5A REVISION QUESTIONS
Eliot, Joyce, Wilde
In the early 20th century a sense of loss of shared values and lack of cultural and moral points
of reference of the modern man is expressed in poetry. Which author deals with this theme
and how?
In the field of poetry Eliot would attempt to render this cultural fragmentation, particularly in “ The
Waste Land”.
The subject of poetry becomes not the expression of the poet’s feelings but the way his
consciousness operates and by extension the nature of human consciousness. Since it isn’t possible
to have access to the consciousness of another man, the poem itself becomes impersonal, a
construction that reflects the operation of the reader’s consciousness rather than the expression of
the author’s consciousness. Reality becomes an individual construction.
What are the main features of the literary output of the first half of the 20th century?
The literature of the first half of the 20th century reflects the spiritual crisis which war had brought.
The destruction of accepted ideals under the impact of terrific events caused a widespread sense of
disillusionment and despair. Therefore a sense of uncertainty of aim, cynicism and disbelief in man
as an individual are the main features of this period.
What are the themes in Eliot’s “ The Waste Land” ?
The themes are :
- Insignificance of modern man
- The meaningful link with the past
- The emptiness and sterility of modern life
In this poem the images are juxtaposed and fragmented and it is the ordering that the reader finds
which counts. The fact that each individual can find an order, his own order, in the poem proves
that human mind can give order to the reality outside itself. The fragmentation of the poem is a
reflection of the fragmentation of contemporary culture for which each individual must try to find a
personal order to follow.
In the poem there is no plot, but a sequence of images, situations and characters linked by a
common theme: desolation.
It is a representation of a journey through the modern world with its decay and sterility, not the
actual world devastated by war, but the world of the spirit of the modern man. The Waste Land is
Europe which is disintegrating in a sort of apathy.
The poem is divided in 5 sections. The First section “ The Burial of the Dead” deals with the
squalor of life of a modern town:, London, adopting a symbolist technique. Eliot gives a ghastly
description of London which is unreal because the crowd of office workers walking in the fog seem
lifeless. They are like people returning from the dead.
Explain the section of The Waste Land ‘ Unreal City’
The passage gives us a ghastly description of modern London. London is ‘unreal’ because the
crowd of office-workers going to the City, seems lifeless. They are like people returning from the
dead, and the church bell, more like a funeral tolling-bell, strikes the hour when work begins. The
city is unreal too because it is not described; only the people create a picture of it. We know only
that it is early on a winter’s morning, and the brown fog which obscures everything makes the scene
doubly unreal.
The poet greets Stetson, who was with him at the battle of Mylae, Eliot disregards the timedifference, from the Punic wars to the 20th century London. He calls him ‘my brother’: they are all
alike, the poet, Stetson and the rest of the zombie figures, all indifferent in the face of life, death, or
life-in-death. Thy all, as in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, from which the last lines of the passage are
taken,suffer from one of the seven Deadly Sins, spiritual sloth, which is the negation of life and
God.
The reference to Dante’s Inferno emphasises this concept: ‘I had not thought death had undone so
many..’ gives us a clue to the characteristic of the crowd. In Dante they are the spirits who, in life,
recognized neither the good nor the bad ,and all Eliot’s philosophy was directed towards
condemnation of such people.
What symbolism can be found in the Waste Land?
The symbolism is referred to one of the themes of The Waste Land: sterility. Eliot presents sterility
at various levels:
-
natural: the land is dry,rocky, polluted and unfruitful
social: people find it difficult to communicate with each other and are unable to love
spiritual: people no longer believe in religious values and in Christ as the spiritual saviour
So only trough rain love and faith will our “ waste land” be saved and restored to fertility.
What does Eliot mean by “ objective correlative”?
He means a set of fictious objects, people or situations whose nature ( replacing the poet’s
personality which disappears) become s the symbolical equivalent of the poet’s inner condition and
feelings. In this way the poet conveys an emotion without a direct statement but, indirectly, through
something suggesting one’s own feeling.
The objective correlative is different from symbolism, where the poet is always present,just because
the poet’s emotions are represented not directly but indirectly through something (
landscapes,objects,persons, images etc.) so that the reader may correlate them with particular
emotions.
What are the themes in Eliot’s poetry?
-
modern man’s alienation from society
the problem of faith in modern civilization
the sense that the present is inferior to the past
the fear of living the moral, spiritual and sentimental emptiness of our time
What was Eliot’s conception of poetry?
He maintained that poetry must be used as an instrument to express not the poet’s own sentiments,
he advocated the complete objective impersonality of art against the romantic conception of poetic
subjectivism. According to him poetry must communicate something, even before being
understood, first of all through rhythm and musicality. In other words we can enjoy even a foreign
poem although we don’t know the language in which it is written
Why did Eliot revalue the past?
He revalued the importance of tradition since, he said, past and present co-exist in man and the past
is an active part of the present. A poet should therefore turn to the past, outside its country too,and
write a sort of universal poetry, drawing on all those experiences that have paved the way for our
modern culture.This is why Eliot’s poetry is so rich in universal symbols, in quotations from works
of the European literary tradition and in references to ancient rituals, mythical events and religious
allusions, all drawn from modern anthropological studies.
Why did Eliot convert to Anglicanism?
Because he found the answer to his own questionings and to the despair of the modern world
lacking faith and religion.
What role of the artist did he present in his critical essay?
The artist had to be impersonal and to separate ‘ the man who suffers from the man who creates’.
Both Eliot and Joyce believed in the depersonalization of the artist. The artist , like the God of
creation remains above his work, he is invisible.
What are the themes in the Hollow men?
The emptiness of the modern world, spiritual death,paralysis,the search for God, the inability to
pray, the burred boundaries between the world of the living and the dead.
What are the general characteristic of the writers of the first half of the 20th century?
They refused traditional values and tried to judge the events from various points of view, no longer
giving the reader an objective truth, but the inner subjective truth of each character.
Whose philosophical theories were applied to “ the stream of consciousness”?
Those of Henry Bergson about time duration, as inner time ( the flux of incommunicable
impressions,thoughts,flashes of the individual mind) eludes conventional clock time; the technique
was based also on The Principle of Psychology by William James, who considered mental activity
a “ stream of thought”, as it flows continually like a stream.
What does Joyce meant by “ epiphany” ?
The term really means “ manifestation”, as in the showing of the Christ child to the Magi. For
Joyce it indicates that moment when a simple object or fact, an ordinary situation, suddenly flash
out with meaning and make a person realize his/her condition.
What is the function of the stream of consciousness in Joyce’s works?
To convey the life of an individual in a single day, and in the absence of a plot, Joyce chose to give
the minutest details of that day and especially the characters’ process of thinking. The “ stream of
consciousness” is a difficult prose style which does away with syntactical grammatical connectives
and juxtaposes apparently incongruous images, in the attempt to show the chaotic flow of thoughts
in the human mind.
How does Joyce apply the “ mythical method” to his Ulysses?
The wanderings and tribulations of the epic hero, his adventures through different realms and seas
and his final return home to his wife are used in Ulysses as a parallel to the events in the life of
common men and women in modern Dublin. Joyce uses the mythical method to stress the lack of
heroism, of ideals, of love and trust in the modern world. The epic structure becomes a mirror in
which to reflect the modern waste land. Together with Eliot’s Waste Land, Ulysses is one of the
greatest example of the reworking of myth in modernist literature.
Ulysses ‘ story has always been taken to represent allegorically man’s journey though life. The
change operated by Joyce is from the universality of the ancient epic to the limitations and lack of
heroism of the modern novel: if Homer exalts Ulysses as a man who has “seen many cities of men”,
Leopold Bloom only knows Dublin.
Molly corresponds to Penelope, but unlike her, she is not faithful to her husband. Their relationship
is typical of the lack of passion and strong family ties of modern life.
What is the real meaning of Joyce’s hostility toward the church?
His hostility toward the Church was the revolt of the artist-heretic against the official doctrine and a
provincial church which had taken possession of Irish minds.
What was the writer’s task according to Joyce?
The artist’s task was to render life objectively in order to give back to the readers a true image of it.
This necessarily led to the isolation and detachment of the artist from society.
How are the stories in ‘ Dubliners’ arranged and what sort of description is employed in each
story?
Dubliners consists of 15 stories, they all lack obvious actions, but they disclose human situations,
moments of intensity and lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation. They are arranged into four
groups: childhood, adolescence,maturity and public life.
What is the’ falling snow’ at the end of ‘ The Dead’ symbol of?
Gabriel realizes with a shock, that he had never really known his wife, that she might never have
loved him, and that therefore his life is a failure: he had never lived. So the falling snow at the end
is symbolic as it falls ‘ upon the living and the dead’ making everything indifferentiated.
Where does Ulysses complex structure derive from?
Joyve combined several methods to present a variety of matters. The stream of consciousness
technique , the cinematic technique with the literary equivalent of close-ups, flashbacks, tracking
shots. He created a sort of ‘ collage technique, quite similar to the technique used by the cubist
artists who depicted a scene from all perspectives.
What is Molly’s soliloquy like?
It’s a mazy outpouring where time and identity slip and dissolve. Her thoughts are free to move
backwards and forwards in time to mix present past and future Her apparently chaotic flow of
thoughts is underlined by the complete absence of punctuation. She is in bed at night, relaxed and
drowsy, isolated from the world outside so that the flow of her thoughts pours out uninhibited. The
result is deliberately chaotic, but Joyce seems to suggest that from this chaos arises the possibility
of everything, perhaps even new forms and expressions of life. Molly affirms the value of living at
any level with her closing, repeated, “ ….and yes I will Yes.”
What is the difference between the Stream of Consciousness and the Interior Monologue?
The term Stream of Consciousness was first used by the psychologist William James in 1890 to
refer to the unbroken flow of thought and awareness of the human mind. As a literary term stream
of consciousness refers to any attempt by a writer to represent the conscious and subconscious
thoughts and impressions in the mind of a character. This technique takes the reader inside the
narrating character’s mind, where he sees the world of the story through the thoughts and senses of
the focal character.
At the beginning of the 20th century some authors developed a stream of consciousness technique
called interior monologue. The term is borrowed from drama, where “monologue” refers to the part
in the play where an actor expresses his inner thoughts aloud to the audience. The interior
monologue represents an attempt to transcribe a character’s thoughts, sensations and emotions. In
order to faithfully represent the rhythm and flow of consciousness, the writer often disregards
traditional syntax, punctuation and logical connections. He does not intervene to guide the reader or
to impose a narrative order on the mental process.
Give the definition of myth and explain the reason why many modernist writers revived
classical mythology in their work? What is the function of the myth?
The myth is a traditional or legendary story used to explain religious or supernatural phenomena
and dealing with heroes, gods, the forces of nature etc. The myth served to explain, in terms of
intentions and actions of supernatural beings,why the world is what it is and why things happen as
they do. Stories like those of Ulysses, Prometheus, Orpheus etc can account for passions like the
desire of knowledge, ambition and love, that have always characterized man’s life since the
beginning of time. In other words myths provide paradigms of meanings whereby we can interpret
reality.
It was exactly this interpretative capacity that rendered myth an indispensable tool for the Modernist
writers, who perceived reality as fragmentary and unrelated. The order of myth, therefore, was to
take the place of the disorder of reality
The most important writers who made use of the myth in their works are ; J. Joyce,in “ Ulysses “, T.
S.Eliot in The waste Land but also Ezra Pound, Yeats and Lawrence
1) ”All art is quite useless”. Explain this aphorism from the preface to The Picture of Dorian
Gray in the light of Wilde’s theory of art.
Wilde’s theory of art is the aesthetic one: he is convinced that art mustn’t have an aim, it isn’t moral or
immoral, it’s “art for art’s sake”; this is true for him about all art-works, such as books and pictures;
they can’t influence anyone in any way, they are just well or badly made. His theory is partly drawn
from Keats, who worshipped beauty and believed that it’s the only truth we can know; Wilde
elaborates his thought and in his work “The picture of Dorian Gray” art gives pleasure and Dorian, its
protagonist, lives searching pleasure; his life was art itself.
2) What is meant by Victorian compromise? How did the publication in installments influence
novel writing?
The Victorian age is contradictory and full of paradoxes in England: it’s a period of growth of the
country and faith in progress because of the first industrial revolution, but the conditions of the lower
classes are appalling, so a large number of work-houses are built; there is great sense of duty, but it’s
kept with repression, especially in the schools; respectability in society is an important value of the
upper classes. The reading public increases, so novelists publish their works in installments;
consequently the plots aren’t united, the story is told in episodes and the characters are exaggerated,
similar to caricatures; the whole novel produces an effect of climax and this techniques help the reader
follow the story and keep his interest high.
3) Explain why the modernist writers used myth as a point of comparison with contemporary
society and provide any example you think relevant to this point.
The modernist writers felt the urgency to represent the variety of modern urban life with the
awareness that the perception of reality was fragmentary and changeable. One way to create order out
of the chaos of the modern world was the recourse to primitive myths .
The myth of Ulysses offers the model hero who ratifies the values of archaic Greek society, such as
strong family ties and the restoration of peace, law and order.
The title and the structure of Joyce’s Ulysses clearly allude to Homer’s Odyssey, but Joyce’s Ulysses is
Leopold Bloom, a common man, living in Dublin, a city intellectually and artistically stifled. His
travelling is compressed into a single day in a modern town. His adventures are the events of everyday
life. He is attracted by remote lands, but only in his dreams. Joyce deliberately changes the figure of the
ancient myth to
- point out that the modern age has no heroic standards
- suggest that life has become squalid
- indicate that nowadays heroism means being able to survive in a squalid world
The use of myth can also be seen in Eliot’s work. In the Waste Land he refers to the myths of fertility
analysed by Frazer in The Golden Bough . According to Frazer primitive men explained the annual
death and rebirth of vegetation in terms of death ( winter) and rebirth ( spring) of divine beings.
Eliot’s Waste Land focuses on the futility of civilization after the First World War and on the
emptiness and confusion of contemporary life. The Waste Land alludes to the opposition between the
sterility of the modern world and the fertility of the past. While the legend and myths of the past sill
contain a sense of moral and spiritual wholeness, modern culture is a heap of broken images that we
cannot experience in their original meaning anymore. This means that in the modern world culture
has been made banal and no longer teaches us anything.