“Film may be nearer in detail to superficial reality, but is always at a further remove from some deeper reality”

T.S. Eliot and Visual Culture

Research by Elena Leeke-KuenzlerSupervised by Dr. Adrian Hunter

In his own words:

“the encroachment of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema”

“where his mind is lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon”

“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—”

“In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis”

Did T. S. Eliot completely reject visual cultures such as cinema? To answer this question, it helps to sketch out the historical context of what came before, what factors of the time period would have influenced him and how his fellow Modernist writers felt.

Historical Context 19th/20th century• industrialisation, automatization, incl. invention of trains,

telegraph ↳ ‘hyperstimulation of the nerves’, low-level anxiety as

defence mechanism against shock of modernisation↳ Erosion of social barriers↳ Invention of standard time↳ Sensation novels, melodramatic mode = precursor of

early cinema ↳ Urbanisation• Discovery/ Invention of Quantum theory, radioactivity • Einstein’s Theory of Relativity ↳ matter = energy in space↳ New perception of reality – subjectivity of individual’s

experience, depending on location in time and space• Roger Fry’s exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists

– strong reactions of audiences first experience of impressionism

• Discoveries and new theories by Freud, Jung –psychology/psychoanalysis, the unconscious and the self

• Dadaism and Surrealism – collage, photomontage techniques, disgust for bourgeois values, exploration of subconscious

Cinema – Origins and Inceptions• Before: Magic lantern, music halls, vaudeville,

revue, variety theatre• ‘First Birth’: Screening of first film in 1895 by

Lumiere brothers first seen as working class entertainment

• ‘Second Birth’: narrative storytelling through editing, institutionalising, film not merely as a medium (Shail, 2012)

Modernism• Formalism of New Criticism• Setting itself apart from Realism• Post-Impressionism: “this art is

not concerned with depiction, but with the arousal of emotion” (Goldman, 2004); substituting representation to feeling

• Imagism – reduction to essentials, ‘aesthetics of presence’, engages the reader through its brevity

• Collage, confusing boundaries between art and life, original and imitation

• Less focus on external events, more introspection, analysis, in media res beginnings & ambiguous endings Art as/or Commodity?

• Emergence of the mass market, commercialisation –conflict between autonomous art and product

• Audience changed from rich benefactors to middle classes wanting to see themselves represented, becoming consumers, investors, spectators, e.g. poems like The Waste Land were seen as a financial investment

• Early Silent cinema first seen as working class entertainment, democratic and international

• Walter Benjamin (1935) feared the loss of the authentic ‘aura’ of the original in an age of endless reproduction, disconnected from tradition/ritual

Eliot’s Contemporaries’ Relationship to Visual Culture• Virginia Woolf: wrote essay about ‘The Cinema’, her novel

To the Lighthouse, interest in time - ”time cannot be imagined without consciousness” – influenced by diegetic narration of film

• James Joyce – “His incorporation of advertising, telephony and the streetcar into his construction of perception represents a naturalisation of technological modernity”

• Ezra Pound – compared his idea of Vorticism (‘ The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster’, (1914)) to impressionism of the cinema image

• Contributors of literary film magazine Close Up: H.D, Dorothy Richardson – both innovators of ‘stream of consciousness’ style writing

• Frankfurt school – ‘disappearance of the inner life’, seduced by capitalism, mass media

• Sergei Eisenstein “Let this past be a reproach to those thoughtless people who have displayed arrogance in reference to literature, which has contributed so much to this apparently unprecedented art, and is … the art of viewing” (in Marcus, 2007)

As Armstrong points out, Eliot was attracted to eugenics and there was antisemitism and “cultural pessimism” “in his depiction of race and ‘recessive’ types ... ; and in The Waste Land’s degenerating metropolitan civilisation, middle-class sterility and working-class breeding”. However, despite Carey’s polemical attempt of a take down of various Modernist writers, one of the only mentions of Eliot was a description of his conflict between his belief that “in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards”, yet in a a literature class, made up chiefly of women elementary schoolteachers he describes them as “the most hopeful sign in England”.

The Waste Land can also be taken as an example of the blurring between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture’; superficial entertainment and philosophical interrogation, snapshots, fragments of psychological conditions of a population after a war and living through automatisation. This fragmentary and non-coherent structure leaves room for readers to connect to individual lines not dependent on an endless reference list which can expand the understanding but will not necessarily unlock a hidden coherence. While Eliot critiques the nature of the financial district as an employee of Lloyds Bank he was a part of it and thus does not detach himself from the critique. There is perhaps also empathy and pity for and self-recognition of the typist and the cultural, eternal references give meaning ‘even’ to her experience and does not trivialise.

Were they all just Snobs?• Eliot’s London Letters: “the middle classes

are morally corrupt”• Woolf: “everything is the proper stuff of

fiction” (1925), asked herself the question ‘Am I a Snob?’, conflicting feelings about her own fame, “sustained by an empty performance of sophistication staged in the cultural marketplace” (Latham, 2003) and worried about everything being reduced to superficial material signs that could be manipulated for social and economic gain, thus threatening our inner lives

• Joyce’s Ulysses – about the ‘Everyman’ but a book a person like the protagonist himself would never read

• George Orwell – conflict between idealist pastoral, pre-industrial beliefs of more primitive existence and egalitarian, Socialist beliefs and condescension against less educated and against destruction of nature for e.g. cost-effective social housing

• Arnold Bennett: knowledge of literature vital to complete living yet his not well-read working class characters live full lives, also aware of book as product and “value of literary knowledge as convertible cultural capital” (Latham)

So can we take Eliot at his words?• “Poets in our civilisation … must be

difficult” (1921) – not solely a question of snobbery, perhaps an attempt to get away from superficiality and light entertainment to look at deeper philosophical questions

• In his essay Degrees of Reality: interest = selective attention – everyone builds their own subjective system, no perception can be completely false, thus humans can’t be consistent - Philosophy tries to be consistent but must fail

• Just because he shows disdain for e.g. cinema does not necessarily result in an absence of influence

• Potential for appreciation of cinema in his admiration for Marie Lloyd: “it is to be regretted, however, that there is no film of her to preserve for the recollection of her admirers the perfect expressiveness of her smallest gestures” (1922)

• “film has been perfected to such a point that we can begin to see what it can do better than the stage, and what it cannot do as well … The cinema gives an illusion not of the stage but of life itself” (1936)

Why is this important?The early twentieth century was, just like now, a time of rapid technological development and the function (or lack thereof) of the novel, the poem, cinema and essentially any other art and role as a commercial product was changing and being reconsidered.The debate on elitism and snobbery will perhaps always be a part of our discussion of art, especially in academia, since autonomous art cannot be part of the cultural marketplace. The question of the creator’s role, their beliefs and relationship to their work will arguably not yield any definitive answers. Art was and continues to be influenced by its audiences, sciences and inventions, conception of time and reality and vice versa. Eliot described The Waste Landboth as “personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; … a piece of rhythmical grumbling” but also showed clear ambition as a Modernist trying to “create a totality which enfolds history” (Armstrong, 2005). While one art was not the cause of another, both cinema and Modernist art were symptoms and influences on each other, as Bazin describes them as siblings: “the American [modernist] novel belongs not so much to the age of cinema as to a certain vision of the world”.Just as Eliot laments the demise of music halls and even the traditionally regenerative season of spring is ‘cruel’, this does not negate hope and renewal bur rather demands sacrifice: “'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout?“ giving birth to new life and art and with it new ways of telling old stories.