5 Language ModernEnglishLiterature SipraM

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/335313554
Excerpt_Modern English Literature, 1890-1960 (Literary Contexts)
Book · January 2016
CITATIONS READS
0 5,233
1 author:
Sipra Mukherjee
West Bengal State University
21 PUBLICATIONS 31 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by Sipra Mukherjee on 15 April 2021.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

LITERARY CONTEXTS
Modern English Literature,

1890–1960
Literary Contexts recognises that literature is always rooted
in its social milieu and that we need to study literary cultures
in all their complexity and connections. It offers the thrill of
locating a text within its context and seeing a context reflected
in a literary/cultural text.
Each of the books in the series offers students of English and
other literatures concise, informative insights into the history
of ideas embodied in literary texts, authors and movements.
Organised around themes and ideas with extensive examples
from literary and cultural texts, the books enable students to
understand how the “literary” takes shape in an intellectual
milieu and discover manifestations of abstract ideas in literary
texts. Written by scholar-teachers who have taught and
researched literature for several years, each volume in the series
is a stand-alone reference book for students and teachers alike.
Series editor
Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English,
University of Hyderabad. His most recent books include The
Transnational in English Literature: Shakespeare to the Modern
(2015), Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance (2015),
The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary (2015) and Postcolonial Studies:
An Anthology (2015). His forthcoming work includes a book on
the Indian graphic novel.
Also in the series

Shakespeare
American Literature
Postcolonial Literatures
Victorian Literature
Postmodern Literatures
Eighteenth-century English Literature
LITERARY CONTEXTS
Modern English Literature,

1890–1960
Sipra Mukherjee
Series Editor
Pramod K. Nayar
MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1890–1960
ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LIMITED
Registered Office
3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029, Telangana, India
e-mail: centraloffice@orientblackswan.com
Other Offices
Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chennai, Ernakulam, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur,
Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida, Patna, Vijayawada
© Orient Blackswan Private Limited 2016

First published 2016
ISBN 978 81 250 xxxx x
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro 11.5/14.3 by

OSDATA, Hyderabad
Printed and bound at
Published by
Orient Blackswan Private Limited
3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029
e-mail: hyderabad@orientblackswan.com
FIVE
LANGUAGE
[We] do things with words.
J. L. Austin
I
n 1785, the enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried
Herder claimed language was humanity’s supreme
achievement which had made everything else possible: “No
cities have been erected by the lyre of Amphion, no magic wand
has converted deserts into gardens: but language, the grand
assistant of man, has done these” (420). The statement affirms
a relationship between words and intelligence, words and
civilisation, words and progress, claiming language has made
such accomplishments possible. To state it another way: human
beings could not have arrived at any of the frontiers of what the
world largely recognises as “achievements” without language.
One of the core assumptions of this thesis would surely be the
belief that language enables cognition. We cannot see or think or
understand our surroundings in their totality without linguistic
signs. Language, therefore, lies at the root of our intelligence or
imagination since we are unable to, without words, make sense of
what we see, hear, smell, or touch. It is the instrument humanity
uses, and has used, for thinking. Knowledge therefore does
not pre-date language, simply because it cannot exist without
words. While this is the general view of enlightenment writers
on language, it would be naive to not recognise the complexities
within it, especially when we remember that awareness of the
180 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE, –
historicity of all forms of life was a mainstream enlightenment

notion. Isaiah Berlin writes of a counter-enlightenment present
during the enlightenment period – its champions including
Giambattista Vico and Herder – that emphasised relativism
and the irrational aspects of human nature.1 Enlightenment
tenets of “universality, objectivity, rationality” were therefore
not as universal as would be thought. Berlin, in fact, emphasises
the debt that modern intellectuals owe to enlightenment
thinkers who took care to establish that their ideas, “that all
explanation, all understanding, indeed, all living, depend on a
relationship to a given social whole and its unique past, and that
it is incapable of being fitted into some repetitive, generalised
pattern” (20–21).
Modern doubts regarding language surfaced explicitly
towards the late nineteenth century. “Is language the adequate
expression of all realities?” (Magnus and Higgins 116), wrote
Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1873 essay, “On Truth and Lies in
a Non-Moral Sense”. This question was to rapidly develop
into an obsession that preoccupied the modern mind in the
twentieth century, threatening the foundations of the last
bulwark of European enlightenment2 against the imminent
chaos of postmodernity. With the citadels of reason, morality,
religion and science undermined by Immanuel Kant, Hegel,
Charles Darwin, James George Frazer and other thinkers of the
nineteenth century, it was only to be expected that the questioning
eye would turn to language, the material form indispensable for
the articulation of such realms. Historicity, the key influence
on nineteenth-century thought, had affected the deterministic
theories of empiricism and rationalism, making them appear
suspect, reductionist and out of touch with the complexities of
reality. Hegel’s philosophy argued that the history of any sphere
of knowledge was the history of man building upon earlier
knowledge even as he reacted against it. Humanity did not move
forward into the future, or backward as Benjamin suggests in
LANGUAGE 181
his angel of history.3 Humanity struggled with a thesis and its

antithesis to move to a third, wholly new, position: synthesis. It
was surely with this sense of the connectedness of history that
Henry James wrote the following lines from the preface to The
Golden Bowl: “. . . the whole conduct of life consists of things
done, which do other things in their turn, just so our behaviour
and its fruits are essentially one and continuous and persistent
and unquenchable, . . . and so, among our innumerable acts, are
no arbitrary, no senseless separations” (21).
No thesis or its antithesis or the consequent synthesis was,
according to Hegel’s theory, final. It was only one point that
would lead organically to another on the trajectory of time
which humanity called “progress”. This zigzagging dialectical
movement through time made all knowledge contingent to
particular moments of history and caused the absolute nature
of knowledge with a capital K to be besieged by relativism.
Within this zeitgeist (Hegel’s term for “spirit of the age”) of the
post-Hegelian century, diverse areas of knowledge were probed
historically. This included language, the major and most flexible
instrument of communication which had been the hitherto
accepted vehicle of man’s thoughts, learning and experiences.
Its position at the heart of all realms of knowledge made it
impossible to unravel one from the other: the knowledge
communicated from the words which carried it, the content
from the form. So intimate was this weaving that all areas of
man’s knowledge could be said to exist largely in language, be it
morality, religion, science or reason.
It was around the age of enlightenment that a transition
from the older theory of language as “encoding” or mirroring
our thoughts had begun. The traditional view, propounded by
authors as diverse as Aristotle and Descartes, was that words
expressed realities or ideas already existing. Till the eighteenth
century, and into the nineteenth century, Western philosophy
had been dominated by the view that “thought and language
were separate activities: language was an activity with words

and thought was an activity with ideas: words depended on
ideas, but ideas did not depend on words. Ideas were treated
as standing for objects, properties and relations in the external
world, as perceived by the senses” (R. Harris 2). The question
increasingly asked in the nineteenth century was: were thought
and language truly separate activities? And the consequent
question: could language be trusted to be an unprejudiced
carrier of ideas? To return to Nietzsche’s mistrust of language:
The various languages placed side by side show that with words
it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate
expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages.
The “thing in itself ” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart
from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something
quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something
not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates
the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations
he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve
stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image,
in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time
there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the
middle of an entirely new and different one. . . . It is this way
with all of us concerning language: we believe that we know
something about the things themselves when we speak of
trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but
metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way
to the original entities. (Magnus and Higgins 116)
The “original” lay beyond the seeking grasp of a language

which was merely a string of metaphors designed by men and
women, or more correctly, by those of a certain community
belonging to one particular time. Roughly two decades later
Arthur Symons, exploring symbolism in literature, concluded
that without symbolism there would be no language, for words
were, in reality, symbols: forms of expression which were “best but
approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until [they had] obtained
LANGUAGE 183
the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by

the consciousness” (2). The insertion of the element of human
arbitrariness into the understanding of language peeled from
language the veneer of innocence that had been its largely
unquestioned characteristic. The allegedly colourless medium
was found to be deeply dyed in the myriad beliefs and ideologies
of class, race, community, gender, geography, history and other
such lenses through which humanity viewed the world. This
at-the-most-approximate congruency that language provided
between things and their designations could lead man to a truth
which was only a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies,
and anthropomorphisms” though it appeared “to be fixed,
canonical, and binding” out of long usage (Magnus, Higgins
117). Language then was no longer a transparent and objective
form of encapsulating ideas, but one that used metaphors which
were questionable because they were born of subjective human
experiences. A sentence was no longer seen as a string of words
that were irreplaceable, capable of being translated only by
using synonymous words from another language. Depending
on who wrote the sentence, it could only be decoded by one
knowledgeable of the culture and experiences of the writer’s
particular community because every word or idiom used by the
writer carried their community’s legacy. In Chinua Achebe’s
novel No Longer at Ease (1960) this phenomenon is depicted in
the incident where the elders of the Nigerian Igbo community
rue their society’s transformations as a result of Westernisation:
“Many of his hearers whistled in unbelief when he told them
that a man could not go to his neighbour’s wedding unless he
was given one of these papers on which they wrote R.S.V.P.
– Rice and Stew Very Plenty – which was invariably an over-
statement” (10).
Aristotle had had the idea that “the mental experiences,
which these [words] directly symbolize, are the same for
all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the
images” (2). This however did not make sense in the context
of a humanity who used hundreds of languages which differed
substantially from one another in the mental affections or the
objects they denoted with signs. The belief, then, that all ideas
or objects pre-dated language and existed independent of their
names appeared flawed, as did the corresponding theory that
words followed thoughts in the natural progression of events.
Wittgenstein’s statement in Philosophische Grammatik that we
think in language articulated this and, more significantly, drew
attention to the centrality of language in our understanding
of the world. Wittgenstein wrote, “When I think in language,
there aren’t meanings going through my mind in addition
to the verbal expressions; the language is itself the vehicle
of thought” (R. Harris 27). It was with the aid of language,
the legacy handed to a child at birth, that the human mind
grasped the world, and not the other way around. As Freud
said, the mind connected the object with the word-presentation
corresponding to it and arrived at a consciousness of the earlier
un-nameable, and therefore un-categorised, un-comprehensible
object. Communities saw, recognised and thought of things,
ideas and practices that their languages had names or words for.
A language could facilitate or thwart, encourage or discourage a
person from thinking, imagining and comprehending those areas
of knowledge that the language did or did not encompass.
In these discussions, therefore, two distinct aspects of
language were explored. One was the constructed and synthetic
nature of a medium of communication that had earlier been
accepted as natural (or a divine gift according to the Adamic
thesis)4 as well as universal. The other was the understanding
that language was not peripheral to human comprehension of
the world, but central to it. It played a constitutive role, and not
merely a representative role, in human cognition. Both these
aspects underlay the modernist “make it new” dictum, with
its belief that with the world having changed, language would
too.
LANGUAGE 185
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE

Possibly the most significant feature of modern thought on
language is its emphasis on the collective, rather than the
individual unit. This modern inclination may be discerned in
a somewhat extreme form in Émile Durkheim’s thesis that the
determining cause of a social fact needs to be sought among
the antecedent social facts, and not among the consciousness
of individuals who constitute that society. In the study of
language too was followed the overwhelming trend of viewing
the individual as one constitutive unit of the larger collective
– society.
The climate of the age appears to have encouraged thinking in
binaries. Freud, born 1856, revolutionised psychoanalysis with
the twin concepts of the conscious and unconscious. Ferdinand
de Saussure, born 1857, revolutionised linguistics with the twin
concepts of the parole and the langue. Durkheim, born 1858,
revolutionised sociology with the twin concepts of ritual and
religion.5 One may add to this list Hegel’s binaries of the subject
and object of knowledge, mind and nature, knowledge and
faith, freedom and authority. Significantly, in these binaries, the
relation between the two was along similar lines. The former of
the two concepts, that of the conscious mind, the parole (usually
translated as “speech”) and ritual were concepts that privileged
the individual. The latter of the two concepts, the unconscious,
the langue and the religion, referred to a larger sphere that
was beyond the control of the individual. This latter realm
functioned almost like a matrix within which the first concepts
“lived”. Despite the apparent role played by the personal will
in the conscious mind or the parole or the religion, it was the
second concept that controlled and ordered the first.
Saussure’s langue, usually translated as “the language” or “a
language”, or as “linguistic structure” or “linguistic system”, is
“both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection
of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social

body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty” (Saussure
9). The langue therefore is independent of individual speakers
and yet at the same time dependent on each individual speaker
because langue exists through the parole which upholds the
system. The langue is “a storehouse filled by the members of
a given community through their active use of speaking, a
grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain,
or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For
language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only
within a collectivity” (Saussure 13–14). Any language spoken
by an individual is engendered by and contained within the
huge, predetermined and well-ordered matrix of the langue.
Language, therefore, is a realm within which is embedded the
impression of the mind, the unconscious and the collective mind
of the social community. Scholarship on the three subjects of
sociology, psychology and linguistics thus come together in the
twentieth century’s understanding of language. Decades later,
the “French Freud”, Jacques Lacan, who campaigned for what
he called “a return to Freud” in the 1950s and 60s, was to use
structural linguistics to argue that the unconscious was, in fact,
structured like a language. Accepting Heidegger’s notion that
an individual experienced the world as a meaningful totality,
Lacan saw language as instrumental to gaining this capability.
A child’s learning of its mother tongue determined every aspect
of its response to the world, he argued, for as the child began
to interpret its surroundings through the media of words, it
embarked upon a mode of experience that would be accessed
linguistically.
If language is a socially constructed tool of communication
and thought, then a narrative should be analysed neither as a
narrative detached from history nor as one universal to it, but
as narratives that embody aspects of time and space. Forms of
language bore within them values and ideologies as legacy. The
LANGUAGE 187
meaning was not, or not only, conveyed by the words used. A

word’s meaning was also embedded in the history that the word
or the language had lived. It is for this reason that writers have
felt the need to re-write languages when moving the language
from one time, space or culture to another. Chinua Achebe in a
speech entitled “The African Writer and the English Language”,
said that in order to carry the weight of his African experience,
the English language would have to be “a new English, still
in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit
new African surroundings” (102). Raja Rao, in his preface to
Kanthapura, famously spoke of how “the telling [had] not been
easy” because one had to convey in a language that was not
one’s own the spirit that was one’s own: “One has to convey the
various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement
that looks maltreated in an alien language” (v).
The study of the philosophy of language has consequently
been informed by the belief that it “is the fundamental basis of
all philosophical problems, in that language is the distinctive
exercise of mind, and the distinctive way in which we give shape
to metaphysical beliefs” (Blackburn 211). Roy Harris illustrates
this with examples of the differences between European
English and Tzeltal, the language of the Mayan Indians. Most
Europeans, he writes, would not see the relevance of having
definite words for, say, what people utter on Thursdays, or for
words spoken at night, or for talk that took place a year ago.
To a Mayan Indian of Tenejapa, however, these questions
would make perfectly good sense and accordingly, the Mayan
language Tzeltal provides commonly used designations for all
of these. While the European may, with the linguistic resources
of his own language, make up terms such as “Thursday talk”,
or “night words”, he does not see the point of drawing such
distinctions. Since it is not part of his concept of a language that
a language should provide you with “Thursday talk” or “night
words”, there are no corresponding metalinguistic expressions
either. However, he finds nothing strange about having specific

words in a language for the clothes people wear on Sundays,
or for the dress worn at night, or for a coat that one wears in
winter. Harris concludes that for the European
. . . concept of clothing, unlike his concept of a language,
incorporates the notion of appropriateness to different times of
the day, of the week, or of the year. Time is one of the important
conceptual parameters in the European’s categorisation of
clothes, food, and many other things; but a relatively unimportant
one in his categorisation of words. Terms like archaism and
neologism belong to the technical lexicon of the scholar, not
to the everyday vocabulary of the ordinary language-user. (R.
Harris 19)
In the words of the eighteenth-century grammarian James

Harris, “one may be tempted to call language a kind of picture
of the universe, where the words are as the figures or images of
all particulars” (394).
Saussure’s study of linguistics introduced the theoretical
paradigm that came to be called structuralism. This was based
on the theory that all elements of a culture are codes. For the
understanding of language, this had two consequences. The first
was that as in a code, a word had no association with the object
in itself. It was an arbitrarily chosen indicator, meaningless to
begin with. It only pointed to the idea or the object in the real
world. It was a signifier which the language-user used to arrive
at the signified. The meaning emerged when that indicator was
set among other indicators, equally arbitrarily chosen, but each
different from each other. In each indicator that was different,
a certain value was, again quite arbitrarily, inscribed into each
word. So the word “book” could begin to signify an object only
when it was placed within the English language where other
different-sounding signs were present. With each indicator being
different, the meaning of a word emerged with the speaker’s use
of the differences. The word itself therefore would be a successful
LANGUAGE 189
signifier only if it was different, phonetically or visually, from

other words. The second consequence of Saussurean linguistics
to the understanding of language was that langue was recognised
as the larger structure that was needed to present the differences
among the words, thereby endowing each with its meaning. Just
as a code is incomprehensible without a structure, a language
is unintelligible without the interrelations of its words. To
understand the meaning of the words or signs and their relations,
one needed to recognise the larger structures within which they
functioned, their contexts of a system, a design or a ritual.
This understanding of a word would soon be extended to the
entirety of texts because every text, like a word, has its particular
context. No word or text exists on its own autonomously, because
it is part of a larger arrangement that “holds” the smaller text
or word in place. There is, consequently, an environment within
which the sign or text exists, an environment constituted not by
its own self, or even by other signs or texts directly connected
with it, but by many other signs and texts, from diverse areas
which together create this milieu. Intertextuality, a term coined
much later in 1966 by Julia Kristeva, may be useful here to
understand the way words/texts “speak” to each other within a
system, determining and defining meanings. As Woolf said in her
1937 BBC broadcast, “Craftsmanship”, the word “incarnadine”
would always carry with it echoes of Lady Macbeth’s anguish.6
The power of a word can never consequently be entirely within
the control of the author:
Everyone who has ever written a sentence must be conscious or
half-conscious of it. Words, English words, are full of echoes, of
memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and
about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields,
for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in
writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with
memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.
The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use it
without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? (Web n.p.)
The meaning of a word does not lie in itself. It lies in the

multitude of relationships of difference and sameness that that
word has with the other words surrounding it. Kristeva coined
the term to relate Saussure’s semiotics to Bakhtin’s dialogism.
Intertextuality therefore proposed that semiotics (the study
that believed a sign got its meaning when placed among other
signs) could be associated with dialogism (the concept that a
conversation occurred within a text through heteroglossia and
between texts of/by the same or diverse times/authors). This
milieu within which texts existed may be said to be akin to what
T. S. Eliot described in his essay “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” as “tradition”:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.
His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his
relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him
alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among
the dead. . . . The existing monuments form an ideal order among
themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new . . .
work of art among them. The existing order is complete before
the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention
of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work
of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity
between the old and the new. (Sacred Wood 44–45)
Possibly because of this two-way association between a word

and its context, both Wittgenstein and Saussure used the analogy
of a chess game to explain the functioning of units of the word
within a language. The idea of language involving a series of
coordinated moves was termed by Wittgenstein as language-
games. Meaningful language happens when we recognise not
only the word but more importantly the position that the word
occupies in a familiar exercise or an identifiable pattern:
Take a knight, for instance. By itself is it an element in the game?
Certainly not, for by its material make-up – outside its square
LANGUAGE 191
and the other conditions of the game – it means nothing to the

player; it becomes a real, concrete element only when endowed
with value and wedded to it. Suppose that the piece happens
to be destroyed or lost during a game. Can it be replaced by an
equivalent piece? Certainly. Not only another knight but even
a figure shorn of any resemblance to a knight can be declared
identical provided the same value is attributed to it. We see
then that in semiological systems like language, where elements
hold each other in equilibrium in accordance with fixed rules,
the notion of identity blends with that of value and vice versa.
(Saussure 110)
This intermesh of the value and identity encapsulated within

each sign gave each word a two-dimensional nature: it existed
in the present, or at one moment in time, and it existed, perhaps
even evolved, across moments of time. Like a game of chess,
language could be studied in two ways: the synchronic way –
concentrating on a study of the game as complete and present
at that particular time – and the diachronic way – studying
the game as it has evolved through time over the ages. The
synchronic study of signs (words) would seek to understand the
relationship between various signs across diverse languages and
the substitution of one sign by another equivalent sign (words).
The diachronic study would involve analysing the evolving
nature of signs. Raymond Williams, taking up the evolution
of 110 words (and later, in the 1983 edition, 121 words) in
Keywords, explored how an inherited vocabulary is subject
to change as well as to continuity . . . not a tradition to be
learnt, nor a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meanings
which, because it is ‘our language’, has a natural authority; but
as a shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from
profoundly different and important points of view: a vocabulary
to use, to find our ways in, to change as we find it necessary to
change it, as we go on making our own language and history.
(24–25)
Language therefore becomes the space where our sense of

ourselves is constructed, our subjectivities are engendered. This
sense comes not from the individual’s unique and personal
being, but from social meanings and social institutions which
are themselves constructed by a range of discursive formations.
Extending Saussure’s semiotics of words and languages to texts
and narratives, we arrive at the term “discourse”, a term of whose
meaning Harold Bloom may have said, like reading, tends to
become more under-determined even as its use becomes more
over-determined. Simply explained, discourses are forms of
speech or writing that communicate a certain approach or
ideology. As the twentieth century progressed, discourses began
to be viewed as dominating our use of language.
THE POLITICS OF FORM

Dorothy Richardson, when looking for a model of the novel
for her own work, felt compelled to reject previous styles of
narratives which embodied, as she called it in the foreword to
Pilgrimage (1912), “current masculine realism”. Despite the
non-linear plotting, the stream-of-consciousness narrative and
the innovations in prose, all of which were attempts born out
of Freud’s research of the phenomenology of consciousness,
a degree of intractability stubbornly clung to language.
Dissatisfied, she set aside a “considerable mass of manuscript”
(Richardson 430). This discourse, no matter how emphatically
she shaped it to reflect the patterns of her mind, was an
inherited one and not entirely in accordance with her individual
understanding of the world. What Richardson was referring to
in this passage as she detailed her frustration were not discrete
words, but, as Bakhtin said, “forms of utterance” (The Bakhtin
Reader 178) that struck her as conveying a masculine worldview.
No matter how carefully she selected her words to express her
individual thoughts, once she set those words in sentences and
LANGUAGE 193
paragraphs, the end-meaning shifted to a space somewhat

removed from her own. This had to do with the style and
manner of prose used in earlier models of narrative. These styles
and manners were already situated in a context and that context
had endowed the words and sentences with its own ideology.
So when words were strung together in a particular way, the
form of utterance constructed would recall prior contexts and
all their associated ideologies. Constructing a new discourse
therefore was of primary importance to twentieth-century
writers because earlier forms were dominated by the male point
of view and deeply embedded within a patriarchal ideology. It
was not only the words that were carrying the meaning of the
sentence, but also the contexts that had become, with repeated
use, welded to the words. This formed a discourse which had a
predetermined colour of its own and hence tinted Richardson’s
narrative when she used it.
Two passages, drawn from novelists a little over a century
apart, may illustrate this material presence that language
possesses in a work of literature. Both these novelists are women
and both are describing, largely from a woman’s point of view,
proposals of marriage being made to two women who remain
unimpressed. The first is the hilarious and infuriating proposal
to Elizabeth by Mr Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
(1813):
“May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter
Elizabeth, when I solicit for the honour of a private audience
with her?”
Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise,
Mrs. Bennet answered instantly, “Oh dear! – yes – certainly . . .”
And . . . was hastening away, when Elizabeth called out, “Dear
madam, do not go . . . Mr. Collins must excuse me. He can have
nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear. I am going
away myself.”
“No, no, nonsense, Lizzy. I desire you to stay where you are.” And
upon Elizabeth’s seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed
looks, about to escape, she added, “Lizzy, I insist upon your
staying and hearing Mr. Collins.”
Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction – and a
moment’s consideration making her also sensible that it would
be wisest to get it over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat
down again and tried to conceal, by incessant employment the
feelings which were divided between distress and diversion. . . .
Mr. Collins began.
“Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty . . . adds
to your other perfections. . . . But before I am run away with by
my feelings on this subject, perhaps it would be advisable for me
to state my reasons for marrying. . . .”
The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being
run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing,
that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt
to stop him further, and he continued. . . . (92–94)
A near replica of this episode occurs in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando,

where Orlando, now a woman, is suddenly confronted by the
Archduchess, who reveals himself to be an Archduke disguised
as a woman out of his mad love for Orlando:
‘A plague on women,’ said Orlando to herself, going to the
cupboard to fetch a glass of wine, ‘they never leave one a
moment’s peace . . . and now’ – here she turned to present the
Archduchess with the salver, and behold – in her place stood a
tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She
was alone with a man.
Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she
had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote
enough to be equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with
faintness.
‘La!’ she cried, putting her hand to her side, ‘how you frighten
me!’
LANGUAGE 195
‘Gentle creature,’ cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee

and at the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando’s lips, ‘forgive
me for the deceit I have practised on you!’
Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed
her hand.
In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes
with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. . . . Falling
on his knees, the Archduke Harry made the most passionate
declaration of his suit. . . . As he spoke, enormous tears formed
in his rather prominent eyes and ran down the sandy tracts of
his long and lanky cheeks.
That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women,
Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was
beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when
men display emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was.
(105–06)
Even in these severely clipped quotations, the irony (and

amusement) in both the authors’ voices is quite distinct. In both
passages, the authors portray the woman as smart, intelligent
and somewhat impatient of the behavioural codes expected of
young women when subjected to marriage proposals. In both,
the proposal is an unwanted one to the woman and, though a
little upset or irritated, they are in control of their emotions. Yet
despite these pronounced similarities, the feel of the language
makes the experience of reading the two passages different.
Austen’s Elizabeth emerges as a more conventionally gendered
young woman than Orlando. This is despite Orlando being
suddenly “seized with faintness” and being, as the author tells
us, upset, frightened and conscious of her sex – all features
usually seen in keeping with the stereotype of femininity. The
difference, then, is due not just to the words used to describe
either Orlando or Elizabeth (“blush”, “vexed”, “embarrassed”)
but also to the tenor of the language. Woolf ’s language is more
clipped than Austen’s, shorn of emotion and its sarcasm more
pointed regarding the “acted” roles and the “natural discourse”.

In short, Woolf ’s language, with its precision and irony, is what
we would usually call more “modern”. She also places two
simultaneous strands of narrative before the reader: one, of the
events unfolding and two, of the stream of thoughts inside the
character’s mind. The other difference in language comes from
the very different modes of depiction. Austen depicts the scene
such that the reader is forced to experience what Elizabeth
experiences at the time: “Elizabeth’s seeming really, with vexed
and embarrassed looks, about to escape” or “the idea . . . made
Elizabeth so near laughing, that she could not. . . .” Woolf ’s
depiction, on the other hand, makes the reader feel as though
he or she is watching Orlando from a distance. Her emotions
are more clinically stated, as though by a dispassionate observer,
and Woolf urges the reader to view Orlando’s femininity (and
the Archduke’s masculinity) more as a particular gender role that
is expected of her (and him), not entirely extraneous but largely
performative. Thus despite the situations depicted being very
similar, the difference of language makes the impressions that
the two make on the reader’s mind very different. That we often
study the construction of the language in an undated passage
to locate the period, or in an anonymous poem to locate the
gender or class of the writer, showcases how languages change
with context. This is because languages, or more precisely, groups
of statements, derive from discursive formations that are a part
of systems of thought and knowledge, and consequently carry
coded within them the worldviews of the cultures from which
they emanate. Years later, Foucault was to premise his method
of studying discursive formations, or “epistemes” as he calls
them, on the belief that “systems of thought and knowledge . . .
are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that
operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and
define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the
boundaries of thought in a given domain and period” (Gutting,
LANGUAGE 197
Web n.p.). The earlier accepted forms of discourse in literature

conveyed a reality that the modern writer felt was outdated and
archaic. In order to portray their characters closer to what they
felt was the new, changed reality that came about “on or about
December 1910”, twentieth-century writers had to change
their ways of seeing, experiencing and expressing life – the three
activities which together shaped discourses.
Foucault explored – in Madness and Civilization (1961), The
Order of Things (1966) and finally in the explicitly titled The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) – the construction of discourses
through history as a community’s ideas evolved. In Madness and
Civilization, for example, he critiqued the discourses of history
and psychiatry, revealing the hypocrisy and opportunism that
underlay the allegedly beneficial and unprejudiced narratives
that shaped European ideas of normalcy, civilisation and
knowledge. Discourses constitute systems of thought which
indicate certain ideas and practices as truth, knowledge, wisdom
and tradition. Consequently, discourses tell us who we are, what
or how we should think and what our beliefs should be, thereby
in effect controlling our thought. When Walter Benjamin, for
example, began his essay “Unpacking My Library”, he drew
upon words and idioms that were already associated with a
context – a situation and a persona:
I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on
the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I
cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review
before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that.
Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates
that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust
of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among
piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years
of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of
the mood. . . . (61)
The personality evoked here is that of the disorderly, eccentric

and passionate booklover. It is only in such a context, as part of
this familiar discourse, that a phrase like “the mild boredom of
order” carries any sense, and images of “floor covered with torn
paper” and “disorder of crates . . . wrenched open” carry any beauty.
Next to this “innocent” discourse one may set others with more
disturbing political implications. Charlotte Bronte’s references
to the presence of the unknown living being in the upper parts
of the house are deeply embedded within the Oriental discourse
that perceived the non-European Other as sinister, non/sub-
human and fearsome. The first night Jane becomes aware of this
presence is conveyed through phrases such as “a demoniac laugh
– low, suppressed, and deep”, “goblin-laughter”, “something
[that] gurgled and moaned” (173). The second reference is more
explicit about the animal-like personality being described:
The night – its silence – its rest, was rent in twain by a savage,
a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield
Hall.
My pulse stopped: my heart stood still; my stretched arm was
paralysed. The cry died, and was not renewed. Indeed, whatever
being uttered that fearful shriek could not soon repeat it: not the
widest-winged condor on the Andes could, twice in succession,
send out such a yell from the cloud shrouding his eyrie. The
thing delivering such utterance must rest ere it could repeat the
effort. (238)
It is hardly surprising therefore that writers of the twentieth

century have felt it incumbent upon themselves to examine,
analyse and locate discourses. The overwhelming dominance
of language in any written work caused them to focus much
of their energies on the sheer materiality of the medium
they used. Bakhtin, working in the 1920s and the 30s, added
a crucial dimension to the idea that man’s consciousness and
conceptualisation of reality is through language, since it is not
possible to have a distinct consciousness of the world outside
LANGUAGE 199
of the word. However, he adds, “[the] consciousness and

cognition of reality is not achieved through language and its
forms understood in the precise linguistic sense. It is the forms
of the utterance, not the forms of language, that play the most
important role in consciousness and the comprehension of
reality. . . . We think and conceptualize in utterances, complexes
complete in themselves” (178). Just as reality is refracted
through language, the forms of utterances are articulations of
the individual/community’s attitudes towards that reality. It is
as if the human imagination possesses “a series of inner genres
for seeing and conceptualizing reality” (179). A particular way
of viewing and understanding reality can only be represented
through a certain mode of narrative. Certain genres therefore
may be more powerful and greater in number depending on
the ideological environment present in the society, while certain
genres may fade away. Thus questions have been raised, from
Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth of Tragedy to Joseph Wood Krutch’s
1929 The Modern Temper, to George Steiner’s 1961 The Death of
Tragedy, on whether tragedy as a genre had died. The question
essentially revolved around whether the genre could survive the
triumph of rationalism and the secular worldview of the modern
age, since both made it impossible to view humanity with
the metaphysical dimension that the tragic genre demanded.
The rationalisation and intellectualisation of the modern
times had contributed to, as Max Weber so eloquently put it,
a “disenchantment of the world”.7 It was no longer possible
for modern man to assume the dignity, the large-ness, the
magnificence of the tragic protagonist. The very concept of values
had changed, and the terms “evil”, “transgression”, “shame” or
“honour” had quite different meanings in the twentieth century.
As Freud writes in Totem and Taboo, “The Hero of tragedy must
suffer; to this day that remains the essence of a tragedy. He had
to bear the burden of what was known as ‘tragic guilt’; the basis
of that guilt is not always easy to find, for in the light of our
everyday life it is often no guilt at all” (181).
The guilt that lay in rebellion against a divine or human
authority could no longer, in modern thinking, be comprehended
as “sin” or a “fall”. The feelings of outrage at the rashness of the
tragic hero, or the feelings of pity and terror at his fall, could
hardly be evoked in the prosaic banality of modern life. The issue
of the tragic genre dying out was, therefore, not an academic or
literary question about a form of literature being practicable
or not. It was an issue which questioned the consequences of
science and progress and challenged the meanings of culture
and civilisation. To accept that tragedy was dead in the modern
age would be to acknowledge the mean and trivialised state of
modern humanity. Wagner, like others of his age, believed that
the disappearance of tragedy indicated cultural decadence and
that such a state could ultimately lead to the dissolution of an
entire state or civilisation. Arthur Miller’s reinterpretation of
the genre of tragedy along socialist lines reveals how an earlier
discourse could be reread, reinterpreted, and then shaped
accordingly to fit the new reading and interpretation which
have come with the changed world and which need conveyance
in a different discourse. Miller sees the tragic hero less as a
larger-than-life character, condemned with the tragic flaw,
and doomed in his challenge with fate. In Miller’s reading, the
tragic protagonist is one among common men, singular only
in his “inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of
what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of
his rightful status” (4). Tragedy therefore becomes the story of
rebellion against an unjust fate that places a person in a certain
class, rank or social position. The hero’s challenge consequently
is a battle for the justice denied to him/her by destiny or, the
socialist understanding of destiny, by history. The plot of tragedy
exists, according to Miller, for us, “we who are without kings”,
in “the heart and spirit of the average man” (7).
LANGUAGE 201
Like Durkheim said of society, language too is more than the

sum of its parts. It is not what language says, or claims to say,
that encompasses all that is said. Every language draws upon
unspoken and invisible resources, becoming an arena within
which may be enacted games of power. One example of this
layered nature of language being unpacked is the intense scene
in Joyce’s Portrait when the Irish Stephen Dedalus resents the
English dean’s ignorance of the word “tundish”, pointing the
reader to the larger context of imperialism and language-politics
in colonised Ireland:
That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?
What is a tundish?
That. The... funnel.
Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard
the word in my life.
It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen,
laughing, where they speak the best English.
A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting
word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.
His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at
the English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in
the parable may have turned on the prodigal [. . .].
The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his
sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with
a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was
a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is
mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE,
MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write
these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar
and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have
not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My
soul frets in the shadow of his language. (204–05)
Fretting in the shadow of the imperialist’s language, Joyce

goes on to invent for his writing an English that is imbued
with the politics of decolonisation. Conditioned by a time
when nationalist movements in Ireland were at their peak,
and the majority of his schoolmates and peers part of the anti-
imperialist movement, Joyce’s decolonisation is political even
as it is discursive. It is for this reason that postcolonial studies,
the critical domain that has gained much relevance and seen
energetic research in the past few decades, has repeatedly
turned to Joyce for examples of alterity, marginalisation and
difference.8 Joyce constructs a materially different language with
Dublin as the centre believing, as Attridge states Joyce’s texts
imply, that “all versions of history are made in language and
are, by virtue of that fact, ideological constructions, weavings
and re-weavings of old stories, fusions of stock character types,
blendings of different national languages, dialects, and registers”
(Joyce Effects 80). This language-driven reality of Dublin is one
of the possibilities among the many possible realities, awaiting
creation in the coloniser’s language.
Born in the years when the sun was beginning to set on the
British Empire, and flaunting immigrants from the periphery
as the vanguard, literary modernism is suffused with political
tension and anxiety. Colonialism and nationalism were among
the most visible of ideological movements making their mark
in different parts of the British Empire. By the beginning
of the twentieth century, the idea of a national identity was
increasingly being debated and discussed through the register
of culture. The idea of the nation was defined increasingly in
terms of language, myths, memories and history, resulting in
movements of nationalism based upon cultural nationalisms.
Language was one of the prime instruments used to construct
the identity of a nation and the subjectivity of its people. This
conscious use to which language could be put was reflected in
Yeats’ statement: “Gaelic is my national language, but it is not
LANGUAGE 203
my mother tongue” (520). It is no coincidence that much of the

experimentation and innovation that modernists ventured upon
have a palpable degree of resistance to the canonical discourses
of English literature. Received as a legacy by many who chose
to write in English, the tyranny of the established hegemony is
held at abeyance by writers who, like early modernists Conrad
or Yeats, came from outside England. Exploring the themes of
pride, arrogance, humiliation and corruption in his many novels,
Conrad took English literature out of the English-speaking
world and into its dark margins. Conrad’s “white” heroes like
Tom Lingard, “black” heroes like Peter Willems, or those of
morally grey shades like Jim and Kurtz, are all white men who
move beyond the white man’s territory into areas where “the
distinction of being white” (Lord Jim 12) gives them an easy
and immediate access to power. Conrad’s critique of civilisation
and history, engendered outside imperialist nations, approaches
language with infinite hope and caution:
Words, groups of words, words standing alone, are symbols of
life, have the power in their sound or their aspect to present the
very thing you wish to hold up before the mental vison of your
readers. The things ‘as they are’ exist in words; therefore words
should be handled with care lest the picture, the image of truth
abiding in facts, should become distorted – or blurred. (Novelists
on the Novel 319)
His preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) famously read:

“My task . . . is, by the power of the written word, to make
you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see”
(10). In this role, the written word is charged with the function
of making visible scenes that have been rendered invisible,
and making audible voices that have been silenced. The white
man is rendered visible by placing him outside his habitual
zone of privileged light. Positioned against the background of
that vast darkness of a complex human history, the burden of
his otherwise elusory past is discernible. In An Outcast of the
Islands, the Malaysian Babalatchi bitterly rejects the arrogant

and patronising “talk” of the white man, the language which is
capable of “investing their activities with spiritual value” (Leavis
199) and disguising the truths for so long that those truths
eventually begin to elude the white man too:
“This is white man’s talk,” exclaimed Babalatchi, with bitter
exultation. “I know you. That is how you all talk while you load
your guns and sharpen your swords; and when you are ready,
then to those who are weak you say: ‘Obey me and be happy, or
die!’ You are strange, you white men. You think that it is only
your wisdom and your virtue and your happiness that are true
. . . you do not understand the difference between yourselves and
us – who are men.” (174–75)
Within the context of fast eroding imperial power, it became

possible for the discerning eye to belong to non-native and
non-male writers and for those writers to shape a literary
oeuvre from his/her off-the-centre viewpoint. These writers
perceived the English language to be a more fluid and malleable
medium and less a given rigid tradition. In Reframing Yeats:
Genre, Allusion and History, Charles Armstrong explores Yeats’
prodigious investment in the past and in tradition through the
poet’s dialogues with his literary precursors. He argues that
the formal genres of tragedy, ballad and sonnet were viewed
by Yeats himself as dynamic and fluid, and that his relation
to the forms and authors of the past is a “fusion of autonomy
and obedience” (1). Yeats, in his drama, Armstrong writes, is
“very happy to unmoor the central experience of tragedy from
its generic underpinnings” (80). Over time, Armstrong argues
in his discussion on the Irish poet, genres provide a form of
transtextuality that coexist with, and also relate to, extra-literary
forms in literature. Providing a historically oriented reading of
genre and allusion in Yeats’ poetry, he moves into questions that
deal with the personal, political, linguistic and metaphysical to
reveal how a poet’s autonomy and obedience makes his art more
LANGUAGE 205
than a literary game as it “seeks to appropriate (or outbid) the

knowledge of the traditions with which he engages” (140–41).
The high modernist “Make it New” brigade who came next
were often, like Mansfield and Lawrence, either immigrants
to the “centres” or, like Woolf, from the marginalised gender.
Their innovations challenged earlier structures of power and
sought to impose a new aesthetic. This arrival of the margins at
the centre may have been in response to the lure of the magic
that the centre promised. Paul Morrell of Sons and Lovers and
Stephen Dedalus of Portrait are keen to leave the mundaneness
of their hometowns, “the dull inelegance” against which Little
Chandler’s soul revolts in the Dubliners story, “A Little Cloud”.
The desire to make that near-mythical journey in search of
the land where there is “gaiety, movement, excitement” – the
global metropolitan centre which embodies all that is “modern”,
avant-garde and international – is voiced throughout modernist
literature. Yet, having escaped stultifying provincialisms, they
continue writing about banal life. Saikat Majumdar’s Prose of the
World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire proposes that the
oppressive banality and boredom depicted in so many modernist
narratives are a deliberate inclusion that shape the aesthetics of
modernist fiction. He argues that the works of authors like Joyce
and Mansfield portray the dullness and tedium of everyday
life on the margins of empire, an ineluctable experience of
colonial modernity that is marked by a desire for the empire’s
metropolitan centre. The banality of the content indicates life
on the margins of the empire in its “semi-feudal smallness
and immediacy, caught in the troubled waters of a subaltern
nationalism and imperial exploitation” (51). The aesthetisation
of banality, however, is a device, chronicling an encyclopaedic
abundance of ethnographic details of triviality and ordinariness,
and marking the disenchantment present: “the lacuna created
by the perpetually deferred arrival of Western modernity, which
promises to capture successfully the excitement of history and
progress” (14). To Joyce and Mansfield may be added the name

of T. S. Eliot – arriving at the centre from the unsophisticated
America – and the name of Virginia Woolf – of and from the
centre, but inescapably marginalised by her gender. Eliot’s
inclusion of banality in his poetry and plays is, quite unlike
Joyce’s celebration, an accusation of the hollowness of modern
civilisation. His people drink coffee, idly chatter, “come and go
talking of Michel Angelo”, and live their lives embedded in
barren “stony rubbish”, with no recognition of the “third who
walks always beside” them:
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you? (The Complete Poems
and Plays 48)
Woolf ’s discourse, similarly, is characterised not just by its

inclusion of the banal details of Mrs Dalloway’s flowers,
Rumpelmayer’s men, Durtnall’s van and the boom of the
Big Ben, but by it being, as it were, structured by these very
banalities. Mansfield’s stories too abound in the trivial everyday
details of the quiet, quotidian domesticity circumscribed by
garden parties, sandwiches, and azaleas that become streaming
pink and white flags as one dances by.
One interesting perspective on this prominence of detail in
modern art may be found in Naomi Schor’s book, Reading in
Detail, which argues that the concept of detail, and consequently
its rendering, is gendered. Schor explores how detail had not
always revelled in its current status, but had gained legitimacy
only after a prolonged and hard-fought struggle that had broad
socio-political ramifications. Shaking off its century-old censure
to assume its commanding position in the field of representation,
the detail transcends the earlier semantic network within which
it had remained embedded: “. . . bounded on the one side by the
ornamental, with its traditional connotations of effeminacy and
LANGUAGE 207
decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’

is rooted in the domestic sphere of social life presided over
by women” (xliii). According to Schor, detail, traditionally
connoted as feminine and devalorised, is linked to “feminized
labor, as against classical and neoclassical valorization of the
ideal with no particulars, which shapes the masculine structure
of Western literary and philosophical imagination” (Majumdar
50). By including the banality of detail and domesticity as a core
part of the narrative, the form brings together the aesthetic and
the political, disrupting and challenging canonical discourses
that valorised the great and significant.
FORM AND CONTENT IN THE NOVEL

In the context of the changing understanding of language, it
becomes necessary to look closely at the twentieth-century
novel since no other genre of writing passed through as many
diverse renditions as this particular form. It was through
language that much of the innovation and experimentation
of modernism was worked. With the modern understanding
of language setting the form of the literary work apart from
its content, it became possible to study the fabula (story or
chronological plot) and the syuzhet (the arrangement of that
story or the presentation) – terms coined by Russian formalists
– separately. This introduced the thematic and the modal
approach to literature which led to Tzvetan Todorov’s theory
of narratology. In view of the immense dedication that modern
writers like Gustave Flaubert, Knut Hamsun, Henry James,
Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf gave to perfecting the form, this may
be argued to be the more significant of the two. The modernist
“Make it New” dictum, evident in their obsessive fascination
and repeated experiments with form, had had far more to do
with style and the form of representation than with content,
despite their insistence on changed and inner realities. This was,

to a lesser extent, reflected in poetry too. It was not the content
of Eliot’s The Waste Land that Pound struggled with as he edited
the poem to its published 434-line version from its original
version, which was about twice the size. His “criticism of The
Waste Land was not of its meaning;” writes Richard Ellman of
Pound’s heavy-handed editing, “he liked its despair and was
indulgent of its neo-Christian hope. He dealt instead with its
stylistic adequacy” (Ellman 54). Modernists could not return to
earlier discourses hallowed by tradition because those discourses
upheld the idea of a coherence and a unity in the world around
them. If they returned to these conventional forms of narrative,
they would have been endorsing a harmony and an order they
no longer believed was relevant to modernity.
Significant consequences to the novel follow the modernist
thought and innovation with form. By the 1930s it was apparent
that the determined modernisation and experimentation carried
out by these writers had successfully rendered the material
of language more pliable. It had freed the form of the novel
from its restrictive moorings. Writers like Joyce Cary, Jean
Rhys, Dorothy L. Sayers and Elisabeth Bowen found far fewer
occasions to set aside “considerable mass(es) of manuscript”
(Richardson 430) in despair at the intractability of the inherited
language. As a consequence of diverse strands of innovation,
the structures of narratives grew complex and increasingly
self-referential, foregrounding the process of its own creation.
The lines of the plot were minimal, the chronological uni-
directional narrative was broken into, disrupted and made non-
linear, the characters no longer appeared to be stable subjects,
the omniscient narrator was replaced by multiple and often
unreliable narrators, and, most damningly for traditional fiction,
closure became problematic. As the postmodernist American
author John Hawkes famously said in a 1964 interview, “I began
to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the
LANGUAGE 209
novel were plot, setting, character, and theme, and having once
abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality
of vision or structure was really all that remained” (149).
In the course of this evolution of the form of the novel, the
familiar traditions of past structures that positioned and held
reader and writer in a framework began to disappear, and the
novel moved into unmapped narrative forms. “The narrative
begins,” as Maurice Blanchot writes in his The Book to Come,
“where the novel does not go” (6). Discussing Elisabeth Bowen
and the dissolution of the novel form, Ann Wordsworth writes
about how the positioning of the canon and the accommodation
of character and plot are so drastically changed that the
architecture of the stable critical practices are denied, requiring
of the critic “a different address, a mobility” (Bennett and
Royle vii). The broad philosophical matrix of ideas, necessary
to the innovatory impulse, had been engendered in the
nineteenth century through the questioning of the world and
the word. This had been voiced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik
Ibsen, Thomas Mann, August Strindberg and many others.
Christopher Butler, in his Early Modernism: Literature, Music
and Painting in Europe 1900–1916, explains that modernist
innovators responded to what they perceived to be a cultural
crisis consequent to the widespread atmosphere of scepticism at
the end of the nineteenth century. As the character Gilbert says
in Wilde’s essay, “The Critic as Artist”: “It is enough that our
fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith-faculty of the
species. Their legacy to us is the scepticism of which they were
afraid” (159). By deliberately fashioning aesthetic conventions
for their art that were in opposition to the traditional, they
rejected the mimetic ideal of realism. The “true” reality, they
declared, lay beyond the shared single-faceted understanding
of surroundings. It was subjective, intuitive, unstable and
dynamic. This rejection of traditional realism has remained a
shared perspective between postmodernists and modernists
despite postmodernism’s jettisoning of modernism’s search

for unity and meaning. As Malcolm Bradbury wrote in his
essay “Modernisms/Postmodernisms”, “What Modernism and
postmodernism share in common is a single adversary which
is, to put it crudely, realism or naïve mimesis. Both are forms
of post-Realism. They likewise share in common a practice
based on avant-garde and movement tactics and a sense of
modern culture as a field of anxious stylistic formation” (qtd.
in Christopher Butler 1). Yet, that “leaky old boat”, as Alain
Robbe-Grillet was to say in 1957 of the academic opposition
between form and content, had not “been entirely scuttled”
(42). Discussions on form and content were given a political
dimension by Left-inclined writers of the 1930s who accused
modernists of being excessively obsessed with form and
consequently making much of their literature inaccessible to the
majority. “If modernism cut exhilaratingly loose from exhausted
national traditions,” writes Terry Eagleton, “it did so, after all,
as a deracinated, disorientated elite. . . . One corollary of that
was a virulently anti-democratic politics” (132). The verities
and myths of the theory that the modernist movement was
reactionary in nature and that modernist artists were apolitical,
or worse, that they were elitists (with some inclining towards
the political Right), may be debated.9 Yet factual or illusory, this
opinion significantly changed the way in which language was
used by writers. The triumph of socialism in 1917’s Red October
and the consequent sweep of its philosophy across Europe’s
intellectuals brought back the sense of a “role” required of the
arts. Modernism’s experimentation and innovation with form
was viewed as unnecessary obscurantism by a self-indulgent
dilettante. Socialist writers believed language should be “like
a windowpane” (Orwell 395) and, despite their criticism of
the Modernist obsession with form and their alleged focus on
content, they proved themselves to be as exacting and particular
when choosing the form for their works. When Brecht began
LANGUAGE 211
his play “The Exception and the Rule” with the following
prologue, he very deliberately chose one form of language over
many others:
We are about to tell you
The story of a journey. An exploiter
And two of the exploited are the travellers.
Examine carefully the behaviour of these people:
Find it surprising though not unusual
Inexplicable though normal
Incomprehensible though it is the rule.
Consider even the most insignificant, seemingly simple
Action with distrust.
Ask yourselves whether it is necessary
Especially if it is usual. (110)
Much attention was devoted to the content of their writings

too since, in accordance with Marxist thinking, literature had
a function to fulfil, and form was important only to the extent
that it made content accessible. That they attributed political
efficacy to their works and to the formal modes used is voiced
by Orwell in his essay “Why I Write”:
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is
to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always
a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down
to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce
a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want
to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my
initial concern is to get a hearing. (394)
After the First World War, returning artists appear unable

to assume the earlier position of the prophet and guide. In an
interview regarding his Tyro exhibition at the Leicester Galleries
in 1921, Wyndham Lewis, a survivor of the War, referred to
contemporary modernist art as one that needed “waking up”:
“I am sick of these so-called modern artists amiably browsing
about and playing at art for art’s sake. What I want is to bring
back art into touch with life – but it won’t be the way of the
academician” (“Dean Swift” 359). The experience of war and
the absurdly powerless position of the arts when compared
to the sciences combined to discourage modernist claims of
significance of the arts, to render the complexities of form and
the solemnity of the artist regarding his art incongruous to the
larger reading public.
It becomes important to note therefore that the hostile
or indifferent response to modernist art was irrespective of
class. Philip Larkin was to refer, in 1971, to modernism as an
“aberration that blighted all the arts” and which was one of the
reasons that “in this century English poetry went off on a loop-
line that took it away from the general reader” (216). Closely
linked with modernism, Larkin suggests, was another reason
for this phenomenon: “the emergence of English literature as
an academic subject with its consequent demand for a kind of
poetry that needed elucidation” (216–17).10 This argument of
the “EngLit” or art aficionados guarding their turf has been
explored by Thomas Strychacz in his book, Modernism, Mass
Culture, and Professionalism. Strychacz approaches the politics
of “elitism” from a different angle, examining how particular
literary and aesthetic forms may bring prestige, power, and
income to certain groups. Basing his study on sociological
analyses of the early-twentieth-century phenomenon of a
professionalisation of literature and literary criticism, he argues
that modernist obscurity may have been born out of a fear
of being redundant with the rise of the masses and with the
explosion of, to use Adorno’s phrase, “the culture industry”.
This is the thesis presented by John Carey in his book, The
Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the
Literary Intelligentsia, of the intellectuals and their resentment
against the masses. Uneasy with the reality of the masses, they
demanded, Carey suggests, “a cosmetic version of the mass”
(38). This is a criticism Carey levels against both highbrow
LANGUAGE 213
intellectual modernists and Leftist writers. He quotes Edwin

Muir to support his case that the masses which the intellectuals
had in mind were “dehumanized, formalized, throttled by an
automatic ideology, which denies humanity except in great
bulk, so huge that it has no immediate relation to our lives . . .
dehumanized as an army” (39). The masses, concludes Carey,
were a disappointment to socialist intellectuals: “wallowing in
consumer pleasures, they refuse to take on the revolutionary role
the intellectual ascribes to them” (40). This disappointment was
both linked to, and a veneer for, the feelings of inadequacy that
the intellectuals felt when faced with the culture industry and
the burgeoning world of mass journalism. For those involved
with the publishing industry, as writers or critics, maintaining
their status in the face of a philistine public required special
forms of knowledge and language. Modernist literature, these
critics argued, served as that special language and knowledge. It
differentiated itself explicitly from mass culture through its use
of language which was distinct from the discourses used by the
masses, particularly that of journalism. The implicit battle with
journalism is perhaps best articulated by Pound in his ABC of
Reading: “Literature is news that STAYS news” (29). This gives
a different complexion to the modernist innovation of form.
The modernist pursuit of perfection of form has usually been
broadly explained in either of two ways: one, the need to have a
changed form/language in response to the new world and two,
as the persistence of a style beyond its time: an influence of their
immediate predecessors, the aestheticists. But the arguments
of Carey and Strychacz,11 make the modernist’s unique use of
language/form a reactionary enterprise.
This alleged exercise of power through culture and literature
was resisted by W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and George
Orwell, writers who, in the politically charged atmosphere of
the 1930s, had moved beyond the earlier generation’s sombre
and elegiac vision of the lost Edwardian world. In the “Devil’s
Decade”, as British journalist Claude Cockburn called the

1930s, the pursuit of aesthetics and form could only be a
profligate luxury. In accordance with this perspective, the 1920s
were caustically described by Cyril Connolly as “a romantic,
affected and defeatist epoch” living in “the last long shadows of
the Ivory Tower” (56). In this epoch, action was discredited, for
it had caused the war: “And as for goodness – listen to Freud.
Truth? but what about Einstein? History? Have you read The
Decline of the West? Nothing remains but beauty. Have you
read Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems? Beauty and, of course, one’s
intellectual integrity and personal relations” (56). These were
the “emotional dud cheques” that flooded the Universities,
writes Connolly, “stumers on the bank of experience forged
in the name of Swann or Daedalus, Monsieur Teste or Mrs
Dalloway” (55). They were deemed useless in Connolly’s
changed political scenario where questions of commitment
and engagement were paramount in a world divided by fascism
and communism, socialism and nationalism, mass/class and
individual identity. The post–30s writers validated their pursuit
of the arts by moving away from the modernist “cult of the
unique personal point of view” (Wilson 269). Stephen Spender
describes the writers of the 1930s through his answer to the
question “What is my responsibility?” For these writers, he says,
their “responsibility [was] of a public kind: to make the reader
aware of the contemporary historic situation and to imagine
what [she/he felt would] be the correct response to it” (5). These
critics recognised “the dependence of the individual on politics
and authoritarian systems of thought” (16), shaped their art to
convey that, and espoused the art in language that would be
comprehensible to all.
Yet their ideologically positioned literature would have
a difficult time in the post–1950s era which witnessed
disillusionment, cynicism and the frustration of hopes. This
atmosphere of despair tinged literature from the time of the
LANGUAGE 215
First World War, creating, as the critic Piper was to say of the
American writer Fitzgerald’s works, a “cult of disillusionment”.
In Fitzgerald’s writing the war crystallised much of the despair
that, in their earlier writing, had been vaguely atmospheric:
“It looks as if the youth of . . . my generation ends sometime
during the present year” (qtd. in Piper 76), wrote Fitzgerald
to his cousin in 1917, shortly after the United States declared
war on Germany. Whatever hope and ideology that had been
garnered by young socialist writers after the First World War
was beaten down by the monstrosity of the Second World War.
Any slender hopes raised after the Second World War of an
equal and just Europe dwindled within a decade to bring to
the 1956 London stage the impotent fulminations of the angry
young man in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.
By the time the immensely destructive Second World War
ended, English literature had become a world phenomenon
represented by diverse voices. By then also the institutionalisation
of literature, the skilful critical apparatus that reinforced it,
and the triumph of technological inventiveness were complete
and the powerful publishing industry had been established.
Whatever may have been the underlying reasons for modernist’s
language and the reasons for its critique by the writers of
the 1930s, the hegemony of modernist forms were rendered
indisputable by the combined power of these new forces. For
the late modernists the possibility of being anything other than
“modernist” in form was, if not non-existent, minimal. Rod
Rosenquist in his Modernism, the Market and the Institution of
the New, uses literary criticism, correspondence and memoirs
to explore “questions of late modernist self-perception” (30).
Pointing to the enduring institutional power of the high
modernists, Rosenquist argues that the qualities associated with
later writers may not have constituted a deliberate continuation
of modernist style, but rather symptoms of their hegemonic
power – as the arbiters of taste in their varied roles of editors
or reviewers of literary magazines, anthologies and publishing

houses. “So nearly complete was this,” writes Raymond Williams
of the modernist cultural reformation, that “the succeeding
metropolitan formations of learning and practice – what had
once been defiantly marginal and oppositional – became, in
its turn, orthodox” (“The Metropolis and the Emergence of
Modernism” 92). The state of “permanent novelty” (Lewis, Time
and Western Man 123) that modernists aspired to may thus be
seen as established through the institutionalisation of literature
in the age of what has come to be called by various critics as
“late modernism”.
But to turn from the form-content debate and return to the
use of form in twentieth-century literature, we find in the modern
texts a repeated foregrounding of the language and techniques
writers use. This is done sometimes subtly and sometimes not
so subtly, showing the differences between society’s prescribed
discourse – the acceptable speech as Judith Butler said (128)
– and the other narratives that cannot be made part of this
discourse. Joyce’s young artist, Stephen Dedalus, is keenly aware
of the diverse field of discourses that lie before a writer:
One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know
whether words are being used according to the literary tradition
or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a
sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin
that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use
of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I HOPE I AM
NOT DETAINING YOU.
Not in the least, said the dean politely.
No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean--
Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point:
DETAIN. (232)
Saussurean linguistics, by introducing semiology into the study

of narratives and emphasising the arbitrary and constructed
LANGUAGE 217
nature of language, had undermined the authority of language.

All language, be it the hitherto acknowledged “fact-based”
narrative of history or the objective and dispassionate narrative
of science, were viewed as objects of study. More than what you
wrote, it was how you wrote it wherein lay the crux of the matter.
Roland Barthes believed that, with the consciousness of the
overwhelming presence of language, “the whole of Literature,
from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of
language” (Writing Degree Zero 3). While Barthes might be, in
the words of John Barth, indulging in “French hyperbole”, Barth
does agree that “one cardinal preoccupation of the modernists
was the problematics, not simply of language, but of the medium
of literature” (199).
Alert to the complexity and power of words, the older Stephen
in Ulysses finds his blood is “wooed by grace of language”(148) and
cautions himself against the next speech: “Noble words coming.
Look out” (150). The nobly worded speech turns out to be what
is generally called a “rhetorical” speech. Like all discourses, this
speech too, when studied, is found to be in accordance with a
structure – in this case, the structure of the rhetorical or the
declamatory speech which may be constituted, as is here, by the
inclusion of devices such as metaphors, allusions, repetitions,
hyperbaton and climax:
Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: great was my admiration
in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a
moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had
been transported into a country far away from this country, into
an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and
that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land
addressed to the youthful Moses . . . – and it seemed to me that I
heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised. . . . (150)
Or the popular romance discourse: “The eyes that were fastened

upon her set her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment,
meeting his glance, and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot
passion was in that face, passion silent as the grave, and it had
made her his” (386). Joyce’s 1922 text Ulysses stands out as the
book which explored the greatest range of discourses to indicate
how language conditions our responses. Ulysses includes the
epic discourse, the historical discourse, the scholastic discourse,
the scientific discourse, the religious discourse, journalese, and
others. Having experienced first-hand the dramatic and often
tragic consequences of two formidable discourses, that of the
Church and that of Nationalism, speaking in two divergent
voices on the “good” of his colonised land, Joyce knew how
loyalties could be bent and emotions twisted by words. In
Ulysses he takes the reader through eighteen chapters, each
written using a form of narrative different from the earlier
and quite a few using more than one discourse (the Nausicaa
and the Oxen of the Sun episodes, for example) to reveal how
the discourses connect, echo and struggle with each other as
characters cross each other’s paths. In the Cyclops episode, the
citizen, with his prejudice and anger against “strangers”, uses
the narrow discourse of xenophobic and racist nationalism with
its bombastic rhetoric:
And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again,
says the citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty
will be full again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay,
Ventry in the kingdom of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest
harbour in the wide world with a fleet of masts of the Galway
Lynches and the Cavan O’Reillys and the O’Kennedys of
Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with
the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he,
when the first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with
our own flag to the fore, none of your Henry Tudor’s harps,
no, the oldest flag afloat, the flag of the province of Desmond
and Thomond, three crowns on a blue field, the three sons of
Milesius. (345–46)
LANGUAGE 219
This is contrasted with Leopold Bloom’s down-to-earth and

pragmatic language regarding the nation:
But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
Yes, says Bloom.
What is it? says John Wyse.
A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the
same place. (349)
The narrative becomes an embodiment of the many worldviews

that co-exist with one another in the minds of many people, a
perfect example of what Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics calls polyphony: “The novel, as a whole is a phenomenon
multiform in style and variform in speech and voice. In it the
investigator is confronted with several heterogeneous stylistic
unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject to
different stylistic controls” (Dialogic Imagination 261). By using
diverse narrative genres, the text serves to explore the workings
of language, revealing how each discourse is exclusive (despite
the echo of memories and events that occur across the discourses
of the characters who inhabit the same space and time) and is
governed by its own structural rules. The use of many languages
foregrounds and complicates questions regarding the authority
and reliability of each narrative. “Had Pyrrhus not fallen . . . or
Julius Caesar not been knifed to death?” (26) Stephen wonders
as he teaches his students the narrative that is history. “Time
has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of
the infinite possibilities they have ousted” (26). Each discourse
ousts “infinite possibilities” that it cannot encompass. Even the
ostensibly factual narrative of history could be, as Thomas Kettle,
the Irish politician, said of Irish history, “a lie disagreed upon”
(Spoo 4). “We are taking language not as a system of abstract
grammatical categories,” writes Bakhtin in The Dialogical
Imagination, “but rather language conceived as ideologically
saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion,
insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of

ideological life”(271).The basic content of the language of verbal-
ideological movements are conditioned by “the specific socio-
historical destinies of European languages and by the destinies
of ideological discourse, and by those particular historical tasks
that ideological discourse has fulfilled in specific social spheres
and at specific stages in its own historical development” (270).
The two final lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum
Est” hit hard because behind the words lie a legacy ancient and
powerful, seldom challenged, accepted as axiomatic throughout
centuries:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in
...........................
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori. (Walter 141)
This is the “verbal conception” of the world to which Gramsci,

in “The Study of Philosophy” drew our attention to. We inherit
this/these from our past and absorb mostly uncritically. It remains
present in our consciousness but not without consequences:
It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral
conduct and the direction of will, with varying efficacy but
often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the
contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any
action, any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of
moral and political passivity. Critical understanding of self takes
place therefore through a struggle of political “hegemonies”
and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then in
that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a
higher level of one’s conception of reality. (333)
LANGUAGE 221
The first step in reaching this conception, writes Gramsci, is

the recognition and consciousness of being part of a particular
hegemonic force. Dynamics of power and politics are, therefore,
the warp and weft of every discourse. While discourses may
or may not be wilfully made by the hegemony, the hegemony
almost always appropriates and uses historically engendered
discourses. This understanding of how discourses can be used
as instruments of hegemonic power groups informs much of
later research on gender, insanity, race, marginalisation, and
other spheres susceptible to power inequity and discrimination.
Language becomes a complex site of struggle within which
communities construct their sense of the real. It is a “thick”
medium, with layers plastered one upon the other and between
each other, constructed collectively by groups as individuals
articulate their desires, anxieties and fears.
GAMES THROUGH LANGUAGE

Language, and specifically literary language, began to be
recognised for its radical potential to influence political and
philosophical thought. With text and textuality beginning to
occupy the centre of nationalistic and gender-based movements,
literature became, as Julia Kristeva was to put it years later, a
site to perform “writing-thinking”. Along with colonial and
feminist “writing back” to the centre, some of these literary
texts discussed narration and narratives. Sartre’s protagonist
Roquentin in Nausea (1938) tries to understand the implication
of the narrative end:
This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an
adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it.
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales . . .
and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. . . .
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people
come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days
are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable,
monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-

total: you say: I’ve been travelling for three years, I’ve been in
Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never
leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. . . . But everything
changes when you tell about life; . . . things happen one way and
we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at
the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a
notary’s clerk in Marommes.” And in reality you have started at
the end. (39)
In her book The Novel After Theory Judith Ryan argues that “some
of the most significant and subtle negotiations with theory have
taken place in novels” (205). Though Ryan is discussing novels
of the latter twentieth century, the trend may be seen to have
begun with the late modernists.
This suspicion and alertness regarding language, however,
seems to have given way to a sense of the utter inadequacy of
language with the onset of the Cold War following World War
II. The explicit politicisation of 1930s literature, when socialism-
inclined writers demanded that literary form and its language
should be accessible to the common man, was followed by an
age when the arts appeared overwhelmed with a reality too dark
to bear expression. Auschwitz, followed by Hiroshima, were
realities that made language appear limited and useless in its
attempt to articulate the lives of men and women who were
random ciphers in a senseless equation. Writers thus rejected the
earlier forms of literature. Lawrence Langer, in his introduction
to Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, writes,
. . . the most compelling Holocaust writers reject the temptation
to squeeze their themes into familiar premises: content and
form, language and style, character and moral growth, suffering
and spiritual identity, the tragic nature of existence – in short,
all those literary ideas that normally sustain and nourish the
creative effort. Just as the Holocaust experience crushed the
structures of self that usually favoured survival, forcing victims
to find new means of staying alive, so its literature sabotages
LANGUAGE 223
the reader’s hopes for a durable affirmation lurking in the dusk

of atrocity. Reading and writing about the Holocaust is an
experience in unlearning. . . . (6)
Theodor Adorno’s statement that it would be barbaric to

write poetry after Auschwitz deserves to be quoted in its fuller,
and more difficult, form:
The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the
mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification
on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom
threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds
itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and
barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this
corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible
to write poetry today. (34)
In the “open-air prison” (Adorno 34) which the world was

becoming, satire was the chosen narrative genre. Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty Four and Huxley’s Brave New World depicted
a world where, as Huxley wrote to Orwell in 1949, the world’s
leaders would discover new instruments of control outside
clubs and prisons. They would discover that “the lust for power
can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into
loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them
into obedience” (Huxley 605).
Leftist writers who had succeeded modernism may have
accused their predecessors of an obscurity that defeated
the purpose of language, but they had retained faith in the
capability of language to communicate. In the post–War 1940s
and 50s, however, texts began to foreground the impossibility of
communication through language. Samuel Beckett, considered
to be the last of the modernists, repeatedly holds up the idea
of language as ineffectual. His 1953 play, En attendant Godot,
translated by Beckett as Waiting for Godot (1955) and staged
the same year as Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was
posthumously published, highlights the failure of language

to do much else than play a ritualistic role. Vladimir begins a
conversation about four Evangelists, pauses, looks at Estragon
and says, “Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in
a way?” And Estragon, who till then has been quite incapable
of understanding what Vladimir is talking about, replies with
exaggerated enthusiasm: “I find this really most extraordinarily
interesting” (Beckett 5). Language is a social game, with well-
choreographed moves. Using language therefore entails a set
formula consisting of a routine of returns, passes, dribbles and
feints. Human beings use this language either to pass the time
or as an elaborate social game that elevates to a dignified level
the ordinariness of their gestures. Pozzo finds it difficult to take
a seat unless he is expressly requested to by his companions:
Pozzo: (He looks at the stool.) I’d very much like to sit down, but I
don’t quite know how to go about it.
Estragon: Could I be of any help?
Pozzo: If you asked me perhaps.
Estragon: What?
Pozzo: If you asked me to sit down.
Estragon: Would that be a help?
Pozzo: I fancy so.
Estragon: Here we go. Be seated, Sir, I beg of you.
Pozzo: No no, I wouldn’t think of it! (Pause. Aside.) Ask me
again.
Estragon: Come come, take a seat I beseech you, you’ll get
pneumonia.
Pozzo: You really think so?
Estragon: Why it’s absolutely certain.
Pozzo: No doubt you are right. (He sits down.) (29)
He finds it awkward to sit down again once he has got up, and
attempts to prompt Vladimir into an articulated request:
LANGUAGE 225
But how am I to sit down now, without affectation, now that I

have risen? Without appearing to – how shall I say – without
appearing to falter. (To Vladimir.) I beg your pardon? (Silence.)
Perhaps you didn’t speak? (Silence). (21)
But apart from its performative or ceremonial uses,

language appears to serve no other use, failing miserably as
a tool of communication. Vladimir’s succeeds in getting his
question heard by Pozzo only when he abandons “meaningful”
language:
Vladimir: You want to get rid of him?
Pozzo: He wants to cod me, but he won’t.
Estragon: You want to get rid of him? . . .
Pozzo: In reality he carries like a pig. It’s not his job.
Estragon: You want to get rid of him?
Pozzo: He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I’ll
regret my decision. . . . Well, that’s that, I think. Anything else?
(Vaporizer.)
Estragon: You want to get rid of him?
Pozzo: Remark that I might just as well have been in his shoes
and he in mine. If chance had not willed otherwise. To each one
his due.
Estragon: Youwaagerrim?
Pozzo: I beg your pardon? (24)
Many years later, in 1979, Jean Francois Lyotard was to

use Wittgenstein’s theory of language-games to argue that
the postmodern age was witnessing the collapse of all macro-
narratives. In the postmodern world, Lyotard argued, the
enlightenment narrative in which the “hero of knowledge works
toward a good ethico-politico end – universal peace” (XX) can
only be greeted with incredulity, suggesting the collapse of such
metanarratives.
Language, in its apparent naturalness and ease masks a
highly organised and disciplined structure. Saussure’s theory, by
highlighting the arbitrary and non-referential nature of language,

draws our attention to the fact that no matter how exceptional
an individual’s speech, all his or her words are choices made from
within a pre-existing system. Within this hardly individual,
eminently social framework exists the text, a “multidimensional
space”, according to Barthes, “in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash” (Image – Music – Text
146). Echoing, arguing, agreeing and disagreeing with one
another, the texts are each a “tissue of quotations drawn from
the innumerable centres of culture” (146). No text therefore
stands on its own, permeated as each is by diverse ideologies
traced through various texts. Being locations of ideology, the
texts, through their narratives, participate in the power games
played out within and among communities. It is also the reason
why language has been seen as a powerful, if not the primary,
weapon of control in the postmodern age.
Works Cited
Aarsleff, Hans. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language
and Intellectual History. London: Athlone, 1982. Print.
Achebe, Chinua. No Longer At Ease. London: Penguin. 1960. Print.
———. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Morning
Yet on Creation Day. New York: Anchor Press, 1975. Print.
Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms. Trans.
Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute
of Technology P, 1981. Print.
Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London, New York: Routledge, 2000.
Print.
Aristotle. “On Interpretation.” Ebooks. Trans. E. M. Edghill. Web.
20 October 2015. <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/
interpretation/>.
LANGUAGE 227
Armstrong, Charles. Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History.

London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Print.
Artigas, Mariano. “The Disenchantment of the World.” Faith,
Scholarship and Culture in the 21st Century. Eds. Alice Ramos and
Marie I. George. Washington: Catholic U of America P, 2001.
Print.
Attridge, Derek. Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory and History.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.
Attridge, Derek, and Marjorie Howes. Eds. Semicolonial Joyce.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: R. D. Bentley, 1853.
Print.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael
Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin:
U of Texas P, 1981. Print.
Bakhtin, Mikhail, and P. N. Medvedev. “The Formal Method in
Literary Scholarship.” The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of
Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov. Ed. Pam Morris. London:
Arnold Publishers, 2003. Print.
Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” Friday Book: Essays
and Other Non-fiction. London: John Hopkins UP, 1984. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Image – Music – Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London:
Fontana, 1977. Print.
———. “The Discourse of History.” Comparative Criticism, Vol. 3:
A Yearbook. Ed. E. S. Shaffer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.
Print.
———. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. Print.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.
Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana
Press, 1982. Print.
Bennett, Andrew, Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution

of the Novel: Still Lives. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Print.
Berlin, Isiah. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. Print.
Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
Print.
Brecht, Bertolt. “Prologue to the Exception and the Rule.” Twentieth-
century Theatre: A Sourcebook. Ed. Richard Drain. New York:
Routledge, 1995. Print.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting
in Europe, 1900–1916. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Print.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New
York: Routledge, 1997. Print.
Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among
the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber,
1992. Print.
Chang, Vincent. J. Joyce, Race and Empire (Cultural Margins).
Connolly, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Print.
Conrad, Joseph. “Letter to Hugh Clifford. 1899.” Novelists on the Novel.
Ed. Allott, Miriam. New York: Columbia UP, 1962. Print.
———. The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea. The Floating
Press, 2010. Print.
———. Lord Jim. London: Bibliolis Books, 2010. Print.
———. An Outcast of the Islands. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.
Eagleton, Terry. “Turning towards Europe.” Times Literary Supplement.
Feb 1989. 10–16. Print.
LANGUAGE 229
Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays in Poetry and Criticism. New York:
Alfred Knopf, 1921. Print.
———. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York/San
Diego/London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1980. Print.
Ellman, Richard. “The First Waste Land.” Eliot in His Time: Essays
on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. 51–66. Print.
Freud. Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between
the Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Trans. James Strachey. New
York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Gramsci, Antonio. “The Study of Philosophy.” Selections from the
Prison Notebooks. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and
Geoff rey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers,
1971. Print.
Gutting, Gary. “Michel Foucault.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Web. 20 October 2015. < http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2013/entries/foucault/ >.
Harris, James. Works of James Harris, Esq., With an Account of his Life
and Character, By His Son the Earl of Malmesbury. Vol. 1. Luke
Hansard: London, 1801. Print.
Harris, Roy. Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games
with Words. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Hawkes, John, and John J. Enck. “John Hawkes: An Interview.”
Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6.2 (Summer 1965).
141–55. Print.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of
Humanity. 2nd ed. Trans. T. Churchill. London: Printed by Luke
Hansard for J. Johnson, 1803. Print.
Huxley, Aldous. Letters of Aldous Huxley. Ed. Grover Smith. London:
Chatto and Windus, 1969. Print.
James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. London: Penguin, 2009. Print.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus
Deane. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.
———. Ulysses. London: Minerva, 1992. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. “Les Samuraïs Tel Quels.” Parallax 4.1 (Special Issue).
Ed. Patrick French. 1998. 7–11. Print.
Langer, Lawrence L. Ed. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.
Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. Print.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad. New York: George W. Stewart, 1950. Print.
Lewis, Wyndham. “Dean Swift with a Brush: The Tyroist Explains
His Art.” The Complete Wild Body. Ed. Bernard Lafourcade. Santa
Barbara: Black Sparrow P, 1982. 357–59. Print.
———. Time and Western Man. Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa,
California: Black Sparrow P, 1993. Print.
Lifschitz, Avi. Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the
Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.
Magnus, Bernd, Kathleen M. Higgins. The Cambridge Companion to
Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.
Majumdar, Saikat. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of
Empire. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print.
Miller, Arthur. “Tragedy and the Common Man.” The Theater Essays
of Arthur Miller. Ed. Robert A. Martin. New York: Viking Press,
1978. 3–7. Print.
Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London and New York:
Orwell, George. The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays and Reportage.
Orlando: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1984. Print.
Piper, Henry Dan. “Fitzgerald’s Cult of Disillusion.” American
Quarterly 3.1 (Spring 1951). 69–80. Print.
Pound, Ezra. The ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1934.
Print.
Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.
LANGUAGE 231
Richardson, Dorothy. Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of

Dorothy Richardson. Ed. Gloria Gilkin. Georgia: U of Georgia P,
1995. Print.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Tr. Richard
Howard. Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1965. Print.
Robbins, Bruce. “Enchantment? No, thank you.” The Joy of Secularism.
Ed. George Levine. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Print.
Rosenquist, Rod. Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New.
Ryan, Judith. The Novel After Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2012.
Print.
Sartre, Jean Paul. Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New
Directions, 2007. Print.
Saussure, Fredinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Eds. Charles
Bally, Albert Sechehaye and Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Wade
Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill, 1915. Print.
Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. London:
Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.
Spender, Stephen. “Movements and Influences in English Literature,
1927–1952.” Books Abroad 27.1 (Winter 1953). 4–32. Print.
Spoo, Robert. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’s
Nightmare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print.
Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
Print.
Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism.
Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. New York: E.
P. Dutton and Co., 1919. Print.
Sypher, Eileen. Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics
in the Turn-of-the-century British Novel. London: Verso, 1993.
Print.
Walter, George, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.
London: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.
Warren, Robert Penn. “Introduction.” Nostromo. By Joseph Conrad.
New York: The Modern Library, 1951. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Prose of Oscar Wilde. New York: Cosimo, 2005.
Print.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print.
———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.
———. “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism.”
Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. Peter Brooker. New York:
Longman, 1992. 82–94. Print.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1959. Print.
Woolf, Virginia, Orlando. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Print.
———. “The Death of the Moth and Other Essays.” Ebooks. Web. 20
October 2015. <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/
w91d/chapter24.html >.
Yeats, W. B. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan, 1968.
Print.
Notes
1. For more on this see Isiah Berlin’s Three Critics of the Enlightenment
and Avi Lifschitz’s Language and Enlightenment.
2. Avi Lifschitz’s Language and Enlightenment discusses the
importance of language in the social theory, epistemology and
aesthetics of the enlightenment and argues that awareness of
the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was
a mainstream enlightenment notion, rather than a feature of the
so-called “counter-enlightenment”.
3. “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking
as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his
LANGUAGE 233
wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History.
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain
of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The
angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has
got caught in his wings with such violence that the Angel can
no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”
(Illuminations 257).
4. This view, that language was God’s gift to man, was popular as
late as the eighteenth century. According to this, in Genesis,
when God brought the things on earth to Adam to be named,
they were all called by their correct names. See Roy Harris’s
Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein. Modern linguistics grew out
of the dissatisfaction of some Enlightenment philosophers with
the Biblical account of language. See Hans Aarsleff ’s From Locke
to Saussure.
5. I am indebted to Sibaji Bandyopadhyay for pointing this out in
his lecture on Freud at the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan,
Kolkata, on 14 June 2014.
6. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red” (Macbeth II.ii.63–66).
7. The phrase is believed to have been taken by Weber from Friedrich
Schiller. But Weber’s term is “Entzauberung” (the elimination
of magic), and not Schiller’s “Entgötterung” (de-divinisation).
Schiller used the phrase “die entgötterte Natur” (nature from
which the gods have been eliminated) in his 1788 poem, “The
Gods of Greece”. Weber’s 1918 term refers more to the loss of
romance and mysticism as a consequence of the rise of various
aspects of modernity: rationality, secularism and capitalism. For
more on this see Bruce Robbins’s “Enchantment? No, thank you”.
Weber’s Entzauberung may, in fact, be translated as “pessimism”,
an experience traceable in many nineteenth-century writings,

from Nietzsche’s “God is dead” to Benjamin’s loss of aura to
Heidegger’s loss of the gods. Also see Mariano Artigas’s “The
Disenchantment of the World”.
8. For interesting discussions on this approach to Joyce see
Semicolonial Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes,
James Joyce and Nationalism by Emer Nolan, and Joyce, Race and
Empire by Vincent J. Chang.
9. These have been dealt with in the first chapter.
10. Larkin also cites the “culture-mongering activities of the
Americans Eliot and Pound” (217) as a reason, though he does
not elaborate on this.
11. Also see Eileen Sypher’s Wisps of Violence, and Vincent Sherry’s
Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism.
View publication stats

5 Language ModernEnglishLiterature SipraM

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

5 Language ModernEnglishLiterature SipraM

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Excerpt_Modern English Literature, 1890-1960 (Literary Contexts)

Book · January 2016

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Modern English Literature,

Also in the series

Modern English Literature,

ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LIMITED

© Orient Blackswan Private Limited 2016

ISBN 978 81 250 xxxx x

Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro 11.5/14.3 by

Printed and bound at

historicity of all forms of life was a mainstream enlightenment

his angel of history.3 Humanity struggled with a thesis and its

were separate activities: language was an activity with words

The “original” lay beyond the seeking grasp of a language

the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE

of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social

meaning was not, or not only, conveyed by the words used. A

either. However, he finds nothing strange about having specific

In the words of the eighteenth-century grammarian James

signifier only if it was diﬀerent, phonetically or visually, from

The meaning of a word does not lie in itself. It lies in the

Possibly because of this two-way association between a word

and the other conditions of the game – it means nothing to the

This intermesh of the value and identity encapsulated within

Language therefore becomes the space where our sense of

THE POLITICS OF FORM

paragraphs, the end-meaning shifted to a space somewhat

A near replica of this episode occurs in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando,

‘Gentle creature,’ cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee

Even in these severely clipped quotations, the irony (and

pointed regarding the “acted” roles and the “natural discourse”.

Web n.p.). The earlier accepted forms of discourse in literature

The personality evoked here is that of the disorderly, eccentric

It is hardly surprising therefore that writers of the twentieth

of the word. However, he adds, “[the] consciousness and

Like Durkheim said of society, language too is more than the

Fretting in the shadow of the imperialist’s language, Joyce

my mother tongue” (520). It is no coincidence that much of the

His preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) famously read:

Islands, the Malaysian Babalatchi bitterly rejects the arrogant

Within the context of fast eroding imperial power, it became

than a literary game as it “seeks to appropriate (or outbid) the

progress” (14). To Joyce and Mansfield may be added the name

Woolf ’s discourse, similarly, is characterised not just by its

decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose ‘prosiness’

FORM AND CONTENT IN THE NOVEL

despite their insistence on changed and inner realities. This was,

despite postmodernism’s jettisoning of modernism’s search

Much attention was devoted to the content of their writings

After the First World War, returning artists appear unable

intellectual modernists and Leftist writers. He quotes Edwin

Decade”, as British journalist Claude Cockburn called the

or reviewers of literary magazines, anthologies and publishing

Saussurean linguistics, by introducing semiology into the study

nature of language, had undermined the authority of language.

Or the popular romance discourse: “The eyes that were fastened

This is contrasted with Leopold Bloom’s down-to-earth and

The narrative becomes an embodiment of the many worldviews

insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of

This is the “verbal conception” of the world to which Gramsci,