The un-Englishness of Modernism

'Modernism' does not just refer to the literature of a certain period of time, say 1890 or 1910-1940. The '-ism' suggests it was a distinctive doctrine, or at least a distinctive practice. Yet it is best not to attempt a strict definition of the typical modernist work. No two writers wrote to one formula (though Ezra Pound, an impresario of the modern, tried to get many to do just that). Modernist works deploy devices or manifest traits that include the following: (a) perspectivalism: knowledge limited to the point of view of specific persons (the most radical form being 'stream of consciousness'); (b) juxtapositions without copulas: the omission of transitional matter that would indicate grammatical, chronological or logical relationships; (c) presentation of images or events without commentary or explanation; (d) style of presentation so radically in service of subject matter that, paradoxically, style becomes the subject of attention; (e) parody of popular literary styles and, by implication, mockery of the general readership that made such styles popular; (f) learned allusions to literary classics; (g) mythic parallels to contemporary life and demythologising treatment of Christianity; (h) a governing principle of 'art for art's sake': self-conscious neglect of a utilitarian purpose for the work, such as to teach a moral or move the public to action; and (i) the manifestation of literary art in every sentence or line, as Joseph Conrad demanded of prose writers equally with poets.

Myths of origin

Histories of the drama of the ‘Irish Renaissance’ usually do not begin in 1890; they begin instead in the summer of 1897. Following signposts in memoirs by W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory, scholars often date the conception of modern Irish drama to a conversation between these two held in a land agent’s office on the seaside Galway property of a landlord with the storybook name, Count Florimande de Basterot. As the rain fell outside, 32-year-old Yeats spoke to 45-year-old widowed Lady Gregory of his long-held wish for an Irish theatre in which the plays he and her neighbour Edward Martyn had written could be performed. But what was the use? No professional theatre in Dublin would take them; a sufficient audience could not be found for them; and who would subsidise such unpopular performances? Lady Gregory took the bait, and asked how much was needed. £300 for one week of performances. She thought that such a sum might be raised by a public-spirited appeal to people of wealth and position in Ireland, many of whom she herself knew. To start the fund, she donated £25 of her own money.

'Ideology' is not simply, though a thesaurus equates them, 'thought'; it can also refer to unconscious assumptions that place a boundary beyond which thought cannot go. The most influential definitions of the concept are those of Karl Marx: 'The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production,' and, more particularly, 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.' Such ideas 'rule' because it is only through them that a person can imagine a relationship to 'transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History'. Both the dominant and subordinate classes live within a historical thought-world, which holds all the thought the masters have and all the mastered get. 'False consciousness' is thus unconscious of all that is false in its picture of the world. The landlord class cannot see the tenant truly and the tenants can’t either; similarly for workers and employers and all other echoes of the master/slave relationship. Ideology is given glamour by the best minds that schools can educate, publishers can publish or money can buy. Seeking instruction or entertainment, people become willing partners in their own subjection. It is a sorry state of affairs as Marx describes it, this prison-house of ideology.