Carl Krockel
Seoul National University, South Korea
Modernists at War: Lawrence and T.S. Eliot
In my paper I will explore how the early debates regarding English Modernism were rooted in the experience and memory of the war. Eliot's description of Joyce's (and by implication, his own) "mythic method" as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility which is contemporary history," helped to establish a reading of their Modernism as a triumph over the trauma of war. In a world where language had lost touch with experience, whether in political speeches, press reports or in people's everyday life, their work promised an alternative world in which language at least reached out towards an ordered, meaningful experience. Lawrence's language was dismissed by Eliot as a form of emotional demagoguery – "rotting, and rotting others".
I will focus my counterargument on the first version of Lawrence's Women in Love. Previously the novel had been placed at 1922 on the calendar of Modernism, on the tail of Ulysses and The Waste Land in 1921. However we can place Lawrence's 1916 version alongside the first British reactions of protest to the war. If, then, The First "Women in Love" represents the first Modernist response to the war in its fully developed state, it follows that we can reconfigure the history of Anglo-American Modernism which followed the war.
I am not concerned with the 'settling of old scores', rather I wish to draw attention to the fundamental affinities between Lawrence and Eliot, in terms of their experience of history, and in their imaginative response to it. I will argue that, like The First "Women in Love", The Waste Land did not represent a mastery over the immense panorama of futility that is history, but a traumatised submission to it. Consequently, we can look at the rise to cultural dominance of Eliot's Modernism in the Twenties in a different light. Ulysses and The Waste Land were regarded by contemporaries as the twin columns that could support a renewed post-war, Modernist culture. Meanwhile the 'turgid' ravings of Women in Love, to quote from John Middleton Murry's review, were regarded as a symptom of the age, not its cure. But what if both texts are symptoms of the age? Then the "Age of Eliot", founded on a text which is more a document of psychiatric abreaction than a poem that continues a classical tradition, is built upon a presumption, not the achievement, of mastery over history.