In Our Time - Literary Modernism

Episode Date: April 26, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss literary modernism. In James Joyce’s Ulysses he writes, “Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man may lay down his wife for a friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius Professor of French letters to the University of Oxtail”. It is profane, it gets the Bible wrong on purpose, it nods in the direction of Nietzsche and it doesn’t quite seem to make sense - it must be modernism! The literary movement that embraced Joyce, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and many others in the early decades of the twentieth century. Modernism claimed to be revolutionary, and has been accused of being wilfully obscure. Some modernist writers campaigned for the rites of working women, others embraced fascism. What were the movements defining features, and do the questions that exercised the genre at the start of the twentieth century have relevance to us at the beginning of the twenty-first?With John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Laura Marcus, Reader in English at the University of Sussex; Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In James Joyce Ulysses, he writes, Greater love than this, he said, No man hath, that a man may lay down his wife for a friend.

Go thou and do likewise. Thus a word to that effect, saitha Thruster, sometimes read just professor of French letters to the Unus. University of Oxdale. It's profane. It gets the Bible wrong on purpose. It nods in the direction of grand philosophy. It doesn't quite seem to make ordinary sense. It could be called an example of modernism. Modernism claimed to be revolutionary and has been accused of being willfully obscure. Some modernist writers campaigned for the rights of working women, others embraced fascism. What were the movement's defining features? And do the questions that exercised the modernists at the start of the 20th century have relevance to us at the beginning of the 21st?

With me to discuss literary modernism is John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and author of the most controversial text on modernism in recent years called The Intellectuals and the Masses. Also with us is Laura Marcus, reader in English at the University of Sussex, and Valentine Cunningham, professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford.

John Kerry, modernism's a very loose term, when do you see it starting and what are its most obvious defining characteristics? Well, you could regard that as a question about time. That's to say you might say that modernism began in, say, the 1890s, coming after aestheticism, and went on perhaps to the end of the 1920s. Or you could regard it in terms of figures. You could say modernism is what people like, Elliot, Joyce, Pound, Virginia Woolf did. But if you try and do it, as you're suggesting by theme, or something that holds all these together,

that is very difficult. I suppose you might take, though, the notion of fragmentation, the idea that the world is breaking up. I think there are various movements in the culture that made modernists feel that. Quite diverse movements, for example, you had Einstein and relativity, the notion that the physical world is suddenly quite different,

that time and space no longer exist, as they had been understood too. In the political world, you have democratic movement. You have, of course, Marxism, socialism, Communist Revolution. You have movements also, I think very important movements in education. You have, for the first time, a mass readership produced by alterations in educational legislation in the 1870s and the following decades. And you therefore have the rise of popular newspapers. and popular culture.

So these different movements led, I think, to fragmentation in an obvious sense in that the old patterns of life and culture were breaking up, and fragmentation in a quite specific literary sense that plots and characters and poems that made sense were coherent, somehow no longer seemed adequate to the culture that they were facing. Well, that's a very comprehensive statement. Would you like to comment and add to that, Valentine Cunningham? Yes, I mean, I think there is a dominant theme of, as were, fragmentariness running through the sort of literature that we think of as modernist,

and also, of course, parallel events going on in music and painting. I think we have to ask what drives these results in aesthetic product, as it were. And I do think that a kind of dominant sort of force, really is kind of skepticism. There is a converging at the end of the 19th century of a great series of attacks in various ways on what I might call order and hierarchy and patriarchy and the idea that truth is desirable

even, let alone knowable. And this has great consequences for writing. You get, as it were, the collapse of confidence in writing, the arrival of impregnance. of hesitancy, as James Joyce liked to play with the notion of hesitancy. You get grand metaphors running through the literature, as well as through painting, particularly painting, which have to do with the fading of a keen, certain light on experience and the world.

And so on. John Kerry talks about, mentions things going on in the scientific apprehension of the world. And yes, they come in very, very much. you have the collapse of grand narratives, whether Christian or otherwise, and the introduction of a grand kind of metaphoric atmosphere of dubiousness. We live in the flicker, says somebody in Comrade's Heart of Darkness, and this notion of the light of knowledge being a flickering light from now on. It's not accidental that the cinema with its flickering image was called, the flickers. And Elliot's very preoccupied with this notion of only being able to perceive things

in a kind of flickering light. And this has grand consequences for the idea of what narrative does and the kind of knowledge you will arrive at through narrative, and also for a sense of what the person is, what the subject is, you know, what the family is, and so on. The knock-on effect of these great kind of skeptical drives is absolutely enormous at this period and the writing inhabits this atmosphere. Laura Marcus, would you like to put your perspective on that? I realise that these two professors have left

perhaps very lean pickings, but even so, can you perhaps address for us where this came from, where this might have started from? John Carrier's mentioned the 1890s and talked about following etc. Is there any sense we can get a grip on where this movement, which Valentine Cunningham described in such massive terms, where it was seeded?

Yes, I mean, I think one of the things we need to think about is the very term modernism and the way the intense awareness of the new, Pound's war cries make it new, comes from, that comes out of the promise and predicament of being modern. I would take it perhaps further back from 1890 to somewhere around the 1850s, Baudelaire is a key figure for us,

and I think we need to be thinking, about the cosmopolitanism, the pan-European nature of the movement, as well as specificity of the Anglo-American modernisms that we might want to go on to talk about. So I think the urban is something that we link with Bodle-Lair, the flicker and the flickering and the fleetingness, the passingness of it all is coming up very much out of the new metropolitan experience, which these movements are arising out of. We need to think about the avant-gardisms of the late 19th century

of which modernism is one, and modernism in some ways subsumes the avant-garde, but we might also want to think about these specific avant-garde movements, futurism, surrealism, aestheticism, earlier, symbolism, and the relationship to that more all-encompassing movement that we call modernism that shares so many of those features, particularly the questions of rupture and newness and a kind of revolutionary aesthetic. There's a self-consciousness about people at that time, which is remarkable in its exactness in a way.

Virginia Woolf says, honour about December 1910, the world changed. Now, I mean, she's talking about an exhibition, but even so, she was onto it, as so many of them were, that things really were changing for them as artists radically. Could you refer to the Virginia Woolf remark? Yes, I mean, I think what she says is,

on or about December 1910, human character changed, and I think it's important that she's actually thinking about the change in the world climate through the notion of the subject, through the notion of subjectivity. And I really do think we need to think about modernism very broadly as a kind of new way of thinking about what it means to be human.

This is something Valentine talked about. So Wolf is trying to get at a changing identity, which he actually does through the idea that the cook is now going to come up to the drawing room and ask you to borrow your copy of The Daily Herald, interestingly the popular cultural reference. So she's seeing class shift as fundamental. That remark is also linked to the fact

that it may refer to the first post-impressionist exhibition, which had brought in new ways of seeing new ways of perception, so class, subjectivity, perception, all coming together in their remark. But I think it's also linking to something which is true in rather more narrowly literary terms about the novel, which is massive investment in how you represent character and subjectivity and identity,

which of course takes us back to Ulysses as a prime example of the shifting label, mobile boundaries of what it means to be a self. Can we talk about the, the technique that how modernists defined themselves, John Kerry, and how they knew that they were about something new and how they took that self-consciousness into their work, perhaps with Ulysses an example, or Lawrence or wherever you want to go.

Yes, well, I think you see that the answer to that question quickly takes us into the difference between these various figures called modernist. Now, Laura talks about that famous remark of Virginia Woolf, through that human nature change, human character changed, because of the post-impressionist exhibition. But when you think of that remark, it is extraordinarily elitist. I mean, of course, most people didn't change at all or even have any high opinion of post-impressionism.

It was, of course, mocked in the popular press as daubs and so on. It is a self-consciously elitist remark. And I think the notion that the cook comes up and borrows the Daily Herald certainly does not mean that. you no longer have a cook, very much not, you know, we live above stairs, and the servants are down there still. And so I disagree, too, with Valentine in a way about, of course he's right that skepticism had come in at the end of the century in various ways. But I don't see modernism, not the central modernists as being skeptics, by any means. I think they were searching for certainties.

Elliot found it in eventually in, of course, Anglo-Catholicism, Dante, the order of the Middle Ages, so did Pound, the troubadours. They all look back to ancient, established culture and politically, of course, by no means to democracy. Democratization was a dirty word for most of the modernists. So that though skepticism was there, they resisted it, though democracy was there, they felt it to be alien. But as I say, there are different attitudes. Joyce, I do think, is genuinely different. And, of course, was divided by Virginia Woolf,

as low-bred as the kind of stuff a board school boy would write. Didn't she call him a pot boy? I think it was, well, she may have called him a pot-way. I think certainly a board-school boy, and how embarrassing it was. The kind of thing you'd expect from a self-taught man and we know all how raw they are and so on. That kind of snobbish reaction to Joyce,

I think what it signals is how different Joyce was. A thing we haven't mentioned yet is, of course, Freudianism, and that was enormously influential in the way people regarded the human mind. It links to Valentine's point about the flicker and how the human character, as it's previously been understood, breaks up. And that's partly Freud. and enjoys he is following that, of course. He's trying to be real.

He's trying to follow a human mind into areas where fiction has never followed it before. When you see bloom on the lariatry, bloom masturbating at the scene with Gertie McDougall, these are deliberate attempts to open up literature to life, very much resisted by most of the modernists who thought it indecent. So I think we do come up here

against differences between what we call modernist. I have problems, of course, with that... I have problems with that way, putting it at least quite so starkly. But I do agree very much that we have to see differences. And one... And we must see, as we were, developments over the period. I stick by the notion of grand skepticism being very important as originators of what we think of as modernism.

course, a key thing across the ages is that there's never such a thing as a belief vacuum. And what you get is, of course, the abandonment or the shaking of old mythologies, but instantly the kind of rushing in of new ones. And the thing that becomes pretty clear is that within a few years of what we might call modernist developments, In other words, I think very shortly after the First World War, you get in a kind of, perhaps even before that, a kind of grand re-mythicisation. I mean, one shouldn't forget that Elliot,

when he reviewed Ulysses, in a famous essay called Ulysses Order and Myth, he said, we've come to the end of what he called the narrative method and what the time is now auspicious for what he called the mythical method. And then he rambled on about Fraser's Golden Bow and psychoanalysis and so on. And he brought in Yates and so on. And that was a very key sort of thing to think of Yates.

And when you think of what happened very quickly in the 20s is that Yates and Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot somewhat. Ezra Pound, definitely. Lawrence definitely. They move, they're attracted towards the new mythicisation, and particularly fascism. I mean, they embrace fascistic ideas. You can't live without a myth, you see. But can we talk just to define modernism for another moment or two before moving on to develop it a bit? Do we have evidence of John Kerry mentioned Freud and 1900 the great book of Freud? Do we have evidence? Virginia Woolf's, as were, her part in the Hogarth Press, translated and published Freud in this country. Do you have evidence that Freud was read by modernists,

was seized on by Joyce and Virginia Woolf and Lawrence and so on, and the ideas were specifically... I mean, I'm interested in how ideas get there, where they come from, and how can really track them passing through, or isn't it a general kind of infection in the air? I think it obviously is much more to do with the way... influence diffuses itself slowly, though the Bloomsbury group were clearly the key purveyors of Freud in this country. They were the translators and the publishers, and indeed Leonard Wolfe was the first person to write a non-medical review of Freud with the psychopathology of everyday life.

Wolf claimed not to have read Freud until nearly the end of her life in the late 1930s. And the term that struck her most when she read Freud was indeed ambivalence, which seems to me something we could use to sum up modernism, more generally. But there is ambivalence and oscillation and vacillation in Woolf's writing, as in so many of the modernists, from so much earlier on that I don't think we take the date of her literal reading of it as indicative of the influence upon her. It is, of course, very interesting that she was packing the books of Freud in the Hogarth Press, probably sitting on them to write her novels at the same time as she was claiming not to have read them. Lawrence obviously has a key debate with Freud in Fantasia of the Unconscious and other works. I think he found Freud

much too rationalist and too materialist and insufficiently interested. He thought he was too interested in sex in some ways and not enough interested in bodies. Whereas Freud thinks of the unconscious, as actually evil, it must, it's repressed, and it must be repressed for civilisation to happen. Lawrence thought quite the opposite, of course,

it must be let out to destroy the old civilization and make a new one. And as for new mythologies, of course, that's true too, but what one has to remember is that some of the new mythologies were deliberately chosen, because they were exclusive. I mean, Yates, a figure we haven't mentioned so far, of course, went over to hermeticism, theology and so on,

and prized it particularly because it shut out the majority, the mob, the rabble. It shut them out, and indeed, Yates believe they should be destroyed. Yates wrote on the boiler, towards the end of his life, there ought to be a war between the intellectuals and the masses, and the masses would be destroyed. said, the intellectuals would win. He used an analogy of the U-boats, the German submarines, that have managed to destroy a huge amount of English shipping because they were cleverer

and more technically educated. That's what it would be like. The mob would be wiped out, yet said. Well, let's come to one of the core sentences, of one of the provocative sentences in your book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, which ruffled a few feathers, I'm pleased a great number of other people. I'm quoting, The early 20th century saw a determined effort on the part of the European intelligentsia to exclude the masses from culture. In England, this movement has become known as modernism. You've talked about Yates.

Would you like to amplify that a little, and then we can talk about that round the table? Yes. I think it's instructive to see what sort of readership the modernists were aiming at, catering for, and how tiny it was. T.S. Eliot's paper, the Criterion, had a print run of 750. It was minute. So it regarded, and Elliot is quite specific, I think, about keeping the light of culture alive in an age of darkness. He's very specific about this.

He talks about an interesting factor is the attitude to universal education. Now, you would think universal education, to come in in the 18, 70s and the 80s, would generally be greeted by intellectuals as a good thing. You educate a new readership, you educate the maths. Not at all. Nearly all the modernists were against it. Elliot said, well, Lawrence said, of course, that all schools should be closed at once, that boys should learn only primitive methods of fighting

and some handicrafts and girls should learn domestic science. Elliot said that the number of educational institutions should be cut by one third and that we should go back to the teaching orders of the Middle Ages. you should go into a cloister if you wanted to be a student. I mean, they were deeply, deeply retrogressive about education. So when I say that they wanted to exclude the maths, I think that is provable simply by their statements about such subject as math education.

It's wonderful that actually the products of mass education are nurturing the reputation of the modernists more than anyone else at the moment. Valentine Cunningham, would you like to respond to us? Well, I think we have to be a bit careful about this myself. we have to acknowledge are definitely kind of elitist groups

and elitist-minded persons and artworks and the massness of the time. And something like Wyndham Lewis, for example, who espouses

fascism, writes the first book in England admiring of Hitler, for example, he is deeply preoccupied. We live in an era

of the masses. He's obsessed by that. And one reason why people embraced, it seemed to me, fascism was that that was a political movement which as it were explained or coped with or could deal with the massness of modernity.

But you can, there are other things you could do and one of the things we have to take into account is, for example, the attraction towards communism as well as towards fascism, and particularly say in the case of Virginia Wolfe her interest in the Labour Party. I mean she and

and then they go to Labour Party conferences she conducted evening classes at Morley College. She addresses the workers' educational association. She goes to meetings and rights for groups of working women and so on. I mean she is

incuriously very conscious of her privilege. She said, I've never stood with my hands up to the arms up to the elbows in a wash tub. She has a tremendous self-consciousness there, all her difference. I think it's a bit unfair, actually, of John,

to stress only the other side, the snobbery, the anti-Semitism, and so on and so on. Well, let's take this through, and then come back to John Kerry, after Laura's had Laura Marcus as her say in it, to bring you back to the quotation that started this particular paragraph from John Carey's book.

The early 20th century saw a determined effort on the part of the European intelligentsia to exclude the masses from culture. Now, what's your response to that? I think we have to understand that modernism, avant-gardeism, these movements are anti-Borgia. And I think this is true

that what we're all saying is that it could actually go either way. Either the working class gets lumped in with the kind of bourgeoisie as this sort of proletarian mass that has to be resisted. Or you can move to the left with the working class being absorbed as part of the or sympathy with the working class being absorbed

as part of the artist's approach to the world. I think actually what you find in Wolf very often is much more a loathing of the middle brow, the middle class. And then in various essays she talks about the high brow and the low brow having things to say to each other, but it's the middlemen, the middle brow. And part of the formation of the Hogarth Press was in fact precisely to get away from middlemen of all kinds.

So it's the middle class and the bourgeoisie who much more often, it seems to me, are the butt of hatred and contempt. But I think perhaps we have to separate out, as in John Kerry's book, there is a tendency perhaps to see a writer like Wells and his hatred of the mass as identical with the high modernists, the high avant-gardists dislike of mass culture. And it seems to me that those are not entirely John is shaking his head, which you can't see you,

but there's not actually the the same kinds of resistance to massification and to mass culture. Oh, no, I never pretended that they were. I mean, I've written two chapters on Welts in the book, one showing Wells' fear and hatred of the mass, but the other, showing that what Wells tried to do about it, well seems to be quite different

from any other of the writers of the period at all, any of them, in that he wanted truly to save the world, he wanted to lead a political movement. He had real ideas. It was the most extraordinary thing. I mean, it's very hard to find a match, Tolstoy perhaps. But, yep, he wanted, he, of course, vote, a history of the world to educate people, came out in serial parts. There were Wellesians around in the early years of the 20th century, William Golding's father was one, who truly believed the world could be saved by these new leaders who would be, you know, extraordinary lot. They were called the samurai. They were going to be unpaid political leaders of great idealism who would go on a sort of outweigh.

were bound holidays once a year, would have to have written a book or painted a picture. They were sort of ideal men, and they would lead the world. Actually, a lot of people would be exterminated. He said a lot of people would have to go. But as a matter of fact, many of these seemingly leftist people believe that. Valentine talks about the left, you know. But actually, George Bernard Shaw, you know, who went along to Fabian meetings,

said that most people in Europe, most men in Europe had no right to be alive. And a lot of extermination was needed. The left believed that, and of course that's partly why they went for Stalin who was doing it. I think the question which John raises of eugenic thought, which is one of the things clearly floating around in a very major way at the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th, which has become so abhorrent to us in the post-Holocaust years, has to be seen as part of that extraordinary melting pot of ideas, which we've said could go either way to the good or in our terms to immense things.

evil and that one does have to preserve some sense of the kind of historical specificity of these times. And the fact that often, I mean, Wells, who does start out saying being a eugenic thinker actually comes to change his mind later on, partly because he looks at his own puny frame and thinks that he's not sure he would have been allowed to survive had there been such extermination going on. I think when she said it said that poetry, it was likely that poetry must be difficult, he said on the famous occasion. I think he was...

We're talking about Elliot here. This is T.S. Elliot, yeah. I think he was not only thinking that poetry was likely to be difficult because, you know, it was for a small clientele, but the times were difficult. And this would make, and ideas have become difficult, and the sense of the person that become made difficult in modern times. And that thus inevitably poetry would... be more difficult because the times were like that.

And so I think we have to add that notion. The times being technology had come in. Exactly, exactly, and particularly the great shock of the new, as you might say, provided by the First World War. John Kerry? I doubt that very much. I think all times are difficult. What about the Victorians who had the coming of the railway train?

What about living through the black death? All times are pretty difficult, and time changes everything. all the time. And Valentine said earlier that, you know, the axioms of modernism are still alive with us. Well, I'm not so sure. And on that very point, indeed, about poetry being difficult, well, who are the great English poets of the post-second World War period? They're obviously Hughes, Larkin, and Hini. All of... England would quill a little about being English, but... Oh, yeah. Writing in English. I'm sorry, writing English. That's another point, isn't

but writing in English. And none of, all of them write poems that can be understood by schoolchildren. When I say that's another point, another thing that does not go on for modernism is that a huge amount of English. Now is what we, or is sometimes called post-colonial. It's written by inhabitants of the previous colonies. Modernism has got nothing whatsoever to do with that. Pound and Wyndham Lewis would have been shattered to think that the colonials were going to write the English literary of the future. They've been shattered.

It's absolutely changed. It's not true. the axons of modernism are still alive, everything's changed. Sorry, after you. I would question that. I mean, I think it took the work of rupture. It took the break, certainly as they saw it was realist styles and forms for the post-modern, if we want to call it that of the post-war generation, to be able to write, as they did,

or indeed for an ordn to be able to return to much more lyrical, direct forms. I think it did. I think there was a difference about this period for political, for, for social reasons that did mean that there had to be a total break with conventional forms, as they'd been known. Well, the movement seems to me to have gone the other way. That is to say, in the 30s, I think things go in a way that is not sanctioned or anticipated by the modernists. For one thing, the left is embraced. Instead of democracy and the left being rejected, as the modernist did,

the left is obviously embraced by the 30s' rights and people. poets. They try and make themselves into working people. They chew chocolates to rot their teeth. They wear cloth caps and so on. Their antics have been well documented by Martin Green and others. So that, I think, is one thing which is not sanctioned or anticipated by modernism. Also, the whole new approach to the mass, which is mass observation, which is political, which is looking what it's really like, going into pubs, documenting them completely unlike modernism. So I think there's a radical change and that modernism actually breaks and something else comes.

Yeah, I'd like to just throw into the... Please say what you want to say, because, I know you want to get in. Can I just chuck in this idea of the mass, which we've sat through now for quite a long time in this programme, which seems to me to be a way of wiping out, denigrating and dispensing with the majority of people.

It's a useful word. It sort of neuters them and turns them the masses into... That word comes up again and again in the conversation in the ideas about modernism and is the sort of submerged

seven-eighths it seems to me of this iceberg that could be talking about. I'm not sure that the mass and modernism or the modernism is to be so much defined around this question of the mass.

I mean I perhaps would take it back to these questions of identity, subjectivity, the relationship between the interior and the outside world, which obviously relates to the question of private and public and individual and social, but that this sense of mass, the hatred of the mass, or the masses, is not for me the absolute defining feature,

though there have been interesting arguments made about the relationship between the feminization of the mass, which may explain some of the misogyny that we may go on to talk about. Maloney-Dunganningham, then John Kerry. I mean, I would say that, to go back to, to what John was saying about great crises in the past, there had never been such a crisis for the world as the First World War. And it's not accidental that the mass death is the great theme

and absorbed quickly into the stirrings of what we think of as modernism. The first of all comes to seem as the apotheosis of all these themes about modernism. of all these themes about break and rupture and fragmentation and destruction and so on. It's the apotheosis of Windham and Lewis's blast movement and the futurism and so on. And what is it? It is, it provokes a profound sadness at, as it were, the death of ordinary people, the death, the mass death of men. And that quickly feeds into the great modernist text.

like the wasteland and Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf and Ulysses and so on, all marked emphatically, it seems to me, by mass slaughter. And I don't think one can separate, as it were, what we've been calling the elitist preoccupations of the aesthetic movements from that profound sense of shock. Well, my point about the, my point about the, mass in the book is, of course, that the mass doesn't exist, as you said. The mass is a word you use for people you don't know and who are not your friends. It's just the great out there.

Therefore, it is infinitely fictionalizable, infinitely plastic. If you configure it as the young men who died in the First World War, of course it's a sympathetic mass. But if you configure it as the bourgeoisie, as Laura was saying, though they're the same people, I mean they were the young bourgeois men, it's a deeply horrible mass. The reason why people like Virginia Woolf couldn't stomach the bourgeoisie but liked the lower classes, because they could patronise the lower classes, whereas the bourgeoisie was a real threat to them, was making money. It's very simple, I think, and that's why the peasant figure is such a favourite

with modernist writers. The peasant was tremendously popular with £1,000, win a million. Lewis, Hitler, of course, also very keen on German peasants who were going to farm the Ukraine once he had taken it and exterminated the Slavs who lived there. So peasant is good, but for T.S. Eliot and the Wasteland, for example, to be a clerk, house agent's clerk, or a typist, that's very bad, because you have to do with machines and machines are bad things in the old William Morris Ruskinian way. after the in the 1930s machines become good

to work with the machines is good to be a coal miner is very good because that's how Orwell and such people configure the maths so the maths of course doesn't exist at all it's just a term that we use to configure the other that we aren't But why then is in the 1930s

are the left-inclined writers who are deeply as it were at least in spirit committed to the idea of ordinary people. Isn't it interesting that they take T.S. Eliot's proofrock as a great example of the, quote, little man, the Charlie Chaplin figure and so on, who represents utter ordinariness.

Precisely in a way represents one of the clerks of the world, you might say, whom, of course, T.S. Eliot came perhaps to feel more distanced. from as time went on, but when you think of, you know, the love song of J. Jeffrey Prufurtr as a kind of great, it's kind of a foundational modernist poem in which the challenged selfhood, who am I, what am I, perhaps I'm this,

you know, no, it's no longer possible to be a grand heroic figure and so on, all done extremely, I'm not Prince Hamlet, all done extremely sympathetically, I think, and Elliot entering on the inside of proofroft, of troubled himself. And here is Proufrock, just your ordinary guy. I mean, it's not accidental, Lawrence starts off

writing about the working class, and he's praised early on for getting on the inside of what you might call provincial ordinaries, and the bourgeoisie, of course, don't like that. They see that. The stage was black with minors, and somebody

wrote one of Lawrence's place. Lawrence is regarded as getting on the inside of ordinarily abandoning it, but... Laura, would you like to give in on them? Yeah, on Proof Rock or indeed Panse Mobily, I mean, they both seem to me about figures who fail to be the kind of the poet

that is writing them, and in that sense I'm not sure I'd see them as disposing the virtues of the little man. Can I cut across this just as we're reaching the end of this? I think it would be ridiculous not to ask you about the... What sort of... What is modernism through Veney wolf, as it were, on the one hand?

and Lawrence on the other. And they're published about the same time in the second decade and the third decade of the century, of the old century. What are they doing to the idea of feminism? And how far is that part of modernism? I know that you're particularly interested in. Yes. I mean, I think we have been talking with the exception of Wolf, and this is very standard really about modernism

as if it was mostly male writers. This is not the case. I could produce a long list of women writers who would be very important. to the movement, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loi, HD, I won't go on. And I think the question then becomes, do we redefine the terms of modernism

to include these writers? Or do we say modernism was an aggressively, in some ways, masculineist movement, which sought to exclude the feminine from its terms in precisely the ways that it sought to exclude the mass? I think the question of gender has to come in very importantly here,

and I think there is an issue about the way that many of these writers, Wolf took the Androgyne figure as central to Room of One's Own, but there were other writers as well for Elliot, for Joyce. The figure of the Androgyne, the bisexual, was terribly important, that there is a kind of gender ambivalence and ambiguity determining modernism, as well as the kind of sexism and misogyny. So it's a time of extremely labile sexual gender identifications, and that's why I think it's become so important for the later 20th century.

And Lawrence's position here becomes ripped up, doesn't it, in the 7th and 9? 1970s with the Kate Millett book, but at the time he's seen as somebody who can understand, in some of his earlier books, can understand, to use the phrase, get under the skin of women in a way which writers have rarely done. And that is part of his power and his appeal. Is that right, John Kerry? Well, I think that is true, and I think that the Cape Millett book was enormously damaging to him, but in some ways unfairly. I don't read, say, Sons and Lovers as a book that is unsympathetic to women. Of course, Lawrence wasn't open to a lot of aspects of women's lives.

And of course, he was in some ways deeply masculinist. If you think of, though, of a short story like son, where the woman has a kind of love affair with the son. I mean, he does think of women as connected with what he believes in, I mean the deep movements of sexuality and the earth. And these can be mocked in these terms, but he isn't in any simple sense anti-woman, as say Wyndham Lewis was. Wyndham Lewis seems to me to be a virulent anti-woman figure

because he thought that women represented things he hated physically, sort of softness and flabbiness and somehow wasn't classical hardness. I mean, that's all his philosophy seems to me to amount to a few stupid phobias. And I think a lot of modernists are like that. But Lawrence, I don't think, is so simple. Finally, and I'm afraid briefly, but I mean, look at Lawrence and Virginia Woolf and Joyce. Is there a sense in which the paradox here is that we're talking about figures of modernism

who don't much like modernity, they don't much like new technologies, they don't like new inventions, they don't like the new lifeless sea around them? They certainly don't like lots of people voting and lots of people saying, well, we have a claim on the culture too. What do you make of that? Well, that is true. That is true. And it is interesting how technology comes to be regarded as linked up with the First World War is the great technological war. And I think that just as I think the First World War has a lot, as you were, of input in this story.

I think its technologization of warfare is one key aspect of that. and it helped, I think, kick consciousness into a kind of deep hostility to the modern. We shouldn't, though, forget all the time the paradox of all this. As Laura was saying, these art movements are emphatically linked up with the city, and there's nothing more kind of modern than the modern cosmopolies. Yes, I think that's certainly true, and I think Wolf and Joyce particularly celebrate the city, and Wolf celebrates speed and motion, did indeed. write a very interesting and informed essay about the cinema that it's Lawrence who loathes

the cinema because it brings a light into dark places which should remain dark. So I think again we're back with our split between left and right that we can think of those modernists for whom modernism was the modernity of the new city and of its speed and of its technologies and of the new relations of anonymity that it, but of a new way of knowing people that the city actually brought into being. see anti-modernism, anti-modernity as a definitional of modernism. Finally, John Kerry. Well, I think I would, and I'm interested by the point about the cinema. I think photography was a huge shock to the arts. Walter Benjamin, in a famous essay,

talks about it. You could say that it spawned modern art. Modern art had to move away from representation. Representation, fact, realism were all associated with the masses, with the new illustrated newspapers which were execrated by the modernists. And in fact, Virginia's Wolf's brilliant essay on the cinema is about how it's impossible for the cinema to turn literature into cinematic art. What she wants the cinema to be is a kind of surreal, a kind of art cinema, not the way the cinema went at all. So I take modernism as, yes, to be very distinctly anti-modern. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you John Kerry, Valentine Cunningham, and Laura Marcus, and thank you all very much for listening.

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