The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World

Preface

Preface During the first part of the nineteenth century, literature—both poetry and prose—was able to assume a coherent culture that the writer shared with the reader. For complex reasons this situation gradually ceased to exist, and the First World War put an emphatic end to the assumptions of the nineteenth century. In A Broken World: 1919–1939, Raymond James Sontag quoted Gabriel Marcel, who in 1933 felt he was living in a broken world, “like a watch with a broken spring; in appearance nothing was changed and everything was in place, but put the watch to the ear, and one heard nothing.” In The First World War, John Keegan made the connection between that apocalyptic war and the decades that constituted the middle of the twentieth century. The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called the middle of the twentieth the “time of troubles,” surely an understatement. Keegan describes the connection between the “Great War” and the “time of troubles”: On 18 September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilised front fighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realise seventeen years later: “It cannot be that two million Germans should havefalleninvain. . .No,wedonotpardon,wedemand—vengeance!” The monuments to the vengeance he took stand throughout the continent he devastated, in the reconstructed centres of his own German cities, flattened by the strategic bombing campaign that he provoked, and of those—Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Rotterdam , London—that he himself laid waste. The derelict fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, built in the vain hope of holding his enemies at bay, are monuments to his desire for vengeance; so, too, are the decaying hutments of Auschwitz and the remnants of the obliterated extermination camps at Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. A child’s shoe in the Polish dust, a scrap of rusting barbed wire, a residue of pulverised bone near the spot where the gas chambers worked, these are as much relics of the First as of the Second World War. They have their antecedents in the scraps of barbed wire that litter the fields where the trenches ran, filling the French air with the xi smell of rust on a damp morning, in the mildewed military leather a visitor finds under a hedgerow, in the verdigrised brass of a badge or button, corroded clips of ammunition and pockmarked shards of shell. They have their antecedents also in the anonymous remains still upturned today by farmers ploughing the bloodsoaked soil of the Somme—“I stop work at once. I have a great respect for your English dead”—just as the barely viewable film of bodies being heaped into the mass graves at Belsen in 1945 has its antecedents in the blurred footage of French soldiers stacking the cordwood of their dead comrades after the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915. The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation. In A Broken World, Sontag dates the brokenness as beginning in 1919, which indeed was the year it became manifest. But the nineteenth-century consensus had begun to break down long before, first in France and then in England, where the middle class had greater cultural authority. It is important to understand this social background, because it created the problems modernists address. The modernist response was various and complicated but often profound, and the great modernist works are of lasting value. All of this will require attention if the reader is to understand the sources and the achievements of this important development. T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land appeared in 1922, its structure fragmentary, and the poem full of fragments of Western culture. Near the end of The Waste Land is the phrase “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” which reverberated all through the literature of the 1920s and became the banner of modernism. In fact, however, the challenges addressed by modernism had been present long before 1922, as modern thought in various forms as well as social stresses called in question the assumptions of the nineteenth century. The Living Moment will address the erosion of nineteenth-century assumptions in France and substantially later in England, and also the important responses modernist writers made to the cultural crises that resulted. The issues involved are complex and difficult and so often is the modernist response. The reader here can expect some hard work as well as the pleasure of exploration and discovery. xii Preface [3.140.198.43] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...