T.S. Eliot and the Élitism of Modernism

Modernism is the most peculiar of all artistic movements of the twentieth century and the most difficult to pin down since people started coming up with "movements" in the first place. Modernism is the only thing that strikes more fear into the heart of an English undergraduate than the idea of going to a lecture. Critics and academics, not unwisely, prefer their artistic movements to be readily comprehensible and clearly enough defined to make some logical sense. Modernism, however, will not be tamed. It is straggly, begins nowhere and with no one in particular, and ends only when its writers have started to baffle even themselves. One treads carefully through its key texts: James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925). The authors of these aberrations, these posturing, egotistical, lunatic, kaleidoscopic works of blatant and self-conscious genius, have laid literary landmines throughout their works. Joyce said of Ulysses that, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality". This statement sums up the enigma of modernism (if one can be said to sum up an enigma) in that it contains arrogance mingling with modesty, cleverness tied up in self- effacing humour, and above all absurdity with a purpose. Plots, such as they exist at all in modernist writing, are submerged beneath wave upon wave of classical allusions, archaisms, neologisms, foreign languages, quotations, swear words and other hyper-literary and meta-literary indulgences. If I haven't made it clear already, it is hard not to love modernism. It is hard to work out what exactly it is.

Recently, while browsing in an Oxford bookshop, a friend of mine picked up a copy of Finnegans Wake - James Joyce's final book - and read the first page. Between tears of laughter, he managed to indicate to me that he couldn't understand a word of it. It is hard not to sympathise with the outsider's attitude so amply demonstrated by my friend's outburst of shock and wonder. To find one of our most famous authors writing gibberish is rather heartening. Yet we remain outsiders to the work. Finnegans Wake, you see, is emblematic of all that is right and wrong with modernism. It took a spectacularly long time to write and was finally published in 1939, seventeen years after its predecessor, Ulysses. That probably had something to do with the fact that over 40 different languages crept into its catalogue of portmanteau words (ersatz words consisting of two or more real words or word elements, like those of Lewis Carroll in his poem "Jabberwocky"). The resulting book is uniquely inventive and at the same time uniquely confusing. In that sense, it is the perfect example of a modernist text. It alienates its reader just as it tries to mimic how they think. The English modernist novel is a sociopath and a cad: dangerous and reprehensive but somehow roguishly likeable.

The Englishness of modernism is something of a mirage, however. The poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were both Americans who immersed themselves in European culture (Eliot only became a British subject late in his life). Proto-modernist novelist Henry James and poets William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings were also Americans. James Joyce and William Butler Yeats were Irish, while Joseph Conrad was Polish. Only Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence were actually English, and Lawrence was Northern, which at the time amounted to being foreign anyway. It is notable that it was the two English modernists who were also the ones most obsessed with the psychology of their characters. Admittedly, the best of Conrad and James' novels were written before Freud's groundbreaking works were published (1900 and after), and Eliot had little respect for the minds of the majority.

Modernism rapidly became such an extremely vague concept, taking in artists who clearly despised one another (Lawrence called Joyce, "Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty- mindedness" in a 1928 letter to Aldous Huxley). It is hard to imagine such a diverse group emerging now, let alone one experimenting so extremely without the knowing smile so fundamental to post-modernism. William Golding, writing after modernism had faded from being, experimented linguistically in The Inheritors (mimicking the thoughts of a Neanderthal mind), stream-of-consciousness in Pincher Martin and dense, symbolism-heavy prose in The Spire. Yet, Golding is not considered to be a modernist. This is because Modernism is more than a sum of its common traits. In theory it is anti-populist while Golding was just indifferent to popular opinion, and in that lies something of its essence. Modernism cannot stand for invention alone because every age has had its own mavericks. It does not even offer a particular political manifesto. It is just obtuse - difficult for the sake of being difficult. Eliot added notes to The Waste Land to bulk the book