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Some Remarks on the Audenesque Self Viewed As a Product of the Inter -War English Domesticity

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Some Remarks on the Audenesque Self Viewed As a Product of the Inter -War English Domesticity PRACE NAUKOWE Akademii im. Jana Długosza w Częstochowie Studia Neofilologiczne 2014, z. X Anna CHOLEWA-PURGAŁ Akademia im. Jana Długosza w Częstochowie SOME REMARKS ON THE AUDENESQUE SELF VIEWED AS A PRODUCT OF THE INTER -WAR ENGLISH DOMESTICITY Abstract The paper focuses on the formation and predicament of the Audenesque self as a reflection of the in- ter-war English domesticity emerging from the discourse of the 1930s, especially from the poetry of the Pylon school: W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. Eventually disillusioned with history, with the new ‘pyloned’ technological landscape, modern mass civilisation and high elitist culture, Auden’s generation of poets and writers sought their identity attempting to narrate their selfhood ‘in the low and dishonest decade’. 1 Witnessing the paradoxical times of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the apocalypse and sterility of modernism, radical political, social, economic and moral changes, the Audenesque wobbling self strove to ‘set its lands in order’ and grasp its identity between life and art, domesticity and otherness. 2 The self has always been a problem, since it ‘was born as a problem’, Zygmunt Bauman observes from the postmodernist viewpoint. 3 The self’s baffling nature re- sults apparently from its intrinsically complex subject matter: human psychology, morality and identity can never be concluded dossiers upon which one might set the seal. Since it constitutes ‘a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others’, the self pertains to a unique field of study and as ‘the object of introspec- tion or of reflexive action’, it is comprehensible only within some specific frames. 4 According to Charles Taylor, a contemporary interpreter of the self, these ‘ines- capable frameworks’ rest on the concept of a good and on the bounds of a com- 1 A quote from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘September I, 1939.’ 2 A phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s Eliot, The Waste Land, part V ‘What the Thunder Said’. 3 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity,’ [in:] Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage Publications, 1997. P. 18. 4 The New Oxford Dictionary of English, Judy Pearsall, ed., London: Clarendon Press, 1999. P. 3685. 54 Anna CHOLEWA-PURGAŁ munity, which both constitute the two adjacent dimensions, each necessitating some kind of articulation. 5 Those frameworks, Taylor asserts, ‘provide the back- ground, explicit or implicit, for our moral judgements, intuitions and reactions; to articulate a framework is to explicate what makes sense of our moral responses’. 6 Articulation and frameworks seem to act as the coagulators of identity – they are catalysts responsible for the self’s firm and solid condition and this is their abstruse nature that incorporates the formidability of selfhood. Should they wane, identity wobbles and dilutes. ‘We achieve selfhood in a space of concerns … among other selves’, Taylor stipulates, hence only in reference to the good and to the Other, may the self, a being of a requisite depth and intricacy, be approached. 7 Similarly, exclu- sively by means of strong evaluations and qualitative distinctions can ‘the who of identity’ get underscored. 8 The frameworks secure the self from groundlessness and teleological chaos and, as Bauman corroborates Taylor’s stance, they make the self anchored to the ‘island of meaningfulness’. 9 Without those firm anchoring points, ‘human beings cannot face Chaos and face it as Chaos, they cannot stand up straight and confront the Abyss.’ 10 Correspondingly, had it not been for the recog- nition of God, the epitome of Taylor’s concept of a cardinal ‘hypergood’, ‘not con- fronting the Abyss’ and ‘not facing the Unfaceable’ would have proved hardly fea- sible a task. 11 Both Taylor and Bauman accentuate, therefore, the exigency of coercing hu- man selves to be moral, the powers in charge being community and ethics. Self- identity, nevertheless, does not appear to be a ready-made concoction of the two formants. It is rather a perpetual formation-in-process, an entity-to-be. As Bauman attests, ‘moral selves do not “discover” their ethical foundations but … build them up while they build themselves’. 12 Owing to the inexorable temporalisation of hu- man existence, ‘the issue of our condition’, Taylor concedes, ’can never be exhaust- ed for us by what we are because we …are changing and becoming ’; thus, what a self is, has to be understood as what it has become. 13 Calvin O. Schrag, the author of The Self after Postmodernity , perceives human identity in like manner: ‘the story of the self is a developing story, a story subject to a creative advance’. 14 In its dynamics, the self appears then as an assemblage of 5 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. P. 26. 6 Ibid. P. 50. 7 Ibid. P. 51. 8 ‘Strong evaluations and qualitative distinctions’ are key terms in Taylor’s discourse of the self, whe- reas ‘the who of identity’ pertains to Schrag’s idiolect. 9 Zygmunt Bauman, Theory, Culture, and Society, London: Sage Publications, 1994. P. 4. 10 He recalls here the words of Cornelius Castoriadis, as quoted in ibid. P. 3. 11 Bauman, Theory, Culture, and Society. P. 5. 12 Bauman, ibid. P. 9. 13 Taylor, Sources of the Self. Pp. 46–47. 14 The Self after Postmodernity, New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. P. 37. Some Remarks on the Audenesque Self Viewed… 55 forces, an agent as well as a receiver of action. It expands and diversifies by itself, while getting transformed simultaneously by history and time, and the new under- standings of the frameworks they inflict. As an energetic constituent, the self re- quires a flexible mediator, so that articulation must evolve as well, lest it should be a discontinued requisite. Another conclusion emerging from the analyses of Bauman’s, Taylor’s and Schrag’s is the conviction that the crucial frames cannot be grasped mimetically, on an ad hoc basis. As it has been already indicated, sovereignty of the good, as the password to identity, binds up the selfhood inextricably with articulation. 15 Obvi- ously, all man’s creation, material and intangible, accrued throughout the centuries, does bespeak human self, yet its most direct presence is to be encountered in the language. An arbitrary code of meanings though it is, the language provides rather explicit rendering of the self, permitting its pursuit and determination of the good, along with fixing and maintaining a relationship with the Other. ‘The issue of … identity is worked out only through a language of interpretation’, reads one of Tay- lor’s postulates, the complementation of which one may find in Bauman’s work. 16 Discourse is the realm proper of the moral self, and thanks to language, Bau- man claims, ‘it is possible now, nay inevitable, to face the moral issues point blank … as they emerge from the life experience … and confront moral selves in all their irreparable ambivalence’. 17 What is more, the liaison between the discourse, or gen- erally between the narrative and the selfhood, turns out to be a quintessential sym- biosis, for neither of the parties can exist on its own. Moreover, viewed holistically as all verbal or non-verbal instances of epiphanic arts, the narrative signifies the medium of articulation through which the self gets grasped. ‘Self-understanding necessarily has temporal depth and incorporates narra- tive’, Taylor grants; the narrative, which finds expression ‘not only in linguistic de- scriptions but also in other acts – liturgy, ritual, its music and in display of visual symbols’. 18 A mode of manifestation and revelation, the narrative conditions epiph- any, so that it brings the self ‘into the presence of something which is otherwise in- accessible, and which is of the highest moral or spiritual significance’. 19 Simultaneously, the narrative constitutes the self’s artefact and its maintenance rests on the selfhood entirely. This tenet meets again its ample corroboration in Schrag’s deliberations on the self. The self makes inescapably ‘the narrating self’, he says, that is ‘the self as homo narrans ’. 20 Hence, its formation is achieved through the discourse, as the most immediate mode of man’s narrating, and is likened to the 15 Taylor, Sources of the Self. P. 34. 16 Taylor, ibid. P. 34. 17 Bauman, Theory, Culture, ad Society. P. 31. 18 Taylor, Sources of the Self. P. 419. 19 Taylor, ibid. P. 419. 20 Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity. P. 39. 56 Anna CHOLEWA-PURGAŁ ‘development of characters within the plot of a story.’ 21 The self, as ‘the who of dis- course’, dwells therefore in a coherent narrative, which, notwithstanding its bent for ambivalence, insures the ‘unity and species of self-identity’. 22 The touchstones that delineate its habitat rely on the society of other selves and the axiom of a hypergood, which both compel the ceaselessly becoming nature of the self. 23 Little wonder that the representation of the self has been an exceptionally fre- quently rehearsed topic in literature and philosophy, and that the problem of self- identity has occupied the centre of many a controversial writing. While evolving in- cessantly, the contemporary, postmodern self is apparently presented with the ad- vantage of an overall view of its diachronic and synchronic development. It proves even more so, for, as Taylor emphasises it, ‘language, [as the means of the self’s ex- pression], and artistic creation rise at times to obsession in our century’. 24 Very close and in many facets homogenous to the late postmodern identity treated in Bauman’s, Taylor’s and Schrag’s analyses is the Audenesque self, the ‘who’ of a dis- tinctive discourse created by a generation of British writers in the 1930s.
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