Alexa Valaree P.

Salugsugan
March 30, 2016
ENG 143 WFW
PROFESSOR: DR. M.R.G. ANCHETA
Oral report paper: Modernist Poetics

The Sound of Silence: Fragmented and Objectified Humanity in Modernist Prose

She had got the habit of silence anywaythat was fixed.

Sherwood Anderson, Death In the Woods, 1933

But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury
and enjoyed it.

William Carlos Williams, The Use of Force, 1938

Douglas Mao cites an exchange between Sigmund Freud and a certain H.D. in the introduction of

his book Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production, in which Freud remarks the easy mistake

people make of reading Gods as Goods (3). He believes that this anecdote perfectly encompassed

modernisms fascination with the object understood not as commodity (Goods) nor as symbol

(Gods), but as object (4). This valorization of the object is indeed a very potent part of modernism, as

seen in the rise of abstractions in modern arts and literature that sought to end the hegemony of realism.

Modernists are called the lost generation because they are those who have lost faith in the

overarching explanatory patterns and transcendent reference points (God, King, Soul, Reason, History,

etc.) that delineated selfhood (Mller 9). They are those whose notions of humanity and reality have

become fragmented and, to reiterate the previous, objectifiedin the sense that after a cold and

impersonal world such as fin de sicle to post-WWI America, it was now possible to see the self through

objects one is surrounded with. As a less convoluted example, sociologist George Simmel says that rather

than objects of obsession like jewels working for the owner, [o]ur allegiance to our jewels, our capacity

SALUGSUGAN 1
to model ourselves upon the markers of prestige we have acquired, is the true apotheosis of modern

selfhood (qtd. in Plotz 115).

The Rorschach blot test invented in 1921, according to Plotz, is another example of revealing

ones subjectivity through the object: The crucial contribution of this account is that it locates the

problem of the talking thing [the image] not within the thing itself but at the vexed boundary between

self and world (114). Plotz also studies another framework of seeing into the modernist construction of

object and subject by looking at Stephen Bests discourse on late 19 th-century American labor practices

and the fragmentation and objectification of the human: [E]ven attributes that are a seemingly

inalienable part of one human beingmy personality, my face, my voice, my talentmight also be

thingified, turned into separable properties liable to transaction on the open market (116).

Thus, even the human body and humanity itself were possible to be thingified in modernist

eyes. In Sherwood Anderson and William Carlos Williams works, aspects of humanity are negotiated in

the act of silencing the speaking subject in favor of the narrator's perspective; and through such an act, the

human is both rendered as an objectstripped of agency, control, and one might say ontological status

while simultaneously transferring these aspects of subjectivity and humanity solely to another human: the

narrator. It is reminiscent of the modernist ethos of seeing humanity as like a self-assembled toy, with a

modernist willingness to see particular attributes of people available as detached bits and pieces rather

than as coterminous with a singular life (117). It is what powered the modernist notion of humanity as

flexible to being stripped of human attributes and simultaneously subjecting these attributes and the

body itself to objectification.

Both texts are written in the first person perspective, which emphasize the narrators subjectivity

and inevitable status as observer, in the sense that the reader will never fully understand the texts

neutrally. The narrators perspective is from which these texts take place; the reader is never given any

other means to generate meaning. Both texts also use repetition to further the narrators development. In

Andersons Death in the Woods, the narrator stresses the old womans generic existenceAll country

SALUGSUGAN 2
and small-town people have seen such old women, but no one knows much about themand

dispensability The old woman was nothing specialby use of repetition. These epithets actually

make way instead for the privileging of the narrators own feelings and experiences, his own value in

the text, whereas the old woman is silenced and her death turned into a grotesque spectacle that affected

him more than anything else. He characterizes her as a woman who was silent all her life, who did not

articulate her own subjectivity even within her own narrative as a servant, as a wife, as herself.

Williams repetitive language in The Use of Force, on the other hand, is hinged on the dynamic

of adult/childthe narrators register of talking down to the sick young girland with every passing

paragraph the narrators development is also privileged over the childs agency. The narrator recognizes

that her resistance was merely borne out of a childish need to not do what the adults are saying, but his

determination to get a diagnosis soon overpowers his rationality and he becomes more and more forceful

until the child is injured:

Get me a smooth-handled spoon of some sort, I told the mother. We're going through with this. The child's

mouth was already bleeding. Her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks. Perhaps

I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more. No doubt it would have been better. But I have

seen at least two children lying dead in bed of neglect in such cases, and feeling that I must get a diagnosis

now or never I went at it again.

While his profession dictates that he must save her life and others she may infectThe damned

little brat must be protected against her own idiocy... Others must be protected against her. It is a social

necessitywas it worth the violation of the childs humanity? It is evident that the narrators unwanted

penetration of the childs mouth and the childs defiance until the very end is analogous to a rape; but

even though the narrator recognizes the guilt he felt during the ensuing struggle as an adult shame, he

does not desist from forcing the young girl to submit to his control. Williams paradoxically mingles the

language of anatomy and medicinal practice to the language of violence and injury; by maneuvering

language in that way, he is able to highlight the objectification of the child as a mere body that needed

SALUGSUGAN 3
diagnosis whose humanity is dispensable, easy to disregard in the quest of triumphing over disease.

However, unlike the old woman of Andersons text, the secondary character here struggles in resisting the

texts silencingbut still there is neither victory nor sympathy to be attained. She may thrash and scream

but she would not be able to articulate herself through the text; the narrators perspective must win.

There is a focus on the materiality of the body in both of these texts, evident in the fragmentation

of its anatomical attributes. In Anderson, the body is reduced to a corpse, a shelldestined to feed

animal lifeand in Williams, the body is reduced to a throat, a conquest[o]ne goes on to the end. It

is in these elements of fragmentation and objectification that these texts are similar to the Rorschach test:

The [Rorschach blot test] means that the functions of subjectivation (how subjects are formed) and

objectivation (how objects are formed) enter at precisely the same moment. To describe the cards (on the

outside) is exactly to say who you are (on the inside) (Galliston qtd. in Plotz 115).

These silenced bodies ironically say something about their narrators even when they are not actually

given the ability to speak. Like other twentieth-century texts, the objectified humanity of the unnamed

woman and the sick girl reflect the same idea behind the Rorschach test that made it such a potent way to

look into the modernist psyche; they articulate what it might mean for indisputably mute objects to

speak the inner truth that they contain, to disgorge out of their abiding flatness some kind of depth that

bespeaks the character of the people with whom they abide (115)in this case the narrators, who are

revealed not to be the romanticized, moral heroes of the past but rather disaffected individuals living in a

modern world. That much is revealed about their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences reflects a

certain transfer of subjectivity that problematizes the idea that modernism had the ability to objectify even

their very humanity.

These texts provide an interesting view into how modernist notions of humanity and being are

negotiated and articulated through language. Modernism can easily fall trap to the idea that it was simply

dehumanizing and disillusioning, but with this knowledge of how the self was constructed during that

time, it sheds new light on how to see that period in history. Modernism in itself cannot be simply located

SALUGSUGAN 4
in the binary of humanizing and dehumanizing; rather, it invites one to navigate between a fragmented

sense of self that finds solace in seeing things as they are while coping with an increasingly cold and

material world. In the end, the silences in both Anderson and Williams texts reiterate that modernist

notion of the fragmented and objectified self which is pulled in different directions. It is that tension

between object-character and subject-narrator that recognizes that the body is a thing among things

(Merleau-Ponty qtd. in Brown 4), that thingness can appear an attribute even of human beings (Plotz

117).

SALUGSUGAN 5
 WORKS CITED

Anderson, Sherwood. Death in the Woods. American Studies at the University of Virginia.

University of Virginia, n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2016.

Brown, Bill. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry, 28.1(2001): 1-22. Print.

Mao, Douglas. Introduction. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1998. Print.

Mller, Timo. Introduction. The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway.

Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2010. Print.

Plotz, John. Can the Sofa Speak?: A Look at Thing Theory. Criticism, 47.1(2005): 109-118. Print.

Williams, William Carlos. The Use of Force. The Rise of Scientific Medicine Syllabus. Stanford

University, n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2016.

I value intellectual integrity and the highest standards of academic conduct. I am committed to an ethical learning environment that promotes a
high standard of honor in scholastic work. Academic dishonesty undermines institutional integrity and threatens the academic fabric of the
University of the Philippines. And because I believe that dishonesty is not an acceptable avenue to success, I affix my signature to this work to
affirm that it is original and free of cheating and plagiarism, and does not knowingly furnish false information.

SALUGSUGAN 6
____________________________________________________

ALEXA VALAREE P. SALUGSUGAN

SALUGSUGAN 7