Tim Armstrong

Two types of shock in modernity

The term ‘shock’ has been central to accounts of the origins of technological and artistic modernity. Its appearance ranges from Baudelaire’s use of the term to describe urban experience in the 1860s and the phenomena of ‘railway spine’ in the same decade to the psychology of shell-shock; from the aesthetic categories of Krakauer, Benjamin and Brecht in the inter-war period to later titles like The Shock of the New. Like all respectable terms in modernity it has even acquired a prehistory, a recent cultural historian, Jeffrey T. Schapp, insisting that the origins of modern notions of shock lie in the ‘carriage revolution’, in the speeded-up world of the late eighteenth-century, rather than in Baudelaire’s Paris.

Player Piano: Poetry and Sonic Modernity

The problem addressed in this essay is that of the poetic impact of recorded sound; and more specifically the connection between recorded sound, music and poetry. This is not, according to one way of thinking an inevitable connection, for in the gramophone and its successor devices the modern world has a way of recording not just the discrete tones of music but all sounds, the messy glissandi and dissonances of the natural world. In Douglas Kahn’s account of the move towards sonic transcription – and this is also implicit in the work of Richard Leppert, Friedrich Kittler and other recent media theorists – devices like the gramophone and Edouard Leon Scott’s earlier phonautograph (1857) means that the musical model for sonic reception which runs from Aristotle to Helmholtz must be rejected in order to open up the regime of sonic modernity, characterized by what Kahn calls ‘all sound’ including noise:

Catastrophe and Trauma: a Response to Anita Rupprecht

Anita Rupprechts paper in this number, the first detailed discussion of the role of the Zong massacre in abolitionist writings to be published, raises a number of interesting questions. Perhaps the boldest suggestion is that the Zong served, in its above-decks visibility, as a stand-in for the below-decks invisibility of an experience of which there are almost no eyewitness accounts left by those who experienced it: the Middle Passage itself. In Rupprechts account it circulates in the writings of Thomas Clarkson and others, both as an emblem of the horrors of slavery and, in descriptions of the court case, of the cold-blooded equation of persons and property. The conclusion of the paper is also arresting in its shift in focus from the traumatic memory of slavery to the legal and political actions involved in recent campaigns for ‘reparations’ and the discovery of documents related to the legacy of slavery. I want, in this response – which is offered from the perspective of cultural history, though it touches on the legal issues at points – to explore these two aspects of her discussion.

Hardy, History, and Recorded Music

This chapter is a meditation in three parts on the meaning of music in literature: music as an abstract notation which seems to offer the possibility of encoding temporality and history; music as performed on or by the human instrument—especially the fingertips; and finally, recorded music, that is, music as stored by technology.

Len Lye and Laura Riding in the 1930s: the Impossibility of Film and Literature

This essay concerns itself with one episode in the intersection of film and writing in modernism, the brief collaboration of the experimental film-maker Len Lye and poet Laura Riding in the early 1930s. It was a collaboration which saw Riding and Graves publish some of Lye’s writings, use his illustrations for book covers for their Seizen Press, and Riding and Lye produce a film script and a joint film manifesto, as well as other related writings. In part I simply want restore Lye to the picture, since his trajectory is a fascinating one, emblematic of a second-wave British modernism characterised by its dialogue with Surrealism, its satirical stance, its collaborative work, and by such fluid movements between genres and media as we see in Lye (and in other figures such as his friend Oswell Blakeston, film-maker, artist, novelist, poet, editor, travel-writer). In terms of the concerns of this collection, I want to look at a form of cinema which sees itself as inscription, and a form of writing which seems to partially conceive itself in terms of cinematic technology. Ultimately, what will be described is, paradoxically, both collaboration between poet and film-maker and a mutual rejection of the intersection of literature and film.

The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (review)

396 imagination, and melancholic withdrawal. Quoting James McConkey, Ress maintains that for Yeats, as for Proust, memory becomes “an event superior to the event itself” (108). Yeats’s Reveries also shares with Joyce’s Portrait and Proust’s Recherche the paradoxical belief that, although artistic sensibility is an elite distinction, the artist’s imagination sustains itself by drawing upon the worldliest sensory perceptions. In this mixture of high and low, aristocratic taste and brute physicality, we find another common denominator between the Modernists and their predecessors in the sentimental. The chapter on Joyce’s Portrait focuses on the consolatory quality of language for the sentimental writer. Ress contends that Stephen Dedalus’s faith in the solace of literature reaffirms the sentimental emphasis on the crucial place of verbal associations in the succession from sense perception to emotions and epiphanies. Such “images sensuously apprehended and emotionally vibrant” (171) ought to be related, as I have observed, to the scenes of suspended narrative action that we find in Sterne. Ress also traces back to the sentimental tradition Joyce’s view of the artistic impulse as an innate characteristic that may be discerned in childhood. If there is a significant criticism to be leveled at Ress, it is that she does not devote sufficient attention to the way her three representatives of Modernism modify or reinterpret the sentimental ideology. A case in point is her chapter on Proust’s Swann’s Way. Although it is certainly possible, particularly during the early phase of Proust’s career from Jean Santeuil to the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, to identify the traces of a sentimental sensibility in his work, what is even more conspicuous is his highly original effort to deconstruct and transform the conventions governing representation of the beautiful soul. Combray, the section dedicated to Mlle Vinteuil’s extraordinary mourning of her father’s death through sadistic, ritual desecration of his portrait, offers a good example of Proust’s determination to subvert the cliché of the sentimental imagination, rewriting the rules of empathy and sympathy from the point of view of the perverse. One might also observe that to depict a mannerist writer such as Proust as an author enthralled by the quintessential sentimental ideals of sincerity and spontaneity is to read him in a partial and somewhat deceptive light. These qualities, as Ress herself admits, seem squarely at odds with Proust’s evident inclination toward long, complicated, digressive phrasing and psychological speculation (227). Despite these limitations, however, Tender Consciousness ultimately must be regarded as a significant contribution to recent scholarship on Modernism, due to its creative approach to genealogical criticism, its breadth of historical vision, its brio, pathos, and vivid intelligence.

An Old Philosopher in Rome : George Santayana and his Visitors

Rome after the Second World War presented something of an anomaly. Of all the traditional capitals of European civilization it was the least affected by the conflict. Because of the Popes presence, it had not been bombed, and it had escaped the heavy fighting in the campaigns to the south. Indeed, so easily was it taken that one film was to show the Eternal City captured by a single jeep. Italy was also faster to recover than any of the other combatants. American money flooded into the country, and political life was quickly under way again. All this made it a good place for visitors, a relative bright spot amidst a shattered landscape. Harold Acton, the English historian who went there in 1948, remarked that “After the First World War American writers and artists had migrated to Paris: now they pitched upon Rome.” Among those who visited Rome or lived there for a period after the war were Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Frederic Prokosch, Daniel Cory, Alfred Kazin, Samuel Barber, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (slightly later), as well as Acton himself and a host of less well-known figures. Many were entertained by Lawrence and Babel Roberts, under whose influence “the Roman Academy became an international rendezvous for artists and intellectuals.” While they were there, a large proportion of these writers made a pilgrimage to the Convent of the Blue Sisters, where since 1941 George Santayana had been living in a single room.