Summary
In Chapter Two, VIII, “A Note on Modernism”, of Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said suggests that many of the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, usually derived from purely internal dynamics in Western society, include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.215 / printed p.188).
Details
- Conrad, Forster, Malraux and T. E. Lawrence take narrative from the triumphalist experience of imperialism into the extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality, and corrosive irony, the formal patterns recognized as the hallmarks of modernist culture, which also embraces Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Proust, Mann, and Yeats (PDF p.215 / printed p.188).
- The formal dislocations and displacements in modernist culture, and most strikingly its pervasive irony, are influenced by two disturbing factors Seeley mentions as consequences of imperialism: the contending native and the fact of other empires (PDF p.215-216 / printed p.188-189).
- A new encyclopedic form became necessary, with three features: a circularity of structure, inclusive and open at the same time (Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, À la recherche, The Waste Land, Cantos, To the Lighthouse); a novelty based on reformulating old fragments drawn self-consciously from disparate locations, sources and cultures; and the irony of a form substituting art for the once-possible synthesis of the world empires (PDF p.216-217 / printed p.189-190).
- When Britannia can no longer be assumed to rule the waves forever, reality must be held together by the artist, in history rather than in geography; spatiality becomes the characteristic of an aesthetic rather than of political domination (PDF p.217 / printed p.190).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, Imperialism, Contrapuntalism