On the Paradox of Mt. Vernon

The other big thing I able to see in Virginia this last weekend is George Washington's estate at Mt. Vernon.  The view of the Potomac from the back is spectacular, and the non-profit that owns the property has done an admirable job of preserving it for prosperity.

Nevertheless, my experience there was highly fraught.  For in one of the rooms, the tour guide points out a large key encased in glass; it is the key to the infamous Bastille, sent to General Washington as a token of friendship between the United States and the newly-christened French Republic.  "This key is the sign of French liberty," read the accompanying letter, "and it deserves to be with the father of all human liberty."

 

The fact that the 1st French Republic soon collapsed into the Reign of Terror and gave rise to Napoleon is not the only thing that complicates that gesture considerably; for the estate (to its credit) also makes no bones about the fact that Mt. Vernon was first and foremost a slave plantation, and that for all of Washington's entrepreneurial innovation and drive, it was still upon the backs of enslaved Africans that his wealth was accumulated.   Yes, he did free them when he died (not even Jefferson did that!), but, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that that was small comfort to his slaves while he was still alive.

And yet George Washington really was remarkable; he is that ultra-rare leader who really did voluntarily walk away from absolute power.  Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, etc and etc, all led ostensible Democracies to glory, only to then crown themselves Emperor for life.  The crown of the United States was likewise offered to Washington, but he really did turn it down and retire after only 2 terms in office, of his own free-will and volition, and that solely to preserve everyone else's freewill and volition as well.  For all of our grade-school pontificating and hagiography, that is truly astounding, and far more than mere lip-service to liberty!

Yet he also really did own slaves; even if he did actually despise the institution, still he never could quite bring himself to wean himself away from it, could he.  He was keenly aware of all the precedents he was setting as our first president, but he couldn't set the one precedent that could have prevented the Civil War less than a century later (and given the Confederate flag on the sleeve of the young man who shot up that Black church in Charleston last summer, that legacy is still with us).

The man Washington seemed to neatly encapsulate the founding paradox of these United States from its inception: a land based not upon race and ethnic identity but upon the ideals of freedom and liberty, but whose prosperity is nonetheless rooted in the most appalling slavery.

And not just in the African slavery that defined these colonies first 3 century's of existence: the shirt on my back was sewn by sweat-shop child laborers in Southeast Asia; the phone in pocket is made of rare minerals mined by child-slave laborers in Afghanistan, and assembled by Taiwanese workers in such a miserable environment that they need suicide-nets outside the top-story windows; the food in my belly was harvested by Mexican migrants making less than a dollar an hour in the searing hot sun.  We didn't end slavery, we outsourced it.  Perhaps it is less that we shouldn't judge Washington's era by the standards of our own than that we shouldn't think our own is so much better to begin with (at least Washington knew he lived off slavery...).

And yet the Western world is undeniably freer overall because the United States survived, and that is thanks in no small part to this here General Washington.  Such are the queasy contradictions that still define my country, and they refuse to be disentangled.

These are the thoughts that ruminated through my mind as I stood before the tomb of George and Martha, the couple for whom my home-state is named, who still influences my national identity, and by extension, the whole entire world.

On the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

I was unable to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum during my last trip to D.C. in 2013, and frankly, given the massive lines to get in, I wasn't sure I wanted to; something about seeing so many tourists herding into a genocide exhibit was kinda off-putting to me.  The crowds struck me as less memorializing than voyeuristic, gawking than remembering.  What's more, I began to wonder if our monomaniacal fixation on the Jewish Holocaust was a tad unhealthy--after all, there have been a ton of similarly awful genocides since then (the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Chinese Great Leap Forward, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, etc), causing our sanctimonious calls of "Never Again!" to ring rather hollow, and moreover gives short shrift to all these other victims who are never memorialized in equally grandiose fashion.

Moreover, if I had seen the Holocaust Museum in 2013, I probably would have wondered if it is getting rather counter-productive to constantly villanize a long-defunct, 70-year-old, easy enemy like the Nazis, what with "Nazi" becoming our go-to, watered-down insult for anyone whose political beliefs we don't like, or even just corrects our grammar too much.  Also, the Nazis seem to give the rest of us too much of free pass, for no matter how many civil liberties we violate, countries we invade, people we torture, etc, we can always just point to the age-old Nazis and claim that we're still the good guys compared to them--which is technically correct, but to quote Seneca, bonitas non est pessimis esse meloriem [it is not goodness to be better than the worst].

But I didn't go through the Holocaust Museum in 2013; I went through this last weekend in 2016, where I was swiftly reminded of what dire importance these lessons still are.  For the permanent collection makes no bones about the United States' own enabling role in the Holocaust, when, in the '30s, we refused to raise our stringent immigration quotas enough to allow in Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich (go read about the good ship St. Louis being denied safe harbor anywhere in Cuba or the U.S. if you want to feel really depressed today).  Our stinginess basically condemned millions to death because we tacitly agreed with the Germans that no one wants the Jews in their borders, either--and it is difficult to not draw a parallel to the fact that over half of our state governors today have loudly refused to accept Syrian refugees.

In our current election cycle, it is likewise difficult to read the exhibit captions and not draw direct parallels to the rise of a racist demagogue whom neither the left- nor right-wing parties took very seriously until it was too late; who is only granted power by party officials in the secret hopes of better controlling him; who in fact only wins elections with a plurality, no majority; who scapegoats an unpopular religious minority (Muslims, in our case); who openly advocates engaging in mass-reprisals against foreign enemies and other war-crimes; who proposes removing 11 million "undesirables" (Mexicans, in this case) from our borders once and for all--a "final solution," if you will--oh, and whose supporters have shown a predilection for street violence.

I had a Mexican-American student last semester who told me she thought Mr. Trump sounded like Hitler--at the time, my Godwin's Law alert went off in my head, and I said something to the effect of, "Eh, he's certainly a jack-ass, but c'mon, Nazi's a little strong."  But I've lately realized that Mexican-Americans haven't had the luxury to not be prescient, that, encountering so much more open bigotry than us White-Americans, they've been fully aware all along how many racists there really are in America, and how easy it would be to rile them all up around a single demagogue.  I'm starting to think that I--that we all--owe the Mexicans an apology, for treating as a joke that which was never a  laughing matter.

Now, here I must be careful about all these parallels, in part because there is no such thing as direct parallels--the U.S. has a much better system of checks and balances than the Wiemar Republic; our Two-Party system, whatever else its faults, generally prevents pluralities from seizing power; and we are not currently in the midst of a Great Depression and hyper-inflation (thanks Obama...no seriously, thank you Obama).  I'm not saying that Mr. Trump is the second coming of Hitler--just that I want to keep it that way.

What Is Modernism, Anyway?

[The Review Essay from my PhD Comprehensive Examination Portfolio, which at least a few of my colleagues have purportedly found useful and informative for engaging with the surprisingly difficult question of just what the heck is literary Modernism, anyways?]

The oft-cited quote that haunts much of contemporary Anglo-Modernist scholarship comes from John Harwood: “We are accustomed to thinking of ‘Modernism’ as something that flourished a century ago, but the term itself was not widely employed by literary critics until the 1960s” (31).  Featured in his 1995 anti-theory polemic Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation, Harwood attacks the very concept of “Modernism” as a useful category of literary periodization; he claims that scholars have seriously hampered their ability to understand the literature of the early-20^th-century by forcing upon the era some unified set of defining characteristics, as implied by the very term “Modernist”.  While many scholars would take as axiomatic that “modernism…has come to serve a crucial function in criticism and literary history, as well as theoretical debates about literature” (Eysteinsson 1), that still by no means answers Harwood’s sally as to whether “Modernism” should.  Harwood claims that it is high time that literary scholars acknowledge that “Modernism” simply does not exist, and never did—that T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and a whole host of others we currently consider the “canon,” not only never referred to themselves as “Modernists,” but never even formed a cohesive movement, nor ever tried to. 

Harwood is not alone in critiquing this retroactive periodization of the early-20^th century under a single, reductive heading; just 5 years earlier in 1990, fellow Iowa alum Astradur Eysteinsson, in his The Concept of Modernism, argues that “Modern” is first and foremost an Anglo term:

One must of course be aware that until quite recently “modernism” was not a widespread concept, especially not outside the spheres of Anglo-American and Scandinavian criticism, and even today [1990] one may not encounter it frequently in the works of, say, German and French critics and scholars. (Eysteinsson 1)

Eysteinsson goes on to claim that only relatively recently has the rest of the European world begun applying the term “Modernism” to their own literatures (and that begrudgingly), due primarily to the hegemony of U.S. scholarship.  We can see examples of this Anglo domination exercising its power in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlanes’ famed 1976 anthology Modernism:  A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, which corrals together the major European art movements of the period—German Expressionism, French Symbolism, Italian and Russian Futurism, etc.—all under the broad rubric of “Modernism.”   Matter-of-factly do they claim that:

The case for Modernism’s total dominance has often been put and is easy to see.  One of the word’s associations is with the coming of a new era of high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism, in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life. (Bradbury and MacFarlane 24-25)

And again later they claim that:

Modernism was in most countries an extraordinary compound of the futuristic and the nihilistic, the revolutionary and the conservative, the natural and the symbolistic, the romantic and the classical. (Bradbury and MacFarlane 46)

In these two passages, Bradbury and MacFarlane assume that 1) “Modernism was in most countries”; and 2) that “Modernism’s total dominance has often been put and is easy to see.”  Needless to say, neither of these assumptions are self-evident; and as cosmopolitan, wide-ranging, and inclusive as that anthology may be, still Bradbury and MacFarlane presume that the term “Modernism” suffices as an adequate and sufficiently self-explanatory term for encapsulating not only all Anglo art movements of the era, but all of Europe’s as well.  This attitude I have found is par for the course; the vast majority of English and Anglo-American scholars have taken the term for granted, preferring primarily to examine the contours of the era—how these writers, say, responded to the Great War, or the invention of cinema, or to the rise of automation, mass-production, and globalized capitalism—than as to how the term is defined, or whether the term should even exist at all.  This is a perspective that has generally required non-Anglo scholars to interrogate.

For example, Eysteinsson, as an Icelander, brings an outsider’s perception to this discussion of how the concept of Modernism was formed, since the term was by no means a given outside of the Anglosphere.  Rather than simply accept as uncontested the claim of “Modernism’s total dominance,” Eysteinsson instead questions the meaning of the term itself, asking whether the Modernists were anti-traditional or secretly crypto-traditional; revolutionary or reactionary; synonymous with the Avant-garde or distinct from it; opposed to Realism (as Bradbury and MacFarlane claim) or rather a reformulation of it.  Eysteinsson also asks what exactly the genre’s defining features are if some of its most notorious elements—such as stream of conscious and metafiction—can be traced clear back to Madame Bovary, or even Tristam Shandy.  The answers (as Harwood would doubtless gloat) are yes to everything, depending on which authors one leaves in or out—which again raises the question of whether or not the term is even useful for periodization.

Another prominent non-Anglo scholar who interrogates the term is Romanian critic (and Soviet-era defector to the U.S.) Matei Calinescu, who examines the concept of “Modernism” in his 1976 landmark work Five Faces of Modernity.  Now, he is less skeptical than Harwood and Eysensteinsson of the term, claiming that, “Broadly conceived, modernity itself can be seen as a ‘culture of crisis’” (Calinescu 124), thus at least providing a unifying theme of “crisis” for the era; he also claims that common characteristics of Modernism can be “related to other Western cultures similarly engaged in the adventure of modernity” (Calinescu 74), matter-of-factly expanding the term beyond the Anglosphere to include the rest of the West.  But he does not stop there, and greatly expands the term far beyond what Bradbury and MacFarlane intended, as he approaches the term as by no means exclusive to the early 20^th century, tracing the term’s evolution and applications over the past 500 years.  At the same time, Calinescu is also careful to disassociate Modernism from the Avant-garde and Decadence, terms with which it has often been used synonymously, thereby greatly narrowing Modernism’s meaning.  That is, Calinescu both expands and narrows the definition of “Modernism”, until it covers both everything and nothing at once, which still leaves the term difficult to apply usefully to the early 20^th century exclusively.

Thus far it appears Harwood may have a point about Modernism’s questionable status.  Yet though Harwood is correct to deny that these writers ever self-consciously called themselves “Modernist” with a capital-M, nevertheless Harwood still elides the fact that these writers (at least in the Anglosphere) were still self-consciously modern.  Laura Riding and Robert Graves, for example, published in 1927 the tellingly-titled A Survey of Modernist Poetry, right in the thick of the era in question.  Granted, it is debatable as to whether they were attempting to denominate the period as “Modernist” with that title (in 1945, Joseph Frank still classified the era as “Symbolist”), but Riding and Graves do investigate their contemporaries as though they formed a definite movement with certain shared similarities.  They note two primary characteristics of their generation that continue to dominate our perceptions of Modernism to this day: 1) its self-conscious difficulty, and 2) its purported elitism.

First, Modernism’s self-conscious difficulty: as Calinescu likewise glosses of Survey of Modernist Poetry:

Characteristically, Riding and Graves define “modernist” poetry (as distinct from “modern” poetry in the neutral chronological sense) by its willful deviation from accepted poetic tradition, by the attempt to “free the poem of many of the traditional habits which prevented it from achieving its full significance.”  Seen from this point of view, the most outstanding feature of “modernist” poetry is the difficulty it presents to the average reader. (Calinescu 83) (emphasis added)

Difficulty becomes the catch-word for the Modernists.  Indeed, whether Ridings and Grave are angrily dismissive of H.D., perplexed by e.e. cummings, or surprisingly delighted by Gertrude Stein, in all cases it is the reputed difficulty of these poets that most engage them.  Such is likewise the thesis of Leonard Diepeveen’s 2002 study The Difficulties of Modernism.  In this cultural biography and reception history, Diepeveen tracks how the single defining trait of what we now refer to as the Modernist period is its renowned (some might say infamous) difficulty.   He claims that “Difficulty…was the early twentieth century’s central tool for arguing about what literature is and who should control it” (Diepeveen 2).  Indeed, the willful difficulty of these texts is how Diepeveen claims the Modernist canon was formed in the first place:

During the years 1910 to 1950, years that saw the formation of the Anglo-American modernist canon and the establishing of these texts and writers in the university curriculum, readers overwhelmingly sensed that difficulty was central to what was beginning to be called modernism.  Difficulty was the most common frame for readers’ discussions of what was different and new about modernism. (Diepeveen 17)

He demonstrates how Joyce, Stein, Eliot, and Pound et al consciously defied and infuriated their readers from the very beginning, as they still do today.  In refreshingly (and ironically) lucid prose, Diepeveen chronicles how difficulty was commonly perceived by journalists, the general public, critics, and the artists themselves as the single dominant characteristic of the period, and that all of the era’s debate over the nature and future of art was centered primarily upon this question of the necessity of difficulty, that “Arguing about their difficulty, in fact, is the dominant initial response to modernism’s texts” (Diepeveen 14).  As Diepeveen tells the tale, the battle-lines were starkly drawn in early-20th century Great 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 bringing about the decadence and downfall of Western civilization—all of which accusations pivoted around the question of difficulty. 

Bracketing for now the question of whether or not such difficulty is actually necessary in literature, it is still noteworthy that the champions and critics alike of these artists were uniform in classifying an intentional difficulty (as opposed to the incidental difficulty that comes of an older text removed from its historical context and dialect, as with, say, the Elizabethan poets), as the defining characteristic of the age.  T.S. Eliot it was who claimed that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,” and his is the view that ultimately won the day, argues Diepeveen.  He demonstrates the Modernists’ critical victory by the fact that Eliot’s contemporaries Robert Frost and Willa Cather are rarely classified with this generation, and that most scholarly attempts to “rehabilitate” them into the “Modernist canon” focus upon their “deceptive simplicity” and covert difficulty, as though difficulty alone were the litmus test above all.  Now, Harwood here might then declare that any terminology that would exclude such popular and significant writers as Frost and Cather from the era is an impoverished term indeed, and hence its deployment should be abandoned.  Nevertheless, the stickiness over the question of difficulty is part of what led to the rift between Frost and Pound in the first place, and is part of why Cather entitled her 1936 collection None Under Forty, since none under the age of 40 would purportedly appreciate her writings anymore.  That is, whether one stood for or against intentional difficulty, the question of difficulty itself is still what predominantly defined the era.  “Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?” blared a TIME magazine headline at the time of The Waste Land’s publication—and the same question still conditions our conversations about Modernism today.

This literary anxiety over the intrinsic necessity of difficulty during this period is likewise explored by C.D. Blanton’s 2015 Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism, which reads in the Modernists an acknowledgment that history is far too complex to ever be totalized into a poem anymore: as Blanton writes, this style of “negation marks a concrete formal problem, a synchronic resolution by which a text strains to evince a field of reference that it cannot name, to which is does not apparently refer at all” (10-11).  The Modernist strategy that arises, argues Blanton, is to encompass history through negation—that is, what is historical within a Modern epic is precisely that which is absent, since it was all too big and complex to be included in the first place.  Pound’s Cantos are Blanton’s Exhibits A of this attempt to encompass all of history by focusing only on the fragments—which in turn calls attention to all of the fragments that have been left out.  It is in this negation and fragmentation, argues Blanton, that Modernism solves the problem of how to include history in all its unwieldiness—all of which presupposes that civilization is now far too difficult to be contained in the first place, and that Modernist literary difficulty (as Eliot claimed) is but an expression of civilizational difficulty.

But what sort of difficulty defines Modernism?  Megan Quigley, in 2015’s Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language, fine-tunes that diagnosis of difficulty down to self-conscious vagueness specifically.  For Quigley, the fact that Modernism is vaguely defined is a feature, not a bug.  The concept of Modernism’s own vagueness aptly reflects the vagueness of its novels and poetry, as well as the anxieties of the era’s philosophy, as was manifested both in the era’s desperate attempts to make language more clear and precise (as in the invention of Basic English, and the early writings of Bertrand Russel) and more willfully vague (as in the philosophy of Wittgenstein and in the novels of Woolf, Joyce, and late-period James).  She historicizes this Modernist turn towards the vague, noting that it is no coincidence that Modernist novels become far more ambivalent at the same moment that Western philosophy turns towards linguistics and an obsession with the intrinsic vagueness of language—as well as the same moment when Einstein renders physics itself vague by describing light as both a wave and a particle.  The Modernist novelists, likewise, begin to play with the possibilities of words functioning as both waves and particles, “vaguely defined but still forces of power” (Quigley).  Though Quigley’s book is cutting-edge recent, this conflation between physics and literary modernism is an old saw that has been around at least as long as Bradbury and MacFarlane:

[Modernism] is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos.  It is the art consequent of Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty principle”, of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. (Bradbury and MacFarlane 27)

Here, Bradbury and MacFarlane go one further than Eliot: not only is civilization difficult, but it turns out that the universe itself is irreconcilably difficult—and hence poetry must be as well.  That is, the intentional difficulty of Modernist works such as Ulysses or The Waste Land is qualitatively different from other intentionally difficult works such as Paradise Lost or Tristam Shandy because the former no longer have the same absolute universe upon which to resolve itself as the latter had.  For Quigley, the difficulty associated with the Modernist period is specifically rooted in an unsettling sense of vagueness, one that disconcertingly and radically dislocates the modern subject’s sense of immutability, neither seeing nor offering any potential resolution to the anxieties permanently plaguing us.

Irving Howe’s 1967 anthology Modernism makes a similar claim, that “The kind of literature called modern is almost always difficult to comprehend: that is a sign of its modernity” (Howe 13).   Furthermore, this difficulty is no longer the diagnosis, but the prognosis itself: “A modernist’s culture sees doubt as a form of health” (Howe 30).  Here, a permanent doubt rooted in this newly-created lack of firm absolutes is what defines the peculiar difficulty of the Modernists.  Howe’s Modernism is far closer chronologically to the era than Quigley (indeed, many of the essayists therein spend significant time simply expressing their consternation that recent authors such as Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway are now yet another generation of dead authors), and hence have much more recent memories of the doubt that plagued the era.  What is likewise interesting about Howe’s anthology is its perception that “Modernism” was already classified as a definite period that was ending: “Modernist literature seems now to be coming to an end” (Howe 13).  As opposed to Riding and Graves who read “Modernist” as their present, Howe et al read Modern as a pre-war phenomenon—one that is likewise not dependent upon Postmodernism to define itself against.  I mention this difference because so many of these critics claim Postmodernism as a thoroughly self-conscious movement, one that explicitly named the generation preceding as “Modernist” so that they could define themselves against them.  Yet all the writers in Howe’s 1967 anthology make not even a passing reference to Postmodernism.  For that matter, Calinescu did not even add his chapter on Postmodernism to Five Faces of Modernism until 1986.  The Postmodernists apparently needed the Modernists to justify their existence, but the Modernists never needed the Postmodernists.

I bring up the Postmodernists because, according to Calinescu, part of how they defined themselves against the Modernists was by leveling against them the same charge Riding and Graves’ once made: that Modernism is fundamentally elitist, which is a much more complex claim to parse.  On its surface, the claim for Modernism’s elitism is as self-evident as its will-to-complexity; as Lawrence Rainey chronicles in 1998’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, Pound himself sought an old-style, pre-modern aristocratic patronage when he first moved to London.  Rainey also argues that T.S. Eliot’s series of awards for The Waste Land were really covert patronages by other names.  H.D. also retreated into full-on aristocratic seclusion after her initial Imagist associations passed, such that she was virtually unknown at the time of her death.  Gertrude Stein was similarly independent thanks to an aristocratic inheritance, and thus able to self-finance her earliest works.  Yeats, though his family fortunes had collapsed by the time of his birth, was still officially a part of the Anglo-Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.  Virginia Woolf, as she openly admits in A Room of One’s Own, was only able to write freely thanks to her inherited £100 per annum, claiming that literature does not come from the burdened lower classes (doubtless to the chagrin of D.H. Lawrence, but more on him in a moment).  Even Joyce, with far fewer aristocratic pretentions than many of his peers, worked under the care of patrons who financed his works when he otherwise would not have been able to support himself by book sales.  There really is an undeniably aristocratic elitism undergirding much of Modernism.  As Calinescu also observes, Modernism is differentiated from the Avant-garde specifically for how the former still reifies traditionalism and bourgeois values; it is a crypto-realism that seeks to piece back together the tradition (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) rather than overthrow it altogether; the avant-garde and the Postmodernists, according to Calinescu, are who try to overthrow the whole edifice together. The Modernists, by contrast, are purportedly trying to conserve it.  The claim can easily be made that the Modernists were all either aristocrats or aspiring aristocrats writing mostly for each other, with an obvious disdain for the mass-market. 

But like all sweeping over-generalizations, there are obvious complications with that statement.  First is the fact that the canonically Modernist D.H. Lawrence was a working-class man who relied solely upon popular book sales for his support.  Harwood here would probably claim here that this is but another example of how Modernism was never a cohesive movement, and we undermine our ability to properly examine the period when we try to impose sweeping definitions upon it.  But it is also not as clear that these other aristocratic writers were as extricated from the mass-market as is often perceived.  As chronicled by Rainey, Joyce’s special deluxe first edition of Ulysses was specifically an attempt to create an object d’art with higher resale value on the art-dealer market.  Pound leveraged his elitism (following the polemical example of the Italian Futurist Marinetti) to drum up popular publicity.  Eliot kept a signed-photo of Groucho Marx on his desk.  All these Modernist writers were participating one way or another in the mass-market, even as they were supposedly resisting market commodification. 

But the fact that all these Modernists were so ambivalent about the market economy points to another key feature of Anglo-Modernism that keeps reappearing in the major criticism: the fact that Modernism is defined not only by its participation with but also by its resistance against the modernization process.  As is put more poetically by Bradbury and MacFarlane, Modernism “was a celebration of a technological age and a condemnation of it; an excited acceptance of the belief that the old regimes of culture were over, and a deep despairing in the face of that fear” (Bradbury and MacFarlane 46).  Some of Modernism’s most celebrated poets were in fact precisely those who resisted it the most.  For example, Louis Menand in Discover Modernism: TS Eliot and His Context observes that Eliot was in reality a traditionalist coming to grips with the fact that he was forced to be a modern: “Eliot was an avant-gardist, but he was also a critic of avant-garde aspirations, and he grasped the particular fatality of modernism’s predicament” (Menand 4).  Hence, it was possibly with chagrin that Eliot claimed “Poetry must be difficult,” perhaps wishing deep down that civilization could just let him be a traditionalist instead—which also perhaps explains why older Eliot turned so full-throated towards Anglicanism and British citizenship: he was never seeking to modernize at all, but rather how to resist modernization. 

Frederic Jameson makes just such an argument about the era in his 2002 study A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.  He opens by noting how during the “Modernist” period, it was exactly these “less”-developed colonies and former colonies—including Ireland, the United States, and Latin-America—who were considered the most “Modern” literarily.  In fact, he claims that “modernism is essentially a by-product of incomplete modernization” (Jameson 103).  Modernism for Jameson arises from a modernization process that only ends once said modernization process actually finishes—Jameson’s examples include Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which effectively ended the experimental art movements within their respective countries when they turned towards totalitarianism in order to finish “modernizing” economically.  These art movements lasted longer in England, Ireland, and the U.S., yes, but were still constantly threatened by similar forces of economic modernization.  Jameson tracks how it is within this temporal tension betwixt the “pre-modern” and the “modernized”—or more precisely, between the agricultural, feudal-peasant countryside (as we see in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) and the fitfully-industrializing, bourgeois city (as we see in Joyce’s Ulysses)—that Modernist art situates itself.  For Jameson, it is in the unfinished process of modernizing, not in the modernized, that “Modernism” is to be located.  Modernism then is largely about resisting modernization, reacting against the modernizing process.

Jed Esty makes a similar claim the same year as Jameson in 2002’s A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.  Esty tracks how the collapse of the British Empire over the course of the Modernist period influenced the writing of this time-period.  It is borderline-axiomatic nowadays to note that most of the really vital English literature published throughout the 20^th century came not from England but from England’s present and former colonies: Ireland, the U.S., the Caribbean, India and Africa.  What happened to the home of the mother tongue?  Some blame England’s increased provincialism as they lost their overseas holdings, but Esty posits that this provincializing process really began before the process of decolonization.  (In his Introduction, Esty notes that in 1910, Ezra Pound was already claiming England as irrelevant to the future development of English letters).  As Esty traces this history, England’s self-identity by the end of the Victorian era was very much rooted in its sense of being the central hub for a multi-national empire, from which it could mine endless new mythologies, folklore, and stories (as seen in the fiction of Kipling).  Yet this self-conceptualization ironically had the effect of making England itself feel de-centered, hazily defined, and absorbing identities more than exporting their own.  Moreover, the laissez-faire capitalism of the era rendered most the English feeling radically individualistic and therefore radically alone, without firm anchor in any sort of common culture, and therefore all the more subject to the ruthless power of market forces (as the artists often felt as well).  Likewise, the rise of fascism on continental Europe had the effect of 1) cutting England off from further continental contact and cultural sources, and 2) forcing the English to band themselves into a common cultural identity in order to oppose a common foe, yet in a nationalistic formation that hopefully was not fascist as well.

These various pressures, argues Esty, forced England to turn inwards to mine their own countryside, searching for forgotten native folklore, traditions, and a sense of pre-modern unity.  As Esty repeatedly notes, Virginia Woolf’s first novel, 1915’s The Voyage Out, involves sailing out to the colonies, while her final novel, 1941's Between the Acts, takes place in the provincial countryside; J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is similarly symptomatic of this English late-Modernist turn towards the pre-modern; likewise T.S. Eliot’s latter poetry, especially 1943’s The Four Quartets, is unapologetically Anglican.  Esty, however, is careful to argue that Eliot, Woolf, and Tolkien were no mere reactionary nativists (though there was plenty of that, too), but rather part of a larger grass-roots strategy for forming a common cultural core within England that could resist both the isolating loneliness of free-market capitalism as well as the forces of Continental fascism.  English Modernism in the end thus becomes anti-Modern out of necessity.  Overall then, Modernism is always a process of resisting modernization; as Jameson claims, “complete modernization in fact generates not modernism, but postmodernism” (Jameson 104).  Postmodernism, then, arises when the modernization process is completed.

But Jameson’s statement presupposes that the modernization process is ever completed—or if, by definition, it can be completed.  As Jürgen Habermas argues, modernity is inherently an “unfinished process.”  We see this endlessly incomplete modernism in the fact that the Modernist canon itself is under constant revision (even more so than other literary canons).  For, with the notable exceptions of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land (the two works as central to Modernist studies as Oedipus Rex and Hamlet were to the earlier generation of Nietzsche and Freud), this is a canon that has been and remains in constant flux, with surprisingly little consensus over the past century as to who qualifies as “canonical.”  Riding and Graves, for example, angrily attack H.D., but only because they perceive her as a major poet—which certainly was not the case post-war, when it required Second-Wave Feminism to recover her.  Riding and Graves in turn admire e.e. cummings and examine him as the quintessential Modernist poet—which one would be hard-pressed to find any mention of cummings in any and all post-war criticism. These two praise Gertrude Stein, yet both Stein and H.D., as well as Woolf, are utterly absent from Howe’s 1967 anthology Modernism.  Lest one assume these were strictly sexist exclusions (though there was obviously that, too), Ezra Pound is also absent from Howe’s Modernism, whose fascism had lost him critical favor until Hugh Kenner recuperated it through 1971’s The Pound Era, which sought in turn to establish Pound as the central figure of the period. 

Adding to this endless canonical flux is the question as to whether the Modernist canon can seep down to the continent to co-opt Kafka and Proust away from Germany and France, or whether Modernism can (or should) ebb and flow across the Atlantic to absorb the Americans—Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, or even the Harlem Renaissance—not to mention the manifold Anglophone writers of the Caribbean, India, and Africa.  There is likewise debate as to whether Samuel Beckett was the last Modernist or the first Postmodernist, or whether Wilde, James, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Baudelaire can be stolen away from the 19^th century as proto-Modernists.

But here again we run into the incipient vagueness of Modernism: when did it really end?  Did it really end, or is Postmodernism, as Mark McGurl argues in The Program Era, really just a protracted late-Modernism by other names?  For that matter, when did Modernism supposedly begin?  I will explore the last question first.  The dates are, as with all literary periods, arbitrary and rather fuzzy: Virginia Woolf famously (and half-facetiously) claimed that “In or around December 1910, the world changed.”  D.H. Lawrence made a similar claim for 1915.  Ezra Pound, remember, praised Eliot’s Waste Land with “it justifies all our modern experiments since 1900”; yet intriguingly, all three made those statements in 1922, from which same year Pound likewise suggested we start a new calendar Year 1, as though we had started a new Christian era, or another French Revolution.  As Michael North notes in Reading 1922: Revisiting the Scene of the Modern, 1922 has long been treated critically as the watershed year of the era.  It is when both Ulysses and The Waste Land were first published—as well as the first English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus.  Willa Cather at last won the Pulitzer that year, only (as noted earlier) to suddenly find herself suddenly out of favor.  F. Scott Fitzgerald for his part identified 1922 as the high point of this new generation.  It was the year Marcel Proust passed away, drawing In Search of Lost Time to a close.  It was also the year when Ireland, Egypt, and India first gained self-autonomy, signaling the beginning of the end of the British Empire, as the forces of modernization began to be felt throughout the “developing” world, as they had already wreaked havoc upon the “developed” world.

But such a historical reading of Modernism’s dates moves against the aggressive ahistorical claims that certain of the critics closest to Modernism made for the period.  As Riding and Graves claimed in 1927:

Modernist, indeed, should describe a quality in poetry which has nothing to do with the date or with responding to civilization…always its modernism would lie in its independence, in its relying on none of the traditional devices of poetry-making in the past nor on any of the artificial effects to be got by using the atmosphere of contemporary life and knowledge to startle or to give reality. (Riding and Graves 179)

For Riding and Graves, a work is modern precisely in how it disconnects itself from the devices of all prior tradition; it is always modern because there is no older form with which to attach it.  Of course, such a reading utterly elides how completely dependent the collage-works of Ulysses and The Waste Land are upon the totality of Western literature preceding them for their production.  But then, perhaps what Riding and Graves identify as “Modernist” is not so much a break with a prior tradition as it is a break with prior criteria.  As Habermas similarly argues in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself” (7).  It is not whether Joyce writes in a sentimental style in “Nausicaa” or in catechism in “Ithaca”, but rather it is the framework by which those pre-modern styles are approached and evaluated that has fundamentally shifted.

Moreover, the shift in criteria does not then settle into a new normativity or model, but is instead left in perpetual flux, with all new criteria strictly provisional and awaiting further immediate disruption.  Modernism, then, could be defined not by which new criteria supplants the old, but in the very (and constant) act of changing criteria itself.  As Howe claims 40 years after Riding and Graves, “modernism does not establish itself a prevalent style of its own; or if it does, it denies itself, thereby ceasing to be modern” (Howe 13).  Modernism in this model is about the continual overthrow of style, never the establishing of a new one; it is about always throwing out the old boss, never about welcoming in the new one. 

But the Modernist period in question is not just about the general breaking—or even constant breaking—with previous criteria; rather, what I argue most defines the era are which sets of historical circumstances prompted this particular set of endless-breaks in the first place.  For, like all historical and literary periods, the era was under the influence of common anxieties and factors, within which all these artists coped in differing manners.  One such factor was of course World War I, as shown by the great and continued popularity of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, featuring as it does Stein’s epigraph of “You are all of a Lost Generation.”  The war, of course, was so unprecedented in its horror in part due to the rise of new mechanized weapons such as the machine-gun, the tank, and the airplane—all recent technologies that further emphasized the increased mechanization of the human subject, a development that was addressed and resisted by Modernist writers.  Some (Eliot, Pound, Yeats) turned towards fascism as a solution to the mechanization of humanity, others towards communism, but all were still responding to similar forces. Closely tied to the rise of mechanization is the invention of New Media technologies such as cinema, as chronicled in the works of David Trotter (e.g. 2007’s Cinema and Modernism) and Julian Murphet (e.g. 2009’s Multimedia Modernisms); Murphet sees the invention of cinematic techniques such as jump-cut and montage as having definite influence upon new literary techniques such as stream-of-conscious, while Trotter claims that it is less cinematic technique than the mechanization of cinema itself—a “will-towards-automation”—as the greatest, overweening influence upon the Modernist writers.  David Ayers similarly reads the constant grapple with mankind’s mechanization as the defining attribute of the era, as emblematized in the works of D.H. Lawrence:

[Lawrence’s] guiding notion is that civilization has tended to force apart mind and body, with the effect of turning sexual relationships into verbal meetings accompanied by mechanical sex, focused on the instrumental pleasure of two separate beings…he examines the ways in which an imagined unity of mind and body has become lost, and the ways in which it can be glimpsed or rediscovered in industrial modernity. (Ayers 88)

As Ayers reads Lawrence, the mechanization of human beings is what has in effect ruined sex, and by extension human vitality in general.  Even the Jazz Age during which he wrote, far from some organic resistance to automation as it is commonly perceived today, was a chief symptom of it: “[For Lawrence] jazz is not associated with vitality…but with the very opposite, deadness and mechanism” (Ayers 86).  Since the rise of automation fueled many of the other aforementioned events of this era—the horrors of World War I, the rise of fascism—one can read Modernism as a collection of competing strategies for coping with mechanization.

But more than mere mechanization was at play for these writers; there was also the loss of any sort of the subject’s epistemological stability that could have provided a reliable framework within which to grapple against automation.  The previous century had already chipped away at these foundations thanks to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Marx’s Das Kapital.  The 20^th century would only accelerate this process: 1899 is the first publication of Freud’s On The Interpretation of Dreams; Nietzsche’s death in 1900 is what first precipitated the mass-reading of his works; Einstein’s theory of relativity is first published in 1905; it is perhaps less that the world “changed on or around December 1910,” but that by the end of 1910 it became collectively obvious in the West that things were now different than they were just 10 years earlier.  So, as to the earlier question of when exactly Modernism begins, I am comfortable with the traditional dating of the period beginning in 1900, with the era achieving critical mass in 1922. 

But then, it is not like all these techno-historical-philosophical processes have ebbed since a century ago; quite the contrary.  It is tempting, then, to agree with McGurl that Modernism never ended, that Postmodernism is simply second-generation Modernism, or a late-Modernism that has perpetuated into the present day.  However, I am willing to argue that the era now defined as Modernist did come to a definitive end when there comes about a fresh new set of historical circumstances different from the previous generation, inaugurated by 1945: the revelation of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima.  In these two events, mankind learns that there exists both means and motivation to annihilate all mankind, which was not readily apparent even during the first World War.  The “Post” is added to Modernism perhaps less to denotate the end of a previous generation, but rather the coming end of all generations.  Post-Hiroshima, there are no longer any attempts to piece back together the tradition or a lost epistemology, because, as William Faulkner warned in his 1950 Nobel Acceptance Speech, “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?”  The Modernists worried about an epistemological destruction, the Postmodernists of an ontological one (as Brian McHale argues).  But that is a topic for a different essay; for now, I split the difference with John Harwood: Yes, the period known today as Modernism was of course a fiction.  It was even a difficult fiction.  But like the texts it encompasses, Modernism also remains a useful fiction.

Works Cited

Ayers, David.  Modernism: A Short Introduction.  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.

Blanton, C.D. Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism.  Oxford: Oxford  University Press, 2015.

Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane Modernism:  A Guide to European Literature, 1890- 1930.  Westminster: Penguin Books, 1976.

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.  2^nd edition.

Diepeveen, Leonard. The Difficulties of Modernism.  London: Routledge, 2002.

Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Habermas, Jürgen.  The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.  Boston: MIT Press, 1987.

Harwood, John. Eliot to Derrida: the poverty of interpretation.  London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995.   

Howe, Irving, ed. Literary Modernism.  Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1967.

Jameson, Frederic. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.  New York: Verso, 2002.

Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: TS Eliot and His Context.  Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Murphet, Julian. Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde.   Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  Print.

North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern.  Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Quigley, Megan. Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 

Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Riding, Laura and Robert Graves, Survey of Modernist Poetry.  Folcroft Press: 1927.

Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.