Modernism, metonymy and fragmentation

Fragmentation and disintegration, and substitutions of parts for wholes, were occurring at many different levels in the early twentieth-century.  As Terry Eagleton observes:

Modernism reflected the crack-up of a whole civilization. All the beliefs which had served nineteenth-century middle-class society so splendidly - liberalism, democracy, individualism, scientific inquiry, historical progress, the sovereignty of reason - were now in crisis. (After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003) p. 63)

Which of these levels was most significant is disputed. I mentioned in class Henry Ford's perfection of the assembly line. In 1908, Ford's company began selling his famous Model T. The car became popular, and soon Ford found he was unable to meet the enormous demand:

His solution was to invent a moving industrial production line. By installing a moving belt in his factory, employees would be able to build cars one piece at a time, instead of one car at a time. This principle, called "division of labor," allowed workers to focus on doing one thing very well, rather than being responsible for a number of tasks. (source).

You can see film of  Ford's assembly lines at work here.

It is Terry Eagleton (see above) who points to a modern move from metaphor to metonymy. The critic Michael North connects this to 'Prufrock': 

The general fragmentation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is obvious and notorious. The poem seems a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton calls the modern "transition from metaphor to metonymy: unable any longer to totalize his experience in some heroic figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it trickle away into objects related to him by sheer contiguity." Everything in "Prufrock" trickles away into parts related to one another only by contiguity. 

 As North goes on,

In this poem the horror of sex seems to come in part from its power to metonymize. Like Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the body over the whole. Though Eliot is far too circumspect to name this part, he figures its power in his poetry by the rebelliousness of mere members: hands, arms, eyes. Sexual desire pulls the body apart, so that to give in to it is to suffer permanent dismemberment. This may account for the odd combination in Eliot's work of sexual ennui and libidinous violence. The tyranny of one part scatters all the others, reducing the whole to impotence. In this way, the violence of sex robs the individual of the integrity necessary to action.

North also discusses metonymy and time in 'Prufrock' - you can find a more complete extract from his book, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge University Press, 1991), by following the link in the post before this one, or simply clicking here and scrolling down.

We will return to this in greater detail next week.