VV(18): A political cast ...

[Dave Monroe]

"Somehow the performance had taken on a political
cast.  Orientalism--at this period showing up all over
Paris in fashions, music, theater--had been connected
with Russia in an international movement seeking to
overthrow Western civilization.  Only six years before
a newspaper had been able to sponsor an auto-race from
Peking to Paris, and enlist the willing assistance of
all the countries in between.  The political situation
these days was somewhat darker.  Hence the turmoil
which erupted that night in the Theatre Vincent
Castor." (V., Ch. 14, Sec. ii, p. 412)


>From Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York:
Knopf, 1993), Ch. 2, "Consolidated Vision," Sec. VIII,
"A Note on Modernism," pp. 186-190 ...

"I would like to suggest that many of the most
prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which
we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics
in Western society and culture, include a response to
external pressures on culture from the imperium." (p.
188)

"In Mann's great fable of the alliance between
creativity and disease--Death in Venice--the plague
that infects Europe is Asiatic in origin; the
combination of dread and promise, of degeneration and
desire ... is Mann's way of suggesting, I believe,
that Europe, in art, mind, monuments, is no longer
invulnerable, no longer able to ignore its ties to its
 overseas domains.  Similarly Joyce ....  Bloom
testifies to a new presence within Europe, a presence
rather strikingly described in terms unmistakably
taken from the exotic annals of overseas discovery,
conquest, vision.  Only now instead of being out
there, they are here, as troubling as the primitive
rhythms of the Scare du printemps or the African icons
in Picasso's art." (p. 188)

"The formal dislocations and displacements in
modernist culture, and most strikingly its pervasive
irony, are influenced by precisely ... the contending
native and the fact of other empires." (p. 188)

[see here J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England
(1883)]

"I venture the suggestion that when European culture
finally began to take due account of imperial
'delusions and discoveries' ... it did so not
oppositionally but ironically, and with a desperate
attempt at a new inclusiveness.... members of the
dominant European cultures now began to look abroad
with the skepticism and confusion of people surprised,
perhaps even shocked by what they saw." (p. 189)

[see here Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries:
Studies in India in the British Imagination, 1880-1930
(London: Allen Lane, 1972)]

"To deal with this, a new encyclopedic form became
necessary, one that had three distinct features. 
First was a circularity of structure, inclusive and
open at the same time: Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, A
la recherche, The Waste Land, Cantos, To the
Lighthouse.  Second was a novelty based almost
entirely on the reformulation of old, even outdated
fragments drawn self-consciously from disparate
locations, sources, cultures: the hallmark of
modernist form is the strange juxtaposition of comic
and tragic, high and low, commonplace and exotic,
familiar and alien whose most ingenious resolution is
Joyce's fusing of the Odyssey with the Wandering Jew,
advertising and Virgil (or Dante) ....  Third is the
irony of a form that draws attention to itself as
substituting art and its creations for the
once-possible synthesis of the world empires.  When
you can no longer assume that Britannia will rule the
waves forever, you have to reconceive reality as
something that can be held together by you the artist,
in history, rather than in geography.  Spatiality
becomes, ironically, the characteristic of an
aesthetic rather than of political domination ...."
(pp. 189-90)

But what of dissolution (vs. resolution), temporality
(vs. spatiality), and ...



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