modernist reality | passing | sir galahad’s grail destiny | end of the affair
Modernist Reality:
A Life Measured Out with Coffee Spoons
Or Any Kind of Spoon You Choose
Reality is a rather bleak place for American Modernist authors. With no guiding moral compass, no omnipotent God, no absolute that exists outside the relative human consciousness, modernist reality basically strips human existence of any religious or redeeming hope that death is not the end of existence. According to Robert Frost, nothing outlasts death; all things in this natural world disintegrate and decompose into a primal, original state of amorphous particles. Other Modernist writers like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams elaborate further upon this inevitable cycle of decay and go beyond the dualistic reality, which the consciousness has constructed. Stevens and Williams argue that the root of existence is not the ability of human sensory perception to recognize a concrete state of matter or being. Rather, pure existence is a state of imperceptible non-existence in the stillness of nothingness. Modernists Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald show the ironic relationship between human existence and this nothingness to which everything succumbs. As beings of free will, humans have no choice other than to exercise the will. They create and destroy all things perceived as external reality, a reality that arises from and always eventually gives way to nothingness. In this regard, the essence of human optimism and progress toward some imaginary ideal is itself an illusion – a coping mechanism for the human consciousness to deal with the inexorable anxiety of meaningless existence within an amoral world. And after stripping existence bare of any significance external to the self, Modernist writers contend that the only meaning remaining is that which one chooses to create, despite the bleakness of one’s relative and ephemeral consciousness.
In Robert Frost’s poem, “The Wood-Pile,” Frost conveys the transience and relativity of the human self’s existence. Written in the first person, the poem depicts the aimless wandering of the speaker through an unknown, frozen swamp, in which all conception of space and time is lost. Everything hinges upon the thoughts and associations made by the sole speaker. When the speaker comes across an abandoned pile of wood, carefully cut and neatly corded, he describes the scene and conjectures a reason for its abandonment:
What held it, though, on one side was a tree / Still growing, and on one stake and prop, / These latter about to fall. I thought that only / Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks / Could so forget his handiwork on which / He spent himself, the labor of his ax, / And leave it there far from a useful fireplace / To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay. (32-40)
Passing: ‘Having Your Cake and Eating It Too’
Is It Even Possible?
In Passing, Nella Larson constructs the racially segregated society of the 1920s through the perspective Irene Redfield. Irene’s personality, and her actions regarding Clare Kendry (the other main female role) shed light upon Larson’s opinion about the practice of “passing.” Irene is a conservative black woman who lives in Harlem New York. She passes when she deems necessary, but embraces her racial identity. In contrast, Clare basically severs her ties with the black race, masking her identity, even to her bigoted husband. The very different lives of these two women show the unclear line of “passing.” And their tension-filled relationship (in the eyes of Irene) shows the effects of denying one’s ethnicity as well as the moral implications of racism.
Sir Galahad’s Grail Destiny:
A Blessing or A Curse?
Perhaps no tale of the Arthurian Legend is better known to modernity than the quest for the Holy Grail. But what exactly is the Holy Grail? Can one actively choose to seek the Grail? Or is it a matter of unalterable destiny? In his Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory narrates the Grail quests of Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, Sir Percivale, and Sir Bors. All four knights desire the glory of the Grail, but only the Christ-like Sir Galahad, due to destiny alone, can fully comprehend and accomplish the true nature of the quest. Throughout the tale, the other three knights receive multiple premonitions and signs that disclose Galahad’s ultimate success. However, Malory develops a tension between the overarching ideas of fixed destiny and contingent destiny. According to R.M. Lumiansky, Malory faced the task of making Chrétien de Troyes’s Grail poem, his primary source, fit into the larger context of his Arthurian legend. Lumiansky claims, “The nature of the source made Malory’s problem two-fold: he needed (1) to reduce, without injury, the religious fabric and tone of the whole, and (2) to adapt the material before him to his history of Arthur’s court and to the theme which he had been expounding from the beginning of his book” (186). In other words, Malory had to reconcile the secular chivalry of the Round Table with the sacred Grail quest. Because Malory’s Lancelot, the earthly paradigm of knighthood, cannot achieve this purpose, he uses Sir Galahad, the heavenly paradigm. In doing so, however, he never fully integrates the Grail destiny into the larger context of the Round Table legend.
Freedom to Choose, But Chosen To Be Human:
An Affair That Never Ends
While The End of the Affair is arguably the most religiously centered novel written by Graham Green, it focuses on some of the most instinctual human desires – to define a purpose of life, to understand the self, love, and intimacy. Though the novel can be read as a story of conversion, it raises a more universal question of existence beyond the limits of human rationality. Is one ever truly alone? If so, life can be described as nothing more than empty and arbitrary habitualness, grounded in temporal materialism. Desire, then, lives and dies with the flesh. Yet, like Bendrix and Sarah, if one struggles to construct beliefs that both relate to and exceed the sensory-driven human experience, namely a belief in God, one can never be satisfied with the incomplete conceptions of life according to the self. At the same time however, one never reaches indubitable, logical proof as to whether existence transcends life. It is the choice between ignorant, animalistic complacency and insatiable, intellectual yearning.
Greene contextualizes Bendrix and Sarah’s affair within this dichotomy of temporal life and eternal transcendence. He depicts their struggle to find peace that comes only through belief in each other and God, a belief underpinned by love, not rational proof.
joe marinelli 