Modernism’s Whims

Thomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: ''Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?'' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic ''whither'' that sceptically hovers between ''where'' and ''whether'', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being ''whim-drawn.'' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim.Beci Carver''s Modernism''s Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavour to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalised spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim''s Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy''s stalker ghost is on the run.