Mud and Metaphysics: The Matter of Modernism

Abstract

Abstract In a recent essay, Michael North meditates on the persistence of Modernism as the ‘cultural dominant of our time’, suggesting that our own culture can be described as the ‘afterlife’ of the aesthetic movements of the early twentieth century. In its powerful identification of the modern with the new, Modernism provided the terms with which we are still constrained to theorize our ideas of the contemporary. We live in a condition of belatedness, then, North argues, with what was once the triumph of the new weighing upon us as ‘the dead hand of the past’. I propose that this modernism and its obsession with the new has to be weighed against a counter-tendency during the same period which sought to curb a metaphysics of originality and constant innovation with a modernism preoccupied with its own limits and with the obdurate materiality of a world resistant to aesthetic fantasy. I draw my polarizing terms – mud and metaphysics – from Ezra Pound and then contrast his visionary fantasies with a range of writings that assume the absolute externality of things and other people. The essay looks at texts by Franz Kafka, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett, and then surveys the nineteenth-century current of sceptical materialism that provides a sort of pre-history of this modernism but which was overshadowed by the lyric materialism so rousingly proclaimed by Marinetti and the Futurists. In conclusion I turn to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves where we find that her usual scepticism is tempered by a jubilant grasp of the ‘mud-stained’ real.