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 MODERNISM

Modernist movements radically transformed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
literary establishment, and their effects are still felt today. Modernism introduces and analyses
what amounted to nothing less than a literary and cultural revolution.

In this fully updated, expanded and revised third edition, charting modernism in its global and
local contexts, Peter Childs:

details the origins of modernism and the influence of thinkers such as Darwin, Marx,
Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein;
explores the radical changes which occurred in the arts, literature, drama, and film of the
period;
traces ‘modernism at work’ in literature by a range of authors including James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, T. S.
Eliot, and many others;
explains recent critical interest in the culture and worldwide impact of modernism;
reflects upon the shift from modernism to postmodernism.

At once accessible and critically informed, Modernism guides readers from first steps in the
field to an advanced understanding of one of the most important cultural phenomena of the last
centuries.

Peter Childs is Professor and Pro Vice chancellor at Newman University, UK. He has edited
and written over twenty books on diverse subjects ranging from contemporary British culture
to post-colonial theory.
 THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to today’s critical
terminology. Each book:

provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term;
offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural critic;
relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.

With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible breadth of examples,
The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies.

Also available in this series:

Adaptation and Appropriation – second edition by Julie Sanders

Allegory by Jeremy Tambling
The Aphorism and Other Short Forms by Ben Grant
The Author by Andrew Bennett
Autobiography – second edition by Linda Anderson
Class by Gary Day
Colonialism/Postcolonialism – third edition by Ania Loomba
Comedy – second edition by Andrew Stott
Crime Fiction by John Scaggs
Culture/Metaculture by Francis Mulhern
Dialogue by Peter Womack
Difference by Mark Currie
Discourse – second edition by Sara Mills
Drama/Theatre/Performance by Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis
Dramatic Monologue by Glennis Byron
Ecocriticism - second edition by Greg Garrard
Elegy by David Kennedy
Epic by Paul Innes
Fairy Tale by Andrew Teverson
Genders – second edition by David Glover and Cora Kaplan
Genre – second edition by John Frow
Gothic – second edition by Fred Botting
Grotesque by Justin D Edwards and Rune Graulund
The Historical Novel by Jerome de Groot
Historicism – second edition by Paul Hamilton
Humanism – second edition by Tony Davies
Ideology – second edition by David Hawkes
Interdisciplinarity – second edition by Joe Moran
Intertextuality – second edition by Graham Allen
Irony by Claire Colebrook
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Lyric by Scott Brewster
Magic(al) Realism by Maggie Ann Bowers
Memory by Anne Whitehead
Metaphor by David Punter
Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip Hobsbaum
Mimesis by Matthew Potolsky
Modernism – second edition by Peter Childs
Myth – second edition by Laurence Coupe
Narrative – second edition by Paul Cobley
Parody by Simon Dentith
Pastoral by Terry Gifford
Performativity by James Loxley
The Postmodern by Simon Malpas
Realism by Pam Morris
Rhetoric by Jennifer Richards
Romance by Barbara Fuchs
Romanticism – second edition by Aidan Day
Science Fiction – second edition by Adam Roberts
Sexuality – second edition by Joseph Bristow
Spatiality by Robert T. Tally Jr
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
Subjectivity by Donald E. Hall
The Sublime by Philip Shaw
Temporalities by Russell West-Pavlov
Translation by Susan Bassnett
Travel Writing by Carl Thompson
The Unconscious by Antony Easthope
MODERNISM
_____________________

Third Edition

Peter Childs
Third edition published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Peter Childs
The right of Peter Childs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published 2000
Second edition published 2008
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Childs, Peter, 1962- author.
Title: Modernism / by Peter Childs.
Description: Third edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. |
Series: New critical idiom | Includes bibliographical references, glossary, and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014248| ISBN 9781138931619 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138931626 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781315679679 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Art) | Arts, Modern—19th century. | Arts, Modern—20th century.
Classification: LCC NX454.5.M63 C48 2016 | DDC 709.04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014248
HBK ISBN13: 978-1-138-93161-9
PBK ISBN13: 978-1-138-93162-6
EBK ISBN13: 978-1-315-67967-9
Typeset in Times New Roman PS
by diacriTech, Chennai
 CONTENTS

Series editor’s preface

Introduction
Answering the question: what is modernism?
Plunging in
Words, words, words: modern, modernism, modernity
Periods, genres, models
International Anglophone modernisms
Cultures of Modernism

1. Interpreting and changing

Marx (1818–83)
Darwin (1809–82)
Freud (1856–1939)
Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Saussure (1857–1913)
Einstein (1879–1955)

2. Genres and the arts

Novel
Short story
Poetry
Drama
Art movements
Film
Photography, dance and music

3. Texts, contexts, intertexts

‘The struggle of becoming’: freedom and gender
‘It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream’: epistemology and narration
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: identity and war
‘Who’s passing for who?’: sexual and racial divisions
‘History is a nightmare’: symbolism and language

Glossary
Bibliography
Index
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to extend the lexicon of
literary terms, in order to address the radical changes which have taken place in the study of
literature during the last decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear, well-
illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use, and to evolve histories of
its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where there is considerable
debate concerning basic questions of terminology. This involves, among other things, the
boundaries which distinguish the literary from the non-literary; the position of literature within
the larger sphere of culture; the relationship between literatures of different cultures; and
questions concerning the relation of literary to other cultural forms within the context of
interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic and heterogeneous one.
The present need is for individual volumes on terms which combine clarity of exposition with
an adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of application. Each volume will contain as
part of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the definition of particular terms
is likely to move, as well as expanding the disciplinary boundaries within which some of these
terms have been traditionally contained. This will involve some re-situation of terms within
the larger field of cultural representation, and will introduce examples from the area of film
and the modern media in addition to examples from a variety of literary texts.
 INTRODUCTION

ANSWERING THE QUESTION: WHAT IS MODERNISM?

Romance – ‘In medieval literature, a verse narrative [recounts] the marvellous adventures of a
chivalric hero. ... In modern literature, i.e., from the latter part of the 18th through the 19th
centuries, a romance is a work of prose fiction in which the scenes and incidents are more or
less removed from common life and are surrounded by a halo of mystery, an atmosphere of
strangeness and adventure.’ (The Reader’s Encyclopedia, William Rose Benét)

Realism – ‘A mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or “reflecting” faithfully
an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a literary method based
on detailed accuracy of description (i.e. verisimilitude) and to a more general attitude that
rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of romance in favour of
recognizing soberly the actual problems of life.’ (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Chris
Baldick)

Modernism – ‘Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art of what Harold
Rosenburg calls “the tradition of the new”. It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical,
contains elements of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the
artist’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural
apocalypse and disaster. … We can dispute about when it starts (French symbolism;
decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes
“paleo-modernism” and “neo-modernism” and hence a degree of continuity through to post-
war art). We can regard it as a time-bound concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one
(including Sterne, Donne, Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers
(James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner in fiction;
Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama; Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke,
Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking
technical innovation, emphasize spatial or “fugal” as opposed to chronological form, tend
towards ironic modes, and involve a certain “dehumanization of art.”’ (Malcolm Bradbury in A
Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, Second Edition, ed. Peter Childs and Roger Fowler)

Postmodernism – ‘The new avant-garde literature (neo-modernist or postmodernist) partly

carried modernism further, partly reacted against it – for example against its ideology and its
historical orientation. What it consistently pretended to be (and sometimes actually was) was
new. Determinedly self-destructive, it attempted to cut off its branch of the past, by proposing
entirely new methods, a fresh “syllabus” or canon of authors (Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure,
Proust) and a new register of allusions.’ (A History of English Literature, Alastair Fowler)

If the idea that identity exists through difference is taken as a starting point, then Modernism
can begin to be understood in terms of possible distinctions from other literary forms.
Modernism is, for example, frequently distinguished from realism, the dominant mode of the
novel from its inception in Britain in the eighteenth century with the rise of bourgeois
capitalism to the present day. According to many critics, realism is characterised by its attempt
to offer up a mirror to the world, thus disavowing its own culturally conditioned processes and
ideological stylistic assumptions. Modelled on prose forms such as historiography and
journalism, realist writing thus often presents itself as transparently representative of the
author’s society and so features characters, language, and a spatial-temporal setting familiar to
its contemporary readers. Most importantly for a debate of literary history, it is apparent that
the hegemony of realism as the dominant form of the novel was challenged by writers
throughout the twentieth century as alternative ways of representing reality and the world were
presented by Modernists and then postmodernists. Realism itself was once a new, innovative
form of writing, with authors such as Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) and Samuel Richardson
(1690–1761) providing a different template for fiction from the previously dominant mode of
prose writing, the Romance, which was parodied in one of the very first novels, Cervantes’
Don Quixote (1605–15), and survives in Gothic and fantasy fiction. To the present day,
realism remains the primary favoured style for most novelists, but many avant-garde,
innovative, and radical writers have sought to undermine its dominance. Very broadly
speaking, the vast majority of attempts to offer alternative modes of representation from the
middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century have at one time or
another been termed Modernist, and this applies to literature, music, painting, film, and
architecture (and to some works before and after this period). In poetry, Modernism is
associated with moves to break from the iambic pentameter as the basic unit of verse, to
introduce vers libre, symbolism, and other new forms of writing. In prose, it is associated with
attempts to render human subjectivity in ways more real than realism: to represent
consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual’s relation to society through
interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunnelling, defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution
and other terms that will be encountered later in the book. Modernist writers therefore
struggled, in Ezra Pound’s brief phrase, to ‘make it new’, to modify if not overturn existing
modes and subjects of representation, partly by pushing them towards the abstract or the
introspective, and to express the new sensibilities of their time: in a compressed, condensed,
complex literature of the city, of industry and technology, war, machinery and speed, mass
markets and communication, of internationalism, the New Woman, the aesthete, the nihilist, and
the flâneur.
The dominant post-war conception of Modernism has accentuated these aspects to its key
texts; however, emphases in recent studies have moved towards alternative conceptualisations.
Instead of the progressive model whereby literary modes eclipse or supersede older ones in a
teleological line of development, like Virginia Woolf’s gig-lamps symmetrically arranged,
there is acknowledgement of, first, styles existing alongside one another in the text, and second,
of Modernism’s involvement in the broader social structures of the period and with the mass
movements and popular cultures of modernity. Here, the literary complexion starts to change
once the dominant view of a break from previous, or indeed contemporary forms and cultural
practices, is questioned, and marginalised voices from the fin de siècle and the empire, as well
as voices of those excluded for reasons of gender or sexuality, are placed closer to the centre
of Modernism’s narrative. Also, a critic such as Lawrence Rainey explores the role played by
various individuals, such as patrons and collectors, and institutions, such as the academy and
the law courts, in initially promoting the avant-garde to a wider reading public, beyond which
point literary Modernism, whose engagement with popular culture is evident in the works of
James Joyce and T. S. Eliot for example, would require the influence of the mass media as
well as both ‘critical approbation and some degree of commercial viability to ratify its status
as a significant idiom’ (Rainey 1998: 170). Starting with the little discussed pre-war visits to
England of the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Rainey’s sociologically oriented
Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture reconstructs formative
moments in the making of Modernism, focusing on the decade after 1912 up to the publication
of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922, and then Ezra Pound’s Draft of XVI
Cantos in 1925. Rainey pitches Modernism between the age of journalism and the coming of
the Universities, seeing it as situated between a passing elite bourgeois culture and the coming
middlebrow world of media aesthetics. Most importantly it was ambiguously caught between
its inclinations away from and towards contemporaneous common cultural practices in the
wider civil society. In the conception of Modernism, Rainey sees a greater importance for all
kinds of cultural institutions than has previously been acknowledged: the idea of the deluxe
edition and Ulysses, the rise of the little review and The Waste Land (both forms of
publication indebted to massive patronage), politics for Pound and ‘a coterie politics’ for H.D.
Thus, the significance of popular and even demotic culture on ‘high Modernism’ can be re-
acknowledged, from such seeming extremes as Joyce’s interest in pornography to Eliot’s 1923
essay on the extremely successful comedian and singer Marie Lloyd. But, the wider influence
of jazz, art, music, romance, machinery and the sheer frenzy of economic, cultural, and social
change, from market forces to machines, is increasingly felt in the depictions of Modernism.

PLUNGING IN
With regard to literature, Modernism is most readily understood through the work of the avant-
garde authors who wrote in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. It is a
contentious term and should not be discussed without a sense of the literary, historical and
political debates which have accompanied its usage. The problems of definition are such that
many critics avoid providing one, even though they freely use the term. David Ayers avoids the
issue of definition by stating a starkly contrasting problem with regard to Ulysses: Joyce’s
novel is such a touchstone for uses of the term in literature that it has become almost
impossible to read it in any terms other than ‘Modernist’, which means reference will be made
to its symbolism, its variety of textual forms, and range of methods (see Ayers 2004: 66), and
no matter how much contemporary critics try to analyse the novel’s content, in terms of gender,
nationalism, colonialism, and so on, rather than its form, content and form remain inseparable,
and so do, it seems, Ulysses and Modernism.
One of the first aspects of much Modernist writing to strike contemporary readers was the
way in which such novels, stories, plays and poems immerse them in an unfamiliar world with
little of the orienting preambles and descriptions provided by most nineteenth-century realist
writers, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In other words, Modernist
writing ‘plunges’ the reader into a confusing and difficult mental landscape which cannot be
immediately understood but which must be moved through and mapped in order to understand
its limits and meanings (see Mahaffey 2007). In this Introduction I will briefly sketch features
of this landscape so that some of the contours of Modernism can be visible but I recommend
that the reader returns to the Introduction having read the entire book, at which time its broad
brushstrokes will be better appreciated with the knowledge accrued from the later chapters.
But before plunging into the terms and the definitions employed by critics, I would like to
plunge into a fictional narrative, and discuss what is going on at the start of a Modernist text
which is in some ways exemplary but which would actually be sidelined by some definitions
of Modernism and by some overviews of Modernist writers. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy was
published in 1938, supposedly eight years after Modernism started to wane and be replaced by
the neo-realism of writers such as Graham Greene, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway,
Rosamond Lehmann and Evelyn Waugh. It is also by a writer who is often cited as the first
postmodernist. However, the elements of religious scepticism, deep introspection, technical
and formal experimentation, cerebral game-playing, linguistic innovation, self-referentiality,
misanthropic despair overlaid with humour, philosophical speculation, loss of faith and
cultural exhaustion all exemplify the preoccupations of Modernism. I shall quote the opening
page of the novel, to give a strong flavour of the writing, and then offer a commentary on it.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy

sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.
Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk,
slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of
north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized 5
cages
of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other
arrangements,
for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to
buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes
on and off, in quite alien surroundings.
He sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed
 not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his
own, it never left him. The corner in which he sat was curtained off
from the sun, the poor old sun in the Virgin again for the billionth
time. Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to
the rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to 15
the back, one his wrists to the strut behind. Only the most local
movements were possible. Sweat poured off him, tightened the
thongs. The breath was not perceptible. The eyes, cold and unwavering
as a gull’s, stared up at an iridescence splashed over the cornice
moulding, shrinking and fading. Somewhere a cuckoo-clock, having
struck between twenty and thirty, became the echo of a street-cry,
which now entering the mew gave Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo!
directly.
These were sights and sounds that he did not like. They detained
him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he fondly 25
hoped. He wondered dimly what was breaking up his sunlight, what
wares were being cried. Dimly, very dimly.
He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First
it gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free
in his mind. For it was not until his body was appeased that he could
come alive in his mind, as description in section six. And life in his
mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the
word.
Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
(London: Picador, 1973, lines 1–33)

When beginning to interpret or decode these lines, we should remember that Modernist prose
is enormously compressed, which means that it ought to be read with the attention normally
reserved for poetry or philosophy. Brief lines allude to complex ideas, comic set pieces enact
philosophical theories, and there is little attempt to relate the extreme situations and mental
conditions in the novel to anything the reader might consider to be representing ‘normality’.
This opening contains many of the features associated with Modernist stylistics and
preoccupations: a solipsistic mental landscape, an unreliable narrator, psychological and
linguistic repetition, an obsession with language, a quest(ioning) towards ‘reality’, uncertainty
in a Godless universe, the constraints of convention against the drives of passion, and black
humour.
A Dubliner in London, Murphy is a quite typical Beckett (anti) hero. This is at least in the
sense that he follows Beckett’s idea of the human condition and so has a supple mind shackled
to an imperfect, cumbersome body: the one a sanctuary to which he wishes to retreat, the other
a chaos which he wishes to control. This is one reason why he is literally tied up at the
opening of the novel, as he attempts to negate the body and escape into his mind by achieving
some kind of nirvana through meditative contemplation. For our purposes, this immediately
signals a greater interest, typical of Modernism, in the workings of the mind than of the body.
As discussed below, it is also a starting point for consideration of how the mind works, and, in
particular, how a mind in extremity works.
As would be common in a Modernist narrative, the novel has been read as a search to climb
inside the mind, away from the body’s needs and wants: to be free from desire. On the
superficial level Murphy is a young man with a gull’s eyes and a yellow complexion who
suffers from violent heart-attacks. His girlfriend Celia is a prostitute who is described via a
perfunctory list of measurements and passport details at the start of Chapter 2 and yet is the
most sympathetically portrayed of all the characters – Beckett calls them puppets – in his
novels. It is Murphy’s predicament that he is to be sought by each of the other characters in the
novel while he only wishes to escape from himself. Murphy wants to flee the physical world
and seek refuge in the indivisible, unextended, pain-free mental world, which is one reason
why he later takes a job in a mental asylum. Beckett’s interest is in the Cartesian problem of
dualism: how do the mind and the body interact? They co-exist together like the yolk and
albumen sealed within an egg, but no one knows now they are connected. In an attempt to
represent this dilemma, Beckett toys with several theories such as Descartes’ belief that there
is a connection through the pineal gland and also the theological explanation, related to the
issue of free will, that whenever the individual wills their body to move, God causes the action
to be performed. Such concerns, though flavoured by Beckett’s peculiar preoccupations,
exemplify Modernism’s fascination with the way the mind processes or projects a reality
which surrounds the individual but which is often alienating and oppressing.
The novel is also deeply concerned with religious explanations of the universe and with
questions of what it means to be human with or without God. The opening line of this,
Beckett’s first novel, reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun (cf. Ecclesiastes 1:9)
and also hints at the belief that there is no free will in the universe. The sun has no alternative
but to shine, and in the second sentence we find Murphy sitting out of the sun ‘as though he
were free’, suggesting that he, like the sun, is actually determined by his nature, driven by
biological and psychological impulses of which he knows very little. This comment on
restriction has a more literal embodied relevance in the next paragraph when we learn that
Murphy is tied to a chair, a predicament that is quite possibly a parody of the philosopher
Wittgenstein who famously used to sit on a deckchair beneath a fan in his otherwise bare room
at Cambridge. The third sentence tells us as much about Beckett’s narrator as it does about
Murphy. This is because the narrator, who at most later times will appear omniscient, is
undecided about the length of time Murphy has been at West Brompton: ‘what might have been
six months’ (l. 3). It is one of the first hints that the narrator, who we have already realised is
playful, is not going to follow the usual conventions of storytelling, but will mock them instead.
So he has little time for the normal realist descriptions of homes and is content to describe
Murphy’s condemned mew as ‘a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect’. The final
sentence of the paragraph introduces another of Beckett’s favourite techniques: repetition.
Lines 8 and 9 repeat the round of eating, drinking, sleeping and dressing mentioned in lines 3
and 4. In this case, the echoing underlines the point that, though Murphy will soon have to
move, there will indeed be nothing new for the sun to shine on. This is a Modernist
preoccupation with repetitive, cyclical rather than chronological, teleological time which will
be discussed later.
The second paragraph immediately matches Murphy’s undressed body with the undressed
teak of his rocking-chair, the perfect vehicle in which to be constantly moving and yet going
nowhere. The difference between the two is that Murphy’s body is not guaranteed not to ‘crack,
warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night’ (l. 11). The reader is then once more reminded of
nature’s unremitting cycles at the level of the cosmos and of animal sexuality, with ‘the poor
old sun [son] in the virgin again for the billionth time’ (l. 13). The extra significance of this is
that Beckett substitutes astrology for God as a system of faith for Murphy. The following
sentences concerning Murphy’s bondage are a typical Beckett set-piece in that they contain the
detailed but flawed over-explanation of a situation containing permutations. Murphy is tied up
with seven scarves: two on his shins, one round his thighs, two at his torso, and one round his
wrists. The inadequate or delinquent rather than unreliable narrator leaves the reader with two
questions: where is the seventh scarf, and how did Murphy on his own achieve this Houdini-
like position, in which his hands are tied and he is restricted to ‘the most local movements’?
(ll. 16–17) Beckett’s points here are that first, mathematics, the purest science, does not
adequately represent the world (for example, try to work out, to as many decimal places as
your mind can tolerate, the exact number of weeks in a year by dividing the number of days in a
year [365] by the number of days in a week [7]); and, second, that Murphy’s mind is always
ensnared in and unable to escape from his body, and hence is always ‘tied up’. Bringing these
two points together provides a clue to why Murphy later calls another character ‘Thou surd’
(p. 47). A surd is an irrational number, such as the square root of minus one. The mathematical
way of recording these imagined figures which exist in theory but not in practice is with the
symbol i, which, curiously, is also when capitalised the pronoun used to represent the
individual, who is always an irrational and absurd figure in Beckett’s imagined fiction, where
the perverse, neurotic, thought-tormented characters of Modernism find their fullest expression.
Murphy sits, sweats and watches the sunlight’s play on the ceiling. A cuckoo-clock strikes
the improbable time of between twenty and thirty and echoes the barterer’s shout Quid Pro
Quo! [one thing in exchange for another]. This business cry, signalling the difference between
the commercial preoccupations of the capitalist world against which the Modernists pitted
artistic freedom, is a precursor of one of the novel’s major speculative philosophical themes:
that the amount of suffering in the world is always constant, though it may change in form. The
argument is that life is a closed system, that ‘For every symptom that is eased, another is made
worse. … Humanity is a well with two buckets … one going down to be filled, the other
coming up to be emptied’ (pp. 36–37). The supposed comfort of this theory is that though things
cannot overall get better they cannot get worse either. Things ‘will always be the same as they
always were’ (p. 36); or, to return us to the start of the book, there is ‘nothing new’ under the
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