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An 'official' Soviet evaluation of Joyce's later work described it as
- a return to inarticulateness, to a chaotic, pre-logical form of consciousness... a return to that monotonous flow of inarticulate perceptions that characterized primitive consciousness; it is an attempt to penetrate to the very beginnings of language, to the dawn of articulate speech.[1]
The “transrational” language of Khlebnikov and his colleagues was described by Chukovsky in similar terms as a
- pre-language, precultural, pre-historical...when there was no discourse, conversation, but only cries and screams...[2]
Chukovsky thought it paradoxical that, in their passion for the future, the Futurists had
- selected for their future poetry the most ancient of the very ancient languages.[3]
The Stalinist reviewer quoted above argued that "the quest for the primeval, the turning to savage, primitive art as the elixir that might help to revive bourgeois culture" characterized modern art in general and declared:
- The reactionary significance of these 'modernist' seekings is quite clear...They give expression to an anarchic desire to destroy, to turn the universe into chaos, in a word, to the pathos of suicide of contemporary bourgeois civilization...[4]
This reviewer seems uncertain as to whether the charge is that the modernists wish to "revive" bourgeois culture or destroy it, but it Would seem that in either case the artists are to be condemned.
- ↑ R Miller-Budnitskaya, James Joyce's Ulysses, (translated by N J Nelson), Dialectics, A Marxian Literary Journal, N Y No 5 (1938); in: Denning op cit p 658. Compare Malcolm Muggeridge's comment: "Language which emerged from confused, meaningless sound, returns to its origins-painstakingly, laboriously returns...“ Time and Tide (review) May 20 1939; in: Denning, op cit p 684.
- ↑ Futuristy, 1922 ; quoted in: Barooshian, op cit p .95
- ↑ Loc cit.
- ↑ Miller-Budnitskaya, loc cit.
