A Genealogy of Modernism

Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Print.

“The English modernists were inclined to definitive opinions expressed in vehement tones” - Michael Levenson, viii

I read the preface an Chapter 1, entitled Consciousness. I may also read part or all of the chapter on T.S. Eliot when I read his poetry.

I liked Levenson’s preface a lot because he’s the first person I’ve read to actually say straight out that a) modernism is only loosely defined and b) that modernism is a literary movement associated primarily with a particular group of artists: Pount, Hulme, Ford, Lewis, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Larence (vii) and lastly c) that his genealogy is only a genealogy and not the genealogy of modernism (x). This is refreshing (and a model I’d like to follow) since I despise how most critics throw around terms like modernism just expecting I know what they mean. Levenson also situates his genealogical focus in the years 1908-1914, though he points out that there was no sudden break with modernism in British lit (x).

Levenson, in his preface, notes that the modernists were quite polemic and dualistic (ie. they argued that Victorian poetry was soft, modernist poetry is hard) despite having rejected many dualist notions, such as that of good an evil (ix). He expands this modernist contradiction in his chapter on consciousness. He begins his discussion with Joseph Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ in which, “on one hand, Conrad makes a rousing rhetorical call for the sensory appreciation of life’s surfaces; on the other, he demands inwardness and depth” (1). Levenson points out that that for the modernists, who were influenced by Victorian thinkers like Arnold, Mill and Ford, meaning created within human consciousness was focal because it could work “against the evanescent flux of the phenomenal,” providing a sense of “permanence, pattern and significance” (2). Levenson argues that in Conrad’s earlier work, such as The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ self-consciousness and intellectualism are submerged within the concrete, practical tasks undertaken by the characters (3), making possible an unmediated apprehension of meaning for the reader (3). As Levenson points out, however, Conrad’s “consciousless” or externally-focused narration is occasionally interrupted by a first person plural narrator (a “we”) who “places incidents within the context of a perceiving subject,” a subject who acts as a feeling witness to these incidences, and who also reveals the contradictory interplay between physis (the development of an external physical space) and psyche (the construction of an internal/psychological space) in Conrad’s work (4, 7).

Levenson notes that Conrad’s style of narration, which creates a “division of narrative labour” between distinct points of view, is a departure from Victorian writers like George Elliot, whose omniscient narrators could move back and forth between consciousnesses. This idea of narrative interplay puts me in mind of Virigina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which uses an omniscient narrator, but also gives us distinct points of view, distinct narratives, through the perspective of that narrator, almost like it’s narrated by a ghost who can drift between and inhabit different bodies and minds. Unlike most omniscient narrators, she focuses almost exclusively on the psyche rather than the physis. We see so much inside her characters that we can’t get in among them; they are so inside themselves, so individual in their consciousnesses, that they can’t really interact together, and thus see how much their consciousnesses overlap.

Levenson locates the origins of modernists’ focus on the physis in Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, which attempted to empiricize Christianity by locating its “natural truth” in human consciousness, and (universalized) personal experience, rather than in divinity (11). As Levenson notes, “Religion is thus assimilated into the most elementary cognitive process, the trial and error of individual contact with reality. Secularizing is thus radicalized into psychologizing.” This new secular, psychological morality, of which Arnold was only a part, attempted to create an altruism out of egoism, as is illustrated by Mill’s claim that “each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, good to the aggregate of all persons”(13). Under Mill, the dogma that remained in Arnold’s model was given over to principles of individual psychology, such as individual ideas of happiness, which are then assumed to be universal (13). (This is a useful idea for me in looking at psychological discourses, and many of its moral pronouncements and binarisms).

Walter Pater, however, further extended the centrality of personal psychology in The Renaissance, undoing the (already tenuous) connection between individual consciousness and morality, completely aestheticizing consciousness and condensing all forms of observation into those existing in “the narrow chamber of the human mind” (17). In Pater’s world there is only the experience, only subjectivity, and it can cut away even the scientific objectivity which inspired Arnold in the first place. Pater uses Arnold’s very reliance on individual experience (which Arnold hoped would create a new religious certainty) to undercut scientific and religious claims to constancy, objectivity and morality (16, 18). Modernism took up this last shift to pure psychology in its literary methods. Levenson argues that as Conrad progresses through his career, for example, his work shifts increasingly towards a focus on the psyche rather than the physis. In modernism, he argues, value is not based on verisimilitude, but on psychological aesthetics, though that is not to say that the “surface level” is completely abandoned in modernist texts, either (20-1). I think D.H. Lawrence is a good example of the negotiation between these two planes, since he both offers long, concrete descriptive passages to show us the “real” outside world, as well as long descriptions of characters’ inner agony and ecstasy as well, descriptions which reveal the insufficiency of the surface descriptions (Levenson 21).