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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Whether critics believe the myth of discontinuity or whether they offer an opposing narrative of continuity and progressive development from the fin de siecle into modernism, both models tend to be based on an assumption of the supremacy of the modernist aesthetic. To understand more fully the turn-of-the-century period we need to find new, more nuanced and complex models that allow us to think outside of this entrenched and limiting construct. One such is offered in this article in the form of homage: a recognition that within high modernism there are gestures of tribute to the fin de siecle that acknowledge an aspect of aesthetic regression within modernism.
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And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his anger was also a form of homage.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
We are only too familiar with many modernists' rejection of fin de siecle literature (or was it of the writers and the lifestyle they were deemed to embody?)--and the often extreme language in which it was couched. (1) The cause of such reactions was sometimes homophobic panic, but frequently it is not clear why the fin de siecle proved so unnerving for the next generation. Such anger is in itself something of a tribute to the potency of the literature of the previous generation, and a sign of more than the usual intergenerational strife. I suggest that however much modernist writers may 'revile and mock' the image of the fin de siecle, for many this anger 'was also a form of homage'. This is the unthinkable truth that lies behind the myth of discontinuity; this is frequently what necessitated such heated denial.
By tracing a model of homage to the fin de siecle within modernism, it is possible to recognize a sense of regression at the heart of modernism, and an element of respect for an aesthetic moment in late nineteenth-century poetry that many key modernist writers felt was lost to them and they were unable to follow. What is made visible through this analysis is a loss of confidence within modernism that is felt in direct comparison with the 'audacity' of the poetry of the fin de siecle. I use the French 'homage', rather than the English 'homage' used by Joyce in my epigraph, (2) to signal an appeal to a concept from a critical discourse rather than a natural one. In film theory it is often used to invoke recent past masters, and it acknowledges their greatness while coming to terms with the threat of the debt to them through an element of pastiche. Homage, then, is not simply 'homage' or 'tribute', which lack the self-reflexivity necessary to provide the complicated mix of irony and reverence captured within the French term. Neither is homage the general 'nostalgia' that underpins modernism, which relates to a world already gone by the 1890s. Nor is homage about an engagement with history as such, because the objects of homage are located in a past much more recent than 'history' would seem to denote. However, it does have a close relationship with memory, as will be demonstrated later.
Two qualifications need to be introduced immediately into this narrative of homage. First of all, this is not an argument for a blanket characterization of modernism as a whole: this paper offers one model to trace one particular trajectory through modernism to suggest that current thinking is still too conditioned by the modernist's own mythology. Indeed, the concept of homage is worked out in rather different ways by each of the canonical writers examined in this paper, and I identify a very specific set of acts of homage to the turn of the century. The second qualification is that the homage traced in this paper is limited to poetry of the fin de siecle, and not to prose. This model works specifically in relation to poetry for a variety of reasons, such as the different relationship between fin de siecle poetry and prose and the marketplace, and modernism's own quest for a poetic novel, firmly differentiated from Victorian realist fiction. There is great potential for other similar narratives over the turn of the century concerning other genres, but they would differ in crucial respects and so must be taken up on other occasions.
But first it is necessary to dwell more on why we need new models to recognize more fully the complexity of the relationship between modernism and the poetry of the fin de siecle. Current critical characterizations of the relationship between the early decades of the twentieth century and Victorianism often ignore the fin de siecle completely, and when they do not they are stuck in two well-worn ruts: one of rupture, and one of continuation. It is surprising how frequently the relationship between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century epistemologies is still pathologized by a critical outlook uncritically accepting of the modernist myth of discontinuity. More recently a few notable studies have sought to challenge this myth with a truer picture of continued themes, images, and concerns traced across the turn of the century. Carol T. Christ's Victorian and Modern Poetics is key in this respect, and here the author identifies three core strands of continuity between Victorian and modernist poetry (those dramatic aspects of masks, persona, and dramatic monologue; theories of the image; and the use of myth and history). (3) David Weir, in Decadence and the Making of Modernism, presents decadence as not only an age of transition in which the origins of modernism must be located, but itself inherently a 'dynamics of transition'. (4) Jessica Feldman attempts a similar project of reconciliation in her Victorian Modernism, albeit in a very different way. (5) Here, Feldman uses pragmatism to challenge the myth of discontinuity, and takes as her focus cultural sites of aesthetic endeavour (such as workrooms and relationships) as well as printed texts and paintings to argue for continuities as well as breaks. She sees the need in modernism to preserve the past through change, just as she sees in Victorianism the 'testing ground for modern culture, that it might have provided both the space of reaction and the space of rebellion'. (6)
All of these analyses convincingly bring 'Victorian' and 'modernist' into much closer proximity than had previously been allowed, and prove the myth of discontinuity to be much less potent than had formerly been credited. However, such approaches can be constrained by one of two problems. First, they frequently still advocate a developmental narrative, where modernist poetics are an improvement on, or elaboration of, existing or nascent fin de siecle models. For example, Weir's notion of 'transition' risks suggesting that decadence was important for enabling modernism. (Another version of this is when fin de siecle writers are praised and considered interesting to the extent that they exhibit modernist tendencies.) Secondly, if analyses avoid this pitfall of overstating progressive aesthetic amelioration, they sometimes risk simply stating the obvious: that there are, of course, similarities between the two aesthetics.
Much more recent papers by Ronald Bush and Cassandra Laity, tracing the links between Eliot and Wilde, and Eliot and Swinburne, respectively, attend to a level of specificity that entirely avoids the second of these problems, but they are still concerned with tracing intertextuality and continuity. (7) In other words, there is still a tendency to look for evidence of a particular kind of relationship between the two aesthetics, and that is one still defined by the myth of discontinuity and the opposing arguments for continuity it elicits.
I suggest there is much that characterizes the period that cannot be contained within either the narrative of rupture or the narrative of progressive continuation. It is essential that we find other, more nuanced models that can characterize the relationship in all its complexity. The model explored in this paper in some ways goes much further in dismissing the myth of discontinuity, but in doing so better explains the need for it and the force of it. The narrative of homage and, to an extent, 'regression' is a different dynamic of influence altogether.
Some evidence from Pound initially will allow us to see how fin de siecle poetry held a different place from fin de siecle prose in the minds of many modernist writers. Ezra Pound's scholarly engagement with the 1890s establishes an intricate web of poetic engagement that is as often overlooked in critics' mapping of the fin de siecle as it is in our understanding of modernism. This lineage is demonstrated particularly clearly in Pound's essay on Lionel Johnson that appears in Eliot's selected essays of Ezra Pound. Pound's essay begins by praising Johnson for 'poems as beautiful as any in English', and singling him out from the 'muzziness' of the nineties. (8) Pound then reproduces Johnson's notes on his 1890s...
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