(1) Modernist literature depicts modern life, especially urban life, and shows

ambivalence towards it. In depicting modern life, modernist literature appears

to be addressing the fundamental problem of the justification of art in the

modern world: it is attempting to demonstrate that it is equal to the conditions

around it, and is not retreating into pastoral. In so far as urban life was not

conventionally deemed beautiful, the depiction of it also implicitly answers the

question of what makes a work of art valuable: if the value of Dubliners or The

Waste Land does not inhere in the subject matter, it must lie in the form or

treatment. Many reviewers, however, felt that there was value in neither, and

roundly condemned such works on both aesthetic and moral grounds. To some

it seemed that modernism (in all media) was a cult of ugliness.15 This is in

part due to its subject matter, and in part to its treatment.

(2) It is difficult: it makes use of a wide and sometimes unexpected range

of reference (literary, cultural, and linguistic); it removes many of the devices

that would conventionally have helped the reader to make sense of the text;

it is verbally ambiguous and paradoxical. In consequence, the modernist text

appears fragmentary

(3) It contrasts an orderly past with a chaotic present. This characteristic of

modernism was articulated early in its critical history: Stephen Spender wrote

in 1935 that writers after Henry James are all conscious of the present as chaotic

[] and of the past as an altogether more solid ground.18 The contrast emerges

not only in direct depictions of the past, but also in allusions to its literature The classic instance is
The Waste Land s allusion to Spensers Prothalamion, in

which the Thames of Spensers sixteenth-century poem is contrasted with the

river in the present day, filled with the detritus of modern life. Such contrasts

implicitly answer the fundamental question about grand narratives: history is a

story of decline. However, for some modernist writers, the chaos of the present is

invigorating and liberating. As Shari Benstock notes in Beyond the Reaches of

Feminist Criticism, at the start of the twentieth century many women writers

were not at all disappointed to see the stable values of the past called into

question and rejected.

(4) Where modernist literature displays the pessimistic contrast seen above,

it often also includes the compensatory idea that art can transcend the disorder

of the present. Yeatss poetry offers many clear examples. In Paudeen (written

1913), the sweet crystalline cry of the curlew, symbolising poetry, stands

in contrast to the debased world of shopkeepers. In Sailing to Byzantium

(written 1926), the mechanical bird Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

symbolises an art which transcends the pain of old age. A variant on this characteristic

is the idea that art is superior to nature: nature is inherently messy;

art is orderly.19

(5) It experiments with time, implying a larger philosophy in which time

is non-linear. This is true not only of narrative works, but also of poetry. It

has been argued that modernist literature possesses spatial form: that is, we are forced to read it
as if every part of the text were simultaneously present,

even when, with texts as long as Ulysses or The Cantos, the feat is impossible to

achieve on a single reading.

The most readily apparent consequence of this characteristic is that it requires

the reader to be an active constructor of meaning, for example, by rearranging

narrative events into their chronological sequence. As a self-conscious display

of formal mastery, it again implicitly states that what makes a work of art

valuable is its form rather than its subject matter. The idea that all moments are

simultaneously present also implies a grand narrative of history in which there

is neither progress nor decline, but simply eternal recurrence.

(6) It employs mythic allusion and mythic patterning as an organising

structure.20 This characteristic was articulated early by T. S. Eliot, in Ulysses,

Order and Myth (1923), and although the essay was less immediately influential

on accounts of modernism than those included in The Sacred Wood (1920) and

Selected Essays (1932), it has proved significant in the longer term The connotations of classical
mythology carried by the term myth may

obscure other organising principles that work similarly. The classics are relevant

for Ulysses, for poems by Yeats such as Leda and the Swan, and for parts of The

Waste Land, but are less immediately relevant to other modernist works. The

concept can be generalised to an idea of recurrent deep structures. The narrative

of a father and son searching for each other is not a specific myth, but a deep

structure that informs numerous narratives, several of which Ulysses draws upon.

In either form, the use of myth, like the use of spatial form, suggests an answer

to the fundamental question about the grand narratives of human history: there

is no narrative; we continually repeat the same mythic patterns.

(7) Modernist literature (and modernist art more generally) often takes man

in his primitive state as a point of reference. Sometimes it does this through

the medium of myth, but the two aspects of modernism are not identical. In

colonial narratives of Europeans going native Heart of Darkness being the

best-known example the primitive state is feared. Elsewhere, most notably

in D. H. Lawrences writing, the primitive is welcomed as offering relief from

enervating rationality.23 Clearly, the use of the primitive addresses the question

of which model of the self is most relevant to modern life, though the actual

answer depends on the value ascribed to primitive states. Likewise, reference

to the primitive addresses the fundamental question of the grand narratives of

human existence, but can be used to produce both narratives of decline and narratives of progress.

(8) Modernist literature displays an awareness of the complexity of the

mind and the self. It is aware of the fluidity of consciousness, of the force

of the unconscious, and of a division between the social and the personal self,
between conduct and consciousness.24 It embodies this awareness through

the use of free direct or free indirect discourse, and through the employment

of multiple linguistic registers to signal different levels or centres of consciousness.

(The term stream of consciousness is problematic primarily because it

is a psychological hypothesis rather than a formal stylistic description, and

secondarily because it does not distinguish between the different levels of consciousness,

and because it does not by itself indicate whether individual or collective consciousness is being
referred to.)25 Most obviously, this feature of

modernist literature stands in a significant relation to the underlying problem

of which model of the self is best suited to modern life, but the complexity of

self that is apparent in much modernist literature indicates a profound uncertainty

about the right answer. Likewise, the complexity of self can be read as

a symptom of uncertainty about grand narratives of human history. Indeed, if

we cannot decide what it means to be human, then we will never readily know

how to tell the story of human existence.

(9) A contrast between the individual and the herd or mass is commonly a

feature of modernist literature; another version is a contrast between the elite

and the masses. John Careys The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) provides the

most extensive account of these structures, though, being polemical in intent,

it gives little consideration to counter-arguments, and is sometimes reductive.

Carey argues that the difficulty of modernist literature came about because modernist

writers wished to exclude mass audiences. I would argue that they did not

wish to exclude the mass audience, but wished to escape the homogenisation

and trivialisation of literature that characterised the mass market. The circulating

library system, for example, encouraged readers to think of literary works

as interchangeable.26 Literature, to modernist writers, was not a form of entertainment,

but a form of knowledge. In working to sustain distinctions of value

within the literary marketplace, modernist writers often defended the aesthetic
values and ideological positions of their own class as if they were universal, and thus excluded many
readers, but this is not a direct result of their modernism.

(10) Modernist writers distinguish between abstraction and empathy, often

claiming to prefer the former. In the novel, the means by which earlier generations

of writers would have allowed readers to identify with a character are

eschewed or radically revised; in poetry, the identifiable speaking voice of lyric

poetry is avoided, or is framed in unfamiliar contexts. For example, in narrative,

the use of complex time schemes tends to disrupt continuity and thus disrupt

our identification with a character. If events which belong late in the chronological

sequence are presented earlier in the narrative, then the reader views

the chronologically earlier events with ironic detachment, knowing more than

the participants. In some writers, notably Wyndham Lewis, the narrators language

may also block empathy, presenting the characters as cultural constructs

rather than as free agents.

AmongEnglish-speaking modernists, an important source for the distinction

of abstraction and empathy was T. E. Hulme, particularly Modern Art and its

Philosophy, a lecture delivered in 1914, and published posthumously in 1924;

Hulme also used the ideas in articles published around 1914 in The New Age.

The ideas in Modern Art and its Philosophy was derived from the German

aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer (18811965), but Worringers Abstraktion und

Einfhlung (1908) was not translated into English until 1953 (as Abstraction and Empathy). Hulme
constructed the distinction in gendered terms, seeing

empathetic art as sentimental and therefore feminine, and abstract art as hard

and therefore masculine. The gendering of the distinction was widespread, but

may have led to some writers being suspicious of it as masculinist posturing.

(11) It prefers the concrete to the abstract: Pounds imagist manifesto, calling

upon writers to go in fear of abstractions, is the classic starting point. As we

shall see, New Criticism further embedded this preference. In Perloff s elaboration,
it prefers the particular as opposed to the general, the perceptual as

opposed to the conceptual. In order to reconcile this feature with the previous

one, it is necessary to recognise that abstraction is not the same as the abstract.

Abstraction is a process; abstractions are the stale products of previous generations.

Through abstraction, the artist asserts control over the materials of his

or her art; by employing abstractions, the weak writer betrays that he or she has

failed to assert control, and is merely repeating old ideas. However, although

we can distinguish the two concepts, the differences are not entirely stable. The

modernist preference for the particular always has the potential to lapse into

the passive reproduction of the real.

(12) The subject matter of modernist texts is sometimes controversial. It is

possible to overstate this aspect, given that only a small minority of modernist

writers suffered the effects of censorship. Nevertheless, the texts officially

censored include two that have become central to the canon, The Rainbow

(1915) and Ulysses (1922), as well as Wyndham Lewiss Cantlemans Spring

Mate (1917). Moreover, many other texts were heavily revised to overcome

the objections of publishers or printers, notably Dubliners (1914) and Sons and

Lovers (1912). While prose works were affected more often than poetry, Ezra

Pounds Lustra (1916) appeared in a reduced, privately printed edition after the

printers and publishers objected to four poems; the public edition was shorn of

nine further poems.27 Modernists found themselves in trouble with the censors

because they wished to represent the body and sexuality as fully as possible,

and, more generally, wished to depict the full range of human behaviour without

having to place it in a moral frame. It is possible to trace this aspect of modernism

back to mid-nineteenth century France where, in 1857, both Gustave

Flauberts Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaires Les Fleurs du Mal met with

legal objections. It has been suggested that, in the case of Madame Bovary, the
combination of the adultery theme with Flauberts formal innovations was the

root of the problem: the new formal structures of free indirect discourse and

impersonal narration denied the possibility of a stable narrative position from

which the heroine could be judged.