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ment for projecting her own sensibility; and in that of other writers,
for subjective outpourings.
The important point which becomes suppressed in Miss Hans–
ford johnson's essay, is that although Joyce employed a technique
of subjective monologue in his work, the intent of his writing was
to achieve an almost total objectivity.
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
may not be complete successes. It is difficult to imagine how they
could be, considering that the aim of Joyce in
Ulysses
was to invent
an imaginative form which would express the whole experience of
modem life, and in
Finnegans Wake,
the whole of history. Perhaps
they were gigantic achievements which include elements of gigantic
failure. But to dismiss them as mere "experiments" whose discoveries
have been usefully absorbed into the novels of C. P. Snow is to
overlook what remains truly important and challenging about them:
that they attempt to envisage modem life as a whole complexity
enclosed within a consciousness conditioned by circumstances that
are entirely of today. They state a challenge which perhaps they
did not meet and which perhaps cannot be met, although they
indicate the scale of it. And what has come after the works which
Miss Hansford Johnson so easily dismisses is fragments of a frag–
mented view of civilization, and
is
on an altogether lesser scale.
The movements of modem literature and art are programs of
techniques for expressing this whole view of the past-future confronta–
tion. There are different types of programs which might be analyzed
as establishing the following categories:
1. Realization through new art of the modem experience.
2. The invention through art of a pattern of hope, influencing
society.
3. The idea of an
art
which will fuse past with present into
the modem symbolism of a shared inner life.
4.
Art
as pattern for a technique of living through self-induced
sensation.
S. The Revolutionary concept of Tradition.
1.
Realization
is
the primary gesture of modernism, the deter–
mination to invent a new style in order to express the deeply felt
change
in
the modem world. Industrial towns, machines, revolutions,
