Looking Past Polemic: Forster and Modernism

Abstract

What the modernists proclaim often differs markedly from what they actually do; it is therefore notoriously difficult to reconcile modernist polemic and modernist practice. The complexity that arises as a result of these inconsistencies points to a number of important considerations hat ought not to be overlooked in any discussion of modernism. Not least of these is that, in looking back, we may be flattening differences which, to the practitioners themselves, were so great that they saw little common ground and were struck only by discrepant aspirations and strategies. In addition, there is the danger of overemphasising the vigorous polemic engaged in by many early twentieth-century writers in an attempt to define difference or settle upon convenient categories. The disputes engaged in by these writers ‘appear now more like family or intergenerational quarrels in which the contending parties seem to be putting up a spirited defense against the lurking threat of co-dependency’ (DiBattista 1996: 4). Polemic, in other words, should not too readily be read as dissent, nor should it be accepted too eagerly as an infallible indication of a literary agenda.

‘in eras of transition writers are all half-blind to one another’

Edwin Muir, Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature (1926:203)

‘Our quarrel... is not with the classics’

Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1966, vol. II: 103)