HIGH MODERNIST COLLECTIVE MEMORY BOMBS AND BOOMS: THE WASTE LAND AND ULYSSES AND THE INJUNCTION “MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR!”
HIGH MODERNIST COLLECTIVE MEMORY BOMBS AND BOOMS: THE WASTE LAND AND ULYSSES AND THE INJUNCTION “MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR!”

Summary/Abstract: The Waste Land and Ulysses recycle tradition in the present in stunningly intelligent imaginative ways. Eliot’s text is conceived as a collective memory bomb in the wake of the First World War, Joyce’s overlooks the World War (and the word “war”!) and ties its readers, like Ulysses in the encounter with the Sirens, to the necessary, epic and constructive screens of tradition, permeated by divine, domestic, erotic and more casual, modern forms of love. I build a collective and cultural memory case study for exploring the gap in the literary history horizon of the 1920s between lovelessness and love. I compare the narrative nuclei/syntagmata of Eliot’s disrupting dramatic monologues to the full emplotment of Joyce’s labyrinthine, yet cohesive, narrative, eventually triumphing over traumatic adversities, as a bona fide epic. I explain the various speeds of high modernist cultural recollection with Denis Donoghue’s connection between two typical reactions of modern intelligence to the presence of urban crowds: the retractile and communicative reaction, Eliot’s and Joyce’s attitudes, respectively. The writers disruptive and constructive returning to tradition, respectively, is the consequence of these two attitudes. Prompted by Ann Rigney’s study of the literary text as a portable monument, I compare the briskly evocative force of the merely narrative nuclei, which serve the poetic principle of equivalence, in The Waste Land with the slowlier, full emplotment which structures the Ulysses narrative. I suggest that the dramatic and poetic communication of The Waste Land is readily accountable to postmemory, in Marianne Hirsch’s sense, while the imposing cultural memory work underwriting Ulysses demonstrably remained opaque to English readers like Virginia Woolf. I measure Virginia Woolf’s intra-generational distance from the two male modernists by invoking the dominance of the dramatic form in literature, which she may have slightly overlooked.

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