ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

As Voss and Werner points out, “the archive is always only partially decodable,” urging us “to read its minimum signs with maximum energy”; the process begins with the act of recollection, wherein every piece of evidence is “provisional and subject to revision” (ii). Marinetti opposes delving into archival investigations, contending that it is a “waste … of … strength” or energy to venerate “the past” which yields no results but “exhaust[ion], [and] diminish[ment]”. Eliot, however, employs numerous allusions to such historical figures as Michelangelo, Lazarus, and Hamlet, to name but a few, to describe Prufrock’s internal conflict and disillusionment which implies the chaotic atmosphere of early-20th-century. The underlying intention of the poet is to engage the reader’s cultural memory.

Both Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” provide a glimpse into the cultural sentiment during a pivotal time in history strongly influenced by industrialization, political shifts and economic changes and demonstrate how the archive is not just a physical space but, as Voss and Wener assert, “an imaginative site”. The early part of the 20th century was marked with uncertainty, a draw to the modern and a perspective that the antiquities are frivolous and best left in the past.  The perspective provided in these two pieces can complement the historical documents found in archives and enrich our understanding of the cultural memory. Voss and Werner summarize that “Clegg argues…for a more symbiotic relationship between history and literary studies”. These two works strengthen Clegg’s argument that creative literary pieces can provide a richer understanding of a specific time period. 

Marinetti embraces the changing world in proclaiming: “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile…”. This is embracing the impact of the automobile on life in the early 20th century, but also describes the excitement over the speed of rapid innovation, prompting a strong desire to break away from the past. Marinetti strongly asserts “we want to demolish museums and libraries…” and “to admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action” and focuses on looking forward rather than back. 

Similarly, Eliot portrays a cynical view of the antiquities mocking conversations with the line “In the room, the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo”. This suggests a disdain for these types of discussions.  Prufrock describes feelings of uncertainty by describing “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels” and of “in a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”. This underscores the pervasive sense of instability and the anxiety of the rapid rate of change during this time period.

Naipaul discusses industry through the lens of nationality/ethnicity to emphasize the internationality that underlies late capitalism. He poses industry and commodification to unite various national and ethnic contexts. “In cafés shabbier than I remembered,” he writes, “Greek and Lebanese businessmen in suits read the local French and English newspapers and talked with sullen excitement about the deals that might be made in Rhodesian tobacco, now that it was outlawed” (250). Naipaul parallels the nationality of the businessmen with the languages (alternatively, nationalities) of their newspapers. The language used to discuss the Rhodesian tobacco deals is not specified, but the papers’ languages are: French and English. Naipaul encodes English and French news material as authoritative in matters of business. Moreover, he poses these business languages as “local,” suggesting the international reach of the papers—more broadly, the French and British Empires. It’s uncertain whether the “locality” of these English/French papers indicates they’re produced in Cairo and sold locally or produced in their respective nations and distributed internationally. Whatever case, Naipaul blends these various national/linguistic contexts into a speculative discussion about the exchange value of an outlawed commodity. The common self-interest of Greek and Lebanese businessmen unites them in ways that vary from some “pre-modern” traditions of community, like religious affiliation, nationality, or language. Importantly, this modern “sullen excitement” when discussing potential profit suggests a law greater than that of the state in which the Rhodesian tobacco has been outlawed. The commodity becomes profitable in the same sentence that it becomes illegal within the state’s borders. The businessmen imagine deals beyond the borders and regulations of the state, however, entangling speculative profit and modern economic principles within an international discourse. Naipaul asks us to consider the positive social value that internationalism offers humanity as inseparable from the exploitative (in this case, illegal) profits of international business.

I’m curious why Naipaul characterizes the narrator’s driver as, primarily, bored. The driver shoos away the “beggar boys in jibbahs” as if waving at them, combining signals of dismissal and welcome in a single gesture. Naipaul’s narrator locates the driver’s personal history in these boys, saying he “once no doubt…had been a boy in a jibbah” (251). Even though the driver’s and beggar boys’ religious and cultural backgrounds may be similar, Naipaul suggests that the driver “had grown up differently” than the beggar boys (251). The narrator’s elaboration on this different upbringing revolves around one’s appearance/dress, and it works in tandem with the repeated mention of jibbahs. “He wore trousers and shirt and was vain of his good looks,” Naipaul writes (251).

Next, the driver’s boredom is associated even closer with geography and his environment. The narrator says of the driver, “[s]omehow in the desert he had learned boredom…bored with the antiquities, the tourists, and the tourist routine” (251). This boredom apparently motivates the driver to insist on taking the narrator to an unfamiliar little oasis. Otherwise, the driver would begin to argue with him (252). I’m interested here in the ways that Naipaul associates the driver’s boredom with the specific location at which that the narrator ends up. Moreover, because the driver is bored of “the tourists and the tourist routine,” he takes the narrator “by unfamiliar ways to a little oasis with palm trees and a large, dried up timber hut” (252). The scene abruptly changes after the narrator admits he “didn’t want to stay,” so the reader arrives at the rest-house full of tourists who speak European languages (252). So, is boredom, to Naipaul’s narrator, inefficient? The driver’s attempt to assuage his boredom by taking unfamiliar ways directly opposes his job as a driver, so much so that even his proclivity to get angry and contentious is a salve to boredom (252). I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m curious how Naipaul figures this middle-level (not beggar boy, not businessman, but driver) boredom as dehumanizing.

There were several interesting elements in Naipaul’s excerpt that might be described as a “transatlantic aesthetic,” including the setting of the steam ship, the cast of nations, and the focus on money, exchange, and modernity that texture this excerpt. The character I was most struck by was the tramp, who stands in as the figure of a sort of existential refugee. This characterization is gestured to in the prologue’s opening when the narrator describes the Greek steamship as “like a refugee ship” (2672). The ship represents being in a liminal state, which is then paralleled by the tramp who seems to oscillate between the past/present, fixed/displaced. He is described as looking like “a romantic wandered of an earlier generation” with his fashionable world-explorer wardrobe, but up close “his clothes were in ruin” (2673). He recounts the 38 years he’s travelled, but the narrator states that “His speech was like this, full of dates, places and numbers, with sometimes a simple opinion drawn from another life. But it was mechanical, without conviction; even the vanity made no impression; those quivering wet eyes remained distant” (2673). Distance plays an interesting role in both the description of his clothes and of his speech; from a distance, his façade of a grand past of adventure, exploration, and cultural maturation is highly romanticized, but when looked at up close this all falls away in ruin and his “eyes remained distant,” as if he is displaced from the present. Indeed, the tramp is described as “odd” and clearly doesn’t fit in on the ship, constantly being displaced from his cabin, the ship’s deck, and the dining room, until he ultimately recovers his cabin through the threat of violence on any who trespasses. This mirrors the setting the ship is heading to, Egypt, which had just seen its own revolution that ousted the colonial government; Egypt is described in both the prologue and epilogue as reconciling with its cultural past and the European-tinted modernity that incubates during and after colonial oppression. The tramp stands in for this complex modernity, where the aftermath of global imperialism has displaced individuals and societies temporally, culturally, and geographically. The kind of transnational figure that is created from these forces is shown not as a globetrotting explorer like the tramp thinks he is, but instead a refugee of modernity.

This post is already longer than anticipated, but I do want to just throw out a final thought I’ve been thinking about in relation to the transatlantic now that the course is almost over. At the start of the semester Daniel asked why “transatlantic” and not “global”(or something similar), and that question has stuck with me for a while. I think what I’ve come to is that we could view the transatlantic not so much as a static spatial category, but instead that the transatlantic is a network of exchange and communication which gives globalization its currency in modernity. I think this perspective accounts for the emphasis on travel, transition, and displacement which seem to be at the heart of many of the texts we encountered this semester. The transatlantic isn’t so much a geographic marker like global, American, British, Caribbean, etc., but instead a collection of historical and cultural processes that facilitates the transgression of these geographic borders, which is heightened with developments in technology in the twentieth century and is captured in the modernist imagination.

In reading this, what I felt most was that Cairo is a tourist destination than anything else, and the implications that accompany that are depressing. It is no secret that this is the case, as Naipaul talks extensively about the various groups of people that are here, all of whom are sight seers or people from outside of this place. Naipaul writes, "perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it as complete" (255). To me, it felt as though the ancient artist, or others who had lived long ago, were seen to be appreciative of this land mostly because that's all they had, and had never been any other place. This quote speaks to one in the beginning of the epilogue which reads, "the ancient artist, recording the life of a lesser personage, sometimes recorded with a freer hand the pleasures of that life... It was the special vision of men who knew no other land and saw what they had as rich and complete" (251). These excerpts sort of act as bookends for this short epilogue, both describing an older era of pastoral innocence. It beckons to this pure time, one well before travelling tourists came to relax and explore in the city. I posed these exceprts up against the description of certain tourists here in Cairo, where a couple of them made a game of throwing sandwhich pieces to the children outside who scrambled to pick them up from the sand. Those who didn't pay this any mind were discussing other matters, ignorant of the spectacle. I thought this conveyed some of the effects of tourism. People from other places see Cairo, or other destination landscape, as a place which is theirs to experience. The wait staff, drivers, and other working class people are shown as being highly concerned with the tourists' experiences, one waiter at first shooing away the hungry children until another threatens to tell on him. At that point, the waiter beseeches him not to do so. It's clear these peoples' livlihoods is highliy affected by these tourists, and their experiences. The way this impacts the landscape in relation to its people is sad, especially when thinking of Naipaul's remarks about the ancient artist and how he likely saw his homeland. The landscape, Cairo, now seeks and works to mirror the desires of the tourists. It is an place of new wonder, but the people who come from this place are no longer the center, but the backdrop. Naipaul even discusses how the children seem to be a part of the desert sand. 

The final reading of our final reading (“The Circus at Luxor”) takes the audience on a temporal journey. Naipaul’s experience in Egypt can’t shake the ghosts of the past—the narrative is shot through with historical references and reflections: “the Museum was still haunted by Egyptian guides possessing only native knowledge… there was a reminder of the wars that had come with the revolution… extravagant columns, ancient in ancient times… they were giving me the room they used to give the Aga Khan… bright visions of the past” (241-2).

It’s in this context that Naipaul asks us to consider the action of the story: 1. Witnessing and spectating the circus travelers while being tourists themselves (not performers) and 2. Witnessing and intervening in an instance of abuse between security guards and Egyptian beggar children. As it relates to the latter, Naipaul is at the center of an ethical conundrum, one he tries to solve by interrupting and chastising the security guard. The problem here, though, is that the security guard is playing the “Egyptian game with Egyptian rules” (243). The security guard is doing his job just as the children are doing there’s—both are surviving in this new world of international capitalism and tourism. The guilty party could be the participants in the game, the security guard or the children. Or the Italian tourists who throw food to them as you would birds or fish. Or perhaps the other tourists who look onward when impoverished and hungry children risk their well-being for scraps of food. The whole episode has a very passive feel to it. Naipaul is unable to help the children, even after he shouts at the security guard and threatens to “report” him. All he can do is document the world that he sees and comment on it. Everyone then, even artists, are transfixed/paralyzed as “another, more remote empire was announcing itself” (247).

While the past suffuses Naipaul’s description and commentary of his journal entry, the final section offers another temporality: the future. Naipaul can’t square a nostalgic primitivism, a pre-modern utopic vision of the Egyptian cradle of civilization with what he experiences. The essay then abruptly moves to a train and the soldiers on the train who would (“seventeen months later”) “know total defeat in the desert” (247). As Naipaul collapses time here, he brings into perspective the changes that a wide view can bring to bear on a particular place. This view ultimately clashes with the very human, particular experience he communicates in the pages before. The past is a vision of connection with the land; the present a vision of unethical global capitalism and vapid tourism; the future is a vision of destruction. Ultimately Naipaul establishes a clear narrative of decay, one that is decidedly anti-modern.

I’m still on the idea/concept of “time” for this week’s Walcott reading, and I see it especially in the poem “Volcano.” The poem opens up in historical uncertainty, in the mire of “legends” such as the lions that supposedly roared at Joyce’s funeral or Joyce’s death itself. It’s from this foundation that the poem transitions abruptly to the external/material/natural world (as Walcott often does—see “A Far Cry From Africa”). In this fork/split, Walcott draws us to the image of “two glares from the miles-out-at-sea derricks” which he connects metaphorically to the glow of a cigar and volcano. After the split, Walcott smooths over the seam and establishes the connective tissue which is the question of whether to be a reader or a writer: “One could abandon writing/ for the slow-burning signals/ of the great, to be, instead,/ their ideal reader.” As the literal image of glowing lights is meshed with the experience of reading great writers (their works or legends like “slow-burning signals”), the narrator is forced with a choice between writing and reading, producing and consuming. The problem is that reading requires a sense of “awe” which is a casualty of the modern world: “So many people have seen everything,/ so many people can predict,/ so many refuse to enter the silence/ of victory.” What the poem resolves into is nostalgia for the past, a lament for a lost appreciation of greatness, the unique and extraordinary. Walcott writes, “so many take thunder for granted./ How common is the lightning,/ how lost the leviathans/ we no longer look for!” In this is a loss of seeing the embers of the cigar, of not recognizing the ”masterpieces,” of “[refusing] to enter the silence/ of victory.” The final line is a resolution to read more and establish connections with the past.

In this lament, I’m struck by Walcott’s formal choices of recycling language and images. In a poem about lost and deteriorating histories, there is a fair amount of repetition: the image of cigars and volcanoes, the symbols of greatness in legends, giants/leviathans, and thunder/lightning. The poem continues to fold back in on itself (at least that’s how I understand my experience of reading it). What catches my eye most is the word “victory,” italicized and capitalized (“Victory”) in several places: first with skepticism towards an idea of victory (“Victory is ironic”), then as the end to a journey with connotations of finality but also impending catastrophe that active volcanoes symbolize (“Victory’s end”), and then as casualty of modern life, a “silent” space “indolent” people no longer explore (“so many refuse to enter the silence/ of victory”). A subtext of the poem is Walcott’s questioning of victory’s meaning. Whether the idea of victory is obscured in legends of the past or the end of an epoch and beginning of another (suggesting finality but really connoting continuance) or a clarity of meaning that people can no longer access, it is a transient and slippery concept that is reinforced by Walcott’s repeated play with the word.

“Victory” is an important concept in thinking about the historical record, since history is written by the victors. Victories also punctuate historical time periods. Wars are contests with victors and each major war symbolizes a break with the past and the birth of new era (literary periodization often coincides with war and violent events—WWI birthed high modernism, for instance). Finally, in “victory” there is a decided sense of temporal progression. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to understand Walcott’s discussion of time and history alongside a questioning of “victory,” with all of its historical implications. Further, what do these concepts (time and victory) mean to black diasporic subjects who are at once in the technological/capitalistic progression of modernity yet “legally and violently excluded from modernity’s official public spheres” (Williams 85)?

As I read Nightwood, I couldn’t help but think back to one of our initial course readings, Sherry’s piece that attempts to define modernism as an era/intellectual movement concerned with time. Sherry discusses the different definitions for this (the Avant Garde proclivity of the moderns, for instance, breaks with historical/aesthetic tradition and establishes its own time, birthed on its own terms with its own rules). When thinking about “time” and Nightwood, see a similar unifying thread as Sherry sees in modernism.

From the first page, Felix is born without connections to the past, with his father dying during pregnancy and his mother dying during birth. As a result, Felix only has the two portraits as artifacts, stories of his parents, and a separation from “exact history” (10). He seems to compensate for that with an “obsession for what he termed Old Europe” (11). We see the theme of time shoot through Felix and Robin’s first interaction. Felix notices the “timeless” in her eyes which contrasts with the symbolic discussion of woman that follows: “Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding… Such a woman is an infected carrier of the past” and the connection between the current generation and their “forefathers” (41).

If I’m reading this passage correctly, Robin is initially thrown in contrast with the typical housewife who is symbolic of patriarchal traditions and their continuance through children. Robin is not this, as we learn; but Felix is invested in this project, a correction of his own childhood. In the next scene, as he speaks with the doctor about marriage and children, Felix says “to pay homage to our past is the only gesture that also includes the future” (43). Through Robin and the children he wants her to bear, he is trying to forge temporal ties that more together the past and the future. Later we learn of Felix’s vision: “the destiny for which he had chosen [Robin]—that she might bear sons who would recognize and honour the past. For without such love, the past… would die away from the world” (49). As Felix attempts to tether Robin, she wanders in “exile” as Winterson’s preface would label it. Especially once the child is born, Robin is gone for “hours, days later” as she can sense an end to time: “a catastrophe that had yet no beginning” (referring to motherhood and perhaps family life more broadly) (52-3).

At the center of the text is a contest for possession of Robin, a ghost-like, ephemeral character who appears in the text mainly in conversation. In thinking about time, Nora’s desire to possess Robin is consistently equated with the end of one’s experience of time, death (63, 69). Barnes continues this discussion with Nora and O’Connor’s conversation in his apartment (see Nathan’s post for a breakdown of this). While Nathan convincingly connects this scene to a discussion of uncertainty and fluid identities, I see it as part of a discussion of death (90, 103) and thus a discussion of the interrelated concepts of time, memory, and history. Indeed, the second half of the narrative is mostly dedicated to Nora’s grief at losing Robin. It is a processing of a lost time and a lost person. Nora attempts to forge connections with that past with a letter, but does so in vain. Robin is unmoored from time, at least from the histories of the other characters in the narrative; perhaps the final scene is her departure from the world of human history and into the world of timeless nature.

In the introduction, T.S. Eliot brings up society’s different perceptions of people who dissent from the norm, referencing both Puritanical sentiments and more contemporary outlooks on the choices individuals make - and how it affects their satisfaction in life. He says that unlike the expectations produced by older (Puritan) morality that he recalls, wherein a person will succeed if they are prudent and practical, people in present-day are more likely to blame “society” for individual discontentment. He claims that what these different outlooks achieve is relatively similar - writing, “it seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our will to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.” I found this interesting, and since he’s basically giving us a book review of his own, I carried this idea into the reading of the book. In the beginning, Felix’s character is explained, and we learn a lot about his mannerisms and beliefs. Barnes writes about how Felix “had insinuated himself into the pageantry of the circus and the theatre” (15). This part struck me, as it seemed to speak to Eliot’s earlier point in the introduction, which seemed to say that ultimately everyone is subject to the same perils of life, especially when they’re based primarily in material things. Some of the circus workers take on faux titles and names that poke fun at the nobility of Paris and elsewhere in Europe, such as Duchess of Broadback and King Buffo. I found a sort of connection between the old nobility, possessing all of the perks of such titles, and the faux nobility people created with false names. Even though the latter is not attempting to become noble, but rather playing against the implications of that status, I find that both groups are similar. They are both compelled to proclaim something about themselves for their positioning in society. It is obvious why someone of noble birth would want that to be known, which is why it is so ingrained in society that the nobility are to be so highly regarded in every way. On the other hand, the people who call themselves by these playful versions of noble-sounding names are not attempting to surpass others in importance, but it does help them create a persona and perhaps even allows them to obtain certain benefits in their place of work, even if it’s simply in the form of more attention paid or how memorable they are to others. Either way, both groups are surrendering in some ways to those “temporal ends,” and who could blame them? Eliot was certainly aware that people have to give themselves a leg up in whatever way they can, but especially those not born into wealth and status. Ultimately, caring too much about what the material world could offer you if you manipulate your talents, prospects, etc. enough - will still lead to the same dissatisfaction with life. Both groups can suffer from that, and both would stem from a fixed focus on the material things of life, and how much of those things one can obtain, and what that material would signify about an individual, including their work ethic, capability, beauty, talent, and a myriad of other factors people are measured by in society and even themselves.

Dr. O’Connor sees himself embodying different national, religious, and gender identities. This embodiment is discussed with Nora in a conversation about “everything [the doctor] know[s] about the night” (79). His character and meandering yet compelling dialogue with Nora imports different gender identities (79-80, 96), national archetypes/stereotypes (90), religious identities (91), and languages (92-94) and combines them in the uncertainties that night symbolizes. Dr. O’Connor says,

“Do things look in the ten and twelve of noon as they look in the dark? Is the hand, the face, the foot, the same face and hand and foot seen by the sun? For now the hand lies in a shadow; its beauties and its deformities are in a smoke—there is a sickle of doubt across the check bone thrown by the hat’s brim, so that there is half a face to be peered back into speculation” (85).

Night represents uncertainty, and uncertainty produces speculation. For the doctor, this appears in the ways glossed above, turned inward, in terms of speculative identity. For Nora, speculations are turned outward, toward Robin. Nora’s pain is emphasized even more, as the doctor implies it, because of the way that otherness is understood among women. “She who stands looking down upon her who lies sleeping knowns the horizontal fear, the fear unbearable. For man goes only perpendicularly against his fate. He was neither formed to know that other nor compiled of its conspiracy” (87). The doctor seems to imply that, unlike men, women were formed to know “that other.” What might Barnes be getting across by having Dr. O’Connor describe this unbearable “horizontal fear”?

As an aside, the perpendicularity assigned to men here reminds me a bit of Vorticism, with its use of sharp, rigid lines and masculine overtones.

One of the passages I was drawn to from Nightwood was the description of Nora’s salon and Nora herself. Barnes writers that “The strangest ‘salon’ in America was Nora’s” and that at any time you would see “poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love; for Catholics, Protestants, Brahmins, dabblers in black magic and medicine; all these could be seen sitting about her oak table before the huge fire, Nora listening, her hand on her hound, the firelight throwing her shadow and his high against the wall” (50). Even among this group of eclectic characters, “she alone stood out” (50). We are then told in what way Nora stands out: “She was known instantly as a Westerner. Looking at her, foreigners remembered stories they had heard of covered wagons; animals going down to drink; children’s heads, just as far as the eyes, looking in fright out of small windows, where in the dark another race crouched in ambush…” (50-51).

This passage points to two distinct narratives of U.S. identity that I think Barnes is interested in exploring in this transatlantic novel. Nora’s house (the land) is meant to parallel the multiculturalism of the United States and its “place at the table” as a globalized space where different cultures, religions, and people come together. Yet in this space, Nora stands out as distinctly American; she is described as signifying U.S. history, including the explorations of the West, native violence, and the abundant wildlife of the frontier. In this way, American identity is singled out from the American landscape creating an interesting national tension; is America American, or is it Multicultural? Nora’s American identity looms over her international “salon,” just as she looms over the lives of Robin, Felix, and Dr. Matthews in her transatlantic travel.

While reading Nightwood, I was interested in the idea of Robin's memory wasting away as she dives deeper into the world around her. Robin's behavior kind of reminds me of the people in The Sun Also Rises, but it shows the effects of that behavior on the people around. I am not confident enough to say that Nightwood is also engaging with the party scene that Hemingway depicts, but I cannot help but notice some similarities. For example, Robin presents herself as a fun and energetic woman, but in the house she becomes a darker version of herself--especially after giving birth to Guido.

The part of the novel that made it more difficult to understand is that it is told from an outsider's perspective, so I am unable to really see into Robin's mind. The story feels a little voyeuristic as I am given all the details of the situation, but I am not let in to listen to the thoughts of any specific characters. Robin claims to not remember--maybe it is true--, but it could also be Robin's attempt to cope with something. 

Unlike The Sun Also Rises, the party scenes are not very prominent in this novel. Maybe "memorable" is a better word. Every time I reflect on this story, I remember the scenes locked in a house. The party scene for Barnes' characters is more like the hotel room for Jake.