ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

A fair space to begin is a quote early in Voss and Werner’s article, “Towards a Poetics of the Archive”: “The archive is both a physical site–an institutional space enclosed by protective walls–and an imaginative site–a conceptual space whose boundaries are forever changing.” Cultural memory, or the act of locking it in place, seems to be deeply entrenched in a level of fear. The root of archiving, even in something so elementally incalculable as the digital or the conceptual spaces, grows in this sense of “explusion” of those without; it follows a frightening zealotry that is often benign at best, but unfathomably dynamic at worst. So it is the case of Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto”. It calls for breaking some imaginary chains, as indicated by the mal d’archive, or “the breakdown of the archive’s integrity that is most visible at moments of great documentary shift in the methods–technologies–of production and transmission” (Werner iii), whereby “literature has up to now magnified pensive mobility, ecstasy and slumber” and that they “want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the slap and the blow with the fist” (Marinetti 3). 

In shadowboxing historical perpetuity, they create their own fervent archive. The Futurists are so deeply concerned with tearing the walls down around them “with their innumerable museums…and graves” that they–curiously–don’t realize they’re replacing the walls with their own, an archival movement that cares deeply about newness or the act of being new. It raises a peculiar question: is chaos for chaos’ sake worth crushing the zeitgeist of the time? And is the zeitgeist part of a greater archive, as feverish as ellucidated in Voss’s and Werner’s essay?

“The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufock” is more pensive and indeterminate. Yet, it also drips with fear in losing itself, seemingly locked into a cataloguing transience of life rather than wholly embracing that life is changing. “And Indeed there will be time/ For the yellow smoke that glides along the street/ Rubbing its back on the window-panes… There will be time to murder and create.” Eliot even finishes the movement of the stanza with that heavy emphasis: “And time yet for a hundred indecisions.” Urgency of freneticism, coupled with that indecision that so handcuffs generations, seemingly all sprouts from some anguish when existing beyond the limits of the archive and when forging one anew. These two generations of culture, Futurists and Eliot’s titular character both, are urgent and raw and hungry, entrenched in their bubbles of archives as they scrape against one another.

Manifesto of futurism by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Merinetti and The love song by T.S. Eliot are great example of cultural memory. Both of the workpieces hold two different approaches towards cultural memory, one is destructiveness and another one is preservation. For instance, In the Manifesto of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso supports the rejection of the past stating that " Time and space died yesterday" and finding no relevance future onwards. Instead of it, they like the rapid expansion of Industrialization, using guns, violence, machinery. According to the futurists, war is the only cure of the world. Filippo Tommaso mentioned that "Gun fire is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace '' and it’s evident that he believes the more you create destructiveness, the more you will make progress. They have kind of mentality to demolish everything which are beneficial for human beings. For example: Libraries, Museums and all the beautiful ideas and create militarism, patriotism and the destructive gesture of anarchists. For them, more aggressiveness will bring prosperity. They think every masterpiece has an aggressive character which shows their destructive nature.

On the other hand, on the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, Prufrock was depressed and haunted by the societal expectations. He is concerned about every tiny thing for example, how he looks, how every person sees him. He is too confused to express his feelings because of these expectations and being judged at every moment. Which was appeared in a line " Do I dare?" "Should I presume?” He is lack of confidence. He suffers from loneliness, aimlessness and disillusionment. His indecisive nature makes him so anxious about everything. He is always concerned about his baldness and feebleness of his own body. These all are cultural conventions which causes a terrifying mental state in his head. In one point he tried to depict his irresistible fear quoting Lazarus from Bible, saying “ I am Lazarnus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”. He seeks confidences but fails to do so. He explains his distress mentioning the shared knowledge of days and night. "And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!” He beautifully captures the cultural memories and utilises them to present his own state of mind.

Warner/ Voss said the archive is placed in physical and imaginative spaces. It has a transformative nature which is pretty much dynamic. Archives are never constant, They are continuously changing. And those changes are influences on many factors such as internal and external. And archives are also changed by Politics, gender etc. Thus, it’s said that archives are not something that is neutral but rather it’s influenced by social factors. The futurists want to take a break from these archives and move forward. They love to challenge political notions and form new orders. But on the other hand, Alfred Prufrok poses the internal archive in his poem. He tries to convey the message that cultural memories and archives are reflected by one’s own memories.

In Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto, he states, “We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” The idea of creating a new "archive" comes from the necessary revolution in Italy. It was obvious to see how aggressive he wanted Italy to seize the power once more, like they used to have in Renaissance period. However, the idea that driven the new concept turns into encouragement of violence, “It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence.” Of course, it led to the aggressiveness of Italy in the later wars.

We can see very similar concept from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In here, T.S. Eliot also indicates his idea on revolution, or how to claim the power once more. “To swell a progress, start a scene or two.” Also, T.S. Eliot mentions the name, Michelangelo, one of the most popular artists in Renaissance. Here, it matches the idea of creating a new archive with Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto. Both indicates the future by referencing how to make a better new world with their new ideas and power.

In Toward A Poetics of the Archive Introduction, it mentions“To archive, ultimately, as Derrida recently reminded us in Archive Fever is to catalogue and subject to bibliographical determination.” New knowledge has to add on to the old archive, however, the old ones might not seem to fit with the new ones. That makes the great change in creating new archive. It has to get rid of the old ones, and create the new ones.

Marinetti's Manifesto advocates aggressively breaking from the past and its cultural archives, boldly proclaiming "We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice." This contrasts with the anxiety about personal legacy and cultural memory displayed in Eliot's Prufrock, who wonders "Do I dare disturb the universe?" While Marinetti seeks a clean break from tradition by burning libraries and museums, Eliot reveals the anxiety of leaving one's imprint on culture's historical record.

As Voss and Werner state, the archive "necessarily established in proximity to a loss" and its contents are "‘citations’ often wrenched out of context." Marinetti wants to destroy such citations and repositories in order to enable progress. But Prufrock is preoccupied with what citations about himself will remain in the cultural archive. So while differing in tone, both grapple with cultural memory’s artifacts and their power to shape legacies. Marinetti rejects giving the past's fragments such definite power, whereas Eliot spotlights personal anxiety about one's place in posterity's mosaic of decontextualized citations.

In short, Marinetti calls for razing archives to liberate the future while Eliot dwells on archives' power to determine personal legacy. But both reveal an intense modernist focus on interplay between cultural memory, artifacts, and the future's unfolding narrative.

In the introduction to Toward a Poetics of the Archive, Voss and Werner describe an archive as “both a physical site . . . and an imaginative site,” a “space [that] . . . creates a system whereby an official record of the past may be preserved and transmitted intact” (i). However, they also note the “paradoxical logic” inherent to the system: “The archive preserves and reserves, protects and patrols, regulates and represses” (i; my emphasis). In The Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti holds contempt for this past, the “[m]ythology and the mystic cult of the ideal” that he and his compatriots are leaving behind, perhaps for this very reason. Instead of the “magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber” of the existing body of literature—a description that might very well apply to J. Alfred Prufrock of Eliot’s poem—he wants “movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.” Later, he also expresses a desire to “demolish museums and libraries” and “deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides, and antiquaries,” and instead embrace industry and “eternal, omnipresent speed.”

Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot seems to hold a much more positive opinion on the existing body of cultural memory, at least on the surface level. As Mohamad noted in the previous post, Eliot includes many references to other literature and art in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Throughout the poem, he refers to Michelangelo and alludes to Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare, and the Bible among other authors and works. Along with Prufrock himself, who, as I mentioned previously, seems to be stuck in the past, the poem acts as a container of the past. Moreover, the phrase Prufrock keeps repeating—“there will be time”—echoes the preservative nature of the archive that Voss and Werner discuss. However, just as Marinetti believes the archive to be a source of stagnation and gangrene, Prufrock might be hindered by the abundance of cultural memory within Eliot’s poem. Rather than daring to “[d]isturb the universe,” Prufrock turns to the past, “the evenings, mornings, afternoons” that he knows well.

As Voss and Werner points out, “the archive is always only partially decodable,” urging us “to read its minimum signs with maximum energy”; the process begins with the act of recollection, wherein every piece of evidence is “provisional and subject to revision” (ii). Marinetti opposes delving into archival investigations, contending that it is a “waste … of … strength” or energy to venerate “the past” which yields no results but “exhaust[ion], [and] diminish[ment]”. Eliot, however, employs numerous allusions to such historical figures as Michelangelo, Lazarus, and Hamlet, to name but a few, to describe Prufrock’s internal conflict and disillusionment which implies the chaotic atmosphere of early-20th-century. The underlying intention of the poet is to engage the reader’s cultural memory.

Both Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” provide a glimpse into the cultural sentiment during a pivotal time in history strongly influenced by industrialization, political shifts and economic changes and demonstrate how the archive is not just a physical space but, as Voss and Wener assert, “an imaginative site”. The early part of the 20th century was marked with uncertainty, a draw to the modern and a perspective that the antiquities are frivolous and best left in the past.  The perspective provided in these two pieces can complement the historical documents found in archives and enrich our understanding of the cultural memory. Voss and Werner summarize that “Clegg argues…for a more symbiotic relationship between history and literary studies”. These two works strengthen Clegg’s argument that creative literary pieces can provide a richer understanding of a specific time period. 

Marinetti embraces the changing world in proclaiming: “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile…”. This is embracing the impact of the automobile on life in the early 20th century, but also describes the excitement over the speed of rapid innovation, prompting a strong desire to break away from the past. Marinetti strongly asserts “we want to demolish museums and libraries…” and “to admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action” and focuses on looking forward rather than back. 

Similarly, Eliot portrays a cynical view of the antiquities mocking conversations with the line “In the room, the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo”. This suggests a disdain for these types of discussions.  Prufrock describes feelings of uncertainty by describing “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels” and of “in a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”. This underscores the pervasive sense of instability and the anxiety of the rapid rate of change during this time period.

Naipaul discusses industry through the lens of nationality/ethnicity to emphasize the internationality that underlies late capitalism. He poses industry and commodification to unite various national and ethnic contexts. “In cafés shabbier than I remembered,” he writes, “Greek and Lebanese businessmen in suits read the local French and English newspapers and talked with sullen excitement about the deals that might be made in Rhodesian tobacco, now that it was outlawed” (250). Naipaul parallels the nationality of the businessmen with the languages (alternatively, nationalities) of their newspapers. The language used to discuss the Rhodesian tobacco deals is not specified, but the papers’ languages are: French and English. Naipaul encodes English and French news material as authoritative in matters of business. Moreover, he poses these business languages as “local,” suggesting the international reach of the papers—more broadly, the French and British Empires. It’s uncertain whether the “locality” of these English/French papers indicates they’re produced in Cairo and sold locally or produced in their respective nations and distributed internationally. Whatever case, Naipaul blends these various national/linguistic contexts into a speculative discussion about the exchange value of an outlawed commodity. The common self-interest of Greek and Lebanese businessmen unites them in ways that vary from some “pre-modern” traditions of community, like religious affiliation, nationality, or language. Importantly, this modern “sullen excitement” when discussing potential profit suggests a law greater than that of the state in which the Rhodesian tobacco has been outlawed. The commodity becomes profitable in the same sentence that it becomes illegal within the state’s borders. The businessmen imagine deals beyond the borders and regulations of the state, however, entangling speculative profit and modern economic principles within an international discourse. Naipaul asks us to consider the positive social value that internationalism offers humanity as inseparable from the exploitative (in this case, illegal) profits of international business.

I’m curious why Naipaul characterizes the narrator’s driver as, primarily, bored. The driver shoos away the “beggar boys in jibbahs” as if waving at them, combining signals of dismissal and welcome in a single gesture. Naipaul’s narrator locates the driver’s personal history in these boys, saying he “once no doubt…had been a boy in a jibbah” (251). Even though the driver’s and beggar boys’ religious and cultural backgrounds may be similar, Naipaul suggests that the driver “had grown up differently” than the beggar boys (251). The narrator’s elaboration on this different upbringing revolves around one’s appearance/dress, and it works in tandem with the repeated mention of jibbahs. “He wore trousers and shirt and was vain of his good looks,” Naipaul writes (251).

Next, the driver’s boredom is associated even closer with geography and his environment. The narrator says of the driver, “[s]omehow in the desert he had learned boredom…bored with the antiquities, the tourists, and the tourist routine” (251). This boredom apparently motivates the driver to insist on taking the narrator to an unfamiliar little oasis. Otherwise, the driver would begin to argue with him (252). I’m interested here in the ways that Naipaul associates the driver’s boredom with the specific location at which that the narrator ends up. Moreover, because the driver is bored of “the tourists and the tourist routine,” he takes the narrator “by unfamiliar ways to a little oasis with palm trees and a large, dried up timber hut” (252). The scene abruptly changes after the narrator admits he “didn’t want to stay,” so the reader arrives at the rest-house full of tourists who speak European languages (252). So, is boredom, to Naipaul’s narrator, inefficient? The driver’s attempt to assuage his boredom by taking unfamiliar ways directly opposes his job as a driver, so much so that even his proclivity to get angry and contentious is a salve to boredom (252). I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m curious how Naipaul figures this middle-level (not beggar boy, not businessman, but driver) boredom as dehumanizing.

There were several interesting elements in Naipaul’s excerpt that might be described as a “transatlantic aesthetic,” including the setting of the steam ship, the cast of nations, and the focus on money, exchange, and modernity that texture this excerpt. The character I was most struck by was the tramp, who stands in as the figure of a sort of existential refugee. This characterization is gestured to in the prologue’s opening when the narrator describes the Greek steamship as “like a refugee ship” (2672). The ship represents being in a liminal state, which is then paralleled by the tramp who seems to oscillate between the past/present, fixed/displaced. He is described as looking like “a romantic wandered of an earlier generation” with his fashionable world-explorer wardrobe, but up close “his clothes were in ruin” (2673). He recounts the 38 years he’s travelled, but the narrator states that “His speech was like this, full of dates, places and numbers, with sometimes a simple opinion drawn from another life. But it was mechanical, without conviction; even the vanity made no impression; those quivering wet eyes remained distant” (2673). Distance plays an interesting role in both the description of his clothes and of his speech; from a distance, his façade of a grand past of adventure, exploration, and cultural maturation is highly romanticized, but when looked at up close this all falls away in ruin and his “eyes remained distant,” as if he is displaced from the present. Indeed, the tramp is described as “odd” and clearly doesn’t fit in on the ship, constantly being displaced from his cabin, the ship’s deck, and the dining room, until he ultimately recovers his cabin through the threat of violence on any who trespasses. This mirrors the setting the ship is heading to, Egypt, which had just seen its own revolution that ousted the colonial government; Egypt is described in both the prologue and epilogue as reconciling with its cultural past and the European-tinted modernity that incubates during and after colonial oppression. The tramp stands in for this complex modernity, where the aftermath of global imperialism has displaced individuals and societies temporally, culturally, and geographically. The kind of transnational figure that is created from these forces is shown not as a globetrotting explorer like the tramp thinks he is, but instead a refugee of modernity.

This post is already longer than anticipated, but I do want to just throw out a final thought I’ve been thinking about in relation to the transatlantic now that the course is almost over. At the start of the semester Daniel asked why “transatlantic” and not “global”(or something similar), and that question has stuck with me for a while. I think what I’ve come to is that we could view the transatlantic not so much as a static spatial category, but instead that the transatlantic is a network of exchange and communication which gives globalization its currency in modernity. I think this perspective accounts for the emphasis on travel, transition, and displacement which seem to be at the heart of many of the texts we encountered this semester. The transatlantic isn’t so much a geographic marker like global, American, British, Caribbean, etc., but instead a collection of historical and cultural processes that facilitates the transgression of these geographic borders, which is heightened with developments in technology in the twentieth century and is captured in the modernist imagination.

In reading this, what I felt most was that Cairo is a tourist destination than anything else, and the implications that accompany that are depressing. It is no secret that this is the case, as Naipaul talks extensively about the various groups of people that are here, all of whom are sight seers or people from outside of this place. Naipaul writes, "perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it as complete" (255). To me, it felt as though the ancient artist, or others who had lived long ago, were seen to be appreciative of this land mostly because that's all they had, and had never been any other place. This quote speaks to one in the beginning of the epilogue which reads, "the ancient artist, recording the life of a lesser personage, sometimes recorded with a freer hand the pleasures of that life... It was the special vision of men who knew no other land and saw what they had as rich and complete" (251). These excerpts sort of act as bookends for this short epilogue, both describing an older era of pastoral innocence. It beckons to this pure time, one well before travelling tourists came to relax and explore in the city. I posed these exceprts up against the description of certain tourists here in Cairo, where a couple of them made a game of throwing sandwhich pieces to the children outside who scrambled to pick them up from the sand. Those who didn't pay this any mind were discussing other matters, ignorant of the spectacle. I thought this conveyed some of the effects of tourism. People from other places see Cairo, or other destination landscape, as a place which is theirs to experience. The wait staff, drivers, and other working class people are shown as being highly concerned with the tourists' experiences, one waiter at first shooing away the hungry children until another threatens to tell on him. At that point, the waiter beseeches him not to do so. It's clear these peoples' livlihoods is highliy affected by these tourists, and their experiences. The way this impacts the landscape in relation to its people is sad, especially when thinking of Naipaul's remarks about the ancient artist and how he likely saw his homeland. The landscape, Cairo, now seeks and works to mirror the desires of the tourists. It is an place of new wonder, but the people who come from this place are no longer the center, but the backdrop. Naipaul even discusses how the children seem to be a part of the desert sand. 

The final reading of our final reading (“The Circus at Luxor”) takes the audience on a temporal journey. Naipaul’s experience in Egypt can’t shake the ghosts of the past—the narrative is shot through with historical references and reflections: “the Museum was still haunted by Egyptian guides possessing only native knowledge… there was a reminder of the wars that had come with the revolution… extravagant columns, ancient in ancient times… they were giving me the room they used to give the Aga Khan… bright visions of the past” (241-2).

It’s in this context that Naipaul asks us to consider the action of the story: 1. Witnessing and spectating the circus travelers while being tourists themselves (not performers) and 2. Witnessing and intervening in an instance of abuse between security guards and Egyptian beggar children. As it relates to the latter, Naipaul is at the center of an ethical conundrum, one he tries to solve by interrupting and chastising the security guard. The problem here, though, is that the security guard is playing the “Egyptian game with Egyptian rules” (243). The security guard is doing his job just as the children are doing there’s—both are surviving in this new world of international capitalism and tourism. The guilty party could be the participants in the game, the security guard or the children. Or the Italian tourists who throw food to them as you would birds or fish. Or perhaps the other tourists who look onward when impoverished and hungry children risk their well-being for scraps of food. The whole episode has a very passive feel to it. Naipaul is unable to help the children, even after he shouts at the security guard and threatens to “report” him. All he can do is document the world that he sees and comment on it. Everyone then, even artists, are transfixed/paralyzed as “another, more remote empire was announcing itself” (247).

While the past suffuses Naipaul’s description and commentary of his journal entry, the final section offers another temporality: the future. Naipaul can’t square a nostalgic primitivism, a pre-modern utopic vision of the Egyptian cradle of civilization with what he experiences. The essay then abruptly moves to a train and the soldiers on the train who would (“seventeen months later”) “know total defeat in the desert” (247). As Naipaul collapses time here, he brings into perspective the changes that a wide view can bring to bear on a particular place. This view ultimately clashes with the very human, particular experience he communicates in the pages before. The past is a vision of connection with the land; the present a vision of unethical global capitalism and vapid tourism; the future is a vision of destruction. Ultimately Naipaul establishes a clear narrative of decay, one that is decidedly anti-modern.

I’m still on the idea/concept of “time” for this week’s Walcott reading, and I see it especially in the poem “Volcano.” The poem opens up in historical uncertainty, in the mire of “legends” such as the lions that supposedly roared at Joyce’s funeral or Joyce’s death itself. It’s from this foundation that the poem transitions abruptly to the external/material/natural world (as Walcott often does—see “A Far Cry From Africa”). In this fork/split, Walcott draws us to the image of “two glares from the miles-out-at-sea derricks” which he connects metaphorically to the glow of a cigar and volcano. After the split, Walcott smooths over the seam and establishes the connective tissue which is the question of whether to be a reader or a writer: “One could abandon writing/ for the slow-burning signals/ of the great, to be, instead,/ their ideal reader.” As the literal image of glowing lights is meshed with the experience of reading great writers (their works or legends like “slow-burning signals”), the narrator is forced with a choice between writing and reading, producing and consuming. The problem is that reading requires a sense of “awe” which is a casualty of the modern world: “So many people have seen everything,/ so many people can predict,/ so many refuse to enter the silence/ of victory.” What the poem resolves into is nostalgia for the past, a lament for a lost appreciation of greatness, the unique and extraordinary. Walcott writes, “so many take thunder for granted./ How common is the lightning,/ how lost the leviathans/ we no longer look for!” In this is a loss of seeing the embers of the cigar, of not recognizing the ”masterpieces,” of “[refusing] to enter the silence/ of victory.” The final line is a resolution to read more and establish connections with the past.

In this lament, I’m struck by Walcott’s formal choices of recycling language and images. In a poem about lost and deteriorating histories, there is a fair amount of repetition: the image of cigars and volcanoes, the symbols of greatness in legends, giants/leviathans, and thunder/lightning. The poem continues to fold back in on itself (at least that’s how I understand my experience of reading it). What catches my eye most is the word “victory,” italicized and capitalized (“Victory”) in several places: first with skepticism towards an idea of victory (“Victory is ironic”), then as the end to a journey with connotations of finality but also impending catastrophe that active volcanoes symbolize (“Victory’s end”), and then as casualty of modern life, a “silent” space “indolent” people no longer explore (“so many refuse to enter the silence/ of victory”). A subtext of the poem is Walcott’s questioning of victory’s meaning. Whether the idea of victory is obscured in legends of the past or the end of an epoch and beginning of another (suggesting finality but really connoting continuance) or a clarity of meaning that people can no longer access, it is a transient and slippery concept that is reinforced by Walcott’s repeated play with the word.

“Victory” is an important concept in thinking about the historical record, since history is written by the victors. Victories also punctuate historical time periods. Wars are contests with victors and each major war symbolizes a break with the past and the birth of new era (literary periodization often coincides with war and violent events—WWI birthed high modernism, for instance). Finally, in “victory” there is a decided sense of temporal progression. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to understand Walcott’s discussion of time and history alongside a questioning of “victory,” with all of its historical implications. Further, what do these concepts (time and victory) mean to black diasporic subjects who are at once in the technological/capitalistic progression of modernity yet “legally and violently excluded from modernity’s official public spheres” (Williams 85)?