’, Stein concludes, ‘is war-time’ (Stein, p. 82). In her statement that the bottle ‘is war-time’, Stein changes from past to present tense, making its existence perpetual. This image of war is concrete and banal, a very different war to the one she searched for in her dream.

Helen’s attempts to understand the war demonstrate the contrast between the idea and reality of how an event takes place.

The shifting and uncertain nature of ‘war-time’, along with Helen’s indifference to it, portrays the difficulty of comprehending war and replicating it in art. This may only be achieved when war is broken down into a series and detached from any form of realism.

The image splits, as the first image of Helen and her dog and the second image of the bottle are separated by a temporal divide. The duplication of images creates a cinematic effect in which Helen and her dog and the bottle divide into corresponding narratives. This evokes the transience of mundane human activity against the backdrop of war, and the cinematic quality makes the scene reproducible. The creation of a text which engages with visual media enables Stein to create a subtle image of war which is in dialogue with multimedial forms of artistic production.

The object permanence of the bottle, juxtaposed with the scene of Helen and her dog passing by, evoke the ephemerality of each series against its perpetual state of reproduction. It also illustrates the pervasiveness of war, rendered mundane through its ubiquity, and how its presence can manifest in implicit ways. Helen and her dog’s disinterest in the bottle demonstrates an acceptance of war. In this way, Stein creates characters which validate her own acceptance of the ‘time-sense’, defined by the inevitability of series production.

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Along with knowing when it was war-time, Helen had an ability to know ‘just what was going to happen.’ This ability was inherited from ‘her aunt Pauline’, who is described as ‘extra-lucid’ (Stein, p. 86). Whether this is a reference to Stein’s automobile or her sensible aunt, this heightened awareness of both Helen and her aunt enables them to navigate the world around them with comfort. ‘Aunt Pauline’ in particular, is described as having an exceptional ability to predict daily habits, such as knowing ‘how often a clock would strike’, who ‘was not going to eat eggs’, and ‘who was going to buy a hat’. The seemingly predictable acts demonstrate a reverence for the everyday, a bathetic play on the grandiosity with which the act of predicting the future is portrayed. The paradoxical nature of these predictions is emphasised by the fact that although ‘a good many people did believe her’, Helen is indifferent whether the predictions were true or not, but ‘liked to just say it to Emil’ because ‘it made her fascinating.’ Helen ‘loved to listen to her aunt Pauline’ – perhaps a reference to Stein listening to the whirrings of her Ford, or to the advice of her aunt (Stein, p. 88). Either way, Aunt Pauline’s understanding of habitual behaviours is part of a deeper understanding of the present day. This works implicitly as a moment for the author’s own self-acclaim, as the characterisations of Aunt Pauline and Helen Button show that Stein’s aesthetic practice is defined by a ‘lucid’ interpretation of the world around her.

Stein presents French people’s habits in the form of a series, whilst simultaneously showing in them an intuitive sense of deeper understanding. This reveals how a macrocosmical event can be reinscribed through the minutiae of daily occurrences, performed and patterned in a mechanical sequence. The narrative of Helen Button and Aunt Pauline provides an allegory for the acceptance of current innovation. This, in turn, becomes a demonstration of Stein’s argument for ‘accepting’ the ‘time-sense’, and doing so by producing everything in the form of a series (Stein, p. 516). Stein creates a France which realises her artistic vision and challenges the idea of an objective reality.

Through the texts ‘Composition as Explanation’ and Paris France, Stein reforms constructions of modern selfhood as a response to the destabilisation of human power in the wake of the creation of machines. Diverse engagements with technology and media throughout modernism have revealed the fears and hopes surrounding inter-war technological and mechanical developments.

Alberto Toscano considers this in relation to what Günther Anders refers to as ‘Promethean shame’, arising from the realisation of the superiority of the man-made machine in comparison to the flawed human body (Anders Günther, p. 594). He regards ‘modernist inhumanism’, the modern identification with the machine, as a requirement for a modernism dependent on a capitalist world (Alberto Toscano, p. 594). ‘Modernist inhumanism’ thus becomes a response to Marx’s ‘rising “organic composition” of capital – the tendency for human living labour to be overwhelmed by machinic constant capital’ (Marx, quoted in Toscano, p. 595). According to Toscano, this ‘inhuman type’ is ‘an adaptation to the present environment defined by continuous shocks’ (Toscano, p. 595). This is voiced through images of machinic hybridity, created by futurists such as Marinetti who ‘thrill[s] to the hyperstimulation of speed and the sense of the exploding, expanding self’ (Toscano, p. 598).

In Stein there is no fetishistic fantasy of becoming the machine. However, she navigates the anxiety created by the inevitability of the mechanical era through a proliferation of selves created by the production of a serialised text. Although initially a ‘little troubled’ with the ‘inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again’, she realised that ‘if series were inevitable and the whole of it was inevitable beginning again and again could not trouble [her]’ (Stein, p. 519). Therefore it is ‘natural enough’ that ‘machines are bound to make series production’ (Stein, p. 22). In Stein, sensations and responses to ‘shock’ are dispersed rationally and pragmatically, as her attitude towards the machine is one of acceptance. By replicating series production, Stein attempts to transcend the ‘limit’ of the ‘human hand’, which is unable to produce art in a series, as people ‘had not the faults and qualities of the machines’ (Stein, p. 23). Stein is inevitably limited by her human capacity, able to create only imitations of series production in her text. However, through the process of publishing and printing her work, Stein’s text becomes replicated by machines; therefore series production is an inevitable part of the dissemination of her work.

Through embracing both the ‘faults and qualities of the machines’, the amalgamation of human and machine replicates itself within Stein’s text, and enables her to encounter ‘faults’ and ‘qualities’ of her own work. Production in a series proliferates indefinitely,

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gaining in momentum and speed, enabling it to traverse rapidly from the small-scale to the epic. Series in Stein’s work begin in daily habits and expand to wars, traversing through history and time, and are constantly, ‘beginning again and again.’

In series production, Stein also creates the possibility of locating the author’s self. Self-embodiment through serialisation enables Stein to ‘insert herself into [literary, cultural and technological] historical narratives’ in a way which enables her to make sense of the world around her (Lisi Schoenbach, p. 246). Stein shows that for the modernist author to feel their place in the world, they must create in the form of a series. In ‘Composition as Explanation’ and Paris, France, the self is proliferated through serialisation, enacting the Promethean tension between creation and self-destruction which is associated with the manufacturing of the machine.

In this way, art which mimics series production formulates a response to technological and mechanical development in the modern era. By engaging with forms of mass production in order to present a multiplied and hybridised self, Stein’s texts provide a commentary on the mechanical systems of production and reproduction and their destabilising effects on the modern author-figure.

n.b. The original version of this piece was completed as part of a master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Literature.

Bibliography

Primary Texts Stein, Gertrude, ‘Composition as Explanation’, from Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. by Carl Van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 513–523.

Stein, Gertrude, Paris, France (Great Britain: William Clowes and Sons Ltd, 1940).

Secondary Texts Berry, Ellen, ‘Introduction’, ‘On Reading Gertrude Stein’, and ‘Modernism/Mass Culture/Postmodernism: The Case of Gertrude Stein,’ in Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism (USA: The University of Michigan Press, 1992).

Huyssen, Andreas, Introduction to ‘After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism’ (USA: Indiana University Press, 1986). pp. vii–xii.

Levin, Harry, ‘What Was Modernism?’, in The Massachusetts Review, 1, 4 (Summer 1960), 609–630.

Schoenbach, Lisi, ‘“Peaceful and Exciting”: Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein’s Pragmatic Modernism’, in Modernism/Modernity, 11, 2 (April 2004), pp. 239–259.

Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2001).

Tate, Alison, ‘A Semblance of Sense: Kristeva’s and Gertrude Stein’s Analysis of Language’, in Language and Communication, 3, 4 (Great Britain: Elsevier Science Ltd, 1995), pp. 329–342.

Toscano, Alberto, ‘The Promethean Gap: Modernism, Machines, and the Obsolescence of Man’, in Modernism/Modernity, 23, 3 (Sept 2016), pp. 593–906.

Tracy, Ryan ‘Writing in Cars with Gertrude Stein and Jacques Derrida, or, the Age of Autotheory,’ in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture and Theory, 76, 1 (Spring 2020), 2–24.

Williams, Raymond, ‘When Was Modernism?’, in New Left Review, 175, 1 (May/June 1989), 48–52.

Winant, Johanna, ‘Explanation in Composition: Gertrude Stein and the Contingency of Inductive Reasoning’, in Journal of Modern Literature, 39, 3 (Spring 2016), pp. 95–113.

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Between Perceptions and Words The Theme of Communication and Language in Ingmar Bergman's The Silence Debarati Choudhury

According to Susan Sontag, The Silence never goes beyond the theme of “failure of communication” (82), whereas in Persona Bergman deals with the failure of language in a more exploratory way in which language comes to signify artifice and fraud. I think that The Silence not only addresses the theme of the failure of language (rather the failure of communication of which language is an integral part but not the sole element), but also that it proposes a way of re-establishing communication. Though attempts at communication are only at their germination in the film, a few relationships are indeed reclaimed, which makes it a more hopeful film than Persona. I will explore the theme of communication in the film: its failure, and the possibility of communication which is rooted not just in language but in perceptions and the body.

The title of the film, ‘The Silence’, which Gado, Kalin, Singer and other critics have interpreted as God’s silence, connects the film to a broader existential context. But, unlike with existential philosophy, hope is not found in the solitary pursuits of individuals but in communication with others. The individual, though responsible for his or her actions, cannot live on his or her own. In this, Bergman departs from the existentialist notion of individual striving alone in the face of absurdity. Moreover, Bergman’s world presupposes a God who has abandoned mankind unlike the existentialists’ world where God’s presence or absence is immaterial to adopting an existential stance. In a way, Bergman’s world is more unbearable because there is the consciousness that there once was a world where faith was a possibility and that it is no longer there. However, since faith was once there, there is still a dim chance of reclaiming that faith. Throughout The Silence we see that this paradox – despair and faith – has been worked out. On the one hand, the sisters, Ester and Anna, drift apart from each other; and on the other hand, Johan’s relationship with his aunt towards the end suggests that faith in human communication is not misplaced. Bergman’s faith is not embodied in an institution or in a philosophy but rather in human communication. But before I deal with how communication is re-established in the film I want to focus on why and how communication fails and how the failure is transposed onto the screen.

Throughout the film the two sisters, Anna and Ester, are represented as opposites – not only in terms of the way they approach their surroundings but also in their approach to language. The film represents this difference visually by constantly situating the two sisters in two different spaces or always with barriers in the cinematic space. According to Frank Gado, Anna represents the body and Ester represents the spirit (296) and Maaret Koshkinen seems to agree when she says that the film is trying to reach a unified whole where the body and the spirit fuse and do not exist as distinct entities (133). I agree with Koshkinen’s view that the film reaches out for a unified whole but I believe that the film does this through the theme of communication rather than through reinforcing the difference between the mind and the body or the duality principle. I will come back to the point of Cartesian duality and how the film addresses it later on when I discuss the body. However, I don’t agree with the view that simply because Anna represents the body and Ester represents the mind and because there is a split between the two that they cannot communicate.

Why the two sisters fail to communicate is hinted at in the two lengthy conversations that the sisters have. Towards the end of the film – in the love-making scene – Anna says that Ester is always “trying to find meanings” and things have to be meaningful in order to please her. Ester’s intellectualism, which Anna takes for a mere stance, emerges as one reason why the two sisters cannot

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communicate. It seems that Ester, despite her illness, leads a more meaningful life or so it appears to Anna. Anna’s own life seems to be meaningless and stifling which is suggested by her constant reference to heat. There is a suggestion that Ester wittingly or unwittingly has controlled Anna’s life and still controls it. Anna’s desperate attempts to spite her sister only reinforce the idea that she is still bogged down by her sister’s ideas or her constant vigilance which she tries to escape. For Anna, Ester’s death can be the only respite and she longs for her sister’s death. The sisters’ falling out can also be traced back to their childhood or their respective relationships with their father. The father is always mentioned with reference to Ester rather than with Anna and it appears that Anna has harboured feelings of abandonment since her childhood.

Anna’s acts of repudiating her sister therefore are acts of revolt and vengeance, but her frustration increases when she realises that her sister still controls her. This means that Anna never has had the chance to live life authentically because she has never found her individuality. Individuality therefore becomes an important premise for communication and in this The Silence subscribes to an existential view. However, in the film, realising one’s authenticity or individuality does not save one from the feeling of abandonment.

It is communication with other people that makes life bearable and individuality should be coupled with the will to communicate in order to communicate. Anna’s state of imprisonment is best signified in the love- making scene in which the chiaroscuro effect works to trap Anna in shadowy bars which resemble a prison. In the dark room, with no human contact, despite the love-making act, Anna’s situation comes to signify the starkness of loneliness. In the face of loneliness, one thing that the existentialists skirt by calling it individualism, the human situation is the most desperate and also the most pitiful. Language fails, as Ester realises once she has recovered from her second fit: “there is no need to discuss loneliness”. It also means that loneliness cannot be discussed and the only way to traverse it is through human presence and communication.

Fig. 1. The railings of the bed become a literal barrier between the sisters.

In the beginning of the film Anna and Ester loathe communicating but as the film progresses Ester seems more willing to communicate with her nephew and her sister. Ester’s growing need to communicate can be read in terms of her growing awareness of her mortality. She does not want to die alone and despite her intellectual occupation, it seems, in the end, human presence or comfort in the “flesh” is the most enduring communication one can have. But Anna seems unwilling to communicate and rebuffs all her sister's attempts at communication. The hotel room comes to represent the impossibility of communication between the two sisters. Perhaps it is the sisters’ relationship that is the bleakest aspect of the film and it is in their relationship that language seems

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to fail. Ironically, they have the lengthiest dialogues between them. At one point, Anna says that words mean nothing and indeed, when Bergman revisited the film, he found the wordiness of the sisters’ lengthiest dialogue in the presence of the waiter to be the least effective (Bergman 109). However, I believe that the wordiness works very well in the context of the film because it signifies the redundancy of words and why communication does not necessarily depend on words. The failure of communication is not merely due to the failure of words or failure of language but because of individual failures. In the love-making scene the railings of the bed become a literal barrier between the two sisters (fig. 1) and the failure of communication is augmented by this barrier.

For Heidegger, “language is the house of the being in which the human being ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of being guarding it” (254). What the metaphor of the house implies is that language is not only a way of understanding and perceiving the world, but also a safeguard against the encroachment of banality on “the being’s” authenticity or essence. Language is as much a mode of social interaction (langue) as an expression of the being’s affective and mental states. Unlike structuralists (for whom language is largely a system and the individual is implicated in the system with little room for ‘authentic’ expression), Heidegger insists on language’s ability to confer humanness to existence and to be infused with individual hopes, fears and desires.

Like Heidegger, Bergman does not discount the idea that language is also a creative mode of expression and that language can indeed become a means to better and more meaningful communication and also establish a deeper relation with the world. Heidegger was trying to redefine the very concept of language and was trying to rescue language from its association with the rational faculty of the mind. By using the word ‘being’ Heidegger implies the totality of existence which presupposes a body and the senses. In this, Heidegger’s view comes close to Merleau-Ponty’s (whom I will come back to later on) existential phenomenology which is premised on the subjective perceptions of the individual. However, Heidegger only cursorily refers to the body; Merleau Ponty’s importance in the existential debate lies in the primacy he accords to the body and the body’s intentionality, even against the rational faculty, in defining authenticity or essence. For Merleau-Ponty, the body of the individual is as crucial as the mind in perceiving the world, which is why language, once freed from its discursive superstructures, can be employed creatively to express one’s “essence”. For Sartre, “existence comes before essence” (348) which means that an individual exists first and then defines his or her existence in relation to the world. Bergman places himself in the midst of these strands of existential thoughts and evolves a philosophy that lies at the intersection of perceptions and words, between existence and essence. For him, unlike for Sartre, a person cannot exist without at the same time trying to understand his or her existence. And the individual’s essence lies in how the individual comes to communicate with other beings. An individual in Bergman’s world cannot live all by himself and still have a meaningful life.

Solipsism is an untenable position in Bergman’s world and like Merleau-Ponty he believes that “individual freedom” is not simply “an act of will” (Phenomenology 506) but a possibility only in the presence of other people (Phenomenology 507). However, to communicate with others, carving out an identity for oneself is important.

In The Silence, vision is a mode of communication since it is one of the primary means of going beyond one’s bodily limits: it connects the self to the exterior world; and Ester and Johan engage in acts of observation throughout the film. Compared to Ester and Johan, Anna seems unable to focus on a particular object; or rather, even when she stares, her gaze comes to resemble the gaze of a sleepwalker. This gaze also indicates her incomplete realisation of the self and her inability to perceive things as intensely as Ester and Johan do. In other words, she lacks their curiosity. In the beginning, Johan too has the look of a sleepwalker but as the film progresses, he becomes more conscious and sentient of the objects and relations around him. The hotel room the three characters share is one and yet there is a door in between, which Anna insists on closing. The door also divides the hotel room into two spaces: Ester’s room is flooded with sunlight; sometimes it seems warm and sometimes bleak and harsh like the sun in Camus’s The Stranger.

Sometimes the light frames Ester in mellow tones and sometimes the frames are sharp and render Ester inhuman. Anna’s room, on the other hand, seems dark for the most part. The two spaces delineated within the same space become key to understanding the sisters’ strained relationship.

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Fig. 2. Ester watches Anna intently.

In one of the scenes, the door is ajar and Ester intently watches Anna grooming herself (Fig. 2). This suggests a lesbian desire for her sister and this could explain why she feels betrayed when Anna makes love with the waiter. However, the intent look is not merely erotic in nature. If it indicates vigilance on her part it also indicates her will to communicate with her sister. But Ester is only a small, blurry figure relegated to the background in the scene where Anna takes the forefront and fixes her gaze at the camera.

Though she is aware that her sister is looking at her, she does not reciprocate. That her sister is looking at her through the mirror or looking at her reflection also suggests that though they might inhabit the same space, even on screen the communication between them is illusory. In another scene, when Anna comes back from the theatre, Ester looks over her shoulder only to see her reflection.

In yet another scene, Johan, sitting on the threshold of the door that partitions his mother’s room and his aunt’s room, is juxtaposed with his aunt’s image in the mirror. Johan does not have access to this image but, as spectators, we have access to the image and it suggests the possibility of a bond between Johan and Ester.

Mirrors are important in the film and reflections of people are juxtaposed with real people to give us an illusory sense of the fragile relationships established in the cinematic space. It also suggests that our visual faculty is not always to be trusted, which is why the film, which is aware of its visual modality, repeatedly seeks out other modes of communication like touch and sound and smell. However, in Bergman’s oeuvre, as Irving Singer points out, “mirrors have to learn how to be more reflective, more capable of providing insights about reality instead of trying just to duplicate it” (53). Therefore, mirrors are not merely mimetic or illusory, but also “reflective” of possibilities in juxtaposing spaces that otherwise seem disparate, even inimical, in real space and time. Johan standing beside his aunt’s reflection may not guarantee union, but acknowledges the possibility of such a union. This “reflective” capacity of mirrors largely resonates with Bergman’s view that cinema can conjure up visions and that, though vision is not always to be trusted, his films, being overly conscious of their own visual modality (Persona being Bergman’s most self-reflexive film), do not shy away from transposing a vision in the manner of a possibility onto vision (the cinematic screen).

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Fig. 3. Johan’s juxtaposition with his aunt’s reflection.

Johan’s juxtaposition with the mirror reflection (fig. 3) of his aunt and the subsequent scene becomes an indication of how communication is made possible in the film. His aunt seems to read Johan better than his mother does. She realises that he is hungry and invites him to share her food. It is a simple gesture of kindness but the scene is important in that it is strongly rooted in the senses and it is also the first proper communication Johan has had with anybody in this film until this point. In a way this is the only wordy conversation that brings out the power of language and also the power of poetic language that is foregrounded in the senses. Ester conjures up for Johan an idyllic image where there is bright sun, and fish, that also seems to restore for Johan a sense of home recalling Heidegger’s comment on language as the “house of the being”. His aunt’s description chimes with him in particular because throughout the film it is made clear that Johan perceives and understands the world through his senses. It also becomes a way of acquiring language, carving out an identity for himself and a way of finding a language equivalent to his perceptions – an “expression” or gesture, an authentic language.

Merleau-Ponty in his The World of Perception writes that the world is felt subjectively through our body and these perceptions that we gather from the senses in a way help us shape our understanding of the world (49-50). This is why poetic language or the language of self-expression is different from discursive practices of language which homogenise language, thus rendering it inadequate for heightened states of consciousness. For Merleau-Ponty, language is not merely representative of objects or is not a network of signifiers in the structuralist way, but a way of representing one’s lived experience. For Johan, who is not yet caught up in the act of signification, because he does not have enough discursive knowledge that could compel him to think in a particular way, things are the way they are. When he sees the tanks from the train window, he tries to reach out with his hand rather than just see it (fig. 5). His hand resembles the boy’s hand who tries to feel his mother’s face on the television screen in Persona, trying to get a better perspective of the object that is near him. According to Koskinen, “Johan is shown as someone who navigates through the world, trying to understand it through his senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching” (116–17). Since for Johan meaning is not a given and he is in the process of making sense of the world, the hotel experience proves to be enjoyable. When Ester apologises to him because she thinks the vacation has turned out to be a failure, Johan does not agree with her. For him the act of discovery has proved fruitful.

Johan’s way of responding to the world is significant to the theme of communication because from the very beginning he acts as a bridge between his aunt and his mother. In the hotel room, it is Johan who navigates between the two spaces and serves as a tenuous link between the sisters (fig. 4).

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Fig. 4. Johan as a tenuous link.

Initially Johan constantly tries to establish a connection with his mother by snuggling close to her or by touching her. As the film progresses and Johan evolves as an individual, the physical tie with his mother weakens. At one point in the film, when Johan is sleeping beside his mother, he is curled up as though he were in his mother’s womb. He is in the process of separating from his dependence on his mother’s body and only gradually comes to see her as an individual distinct from himself. Earlier in the film, Anna sees him observing her feet and when she asks him why he is looking at her feet he says that he is wondering how the feet carry her all by themselves. This statement implies that he perceives his mother in fragments and is yet to see her as a complete individual. Since individuality is a premise for communication, Johan’s closeness to his mother in the beginning does not imply communication. Communication is not a given even when the bond is that of a mother and a son. There are certain things that Johan fails to understand even though he tries to, for instance the issue of sexuality, especially his mother’s sexuality. He comes to associate his mother’s sexuality with the painting that he sees in the corridor. The painting with its sexual theme towers over him, and this is one of the few moments in the film when we lose Johan’s perspective when much of the film is focalised through Johan. His mother’s sexuality distances him from her and he comes to relate it to her mother’s abandonment of him and his aunt.

Fig. 5. The motif of hands.

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Fig. 6. Ester clasping Johan's little face. link.

Because touch becomes a mode of communication, the motif of hands (fig. 5) is significant. According to Frankenegg, the hand and the face in Bergman’s oeuvre symbolize ‘the lack of and search for identity and communication and, positively, a communion of love’ (301). In The Silence, the motif of the hand also reinforces the haptic quality of the film and becomes an important tool of communication. If it is Johan’s way of sensing the world, it is also his way of reaching out to the world. After the first instance of communication with his aunt over food, Johan offers to make a drawing for his aunt. Though Gado interprets the drawing as a giant that Johan’s hands produce involuntarily (302), I think it is a gesture of communication, an instance of reaching out and expanding one’s existential horizon. Hands become an important motif for Ester too. She is a translator and most of the time she is at her typewriter typing away or writing. However, these, for the most part, are mechanical activities. We first get a glimpse of her trying to use her hands to communicate when she watches Johan and Anna sleeping, but she is reluctant to touch either Johan or Anna.

However, after Johan’s Punch and Judy show, when it is evident that Johan is scared, he runs to her aunt and in that scene the camera focuses on Ester’s hand clasping Johan’s little face (fig. 6). It not only indicates a moment of communication but also a communication which is rooted in the sense of touch. As Johan moves away from his mother, he comes closer to his aunt not only because he is driven by the same intellectual curiosity as his aunt, but also because he accepts his aunt’s embrace. Initially he refuses his aunt’s attempts at patting him but he opens up his bodily space as the film progresses. This is what Heidegger calls “hearkening” – the being’s “potentiality for hearing”. At the end of the film, before leaving, he willingly embraces his aunt, and this time not because he is scared but because he has genuinely come to accept her presence, both intellectual and corporeal, in his world. His aunt’s body is no longer a foreign body but a body where he finds comfort.

There is a repeated insistence of the body in the film, not in the erotic sense but in the way of the body’s intentionality. Merleau– Ponty says: The body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a provisional sketch of my total being. Thus experience of one’s body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about the body…and not the experience of the body or the body in reality’ (198–9).

Despite Ester’s refusal to acknowledge her body, her body makes itself felt through her illness. In making the body the linchpin of experience, in reinforcing a phenomenological reading of the film, Bergman also seems to reject the cartesian dualism of mind and

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body. If language and communication are premised on rationality or the mind, this view is negated in the film. Communication is possible when there is a uniformity between the body and mind. This however does not mean that the body gains ascendancy over the mind, because Anna’s corporeal approach to the world without trying to understand it alienates her from the world and the people around her.

Anna’s abandonment of her sister and to some extent her son becomes a microcosm of God’s abandonment of mankind.

According to Kalin, since we no longer have God to turn to, we have to turn towards each other and in this act of ‘turning towards’ another human being lies the possibility of communication (27–8). Abandonment thus becomes a pretext for communication in The Silence. When Anna leaves the hotel room for the first time, Johan assures his aunt that he is there for her and that his mother will come back soon. Curiously, his words are mirrored in his aunt’s when she consoles him after his Punch and Judy puppet show, saying that his mother will come back soon. This mirroring of words suggests Johan’s and Ester’s proximity to Anna as Ester asks Johan, “We both love mommy, don’t we?” and Johan confirms. The mirroring also suggests the proximity in their approach to language. Both of them use language to understand and console each other when they feel abandoned. Unlike the wordiness of the conversation between Ester and Anna which only suggested the failure of language, the short conversations between Johan and his aunt exude empathy and the curiosity to know each other.

That the film is set in a fictional place with a fictional language becomes a test for language. Since the characters do not understand the language of the town, finding alternative modes of communication or forging communication with each other becomes an imperative. It would be wrong to say that language fails entirely in the film. Both Ester and Johan are keen on learning the town’s language and it is the shared curiosity in language that brings them closer. When Johan asks his aunt why she translates books in a foreign language, his aunt replies, “So that you could read those books”. In the same scene we see Johan reading the Swedish translation of the Russian book The Hero of our Times. Though the film does away with the tyranny of discursive language, it does not reject language as a means of understanding the world. The first word that Ester learns from the bellhop is kasi, which means ‘hand’, and, given the importance of the motif of hand in the film, the association of a new language with ‘hand’ also suggests language’s role in communication. The letter, which consists of words from Timoka’s language, that Ester gives to Johan becomes one of the most significant modes of communication in the film. The shared foreign language between Johan and Ester that Anna (who only slights the letter) has no access to also reinforces their intimacy. The letter carries its significance beyond the cinematic space: Johan reads the letter on the train and his curiosity in language suggests that he treasures the letter. The letter also becomes a token of remembrance of his aunt and Johan’s reading the letter in the film strikes the most hopeful note in the film. The only word from the letter that Johan reads out loud is hadjek which means ‘spirit’ and spirit or essence resonates with the phenomenological and existential approach of the film.

The phenomenological approach is furthered by the theme of music in the film. The only music that keeps recurring is Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Interestingly, music in Timoka’s language is musik, which is quite similar phonetically to the word ‘music’.

This suggests music’s universality as a mode of communication. Though Ester and the bellhop do not understand each other’s language, they both relate to Bach’s music. When Anna thumbs through a newspaper at the restaurant, the only words that make sense are ‘J. S. Bach’. Bach’s music moves Anna too – in the hotel room with Johan and Ester, with Bach’s music playing in the background, there is a moment of communication between the two sisters. However ephemeral the moment may be, it is significant in that music becomes the premise of the only moment of concurrence and bonding between the sisters (fig. 4). They both enjoy the music.

Mostly quiet but watchful, Ester is the most loquacious when she is with the bellhop and her last outburst about her loneliness is given way in the presence of the bellhop. Though the bellhop understands nothing, her monologue becomes significant in two ways: first, this is the only time when it seems that she has no control over her language, which speaks of language’s intentionality as well. She is a translator and is in control of language – or rather, seems to be in control of language – most of the time. She talks about semen smelling nasty, her stinking like a fish and her trying out different attitudes but none of these cohere into a narrative ESSAYS | 52

and yet there is a feeling that she communicates her despair to the bellhop who reacts sympathetically. This is another instance where communication is made possible over the abyss of words and conventional language is rendered futile. It is Ester’s “gestures” (an important word in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to indicate the language of the body) that communicate her anguish to the bellhop.

However, this also becomes Ester’s most poetic speech in that it seems uncontrolled and gives expression to her most authentic feelings, or in a way bespeaks her authenticity, which subtends her corporeal state. Ester’s “expression” is peppered with references to the sense of smell which means that Ester too, like Johan, perceives the world through her senses. It is this speech that negates the rationality of language and counters the attitudes or the stances she talks about, which means that even when incomprehensible, language still has an ability to communicate. Ester’s verbal outpouring certainly communicates her loneliness to the spectators. In this scene, if the tyranny of language is countered then the intentionality of the body and how it is entwined with language is also worked out. If there is a distrust of discourses, signified by “attitudes”, there is also an inherent faith in language.

Johan becomes the touchstone of the film: against his perceptions, other characters’ capacities for communication are reckoned.

In a way Johan’s exploratory and phenomenological approach to the world also becomes analogous to the cinematic experience of the spectators. The film, as such, does not have a narrative: the way to understanding the film is not why things happen but how things happen because it is not a film about a story, but about a condition – the human condition, which has been deprived of meaning and yet which must constantly strive towards meaning, not necessarily through rationalising. Meaning is to be found between ourselves and in spite of ourselves as we constantly gravitate towards familiar structures of meaning and are thus constantly frustrated. The film is about openness to the world, and I think the film’s triumph is in its reclaiming the act of communication despite the bleak settings of Timoka which Kalin calls the ‘geography of the soul’ (1). If there is not a proper map for the soul, there sure are markers to traverse it, and that too with a sense of purpose. Communication with other individuals is at the heart of this sense of purpose in the film.

Bibliography

Bergman, Ingmar. Images: My Life in Film. Translated by Marianne Ruuth. Arcade Publishing, Inc., 1994.

Gado, Frank. The Passion of Ingmar Bergman. 1986. Duke University Press, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on ‘Humanism’”. Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 239–76.

Kalin, Jesse. The Films of Ingmar Bergman. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Koskinen, Maaret. The Silence. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2010.

Persona. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. AB Svensk Filmindustri, 31 Aug. 1966.

Merleau-Ponty, M. The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. 1948.

Routledge, 2004.

————. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1962.

Sammern-Frankenegg, Fritz R. “Learning ‘A Few Words in the Foreign Language’: Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Secret Message’ in the Imagery of Hand and Face”. Scandinavian Studies, vol. 49, no. 3, 1977, pp. 301–10.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufman. 1956. Plume, 1975, pp. 345–69.

Singer, Irving. Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity. MIT Press, 2009.

Sontag, Susan. “Bergman’s Persona”. Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, edited by Lloyd Michaels, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 62-85.

The Silence. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, Svensk Filmindustri, 23 Sept. 1963.

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CONTRIBUTORS Tanya Nightingale has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, on Radio Ryedale, and on East Leeds FM. Her directorial debut was Faust – the Musical. She is published in Orbis, Other Poetry, and Sweet Breast and Acid Tongue (Like This Press). She has won the Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition (2008) and the Ryedale Competition (2013). Her first full-length collection, published by Stairwell Book, came out in 2015. She is currently working on her second.

Edwin Black is a writer of ghost stories based in Sheffield. His novelette, Lights Over Cithaeron, was serialised for Sheffield Live in early 2020 and is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Twitter at @EdwinBeatnik, or in the darkest, most forgotten part of any library.

Debarati Choudhury is interested in comic studies, affect theory and narrative studies. She is currently planning to continue her academic studies in the U.S. Charles Eager is a writer, teacher, and scholar, currently living in Italy. Previous places of publication include The Galway Review, The Society of Classical Poets, EPIZOOTICS!, and others.

Isaac Worthington currently resides in Oslo, Norway. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Leeds. In his spare time, he enjoys writing plays for the stage.

Max Gregory BA (Hons) is a composer, pianist, and teacher. His current literary interests include nineteenth-century Gothic novels and Early Romantic European poetry.

Matthew Lazenby has a BA (Hons) from the University of Leeds and is a receiver of the Archbishop’s Certificate in Church Music (A Cert CM). He describes himself as a classical musician with a love for Horatian satire.

Adam Lee has a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Lancaster, and identifies himself with the tradition of English Romanticism. Some of his topics of interest are: American Transcendentalism, French and Spanish poetry, and the relationship between art and modernity.

Iliana Gutch Marinov has a Bachelor's from the University of Leeds where she read Russian and English. Her areas of interest are literature of the late-nineteenth century, modernist literature, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bowen, the Acmeist poets, and Dostoevsky.

Alba Rodriguez has a Bachelor's degree in English Philology from the University of Oviedo and a Master's in American Literature and Culture from the University of Leeds. She currently works as a secondary modern foreign language teacher in the United Kingdom.

Vlad Toma specialized in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the universities of Leeds and York and writes poetry in Romanian.

© 2022 Copyright of individual pieces remains with the contributors.

This journal publishes international poetry in English, critical essays, and short fiction. Submissions are welcome and should be sent to our email address: drangjournal@gmail.com

“Drang is a particularly strong, almost irresistible urge, which is not innate, but dominates one at the moment. The plural is rare. Drang also means 'pressure' in a figurative sense.”

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