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The Modernist Narrator on the Victorian Sailing Ship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Michael Levenson
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Extract

In 1913 Ezra Pound vowed “to sweep out the last century the way Attila swept across Europe.” From our present standpoint, we can recognize in such a remark, not only the familiar antipathy toward things Victorian, but the impulse, everywhere apparent in the early modernist movement, to lay claim to historical autonomy, to suppress origins, to revise history in the light of present inclinations. A remark of Nietzsche's is apposite: “We try to give ourselves a new past from which we should have liked to descend instead of the past from which we actually descended.” But Europe, after all, survived Attila, and the Victorians have survived Pound to enjoy, we may imagine, the satisfactions of neglected precendents returned to claim priority. Now it remains for us to continue the long task of restoring connection where the moderns saw rupture. This essay will approach the problem of literary transition in Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, a work which provides the greatest challenge to those who live by fixed period categories, and which appears to fall as happily within the early modern as the late Victorian. And it is no easy matter to determine whether it lies closer to the spirit of Carlyle or Ford Madox Ford, closer to Samuel Smiles or Mister Kurtz. It raises, I hope to show, the problem of Victorian modernism in austere form, and I will attempt to measure those austerities by taking Culture and Anarchy as my touchstone.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 11 , Spring 1983 , pp. 101 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

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