ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

In many ways, Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas is an attempt to bridge two perspectives or introduce another reality into the one perceived by those with power in government, church, and press. Reading the collected newspaper clippings that were often written by knighted men or judges helped me understand, as much as someone who studies but never experiences an era can, how that reality was so irrationally superseded.

"If she is an employed person her employer may object to employ her on the ground that she is a married woman just as he may object to employ a one-eyed man." - Wives the laws favorite

"In law she [a married woman] has forfeited little, if any, freedom. Her husband in law has little, if any, control over her."

"Official football circles here regard with anxiety the growing popularity of girl's football."

Woolf's essays undertake what is almost like a thirteenth labor of Hercules, and while it may not be impossible to communicate with the victims/perpetuators of a dominant history how their majority's vision is skewed, it almost feels that way. Many of the narratives and perspectives addressed in Three Guineas remain all too present and often encountered. I found myself frenetically highlighting and ALSO considering chucking this book at certain acquaintances' faces; violent urges aside, this reading invited me into a new visual history and another perspective on how the societal disposition to war might develop.

And lastly, to address one more quote (tangentially):

"In any case it is clear that the author of the pastoral epistles, be he St. Paul or another, regarded woman as being debarred on the ground of her sex from the position of an official 'teacher' in the Church, or from any office involving the exercise of a governmental authority over a man (1 Timothy 2:12)."

I believe this is an interesting discourse for me because the rhetoric above is clearly sexist, and I have had the opportunity to research translation with its imposed biases on certain scriptural passages which then become employed toward exclusion. Although it seems like a random departure from literary study of Three Guineas, isn't narrative manipulation (and one-sided interpretations of the world) what it's all about?

To minimize my soapbox time, I'll keep it brief:

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet." (1T 2:12)

Ultimately, the greek word Didaskein (teach) NEVER appears up in the source greek. Not to impose my own opinion, but the word used throughout is Authentein (associated with control or misused authority) which implies far more agency already. Hēsychia (lack of disturbance) would not at all seem to imply "remain[ing] quiet" and being barred from contributing equally. In addition, the verb preceding Authentein is Entrepō, which is temporary and conditional. Again, I'll leave these dots to be connected themselves, but all of these original greek meanings paired with the fact the word for man (Anēr) is often used for a husband imply a different interpretation than the one that has been so often employed in the ways Woolf describes. To encourage said dots after they've been separated for so long: I argue that this passage might have more to do with a specific social moment in one community and a request for a woman (who possessed authority to exert) not to, in the literal translation, "verbally assassinate" their partner when it isn't an appropriate moment, for the sake of public gathering. A reading like this does not exclude women from teaching, leading, or taking part. It might even imply agency and authority that is at the very least equal. Lastly, I would like to add this passage should never have become a permanent or universal statement; its tense is temporary and conditions-based.

I believe Virginia Woolf might have appreciated this possibility for novel interpretation; this is why egalitarian authority is so essential in the pursuit of truth. When biases are imposed and unchecked, realities shift from their foundations. In this way, an analysis like this ties into the idea of perspectives lost and reasserted. Common knowledge is not to be taken for granted; truth takes work, especially in scenes of power imbalance.

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain is a story that follows a wealthy middle-class lady through her years in college, War World I, and politics. There is an intentional focus on her experiences as a woman trying to make it in a man’s world and build her own sense of purpose. Her early years are self-absorb, which leads to her ignorance of life outside of her world. This environment was created by her isolation and her father’s belief that a women’s goal is to get married. Due to this sheltered life and inability to imagine other’s life, she is shocked by the poor food choices when she goes to Oxford. Furthermore, when she becomes a V.A.D. nurse, she realizes her inability to boil an egg is an embarrassment. “Among other facts of life, my expensive education had omitted to teach me the prosaic but important essentials of egg-boiling, and the Oxford cookery class had triumphantly failed to repair the omissions” (165). As a lady of privilege, Vera didn’t have to worry about where or how her food arrived. “To me, whom meals had hitherto appeared as though by clockwork and the routine of a house had seemed to be worked by some invisible mechanism” (165) makes the reader think that Vera never walked into a kitchen or went into town to interact with other people. Her sheer revelation of food is also a sign of her growth throughout the war.
 

Her novel is about change that you can and not control. While she learns to boil an egg and cook for herself and fight for women’s rights, she cannot control war or death.

*I had just finished reading this piece when I received the email about the shortened version, so I am not sure where we are cut off. I may write about sections not assigned.

Testament of Youth is far from being a celebration of youth; instead, the pages are filled with trauma and guilt over surviving when all others close are dead. Youth is supposed to be something to look upon with nostalgia, but this book shows how it became a nightmare for an entire generation. Vera Brittain describes the state of her heart during this period: "Sometimes my heart feels very tumultuous, full of passion and fierce desire; at others it is possessed by a sort of blank and despairing resignation to what one feels must be inevitable" (173-174). Already, the scene of her early twenties are becoming characterized by the blank state the novel ends with. The suffering of this war, to Brittain, is not redeeming or refining--it is simply destructive suffering. She describes suffering: "At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself" (193). This effect of suffering is clearly scene in Brittain's own letters and narrative as she explains all that takes place upon the death of those she was closest to. Brittain does not blossom because of her pain and turn into a saint. Instead, she becomes a shell of the girl she was.

When Brittain is spending time with her mother, who is ill, she begins to become aware of how little work she has done for the war effort. She writes, "I felt myself a deserter, a coward, a traitor to my patients and the other nurses" (433). Brittain is looking over a letter from her friend, and it reminds her of her own supposed duty in the war. It is not a patriotic or religious duty for her. The duty she feels appears to be one connected to her own knowledge of the soldiers' circumstances and those she lost. She even states: "I did not propose to submit to pious dissertations on my duty to God, King and Country. That voracious trio had already deprived me of all that I valued most in life" (450). Though she may work in a religious hospital for a governmental agency, Brittain is spurred on by letters from other nurses and her own experiences.

Rebecca West, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, expresses the need for an honest "mode of life" that is more than what England offers, and this drives her towards Yugoslavia as a novel space in which to explore her worldview. While sentiment-driven, her intuitive thoughts often prove more evocative than more cautious, vetted observations. Her worldly knowledge blends with the feeling that motivates her analysis. I found this approach reminded me of surrealist theory. Her subconscious (or sentimental) self offers an honest mode of thought, even if this mode falls victim to what initiated it.

West seems to have reallocated much of her "nationalism"  to a nation... and those with whom she cannot identify outside her context as an observer. Her external gaze provides clarity, but then also leans too hard into romanticism: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon can somehow address the dangers of ethnic zoning (which would be relevant in the upcoming war) and also limit the Slavic nationality to its pre-globalization "purity." Critics in the introduction address this pitfall, because her fea that sameness has caught up to her is a product of psychological need. The black lamb is arguably a symbol of national identity, youth, loss, and sacrifice all in one. In exploring the symbolic so directly, West reveals what she wants to protect in Yugoslavia. The diverse population appears divided in her writing, resulting in the ideological death of the Ottoman Empire. Lacking in agency, a nation as its people has become the "sacrificial lamb" without agency instead of the "priest" who controls the ritual (war). 

Bryher and Brittain both address this idea of psychological need in different ways. One describes war in the present (situated memories) and recalls the effects on the mind and the young. Identity, packaged in nationalism and a higher education community built on the discussion of historic ideals, drives one soldier to hope he will reflect well on his college whatever happens to him individually. Bryher says, simply: "Fascism and Communism alike respond to primitive, psychological needs." The global culture shifts pre-WWII, whether that is after avatism and the sentimental nationalism; modern media like film, aimed for social evolution; or a different system of government, hyper-national identity. 

In the introduction to Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, James Duncan and Derek Gregory outline major concepts related to travel writing. One in particular caught my eye: “as descriptions move from one place to another… they circulate in what we have called ‘a space in-between’... In general, and as Venuti (1993, 210) points out, translation [in this case, translating experience from foreign climes and customs, etc.] is either a ‘domesticating method, an ethnographic reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values, bringing the author back home’ or a ‘foreignizing method, an ethnographic pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad’” (4-5). Travel writing, then, can be understood as making the foreign familiar or foregrounding foreignness-- of a place or people, say. Yet as the text attempts to make familiar/foreign, it never quite resolves into one or the other; it exists in-between. It’s with this frame that I considered West’s chapter, “Journey.”

The “space in-between” in this chapter exists in a couple of places. The first is in its relationship to the genre of travel writing. The chapter title, “Journey,” suggests an exoticness and a certain excitement that a more accurate title, like “Train Ride,” would elide. Even in the content of the chapter, West ironically plays on the genre of travel writing. She is concerned with the social politics within the train car more than she is the Yugoslavian landscape or culture without. A few instances pop through, as when the “snowfields” appear or discussions of food take place. These elements typical of the genre are humorously deflated and overshadowed, as when the scenery is easily forgotten as the passengers enact justice on the second-class ticket holder or when West falls into a consideration of taste and nationalistic food superiority. The space in-between here creates tension in the narrative, made all the more humorous (darkly humorous) by the weighty topics alongside which they are placed (in West’s narrative but also in the sensibilities of the Europeans passengers).

The other space in-between is in West’s consideration of the German passengers. In many ways, the Germans are the subject of West’s attention. She asks us to sympathize and pity them for their imprisonment within Nazism, yet they exhibit a moral failure in their willingness to eject someone else from the train car while justifying their own rule breaking. There is uncertainty in this scene, I would argue, as West humanizes the Germans: they are people who quibble over small inconsequential things and run into typical problems. This familiarization is broken by the end, though, as they become “incomprehensible” but also “exactly like all Aryan Germans I had ever known” (37). Even in the ending, the Germans maintain both their illegibility and foreignness and their familiarity. One could argue that West’s “journey” is one of observing German tourists, fellow travelers who despite their familiar quirks and characteristics become legible alongside the foreign Nazi regime.

The chapter ends on an innocuous note, albeit a funny one, as the Germans “[break] into excessive cries of exasperation and distress” because the train stop is several miles from Zagreb’s city center. While this scene works as a humorous retribution, the key to West’s ending is her witnessing an elderly man searching for “Anna.” This sad but sweet scene is immediately recognizable and familiar to West: “I was among people I could understand” she writes in the final line. West becomes at several points a defender of Yugoslavian worth as a country, namely through a defense of their local food and hotel accommodations. And she closes the chapter in this very way. The space in-between the foreign and familiar is dispelled as the Germans leave, taking with them a sense of foreignness and incomprehensibility. What is left is West looking out the window at a stranger in a foreign country. Here is where she finds the familiar.

Did anyone else read this passage slowly or was it just me? Comparing The Mad Train by Henry Poulaille with The Origins of Surrealism by Charles Moffat, edited by Suzanne MacNevin; I find that Poulaille mirrors some of the views of Salvador Dali where the “three constants of life were sexual instinct, the sentiment of death, and the anguish of space and time” (Ballard i). I feel that Poulaille’s work is more on the side of Veristic Surrealists as opposed to Automatists and that his subconscious images have meaning.  

Maybe this is grasping, but Poulaille’s story may not be about sexual instinct, but more about both sexes dying during the war. This is a clear intentional focus as men were mostly the ones in the trenches during WWI. Women lose men through death and the returning men are lost to PTSD, which disrupts society, brings confusion, and “no one will escape” (Poulaille 41) in this post-WWI world. Poulaille and Dali relate more with death, space, and time.

Poulaille expresses that the destination is “death, collision” (Poulaille 44), and “the passengers are mute with horror” (Poulaille 46). This makes me think that society is still dealing with post-WWI trauma with no solutions. He also gives meaning to the dream by saying “the train is crossing a land of nightmares. Everything has lost its character” (Poulaille 41). I feel like all one thousand passengers are trapped and they can only watch from the inside as their fate is decided by the two men in the cabin. I guess this would be similar to how a military battle scene would work for a soldier. A soldier is given a command and they follow the orders unable to change their path. The focus here seems to be the inability to make your own choice, you are at the mercy of the cabin boys or the war commanders. I wonder if this increased the opposition to the draft? 

Poulaille displaces space and time similar to Dali, in that the passengers are confused, silent, and paralyzed. Maybe this dream is a reenactment of a specific war scene and the landscape that is rushing by is like the bullets flying over your head. The train goes a “kilometers [every] half [a] minute” (Poulaille 44), which is 74.5 mph. In the 1920s the Ford Model T would travel at 20-28mph, so this train’s speed would seem unstable and lead to the reader questioning the reality of time and space. The illustrations like the lake appearing to go "out like a glow-worm” (Poulaille 44) gives the image of fantasy. I wonder if this leads the reader to get an out-of-body feeling. At this point, the reader might be questioning how all this is possible or what is reality. 

This last comment is a little off-topic, but why is the number one thousand mentioned 6 times in this story? What is the significance of that number during the 1920s? Is it biblical? 

Breton, in name-dropping and adopting Freudian logic to his manifesto, centers the therapeutic potential of art. Surrealism, as a movement begun by Breton and Apollinaire, is explicitly a vehicle not for illustrating Freudian or psychoanalytic logic, but for providing therapy for the creator. In its “psychic automatism” it aims to “to express … the actual functioning of thought” (5) in, I think, an omnipotent sense.

Yet Breton also considers surrealism capable of “reli[ving] with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood” (5), producing an intensely personal contrast to the lofty aims of expressing “the actual functioning of thought.” Moreover, Breton aims to achieve similar sorts of childlike play found in the writing and logic (analogic? alogic?) of Dadaists. Breton wants the psychic automatism to reproduce childhood—plunging the artist/writer into their memory, (or desire for a memory), of their “sentiment of being unintegrated” (5). This nonconforming, unintegrated, automatic (self-acting) approach strives to escape from experience and return to innocence—something no doubt on the (conscious and unconscious) minds of those who survived the War.

Another semi-related thought I had reading the manifesto is about the term imagination, and how Breton uses it. I’m not sure if this is a translation, but nonetheless, I’ve always associated imagination with a conscious creative energy. If I consider imagination as a framework for a movement built on psychic automatism that allows a sudden return to childhood, I'm reminded of my second cousins at play. They aren’t playing a specific game at all but just playing make-believe. Indeed, imagination to them seems automatic.

In Surrealism and Psychoanalysis, Cramer and Gant present the surrealist theory that dreams are expressions of the self-conscious and therefore have value. Schools of thought, however, differed on whether they held meaning or if meaning was even necessary for value to be inherent. All Surrealists saw the unconscious, uncontrolled, disordered mind as liberated; the ungoverned mind was a pristine creative source. Max Ernst was especially interested in mental instability; clinical insanity appeared to be a liberation.

Trauma can introduce confusion into the dreamscape, and I think that is so clearly contextualized by WWI. Depicting disturbing dreams, searching for answers in them... all of this makes sense as cultures collectively processed their experiences. Asking what informs this narrative constructed by the mind leads to one of two answers: either the dream attempts to resolve waking memories or the dream is distinct from any other reality.

I focused on transition 002 and in it, "The Mad Train" specifically. There was a group of passengers in cars: a society. There is a driving force that carries them forward with momentum: a culture, a government? The landscapes they pass become distorted with the speed of the "mad" train (which has malfunctioned), turning into ominous, dream-like sites. As Poulaille describes it, "[e]verything becomes entangled, flows and crashes silently into something else, ushes, as if unde a powerful urge, to an absurd and useless combat" (95). The breaks are broken. The engineers expect collision and the end to their (I might be reaching here) "society." In the end, the nightmare images settle into a normal space. The train slows and nevers wrecks against another train's opposite force. I felt the idea of a "mad" train could be a metaphor for nationalism, collective war-time momentum, and the driving, idealogical machines that failed their creators with spectacularly in the onset of WWI. The notes of nightmare and the idea of insanity, along with the description style and fragmentation in the short story, evoke surrealism in several ways that I'm still unpacking.

As I read through The Sun Also Rises, I found myself interested in Cohn. My initial assessment of him was one of limited perception, someone who lives in fantasy and can’t see out of that (while the others live in disillusionment or boredom or a state of indeterminacy, as Tyler suggested in his post). The apex of Cohn’s story arc (and the climax of the book I would argue) is the fight scene in the bar wherein the building tension between Cohn and Michael (a contest centered on Brett’s time and attention) is released and our narrator Jake gets punched for concealing Brett’s shifting intimacy with other characters. This stems from Cohn’s obsession with Brett and his inability to accept that she’s moved on to another lover— a frustration that can’t be resolved with physical violence either. Again, Cohn really differs from the others in the group: he contrasts with Jake’s listlessness and indifference, and Michael’s drunken anger and frustration. Cohn gives us an image of someone who experiences emotion that isn’t alcohol induced-- emotion that is all consuming, that is uncontrollable (as in the fight scene), and that dictates his movement through the world. Cohn’s perception of this world is skewed. He cannot see or accept Brett for how she is (which arguably Brett herself has trouble seeing and accepting herself, as in the final resolution chapter), nor can he deal (healthily) with that reality when he sees it.

I bring all this up because he is cast as the most transatlantic character. Jake pays particular attention to Cohn’s Jewishness throughout the text, especially in the first few chapters, which maybe brings up questions of his family’s homeland and origins for a post-war audience (?). And Cohn is directly connected to the theme of travel and tourism. Cohn transatlantic imagination is established in the first two chapters as he reads Hudson’s “The Purple Land” and tries to convince Jake to visit South America with him. The book “recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land.” Jake reflects that Cohn “took every word of “The Purple Land” as [literal]” (17) and by Cohn’s own admission he confesses that the imaginary space of this transatlantic text is what convinces him of traveling (18). In their conversation, Jake connects and refutes the idea of travel with escaping one’s own mind through distraction: “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that” (19).

Obviously, this scene prefaces a travel narrative in which people are trying to escape themselves through different means. Indeed, it is the trip Cohn takes to San Sebastian with Brett (during which he falls in love) which builds up narrative/character tension. In foreign lands, then, is the potential for something new, for some development and progression. But the narrative doesn’t really progress as the group visits Spain, or at least the characters don’t progress with the narrative. Nothing really happens as they travel, even though Cohn falls in love and punches some people. The group continues to go to bars and have homosocial interactions that sometimes go well and sometimes don’t. Jake sees the world and reports it to us, but it is in the same place with the same problems as when he began (and he is the same person). There is a tension, then, between movement and stasis that isn’t resolved one way or the other. Arguably this is founded on the idea of (transatlantic) tourism, the visiting of foreign locales.

While reading The Sun Also Rises, I felt myself drawn to thinking about the locations and spaces that all the characters frequently moved in and out of. For one, most of the time they are in cafes or clubs drinking; rarely does a scene take place outside of these spaces, and when they do, it is often while they are in between one café/club and another. Outside of these scene-framing settings, the characters also travel throughout the Transatlantic, coming and going from New York, Paris, Vienna, Spain, and Scotland (I might have missed a few as well).

What struck me about this spatial aspect of the novel is that it felt almost escapist; that is, there was a constant desire from characters to move from one thing to the next or to drown oneself in party spaces to displace themselves and avoid dealing with the realities of their situations. The exhaustive movements from place to place destabilized a sense of centeredness. This spatial motif seems to speak to the state of things post-WWI; when the destabilization of life, culture, and society has left things in a state of disequilibrium. This disequilibrium becomes manifest in the multiple spaces of the novel, but also in the characters themselves. This is perhaps most apparent in Brett and Cohn, who can’t seem to find satisfaction staying in one place, space, or state; instead, it is always an in-process movement to the next thing which might make them feel something.

I ultimately leave The Sun Also Rises, which climaxes with a 7-day party, with a rather somber and melancholic feeling. For a novel whose characters are almost always immersed in a state of party and intoxication, their reality is more of a fragmented existence of moving around trying to just feel any sense of centeredness or happiness in a world of rot (to borrow Brett’s catchphrase) camouflaged with confetti post-WWI.

The selections from Earnest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast were enjoyable to read. I enjoyed his descriptions of the love shared between he and his wife, Hadley. He describes various moments from their everyday life together, like the day they bet on horses and won. Another time he talks about how they went skiing while she was pregnant, and she thankfully did not fall. He recalls countless other moments like these. I personally found these stories to bear more romance and representation of love than some of the more eloquent love poems I've read. Because romantic love is a timeless and universal subject, I feel it must be written about with a certain originality or uniqueness to entertain and relate to some readers, especially in a more modern period. The elements of their romantic love in this book cause me to think of love's ability to transcend time periods, distance, etc. The feeling that Hemingway captures is something writers from every century can hopefully relate to in some way. When I think about Transatlantic modernism, I think of temporality mainly. Then I consider the relationship people have to land, and the crossing of the ocean, and a variety of other things. For me, it seems as if Hemingway has succeeded in speaking to these things I've just mentioned by the mere inclusion of his moments with Hadley. Their relationship has changed over time, and the realites of poverty heavily influenced the trajectory of their lives together, but their loved seemed to have more of the influence on the quality of their life, or at least Hemingway's. Their relationship to the land (Paris, Austria) changed because of their financial situation. They left Paris for a few reasons, but one of the primary reasons seems to be because they had a baby and the Paris winters were becoming too rough. I feel that their relationship, a representative of love here, supercedes the dull and hard parts of life - e.g. poverty, distance, travel. In that way, I think it can be seen as a sort of marker of transatlantic modernism, in the same way time and the urgency of it marks the term. To continue on this idea I'm trying to outline, we can look at the affair Hemingway alludes to at the end of the selections. After talking about how the arrival of some rich people tainted the world in which they were living in the Shcruns, he talks about the other woman he falls in love with, regrettably. He writes, "all things truly wicked start from an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and everyday is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war" (210). The fact that he's comparing a new love to war can speak to the sheer momentum of love and it's ability to transcend time and space, it is a presence which can hardly be defined. And still, at the end, he returns to his wife and upon seeing her at the train station, is as in love as he'd ever been with her. In both relationships, love overpowered circumstances. My point is not that he only loved Hadley and that was the strongest force of this story - but rather, love ruled most decisions. It transcended poverty (in the ways it can), the distance between continents, and the intangible boundaries of monagamy or traditional marriage.