Modernism:Soul of the City Ford Madox Ford
...always be a trace of the individual however minute it may be. ‘London is the world town, not because of its vastness, it is vast assimilative powers, because it destroys all race characteristics’ . Ford acknowledges the fact that the modern destroys all the human individual characteristics that people have and makes them to be something else. ‘The soul of London’ is written in a prose technique, there is a relationship between the prose and the subject. Ford writes the words down almost the way he would say them, it is straightforward the words seem not to have been manipulated or tampered with that’s what it seems like, although this could be a what Ford thought would be the easiest way to get his ideas across. I think this represents the purity of what he is saying and also maybe to show that he hasn’t been affected by the modern life. Ford is Viewing London from a distance, verbs and details reflect the present and continuing development of London. The structure of the sentences are very loose, there are distractions added on to the sentences, there also seems to be no organisation within the text, as it has a climatic conclusion. The soul of London is constructed into a flow of immense detail this could mean that most things he saw were from a distance. Fords states that he is watching from a distance frequently within ‘the soul of the city’ ford states ‘’is this again ‘London’, the London we see from a distance?’ The mental response is a detached impersonal interaction with life, the sense of things being incomplete, the idea that there might not be any individuality left within London. Ford analyses frequently in The soul of London about the ‘chaotic crowds’ this is a key image Ford uses to show the loss of identity within a society that is all the same (as mentioned above). He sees people forming ‘crowds’ where he cannot differentiate from a distance what each person is. Although this may be the case in Ford’s view, Edward Timms in Unreal City explains different views about crowds. Timms states ‘but ‘mass’ and ‘masses’ were also to become the heroic, organising words of the working class and the revolutionary solidarity’. Maybe the crowds also represented the unity that was developing within society. Fords impressions of the urban is that the pace in which the urban city is expanding and evolving is too quick and the changes are too complex for the human mind to handle. During the period, which Ford writes about London, London was a metropolis where numerous changes were taking place such as the exchange of money. Modernity involved new ideas about Money and the exchange of money. The mobility of money causes a detachment from the value of money, we become distanced from money it becomes a product, the complexity of money is overwhelming. Money begins to represent a huge number of things. The division of labour was allowed because money allows things to happen dynamically. The modern life is controlled by money, it has immense influence to the point where values of society will be replaced or disregarded and people are only concerned about money and movement rather than the detail of each individual life. We become distanced from each other and put into a world where everything moves immensely quicker without any importance given to the individual. London becomes a place dominated by the movements of money. In Karl Marx’s Communist manifesto, Marx’s states that people are objectified by the bourgeoisie and the amount of labour that the proletariat is made to do detaches them form any emotion felt . I found this an easier way of explaining some issues within the soul of London, it is almost as though the people of London have become slaves to the metropolis and the ideas behind the modern city. Humans loose their values and there is an emotional detachment like the proletariat had towards the work they were doing, which was controlled by the bourgeoisie. Some people may ask how the metropolis and the experience of the city effect the mental life and why there is a connection. There is a connection, Ford argues, because the truth is hidden within the vast space of London, modernity changes everything, values are modified by vast, rapid changing spaces. A healthy mental life is a key element to a healthy life, if a persons mind is strained by the pressure of the modern life, their minds are bound to collapse which is a effect of the stress caused by the modern life. Neurasthenia is a nervous dysfunction, which can be caused by stress and excessive brainwork. Is neurasthenia a cause of modern life we may ask? In the modern space there is so much intellectual labour, which is a mental focus of labour. Neurasthenia becomes a representation of the self. The effects of Neurasthenia become blatantly visible, the vital energy is clogged by waste products in the body, the accumulation of these products cause exhaustion. The strain of the modern world takes it toll, due to the immense speed of the technological changes whic...