Modernism and modernity
Iliad, and its central character Ulysses. However, it seems apparent that Joyce may not just be providing his audience with an antidote to the Iliad but offering a contemporary version of it. This interpretation of Ulysses addresses the essence of the Modernist debate; while the novel may not strike one as entirely sincere, it may be the case that Joyce is suggesting that the tumult of the First World War has left the ideal of man as an equivalent to Leopold Bloom and, hence, Modernism may not serve as a transparent censure of the past but rather as a vehicle for its reassessment The Modernist literary guise is to a large extent predicated on historical eternality: a sense of both the past and the fleeting present. The movement’s exponents, many of whom were self-consciously portentous, contributed to a grand remythicization of literature which hinged on their admiration for certain Western philosophical traditions, with Yeats expressing an interest in Hermeticism and Theosophy and Eliot in the ethics of Greek Literature. Modernism, in many ways, was driven by a determination on the part of the European intelligentsia to exclude the masses
from culture and place a premium on inaccessible historical works. Such a fact explains the movement’s enmeshment with the development of eugenics not just in the purely scientific way for which Donald Childs argues but also in the desire amongst Modernists to strangle bourgeois culture. Education, which figures such as Pound and Lewis, viewed as a mechanism for intellectual self-empowerment was consequentially poured scorn on in an attempt to deny the middlebrow access to the history and politics around which their works typically gravitated. As T.S Eliot noted, Modernism was largely born out of the quest to find a literature which could reflect ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ and what they stumbled upon was equally complex: it was anachronistic and yet neoteric, inaccessible yet populist and it was full of all manner of more contradictions. For Modernism is best defined by two factors: a complexity in its composition, most particularly its allusions to history and grand philosophy, which rendered it nigh on impossible to comprehend properly at the time and a set of exponents who desired just that.
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