Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone” (1913); - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone” (1913); T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Modernisms and World War

Slide2

Slide3

“Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land.” (Paul

Bäumer, narrator of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, 1928)

Slide4

“Zone” and The Waste LandBoth poems focus on urban experienceBoth

are formally innovativeBoth respond to the peripheral, marginal or decentralized aspects of the modern cityBoth are not just local in their settings,

but instead encompass vast scales of space (across the world) and time (from the

present back to antiquity)

B

oth

relativize experience according to a mobile cast of ‘characters,’ voices or

perspectives

Slide5

Modernity / modernism 

- a break with the past (modernity invents tradition)

- disjointed time (the ‘contemporariness of the non-contemporary’)

- space-time compression (collapse of space, acceleration of time)

- the rise of the everyday (the quest for the ordinary, the momentary, the quotidian)

- the fragmentation of experience

(and the

attempt to fabricate

new wholes

out of

fragments,

through a process of

bricolage

, collage, montage)

Slide6

Pablo Picasso, “Ma Jolie,” 1911-12

Slide7

In the end you are weary of this ancient worldThe most modern European is you Pope Pius X

(“Zone”)

Slide8

Pope Pius X, in office 1903-1914

Slide9

Anti-modernismPascendi dominici

gregis (“Feeding the Lord's

Flock”)

–

papal encyclical issued in 1907, condemning ‘modernism’ in religion and culture

Anti-modernist oath of

1 September

2010:

I

declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred

tradition

…

Slide10

Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowdHerds of bellowing buses hemming you about … Now you are on the Riviera among

The lemon-trees that flower all year long … Here you are in Marseilles among the water-melonsHere you are in

Coblentz

at the Giant’s

Hostelry

Here you are in Rome under a Japanese

medlar

-tree

Slide11

La Zone, 1913

Slide12

“Since the mid-1970s, the colloquial term zone has often been associated with the troubled post-war housing estates on the outskirts of large French cities. However, it once referred to a more circumscribed space: the zone non aedificandi (non-building zone) which encircled Paris from the 1840s to the 1940s.” (James Cannon,

The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840-1944)

Slide13

Residents of the Zone,

Ivry, 1913

Slide14

The Zone = a band of wastelands [terrains vagues] encircling Paris near the old

fortifs (fortifications); occupied, at the beginning of the twentieth century, by poor and marginalised

people (Jews, Romani, immigrants, the unemployed)

Slide15

Weeping you watch the wretched emigrants …They hope to prosper in the ArgentineAnd to come home having made their fortune

A family transports a red eiderdown as you your heart …Often in the streets I have seen them in the gloamingTaking the air and like chessmen seldom moving

Slide16

Adieu AdieuSoleil cou coupé

[‘sun corseless head’][beheaded sun][sun neck nicked]

Slide17

Slide18

The Waste Land as modernist landmark“The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time; its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.

Despite this, it has become a touchstone of modern literature” (Wikipedia)

Slide19

Original title of TWL“You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different

voices.” (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend)

Slide20

I sat upon the shoreFishing, with the arid plain behind meShall

I at least set my lands in order?London Bridge is falling down falling down falling downPoi s’ascose nel

foco

che

gli

affina

Quando

fiam

uti

chelidon

—O swallow swallow

Le

Prince

d’Aquitaine

à

la tour

abolie

These

fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why

then Ile fit you.

Hieronymo’s

mad

againe

.

Datta

.

Dayadhvam

.

Damyata

.

                 

Shantih

    

shantih

    

shantih

Slide21

Is there a single narratorial consciousness to the poem – one voice ventriloquising the others?

Or does it contain a genuine plurality of voices?

Slide22

C.L.R. James on Eliot: ‘He is of special value to me, in that in him I find more often than elsewhere, and beautifully and precisely stated, things to which I am completely opposed’

Slide23

Three contexts for reading The Waste LandThe aftermath of World War I (1919-22)Citation as collage

The birth of radio

Slide24

Postwar“The horror! The horror!” (the original epigraph to The Waste Land)

“Paris was a nightmare and everyone there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without …” (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919)

Slide25

The 1919 Treaty at Versailles ushered in a power vacuum in Europe, a period of inflation, mass unemployment, and middle-man profiteeringThe Waste Land can be read as a critique of speculative finance and modern banking for their role in undermining the foundations of culture

TWL is also a postwar poem in its depiction of demobbed crowds as ghostly war dead (“I had not thought death had undone so many”)

Slide26

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)

Slide27

Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920)

“[Tradition] cannot be inherited” – i.e., it must be invented

TWL

treats poetry as

intrinsically collaborative with the

past

, considered

as a

sound-archive of

citational

sources

Slide28

RadioThe BBC begins broadcasting in 1922Widespread fears over the potential power of the new mass media: radio and film (cf. John Reith, first BBC Managing Director

)High/low culture juxtapositions – Marie Lloyd’s music hall and ragtime Shakespeare (‘O O O that Shakespeherian rag’)

Slide29

Dead men speak“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”Cité

fourmillante, cité plein de rêves,

Ou

le

spectre

en

plein

jour

raccroche

le

passant

(Baudelaire, “Les Sept

Vieillards

,”

Tableaux

Parisiens

)

Swarming city, city full of dreams,

Where the

spectre

in broad daylight accosts the

passerby

Slide30

“The two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead.”

(John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication)