The Homeric and Peasant worlds in Modernism

This earlier post was about how the contrast of the Modern and traditional is internal to Modernism, the way in which Modernist thought and literature is defined by this contrast, and by the acute awareness of this contrast. 

There are at least two spectres or even fantasies of the pre-modern that Modernism conjures in order to then weigh and measure what Modernity has lost. On the one hand, there is, as in Heidegger, the peasant world of handing-down, of intuitively meaningful labour, of know-how and in-dwelling. On the other hand, there is the Homeric world.

In both cases, the peasant life-world, and the Homeric, there is not simply a world but corresponding artistic forms. The forms presuppose that world and cannot survive without it:

In the art works of a pre-industrialized, agricultural or tribal society, the artist's raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences, reinvents the same basic human situations as though for the first time. […] The works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. The writer uses them, but he does not need to demonstrate their meaning beforehand: in the language of Hegel, this raw material needs no mediation.

Thus, Fredric Jameson’s lucid paraphrase of Lukacs. Somesuch world is the lost object of desire for various Modern writers and thinkers. A world wherein the material “needs no mediation”, where there is a continuity between environment and expression. Here is Yeats on the peasanty of the West of Ireland:

Those poor peasants lived in a beautiful if somewhat inhospitable world, where little had changed since Adam delved and Eve span. Everything was so old that it was steeped in the heart, and every powerful emotion found at once noble types and symbols for its expression. […]. The soul then had but to stretch out its arms to fill them with beauty, but now all manner of heterogeneous ugliness has beset us. A peasant had then but to stand in his own door and think of his sweetheart and of his sorrow, and take from the scene about him and from the common events of his life types and symbols, and behold, if chance was a little kind, he had made a poem to humble generations of the proud.

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a community, bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of their own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action.

For Yeats, for Lukacs, or whomever, this world entails a certain form of art wherein there is no rift between the world and the required imaginative resources. Things have an “immediate meaning". It is obvious in Yeats that the image of the peasant world is also a reverse portrait of the Modern and its “heterogeneous ugliness”, and, more exactly, an outline of what is lacking to the Modern writer or artist: that taken-for-grantedness, that meaning immanent in the everyday.

Needless to say that this world frequently overlaps with the Homeric. In Yeats, the overlap is explicit. Reviewing Douglas Hyde’s collection of Irish folk tales, Y writes:

Here at last is a universe where all is large and intense enough to almost satisfy the emotions of man. Certainly, such stories are not a criticism of life but rather an extension, thereby much more closely resembling Homer than that last and most admirable phase [sic] of the “inspiring book,” a social drama by Henrik Ibsen. They are as existence and not a thought and make our world of tea tables seem but a shabby penumbra.

Elsewhere Yeats writes that “A description in the Illiad or the Odyssey […] is the swift and natural observation of a man as he is shaped by life.” Observation is not intercepted by problems of expression, choice of subject matter, problems of style and so on. The task of the poet is a given without being enforced. Freedom and necessity are not yet opposites. 

Here is Hegel on the world presupposed by the Homeric epic:  

everything is domestic, in everything the man has present before his eyes the power of his arm, the skill of his hand, the cleverness of his own spirit, or a result of his courage and bravery. In this way alone have the means of satisfaction not been degraded to a purely external matter; we see their living origin itself and the living consciousness of the value which man puts on them because in them he has things not dead or killed by custom, but his own closest productions.

Hegel offers us a compelling description of this lost world and its literary corollaries. In the world of Homer there exists an acute and graphic sense of how things work, are put together, come apart. Things are known, or reveal themselves, though and in their use. It is “A world where everything is living” (George Steiner), a world corresponding and attuned to a different human sensorium – Sight is not sovereign, touch and smell are equally, simultaneously present. There is no specifically 'psychological' lexicon. “Burn this into your brain” is not just ‘memorize’. The physical world is the best picture of the mental, as though what takes place (tangibly) in the world is the image and yardstick of mental events. The latter do not require their own autonomous language, the language of ‘psychology’ and of action are not, as in our world, dissimilar and differently structured. Epic language is one of simile and analogy rather than concept and abstract measure. A distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by an abstract plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours. Joy, or whatever emotion, is always embodied, implicated in some object, wedded to some event or person. It is not yet some abstract emotion which can fill out any random thing indiscriminately. “Joy.. warm as the joy that children feel/ When they see their father’s life dawn again./ One who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment./ Wasting away,/ Wasting away, slowly, under some angry power’s onslaught.” What the epic simile seems to do – as here- is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some thing, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.

This is the great “mirage” of the Homeric world as we find it in Hegel, at a time when “traditional” German society faced the incursions of industrial mechanisation:

Our present-day machinery and factories, together with the products they turn out and in general our means of satisfying our external needs would in this respect […] be out of tune with the background of life which the original epic requires

The question is not simply whether these invocations and depictions – of the peasant and Homeric worlds - are accurate, whether the Homeric world or the peasant world is indeed one of “immediate meaning”, of concrete comparison rather than abstract measure. Rather, what we should ask is how these invocations function within the discourse of Modernity and Modernism. Both the Homeric and the Peasant life-world are certainly images of what has been lost. In other words they are attempts to “figure out” everything that is absent from and in the Modern. The Modern is depicted in reverse, as it were, through its exact opposite.

Thus in Yeats, for example, the Peasant world – the bard has simply to “stretch out his hands” to find fit subject matter, and the means of expression are collective and handed down - is contrasted with the considerable labour and deliberation confronting the Modern artist, for whom the world has lost it’s taken-for-grantedness, both in terms of the content and means of expression. This loss, and the consequent affects of lamentation and melancholy are of course inherent in much Modernism.

But both the peasant world and the Homeric are also solutions for the modern artist. Again, the example of Synge, who comes to the ‘countryside’ from - in retreat from -the metropolis. He finds in “peasant dialect” a response to the question of literary language which confronts metropolitan writers. This is what T.S. Eliot says about Synge’s language – that he discovered in peasant ‘dialect’ a language that was already ‘literary’, that didn’t have to be made so by all kinds of estrangement techniques, refreshingly different from the modish present but having the stored energy of tradition. Of course, if we ask for whom was it literary, the answer is the Modern writer and his-her audience. Synge’s own formulation was that “style comes from the shock of new material”. Style – that very modern category, the signature of some unique subjectivity, the antithesis of the older collective forms – is now developed in the encounter with the older forms. Consciousness is “shocked” by some foreign material that impinges on and agitates it. But the foreign material is the Old rather than the contemporary.  The older life-worlds, the Homeric or the peasant environment, act as the spurs or catalysts to create style in its peculiarly modern sense.