The Comps Reading Project part 10

Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane.

This massive 600-odd page collection from 1976 corrals together essays that cover the full spectrum of European Modernism, by country (with a primary focus upon the variations of Modernism found in England, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, although Latin-America and North America all get a little more of their due this time around), by movement (the French Symbolists, Naturalists, Surrealists, and Dadaists, English Imagism and Vorticism, German Expressionism, the Futurists both Italian and Russian, etc), by historical time period (tracing the roots of Modernism back through the Symbolists, the Aesthetics, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Romantics, and even clear back to the 18th century; there is also much debate about when, exactly, Modernism began in each country, and how historical events such as WWI, the consolidation of Italy, the industrialization of Germany, the rise of communism and fascism, etc., influenced and/or ended each respective movement), and by genre (poetry, plays, and novels; intriguingly, cinema receives little attention).  Some of these essays are brilliant, others are skimmable, but none can claim this collection isn't breath-takingly thorough.

Nevertheless, there are some shortcomings: although the editors perhaps hoped to avoid accusations of euro-centrism by putting "European" right in the subtitle (thereby narrowing its focus), the European focus elides the fact that Europe had effectively conquered the world at this point--and that art from Africa, China, Japan, and India was already having verifiable impact upon these Western artists (e.g. Ezra Pound).  Many connections are made between literature and art, but no images are included in any of these pages to assist the reader in making these comparisons.  Each of these essays presumes the reader already possesses an in-depth knowledge of Modernist art; the goal of this collection is not introduction, but synthesis.

The book is excellent at establishing how the invention of new technologies (automobiles, photography, telephones, radio, automation, etc), the influence of Freud, Marx, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Malarme, and Nietzsche, and the devastating impact of WWI, were all instrumental in influencing the radical Modernist movement, which were all things I'd heard since an undergrad.  I don't know if these book was instrumental in establishing these assumptions, or simply in communicating them.


Modernism: A Short Introduction, David Ayers.

Oh Hugh Kenner, why can't all Modernist scholars be as delightful as you?  The more I read Modernist criticism, the more I miss you.

This 2004 tome is much shorter (134 pages, not counting references) than Modernism, but I found it that much more difficult to get through, and it stayed with me less than a day.  Don't get me wrong, it is competently written, argued, researched, and cited.  But that's just it: it is written in that dreadfully dull academese that takes a very fascinating, revolutionary, and colorful cast of characters and insists upon analyzing them as dryly as possible.  The focus narrows down exclusively to British Modernism.  What's more, a lot of the information here (the tensions between the Imagists and the Vorticists; the influence of Italian Futurism; etc) is covered much more fully in Modernism; it's goal really is to be "A Short Introduction", not a synthesis.

Despite these quibbles, there are interesting insights to be gleaned here: I appreciated his exposition on how Wallace Stevens both continued and broke off from the Romantics.  I was genuinely intrigued by Ayers' argument that Jazz was initially seen to be a sign of the automation of society--as opposed to a strategy for organic liberation, as it is commonly perceived today; the automation of human beings, such that even sex is lifeless, became a huge preoccupation for D.H. Lawrence, Ayers argues.  And though his analysis of Joyce largely side-steps much of the excellent Post-Colonial readings that were already a decade old when he published this, I did find insightful his exploration of how the topic of love is treated in the works of James Joyce, as something that must be experienced, not self-detached from.  I also appreciated his nuanced analysis of the interplay between art and social class by means of the works of Virginia Woolf.


Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, Janet Lyon.

This 1999 tome purports to be a study of the "undertheorized" genre of the manifesto.  Although it's on my Modernist reading list and has "Modern" right there in the subtitle, the focus of this book is actually upon the genre of the feminist manifesto specifically as it has been deployed throughout Western history.  The first 2 chapters in fact focus primarily upon the earliest feminist manifestos of English Civil War and the French Revolution--that is, Lyon utilizes the term "modern era" very broadly here.  It is chapters 3 and 4 that centers upon the "Modernism" in the literary period sense; and even there, it is specifically to highlight the tensions that suffragists and feminist had with the deeply chauvinistic Vorticist and Imagist (despite H.D.'s prominence in the latter) movements helmed by the arch-chauvinist Ezra Pound--and again against the proto-fascists of the contemporaneous Italian Futurists.  Chapter 5 then moves on to examine some of the more famous (and infamous) manifestos of Second Wave Feminism that cropped up in the 1960s and '70s.

Throughout all these comparisons, Janet Lyon interrogates the ironic exclusionary nature of "Universal" rhetoric that was deployed particularly in France, how Modernist-era feminists often flipped sexist rhetoric against their opponents, how they sometimes reified the very gendered stereotypes they were seeking to eliminate, and how manifestoes can be claimed as uniquely "modern" by the immediacy--the "nowness"--of their militancy.

The Concept of Modernism, Astradur Eysteinsson [Ástráður Eysteinsson].

A 1990 study by a fellow Iowa graduate alumni, an Icelandic fellow who got his PhD clear back in 1987, and is now Dean of the Humanities at the University of Iceland.  Small world, bro!

As the title indicates, this 242-page book examines how the concept of Modernism with a capital-M came to be formulated post-WWII.  This is a meta-analysis of how we as scholars perceive "Modernism," not of the works themselves.  As many already know, the writers we now anthologize as "Modernists" did not actually call themselves Modernists--they may have on occasion called themselves "modern", lower-case-M, in the sense of being contemporary, or up to date--but "Modernism" only arose as a term by which to classify early-20th-century Anglo-literature in the years following WWII.  Eysteinsson (perhaps as an Icelander afforded a more outsider perspective) chronicles how "Modernism" was initially a term utilized exclusively in the Anglosphere, and only relatively recently has the rest of Europe (largely due to the hegemonic influence of U.S. scholarship) begun applying the term to their own pre-WWII lit as well.  (e.g. Germany used to largely just refer to the era as that of the Expressionists, France as the Symbolists, etc). 

Eyesteinsson traces the genesis of how the term "Modernism" became formulated and conceptualized.  As with all terms, it has a messy genealogy; were the Modernists anti-traditional or secretly crypto-tradional?  Revolutionary or reactionary?  Synonymous with the Avant-garde or opposed to it, or an outgrowth of it, or Avant-garde once it becomes canonized?  Opposed to Realism or a reformulation of it?  Was it all only Post Hoc conceptualized so that the Postmodernists (who did self-consciously name themselves) could have something to define themselves against?  And what, exactly, is the genre's defining features if some of its most notorious elements--stream of conscious, metafiction, etc--can be traced clear back to Madame Bovary, or even Tristam Shandy?

The answers, of course, are yes to everything, depending on who you leave in and/or leave out.

Note to self: I may need to read Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) and Joseph Frank's "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" (1945) for my special topic.  I'm also still chewing over Adorno's claim that how art disrupts society just by existing.

The Difficulties of Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen.

The title of this 2003 study is similarly straightforward: the author tracks how the single defining trait of Modernism is, well, it's difficulty--how Joyce and Stein and Eliot and Pound et al have defied and infuriated their readers from the beginning.  This book is a history of the reception of Modernism, not of the works themselves, in other words.

In refreshingly lucid prose, Diepeveen chronicles how difficulty was commonly perceived as the single dominant characteristic of the period, and that all this debate on the nature and future of art was centered primarily upon this question of difficulty.  As Diepeveen tells the tale, the battle-lines were starkly drawn in early-20th Britain and North America, with both the modernists and the traditionalists digging in their heals, lobbing vicious insults, and making grandiose, hyperbolic claims about how the other side was not merely making bad art, but was bringing about the decadence and downfall of Western civilization.  There's a very colorful cast of characters on both sides of the question, and it's a surprisingly entertaining cat-fight.

The text pushes into the dawn of the Postmodern period, as well, to track how the question of difficulty in many ways still defines our debates about literature.  One interesting moment from the book that has stayed with me is a history of the initial reception of Beckett's Waiting for Godot.  It should surprise no one to learn that the play enraged theatre-goers across both Europe and North America when it first debuted; what may surprise is that the first rapturous audience the production encountered was at San Quentin Prison in California--it seems prisoners endlessly awaiting for a parole that never comes would in fact be the ideal audience for Beckett.  The argument, then, is that it is actually intellectuals who find Modernist works too "difficult", that is, those too over-educated in genre tropes and expectations for their own good--that it is those who go in with the fewest assumptions and preconceived notions of what art should be that are the ideal audience for engaging a modernist work on its own terms, not theirs.

These various attempts to rehabilitate High Modernism by claiming that it really is accessible (I recall reading William Gaddis' JR last Christmas break, wherein the intro made the repeated--and frankly dubious--claim that this 700+ page small-print text composed almost entirely out of dialogue with 0 chapter breaks is actually easy to read) is interesting to me, because Diepeveen concludes by claiming that difficulty ultimately won, at least in the University.  He cites Willa Cather and Robert Frost as examples of writers who have to be "recuperated" into the Modernist canon by scholars claiming that they were actually "deceptively simple", that there really is a hidden complexity to their works that renders them worth reading--as though something needs to be difficult to have value.  (Though as someone who has sat through far too many uncritical college commencement readings of "The Road Not Taken" as exactly the sort of happy-go-lucky poem that it is clearly not, I'm generally OK with promulgating "deceptively simple" readings of Frost).

Diepeveen opens the book with a quote from TS Eliot, "Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult", and especially in his recounting of the Twisted Arc fiasco of the 1980s does spend some ink defending difficulty as a virtue; but seeing as how much difficulty has been privileged above all other aesthetic values in our day and age, he finally concludes with, "Eliot was just wrong."