1. Surely Our Unhappy Marriage Will Be Revived In Paris
2. Our Marriage Deteriorates Even In Paris
3. Perhaps If We Were To Try…An Open Marriage
4. I Didn’t Have Anyone Particular In Mind, But Maybe One Of Our Intellectually Curious Friends Would Be Interested In Our Open Marriage, After All, It Is A New Century And I Hate Queen Victoria But Love Bisexuality
5. Let Us Break With The Closed-Minded And Stagnant Past, Except I Still Don’t Like Jewish People, Or Say Nominally Positive Things About Jewish People But In A Creepy And Condescending Way That Feels Super Weird A Century Later
6. Let Us Describe The Objects On The Mantel In The Drawing Room And In So Describe The State Of Our Marriage
7. Here’s The Worst Things I Can Think Of: Clocks, Factories, The Middle Class, Carpeting, Conventional Marriages
8. But What Was The War For, Thomas
9. I Have Inherited The Ancestral Home, But It Is Now A Burden Rather Than A Gift, Which Reminds Me Of Another Burden…The Institution Of Marriage
10. Psychiatry Seems Interesting, Let’s Talk About That For Eighty Pages
11. Septimus Is So Terribly Conventional Now, Let’s Hate Him
12. I Had A Pleasant Yet Non-Eventful Chat With A Non-White Bartender And Now I Understand Alienation And The Human Condition
13. Why There Is Lesbianism: A Digression On Brainpan Dimensions
14. I Don’t Ever Want To Hear About Nation-States Again
15. Western Civilization Is Over And I Only Want To Talk About Rosicrucianism
16. Conflict Resolution Is For Edwardians, All I Want To Do Is Describe My Failed Attempt To Walk Down The Street To Visit A Butcher In First Person For 100 Years
17. Civilization Is No Good But Maybe Fascism Will Help
18. Could A Sanskrit Quotation Go Here? I’ll Put A Sanskrit Quotation Here Just In Case
Intimacy Between Females Is Of Course Loving And Natural But Men Must Speak To One Another Only From A Distance Of Four Feet Or Greater For Fear Of Appearing (insert list of old-timey euphemisms for “twink”), Unless Of Course There Is A War On In Which Case All Bets Are Off
You mean, they spend a lot of time being very, very close but there’s a need to disclaim that the author is not (insert list of old-timey euphemisms for gay), only has friends who are and about whom he sometimes talks in a sort of condescending manner
*coughROBERTGRAVEScough*
And don’t forget idyllic fishing trips in the country
Is the last one Hermann Hesse because I used to love Hesse and now you’ve made me retroactively embarrassed of that.
I will never be embarrassed of liking Hesse, even if it comes to the point where I only like him because I currently live in a town where he used to live, and if anyone wants to revoke my Toastie membership card because of that, then so be it.
Tbh I liked The Glass Bead Game the best. No Sanskrit there.
I’m thinking TS Eliot? But hell, this could apply to multiple modernists.
Me too. Shantih shantih shantih and all that.
And I will never be embarrassed of liking T. S. Eliot even when he is embarrassing.
ETA: it could apply to multiple modernists but this post has made me realize that I’ve only read modernist poetry. The modernist novel has apparently been a closed book to me.
No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you’ll make sense of the notes.
-Part V of Wendy Cope, The Waste Land: Five Limericks
Thank you!
Everything I know about The Waste Land I learned from Wendy Cope.
Eliot never wrote novels, though.
Might be, but I thought Eliot.
Hesse was my go-to in high school whenever I had no idea what to do for a project so I’m forever grateful for that
It me! Although I do admit to a certain remaining fondness for the Glass Bead Game.
I too hold a remaining fondness for the Glass Bead Game but I worry that I might not like it if I re-read it an so I won’t do so.
aw you know Siddartha is a pretty okay philosophical novel, even if it’s not actually a description of Buddhism really at all
This is the perfect opening for me to tell the story of the best thing I ever did in an English class.
So my 10th-grade English class had studied Siddartha, and the time came for our final test on the book. The whole test was true-false. One of the statements on the test was, “For every truth, its opposite is equally true.” As you know if you’ve read Siddhartha, in the context of the book, that statement was indeed true.
We go through the answers after the test. When we come to that answer, I say, “Mr. ____, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we all get 100s on this test?”
He goes, “Haha, no.” We move on.
Next day, he comes into class and says, “Something was bothering me after class yesterday. It bothered me on the way home from school. It bothered me at dinner. It bothered me when I woke up this morning. Do you know what it is?” We didn’t know. “‘For every truth, its opposite is equally true.’ Since you all were the ONLY class to point this out, you will all get 100s on the test. However, I have written the grade you would have gotten on your paper. If you tell anyone in any other class about this, you will all get those grades instead.”
(I’m going to assume that 10+ years after the fact, nobody is going to go back and revoke all our high school degrees)(Also a friend of mine had commented on this paradox on her own paper; I was not the only one to note this.)
hahahaha A+ job English teacher, that was well done
Bless this. Bless how kind you were to the rest of your class. All my academic smart assery benefited only my grade and drove my classmates away. This is perfect.
That is an awesome story. And you’re right, surely the statute of limitations has expired by now, right?
The fact that your teacher was bothered by that all night is something that I never would have believed as a teenager, and as an adult I have ZERO PROBLEM believing.
Hesse has his time and place, and that’s high school/college for sheltered western kids who really want to get out and see the world/experience other perspectives.
you know it’s actually a pretty interesting introduction to Taoism, if you are kind of into the idea of it but not quite ready to parse all of Laozi’s stubborn obscurantism.
TRUE LIVED STORY
… I do still have a fondness for the sheer psychoanalytic trippy indulgent weirdness of Steppenwolf that I will likely never fully be able to articulate nor defend. Teenage angst masked by intellectualism for the win.
I really liked Siddartha for practicing my German comprehension; I found it much more motivating than most of the German non-fiction I was trying to read.
Yes, it wad high school, but I have fond memories of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Magister Ludi.
I think our Patron Saint of Sex Dreams, Somerset Maugham, also did this.
does Modernist literature denote that the author is currently hired to come up with new dr. pepper flavour variants/ad campaigns
At least half of those came out of a David Brooks column title generator, admit it
Wanly Sipping Apéritifs for Five Hours
#lifegoals
“I Hate Queen Victoria But Love Bisexuality”
I think you speak for us all here.
Well to be frank Western Civilization kind of IS ending, just look at American politics. [I am really bummed out about the election you guys, I hate that the US enjoys electing people for reasons other than “competence” or “principles.”]
I interpreted your first clause as referring to The Toast and was sad all over again.
I don’t exactly know what part of the election you’re referring to, but I want to clarify that sometimes the most competent person for the job may not be the one who reflects or has always reflected every last one of our personal principles.
19. Time, It Passes.
20. Will Someone Please Inform Aunt Mildred That God Is Dead?
21. The Ringing Telephone Interrupted All 14 Of My Reveries Today.
22. How Can One See Those Mannequins And NOT Contemplate The Idea Of Form?
23. The World Is Better When I Think Freely, Worse When Others Do.
Yes! “The World Is Better When I Think Freely, Worse When Others Do,” cutting straight to the bone.
A professor at my undergrad was famous for leading a summer study abroad in Paris and hooking up with undergrads on the trip. He named his daughter – I kid you not – Hadley. As in Hadley Hemingway.
Same professor also once turned a class discussion about Henry V into a discussion of how a gay man in Paris complimented his penis in a bathroom.
Dude was a piece of work but tbh probably could have written a top notch modernist novel.
This is horrifying, sad, and funny in that way that it’s funny when someone thinks they’re the greatest but they’re actually terrible
Whenever I meet a new person I need to add “Could they write a modernist novel?” to the list of questions I ask myself about them. If the answer is yes, run. Don’t look back, don’t grab the bag just run.
I also appreciate that your username reflects my feelings toward the professor in question. I feed off this petty online vengeance.
Your petty online vengeance is truly the Lord’s work
Just checked the ol’ honors college website, and he’s no longer listed as faculty. Which is funny, because he’s too young to retire and doesn’t appear to work at another university.
I wonder why he is no longer teaching.
He has no doubt moved to Paris, where they really appreciate him, if you know what I mean.
This is giving me flashbacks to the weekend I binge-read To The Lighthouse for a Monday class and felt like Virginia Woolf took over my brain and started narrating my life. It was much less pleasant than when Jane Austen took over earlier in the semester – at least I got to be arch and witty then.
Honestly half the reason why I read and watch Pride and Prejudice so much is just so that my inner-self turns into Elizabeth Bennett for a time.
I find Virginia Woolf very hard to read for that exact reason, which is of course also why she was brilliant. It is a difficult tightrope to walk.
BRB, emailing my mom to thank her for having loads of shitty SF/F novels in the house when I was growing up. I don’t know anything about any of these.
Thank goodness for genre fiction! I know I read a few modernist things for school but they mostly didn’t have the same impact as all the mysteries and sf/f I devoured. Or the romances I secretly read.
I read a few modernist things for school but they mostly didn’t have the same impact as all the mysteries and sf/f I devoured
I CANNOT IMAGINE WHY
I’m sure it was all the SEX
To be fair, this is really a spoof of Novels by Americans in Paris and Also Virginia Woolf, not Every Modernist Novel Ever.
If you like SF/F, I would totally recommend the modernist novel Zeno’s Conscience. It’s about quitting cigarettes, with a side-dose of being blackmailed by your psychoanalyst, thought experiments in physics, revolting against the Hapsburg monarchy, the absurdity of business ventures, and the challenges of falling in love with a set of sisters.
Thank you for the recommendation!
Mallory this is perfect how can you leave us I am prematurely bereft.
Here’s The Worst Things I Can Think Of (2016): No more Toast.
Carpeting is still pretty terrible, except in that twilight of just-old-enough-not-to-be-half-loose-fibers and just-new-enough-not-to-harbor-mildew-and-terrible-secrets.
Virginia Woolf 🙁 I love Woolf, but this is very accurate. Why so anti-Semitic? Why so OH NO MANTELPIECE? Bleh.
I wrote a ‘How to tell you’re if you are in a Virginia Woolf story’ for this here website, but someone had already submitted one (which was awesome!) and “OH NO MANTELPIECE” pretty much sums up what I wrote. I think I ended it with a very dark ‘stones in pockets’ reference though…
The narrator is as unreliable as capitalism
“My sentences are as short as my penis is long”
So I guess like average?
says SO MUCH about James Joyce
I was thinking of Hemingway. I haven’t read Joyce.
ETA – assuming you’re talking about #2. I was thinking of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing for #1. But I’d love it if they work for multiple authors.
Still better than postmodernism
Is number 12 Hemingway? It sounds like the plot of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.
“It’s Winter Outside, This Winter Has Been So Long, We Live On The Prairie And The Prairie Is So Vast And Empty, And This Is All A Metaphor For Our Marriage” — Kate Beaton on Canadian Literature
And I will suggest McSweeney’s Literary Fiction Drinking Game, because we’re all gonna have to go somewhere next month.
I feel like this needs a legend upside down at the bottom of the page. And maybe a point system….
The professor’s housekeeper/cook/personal sex slave is perfectly content with her lot in life, and she’ll tell you that if you ask.
Yes We are Upper Class and Have No Real Problems, But Our Lives are Indefinitely More Difficult Than The Poor. It is Therefore Acceptable to Make Comments About How ‘Simple’ and ‘Innocent’ Their Lives Are Whilst We Drink Cocktails and Eat Fancy Sweets.
This really only works in Wodehouse. Everyone else who tries it just comes off as loathsome.
NGL: I live for modernism & it spoiled me for all else. It was so formative that I can’t get through most other fiction because I find plot insufferable & character development so. very. boring. All I want is a total immersion of language and musings that begin with the innocuous and reveal All The Things. I don’t make any apologies about it.
Except to say that Ezra Pound is the absolute dirtiest of dirtbags & his Cantos make excellent kindling for the fires in Ginny’s many mantles.
McSweeny’s has a lovely collection of Ezra Pound takedowns. Here’s my favorite.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ezra-pounds-on…
“I can’t get through most other fiction because I find plot insufferable & character development so. very. boring. All I want is a total immersion of language and musings that begin with the innocuous and reveal All The Things.”
THANK YOU. I’ve had a coworker perstering me to put into words both why I love modernist/post-mod lit (straight up obsessed with Joyce) and have no interest in his recommendations for various books that are basically just Game of Thrones. Other than the obvious, ‘I don’t give a shit about dragons’, I couldn’t phrase why I don’t like genre lit. It’s just so …boring.
Some genre fiction works for me, like Dorothy Sayers or Raymond Chandler or Ursula LeGuin, whom I find idea-driven as well as plotting. And I get it for what it is. It’s the middling “literary” stuff that boggles my mind & dulls my senses. Boring language, boring ideas, boring story, boring characters… But yeah, I’m totally with you. I’ll take Joyce (and really, Wolf) annnyyyy day. And read them over and over.
I am the opposite of you! I love plot! I love character development! I can’t read modernist musings…sentence…structure… something… pleasing to ear… soothing… sleep zzz
So interesting! When you put it like that, modernism makes perfect sense.
I’m the opposite. I’m team genre all the way. Besides the joys of character development and plot, I like to connect emotionally as well as intellectually to books (and all art really) and genre tends to be more emotionally compelling to me. I don’t care if the sentences aren’t perfectly composed – I just want the cyborg princess to destroy the evil queen.
3.5 I Am Now In An Open Marriage But My Wife Doesn’t Think So And Is Upset Because She’s Too Conventional
16. Conflict Resolution Is For Edwardians, All I Want To Do Is Describe My Failed Attempt To Walk Down The Street To Visit A Butcher In First Person For 100 Years
I’m pretty sure this is describing my favourite story from Dubliners? But I am ~always~ here for stories where nothing happens, so.
Stories where nothing happens are my favourite kinds of stories too. Especially when you’ve read the whole thing without realising that nothing is really happening, and you get the end and think, wait a minute, nothing happened that whole time, but you were still totally captivated…
My least favourite thing is action interrupting fraught conversations! i just want everyone to figure out their/each other’s feelings! Taking walks (preferably in pairs) is the only suitable exception.
So Paris didn’t work, surely Spain will.
Pamplona it is! Where we will have an open marriage that my wife isn’t really informed about until it’s happening.
And then the lover will move in with us on our holiday!
And we will watch bullfights which are actually supposed to highlight things about my marriage and my very existence!
For the love of God Mallory do not leave us
One of my first essays as an undergraduate was about Ezra Pound and Modernism and since I had no idea what Modernism actually was I began the essay with an extended metaphor about Odysseus visiting islands and something about the past and the sea and blah blah blah. It made no sense whatsoever but did underline the fact that while I was ill-prepared for a Classics degree, I was even worse prepared for and English Literature one.
This is why the Victorian novel kicks the ass of the Modernist novel. Sorry, Modernism, you were a terrible enabler of poorly-behaved dudebros, and I will take a hundred awful Angel Clares and even murderous Murdstones for every sad sack Gabriel Conroy or smugly awful Lucky Jim you produced.
Well, see if you still feel that way after 8th grade graduation.
What does that even mean? Does graduating from 8th grade give people a sudden appreciation of Modernism that they had not previously known? Are all 9th graders collectively seized by a need to move to Paris and be in an open marriage and make weird sweeping statements about minorities and write Sanskrit quotes?
+100. I’ve been quietly side-eyeing this comment. It makes no sense to me.
19. How I Detest Locomotives and Also the Bourgeoisie
20. How I Love Locomotives But Still Detest the Bourgeoisie
21. Duelling is Now Illegal – So Exciting, Let’s Duel!
19. But What Was The Marriage For, Thomas
YES thank you. as a jew whenever I read things that are Vaguely Strange I always have to pause and be like am I insulted? what is happening here? should I be offended? are there going to be more weird sweeping statements? what exactly are you implying about my People?
+100. I've been quietly side-eyeing this comment. It makes no sense to me.
I just read Tender is the Night and this is a great, great antidote to some of what went on there.
No, with Phillip Roth, she lives in Hackensack, which is the height of class.