Cubism + Futurism = Vorticism (give or take a few definitions)

Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way that it tried to capture movement in an image - in a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas.


Pound and Picabia

The Rebel Art Centre - lasted only a few months... its basic artistic ideas evolved into Vorticism (term coined by Pound). Term suggests a spiraling force which should draw the viewer into the work, creating a different kind of dynamism and strong focal point.


Vorticists' journal BLAST - published work by Pound and Eliot, as well as others, including Wyndham Lewis, whose art was on the cover of the first issue.

Vorticism was for Pound the first major experience in revolutionary propagandizing and the first cause that placed him beyond the pale of orthodoxy. Pound saw Vorticism as setting "the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization." In this way the arts were welded in a mystical union with politics in the manner already envisaged by Yeats.

Knot and Vortex

"Of patterned energies; and first, Buckminster Fuller on knots. He grasps and tenses an invisible rope, on which we are to understand a common overhand knot, two 360° rotations in intersecting planes, each passed through the other.

"Pull, and whatever your effort each lobe of the knot makes it impossible that the other shall disappear. It is a self-interfering pattern. Slacken, and its structure hangs open for anlysis, but suffers no topological impairment. Slide the knot along the rope: you are sliding the rope through the not. Slide through it, if you have them spliced in sequence, hemp rope, cotton rope, nylon rope. The knot is indifferent to these transactions. the knot is neither hemp nor cotton nor nylon: is not the rope. The knot is a patterned integrity. The rope renders it visible. No member of Fuller's audience has ever objected (he remarks) that throughout this exposition he has been holding no rope at all, so accessible to the mind is a patterned integrity, visible or no, once the senses have taught us the contours.

"Imagine, next, the metabolic flow that passes through a man and is not the man: some hundreds of tons of solids, liquids and gasses serving to render a single man corporeal during the seventy years he persists, a patterned integrity, a knot through which pass the swift strands of simultaneous ecological cycles, recycling transformations of solar energy. At any given moment the knotted materials weigh perhaps 160 pounds. (And 'Things,' wrote Ernest Fenollosa about 1904, are 'cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots.')

"So far Buckminster Fuller (1967). Now Ezra Pound (1914) on the poetic image: '. . . a radiant node or cluster; . . . what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.' A patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologically stable; subject to variations of intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words. 'In decency one can only call it a vortex. . . . Nomina sunt consequentia rerum.' For the vortex is not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water."

(Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 1971, pp. 145-46)

Week 4: Imagism

The poetic revolution provoked by Eliot and Pound, as exemplified in the theory and practice of imagism. Req'd reading: poems on handout.

The Imagists

Manifesto - (Poetry I, 1913)

cf again: Melopoeia, Phanopoeia and Logopoeia

the "duree": Bergson's word for the individual moment of minimal consciousness
the "objective correlative": TS Eliot's term for the image (his essay on Hamlet)
- fully adequate for the emotion that is invoked.

Pound's article on vorticism, 1914. "Vortex"

A picture as somewhere between a thing and a thought. As the split (the gap) between the SD/SR and [REF]? Poetic communication: why? So images can be apprehended as intended.

Cf my idea from a while ago - mapping the sine curves accurately from one person to another...

Tenor/Vehicle/Ground
Tenor: the thing
Ground: the basis of comparison
A good metaphor: the tenor in relation to the vehicle, in the context of the ground.

Pound on Provence

From 'The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941', ed D.D. Page:

9 July 1922 (To Felix E. Schelling)

"My assault on Provence: 1st: using it as subject matter, trying to do as R.B. [presumably Robert Bridges] had with Renaissance Italy. 2, Diagrammatic translations (those of Arnaut, now printed in 'Instigations'); all part of study of cerse-form (as trans. of Cavalcanti). Note that the English "poet" en masse had simply said: "these forms are impossible in English, they are too complicated, we haven't the rhymes." That was bunkum, usual laziness of English, and hatred of craft.... I have proved that the Porvencal rhyme schemes are not impossible in English. They are probably inadvisiable. The troubadour was not worried by our sense of style, our "literary values," he could shovel words ini any order he liked.... The troubadour, fortunately perhaps, was not worried about English order; he got certain musical effects because he cd. concentrate on music without bothering about literary values. He had a kind of freedom which we no longer have."

What's interesting to me about all this is that Pound seems rather convinced that he had failed at what he set out to do: "I have failed almost without exception; I can't count six people whom I have succeeded in interesting in XIIth Century Provence. Perhaps the best thing I have done is with the music."

The music? What did he do? Certainly it makes sense for the lyrical verse to be appreciated with music, but I didn't realise that Pound had gone so far, having held a picture of him in my mind as a man of letters only.

1920 saw the publication in London of 'Five Troubadour Songs: With the Original Provençal Words and English Words Adapted from Chaucer, Arranged by Agnes Bedford' (London, Boosey & Co., 1920), with Chaucer's words (translated by Pound) set to music. It would be worth trying to track down a copy, if it's at all possible.
Update, a few hours later: haven't managed to find a copy, unfortunately. It's the sort of thing that would no doubt make the basis of a wonderful poetry/ middle english/ music combined project, looking at word choice in translation and choice of music...

Pound and Troubadours...

Pound apparently considered sex to be a sacrament and an esoteric tradition which had been preserved in the West by the Troubadours. He considered the only true religion to be "the revelation made in the arts." Rejecting Christianity, he described it as "a bastard faith designed for the purpose of making good Roman citizens slaves, and which is thoroughly different from that preached in Palestine. In this sense Christ is thoroughly dead." Pound found the Churches objectionable for having gained subsidies which should have gone to artists, philosophers and scientists.

Pound was inspired by the "love cult" of the Troubadours, which had been suppressed by the Church, and the Classical mystery religions. He considered the teachings of Confucius, which taught a civic religion that assigned everyone a social duty, from emperor to peasant, to be a means of achieving a balanced State. He later saw in Fascist Italy the attainment of such a State.

Like Yeats, Pound's concepts of esotericism and culture brought him up against liberal and democratic doctrines. Pound saw in Fascism the fulfillment of Social Credit monetary policy which would break the power of plutocracy. He considered artists to form a social elite "born to rule" but not as a part of a democratic mandate. "Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists."

As far back as 1914 Pound had written that the artist "has had sense enough to know that humanity was unbearably stupid. But he has also tried to lead and persuade it, to save it from itself." He wrote in 1922 that the masses are malleable and that it is the arts which set the moulds to cast them.

Week 3: Pound and Provence

'Cino' and 'Na Audiart' as examples of Pound's working with Provencal themes and modes; and 'Near Perigord' as the great poem of his early years. Req'd reading: Eliot's "Tradtion and the Individual Talent".

Response to "Tradtion and the Individual Talent":


Essence of the image (an intellectual and emotional complex)

Pound - 'The Spirit of Romance': spirit of lyricism, religious sensibility, awakened in Provence, then to Italy (Petrarch, Dante etc...). The sonnet rose out of Provence.

Pound saw the lyric tradition as being reawoken in Provence->Italy, then Northern Europe and Elizabethan England (then disappearing). He wanted to reawaken the tradition, as a living force.

[Cantos - the vision destroyed, then reasserted.] Again cf The Waste Land - poetic engagement with the notion of tradition.

Writers with a tradition: Eliot/ Pound/ Joyce/ Beckett.

Joyce: myth as a structured force, cf the Provencal tradition.

[/Modernism - Transcendentalism without God] -> something of transcendental mysticism.

Eliot/Pound: spirit of literature/ tradtion (in place of spirit of God)

Pound: "Make it new" best of the present/ best of the past.


"Na Audiart": Troubadour "clus" (trobar clus): a poetic style composed of complex metrics, intricate rhymes, and words chosen more for their sound than for their meaning.

"fashion" / "pass I on" - wit underlining reverence and love

cf "When you are old, under the candellight" ... you will regret...
- the tragedy of age // preciousness of beauty and youth

i.) Phanopoeia: light (visual imagination)
ii.) Melopoeia: sweet (lyrical/ musical imagination)
iii.) Logopoeia: word (illusions and cultures created through words)


"Near Perigord": Think - what is the motivation of Bertrans? Enigma... Come back to this.
The riddle of the love poem - cf Canto 28 of the Inferno (Bertrans into Hell and severed head) = source (borrowings)

Week 2: Early Eliot - 'Prufrock' and 'Portrait of a Lady'

...as imitation of the Modernist mode, but with reference to Browning and James as precursors of the dramatic psychological portrait. Req'd reading: Browning, 'My Last Duchess'

Impressions of 'My Last Duchess':

My Big Idea

Requires a few concepts as given:

That language is a mediator between different peoples' thoughts.
That thought is continuous (in the data sense, not the time sense).
That words (and therefore language) are discrete (data sense again).
That the right choices of words (skill with language) can effectively mediate thoughts from person A to person be as precisely and effectively as possible.

Therefore, appeals to common knowledge/ allusions/ word-associations in poetry and prose act as 'keys' in effective language.

So:

1.) My thoughts in my head are continuous data, like a sine wave.
2.) If I, unskillfully, try to explain my thoughts, it doesn't translate to someone else as continuous, but a disjointed sine wave, with steps and gaps.
3.) With more skill (or appeals to common knowledge/ impressions), not necessarily more words, the thoughts can be represented in the other people's head, relatively exactly.

This clearly nothing new, but it's how I think of good writers - and especially SoC writers like Woolf/ Joyce - they manage to mediate thoughts with only words, to re-present those thoughts in their readers' heads, so that the point of the piece of writing is re-created in its entirety to the reader.

The kind of skill in writing that can do this to an idea is of course present in all forms of writing, but it is primarily in SoC writing that the sense of the idea, of interiority, is re-presented so clearly, so accurately.

NB - I often think in graphs regardless of their being values (belief systems/ numerical places or otherwise) at stake. I think the analogy here is thoughts/ words with continuous data/ discrete data, that is, i) a complete set of values on an interval (continuous), ii) separate and distinct data (discrete) i.e. - separable- data.

Of course, the idea of the word as a unit of data only works well if words are "stripped of the dull patina of use", as William Caros Williams said. Again, there are links to Modm and the rejection of associated and implied meanings for words...

Also ties here to postmodernism (again) but the sense is the same, to "make it new", to stop writers being lazy and relying on years of connotative meanings for words.

Cf. ->Stein as a modernist: "A rose is a rose is a rose..." In a circle. This is what a rose is.


Update (after receiving comments on the above): I suppose, in the above example, a text (pure text) would be just language written down, the language-as-object that can be consumed. Just a physical way of mediating thoughts.
And the idea of 'noise' as well: It's very important, to be sure. Just very hard to quantify. Perhaps with translations it would be easier to compare a few different translations of the same source text. cf Pound talking about "not blocking the road" while translating, not using more than "say 4%" unneccessary "verbiage", or "blanks".
And it's a good point to compare this to Pound in the direct presentations of the image. Imagism is all about reducing the noise.

Notes and Quotes

Form: to prevent the "connections of life" differently, freshly.

Language is no longer seen as transparent, something that, if used correctly, allows us to see through to reality.
It is, instead, seen as the complex, nuanced site of our construction of the real: language is thick, its multiple meanings and varied connotative forces are essential to our elusive, multiple, complex sense of (and cultural construction of) reality.

[Fragmentation/ Juxtaposition/ Motif/ Symbol/ Allusion]

"Art always attempts to 'imitate' or re-present reality; what changes is our understanding of what constitues reality, and how that reality can best be represented ... to the mind and senses ...."

So... What am I expecting from the course?

- to be able to discuss the -isms with some knowledge,
- to read (and respond to) the key modernist texts
- to develop an awareness of the shift of writing styles
- emphasis on the aesthetics of writing, of reading these texts as an enjoyable and meaningful experience -> putting the "fun" back in.

So, I want to find, in the course and the texts, my own version of
*Joyce's "epiphany"
*Hopkins' "inscape"
*Woolf's "moment of being"
*Benjamin's "jetztzeit" (literally, "now time")

In my (limited) experiences with modm, the thing that sticks is the use of open endings - stories/ novels that are more true to reailty, where events don't always resolve themselves. ('A Girl in the Head' from last year's ENGL317).

Also -> from Faulkner's 'S&F' - the shifts in time, orchestrated by Faulkner to provoke the reader - combine meanings and move scenes to echo each other, to be 'inside'. The world is also moved 'inside'.

The world - structured symbolically/ metaphorically.[Remember, it's transcendent, but without God]

I think I also expect to see some experiments in form. I'm not sure how.

More notes

[The city life as a central force in society...]

[Reliance on intuitive insight - that one can see the essence (or the soul) of things.] cf Inductive Reasoning/ Empirical Methods.

Think: 'The Waste Land': IMAGISM -> MODM.
- broken, fragmented images, anti-narrative, generally disjunctive. Metaphor of seeing and vision.

Seeing and vision = central to Modm (see to the heart of things). But, in TWL, the reader doesn't see so much... The narrtor promised to show the reader a different meaning / to show the reader how to make meaning from dislocation and from fragments. "The construction of an exclusive meaning was essential to Modm."

Formal Characteristics of Modm:
- Open Form
- Free Verse
- Discontinuous Narrative
- Juxtaposition
- Intertextuality
- Classical Allusions (cf Romanticism)
- Borrowing from other cultures/ languages
- Unconventional use of metaphor

This is all sounding remarkably like post-modernism. PoMo, is, after all, entirely reliant on what came before. I mean, it has to be, in order to reject it.

Thematic Characteristics:
- Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
- Alientation of the individual within their (broken and fractured) community
- Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
- Valoristion of the despairing individual in the force of an unmanageable future
- Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology
- Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes

-isms I enjoy reading about: Symbolism, Impressionism, Expression, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism.


Update (after receiving notes on the above): On Centrifugal vs Centripetal readings...
Just to clarify this for me:
I seem to remember from studying physics that what we think of as centrifugal force is just centripetal force. Certainly centripetal force is what we get when we're being spun around ("centripetal" = Latin for "centre-seeking"). So it's the force required to stay in the same place (realtive to the centre) while being spun. If centripetal force isn't enough, or is removed, then the object will fly off on a tangent.

So "centrifugal force" and "centripetal force" is the same phenomenon, just the reaction of an object's inertia when released from rotation (centrifugal), or retained in rotation (centripetal). So there's some confusion there, I guess. Not the least of it from me.

In terms of readings, a centrifugal reading would leave the idea ("centre"), and a centripetal reading would stay circling it.

So Modernism would be, to me, a centripetal reading of the formal characteristics... And by the same token, Postmodernism could be seen as a centrifugal reading of these, literally "fleeing" the centre. It doesn't reflect too well on PoMo, though, if the "centre" is a place that one wants to be.

Of course, if we lived in a discernably rotating system (like a space station or something similar) and got the timing right, then centrifugal force would release an object on a straight line from the centre of the rotation. Amusingly enough, I found this comic last week and thought it was great (click the image to enlarge it):

(From XKCD, a maths/humour webcomic.)

Notes from research

Modernist Literature: at its height 1900-1940.

*TS Eliot*Joyce*Woolf*Yeats*F.Scott Fitzgerald*Pound*Stein*HD*Kafka*MennoterBraak*Hemingway*etc*

Modernism (abbrev. to Modm) moves from the bonds of realist lit, introduces concepts as disjointed timelines. "Modm was distinguished by emancipatory metanarrative" - after modm (and post-enlightenment) narratives tended to be emancipatory, but beforehand it wasn't a definite.

[Culture became politically important after WWI, trade unionism?]...

Moving away from Romanticism, modm goes into the traditionally mundane subject matters - think Eliot's "Prufrock". Also - a marked pessimism cf the optimism in a lot of Victorian lit. Common motif = an alienated individual...

[A dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society]

But then, poems like "The Waste Land" - there isn't (really) a central, heroic figure... (other than, perhaps, the author/poet?)

* cf Shelley + Byron (Romantics) and their solipsism; Modm rejects this?

* Also: rejects the subject of Cartesian dualism

[Collapse narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices]
(But this is a crafted collapse - intended and designed for maximum effect; otherwise it would be reduced to Dada, surely? Dada always seems to find meaning out of chaos, rather than putting chaos into meaning, or constructing meaning with chaos. Limitations of the realist novel are taken further - Modm's concern for larger factors such as social or historical change -> "stream of consciousness" SoC.

SoC examples to chase down:

Woolf - 'Kew Gardens', 'Mrs Dalloway'
Joyce - 'Portrait', 'Ulysses'
Porter - 'Flowering Judas'
etc. etc...

Update (after receiving notes on the above): Menno ter Braak was a Dutch Modernist. Admittedly on a different kind of level than the other writers I mentioned, and undoubtedly less well-known, but still an interesting character (who was a polemicist, according to most reports). He wrote for the student magazine Propria Cures in Amsterdam in the 1920s (which is why I read about him to begin with), but his essays later in his life he was pretty ruthless, writing about extraneous authority and false values.
To be honest, what work of his I have read seems to be poorly translated (most of it translated by Dutch students, I think) but he is held in quite high regard by those students. I was just listing most of the big names I could think of that had some connections to the movement, and he came to mind. Likewise with Hilda Doolittle - I've read little of her work, but I remembered that she was leaning towards a kind of feminine modernism from what I have read.

Week 1: Intro to Modernism

Rationale behind the course:
1.) Image
2.) Aesthetic
3.) Allusion...

Aspects of Modernism -

* The "reality effect" - Flaubert's barometer (Flaubertian grotesque = extraneous detail)
Is reality problematic?
Significance -> Incorporation...
[Particularity]

* The "conspiracy of detail" (orchestration)
The effects upon the perceiving mind...
- "the very atmosphere of the mind" (Joyce)
(Think back to 'Dubliners' -> luminous detail, but it's organised so well that it can build to a crescendo of feeling. If I read it quickly.)

* The significant detail
- detail grounded in particularity
- relationship in the objective world//subjective world. (The wading girl from 'Portrait'
- the method of epiphany -> "The Dead", "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall". [The mind as the mediating agent]

* The "proustian moment" (Madeleine) <- Involuntary memory
- the Japanese flower (blossoming suddenly, luminosity, radition)


** The IMAGE (Pound)
- That which presents an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time... (not a "moment" of time...)
(complex -> "The Library of Babel"...)
- Therefore, _freedom_ from the limits of time and space. Big thoughts here...
[Sudden illumination, the moment]
- Think - the lowest moment of conscious awaremess, the "duree" // "specious present"
-quantification of consciousness...-
[the currency of modernism is the currency of the image]

* Spatial form (Joseph Frank)
- relationship of New Criticism : Modernism
- the challenge to narrative
- the role of the ANALOGY

=>so, how to reconcile NARRATIVE/ANALOGY?
1.) Narration unfolding in time, sequence of events, linear, etc. Think A to B to C to D etc...
2.) Modernism challenges this - spatialisation. Think A and B and C to D, or A to B and C and D etc...

- so, with spatialisation, moments are orchestrated, given a poetic quality.
- [A moment that transcends time... cf 'The Sound and The Fury' - Quentin's suicide: freeze time, make it permanent. Romantic ethos. Makes me think of Wordsworth's "Spots of time", of the idea of "Transcendence without God" from ENGL319 last year.]

* The Stream of Conciousness
- the dynamics of the image in the mind
- Bergsonian time (Chronology Vs Duration)
- Woolf's "modern fiction"
- the method of SoC...
- the problem of Form and Fluidity
[come back to this. cf Analog/Digital, Continuous/Discrete data, Ideas/Words]...

* The relationshiop of poetry and prose
- Flaubert: that prose should be as well-written as poetry.
- Pound: (in response) that poetry should be as well-written as prose. So there.
- Edmund Wilson ("Axel's Castle" essays): that the distinction between the two has become (in the C20th) increasingly meaningless.
- the apprehension of form in the art of reading (!) Is it too critical to assume that all writing should be good, better than good, should be luminous? cf Paul Valery's "The Role of Thought in Poetry"
- the above makes me think of Joyce's comments that the heroic and glorious stories were adequately serviced by the newspapers, for the common man. Which is why he turned to the commonplace, and the luminous details within.

* Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"
- the contention that Art is superior to Nature (challenge to Realism). Note use of Capital Letters for Big Ideas... Of course.
- 'Hamlet', and the mirror held up to Nature
- the paradox of Life as an immitation of Art cf the old "Art imitates Life"...
- that bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature
- think London fogs and impressionists. That the fogs didn't exist before then, in the collective consciousness.

[Conclusions below]

That: Art for Art's sake is extreme, but: - the aesthetic effect, the "splendid insincerity of art" (Nabokov), the freedom of form. These are all wonderful things.

Art is carte blanche. It is freedom, it is the ability to be free, to show the imagination...

Narrative moving from the world without to the world within - the concsiouness of the form coexisting with narrative.

The idea of writing poetry and fiction as artistic rather than moralistic.

[Also, remember the variety of form...]

Modernism: supercedes realism's function by incorporating it into itself? Realism is still valid, but what does Modernism add, if not to say that all forms and functions can be valid if used appropriately?
I think, at this stage (admittedly early in the year) that it is the appropriate use of form that is key - form must clearly be used with skill, and skill defies quantitative judgements. Or does it? Am I being too snobbish here? I'll find out.