Search results
11 Unreal cities and undead legacies: T.S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik By the mid 1930s, when Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood were published, The Waste Land (1922) had been absorbed into high culture and T.S. Eliot was established as an important man of letters both in England and in the United States. The transatlantic nature of Modernism itself, exemplified by the lives and works of Eliot, H.D., Pound, Stein and Barnes, was part of a newly dynamised interchange
. Every effort of art from now on and in remembrance of this moment will find its authority dependent upon what it can neither enliven, beautify, nor forget (since forgetfulness, aesthetically, is just sentimentality, entertainment, the culture industry). Dissonance, sublime unknowability, is the aesthetic (non-)representation of the undead. Near the beginning of the novel this climatic moment is anticipated as Zuckerman reflects on how everyday life depends on our trying to understand those people around us and how, no matter how careful, judicious, patient, attentive
neologisms like the uncanny (das Unheimlich) or the undead, both of which seem to take something of their spooky quality precisely from the grammatical violation. On the uncanny, see also Thomson, Chapter 4 above. 77 Deleuze, ‘The exhausted’, Essays, p. 173. 78 Deleuze, ‘He stuttered’, Essays, p. 113.
woodland insects and maggots, or buried for the worms and such to clean it, or even placed in an ants nest’. In a few days ‘they will clean off every bit of tendon and fat from the bone’.62 Such details bring the organic nature of the casket to life for us. Presumably, this process would have likewise heightened the Anglo-Saxon bone-worker’s sense that he or she was working with something still living or, at least, undead. The carving stage would have had a similar effect. Each side of the casket is intricately carved, the runes and images cut with a knife. From the