An Irish Modernist Dialectic of Enlightenment: Singing the Artist Electric

Abstract: In modernist literature, dynamos are frequently featured as agents of the Otherworld. These texts propose that technological discovery does not disenchant modern life or result in the achievement of the enlightenment imagined by eighteenth-century philosophers. In the works of British and American modernists, the divine dynamo inspires violence and threatens human autonomy. This outcome evinces what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno call “enlightenment’s relapse into mythology,” demonstrating the futility of reaching enlightenment through technological advancement. This article contrasts these despairing depictions of dynamos with those of Irish modernists, who view favorably the comingling of technology and mythology with the achievement of enlightenment. Instead of finding in the machine’s otherworldly connections a new brand of barbarism, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and W. B. Yeats detect routes to reimagining modern humanism. Their writings thus forge a positive dialectic that reflects the optimism of the models of Plato, Heraclitus, Bruno, Hegel, and others. These philosophers saw the dialectic as a process that eventually brought coherence to oppositions. Joyce, Bowen, and Yeats, however, propose a model in which the objective is not to establish coherence through negation or reduction but multiplicity. They reckon with but refuse to reconcile the uncertainties of technological advancement, and in doing so, make possible new notions of enlightenment and new notions of modernity.