HEAD CASE

Paul Valéry's ascetic modernism.

- BENJAMIN KUNKEL

One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally ("a record on the gramophone" in "The Waste Land") or as a metaphor for inner states, as when he describes the hour of dusk at which "the human engine waits/Like a taxi throbbing waiting." Sometimes newfangled technology seems to enter into the nature of the writing itself. John Dos Passos's trilogy, "U.S.A.," features passages explicitly mimicking newsreels, and even in cases where the evocation of modernity is less self-conscious something similar is often detectable: it's not just that Hemingway's heroes shoot a .3006 or drive an ambulance; we also feel that Hemingway himself writes typewriter prose after an eon of longhand.