Sequence, Causality, and Determinism: Anxiety over the Collision of Past and Future in Eliot’s Poetry and Joyce’s Prose
Writing in the 1920s, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce were swept up in the tide of Modernism in which the collision of past and future was an ever-present, threatening reality that put both the identity of the self and the identity of culture as a whole at risk of dissolution. Their writing reflects the anxiety of uncertainty over the future and the belief that perhaps knowledge of the future can be sought by interpretation of the past. Eliot’s poetic speakers and Joyce’s prose characters live in a constant state of uncertainty regarding the future they know is coming but cannot see. While both Eliot and Joyce attempt to use the past—through references to old texts and historical details as well as through characters who affirm their present through memories of their pasts—to illuminate the future, both authors reveal that the past cannot be used as an indicator of future fortune, and the only way to find the future is to keep living through the present.
The
by Jordan Javelet
