The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World

Introduction: The Living Moment in a Broken World

Introduction The Living Moment in a Broken World Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” “An odd secret excitement, a strange need,/To be there with words when the heartbeat happened.” That was the poet Mark Van Doren on the experience of writing poetry, the words reflecting something not entirely rational, and perhaps even a physical experience. For the attentive reader poetry makes things happen in the mind; it changes the reader, however subtly. And this is true of many novels. Modernism in both poetry and the novel was usually characterized by heightened originality of form, often by difficulty, and by the centrality of the extraordinary moment with which to organize experience. The difficulty repelled many readers, but it had the effect of forcing attentive readers to engage with the work of literature in a cooperative way to create an island of coherence. Moreover, many modernist works transcended their period and contributed permanently valuable insights. It is important for the reader to understand the social and historical circumstances that created the cultural crisis that modernism addressed, a sense in advanced circles that the nineteenth-century European order had become false and that we were living in a broken cultural world. Such modernism will be the focus of this book. The principal reason why England had an authoritative Victorian culture may be found in a surprising place, Samuel Richardson’s six-volume novel Clarissa (1746). Hardly anyone reads Clarissa nowadays, even in an abridged edition. Most readers would be surprised to learn that this enormous and almost forgotten mid-eighteenth-century novel was a work with latent revolutionary implications. 3 Clarissa is also an example of how reading can imperialize the reader, as is Rousseau’s Julie; or, The New Eloise (1761), heavily influenced by Clarissa. Both of these enormous novels can take days to read. And this is part of their accumulating power. Their readers must have had the time to delve into the shades of thought and feeling explored by these epistolary narratives. I want to emphasize, however, that Clarissa possesses potentially revolutionary implications, as Clarissa Harlowe, daughter of a wealthy middle-class family, defends her independence against the sexually predatory Sir Richard Lovelace. She is attracted to Lovelace but insists on her own terms. Her defense of her virginity is a defense of her integrity and, inferentially, an assertion of middle-class rights. Lovelace, after hundreds of pages, finally drugs her, rapes her, and for that pays with his life in a duel with Colonel Morden, her avenging relative. Notice, this duel must take place in France, not England. Half a century later in France the guillotine would reenact this scenario on a very large scale. As Samuel Johnson said to Boswell, “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment. . . . There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s [Clarissa] than in all Tom Jones.” There were more politics as well in Clarissa. British aristocrats had to reform their manners—no more dueling, swagger, swearing, spitting on the floor; they had to marry the wealthy Clarissas instead of chasing them and raping them. And they gradually agreed to meet the wealthy commoners on the middle ground of the new social ideal of the gentleman, the wealthy commoners even acquiring landed estates. In The Spectator (1711–14), Addison and Steele popularized the style— urbane, mildly witty, condemning with a smile: as the Tory Alexander Pope, Addison’s enemy, said of him, “willing to wound and yet afraid to strike.” The Spectator provided the smattering of knowledge suitable to a gentleman. Of course James Gatz wanted to become an English gentleman known as Jay Gatsby, even an “Oxford man.” The gentleman tertium quid ameliorated social hostilities in England, as England, unlike France, solved its problems one at a time. In 1649, with the execution of Charles I, absolute monarchy ended. In 1688 with the Glorious Revolution, a parliamentary overthrow of James II, the supremacy of parliament was consolidated. None of this happened in France, where, indeed, the revolutionary tradition remained strong at least until recently, that is, with the uprising of 1968. Political consolidation and the ideal of the gentleman created the solid Victorian era in England. The “decadents ”—Wilde, Beardsley, Dowson, Pater—were culturally marginalized. 4 The Living Moment [3.145...