‘Oh, it is agony to meet corruption when one thinks all is fair—the big snail under the leaf—the spot on the child's lung—what a wicked, wicked God! But it is more than useless to cry out. Hanging in our little cages on the awful wall over the gulf of eternity we must sing—sing.’
—Katherine Mansfield.
Letter to John Middleton Murry, 20 October 1919. (Letters 344)
Mansfield’s sentiment characterises the general mood of modernist literature: in the face of a new, dark, unknown chaos, our old tools of justice, form and reason seem impotent. Life can no longer be justified by enlightenment-era ideals: it is only through art that life can be maintained.
This mood has its origins in the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s aesthetic types of Apollo and Dionysus provide a theoretical framework with which we can understand Mansfield’s quotation: the ‘gulf of eternity’ is the threat of nihilism, disorder and Dionysian chaos; the cage is Apolline form and order, stifling in its pure form, but protective in the face of Dionysus; the singer is the expressive artist, justifying existence aesthetically.
The modern industrial age brought with it a new, strengthened Dionysus unleashed in the Great War. Old enlightenment-era Apollo is no match for this modern Dionysus; a new Apollo must be built. This is one part of the modernist project. The difficulty of high modernist texts such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are a symptom of our fledgling encounter with this new Apollo.
But while crafting this new Apollo, there is the chance to reinterpret previously shunned elements of life, and find a place for them among the Olympic ranks. This is the second important reading of the epigraph: the birds in cages are women trapped in the domestic sphere. Women are demonised, and can only exist within an oppressive social structure. The task is to rescue Dionysus from his wholesale consignment to the devil, and harness the Dionysian drive to re-form Apollo, including those desirable elements of women’s liberation in the process. Mansfield’s stories constitute an important cornerstone in this new feminist canon, giving form to (some) women’s experiences.
I will proceed in this essay first with a brief recapitulation of Nietzsche’s aesthetic framework and some comments on its historical relation to the modernist period. I will then look at two texts which demonstrate the rebuilding of a modern Apollo: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Mansfield’s The Canary. Eliot demonstrates a view of a new Apolline form capable of representing a modern Dionysus, and while Mansfield does similarly, she additionally reclaims a female perspective for the side of Apollo—something a pre-modern Apollo lacked.
1.
In The Birth of the Tragedy, Nietzsche constructs two aesthetic types based on the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as a way to explain the historicist view of art as based in a particular historical context; that is, ‘the continuous evolution of art.’ (14) Apollo and Dionysus represent two art-forces which, through productive antagonism, continuously generate all aesthetic experience in the world. Apollo is the image-maker, associated with illumination, lucidity and the static, whereas Dionysus is associated with music, dance, lust and the dynamic. Each god governs their own art-world: a reality or mindset an artist inhabits to create their art. Apollo governs the art-world of dream, and Dionysus governs the art-world of intoxication or frenzy (Rausch).
Apollo protects his subjects from the terrible, self-erasing, primordial unity at the base of reality. The knowledge of this primordial unity is key to the Dionysiac, as is the ‘horror’ and ‘blissful ecstasy’ felt by those who peek behind the veil to gaze upon it. Principle to the very character of Dionysus is his elusive, image-resistant nature. He is in this sense unbounded, infinite, and needs Apolline image to represent himself to us. (26)
It is the ‘mysterious marriage’ (28) of Apollo and Dionysus which characterises the experience of the tragic. The ‘primal contradiction hidden within the things of this world’ (50) is that humans, as Apolline subjects, continually individuate themselves from the primordial unity, causing their own existential suffering. ‘Thus suffering is inevitable; the essence of the tragic few is to affirm that suffering, to glory in the active wrongdoing by which the hero offends the way things are, and to say, as Nietzsche imagines Aeschylus saying: “All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified in both respects.”’ (Leitch 738) It is this tragic understanding of life that Mansfield is appealing to in the epigraph. Suffering is inevitable, but we should love life anyway—we should sing and make art, for it is there where justification of life can be found. O Dionysus, ‘what a wicked, wicked God! But it is more than useless to cry out.’ Instead, we should sing.
Brian Pines provides a neat outline of Nietzsche’s legacy for modernism: ‘The people of his time did not find themselves in his writings, but decades later Nietzsche became a mirror in which priests and painters, conservatives and anarchists, Zionists and National Socialists found a description of their own experiences of modernity. … Nietzsche had articulated the experience of modernity; his writings were a point of reference through which the modernists generations understood their era’s complicated moods.’ (2) We can imagine these complicated moods to be something like the two-fold mood the Greeks encountered in the Dionysian barbarians: contradictory, and nonsensical to the Apolline eye.
Modernism, as ‘the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos’ (Bradbury and MacFarlane 27) takes up the task of representing these Dionysian moods. In moving away from old Apolline form, the modernists necessarily embrace Dionysian drive, even if only to attempt its representation. Bradbury and MacFarlane note that ‘experimentalism does not simply suggest the presence of sophistication, difficulty and novelty in art; it also suggests bleakness, darkness, alienation, disintegration.’ (26) But this new form is still form. It is a new representation of a new Dionysus—an expanding of the Apolline art-world of dream to keep pace with the heightened forces of frenzy and chaos. The tragic marriage is retained.
2.
T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is fragmented and discordant. It features ancient fertility rituals and myth, obscure allusions which send the reader down a bibliographic rabbit holes (or garden paths as they may be) and yet is upheld as the piece which perhaps best captures the complex moods of the modernist period. How can this be?
While the density and breadth of Eliot’s allusions in The Waste Land create difficulty, they also suggest his method to be one of collage or remix. He takes not only great English language poets, but great poets from the world over, and constructs his own work from their pieces. He assembles (a simultaneously visual and structured process—very Apolline) old forms into a new mythology of a modern Dionysus released in the Great War, a Dionysus who has grown strong enough to be uncontainable in the old Apolline form—part of Apollo annexed for himself. What Eliot attempts in The Waste Land, then, is the construction of a modern Apollo, one who has a chance of representing—and thus safely channelling—the modern Dionysus; he is singing himself a new cage while the old one crumbles into the ever-widening gulf of eternity.
This collage of allusions is mirrored in Eliot’s poetic technique, through his use of parataxis. Analogous to the lack of glue sticking the multitude of textual allusions together are the lack of conjunctions sticking clauses together. The overall effect becomes an acceptance of the breakneck pace with which we fly through the poem; the radical novelty is not consciously processed—cannot be consciously processed—but is rather absorbed through osmosis. A Trojan entrance for modern Apollo.
Eliot’s negativity toward the Dionysian drive, and the corresponding weakness of Apollo in post-war Europe, is played out in the poem. Madame Sosostris with her ‘wicked pack of cards’ (line 43) both provides a mythology with which to interpret the narrator’s tortured dreams (corrupted Apolline vision), and symbolises the randomness at the heart of reality. The beginning of the poem is a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, (lines 1–2) but a subversion: whereas Chaucer speaks of April and his showers sweet, bringing an end to the dryness of March, Eliot frames this regrowth as a painful reawakening.
But the integrity of form and image itself has been also undermined. Apollo has failed in suspending us above the terrible inky-black mire of Dionysus. The very Apolline form we use to escape nihilism has been infected with the entropic chaos of death, shadow and fear: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ (line 30) Only Apollo can show (represent), and he shows us fear in a formless cloud of dust. This is an inversion of what Nietzsche characterised as Hamlet’s condition, the despair of the Dionysiac reencountering the Apolline world of society and form:
Dionysiac man is similar to Hamlet: both have gazed into the true essence of things, they have acquired knowledge and they find action repulsive, for their actions can do nothing to change the eternal essence of things; they regard it as laughable or shameful that they should be expected to set to rights a world so out of joint. (40)
Instead, in The Waste Land we have the Apolline subject attempting to claw their way back to safe sense and form, while simultaneously having that rug pulled out from under them.
Even love is corrupted. Eliot directly quotes Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, a tragedy of cosmically unnatural love, and alludes to the myth of Hyacinth, Apollo’s beloved companion who was inadvertently killed by Apollo while they were engaged in a friendly competition. (line 35)
However, The Waste Land cannot be said to be a tragedy in Nietzsche’s sense due to its confounding ambiguity. The Dionysian chorus has risen up like Isolde’s tumultuous sea (lines 31–34) and swallowed any plausible continuity of plot, character or setting. The polyphony of voices prevents any stable individuation of character. And yet what we are presented with is form nonetheless—text on a page; representation. This is the building of a new, modern Apollo, representing a modern Dionysus. The Waste Land is unrecognisable to a subject of pre-modern Apollo precisely because they have not cognised its form before. Or rather, they have not before thought its form in toto—in this conjunctive arrangement—though its components may be individually familiar.
3.
In the construction of a modern Apollo, however, there are degrees of freedom. Just as the Greeks created the Olympians in their image as a guide to life, so the modernists had the chance to create an Apollo who reflected them. A collective endeavour; a political choice. The Apollo Eliot constructs in The Waste Land to some degree reflects himself, a man who once described Katherine Mansfield as that ‘dangerous WOMAN[,] … simply one of the most persistent and thickskinned toadies and one of the vulgarest women’. (Letters of T.S. Eliot 473,775) Mansfield takes a different approach—one based more on perspective.
In her story The Canary, Mansfield brings form to complicated modern moods of isolation, as well as the gendered experiences of women, in particular women’s labour and the dynamic of solidarity versus rivalry. She achieves this through a pair of parallels: the bird in the cage parallels the woman in her house, and the woman’s relationship to the three young men parallels the bird’s relationship to the woman.
The story begins with the protagonist’s admiration for the bird, demonstrated by anthropomorphisms: the bird is so good at his ‘job’, he would ‘sip a little water just as a professional singer might, and then break into a song so exquisite that I had to put my needle down to listen to him.’ (359) Her sympathy and love for the bird extends almost to comprehension: ‘[his song] was always the same, every afternoon, and I felt that I understood every note of it.’ (359) This, combined with the domestic setting and the feeling of rattling around, evokes a feeling of solidarity between women in their gendered labour.
But Delsandro notes that Woolf and Mansfield, among other women modernist writers, have often been ‘scripted in [a] female-female rivalr[y] … although to what extent they actually participated in [this] rivalr[y] is up for debate.’ (175) Indeed, from their diaries Woolf and Mansfield seem to have seen each other with a decent measure of mutual sympathy and admiration. Mansfield writes: ‘Virginia … you write so damned well, so devilishly well. … To tell you the truth—I am proud of your writing. I read & think “How she beats them.”’ (Delsandro 175) And Woolf upon hearing of Mansfield’s death reflects: ‘Yes. Go on writing of course: but into emptiness. There’s no competitor. I’m a cock—a lonely cock, whose crowing nothing breaks…’ (Delsandro 175)
Isolation as a theme and image is strong in The Canary—the dark unbounded void a clear image for Dionysus: ‘through the kitchen window, that hadn’t a blind, it seemed to me the dark was staring in, spying.’ (361) But then the one to save her from this void, part of her Apolline cage, is that other bird in that other cage: ‘And then there came a little “Sweet! Sweet!” His cage was on the table, and the cloth had slipped so that a little chunk of light shone through. … That was so beautifully comforting that I nearly cried.’ (361) It is as if the light shone outward through the cage to illuminate her darkness, as we can picture her light shining outward through her blindless kitchen window. Apollo the light-giver.
To add to the imagery, the three young men are absences, they have no names, are not individuated from each other, are constantly hiding away in their rooms, or on the stairs. We never see them, yet we see plenty of the bird, it’s cage, and the protagonist and her cage. Apolline form and Dionysian formlessness once again.
The knives bring a danger to the story: ‘he lifted his throat—Oh, I can hardly bear to recall it. I was always cleaning the knives at the time.’ (360) This is ominous, foreshadowing a danger, a power imbalance between human and bird—she is outside of the cage after all. The parallel causes us to ask: who is the one cleaning the knives outside of her own cage? ‘[Her] three young men … [she] was nothing to them.’ They would talk about her as ‘The Scarecrow.’ (361) She cares for them, feels close to them—so much so that they are ‘[hers]’—and yet they are hostile to her.
The bird dies, the cage is empty. Life constricted by a too-tight cage. But the juxtaposition with her relationship to the three young men leads the question: has she killed him?—the knives.
Mansfield becomes explicitly Dionysian in the last paragraph: ‘there does seem to me something sad in life. … It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting.’ (362) As Gilles Deleuze put it: ‘beneath Apollo, Dionysus rumbles.’ (12)
* * *
Nietzsche’s justification of life’s suffering as an aesthetic phenomenon underpins a wide variety of modernist literature. The modern life is a tragic one. The balancing of Apolline and Dionysian forces allows the tragic artist to express their complex moods and to love life while affirming its necessary suffering. As birds we spin our own cages, suspended above that gulf of eternity, and we sing—sing.
Bradbury, Malcolm and James MacFarlane, editors. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930. Penguin, 1978.
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Columbia UP, 1983.
Delsandro, Erica Gene, editor. Women Making Modernism. UP Florida, 2020.
Eliot, T.S. The Annotated The Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose. Edited by Lawrence Rainey, Yale UP, 2006.
——. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 1, 1898-1922. Rev. ed., Yale UP, 2011.
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd ed., Norton, 2018.
Mansfield, Katherine. Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913-1922. Constable, 1958.
——. Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories. Oxford UP, 1991.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of the Tragedy and Other Writings. Translated by Ronald Spiers, Cambridge UP, 2007.
Pines, Brian and Douglas Burnham, editors. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2019.