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.202).The artist can ‘emancipate himself from the moulds which language and ordinary perception force upon him’( CW, pp.202-3), and once emancipated from linguistic abstractions, the artist can communicate an ‘actual contact with reality’ and therefore offer ‘an intimaterealisation of an object’ ( CW, p.203).Hulme’s argument here recalls Williams’s characterization of one significanttendency within modernist writing in relation to language: a view that everydaylanguage is a blockage to some true underlying consciousness or state of feeling, and that literature must seek to break through these restrictive barriers through new modes of expression (1989, pp.73-7).The poet’s ‘intimate realisation of an object’is clearly a form of this position; it also recalls Wittgenstein’s search for the logical form of the proposition underlying all linguistic representations.And a similarposition, though not explicitly related to language, is found in Lukács’s search for the material substratum of objects viewed as abstract commodities.Hulme’sparticular vision of this quest was to focus upon poetic language in an attempt to show that ‘beauty may be in small, dry things’ ( CW, p.68), a view most fully articulated in the essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’.In this essay Hulme retains the notion of a ‘realisation of objects’ by means of a visual and concrete language, but the Bergsonian influence is now replaced, to an extent, by an aesthetic politics of ‘classicism’.Alan Robinson has argued thatHulme’s aesthetic preference for Tory classicism should be situated within thewider social and political changes in the years running up to the outbreak of war.24Continued suffragette action, the first Labour members of Parliament in 1906,waves of industrial strikes throughout 1911-12, and the prospect of massenfranchisement threatened by the Liberal party posed a threat to the aristocratic old regime.Perry Anderson argues that in response to assaults upon aristocraticprivilege, certain writers, like Hulme, began to advocate an aesthetic rooted inclassical, conservative values.Interestingly, Anderson sees this adoption of a‘partially aristocratic colouration’ of modernist culture as part of a reaction to commodification as much as to liberal reforms of the political landscape: ‘the oldA Language of Concrete Things 51order.afforded a set of available codes and resources from which the ravages of the market as an organizing principle of culture and society – uniformly detested by every species of modernism – could be resisted’ (1984, p.105).Hulme thusrepresents a cultural moment that Pound was to name in 1914 as the emergence ofan ‘aristocracy of the arts’, a group ready to take over from the declining ruling body, but eager to employ a similar vocabulary against commodification (Pound,1914, p.68).Hulme starts ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ with the stark claim that after ahundred years of romanticism, classical values are ripe for revival.Romanticism, for Hulme, is a kind of hazy belief in the perfectibility of human beings, a ‘spilt religion’ in which concepts such as heaven and hell are mixed up, a confusionwhich will ‘falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience’ ( CW, p.62).If romantic thought lacks Imagistic ‘clear edges’, romantic verse is organized around‘metaphors of flight’, again ignoring properly delimited borders.Romantic verseconstantly refers to the word ‘infinite’, while classicism is bound, bothaesthetically and politically, by a sense of man as ‘an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal’ ( CW, p.61).Classical verse is ‘dry’ and ‘hard’, displays a profound sense of the finite, and can express clarity and precision, even using the clumsy ‘communal thing’ of language ( CW, p.69).In its finite materiality classical verse approximates to the very essence of poetic, as opposed to prose, language.Now Hulme proceeds to distinguish poetry and prose once again:In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters which are moved about according to rules, without being visualised at all in the process.There are in prose certain type situations and arrangements of words, which move as automatically into certain other arrangements as do functions in algebra.One only changes the X’s and Y’s back into physical things at the end of the process.( CW, pp.69-70) Prose is rationalized abstraction that lacks visual form and is thus a language in which ‘concrete things’ are dematerialized.Communication in prose is then an‘automatic’ procedure, conforming to fixed mathematical processes.It is a goodparody of the commodity, which as exchange-value ignores the coarsely sensuousmaterial of the object for its abstract value as congealed labour-time.25For Hulme formal abstraction can be countered by poetic language: ‘Poetry.may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose.It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one.It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily.It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you glidingthrough an abstract process’ ( CW, p.70).Schwartz comments that this passage shows Hulme’s distance from Bergson: ‘Associating abstraction with movementand sensation with fixity.Hulme seems far more attracted to stasis rather than motion, form rather than flux’ (1985, p.56).Poetic language can ‘arrest’ theabstract processes of prose and, once arrested, a more accurate picture of ‘physical things’ is obtainable.Hulme is still indebted to Bergson for the idea of a ‘language of intuition’, but departs from Bergsonian thought in his usage of the concept.A52T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismvisual poetic language is a substitute for a more corporeal discourse, seeminglyreducing the sensuous capacities of bodies to the faculty of sight alone.Theargument recalls Fredric Jameson’s claim that the visual pleasure one takes incolourful and sensual images, such as those of modernist painting, is designed to‘restore at least a symbolic experience of libidinal gratification to a world drained of it’ by the effects of reification (1981, p.63) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]