The Modern Age: 1890 - 1930

In the early 20ieth century many Victorian doubts and fears about society and man's place in the universe were confirmed and many optimistic hopes were disappointed.

By 1890 modernization had been so successful in countries such as France, Germany, Japan and the United States that International competition for raw material markets and the control of trade routes made conflicts seem inevitable sooner or later. An atmosphere of tension which had not existed in the earlier days of British supremacy was visible and obliged the different European nations to make defensive alliances for when the decisive moment finally came.

It came in 1914 with the First World War: a turning point in the history of the world. It shocked a whole generation, making many lose their faith in liberal democracy, capitalism and the Victorian idea of progress. Science and industry had not produced a better world, they had only brutalized men and made their powers of destruction greater. The war seemed to destroy European self-confidence. It marked the beginning of the end of European domination of the world: after 1920 the U.S.A and Russia replaced France and Britain as the two great powers and American capital began to replace British capital as the dominant force in many developing countries. Economic depression in the 1870s and 1880s had caused serious unemployment among the working class and shown that "laissez-faire" would not necessarily produce benefits for everyone or serve the public good. As a result of this and the consequent pressure for changes of the working class governments accepted that state must exercise some control of the economy and accept some responsibility in looking after its poorer citizens. This policy laid the basis of the modern Welfare State by introducing national insurance for old-age pensions, unemployment pay and medical treatment. Some elements in the working class parties of Europe believed that it was time to take advantage of the crises which capitalism was experiencing and do what Marx had suggested in The Communist Manifesto of 1848: to take power away from the middle classes by revolution and establish a fully socialist society. An example came in 1917 when Lenin and the Bolshevik party took control of the Russian state in the name of the Russian working class and invited the working classes of other countries to follow their lead.

Bolshevik influence was great in Germany and France and somehow also in Britain. Moreover Marxism offered an optimistic secure view of the feature to a generation which had lost faith in the traditional virtues of liberalism and democracy.

The most profound fear that had afflicted the Victorians, however, was neither political nor social in nature; it was religious. They were afraid that man was truly a superior animal, isolated in an indifferent mechanical universe, living a life without a meaning and without God. People living at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20ieth centuries even those who considered themselves Christian, experienced this sense of man's isolation, of his spiritual vulnerability in a world which did not seem to obey any divine principles or to be part of any divine plan. For this reason many felt that the systems of belief and morality which were associated with traditional religion could no longer be valid either. The only sure point of reference that any individual had, was himself, either in a limited personal relationship with God or alone. It was for him to decide what was right and wrong or to act accordingly.

This doubt and insecurity, this sense of isolation, to clear in the notes of writers of the period, but it produced different responses in different cases. T. Hardy and J. Courad for example, were both pessimists. They believed in cultivating a storical dignity and accepting what happened in one's life as well as possible. It was precisely this attitude, Courad found, that a shift's captain needed to make his command effective. V. Wolf, D. H. Lawrence and E. M.Toister, on the other and found in personal relationship and human care a substitute for the divine love which man had lost. Hilaire Belloc, G. R. Chestertor and T. S. Eliot decided to ignore their national doctrines and became Christians. G. B. Shaw and H.G. Wells found purpose and dedicated themselves to social reform.

There was no set of values, either social or personal to which writers could confidently refer to and be sure they were valid for everyone. Consequently they left their characters to speak for themselves, to present their own version of reality, without intervening to offer the reader an alternative point of view. In effect, the 20ieth century novelist disappeared from his own work. Moral criticism and humorous observation on the part of the author, are completely absent in the novels of Joyce, V. Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

It was not only morality and social philosophy, however, which had become relative. Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics - the very basis of traditional science - were shown to rest all false assumptions.

In 1906 Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity said that space and time did not exist as separate, absolute phenomena, but changed according to the point of view of the observer.

The French  philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) also rejected conventional ideas of time. They argued that it is an illusion to think of time as an independent medium which contains events in a certain sequence.

Past and future (as memory and anticipation) exist together with the present in people's minds. People, in fact, are simply a sum of their past experiences and future expectations. Their past and future fuse together, run into one other in what Bergson described as a "stream of consciousness".  This stream is that constitutes a person's mind and determinates his thinking. Although the rational part of the mind tries to organise and discipline this stream, the stream itself is not rational; it flows at a semiconscious level, with far greater speed and subtlety than the rational part of the mind is capable of. The importance of the irrational in determining people's actions was understood by the Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In the Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he argued that people's behavior depends very largely on the unconscious part of their minds: they are motivated by their instincts (identity) and controlled by their social conditioning (the super-ego). This leaves little place for the conscious "ego" and, consequently, for man's power of reason. By 1910 Freud's views had become widely accepted and they made it difficult to see man in the traditional way, as a responsible creature taking decisions for himself with freewill.

The importance of a primitive element in human psychology was also apparent in the work of another psychologist, Carl Jung (1875-1961). In The Psychology of the Unconscious (1916), Jung argued that a basic element of man's unconscious mind was formed by his racial memory, that is the primitive memory preserved by each individual of the experience of his race during its evolution. It operated on a symbolic level, which meant that certain figures or objects in the ordinary world had great symbolic power and that people responded to them without realizing. Only the psychologist, or perhaps the poet, could discover  these hidden, symbolic meanings and understand their importance. This is what the French Symbolist poets, particularly Mallarmè, writing of the 19^th Century, had tried to do, giving mystical significance to their mifressions of the observed world, the world of the senses, and using language which spoke to the irrational rather than the rational in the reader.

It was the aim of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats too, not only in his poetry but also in the elaborate prose work.

A Vision, in which he formulated a complete symbolical system.

The Symbolist poets influenced writers of the Aestathic Movement. Their influence is also apparent in the work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, two American poets who came to England, in 1907 and in 1914 respectively, and there produced poetry which broke completely with the Victorian tradition. English poetry at the end of 19^th Century was still under shadow of Temnyson and the earlier Romantics. It was sentimental, elegiac and often pastoral, as the poems of Thomas Hardy show. This did not mean that poets simply copied those who had came before them. Indeed, in the years before the First War (called Georgian Period after George V, who became king in 1910), the poets Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Walter De La Mare (1873-1956) and A. E. Hansman (1878-1936) all produced original verse. But this verse like that of the Aesthetes before them, made no serius attempt to come to terms noith the spiritual anguish of the modern world. It expressed instead a regret for a world which would not return. In fact the Lyrical tradition these poets represented, with its concentration on the sentiment and impressions of the poet, and its rejection of critical reason, had not got the means to meet this difficult challenge. A new poetry was necessary and it was T.S. Eliot and Ezra Paund, and in a different way W.B. Yeats, who produced it.

This development began in England with the critical writings of T.E. Hulme. In his essays, which appeared between 1909 and 1915, Hulme condemned the Romantic idea that art was only a matter of self-expression on the part of the artist: he believed it should be impersonal in the way that Neo-classicism had been. He wanted writers to return to a Pre-Romantic idea of man, the one of Pope's Essay on Man (1733). This recognized man's limitations and did not exaggerate his importance; in a similar way Neo-Classical verse was always controlled with emotion dominated by critical reason. Hulme summarized many of his ideas in Romanticism and Classicism written in 1919 but not published until 1927.

Hulme's theories had great effect on a whole generation of poets, but it is in the work of T.S. Eliot that they find their most important expression. Eliot was also influenced by Paud, who had been in England for several years before Eliot arrived and who had helped found the Imagist Movement. The Imagists wanted poetic language to be dry and hard, with clear and precise images. They rejected the soft, pastoral nature of Georgian verse, which they considered ESCAPIST, and tried to produce poetry which reflected the cold, mechanical reality of the modern world. Both Eliot and Paund ha little sympathy for popular taste. What they wrote was not intelligible or attractive for the majority of people, it was indeed deliberately difficult and ABCUSE, being full of literary references beyond the education of most readers. Paund, in particular, considered contemporary society and its art degenerate, and he was not prepared to compromise his own ideas to suite other people. He was not alone in all this, both W. B. Yeats and D. H. Hulme were desperately looking for a new order that they felt Western society so desperately needed.

Neo Dramatic Novel

Here ,such as in drama, the author is always there, but he is invisible, characters tell and represent the story. The story is self-told. The scene substitutes the old novel. The author is hidden or doesn't appear. The analysis is transferred from the novel to the reader. The reader has the task to discover the meaning, the judgments' is left to him. Wish the author escaping from the novel, of his absence of comments, judgments and interference, ambiguity and uncertainty permeate the novel. The new novel, as a consequence, does not bring about moral convictions or security of its processors. Aesthetic values have taken the place of moral values in modern novelist (James-Conrad).With H. James the main characteristic of modern prose is evident: the author turns inside people's consciences to explore the flus of his mental experience; the so called stream of consciousness. The interior monologue appears where there is preoccupation for logical connection, deep thoughts, the one nearest to the unconscious are expressed. Sensations take the place of thoughts and what the author is looking for is the possibility to render them vividly leaving aside his comments. The reader, instead of studying the characters from a high position is invited to listen to one of them, to identify with him. The reader must not only reconstruct the characters but discover his identity, too.

Old and New Novel

it is commonly accepted by now to distinguish between old novel and new novel whereas the structure of the former was essentially narrative and the one of the latter essentially dramatic.

Old Novel: It's mostly a narrative structure. The narrator is omniscient and alternates summaries of previous events , personal commentaries, scenes, character's descriptions, conversations, reported conversations ,conclusions and précis. The proportion in which the author ... all the elements determines the time, the place around which the whole novel is organized. The summary is quick, the scene has a normal lasting, the comment creates a step in the movement. If we had to compare it to the world of cinema we could create this sort of analogy: summary = panoramic vision, description = close up (1 piano); scene = sonorous close up.

In the old novel (Fielding, J. Austen, W. Scott, C. Bronte, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollage) the story is told by a omniscient narrator, always present and visible both in 3^rd person and in 1^st person narrations and where most of the times the protagonist speaks with the same voice of the author (De Toe, Mall Flanders).

Eliot's mythical method

Eliot sees myth and ritual (the use of anthropological material) as a potential means of  ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience. Their technical function seems to have been even more important to him than their symbolic meaning.

By November 1923, after The Waste Land's publication Eliot is even more explicit about this problem. The very title of his review in " The Dial " of Joyce's Ulysses make. The point - Ulysses, Order and Myth. He sets out to answer the challenge of readers of The Waste Land , saw Ulysses as " an invitation to chaos, an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality". Eliot sees myth and ritual ( the use of anthropological material ) as a potential means of ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience. Their technical function seems to have been even more important to him than their symbolical meaning.

By November 1923 , after The Waste Land's publication Eliot is even more explicit about this problem. The real title of his review in The Dial Ulysses make the point - Ulysses, Order and Myth. He sets out to answer the challenge of readers who, in terms used by many early readers of Te Waste Land, saw Ulysses as an invitation to chaos; an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality . Eliot, in answer to this, calls the work classical and complains that people have underestimated the importance of the Odyssey parallel as a structural device "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him".

Then comes the famous remark which sounds so like as a comment on his own The Waste Land:

"It is simply a way of controlling and ordering af giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history ".

Eliot's own technique for presenting the "immense panorama " is different from Joyce's. By compression and allusion he condenses it where Joyce expands the moment almost to ,  infinitude but both resort to a black cloth of mythology to hold their material in shape.

Eliot's objective correlative

A now famous term used by t.s.eliot in an essay on Hamlet (1919). The relevant passage is : The only way of expressing emotion in the form of cut is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts which must terminate in sensory experience, are given the emotion is immediately evoked. "Eliot goes on the suggest that in Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking speech and in the speech that Macbeth makes when he hears of his wife's death, the words are completely adequate to the state of mind; whereas in Hamlet the prince is "dominated by a state of mind which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear."

These observations have provoked a good deal of debate.

In other terms a successful artistic creation requires an exquisite balance between, and coalescence of form and matter. If the matter ( thought, feeling, action) is " too much" ,the form we have a discrepancy, strain, a lack of unity .

Vice versa, another kind of discrepancy and strain: the experience is overwhelmed by the words.

Colloquially we say " I was speechless", "It was indescribable".

In other words we have not found the "formula". In reverse, lacking the "formula" again we over-describe, say too much.

Anthropology

J. Frazer's The Golden Bough: an anthropological research. The book entitled The Golden Bough by J.G. Frazer ( 1854- 1941 ), the first edition of which appeared in 1890, was indicative of the new interest in mythology and pre-history.

If art were an instinctual thing, if, that is to say, the sources of art lay in the " unconscious", which can be a collective unconscious as well as a personal one ,then is followed that in writing or painting we follow a set patterns of behavior and use ancient symbols without being aware consciously of what we are doing or why we are doing it. Frazer discussed in his work the ancient myth of the Grail, which had such an important part in the Arthurian cycle - well - known to the Victorian public from Tennyson's Idylls of the King; he also discussed primeval customs, fertility, rites etc. Frazer was above all interested in the man beneath the surface of so - called "civilization"; he wrote that he wished to investigate the "solid layer of savagery beneath the crust of society" and that "we seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.

Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance

She post a complex synthesis both historical and geographical behind the 12^th century - medieval Grail legends Hermgor claims that "in the Grail Ring we have a romantic literary version of that strange mysterious figure whose presence hovers in the shadowy background of our Aryan race; the figure of a divine or semi-divine ruler, at once god and king, upon whose life and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his land and people directly depends.

What the Thunder Said

What the Thunder Said is the finale section of the Waste Land. The feeling of desperate searching rises to fever - pitch, and the total absence of punctuation, with the repetitiveness, contributes to the sense of lurching hopelessly forward in a waterless waste. A ascends with the appearance of the headed, sexless figure, who mysteriously changes position, however. Sometimes he is walking with them, and sometimes he is ahead of them, he may be companion, guide or menace. In the greater quiet of the rhythm, there is, nevertheless, a tense hate of hidden terror, conveyed by the repetition of the question. The seekers are now approaching the Chapel Perilious, the place where the Holy Grail was house. They enter a nightmare would of horrors and dangers which they must surmount to achieve their aim. Again, in Eliot's symbolism, these falling cities and visions represent the devastated, nightmare - haunted spiritual man, as arid and empty as the "empty cisterns and exhausted wells". The Chapel is sinned and empty, signifying that the quest has been in vain, man has found what he needs to make his life whole and sane again .A cock-crows on the roof of the Chapel ,perhaps signifying daybreak when evil spirits traditionally, have to return to Hell, perhaps a reference to Peter's betrayal of Christ in the Gospels. Although lightening flashes and the wind is damp, the longed-for rain does not come. It will come, says the thunder, when man has learnt "Datte" that is live and Dayadhvam that is "sympathise": man must come out of the prison of egoism and treat his fellows with compassion. The third message "Damyata" means "Control": man must act with "control" and must accept authority.  Then, as the boat responds do "the hand expert", the heart will be obedient and gay in its responses. The end of the poem adds to these Sanskrit words a series of allusions and quotations taken from different languages, symbolizing the essential unity of mankind. The final Sanskrit words foretell that if man can obey what the thunder says. "Peace which passeth understanding", the world will be saved.

Eliot said that three themes have been used in the 1st part of this section: the journey to Emmaus of two disciples to whom the resurrected Christ adds without being recognized by them (Luke, 24, 13 - 31), the approaching to the Chapel Perilous, final part of the Holy Grail search and Eastern Europe's decadence. àImpersonality in art

Eliot shared with Joyce the view that the felt should be detached; indeed his central purpose can be described as a search for ‘ impersonality as himself called  it in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). Detachment is the counterpoise to his deep sense of unreality, equivocal reality, in personal emotions. In the essay he maintains the idea that an order constituted by all past works of art, the tradition, creates the total meaning of a modern work of art. The new work of art, however, modifies the tradition from which it derives its meaning.

What the Thunder said (331 - 355) p. 237.

1. Read the extract and mark the point where the poet starts imagining a possible alternative to the desolate land he has in front of his eyes.

     Line 346

1. What aspects of the landscape are described between lines 331 - 345 and how many times are they repeated?

Water: it is repeated 5 times (twice at the end of a line, once at the beginning)

Road: it is repeated twice

Mountains: it is repeated five times.

1. What is the meaning of the water symbolism in the extract?

Water is repeated 4 times with the positive connotation of a life - giving pressure. Rock is repeated four times and it is either preceded by a negative or put close to water.

(spring, pool, sound of water, hermit thrush, pine - trees.

1. Compare the aspects of the two landscapes.

     The two elements that appear both in first and in the second landscape are rock and water.

1. Comment all the sound quality of the words involved /rock/: it is a monosyllabic word which has a somewhat harsh and abrupt sound. The sound It has a hard quality which echoes the theme of barrenness to craggy up and down of the ground.

      /w.o:t gamma */ : it has a more melodious sound. The sound ‘w' is mellifluous.

      The smooth   sound of the  word echoes the sweetness of the imagined landscape.

1. Note down the denotation and connotation of water.

Denotation: water (the meaning you can find on dictionary)

Connotation: Biblical connotations: the  lord brought water out of the rock of flint during the journey to the Promised Land, baptism, purification.

Rural connotations: fertility, crafts, green postures, etc

1. what is the meaning of the water symbolism in the extract.

The water symbolism is centred around the concept of what saves and rescues, gives life, purities.

1. Consider the language. Which word in the text would be regarded ad conventionally unpoetic?

Sweat, carious, sneer, snarl

9.  Look at the metre and rhythm of the extract, it is written in regular metre?

There is no regular metre but the iambic pentameter is lurking in the background.

Can it be spilt into regular stanzas? No, it cannot.

How do the rhythm and the layout suit the images presented? The rhythm is monotonous and weary in the first part while It is more lively and melodious.