[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Always, for Hulme, anger remains compelling as it comes closest to the oppositional stance of true critique.Anger serves to reinforce an otherwise anxious boundary betweenintellect and world, shoring up an impossible distinction between the cultural critic and his culture.Indeed, even at his most cantankerous, he finds room to confessthat extremism alone makes his thought appear tangible and concrete; he remarksthat the most powerful thinker is one who can tangibly mark himself off fromothers, that all intellectual work must start with a set of people who are prepared to fight for their position ( CW, pp.131, 60).At base, though, Hulme is deeply troubled by this epistemological muddle.If anything, his loud wrath serves topurify his responses, to drown out the realization that his most rigorous ideas are simply ideological, or that what he thinks is ideology in others has a respectable intellectual basis ( CW, p.145).His greatest frustration arises in response to theHulme’s Feelings 213recognition that, among moderns, any kind of debate has become impossible.Itcorresponds to his recognition that the hybridity of thought both reinforces anddenies the possibility of conclusiveness, at once erects and erases its own rhetoric.Ultimately, relativistic tensions, which once seemed to suggest the possibility of epistemological clearness, now only lead to a hopeless stalemate.In theseinstances, Hulme’s ‘annoyance demands physical expression’; in his impotentrage, he wants ‘to do something dramatic with the printed page’ ( CW, p.153).Importantly, then, Hulme’s anger is always an aftereffect, a defensive pose inresponse to a fearful state of epistemological turmoil.Anger is the default mode for something much less stable, much less assured or comforting; it is an adolescentlashing out at a change or confusion that is otherwise beyond his control.Incontrast, the less spectacular, but no less definitive tone of Hulme’s work issadness, if not outright grief.For Hulme, sadness is experienced prior to any kind of anger: it is his first and most basic response to the relativity of thought and the existential ash-heap of modernity.As he describes it, sadness is no aftereffect, but an absolute condition.It is as primary as ‘the breaking up into cinders’, asimmediate as the ‘essentially imperfect, chaotic, and cinder-like’ de-composition of the modern world ( CW, p.9).For Hulme, there are only two moods in life: one heroic and the other tragic.He is either ‘flying along in the wind’, ‘constructing a new theory’, or ‘Ill in bed, toothache, W.C.in the Atlantic’.The first is thrilling, stable, and impersonal, the latter is debilitating, uncontrollable, and entangled:‘The sick disgusting moments are part of the fundamental cinders – primeval chaos– the dream of impossible chaos’.Granted, both of these moods are personal,subjective, but they entail two different kinds of phenomenology, and, in Hulme’s more honest moments, only the latter bears witness to the abject truth of hissituation: ‘Ennui and disgust, the sick moments – not an occasional lapse ordisease, but the fundamental ennui and chaos out of which the world has beenbuilt’ ( CW, p.13).Most importantly, Hulme’s sadness seems to shut down, or short-circuit, any current line of argument.At the moment of sadness, production ceases; modernism, and particularly its critical anger, is put on hold.Yet, at the same time, these impasses are only temporary.Hulme’s sadness tends to propel his arguments beyond themselves in an entirely different register.After the last line quoted above, Hulme breaks off his paragraph and then offers a radically different definition of the subject as a kind of sorting machine ceaselessly rearranging the objects of his world ( CW, p.13).For me, this sadness – as it is defined by a dynamic of stasis and change – is central to modern emotional life.It is thefulcrum by which the most forward-thinking modernist texts move (Ford’s TheGood Soldier, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Pound’s Pisan Cantos, to name a few) and the basis by which modernism begins to deconstruct itself and the humanisttradition out of which it arose.This dynamic is most clearly on display in Hulme’s fraught account of hisresponse to the work of philosopher Henri Bergson and the thoroughly modernistphenomenon of popular Bergsonisme.Hulme, as always, begins with a personalconfession, describing the ‘great excitement’, ‘the physical delight of freedom’ that he felt when he first encountered Bergson’s work.He describes his initially214T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismoverwhelming fascination with both the content and shape of Bergson’s thought –the ‘physical sensation’ of expansion he felt during his first reading, as if the turmoil of his own cramped mind found a new spacious abode and comfort inBergson’s semi-abstract system.As Hulme confesses, this ‘release’ – at once‘satisfying’ and ‘comforting’ – could hardly be described as intellectual ( CW, pp.126-8).In fact, he repeatedly apologizes for his enthusiasm, which he says springs from ‘mental debility’ ( CW, p.128), and he insists, again and again, that he will soon provide a more sober account.He also asserts his desire to distance himself from other followers of the Bergson craze, who have no true understanding ofphilosophy and are simply ‘driven on the beliefs of this kind by a certain appetite, a certain craving, which must be satisfied’ ( CW, p.129).As he explains, this craving is decisively modernist, since it fetishizes the ‘new’ and ‘different’: ‘It is an unconscious process; it most generally takes the form of a belief that the future holds possibilities of the perfect which have been denied to the present and thepast.This type of debility of mind finds sanity in the belief that it is on the verge of great happenings’ ( CW, p.130).But with these apologies Hulme places himself in a very difficult bind.He has invalidated both his own intuitive response as well as the possibility of any rational vantage point.He traps himself between the mass of sentiment and the falseness of intellectual detachment, mired in his own binary as well as unable to reconcile its terms.The utterly modernist dimension of thisposition becomes apparent when Hulme next attends one of Bergson’s lectures
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]