Essay on why the city is the central focus of modernist writing
‘The city is the central locus of modernist writing’. Discuss this statement with reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
As Desmond Harding (2003: x) asserts, the city has always played a major role in the formation of Modernist art and literature; if its roots are traced back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, through figures such as Ranier Maria Rilke, Yeats and Conrad, then Modernism can be seen as the first aesthetic movement to grow out of the urbanisation and metropolitan planning of the Victorian era.
The images and structures of the city, and the technology that spawned and fulled it, are constant leitmotifs in Modernists works from Joyce’s Dublin (1979), to Hemingway’s Paris (1993), to the network of inter-related, interdependent cities of Dos Passos’ U.S.A (1981). The four texts I would like to discuss here (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1974) and To the Lighthouse (1992), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1994) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1989)) all approach the notion of the city in a remarkably similar way, displaying what we shall see is the ambiguous engagement the Modernist writer and artist had to their urban surroundings on the one hand making it the locus of their artistic vision and, on the other, depicting its decay and unreality.
As Hugh Kenner (1965:138) details, Eliot’s The Waste Land, is a poem concerned, to a very great extent, with city life, and more importantly, with modern city life. The poem not only describes scenes of urbanisation in lines such as:
Trams and dusty trees,
Highbury bore me, Richmond and Kew
Undid me. (Eliot, 1989: 70)
But in its construction and use of borrowed images and words, it mirrors the very nature of the modern city that, like a palimpsest, is built on former cities and former lives; as Kenner states: Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems (Kenner, 1965: 138)
The image of the metropolis, then, not only forms the locus of Eliot’s poem but lends to it a structure and a shape that goes right to the very heart of the Modernist celebration of the new and the modern.
We see a similar motif in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as the consciousnesses of the characters become intermingled with both their surroundings and the fractured narrative of the novel itself. The rhythm of Woolf’s language matches the frenetic, busy rhythm of the city in the morning and afternoon, and the images she uses reflect the sights and sounds of a metropolis: They went to the Tower together; to the Victoria and Albert Museum, stood in the crowd to see the King open Parliament. And there were shops hot shops, dress shops, shops with leather bags in the window, where she would stand staring. (Woolf, 1974: 99)
The thoughts here, of Rezia, are an example of the way in which Woolf’s characters become one with their surroundings; not only is the rhythm of the stream of consciousness a reflection of the speed and constant movement of the city but memories and observations are highly dependant upon their geographical location. Throughout the novel the reader is constantly bombarded with the artifacts of city life: ambulances, shops, automobiles, busy roads and pavements full of people, to such an extent that it is difficult to discern where the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, end and the shared consciousness of the city begins, a point highlighted by Harold Bloom (1990): Not only does a sense of social plurality and equality result from Clarissa’s empathetic union with her surroundings (but)…Identifying herself with the city around her, Clarissa extends that identification to others, too, imagining such an atmospheric afterlife (Bloom, 1990: 176)
In Mrs Dolloway, the city becomes the locus not just for Modernist writing but for human consciousness. As I have suggested, however, Modernist writers such as Eliot and Woolf have a far more ambiguous relationship to the city than these two examples would suggest. In Eliot, for instance, the city, that forms the backdrop to the poem, is revealed to be Unreal (Eliot, 1989: 62) and merely A heap of broken images (Eliot, 1989: 61) and in Mrs Dalloway, the vacuity of the minds of the city-dwellers is constantly suggested through their relationship to modern metropolitan consumption.
In her novel To the Lighthouse (1992), Woolf explores this notion further as the pace and the meaninglessness of the city is contrasted with the freedom and the beauty of the Scottish island. The house where the Ramseys stay becomes a place beyond the relentless movement of progress and time; it exists as a place of meaning and happiness and a focus for their collective memory. The Ramsey’s life in London, with its problem(s) of rich and poor and its complexities of employment and unemployment (Woolf, 1992: 8) is contrasted with the simplicity of life on the Hebridean island and as such, the city, although absent is a constant presence throughout the narrative.
The same also could be said for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that constantly juxtaposes the European metropolis with the untamed environment of the British Congo; the stratification of the city giving way to the chaos and terror of the African jungle. This is, of course, as Robert Hampson (2001) details, symbolic of the decay of European empire building at the end of the nineteenth century. As we have seen, each of these four text deals with the city in a remarkably similar way; even works such as To the Lighthouse and Heart of Darkness, where it is largely absent yet evoked through juxtaposition. The city and its effect on the modern psychology could then, indeed, be seen as forming the locus of the Modernist aesthetic vision but, like Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’, it is a city where the centre cannot hold (1987: 210-211) that is unreal and empty like the Western civilisation that built it. The Waste Land, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Heart of Darkness all share a common Modernist vision, a vision of a society in crisis and the city, as wasteland, forms a concrete metonym for this.
Tags: artistic vision, city centres, Modernist art, unreality, urban surroundings, Virginia Woolfe
