Epilogue: International Modernism

Abstract

This final short section will reflect upon the findings of the book in relation to a local, Irish modernism, and seek to make connections to a more global modernism. In discussing Yeats, Joyce and Beckett in relation to developments in contemporary science, many of the canonical works of Irish modernism, including The Tower, Ulysses and ‘The Trilogy’, have been reframed. From each of these chapters a network of related themes has emerged, centred around time, difficulty, absurdity and desire, which have been linked with or shown to develop from the key theories of the new astronomy and cosmology, in particular ideas about the birth, growth and death of the universe and the behaviour of stars. A central creative focus for all of these authors is the strangeness and difficulty of light in the new universe, which was readily converted into textual and epistemological metaphors by all three authors. Although, as has been explored, there was more at stake for Irish modernists in the downfall of Newtonian science, especially in relation to Berkeleian idealism, nonetheless similarities can be drawn between the authors addressed by this study and a broader modernist engagement with astronomy and cosmology. In so doing brief case studies of a cosmological interest in European and Asian modernism, including in the work of Robert Musil, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges and Miyazawa Kenji, will be examined.