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-20th-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-20th
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 20th 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 20th
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 20th
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 19th 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 20th 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. 2nd 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment