ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

“America” by Claude McKay (1921) and “Let America be America Again” by Langston Hughes (1995) both discuss America as a work-in-progress through creating juxtaposition and tension by using the past to look forward to the future. The last four lines of McKay’s poem reads “Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, / And see her might and granite wonders there, / Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, / Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.” In these lines, the speaker positions themselves by looking toward the future as “priceless treasures sinking in the sand,” both inscribing the line with futurity while also emphasizing treasure, which can only be viewed as treasure because it is valued through a past process that has associated it with said value. Treasure, which McKay associates with America, is linked to both the past and future because it is something that has been ascribed with value in the past that can then be sought after in the future, even if buried in sand.

Hughes similarly uses imagery that integrates both the past and future in its signification. He writes “Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free.” In these lines, Hughes laments “Let America be America again,” implying a process that needs to take place in the future to reestablish a value that may have existed in the past (I say may, becomes Hughes makes it clear that the “dream” of America was never a reality for many). In these lines Hughes also conjures the image of the pioneer, another image which is both associated with the past of America but also the inherent concept of the pioneer as an explorer of the future.

These images in both poems create internal tensions between the past and the future, encouraging a reevaluation of how these two poles might help us make sense of present America. I think there’s a potential connection here to the reading on modernism and primitivism in regard to how these terms envision the past and future, and how all of these terms may be collapsed into a single definition rather than demarcated as separate entities.

I was drawn to two poems of Mckay’s for this week: “Subway Wind” and “To One Coming North.” In both, there is a longing for home, for “native” lands. When thought of together, though, there is an ambivalence that comes with the desire for home.

“Subway Wind” uses the image of a subway tunnel and the wind that rushes through it, as a vehicle for thinking about the “captive” state of people who live in the city yet “moan… for fields and seas” of more natural places. Here these places are seaports and islands, the tropics. Mckay connects these foreign locales with freedom, wildlife, ease, and an openness; ideas that runs counter to the crammed “packed” and stultifying subways that are emblematic of life in the city. The poem turns on the word “moan” wherein the narrator begins desiring something other than the intestines of the city scape in which they are stuck. The moan, an image of painful desire, unleashes an imaginative journey that illustrates the desire to escape to “native” lands at the heart of the home (a desire that doesn’t materialize).  This poem is a pretty clean rejection of urban, technological centers of life in the north and an embrace of more natural tropical settings.

“To One Coming North,” on the other hand, is more ambiguous in its theorizing/desiring of home.  The central image here is that of snowfall—it is, like the wind in the previous poem, what signals the foreign, the alien, the unhealthy, for the narrator. The snow is pleasant at first but then the “wind-worried void… chilly, raw” sets in and the narrator “long[s] for home.” Unlike the subway winds which are omnipresent in the cycles of the city, the snow is seasonal: as it arrives it alienate the narrator and inspires a desire for “flowering lanes… and spaces dry.” Yet as it disappears and warm weather comes back around, the narrator sees the beauty in the “Northland” as it is “wreathed in golden smiles/ By the miraculous sun turned glad and warm.”

While I see ambiguous ideas of home with each narrator, one key difference is the inherent subway winds (not seasonal, a permanent fixture of the city) and the transient snow. In “Subway Wind” the natural environment (or the evidence of) is always alienating. In “To One Coming North” the idea of home comes and goes with the seasons. The next question is the psychological impact of each of these experiences. Both poems show conflicted narrators and feelings of unbelonging and discontentedness for the narrators, yet in distinctly different ways.

McKay and Hughes both have poems with distinct sounds. In McKay’s poem, the wind is trying to escape to freedom, and I can hear the sounds of the children along with squeals and screams that would add to another level of sound. The poem is building quietly, and then the poem crescendos in line 7.  Then as if slowly driving through the country, the sound of the wind moans, and then it turns sleepy and slow….drawing out its sound in the end with “the Trades float above them fresh and free” (16). 

Hughes’s poem Dream Boogie, starts out slow, but quickly builds to an exciting level “I’m happy! /Take it away!/Hey, pop!/Re-bop!/Mop!/Y-e-a-h!” (16-21). This poem seems more straightforward with a rush of excitement at the end. It has a low and slow build and then it quickly builds and then it is over.

North says that “a black voice informs much of what we identify as “American” in modernist literature and carefully shows that modernism owes much of its shape and quality to its engagement with black dialect” (11) and this is reflected in the Dream Boogie poem. I agree with this tone of literature and the volume that it gives to the poem by making it unique. 

I am thinking along several different threads here that, I’m hoping, I can weave together by using the New Mexico travel advertisements in the Atlantic Monthly. I was drawn to Humm’s article for her discussion of the visible versus absent photograph of Three Guinea’s and the ways in which this then connects to memory. Humm writes that  the “…absent photographs…act in dialectical tension with the five visible photographs. It is the absent photographs, or rather the narrator’s memory of these photographs, which in a major way shape the narrative of Three Guineas and its dense visual plentitude” (197). Humm’s exploration of the visible versus absent images depicted in Three Guineas could also apply to the travel advertisements in the Atlantic Monthly.

Before I turn to those advertisements, however, I also want to briefly touch of Prevost’s “The Psychology of Propaganda.” Prevost writes the following on the distinction between propaganda and advertisements: “Propaganda has been compared with advertising; yet this is an error, for advertising is concerned always with commercial gain. On the other hand, propaganda makes itself felt in lands far removed—lands which are necessarily neutral in time of conflict and from which nothing is to be gained” (Prevost 674). This distinction of advertising versus propaganda seems to me interdependent not independent.

There are two advertisements for Nex Mexican tourism that could be interpreted through Humm’s ideas on printed versus absent photographs, and on the slippery distinctions Prevost seems to articulate for advertisements and propaganda. The first depicts a Native American with pueblos and mountains in the background, and advertises seeing “[t]he little-known and fascinating Spanish-Indian country…with its age-old inhabited pueblos and isolated mountains.” The second ad has copy that reads “You’ll see Strange scenes Unchanged by Passing Centuries” if you vacation to New Mexico, with the image depicting a man and woman next to a car overlooking native Americans in a village. The ad describes features such as “weird ceremonial dance,” “modern accommodations,” “Conquistadors,” and New Mexico as the “Land of Enchantment.”

These advertisements, to me, feel propagandic of perpetuating the volatile history of genocide in the American west by advertising Native American history only through the lens of enchantment and tourism. These ads conflate commodity (tourism) with “lands far removed,” both physically in the deserts of New Mexico and temporally by emphasizing the lands as unchanged by centuries. The decision of what is made visible in the ads obfuscates what is absent; that is, the history of genocide that the U.S now markets as a tourist destination.

This article by Jean Prevost and Virginia Woolf’s book, reviews of propaganda and the false media build-up that contributes to the people combining patriotism and war together. Prevost talks about “propaganda urges your approval - and promises nothing in return” (674). This is where Virginia Woolf’s viewpoint of false propaganda comes in too, but her viewpoint is directed at women’s reactions and their ability in war.

Prevost also mentions, “For the most part, man accepts the reputation by which he is known. Our character is ours, suggested, perhaps, chiefly by others - because of the force of circumstance upon the individual is constant and strong” (674). This is why propaganda works when men, especially young men are building and developing their reputations. They based their character on how others and their country will see them. 

While Virginia Woolf focuses more on the limits of women and their parts in the war, “broadly speaking, the main distinction between us who are outside society and you who are inside society must be that whereas you will make use of the means provided by your position—leagues, conferences, campaigns, great names, and all such public measures as your wealth and political influence place within your reach—we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private” (103). Woolf’s focus is on the ability of women to influence war based on their social standings. Women’s influences are limited and she urges for a war free environment. 

Maggie Humm helps illuminate the way Virginia Woolf utilizes photography in Three Guineas, and I found her analysis particualrly insightful, especially with the inital highligting of specularity. In combining two perspectives of memory through photographs, both private and public, I can see how that combination would invoke a deepened sense of empathy from the audience. Humm references the depiction of deceased children in one of the absent photgraphs in Three Guineas, including a quote from Woolf in regards to it which reads, "those photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye" (201). I felt that this was particularly powerful, and I looked at it a little differently after Humm's reading of it. Of all the pacifist literature that exists, a lot of really good and powerful literature, I think images will always just pull at readers differently, providing an added lens which won't be overlooked. For me, I find images of anything harmful or sad in nature to be difficult to look at, and I often try not to do so unless I have to. However, I do think that Woolf did a great job of appealing to the raw humanity of the audience, and I see its importance in general, especially as a statement which touches on anti-war sentiments. Even though this was more of an image description than an outright visual, readers can still picture it well. It still invokes pain and a sense of grief. It does not require extensive explanation, it just speaks for itself. I'm interested in learning more about the other functions this absence of photos has. This idea of memory being captured through photos, and creating a moment which just hangs in time as a still, could also be viewed as modernist in the sense that it also has that sense of urgency and temporality to it. Although the photos are portraying the past, they're able to exist in the now as people view them. They're consequential. I'm interested in the discussion of memory as it relates to photographs and image descriptions.  

Maggie Humm's essay focuses a lot on the absent photographs within Woolf's Three Guineas. A lot of the narration centers on people (mostly women) in some form of distress. For Woolf, much of the distress is financial, but she also acknowledges the people dying in the Spanish Civil War. Instead of using images of those situations, however, Woolf uses images of men in power while in their ceremonial and required attire. While the scenes in SPain may have been described thoroughly, as Humm points out, Woolf draws attention to the root cause behind it all by only showing images of those in power. While it can be argued that Woolf is removing attention from those who are suffering, I find it more interesting that Woolf is placing blame and directing attention to who ought to be making decisions to improve situations. I have tried to think about how adding in those pictures from the Spanish Civil War and the streets of England would do, but I do not think they would add much. The ones Woolf includes speak directly to her argument and provide prompts for readers to think about. 

These images are also connected to memory, so putting these images of men  in power in Three Guineas actually starts to form these new connections in reference to the pictures. I did not know who the men were prior to reading this novel, but they are now connected in my mind to the words Woolf wrote. She, in a way, shifts the legacy of these people and institutions by giving people a new way to associate with them and placing their image into a new context (especially a critical context). This decision also kind of makes Woolf's choice of excluding the other images a little more clear. She avoids altering the meaning and associations of those in distress by keeping their images clear of associations with her words.

A Room of One’s Own was the first Virginia Woolf text I read and, as the title implies, it was invested in the importance of spatiality to Woolf’s program of equality. This spatial imagination is just as pronounced in Three Guineas, with Woolf using proximities, cartographies, geographies, and movements to situate her addressee into the spaces necessary for Woolf to answer how it is that women could help prevent war while existing in the structures of patriarchy.

For one, Woolf plays with the binaries of inside/outside, public/private to discuss how we need to look outwards from these spaces and see their relation in order to transcend the structures they construct. I’m drawn to one particular quote towards the end of the essay, where Woolf writes: “For such will be our ruin if you, in immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected” (169). Woolf advocates to keep an eye towards both the inside and outside; anything less would be to perpetuate the current systems of oppression.

We’ve also talked about the importance of spatiality and the transatlantic throughout this semester, and Woolf places us in and on these recurrent transatlantic spatial motifs such as bridges, rivers, war zones, and government buildings. One especially recurrent setting is the bridge as a point of precipice and vantage. From these bridges, Woolf encourages a transitional thinking and places the addressee in a liminal state in order for Woolf’s investigation of patriarchy to have rhetorical resonance.

Woolf also demonstrates a mastery over the techniques of proximity by her recurrent setting of the reader at the metaphorical “table” where her pictures are laid before the reader—pictures augmented at times with reproductions of photographs and at other times existing as a solely linguistic visual. Woolf is able to slide her reader from their seat at the table in front of her to the war-torn streets of Spain, to the processions of the emergent Nazi regime, and throughout the professional and collegiate spaces of England. This use of proximity, which is underscored by the intimacy of the epistolary form, allows Woolf to create a stronger resonance in her explorations of what conditions would be necessary to exist in the spatial topography of England for women to help prevent war. This spatial metaphor allows Woolf to engage in both the intimacies of her letter-writing address and the macro, international scale that allows her inter-personal argumentation to move from a discussion of a specific request from a treasurer to one that encompasses and analysis, critique, and hypothesis for how an international patriarchy functions and may possibly be dismantled.

I enjoy the various examples Woolf gives to provoke thoughts on the war, like the Wilfred Owen lines or letters from soldiers in the beginning. Her doing this aids tremendously in dissecting sentiments towards war, and where those sentiments may stem from depending on who you are. She writes, "let us then refer the question of the rightness or wrongness of war to those who make morality their profession - the clergy" (19). She goes on to say that they (clergymen) are also of two minds, and no singular opinion or answer prevails on the topic of war. She does include that one Bishop of London claims that "the real danger to the peace of the world today were the pacifists. Bad as war was dishonour was far worse." Another Bishop was a self-proclaimed pacifist. Woolf highlights that there is not a job, role, or indicator of position in life that directs peoples' will regarding war. She identifies comparisons and examples like these throughout. 

Even though I agree that no group of people is of one mind because they are a men, women, or clergymen - I do see how certain patriarchal standards and norms very easily, and even involuntarily, affect the perception of war in the West. The Bishop's quote shows a common sentiment, that even if war is awful, the idea of dishonoring oneself or one's country is worse. To me, that idea is enough to ignite a flame within a large part of the population, because in society there exists this unspoken rule that one must prove themselves, often times physically, to be considered a man. If we apply that to an entire country, then it can be expected that people will want to prove themselves, even more so for those who are patriotic. Often times, that flame is fanned by people of higher status who want to go to war for unseen reasons, whether for financial gain or political agenda, though that is not always the case, it does exist. Regardless, going to war still calls for young people to answer a call which could subject them to injury, death, and a myriad of other consequences of war. I can see how people might see where they come from as an extension of themsleves. If the heteronormative standards that an entire society abides by calls for men to be protectors, to defend their honor, then going to war can certainly fall under that category. In addition to societal expectations at play, war is historic and extends so far into the past that people see it as a necessity of life, one which has always existed. Woolf's book has reminded me of just how layered this argument on war truly is. 

Three Guineas is an essay novel where Virginia Woolf is responding to an unknown person that asked for her help in preventing war. The unknown person suggests that women can help in three ways, and I find all these, like Woolf, to be ridiculous. 1) write letters of protest to newspapers; 2) join an anti-war society; and 3) donate money to anti-war causes. These suggestions from the unknown person show their lack of reality and inability to comprehend what steps need to be done to prevent war. Maybe it was mentioned that the correspondent was a man or woman, but I don’t remember reading it in the essay novel. It leads me to think that the correspondent is a man unaware of the limits that women have in society and how ineffective this is in preventing war. 

While Woolf fills a book with her essay response, her repetitive argument for why the correspondent ideas won’t work is repeated over and over again. This repetitive argument shows that society will have to be reminded of the unfairness of women again and again. This form of writing gets boring for me to read, but i get why it was written like this and why Woolf needed to repeat herself. 

“If we encourage the daughters to enter the professions without making any conditions as to the way in which the professions are to be practiced shall we not be doing our best to stereotype the old tune which human nature, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is now grinding out with such disastrous unanimity? ‘Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree. Give it all to me, give it all to me, all to me’” (71-2).

I am drawn to the quote mostly for its use of the gramophone as instrument of destruction—a flattening tool. But then again, I’m not sure if Woolf is suggesting that the gramophone simile is about destruction but historical loops and revolutions. Is she referring to the grooves in records becoming worn over repeated listens, or is she referring to a broken record, forever looping? For me her simile imagines the destructive needle, reckless as a wrecking ball, defacing the grooves that give the record meaning into “disastrous unanimity.”

Of course, the needle is “stuck,” which, along with the repeated “round the mulberry tree, give it all to me” suggest that the record is looping. The grooves in a record aren’t destroyed in a loop, though (at least most of them, I think). So instead of the physical space of the grooves being affected, the record’s playback—its time—is affected. This is likely an arbitrary distinction, and I’ve pushed Woolf’s simile too far. My point is, while using a musical simile as she criticizes chauvinistic professionalism, Woolf also makes a deft point about recorded music. She suggests a recorded song is a mere stereotype that at once can suggest a flattening of time and space.

I’m interested in how this take, coupled with others’ takes, like Eliot or even Adorno, think about the novelty of recorded music (distinct from radio) before almost all music was electrified, amplified, or otherwise technologized as it is today.