The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature : A Study in Self-Fragmentation

am also grateful to the Polytechnic Research Committee for helping to fund a consultancy visit to Canada during the early stages of writing the book.I am indebted to Faber and Faber Ltd and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc for permission to quote lines from the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Dennis Brown The Modernist Self which is pluralist, heterogeneous and discontinuous. The term 'fragmentation' may bear a double implication. Writers represent fragmentary selves, and such representations constitute selfhood as inherently fragmentary. There is a subtle complicity between perceived reality and constructed description. And this complicity is not a static relationship but a developing torsion. Hence my frequent use of an adjective which is simultaneously a present participle -a trope much favoured by Modernist writers because it signifies ongoing process: 'fragmenting' is used here to express not a fixed conceptualisation but an active, exploratory process.My full title also presupposes some kind of pre-existent unity which is in the process of being broken down. That unity constitutes a model of selfhood which is autonomous, integral and continuous -what Eliot in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' called the' substantial unity of the soul'. 4 The Modernist discourse of selfhood is haunted by the ghost of some lost self which was once coherent and self-sufficient -Joyce's Ulysses, Pound's heroes of the Renaissance virtU, Yeats's men of 'pride', Ford's pre-war Tietjens, Eliot's Fisher King (before the curse), Woolf's Percival in The Waves. When Bloom meditates on the baffling discontinuity 'me -and me now', or when Eliot's Thames maiden laments her desolate estrangement, 'I can connect / Nothing with nothing', they are expressing an experiential Fall from some mythic selfwholeness.Such self-wholeness had been a normative assumption (and indeed a construction) of most cultural discourse up until the Modernist movement. In literature this was particularly so in representations of selfhood since the seventeenth century. Selfhood in Hamlet, King Lear or the poems of John Donne could be represented as variable and complex, 5 but by the time of Milton an integrating, unitary pressure is at work. The writing subject constitutes its self-experience as a bounded, coherent whole: When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide. Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light denied, I fondly ask . . . 6 Dissolving Self 'A Consciousness Disjunct! In his farewell poem to London of 1920, 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', Ezra Pound sketched an extraordinary portrait of a turn-of-thecentury poet. Through a pastiche of Jamesian prose, he effects an almost Cubist dissipation of essence: Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession, Irresponse to human aggression, Amid the precipitation, down-float Of insubstantial manna, Lifting the faint susurrus Of his subjective hosannah. 2 'Personality' (which he traced back to the Renaissance), and his 'BROKEN AND MAD' Critical accounts of Siegfried Sassoon's poetry tend, inevitably, to trace the change in his attitude to war and the development of a more Realist and ironic style. Jon Silkin, for instance, quotes Robert Graves to indicate 'how much Sassoon's earlier attitude to the war changed, and how dramatically, when seen in relation to a background that seemed unlikely to equip him to deal with war and to make a substantial protest against it' .28 The change is indeed dramatic and based on first-hand battle experience. The aspect of that change which is relevant here is the way his war experiences radically modified his sense of the self and led him, in some An exploration of how key modern writers challenged conventional ways of characterizing selfhood, thus developing a discourse expressive of the subtleties of experience in a post-Freudian world long before the self-representation theories of the post-structuralists and post-modernists. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-13 Dissolving Self....Pages 14-42 Self at War....Pages 43-73 Fragmentary Self....Pages 74-107 Self-deception and Self-conflict....Pages 108-140 Discontinuous Self....Pages 141-173 Conclusion....Pages 174-184 Back Matter....Pages 185-206 This is a discussion of the Modernist Self in 20th century English Literature. Specifically a study in Self-Fragmentation.