The subject of objectivity : Modernism and the poetics of objectivity in Hulme, Pound, Musil and Beckett

Abstract

This study argues that Modernism in literature displays a concern with constructing a poetics of objectivity which, albeit variegated, spans across the entire stretch of the Modernist era- temporally, geographically as well as in the diverse literary genres. Certain aspects of Modernism reveal a tendency for adopting or appearing to adopt an objectivist stance, for producing a literary work which sets out to show forth the world as object, to present things as they really are. Spurred by this goal, literature strives to be objective by claiming freedom from subjectivity, attempting to reach a detached or impersonal mode which will enable the object to announce itself spontaneously. In doing so, Modernism seems to profess an ethics of divestiture, as is evidenced in Hulme's call for an aesthetics of starkness and austerity, Pound's continual exhortations to prune poetic language of unnecessary verbiage and Romantic effusions, Musil's attempt to create a character shorn of subjective qualities, and Beckett's move towards a drama of silence where language is removed from the stage and replaced by mime. The Modernist concern with objectivity, however, is fraught with inherent paradoxes in which the writing of objectivity continually erases itself. Ultimately, the literary work which partakes of the search for a poetics of objectivity is not able to escape the subjective view of the world or the relational quality of the language which it is condemned to use. When literature constitutes itself as a literature of objectivity, it discovers that objectivity can only be approached by being transformed into the subject. This dissertation attempts to demonstrate that, in setting out to inscribe a poetics of objectivity, Modernism finds itself in an aporetic space which it inhabits by writing meta-literarily about what becomes the Subject of Objectivity.