Order, Night, Rage

Abstract

“Part III: Apocalypse 1945”, our second block, and final part, looks at avant-garde regroupings during the 1930s and 1940s to 1945, in the face of resurgent realism, the nemesis apparent of modernism and avant-gardism. It aims to show that, nevertheless, modernist and avant-garde practices continue to flourish. The springboard “image” is Picasso’s Guernica; and the little magazine in focus is transition. There is discussion too of the Apocalypse movement, and of work by David Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas and W. S. Graham. I have chosen to emphasise such authors, along with the work of canonical “modernist” writers in the later phase (Joyce, Stein, Woolf, Pound, Stevens and Williams) and of mavericks such as Schwitters and West, more than work by canonical “thirties” and “forties” writers such as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene. The important, and my preferred, literary landmarks in this period of the 1930s and 1940s are Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1935), Gertrude Stein’s Dr Faustus Lights the Lights (1938; 1949), Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Virginia Woolf’s “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940), William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson: The Falls” (1944), Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1945) and Schwitters’s PIN (1946).