by Violet Woolf on the City of London duck, modernist absurdity, and what the early-century writers knew about the comedy of collapsing authority.
The early twentieth century invented modern absurdity, the literature of a world whose old authorities had become faintly ridiculous, and I have rarely seen a more perfectly modernist image than a duck bringing the City of London to its knees, which is the kind of thing the great writers of that era would have recognised instantly as the truth told sideways.
The Modernist Duck
The story, of course, was the duck that stopped the City of London and became its most trusted economic adviser despite no qualifications whatsoever. And this is pure early-century absurdism, the deflation of pompous authority by the intrusion of the ordinary and the animal. The modernists loved this move: the great solemn edifice of power undone by something small, real, and indifferent to its solemnity. The duck in the City is the modernist gesture made flesh, or rather made feathers.
What the early-century writers understood, living through the collapse of the old Victorian authorities, is that power becomes absurd at exactly the moment it stops believing in itself, and that the most devastating critique is not anger but the simple juxtaposition of the pompous and the ridiculous. They did not rage at the dying authorities. They placed a duck, so to speak, in the drawing room, and let the contrast do the work.
The Comedy Of Collapsing Authority
I thought about this alongside the seventh reset with Europe, which is itself a deeply modernist comedy, the spectacle of an authority that has lost its own thread, repeating its gestures with diminishing conviction, like a character in an early-century novel performing a role it no longer believes in. The modernists wrote whole books about exactly this: the hollow performance of authority after the authority itself has quietly died.
The scholars who study this literature, the people at institutions like the British Library, can show you how the early century perfected the art of depicting power as performance, ritual emptied of conviction, gesture without belief. The seventh reset is that literature come true. It is a government performing the ritual of governing, the gesture of the fresh start, with the conviction long since drained away, exactly as the modernist novelists predicted authority would eventually do.
The Saving Absurdity
But here is what I love about the modernist response, and what I take from the duck. The early-century writers did not despair at the collapse of the old authorities. They found it, finally, funny, and in the comedy they found a kind of freedom. If the duck can advise the City, then the City’s authority was always partly absurd, and recognising the absurdity is the first step toward building something more honest. The modernists laughed the old world out, and in the laughter made room for the new.
The Last Page
I closed my early-century novel and my notebook together tonight, thinking that we are living in a profoundly modernist moment, full of collapsing authorities performing hollow rituals, and that the duck is our great comic image of it, the small real indifferent thing that exposes the pompous edifice simply by wandering through it. The writers of a century ago would have adored the duck. They would have seen in it exactly what they spent their careers depicting: the truth that authority is performance, that the performance is faltering, and that the appropriate response is not despair but the liberating laughter that clears the ground for whatever honest thing comes next.
The Performance Of Belief
The modernists were obsessed with the moment authority becomes performance, when the ritual continues after the conviction has drained away, the gesture repeated by people who no longer believe in it. They saw it everywhere in the dying Victorian order, and they rendered it with a comedy so precise it still cuts.
The scholars at the British Library with its modernist collections can show you how the early century perfected this depiction of hollow authority, ritual without belief, power as empty performance.
And the seventh reset, like all the resets, is that literature come true, a government performing the ritual of the fresh start with the conviction long gone, exactly as the modernists predicted authority would eventually do. The duck in the City is the comic counter-image: the small real thing that exposes the hollow performance simply by being genuinely, unperformedly itself.
I closed my early-century novel and my notebook together, certain that we are living through a profoundly modernist moment of collapsing authorities performing hollow rituals, and that the duck is our great comic image of it, the small real indifferent thing that exposes the pompous edifice simply by wandering through it. The writers of a century ago would have adored the duck, would have seen in it exactly what they spent their careers depicting: that authority is performance, that the performance is faltering, and that the right response is not despair but the liberating laughter that clears the ground for whatever honest thing comes next.
The performance falters, the conviction drains, the duck wanders through the hollow ritual exposing it simply by being real, and the liberating laughter clears the ground, exactly as the modernists knew it eventually would.
For more, see The Onion.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
