That Modernism is a ‘Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open’, as Gilles Deleuze suggests in Negotiations, that it is inherently transgressive, amorphous, protean, is one of the tenets of this study (Deleuze 1990: 83–93). Modernism is thus less an historical period than a movement, than movement itself, less a bounded or delimited chronological moment than a flow, a way of thinking or pattern of thought, a mode of investigation which foregrounds the past as memory, not as an inferior or diminished version of the former present, however, but as an organic part of it, as an ontological, accumulating entity in itself. As such we might say that Modernism blurs distinctions between past and present, between interior and exterior, an inward turn that we will call, after Deleuze, ‘involution’.

Shakespeare was already on to something in The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1, as Antonio tries to persuade Sebastian to murder his father with the following argument: ‘What is past is prologue’; that is, all the past has led to and is thus part of this moment, which must be seized. T. S. Eliot has memorably phrased such accumulation of a living past in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, wherein his ‘historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence … a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together’ (Eliot 2007: 538). Or as William Faulkner phrased it in Requiem for a Nun, ‘The past is never dead. It's not even past.’ Eliot was focused on the dead voices of the past to justify his own deeply historical mode of Modernism, but he and Faulkner were echoing French metaphysician Henri Bergson, whose lectures at the Sorbonne Eliot attended in 1919. Eliot found it necessary to restrict his inquiry to the practicalities of the poet: ‘This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism’ (541).