Transcendent Realities: the Search for Meaning in the Modernisms of Yeats, Joyce, and Pound

St. John's University St. John's Scholar Theses and Dissertations 1-1-2018 Transcendent Realities: The Search for Meaning in the Modernisms of Yeats, Joyce, and Pound David A. Price Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Price, David A., "Transcendent Realities: The Search for Meaning in the Modernisms of Yeats, Joyce, and Pound" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 4. https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations/4 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by St. John's Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of St. John's Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ! ! TRANSCENDENT REALITIES: THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN THE MODERNISMS OF YEATS, JOYCE, AND POUND A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY to the faculty of the department of ENGLISH at ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY New York by David A. Price Date Submitted: 4/5/2018 Date Approved: 4/5/2018 ______________________________ __________________________ David A. Price Dr. Stephen Sicari ! ! ABSTRACT TRANSCENDENT REALITIES: THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN THE MODERNISMS OF YEATS, JOYCE, AND POUND David A. Price This dissertation examines the binary of transcendence and immanence in the poetry of W. B. Yeats, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Utilizing a theoretical lens provided primarily through the writings of Jacques Derrida and an historical context established by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the paper argues that the literary texts of Yeats, Pound, and Joyce deconstruct a Western cultural history of a transcendent-immanent binary and seek to revive elements of the transcendent as a cure to the consequences of the dominant materialist-immanent worldview of Enlightenment modernity. This paper relies on the distinction between twentieth century literary modernism and modernity, seeing literary modernism as an avant-garde movement that experiments with style and a more responsive, adaptable, de-centered, view that is suspicious of the stratified, hierarchical, mechanistic view of modernity, a view of human life which can lead to a flattened and oppressive view of reality and the universe. Modernity, beginning around 1500 according to Taylor, in its emphasis on rationality and the empirical, and its de-emphasis on belief in the spiritual or enchanted, has a had negative effect, a sense that something is missing in twentieth century views of life that these works seek to address. Ultimately, these works produce moments of the transcendent in their fragmented twentieth century view of the world that do not coalesce into a stratified view but allow for the incorporation of elements of both the immanent and transcendent. ii ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would to thank my mentor and advisor on this project, Dr. Stephen Sicari, whose feedback and support were integral to the shaping and execution of this paper. Thank you also to my other committee members, Dr. John Lowney and Dr. Gregory Maertz, for taking the time and attention to give your thoughts and expertise to my endeavor. Much thanks and appreciation to my family for their unwavering support and encouragement as I reached the finish line. A special thank you to my wife, Liz, whose love and support could not be replaced, and helped make this accomplishment a possibility. iii ! TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Searching for the Transcendent…………………………………..1 Chapter 1: The Twentieth Century Poetry of W. B. Yeats- Confronting Modernity and Developing the Paganist Transcendent…………………………………….28 I. Early Yeats: Traces of Romanticism in Confronting Modernity 1904-1914……………………………………………………………………33 II. Overcoming Cynicism, 1914-1928……………………………………53 III. Fragments and Revelations: 1928-1935……………………………72 IV. Later Yeats: Reconciliation and Loss 1935-1939………………….79 Chapter 2: James Joyce’s Ulysses – Exploring the Limits and Transcendent Possibilities of Modernity and Modernism………………………………………91 I. Themes and Limits of the Immanent-Naturalist Perspective in the Early Episodes……………………………………………………………………….99 II. The Breakdown of the Immanent, and Emergence of the Transcendent, in the Early and Middle Episodes…………………………………………...122 III. Experimentation, Deconstruction, and Transcendent Moments in Later Episodes………………………………………………………………………142 IV. Reflections: Endings and Beginnings……………………………….162 Chapter 3: The Cantos of Ezra Pound – Developing Transcendence in The Fragments of Immanence………………………………………………………….177 I. Early Cantos: Paganism and Material Concerns…………………...183 II. Malatesta Cantos: Paganism and The Documentary Method...…198 III. Middle Cantos: Fascist and Agrarian Perspectives………………209 IV. The Adams Cantos: Systems of Meaning…………………………..224 iv ! V. Later Cantos: Attempts at a final transcendent meaning………240 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..251 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………..258 ! "! Introduction: Searching for the Transcendent By most accounts, the first half of the twentieth century in most of the world, and certainly in the West, was a time of great change and social upheaval. Even before the Great Depression and the tragic events of two world wars, there was a sense in America and Europe that the world was fundamentally different. This awareness of historical change becomes a defining aspect of literary modernism. Prior to 1900, W. B. Yeats awaited and attached a supernatural significance to the new millennium (Foster, The Apprentice Mage 162). Thereafter, he mythologized its significance in conjunction with the advent of literary modernism in an introduction to the Oxford Book of Verse where he cited 1900 as the “defeat” of Victorianism (Sheils 4). The first chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, set on June 16, 1904 sent by Ezra Pound for publication in 1918, were heralded by Margaret Anderson at the Little Review as a “key moment” in the “history of modern literature” (Bowker 242). Virginia Woolf, whom I do not cover in this paper, but who is considered an important figure in literary modernism, famously stated that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed” (2). Ezra Pound, perhaps the most integral shaper of literary modernism, begins writing the modern epic, The Cantos, around 1915, having had the initial idea somewhere around 1909 (Albright 59). My point here is not to exhaustively define literary modernism, so much as to show that the idea of modernism was rooted in the idea that it was borne out of a newness in the age, and as such, was a response to what came before. What came before could be labeled modernity, but literary modernism could also lay claim to a modern perspective, so what I will discuss now is how literary modernism responds to and differentiates from the concept of modernity. In using ! #! the broad definition of the term modernity, I am referring to the Post-Enlightenment Western world that saw the advance of science, the preponderance of teleological views of progress, the privileging of Reason, the development of industrial-capitalist nations, and the move towards an empirical view of the universe over a spiritual one. Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, whom I will discuss in detail, places this beginning of modernity around 1500. The hallmarks of modernity still define the society and culture we live in today, but beginning in the twentieth century, the dominance of those features was seriously questioned and confronted, causing a change in how Western society views modernity. Some may argue that we live in a Postmodern culture and society now, and while that is not the specific topic of this paper, I will argue that it is evidence of the ambiguous nature of how we define the current age. Western society is both aware of it still being in a modern world while seeing things differently from the modernity that began around 1500. Literary modernism, which helped to foster the Postmodern view, is a reason for that change in view. In the twentieth century there was a sense that the hallmarks of modernity had fallen short of their promise, their newness had become stale. As Stephen Sicari notes in Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914, “Modernism is an artistic response to the negative effects of modernity” (8). To help define this dichotomy I will briefly summarize Sicari’s work from that text. Sicari discusses how modernity came to be conflated with modernism in the work of many twentieth century philosophers, but more recently it has been noted that literary modernism was, for the most part, antithetical to the values and worldview of modernity (8-9). Modernity in this view is the Cartesian/Galilean view of the world that focuses on rationality and progress. David Harvey notes that the promise of this kind of ! $! Enlightenment thinking “promised liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition, release from the arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our own human natures” (qtd. from Sicari, 9). The danger of this modernity, according to Sicari, is that its valuation of rationality and universality can disconnect from humanity and lead to domination and the horrors of systematically organized oppression. Sicari also discusses an alternative to this kind of Enlightenment modernity in the early humanist modernity of Renaissance writers and thinkers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that was more open to thinking about what it means to be human and skeptical of rationality. While I understand Sicari’s argument as it relates to issues associated specifically with Enlightenment rationality, in my view it still struggles with the immanent-transcendent binary with its focus on what it means to be human. The Christian aspect of this view for me is one of the many vestiges of the past that provide some transcendent meaning but are still part of a pre-modern view. I don’t see it as any more significant than the other transcendent views that the modernist texts of my paper incorporate through paganism, Greek mythology, Romantic idealism and spirituality, or a transcendent view of art.

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