Guillaume Apollinaire Zone 1913 T S Eliot The

Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone” (1913); T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) Modernisms and World War

Modernity / modernism - a break with the past (modernity invents tradition) - disjointed time (the ‘contemporariness of the non-contemporary’) - space-time compression (collapse of space, acceleration of time) - the rise of the everyday (the quest for the ordinary, the momentary, the quotidian) - the fragmentation of experience (and the attempt to fabricate new wholes out of fragments, through a process of bricolage, collage, montage)

Pablo Picasso, “Ma Jolie, ” 1911 -12

In the end you are weary of this ancient world The most modern European is you Pope Pius X (“Zone”)

Pope Pius X, in office 1903 -1914

Anti-modernism Pascendi dominici gregis (“Feeding the Lord's Flock”) – papal encyclical issued in 1907, condemning ‘modernism’ in religion and culture Anti-modernist oath of 1 September 2010: I declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred tradition …

The modernist everyday You read the handbills the catalogues the singing posters So much for poetry and the prose is in the papers … from Monday morning to Saturday evening four times a day Directors workers and beautiful shorthand typists go their way

Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about … Now you are on the Riviera among The lemon-trees that flower all year long … Here you are in Marseilles among the watermelons Here you are in Coblentz at the Giant’s Hostelry Here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree

La Zone, 1913

“Since the mid-1970 s, the colloquial term zone has often been associated with the troubled post-war housing estates on the outskirts of large French cities. However, it once referred to a more circumscribed space: the zone non aedificandi (nonbuilding zone) which encircled Paris from the 1840 s to the 1940 s. ” (James Cannon, The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840 -1944)

Residents of the Zone, Ivry, 1913

The Zone = a band of wastelands [terrains vagues] encircling Paris near the old fortifs (fortifications); occupied, at the beginning of the twentieth century, by poor and marginalised people (Jews, Romani, immigrants, the unemployed)

Weeping you watch the wretched emigrants … They hope to prosper in the Argentine And to come having made their fortune A family transports a red eiderdown as your heart … Often in the streets I have seen them in the gloaming Taking the air and like chessmen seldom

Adieu Soleil coupé [sun corseless head] [sun slit throat] [beheaded sun]

The Waste Land as modernist landmark “The poem is known for its obscure nature— its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time; its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. Despite this, it has become a touchstone of modern literature” (Wikipedia)

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Stravinsky, Le Sacre de Printemps (1913)

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919)

Original title of TWL “You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices. ” (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend)

Is there a single narratorial consciousness to the poem – one voice ventriloquising the others? Or does it contain a genuine plurality of voices?

C. L. R. James on Eliot: ‘He is of special value to me, in that in him I find more often than elsewhere, and beautifully and precisely stated, things to which I am completely opposed’

Three contexts for reading The Waste Land • The aftermath of World War I (1919 -22) • Citation as collaboration • The birth of radio

Postwar “The horror!” (the original epigraph to The Waste Land) “Paris was a nightmare and everyone there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without …” (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919)

• The 1919 Treaty at Versailles ushered in a power vacuum in Europe, a period of inflation, mass unemployment, and middleman profiteering • From one angle, The Waste Land can be read as a critique of speculative finance and modern banking for their role in undermining the foundations of culture • TWL is also a postwar poem in its depiction of demobbed crowds pouring through the streets – a mirror of the crowds of ghostly war dead

Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920) “[Tradition] cannot be inherited” – i. e. , it must be invented TWL treats poetry as intrinsically collaborative with the past, considered as a bottomless well of citational sources

Radio radio • The BBC begins broadcasting in 1922 • Widespread fears over the potential power of the new mass media: radio and film (cf. John Reith, first BBC Managing Director) • High/low culture juxtapositions – Marie Lloyd’s music hall and ragtime Shakespeare (‘O O O that Shakespeherian rag’)

“Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. ” (Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”)

Dead men speak “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” Cité fourmillante, cité plein de rêves, Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant (Baudelaire, “Les Sept Vieillards, ” Tableaux Parisiens) Swarming city, city full of dreams, Where the spectre in broad daylight accosts the passerby

“The two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead. ” (John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication)