Herbert N. Schneidau. "Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism"

This is a study of the most paradoxical aspect of modernism, its obsession with the past. Eliot wrote that the artist must be conscious "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." This creed permeated the movement: Modernists believed that the energies of the past could be resurrected in modern works, and that they could be the very force that makes those works modern: the urge of Pound and others to "make it new" stemmed from seeing the past as a source of renewal.



This book investigates the ideas of the past that lie behind some of the major works of literary Modernism. As a character in Ulysses says, "I would deal in especial with atavism." The play of this figure, the "throwback phenomenon," grew out of plant and animal breeding, in which the recurrence of earlier characteristics in later generations could be easily noticed. In the nineteenth century it gave rise to a host of cultural fantasies about degeneration, reversion to "savagery," and the like. Much ill-informed speculation about races, eugenics, and evolution eventuated in such fearful realities as Naziism. This brings in the connection between Modernism and the political nightmares of our century, which — although sensationalistically exploited by some current critics —is a legitimate and revealing object of study. However, since the Modernists were all atavists in some way, the link here is inverse. Schneidau focuses on separate texts that incorporate these concepts: Joyce's Ulysses, Hardy's poems, Forster's Howards End, Conrad's Secret Agent, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and finally Pound's Cantos. In his discussions, many little-noticed connections are examined, including a transatlantic set: Hardy with Pound, Forster with Fitzgerald, Joyce and Lawrence with Anderson.