Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  It is about death or, more specifically, the awareness of death in life. The Arthurian reference in The Waste Land alludes to an arid spiritual state that is not quite death but in no way life. By getting away from the expected touchstone of a consistent narrative, Eliot was free to look at his subject from a multitude of different angles. He could jump through a succession of different scenes taken from a range of different cultures and time periods, and focus on moments which thematically echoed each other.

  The bulk of James Joyce’s Ulysses concerns a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom of Dublin. Ulysses is regarded as one of the great twentieth-century novels, but even its staunchest supporters would refrain from describing it as a cracking yarn. Joyce’s aim, when he sat down to write, was not to produce a good story. As he explained to his friend Frank Budgen, ‘I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.’ He was trying to use the medium of a novel to grasp Dublin from every perspective. Using only a typewriter and reams of paper, Joyce was attempting to do to early twentieth-century Dublin what RockStar North, the Scottish developers of the video game Grand Theft Auto V, did to early twenty-first-century Los Angeles. In Grand Theft Auto V every aspect of the city, including its movies and culture, social media and technology, race relations, stock market, laws and business culture, is recreated and satirised. Ulysses is admittedly not often compared to Grand Theft Auto V, but I suspect those familiar with both titles will let the analogy stand.

  Modernism is now used as an umbrella term to cover this outpouring of innovation that occurred across almost all forms of human expression in the early twentieth century, most notably in the fields of literature, music, art, film and architecture. Movements such as cubism, surrealism, atonal music or futurism are all considered to be aspects of modernism.

  It’s not a name that has aged well, if we’re honest. Describing work from a century ago as ‘modern’ is always going to sound a little silly. It suggests that the focus of modernism was on the new – on what was then modern. This is true to a point. Cars, aeroplanes, cinema, telephones, cameras, radios and a host of other marvels were now part of culture, and artists were trying to come to terms with the extent that they were changing everyday life.

  Certain forms of modernism, such as futurism, were undeniably a celebration of the new. Futurism was an attempt to visually represent and glorify speed, technology and energy. It was a movement with distinctly Italian roots. Italy, a country which includes men like Enzo Ferrari among its national heroes, produced futurist painters who were besotted with a combination of style and speed.

  Modernist architecture was another movement which was in love with the new. In architectural terms this meant new materials, like plate glass and reinforced concrete. The architect Le Corbusier talked of houses as ‘machines for living in’ where ‘form follows function.’ There was no place for decoration or ornamentation in that worldview. He wrote about taking a stroll across Paris on an autumn evening in 1924 and being unable to cross the Champs Élysées because of the amount of traffic. This was a new phenomenon. ‘I think back to my youth as a student,’ he wrote, ‘the road belonged to us then; we sang in it.’ But Le Corbusier was in no way upset by the changes that he saw. ‘Traffic, cars, cars, fast, fast! One is seized with enthusiasm, with joy … the joy of power,’ he wrote. ‘The simple and naive pleasure of being in the midst of power, of strength.’ For architects like Le Corbusier, the manic new world was a source of inspiration. He did not say if the novelty of not being able to cross the road eventually wore off.

  But while futurist artists and modernist architects were clearly thrilled by the startling culture they found themselves in, modernism was not just a reflection on that brave new world. It was not the case that modernist artists simply painted pictures of cars in the same way that they used to paint pictures of horses. Modernist work could critique modern life as much as celebrate it. It could include an element of primitivism, such as Picasso’s use of African masks and imagery, which fetishised a natural, pre-industrial life. There was also early twentieth-century art, such as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or the Laurel and Hardy films, which were products of their time but which are not considered to be modernist. Modernism, then, was trying to do something more than just acknowledge the time it was created.

  Joyce intended his work to be difficult. We can see this in his reaction to the obscenity trial that resulted from an attempt to publish Ulysses in Prohibition-era America. Ulysses was originally serialised in a New York magazine called the Little Review, alongside the poetry of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The baroness’s poems may now seem more overtly sexual, but it was Joyce’s work which was singled out for obscenity.

  A later trial, United States Vs. One Book Called Ulysses, in 1933, ultimately decided that the work did have serious intent and that it was not pornographic (for, as Judge John Woolsey pointed out, ‘In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce’s] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.’) In order to argue for the serious nature of the work, however, Joyce was called on to explain it, and in particular the way its structure echoed the ancient Greek myth it was named after. Joyce was extremely unhappy with this prospect. As he said, ‘If I gave it all up [the explanations] immediately, I’d lose my immortality. I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’

  Joyce wanted to be studied. As he said in an interview with Harper’s magazine, ‘The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.’ In this respect there is a touch of tragedy in his dying words: ‘Does nobody understand?’

  Joyce’s work is chewy, in the best sense of the word. There is a rhythm to his language, and a playful disregard for established grammar and vocabulary. His prose somehow highlights the gulf between the words on the page and the subject that they describe. Even when his references go over your head and as far as you can tell nothing seems to be happening, there is a rhythm to his language that keeps you reading. But to do so takes concentration, and prolonged concentration at that. Joyce’s work was not written for the attention-deficient twenty-first century. This, however, may be the point.

  The need for intense concentration recalls the practices of the mystic George Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff, an imposing and impressively mustachioed Russian who was active in the early to mid-twentieth century, believed that most people lived their lives in a hypnotic form of ‘waking sleep’. It was possible to awaken out of this state, Gurdjieff taught, into a state of consciousness commonly experienced by meditators and athletes at their peak, but which is frustratingly difficult to describe to those who have not experienced it. It involves a significant increase in focus, understanding, ability, liberation and joy. It is sometimes said to be as different to normal consciousness as waking is to sleeping. Psychologists increasingly acknowledge a state of mind very much like this, which they call ‘flow’.

  This state of mind is frustratingly rare and hard to achieve. The key to its activation, Gurdjieff believed, was intense, prolonged concentration. He demanded dedication and commitment from his students, who were set tedious tasks such as cutting a large lawn with a small pair of scissors. His pupils had to mentally force themselves to keep snipping away as the monotonous nature of the task caused their egos to attempt mutiny. This, Gurdjieff thought, would force them into the level of concentration needed to nudge them into a state like flow. Or, in his terminology, it would ‘awake their full human potential’. It is tempting to wonder if putting down the lawn scissors and reading Ulysses for a few hours would have had a similar effect.

  The English author Colin Wilson, whose first book The Outsider led to his association with the 1950s literary movement known as the Angry Yo
ung Men, had experience of this state. It was, as Gurdjieff predicted, triggered by a period of intense concentration. Wilson was driving a car full of students on New Year’s Day in 1979, following a lecture in a remote area of Devon. It had been snowing heavily, and the road was extremely treacherous. ‘It was hard to see where the road ended and the ditch began,’ he recalled, ‘so I was forced to drive with total, obsessive attention.’ After about twenty minutes of managing to keep the car on the road he noticed a warm feeling building up in his head. This became a state he called ‘peak experience’, which continued after the journey had been completed. ‘The two hours of concentrated attention had somehow “fixed” my consciousness in a higher state of awareness,’ he said. ‘There was also an immense feeling of optimism, a conviction that most human problems are due to vagueness, slackness, inattention, and that they are all perfectly easy to overcome with determined effort.’ An intense period of effort and concentration had resulted in Wilson seeing the world in an entirely different way.

  The difficulty of modernist literature also required the reader to enter a state of intense concentration. It is clear from the modernists’ own words that effort on the part of the audience was integral to the work. The difficulty was what created the reward, and that reward justified the effort.

  The Romantics, reacting against the age of Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, also believed that we should not be bound by the innate subjectivity of our singular vision. ‘May God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!’ wrote William Blake in 1802. But the Romantic’s methods of demonstrating this were too vague and whimsical, to modernist thinking at least. The modernists believed that not only were they capable of perceiving a higher perspective, they could make their audience experience it too.

  It just wouldn’t be easy.

  *

  We have, as should be apparent, a theme emerging.

  That theme, seen repeatedly across the wide sweep of modernist culture, was the idea that a single viewpoint was insufficient to fully express or describe anything. It’s an idea that is already familiar to us. The core concept behind Einstein’s revolution was that there was no single perspective which can be considered to be correct or true, and that our knowledge of our subject is dependent on the perspective we take.

  Was modernism the result of creative people being influenced by Einstein? There are certainly examples where this seems plausible. The history of painting was devoid of melting clocks, for example, before the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí produced The Persistence of Memory in 1931. That image appeared after the idea that time could be stretched entered popular consciousness. Dalí has denied that he was influenced by Einstein, and has instead credited a melting camembert as the source of that idea. Yet it remains difficult to dismiss Einstein’s impact on the subconscious leap Dalí made between seeing a melting cheese and deciding to paint a melting clock.

  Einstein’s influence on Dalí is plausible because of the dates involved. By 1931, Einstein was a global celebrity and a sense of his ideas, however caricatured, was widespread. This was not the case when he first published his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. The world of the physical sciences was then much smaller than comparable sciences such as chemistry. Indeed, the world of science in general was tiny compared to the size it would achieve by the end of the twentieth century. Even among those who had read Einstein’s paper, there wasn’t an immediate recognition of its significance. Its failure to include gravity, for example, marked it out as more of a curiosity than a clear revolution.

  Einstein’s importance was finally settled with the publication of his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, but mainstream recognition had to wait until the end of the First World War. The tipping point was in 1919, when Sir Arthur Eddington produced the first experimental proof that Einstein was correct. From that moment on, everyone knew Einstein’s name.

  The great works of modernism also date to this post-war era, so at first glance the argument for Einstein’s influence appears strong. But a long list of modernists, including Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, Braque, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Kandinsky, had all produced work before the war that showed a clear development of their modernist ideas. There is also work by pre-modernists that pre-dates Einstein. Some early still-life paintings by Gauguin, for example, depict a human face in a corner of the canvas which observes the subject of the painting. You can see this in Still Life with Profile of Laval (1886) or Still Life with Fruit (1888). A still life is a collection of objects being observed, so if a painter wished to show it as it really was then they should show those items being observed.

  Einstein and the modernists appear to have separately made the same leap at the same time. They not only recognised that we are bound by relative perspectives, but they found a higher framework, such as space-time or cubism, in which the subjectivity of a single perspective could be overcome. In 1878 Nietzsche wrote that ‘There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.’ Einstein and Picasso were both offering their own solutions to Nietzsche’s complaint.

  The importance of the observer had been recognised. That such a strange idea should play out across both the creative arts and the physical sciences at the same time is remarkable in itself. That people as radically different as Einstein and Baroness Elsa were working on the same problem indicates that a deeper shift was at work. Something big was happening, and its impact on our culture was widespread.

  Even more remarkably, the same idea was emerging from the babbling chaos of international politics.

  The munitions store of a weapons factory, c.1918 (akg)

  THREE: WAR

  Hoist that rag

  On 17 September 1859 Joshua A. Norton issued a letter to San Francisco newspapers which began, ‘At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States.’

  Norton was an example of the globalisation and migration which became increasingly common in the mid-nineteenth century. He was a British-born, South African-raised businessman who had lost a great fortune in a failed attempt to monopolise the rice market, been declared bankrupt after many years of legal difficulties, and was then living in reduced circumstances in a boarding house. He signed his letter ‘NORTON I, Emperor of the United States’. It was duly published and Norton’s career as an emperor began.

  Following his declaration, Norton began to dress in a blue military uniform with gold epaulettes. He wore a peacock feather in his hat, an imperial sword on his belt, and took to walking with a cane. He added ‘Protector of Mexico’ to his title but dropped it a decade later, after the realisation that protecting Mexico was a little beyond his powers. The existing photographs of Norton, with his elaborate facial hair and slightly crumpled uniform, show that he somehow managed to look like both a regal emperor and a crazy homeless guy at the same time.

  He began issuing proclamations, including one calling for the abolishment of the Republican and Democratic parties, and one which declared that anyone who referred to San Francisco as ‘Frisco’ would be subject to a twenty-five-dollar fine. Proclamations such as these were as popular with the people of San Francisco then as they no doubt would be now. Although largely penniless, Norton was allowed to eat without payment at the finest San Francisco restaurants, travel for free on municipal transport, and a box was kept for him in a number of theatres. He began issuing his own currency, which was accepted in the bars he used to frequent. When he was once arrested ‘for lunacy’ the public outcry was such that the police force issued an apology, and took to saluting him when they saw him in the street. He was made a 33rd degree Freemason, and the City of San Francisco provided him with a new uniform when his existing one started to look shabby. When he died in 1880, after more than twenty years as Emperor, thirty thousand people crowded the stree
ts for his funeral. He became immortalised in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Mark Twain based the character of the king on him.

  Norton is something of an enigma. It does not appear that he adopted the title as a joke or a scam. He genuinely believed that he was the rightful emperor and thus had a duty to live his life in the manner his status dictated. The public’s reaction to Norton points to there being more at play than just the humouring of a crank. In 1969 the American satirical philosopher Greg Hill, the founder and indeed only member of the Joshua Norton Cabal of the Discordian Society, pointed out that ‘everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Hermann Hesse. Hardly anybody understands Einstein. And nobody understands Emperor Norton.’

  Norton the First was not, much to his frustration, officially recognised as Emperor of the United States. The closest he came was the 1870 US census, which listed his occupation as ‘Emperor’, but also noted that he was a lunatic. The United States had an uneasy relationship with the idea of emperors, having been founded in opposition to the British Empire, and up until the mid-twentieth century it stressed a policy of isolationism in its foreign policy. President Wilson successfully ran for re-election in 1916, for example, by stressing his isolationist tendencies with the slogan ‘He kept us out of war.’ True, the American annexation of the Philippines and other islands following the American-Spanish war of 1898 can only really be described as an imperial act, and few people would claim that the involvement in the separation of Panama from Colombia in 1903, ahead of the building of the Panama Canal, was a textbook example of isolationism. The United States may have been guilty of imperialism in practice, but this did not sit easily with its own national myth. It was not a country that was about to recognise an emperor, no matter how much he looked the part.