Modernism: we're not *supposed* to understand it...
[Discuss the ways in which modernist writers developed new conceptions of subjectivity and language ]
Modernist writers were particularly preoccupied with conceptions of subjectivity; different ways of seeing the world and interpreting meaning. Rhys and MacDiarmid may not strike a reader as similar enough for comparison, yet both play with language and ideas in a way that undermines the readers’ preconceptions of literature, language, modernity and belonging. Both writers were very conscious of how their writing should come across - as was the case with many of their contemporaries. To put it rather bluntly, their obscurity and inaccessibility was the point: we’re not supposed to understand, at least not immediately, and it is in the reader’s quest for understanding that the works’ comment on subjectivity is expressed.
What most immediately strikes the reader about many modernist works is the way in which language and style differs from the more traditionalist works that preceded it. Rhys, for example, uses the technique of thought-streaming throughout Good Morning, Midnight, creating a melodic, poetic and at times non-linear form of prose. Words are repeated for assonance and emphasis and descriptions made to seem almost filmic in their impersonal immediacy. For example, “The Cinéma Danton. Watching a good young man trying to rescue his employer from a mercenary mistress” (p.89) is typical of Rhys’ descriptions in which a clear (first person) subject is absent. The result is a sense of ideas and images flowing directly from the writer to the reader, adding a level of (indirect) emotional intimacy, while at the same time making it clear that the ideas are firmly subjective. Gone is the omnipotent narrator who holds court over the novel’s ‘objective meaning’. In modernist literature, meaning is fluid and open to interpretation - a neat comparison would be the contrast between Stanislavski’s ‘suspension of disbelief and Brecht’s demolition of the fourth wall, jolting the audience into awareness. MacDiarmid similarly jolts his readers into awareness through his subversion of traditional rigid poetic forms and tradition’s love-affair with elevated (English) language. A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle employs a style of verse with looser metrics and generous use of flow-promoting tools such as enjambment, standing as a direct reaction against more traditional metric forms. The poem also makes use of the colloquial, albeit MacDiarmid’s own brand of ‘synthetic Scots’, all of which contributes to the strong reaction against conservatism that pervades the poem.
It is interesting that MacDiarmid should choose to go beyond the ‘common vernacular’ by using his own obscure mixture of various Scottish dialects in his writing, making his poems tricky to understand even to his fellow Scots. I would suggest that this inaccessibility was very much part of MacDiarmid’s intention. Not only does the fusion of West-coast/East-coast, Highland/Lowland showcase the vast richness of the sometimes maligned and ridiculed Scottish vernacular, the mixture plays subversively on the at-times pretentious inaccessibility of ‘elevated language’, as he suggests in the poem, “I dinna haud the warld’s end in my heid/ As maist folk think they dae” (lines 133-4, my italics). Another aspect of this diversity, of course, is to show both the division and unity in the Scottish language and, by inference, society. Readers of differing backgrounds will understand different proportions and parts of the poem, yet all are united in its common theme that calls for literature and language to return to the (ironically) comprehensible and unformulaic - particularly hinted at in, “I ha’e nae doot some foreign philosopher/ Has wrocht a system oot to justify/ A’ this: but I’m a Scot wha blin’ly follows/ Auld Scottish instincts, and I winna try.” (lines 149-52) To complicate and emphasise this further, MacDiarmid includes translations of poetry and texts from other languages in his poem, such as the excerpt from Russian poet Alexander Blok (lines 169-172), translated, of course, into Scots. This indicates that despite the undeniably Scottish focus of the Caledonian Antisyzygy that MacDiarmid promotes, it would be unfair to say that the division is purely between Scottish and English. All language barriers are equally relevant - or perhaps irrelevant - they just present us more realities; more ways of viewing the world.
The inter-lingual inter-textuality is taken a step further by Rhys in Good Morning, Midnight through the strands of French and occasional German and Russian that is woven seamlessly into the narrative. On the one hand, this can be seen as a form of extreme realism. After all, the languages have not been translated and thus are not ‘second hand’ or dominated over by the linguistic nuances of another. Yet the very dream-like quality of Rhys’ work subverts this realism, creating a multi-linguistic, multi-dimensional dreamscape in which we are assaulted with the many differing realities and contradictions that make up the real world - and her work does indeed seem directly contradictory at times, with its non-linear timeframe, occasional near-surrealism, “’Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’”(p.9) and apparent self-contradiction, “say something. …No, don’t say anything.”(p.24). But reality isn’t ordered or consistent - organisation is the mind’s job and it is only in contrasting realism with surrealism, internal dialogue and external imagery, different subjective experiences that we can understand this and learn to use our own minds, rather than rely on the author, to understand the text. To use a simpler analogy, modernist writers played with textual perspective the way Picasso did with visual perspective. Like his iconic painting of the weeping woman, they employed paradox, contrast and contradiction to simultaneously depict reality from many different angles showing us both what we would have seen and what we would normally have missed.
Pulling momentarily out of the technicalities of language, the issue of subjectivity was also addressed assiduously as a main topic in many modernist works. Good Morning, Midnight portrays a new perspective on the much-heralded image of the ‘modern city’ through its author’s descriptions of Paris as an at-times soulless machine. The people wear masks and the preoccupation is more with one’s external image than one’s internal wellbeing or sanity. “Tomorrow I shall dye my hair blonde”, says our heroine, as if this will solve all of tomorrow’s problems. The preoccupation with image reaches absurdist heights as the protagonist wonders whether drowning herself in the Seine would be cliché and perhaps rather passé. The relevance of subjectivity here is that the protagonist is viewing herself through those around her - the French ladies, the Russians, the artist… ‘How does Mrs so-and-so view me? How do I come across to Mr such-and-such?’ As the exchange with the artist suggests (buying the painting), she is plagued by a fear that her personal reality is at odds with the reality of those around her, but can there really be a ‘right’ way of viewing the world? Another interesting effect of the discussion into clichéd suicide methods is that the reader is again reminded of the presence of Rhys the Author - the dilemma could just as easily have come from a self-conscious author trying to decide the fate of her heroine as from the unfortunate heroine herself.
The subject matter of A Drunk Man is altogether more abstract, being a discussion on Scottishness, identity and more broadly metaphysical questions regarding truth, understanding and meaning. In MacDiarmid’s work then, the notions of subjectivity is actively discussed rather than (as with Rhys) implied. Much of the poem deals with the typically modernist doubt about man’s capacity to find objective truths about the world, describing the conscious mind (following Freud) as the tip of “a floatin’ iceberg/ That hides aneth the sea/ Its bulk,” (lines 1769-71) the depths of which are hard to fathom. MacDiarmid also explores the incongruence between rationality and feeling with the dialogue between body and mind (lines 571-80), challenging received traditions into the bargain by linking religion with sex: “I’ve been startled whiles to find,/ When Jean has been in bed wi’ me,/ A kind o’ Christianity!” This contrast is what essentially makes up MacDiarmid’s vision of humanity - a melding together of mind and body, in which the physical and mental, carnal and cerebral take on equal value. He re-emphasises this idea throughout the poem with, “I wish I kent the physical basis/ O’ a’ life’s seemin’ airs and graces.” (lines 581-2) and “Man’s spreit is wi’ his ingangs twined/ In ways that he can ne’er unwind.’ (lines 585-6) Echoes can easily be drawn between this and MacDiarmid’s probing into vernacular versus elevated - a person can only be taken as a complete individual when both his body and soul are taken into account, just as a language can only reach its full potential and be best understood through reuniting the perceived ‘elevated’ and ‘vernacular’ which the poet, neatly, demonstrates through the writing of his work. Yet amongst all this obscurity and ideas and metaphysical debate, MacDiarmid gives the reader another point to consider: “I lauch to see my crazy little brain/ -and other folks’ - tak’n’itsel’ seriously.” (lines 137-9) Echoing the father of Western philosophy, Aristotle, who said something like, ‘nothing amongst humans should be viewed with much importance’. It is therefore rather ironic that both the poet and the philosopher’s works are held under such close academic scrutiny today. I like to imagine that both would have been rather amused.
So subjectivity was brought to the fore by modernists through depicting at the world in each of its constituent parts and perspectives, with no part made to seem superior or ‘closer to the truth’ than any other. Contradiction, oxymoron, the unconventional use of language aided in this deconstruction, building, or so the writers hoped, a more realistic depiction of truth - and more truthful depiction of reality.
Sonya Hallett
March 2007
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Bibliography
Colebrook, Claire: Jean Rhys online lecture notes, 2007. <http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergrd/english_lit_2/Handouts>.
MacDiarmid, Hugh: A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, (tutorial handout, sources unknown), 2007.
Rhys, Jean: Good Morning, Midnight, Penguin Classics, London, 2000.
Thomson, Alex: A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle lecture handout, February 14th 2007.