Of Bombs and Bugs, Airplanes and Birds, and Things that Begin with the Letter 'M'

Dr. Adrienne Janus

Of bombs and bugs, airplanes and birds and things that begin with the letter ‘M’

or

Modernism’s macrocosmic disorientations and microcosmic derangements

From the planetary scale of world war and the transnational migrations of James Joyce and Mina Loy, to the vogue of transatlantic ocean liner travel that brought Stein, Pound and Eliot to Europe, modernism is usually associated with large-scale expansions of space, its disorientations of style and perspective with the vertigos of explosive speed (Vorticism’s Blast), of the airplane’s aerial view (Stein, Loy), or of leaning, monumental towers (Yeats, Eliot, Woolf). I associate the transnational migrations, back and forth movements, and wanderings of these modernists, particularly Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, with what Adorno calls a poetics of “listening instead of localising,” a poetics that resists fixed orientations, direction, forms, a wandering poetics which never knows where “I” am, because it loses itself in its own whisperings, however loud or quiet these may be.

Accompanying, and intimately related to, the disorientations of this large-scale, macrocosmic modernism, however, are the derangements of what might be called a microcosmic modernism, associated with the implosion of space, the condensation of time and a fascination with the small-scale and miniature. Global war accompanies claustrophobic confinement in trenches, mental hospitals (Eliot) or prison cages (Pound); transnational migration accompanies the claustrophilia of small-scale enclosures of London drawing rooms (Yeats), Paris salons (Stein), or Irish bedrooms (Joyce, Beckett). Just as Blooms’ wanderings around Dublin attach umbilically to the intimate enclosure of Molly’s bed-room, the explosive entropy of Vorticism embraces Wyndham Lewis’ fascination with entomology, and Stein’s aerial views zoom in to close-ups of miniature things.

While making reference to these various mixes of macrocosmic and microcosmic tendencies, this paper will focus on modernist scenes that particularly foreground the mutual implication of spatio-temporal expansion and contraction and of large and small scale: Yeats’ 1916 performances of the Noh-inspired drama “At the Hawk’s Well” in Lady Cunard’s London drawing rooms and Dublin Mechanic’s Institute; Gertrude Stein’s “landscape theatre” and the spatio-temporal cluttering and stasis of A List (1922) and Four Saint’s in Three Acts (1929); and, via Stein's and Beckett's common obsession with lists of of 'M' names, the relation of these to the full emptiness of the enclosures of Samuel Beckett’s post-war plays. I argue that the mutual implication of, and movement between, spatio-temporal expansion and contraction, large and small scale, is not only fundamental to the perceptual disorientation that 20^th century modernism brings to light, but also indexes the constitutive intermediality of the arts that 21^st century modernism foregrounds.