Modern & Modernist

Teaching Modernist poetry, in the form of T.S. Eliot, can be a tricky task, especially if the classroom is dominated by undergraduates who take "Modernist" to mean "Modern," and then simply the meaning of "Modern" to mean anything that is connected with "moving forward" in a most jejune sense of the term--technology.

Reading a review of a collection of letters by Samuel Beckett this morning tells me that I need to get traction in my explanation of how "Modernist" poetry could be the opposite of what to be "Modern" in the early 21st century signifies to a bunch of people with thinking that is pretty straight-jacketed.

Beckett was an arch-Modernist. He wanted to shear expressions off linguistic excess. He is best known for sparseness of expression, and he felt that sparseness would enable him to hold up for the reader's viewing that which he is really trying to show.

Language can diffuse the picture of what one tries to show, or language can cloud our vision of the "nothingness" that Beckett felt ultimately lay behind language.

Here is a sample of that linguistic bareness: 

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.

Beckett is establishing his Modernist stance here: Trying to express/represent that we see almost everyday and hold in our memories--the scene of an oldster holding the hand of a child and moving.

The linguistic bareness upholds the motion. We see the two walk.

The Modernists like Beckett thought the middle class wanted too many words behind which they conveniently incubate in their complacency. The aim of the Modernists were to jolt, amaze and shock the middle-class out of their complacent thinking of what it means to be modern.

T.S. Eliot might have wanted to do the same: unhinge the bourgeoisie's settled ways of thinking. I'm not sure technology by itself can do that. Where communicating ideas are concerned, technology, I feel, can cast the already nonsensical verbiage that is spewed in the name of "expression" every day (especially on the Internet), in a further sheen of mental staidness. 

Modernism can help us understand where we confuse words and meanings.