Joseph Kugelmass
3/3/16
The Role of Text in the Formation of Identity:
“Formative” Texts and Meta-Texts
“A” LIST:
The Making of the Modern Self
Joseph Kugelmass
Introductory Note
My “A” list covers poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from the modernist period,
defined broadly as the 1880s through the 1950s. My “B” list presents a survey of self-fashioning,
as it has been understood in Western culture since classical times by writers engaged in or
conversant with philosophy. My “C” list combines relevant philosophical texts with critical
studies that focus particularly on self-fashioning.
Each of these three lists seeks to describe the relationship between the abstract entity of
the self, and the concrete processes of producing, consuming, and interpreting texts. I should also
note that my concept of “modernism” is not restricted to the cadre of authors who are sometimes
put at the center of the Modernist or High Modernist canon, such as T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.
Rather, my concept of modernism combines a disciplinary periodicity (1880-1960) with an
attempt, begun in my headnotes for the “A” list, to argue that understanding self-fashioning is
critical to understanding the period.
Headnote for the A List
My “A” list is entitled “The Making of the Modern Self.” It comprises 75 texts,
and is still woefully inadequate to the task it intends, which is to show all of the arenas in
which Anglo-American and Continental modernism confronted the dialectic of
authenticity and rhetorical performance, and confronted it as a dialectic rather than as a
problem to be solved by choosing sides. The selection of texts under consideration here,
and the points of connection to the “B” and “C” lists, are designed to advance the thesis
that modernism was that period in which authors sought to sublate the crisis of the truth
of subjectivity by substituting the creative act of writing for traditional models of
pedagogy, readership, and situational rhetoric.
For writers like T. S. Eliot, now at the center of the modernist canon, one of the
biggest obstacles to artistic success was the difficulty of taking one’s place in the Western
literary tradition at a point in history when the catholicity of Europe – a literally Catholic
religious paradigm, but also a cultural one – was disintegrating. In Eliot’s estimation,
Alighieri Dante had been able to write The Divine Comedy in a simple, masterful style
through his fidelity to the pan-European culture of that period. Eliot feared that modernist
art had no such foundation upon which to build. This was not merely a problem of
readership; it was a problem of sensibility, insofar as a writer’s sensibility tended to take
on the cast of the age.
For the first time, the artist was called upon to do more than produce relevant
works within established traditions. The artist had to overcome forces that militated
against him producing any art of lasting value: the apocalyptic or at least entropic
direction of modern societies, the weight of an immense literary tradition, and the
commercialization of media. More often than not, these new social realities paralyzed
original thought and action. In Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, the bourgeois
character Lambert Strether describes his consciousness as something “poured” into a “tin
mould,” and hypothesizes that the “affair of life” could not have gone any differently for
him.
The old pattern, for writers like Samuel Johnson, had comprised a youthful period
of formative instruction, followed by a mature period of productivity and achievement.
For modernist writers, Western culture had become so incoherent that one’s education
was no longer usefully formative. Instead, the formation of the sensibility merged with
the moment of creation, of giving form to something outside oneself: the independent
achievement of authorship. In many cases the theme of authorship is treated literally, but
it can also mean an epiphanal moment of organized perception, or a completed work in
another medium. In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp has to abandon the academy-like
Berghof Sanitorium for a dangerous walk alone, during which he finally receives his
vision. In J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield only achieves
an understanding of and connection with the people he’s encountered once he begins
telling his story to a psychiatrist. Lily Briscoe, a character from Virginia Woolf’s To The
Lighthouse, realizes her ambition when she can separate herself from the society of the
Ramsays and successfully complete her painting.
In other words, the coherent artwork and the integral sensibility come into being
simultaneously, through the same process of creation. It is a process of alienating oneself
from a society in chaos. In D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent, two men create
a new religion in order to transform Mexico into something entirely separate from the
nation that it was, and in order to assume their rightful place as leaders of a revolution,
instead of remaining spectators of modernity. At the same time, this Romantic dream of
the alienated artist-hero is frequently satirized as quixotic. For example, in James Joyce’s
novels, Stephen’s quest to become the author of himself becomes text through a series of
parodic failures. The authors on this list never stop contending with heroic ideals drawn
from the Romantic poets, Matthew Arnold, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others.
Still, in many cases, a quixotic or ironized artist-hero opens the way for a critique of
received notions of subjectivity and individuality.
For ealier writers, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, an
artist had to retreat into solitude in order to create. In solitude, the artist had reestablished contact with Nature and the original sources of Western culture, such as
Homer. These became the conditions for authenticity in life and the work. Modernist
writers, by contrast, sought to overcome the separation between the private “scene” of
reading and writing, the Wordsworthian scene of inspiration, and the dialogic or
oratorical scene of rhetoric and communication. Thus, for example, the Marcel character
in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time will have to re-live all of his superficial
evenings in the drawing-rooms of Paris, in the course of achieving that recollection of his
life that both he and his readers understand through the jargon of authenticity. Solitude
remained an important experience, but only because it allowed different perspectives on
the social.
In addition, many modernist texts transform authenticity from a thematic concern
into a formal one. In Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer’s vitality is in
excess of what she knows how to express; it affects the novel as something beyond
systematic calculus, through her impetuousness and her ability to surprise the Europeans
she meets. She even retains her potential for agency at the very end of the book, since the
reader cannot be sure what will happen afterwards, and this escape from the limit of the
text is a deliberate echo of the possibility of escaping Gilbert Osmond, who has made a
prison of aesthetics. A similar kind of excessive subject, albeit one less likely to ever be
sufficiently expressed, is the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. His
consciousness is flooded, in turn, by a whole series of pedagogues and authority figures,
but he escapes them, at last forced into close confinement with that part of himself that
has heretofore remained invisible.
Authorship, even when it is represented through a series of satirical failures,
comes to represent the only possibility for subjective agency. Unless an author has a
sufficiently independent sensibility, he is absorbed into the mass, and incapable of acting
for himself. One of the distinctive things about this linkage of authorship with agency is
the rejection of other models of heroism, and other models for the “man of action.”
Albert Camus, in his imaginative critical study The Rebel, condemns the French poet
Arthur Rimbaud for abandoning poetry in favor of a mercantile career in Africa. Many of
Rimbaud’s supporters (then and now) defended his actions on the conventional grounds
of preferring action and adventure to the pusillanimity of language, but Camus is all the
more of a modernist for insisting that Rimbaud became a bourgeois and a conformist the
instant that he became an actor and ceased to be an author. Along similar lines, the more
conventional narrative of adaptive self-fashioning and heroism in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven
Pillars of Wisdom is finally subordinate to the effort of telling the story in words, not
least because of the degree to which Lawrence was obliged to compromise his own ideals
in order to serve his country’s military interests.
One of the most important means of achieving agency, for these authors, is
gaining perspective on social norms and the mass media. Thus modernist authors upheld
authenticity, but only because they wanted to be originals, and not because they were
seeking an authentic text with which to replace renounced fictions. Bertolt Brecht used
the theater to de-realize, for his audience, the political structures of everyday life. Other
authors used mixed modes of tragedy, bathos, and satire to accomplish the same effects in
novels and poems. In E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, we observe Leonard Bast
trying to acquire culture, with phrases from John Ruskin’s studies of Venice echoing
uselessly in his head. It is a quintessential image of the failure of the passive mnemonics
valorized in the old myths of learning canonical texts. The pedagogical version of selfformation, championed (for example) by Rousseau in Émile, compares unfavorably to the
autodidactic undertaking of authorship in the modernist period.
My list begins at the historical moment when authorship becomes a self-conscious
ideal for a number of the most influential modernists, and inaugurates the distinction
between textual agency (authorship) as self-fashioning, and self-fashioning as the mere
consumption and imitation of text. The list ends where the transition from modernism to
postmodernism begins: that is, at the historical moment when the ideal of authorship no
longer suffices as a response to perceived political responsibilities and the psychical risks
of alienation and madness.
TEXTS FOR THE “A” LIST
Artaud, Antonin
The Theater and Its Double
Beckett, Samuel
Krapp’s Last Tape
Bellow, Saul
Henderson the Rain King
Brecht, Bertolt.
The Threepenny Opera
Camus, Albert
The Rebel
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness
Eliot, T. S.
Poems
Four Quartets
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Gerontion
The Waste Land
Essays
Matthew Arnold
Arnold and Pater
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Hamlet
The Perfect Critic
Reflections on ‘Vers Libre’
The Metaphysical Poets
The Function of Criticism
Religion and Literature
What Is A Classic?
Ulysses, Order, and Myth
Francis Herbert Bradley
Dante
Baudelaire
Yeats
Milton II (note: as excerpted by Frank Kermode in the Selected Prose)
Christianity and Culture
Ellison, Ralph
Invisible Man
Essays
Society, Morality, and the Novel
An Extravagance of Laughter
Going to the Territory
The Little Man at Chehaw Station
Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity
Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke
The World and the Jug
Hidden Name and Complex Fate
Faulkner, William
Absalom, Absalom!
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby
This Side of Paradise
Forster, E. M.
Howard’s End
Genet, Jean
The Thief’s Journal
Our Lady of the Flowers
Gide, André
The Immoralist
Hesse, Hermann
Narcissus and Goldmund
The Glass Bead Game
H. D.
Tribute to Freud
Hemingway, Ernest
Death in the Afternoon
A Moveable Feast
Huxley, Aldous
Point Counter-Point
Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik
When We Dead Awaken
The Master Builder
James, Henry.
Tales
The Aspern Papers
The Real Thing
The Ambassadors
The Portrait of a Lady
“The Art of Fiction” and the Prefaces to each of the foregoing texts
Joyce, James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
Finnegans Wake
Kafka, Franz
Stories and sketches
The Hunger Artist
The Metamorphosis
A Report to an Academy
Before the Law
Larsen, Nella
Quicksand
Lawrence, D. H.
Women in Love
The Plumed Serpent
Essays
A Propros of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The Novel
Thomas Mann
Studies in Classic American Literature
Lawrence, T. E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Mailer, Norman
Advertisements for Myself
McCarthy, Mary
The Charmed Life
Mann, Thomas
The Magic Mountain
Felix Krull, Confidence Man
Stories
Death in Venice
Tonio Kroger
Maugham, W. Somerset
The Moon and Sixpence
Miller, Henry
Tropic of Cancer
Nabokov, Vladimir.
Speak, Memory
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Pirandello, Luigi
Six Characters In Search Of An Author
Pound, Ezra
Essays
A Retrospect
How to Read
The Teacher’s Mission
D. H. Lawrence
T. S. Eliot
Ulysses
Joyce
Wyndham Lewis
Poems
Portrait d’une Femme
A Pact
The Rest
In a Station of the Metro
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Mauberley
From The Cantos: I, II, VII, LXXXI
Proust, Marcel
In Search of Lost Time
Salinger, J.D.
The Catcher in the Rye
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Nausea
The Words
Shaw, George Bernard
Pygmalion
Saint Joan
Stein, Gertrude
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Everybody’s Autobiography
Lectures in America
Stevens, Wallace
Poems
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Anecdote of the Jar
The Snow Man
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
The Idea of Order at Key West
Of Modern Poetry
A Quiet Normal Life
To an Old Philosopher in Rome
How to Live. What to Do
The Man With The Blue Guitar
Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction
The Necessary Angel (essays)
Waugh, Evelyn
Brideshead Revisited
West, Nathanael
The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts
Wharton, Edith
The House of Mirth
Wilde, Oscar
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
Other Prose:
The Decay of Lying
The Truth of Masks
The Critic as Artist
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Woolf, Virginia
To The Lighthouse
Mrs. Dalloway
A Room of One’s Own
Yeats, William Butler
Poems
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Hosing of the Sidhe
Adam’s Curse
“On Hearing that the Students of Our New University Have Joined the Agitation
Against Immoral Literature”
Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation
To the Rose upon the Rood of Time
Easter 1916
The Second Coming
A Prayer for My Daughter
The Tower
Among School-Children
A Dialogue of Self and Soul
Lapis Lazuli
The Statues
The Choice
Under Ben Bulben