A New Concept of Time anti the Subconscious isCharacteristic of the Twentieth Century Novel.

THE MODERN MODE IN LITERATURE

By MARY M. COLU M

ISHOULD like to give as a sub-title tothe one above, The Characteristit: Lit­erature of Our. Age and How to Un­

derstand It. But before getting to the coreof the subject I have a few general observa­tions to make which may seem platitudi­nous, but which, unfortunately, are not partof the consciousness of the publishing andbook-reviewing worlds.

We have in contemporary writing twoclasses of product: one belongs to the artof literature and the other to the trade ofwriting. Naturally very little contempo­rary writing belongs to the art of literature.The bulk of it belongs to the trade ofwriting, and that includes nearly all thebooks you find reviewed in the literarysupplements-novels by people with acompetent, or even mild narrative gift,verses by people with a talent for makingsyllables at the ends of lines rhyme to­gether, treatises on the lungs and liver by

MARY M. COLUM, the wife of the Irish author andpoet, Padraic Colum, to whom she was married in1912" was bom in Ireland. She is a graduate of theNational University of Ireland and the DominicanCollege, Dublin, and came to United States in t914.For some years she was literary critic of THE FORUMand CENTURY 'MAGAZINE, as well as a contributor tomany other magazines and reviews. She was awardedthe John Guggenheim fellowship in literary criticism in1930, and again in 1938. Her book From These Roou,was published in 1937. The accompanying article byMrs. Colum formed the annual Hopwood- addressdelivered before the candidates for the Hopwood prizesand their friends on May 19, 1943-

doctors, works concocted out of informationdug up in a library, biographies and his­tories, books written by people who haveto employ their time somehow or to get aPh.D. or a raise of salary in a college.

The art of literature is something else al­together. Art of any kind-music, litera­ture, painting or sculpture, belongs to theintellectual and spiritual capital, of theworld; it has always been a rare product ofthe human spirit, and a product of therare human spirit. Now when we discussthe Modern Mode in 'writing we naturallymean the writing that belongs to the artof literature, that belongs to the spiritualand intellectual capital to which our agehas contributed and is contributing. Inspite of the confusion, and indeed I mightsay, the scrambling of standards that existsin our day, almost unconsciously when itcomes to conferring a reputation, it is theartist writers who are placed on the pin­nacle while the others have a differentinfluence and a different position. Publicityand fame are not the same thing andare not conferred by the same public.

I do not imagine that any of you confoundbooks that belong to the art of literaturewith the lasting books. A book or a poemmay be a work of art and not live so verylong; it can be simply something that hasgreat significance for its own day. A greatwork of art, of course, has significance fora very long time, for all time maybe. On

20 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW

the other hand, now and again a book sur­vives that has little or no relation to art­I am not here referring to the jumble ofbooks dealt with in histories of literaturenot because of their connection with litera­ture but because of their scientific, politicalor social revelation-a book, say, like TheOrigin of Species, or Newton's Principia;I mean books like Uncle. Tom's Cabin,which has importance through its associa­tion with history rather than through itskinship with art. Let me follow up whatI have said by stating that the work of ourtime that belongs to literature may notbelong to lasting literature, but that itsdistinctiveness lies in its being the aestheticexpression of our age. The characteristicliterature of any age, let me emphasize,represents the expression peculiar to thatage, an expression which did not evidenceitself in that particular way in any otherage. And so, as we have a modern modein painting, a modern mode in architecture,a modern mode in warfare; we have a mod.­ern mode in literature-a literature pecul­iar to the period of the last three decades,or the period, roughly speaking betweenthe last great war and this one.

When we moderns look back at othercenturies we can readily see what was thecharacteristic literary eXpression of eachperiod. Of the sixteenth century in Eng­land and the seventeenth century inFrance, we say it was the poetic drama; ofthe seventeenth century in England, theprose comedy; in the eighteenth century,the characteristic literary expression was theessay in prose and verse, for po~ts of that,time often called their l20etry 'essays'-the«(Essay O}l Man," the "Essay on Criticism,"and so on. In the eighteenth century we

_had poetry in rhymed couplets which ranlike this:

Eternal blessings crown my earliest friend,And round his dwelling guardian saints attend.Blessed be that spot where cheerful guests

retireTo pause from toil and trim their evening fire.

Of course there was far better poetry thanthis written in the eighteenth century, evenfar better by the same poet, Goldsmith, butI quote these lines on purpose, for whenthe characteristic literature of any ageshows itself getting obvious and facile likethis, we know the change is due, eventhough it does not show itself for a whilelonger. The end of the eighteenth and thebeginning of the nineteenth centurybrought the change, as we know.

When we look back on the nineteenthcentury we see that the characteristic pro­duction nearly everywhere was the novel inprose and the lyric in poetry, but especiallycharacteristic of the nineteenth century wasthe realistic novel; the lyric, of course, hadoccurred before. Now realism in literatureis the revelation of the ordinary man ineveryday life, in everyday surroundings.These two literary forms, realism in thenovel and also, in some countries, realismin the drama, and lyricism in poetry, sogripped the general imagination that actu­ally many readers and writers have diffi­culty in realizing that these are not theperennial modes in literature, that they donot give perpetual laws of literary expres­sion. Neither of them, in fact, is the fittingexpression of the present age at all.

The realistic novel is the expression infictional prose of the nineteenth centurywhen science and the methods of sciencecame into civilization and when literaturebegan to be written from facts, from ob­servation and documentation, when thenovelist, instead of drawing primarily uponhis imagination, set down what his eyessaw and his ears heard, set down what heobserved in everyday life of the everydaypeople around him.

Taine, the great literary critic and psy­chologist of the period, supplied the writerswith what I might call the literary slogan;he announced that the matter of all knowl­edge of any kind was little facts, wellchosen, important, significant, amply cir­cumstantiated, and minutely noted. If

THE MODERN MODE IN LITERATURE 21

anybody wants to write a realistic novel heshould head his first page with that sen­tence of Taine's. Even poetry according tothis critic was made up of little facts, lespetits faits sensibles, which may be trans­lated as the "little facts of emotion."

II

The formula of the realistic novel hada sort of scientific preciseness: the authorpicked out characters from the life aroundhim, then he imposed a story on them witha theme and a problem; there were ideasassociated with each character that tied upwith the plot; then the chief character wentthrough a mental, spiritual, and emotionalstress which first of all helped to build upthe story and then carried it on to a con­clusion. It is easy to find this formula atthe back of the great realistic novels likeMadame Bo'Uary, Anna Karen-ina, EstherW liters, Sister Carrie, Of Human Bondage,Old Wives' Tale, and the great realisticplays like Ibsen's Doll's House and HeddaCabler. It is also, of course, the formula'at the' back of a multitude of lesser novelsand 'plays. Some remarkable works wereproduced by this method, and looking backon them we see how characteristic theywere of the nineteenth century and what agenuiite expresSion of the age they were.The realistic novel then was a characteristicexpression of. the nineteenth century as itcould not have been an expression of anyother age, for it was in line with the scien­tific discoveries, the social and political out­look of the period.

Now how are we to know what is thecharacteristic literary expression of our age,what is the modern mode? What are weproducing that our descendants will thinkof as the distinctive expression of our agewhich is different from the expression ofany other age? Let us take a look at someof the novels everybody was reading in thelast few years. First, let us take TheCrapes of Wrath, a very widely read book.

It opens with a description on familiarlines:

To the red country and part of the greycountry in Oklahoma, the last rains came gently,and they did not cut the scarred earth.... Thelast rains lifted the corn quickly and scatteredweed colonies and grass along the sides of theroad so that the grey country and the dark redcountry began to disappear under a green cover.In the last part of May the sky grew pale andthe clouds that had hung in high puffs for solong in the spring were dissipated. The sunflared down oJl' the growing corn day after dayuntil a line of brown spread along the edge ofeach green bayonet. The clouds appeared, andwent away, and in a while they did not tryanymore. The weeds grew darker green toprotect themselves, and they did not spread any­more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thinhard crust, and as the sky became pale, so theearth became pale, pink in the red country, andwhite in the grey country.

Where have we read this sort of descrip­tion before? We have read it in every real­istic novel whether English, American,French, or German. Was there ever a timewhen this sort of description was fresh andnew and done with rousing art? Yes, it wasdone exquisitely in the first realistic novel,in the novel that supplied the design foralmost all realistic novels, Flaubert's Mad­ame Bo'Uary, and as in every novel of thetype, the description comes in one of thefirst couple of pages:

The rain no longer fell; the day was begin-'ning to dawn, and on the branches of the leaflessapple-trees birds were perched motionless, shak­ing their slight feathers in the cold air of themorning. The flat country stretched away untillost from view, and the clumps of trees aroundthe farms made at long intervals dark violetstains on the great grey surface which becamelost in the horizon and one with the gloomytone of the sky. The warm odor of plaster wasmingled with the odor of the morning dew onthe grass.

You can easily see now how the Flaubertianmanner became the model for all such de­scriptions. Artd now I want to give you a

22 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW

sample of the dialogue in The Craepes {)fWrath:

The six cars stopped. Two bookkeepersmoved from car to car. "\Vant to work 1"

Tom answered, "Sure, but what is this?""That's not your affair. \Vant to work?""Sure we do.""Name? ""]oad.""How many men?""Four.""Women?""Two.""Kids? ""Two.""Can all of you work?'""Why-I guess so!'"0. K. Find house sixty-three. Wages five

cents a box. No bruised fruit. All right, movealong now. Go to work right away."

The cars moved on. On the door of eachsquare red house a number was painted. "Sixty,"Tom said. "There's sixty. Must be down thatway. There, sixty-one, sixty-two-There sheis.",

Al parked the truck close to the door of thelittle house. The family came down from thetop of the truck and looked about in bewilder­ment. Two deputies approached. They lookedclosely into each face.

"Name?""Joad," Tom said impatiently. "Say, what

is this here?"One of the deputies took out a long list. "Not

here. Ever see these here? Look at the license.Nope. Ain't got it. Guess they're O.K."

This conversation is typical of theconversations in The Grapes of Wrath:they all might have been taken down ongramaphone records; they have none of theovertones of emotion of characterizationth~lt the great realists have in their conver­sations. A book like The Grapes of Wrath,in my estimation, is realism in its declineand petering out into sterility. If I hadspace I should compare what I have quotedwith a conversation out of Flaubert's Ma­dame Bovary or out of -Tolstoy's Atsr.aKarenina, and then you would see the dif­ference between a master novelist who

could make every line of conversa­tion vibrate with the emotions behind it,who could show you the interior lives ofthe people who spoke the words, and a verycompetent, very intelligent trade novelistwho really only got down the externaland automatic life of his people. This isnot to say but that The Grapes of Wrathis a good sociological study in narrative andfictional form, but it simply does not belongto the art of literature. Even as sociology,or representation, better results might havebeen obtained by a movie camera screeningthe life of the J oads, the scenes they passthrough, and the camps in which theylived, and with a voice-recording machineto take down the conversations.

Let us see if another widely readbook of the last few years, Gone With thBWind, belongs to the characteristic litera­ture of our age. We look at the opening.Here is a description of the heroine on thevery first page:

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but menseldom realized it when caught by her charmas the Tarleton twins were. In her face weretoo sharply blended the delicate features of hermother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent,and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father.But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin,square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green withouta touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashesand slightly tilted at the ends. Above them,her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting astartling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin.. . . . The green eyes in the carefully sweetface were turbulent, wilful, lusty with life, dis­tinctly at variance with decorous demeanor. Hermanners had been imposed upon her by hermother's gentle admonitions and the sterner dis­cipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.

Now this sort of writing has the charmof the familiar; you have read, more orless, that description of the heroine in manynovels. About a hundred and fifty years19o Jane Austen did it first in Emma. Hereis what she wrote:

Emma vVoodhouse, handsome, clever, and

THE MODERN MODE IN LITERATURE 23

rich, with a comfortable home and a happy dis­position, seemed to unite some of the best ble$5­ings of existence; and lived nearly twenty yearsin the world with very little to distress or vexher. The real evils .... of Emma's situationwere the power of having too much of her ownway, and a disposition to think a little too wellof herself; there were the disadvantages whichthreatened alloy to her many enjoyments. Thedangers, however, were at present so unper­ceived, that they did not by any means rankas misfortunes with her.

You see that Jane Austen manages to tellyou a great deal about her heroine withoutthe cluttered detail that is in Cone Withthe Wind. The clutter got in through nov­elist after novelist, for a century and a halftrying to imitate Jane Austen and improv~on her. Of course, Cone With the Windis an entertaining and readable novel andit saved multitudes of people from ~nnuiand from the trouble of trying to decidewhat to do with their leisure hours. Ofcourse, The Crapes of Wrath is interestingan~ . informi.ng, but both these types ofwntmg are, m one way or another, a hang­over from the nineteenth century.

What is really new in our time, what isreally characteristic of our time, has notf~und expression in these typical andWJdely read books. We find in them noexpression of the new discoveries about thenature of man or the range of his emotionsor the workings of his mind and his mem~ory. For if the nineteenth century was thecentury of scientific discovery and scientificprocedure which naturally found their echoand reflection in literature, the twentiethcen~ury ~as been the century of psycho­IO&,Ica1 dIscovery, of new conceptions of theUniverse, new conceptions of history, andthese, too, are making their entrance intoart and literature.

IIIWhen did the characteristic litera­

ture of our time begin to show itself? Itbegan in about the second decade at" thiscentury when a writer named Marcel

Proust realized that the influence of Time?n people had never been really expressedlll.lIterature, and he wrote a long novel withT~me as the hero or protagonist, showing!Ime as th~ most influential of all thingsIII human hfe. He was given a clue as tohow. to. reveal this discovery through thestudIes III the nature of time of the twenti­eth century philosophers and scientists. Helearned a great deal from the lectures andwritings of Bergson, and he learned notonly about time, but he learned about mem­ory, which Bergson called the direct intui­tion of the past; and he saw how it was allconnected with the new studies concerningthe nature of man, with the new discoveriesin p~ychology, especially those concerningthe Importance of the subconscious. Hismind fertilized ?y this sort of knowledge,he set out to wnte a novel of a kind thathad never been written before and he re­vealed people in a way that had never beenrevealed before. He gave us a whole gal­lery of personages, all under the domina­tion of ever transforming Time characterswhom his readers got to know' more inti­mate~y than ~he people they knew in every­day lIfe. ThIS long novel in different partswas entitled, as you know, A la recherchedu temps perdu, (The Search for Lost!ime) . .Th~ title, as given in English byItS dlstlllgulshed translator, is Remem­brance of Things Past, from Shakespeare'ssonnet, actually misrepresents Proust's in­tention.

And the characteristic literature of ourage had another beginning when a writernamed James Joyce, under the influence ofFreud's and Jung's discoveries in connec­tion with the subconscious, realized that hecoul~ reveal the whole past of people bysh?wlllg everything they did and every­thIng that passed through their minds in afew ho~rs of time. In Ulysses, he tookabout eIghteen hours in the lives of a fewchara~ers i? D~bli~, and by representingall theIr actIons Ill.thls period and the sightsthey saw on the streets, in houses saloons, ,

THE QUARTERLY REVIEW

newspaper offices, hospitals, brothels, andby digging up the content of their subcon­scious he was able to evoke the whole pastof his characters and suggest their future.He broke down that old stereotyped form,with its beginning, middle, and end; hethrew.away the opening description of themise-en-scene; all that description of theexterior appearance of the characters, andwithout any exposition he plunged rightinto the middle of the action. Here is theopening of Ulysses, and how different it isfrom the openings of those books which be­longed to the realistic literature of thenineteenth century and which no matterhow expert are now just hang":overs. Thisis the first page of Ulysses--doubtlessmany of you are familiar with it:

Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from thestairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which amirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dress­ing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently be­hind hini by the mild morning air. He held thebowl aloft and intoned:

"Introibo ad altare Dei."

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairsand called up coarsely:

"Come up, Kinch, come up, you fearful Jes­uit."

Solemnly he came forward and mounted theround gun-rest.. He faced about and blessedgravely thrice the tower, the surrounding coun­try and the awaking mountains. Then, catchingsight of Stephen Daedalus, he bent towards himand made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling inhis throat and shaking his head. Stephen Daed­alu~, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on thetop of the staircase, and looked coldly at theshaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine inits length, and at the light untonsored hair,grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under themirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

"Back to barracks," he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

"-For this, 0 dearly beloved, is the genuineChristine, body and soul and blood and ouns.Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One

moment. A little trouble about those white cor­puscles. Silence all."

A book like Ulysses, when it first cameout twenty years ago, was very difficult forthe reader, for not only was the old logicalform and matter of the novel displaced,but the reader had to know somethingabout the new discoveries concerning thesubconscious and the association of ideas.Something similar could be said about T. S.Eliot's Wasle Land, which came out withina year or two of Ulysses. These and certainother modern writers made a different kindof demand on the reader than previouswriters did: it was as if they said to thereader, "Your mind is composed, not onlyof the hereditary ideas and emotions com­mon to large sections of mankind, not onlyof the common physical experiences; it ismade up of the books you have read, tne::music you have heard, the pictures youhave seen, the countries you have traveledin, the history you have understood. It ismade up of all these in addition to what be­liefs you have been taught, the nervousorganism you have inherited or that yourenvironment has given you. Your person­ality at any moment of duration is reallycomposed of everything that has impingedon your consciousness." Until a reader un­derstands the approach a good deal ofmodern writing will be obscure and maygive the impression of a man talking tohimself of some experience inside himselfof which he alone has the key. But if anintelligent reader with a good training inliterature finds after careful attention thata piece of contemporary writing has nomeaning for him, it may mean there is nomeaning in it, anyway, for as well as seriouswork a monstrous lot of humbug is beingturned out in what purports to be the mod­ern mode.

IVJoyce's method is far different from

Proust's, but both reveal many of the samethings:' people affected by time, people

THE MODERN MODE IN LITERATURE 25

urged by unconscious and uncontrollableforces within them, people dominated bymemory, personal memory and racial mem­ory. As the realistic novel of the nine­teenth century was affected by scientificdiscoveries and scientific procedure, thisnew writing in prose and verse is affectedby psychological and philosophical discov­eries. These, as translated into literature,might be summed up as follows:

( I ). Time is felt duration. We do notthink real time, we live it; it is the verystuff of which psychic life is made.

(2). In every moment of <lction thereis the influence of our entire past--ourcharacter or actions have been shaped byeverything that has gone before.

(3). Our consciousness is memory;mind is memory; therefore these newnovels and much of the new poetry are all asort of autobiography. This is true, notonly of Joyce and Proust, but of ThomasWolfe, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, andmany others.

(4). We change without ceasing; aslong as we are alive, we change from mo­ment to moment, but time and memory re­main as paramount factors in our existence.The psychic life of an adult human being isa conglomeration of memories though atanyone moment our conscious memorypicks out for immediate use only a few oddrecollections. Life, indeed, might be saidto be a continuous process in which newmemories are superimposed on alreadyexisting ones. And this explains why mod­ern authors do not engage themselves intelling a story; they present the stream ofevents, thoughts, and emotions that makeup the lives of their characters.

I should have to give many lectures toexplain in any detail the evolution of thenovel from l\1adame Bovary to FinnegansWake, and of poetry from Shelley to ourtime. It is my business now to give you inone paper some idea of how we have ar­rived at writing such as in Finnegans Wakeand which is beginning to influence all

other kinds of writing; you can see its influ­ence not only in the last play of ThorntonWilder's, The Skin of Our Teeth, in thelast book of poems by T. S. Eliot, but evenin up-to-date advertising.

Now, as realistic literature-the realisticnovel-had its beginning in France, so thereaction against it started in France. Itbecame not only a reaction against the ex­pression of ordinary everyday life, but areaction against the use of ordinary every­day language. A poet like Rimbaud, whosename you so often see now mentioned inthe literary reviews, declared that litera­ture should not be about external life atall: a writer should force himself outsideordinary experience; the external world,the everyday world, was a receiving world;there was no reality to it. Now one mustremember that these ideas represent veryold beliefs of the human race and are atthe back of many religions. These ideaslater were further developed by StephaneMallarme who insisted that the worldwhich teal writers should express is verydifferent from the world in which one lives,eats, sleeps; true reality, interior reality,is in visions, dreams, even in hallucinations.Literature should express the interior lifeof man, the interior life of the world, notthose physical and material conditions suchas our contemporary realistic literature in­sists on expressing. Mallarme, like Rim- !

baud, insisted that in the future writerswould have to give their energies to theproblems of language, for ordinary lan­guage had been developed by the practicalintelligence for the needs of everyday lifeand was of little use any more for highliterary expression; words would have tobe used with new meanings, for every wordhad many meanings, not only its objectivedictionary meaning-,-it might even have,according to Rimbaud, a color meaning­words especially had an association interiormeaning. It is the use of words in theirassociation interior meaning that has madeso much of modern poetry difficult.

26 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW

The discoveries of the new psychologistsand philosophers helped all the new liter­ary ideas along, for they declared that theordinary everyday man who eats, drinks,and sleeps is only part of the whole man,a small part of him at that. The mind ofman was compared by the psychologists toan iceberg of which only about a third orfourth is visible above water and aboutthree-fourths is below water. Now the ad­vanced writers, the characteristic twentiethcentury writers, said, "Let us express thispart of man, this greater part that is, as itwere below water, below consciousness."So writers like Marcel Proust, Paul Valeryin France, Stefan George in Germany,James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,to some extent Thomas Wolfe, also to someextent W. B. Yeats, the greatest poet of ourtime, tried to express both the little bit ofman that is the everyday man and the largepart of him that is not everyday but that issubmerged in the subconscious. Finally,James Joyce in Finnegans Wake threw overthe idea of expressing the everyday man ineveryday surroundings at all, and devotedhimself completely to man in his uncon..;.scious or subconscious, man wholly in his in­terior workings, in his memories racial andpersonal. To do this he took over all theideas of those who were in reaction againstthe methods of realism-the ideas of Rim­baud on the insignilkance of everyday lifeand on the necessity of using words in manydifferent meanings, the ideas of Verlainethat the musical sound of words and nottheir logical meanings were important, theideas of Mallarme that literature shouldnot explain but suggest, that the theme ina piece of literature might have to be or­chestrated as in music, that the logical de­velopment might have to be stopped in themiddle of a sentence to take up some ac­cessory theme, that a writer might even,to express all this, have to create his ownvocabulary and his own language.

Every one of these ideas, plus the ideasand discoveries of the psychologists, plus

the ideas and discoveries of the philoso­phers and philosophic historians are inFinnegans Wake. Some of you who havelooked into this book may have thoughtit too cryptic for perusal, or even a hodge­podge that no one could understand, writ­ten by a person who did not know whathe was doing. But Joyce knew exactly whathe was doing, and his book is bound tohave greater influence on writers, eventhough it can never have an extensive pop­ularity among ordinary readers. Now I amgoing to open this cryptic book and quotea certain passage. It ought to be readaloud because the sound conveys part ofthe meaning. The passage that I give herehas but little to do with the objectiveworld; it describes the effect of twilightfalling on a flowing river and on its banks,the river in this case being the river Liffeyin Dublin but becoming the representativeof all rivers and the symbol of all life.Now I must ask you to allow your logicalintelligence to remain in abeyance as in lifeit so often does, and allow your imagina­tion, your emotions, your sense of thesounds of words to take in the meaning:

Can't hear with the waters of. The chitter­ing waters of. Flittering bats, field mice bawktalk. Ho! are you not gone home? What, TomMalone? Can't hear with bawk 01 bats, all ofthim liffeying waters of. Ho! talk save us! Mvfoos on't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. Ade told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daugh­t~r-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night!my ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonderstone. Tell me John or Shaun? Who wereShem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of?Night now. Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm'Night, Night. Tell me tale of stem or stone.Beside the rive ring waters of, hitherandthither­iog waters of. Night.

In the ending of the book the river, thesymbol of life and history flows into thesea, in a passage about Death and Resur­rection. There passes through the groupsubconsciousness echoes of all that peoplehave heard of dying and resurrection,

THE MODERN MODE IN LITERATURE

angels coming to take the soul away, thenthe belief that some beloved person, fatheror mother, husband or wife, son or daugh­ter, comes at the moment of death to greetthe dying. Faint memories of childhoodand of his past come before the dying one.Then there comes the memories of storiesof the end of the world, of parables aboutthe keys of heaven and the twilight of thegods. The image of the river is alwayspresent, the river flowing on forever, flow­ing into the sea, always beginning again sothat the very first words in FinnegansWake are a continuation of the very lastwords. All these ideas, feelings, and associ­ations represent the effort on the part ofliterature to be an interpretation of life andnot simply a record of everyday objectivehappenings and emotions.

The following passage from a recentpoem by T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, alsotreats of Death and Resurrection in a waywhich shows a strong influence from Finne­gans Wake.

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.Through the unknown, remembered gateWhen the last of earth left to discoverIs that which was the beginning;At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfallAnd the children in the apple-treeNot known, because not looked forBut heard, half-heard, in the stiIlnessBetween two waves of the sea.Quick now, here, now, always--A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything)And all shall be well andAll manner of thing shall be wellWhen the tongues of flame are in-foldedInto the crowned knot of fireAnd the fire and the rose are one.

A comparison of the end of. F~nneg~nsWake and the end of Little G1ddmg wIththe lyrics in Yeats' remarkable play,Resurrection will be very revelatory of theconcern of the most characteristic modernliterature with Death and Resurrection,with the end of one civilization and thebeginning of a new one. ..

In conclusion I feel that It IS necessaryto say that' not all the real literature pro­duced in any age belongs to the character­istic literature of the age. There is alwaysan amount of great literature produced thathas not the special characteristic of any age.But that is a very different thing from thestale continuation of a worn out form. Thewriting I have discussed here as character­istic, as of the modern mode, is the specialaesthetic expression of this age and couldnot be produced in any other age.