Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
While I was preparing this inaugural lecture my mind kept going back to another literary
talk – one that has little to recommend it apart from its comic value. The case I
have in mind is a public lecture forced upon a neophyte academic whose first year of teaching
at a provincial university has been so wretched that he is on the verge of being sacked. In
true comic fashion, the lecture only compounds his woes as his inebriation prevents him from
stringing any coherent sentences together. The hapless protagonist of Kingsley Amis’s
Lucky Jim (1954) completely sabotages himself, as his creator gleefully makes clear: ‘Nobody
outside a madhouse, [Dixon] tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this
conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish. Within quite a short time he was contriving
to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning . . .’
Well: I can assure you that I’ve imbibed nothing but water today so if the next hour
descends into unseemly farce it will be for entirely other reasons. More seriously, though,
I begin with Lucky Jim in order to make a particular point. As most of you will know,
despite his nightmarish performance at the lectern, Dixon is actually in luck. He gets
the girl he’s vainly been pursuing and he’s offered a job in London, far from the dull
and shabby provinces. The prospect sets him daydreaming about where he might live: ‘he
pronounced the names to himself: Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill Gate, Pimlico,
Belgrave Square, Wapping, Bloomsbury. No, not Bloomsbury.’ This is, of course, a cultural
joke at the expense of a privileged coterie, which many commentators associate with a rather
self-absorbed approach to life, a view of it that John Maynard Keynes – a member of
its inner circle – shared. Recalling the philosopher G. E. Moore’s influence on the
Bloomsbury mind-set, Keynes described it as follows: ‘Nothing mattered except states
of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind
were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences.’
By way of Jim Dixon, Amis hints at a conception of modernism that equates it with formalist
aestheticism. Modernism from this perspective is self-indulgent, unaware of or unconcerned
with pressing social issues, and inward-looking. This negative view recapitulates an argument
that goes back to Baudelaire and Flaubert. It finds warrant in these writers’ unbending
commitment to artistic perfection (Flaubert’s oft-cited search for the ‘mot juste’)
and for their obsession with literary style. Flaubert, for example, insisted that the ‘finest
works are those that contain the least matter’, and he longed to produce a book that would
be ‘held together by the internal strength of its style’ but ‘would have almost no
subject’. Influenced by this aestheticist tradition, a host of English writers maintained
that social or political matters had nothing to do with literary art. Punch summed up this
way of thinking in a 1928 cartoon. A foppish young scribbler is asked by his aunt what
he intends to ‘write about’; ‘My dear aunt’, he responds with incredulity, ‘one
doesn’t write about anything, one just writes.’ This stress on artistry above subject matter
goes to the heart of objections against a literary tradition that is closely associated
with modernism but goes well beyond it. The resultant conflict between two opposed views
of literature’s purpose manifested itself with great clarity in the debate about the
novel that took place between H. G. Wells and Henry James in the early years of the
twentieth century. Wells insisted that the novel was a valuable cultural instrument,
which enabled social problems to be discussed from a range of conflicting perspectives.
He considered that for James ‘literature like painting is an end’ in itself whereas
for him ‘literature like architecture is a means, it has a use’. Driving the point
home, he announced that he ‘had rather be called a journalist than an artist’, though
perhaps if he’d attended a bit more closely to the mot juste he wouldn’t have perpetrated
such lines as this, from The War of the Worlds: ‘His landlady came to the door, loosely
wrapped in dressing-gown and shawl, her husband followed ejaculating.’ The breach between
two incompatible artistic temperaments finally took place in 1915, a year before James’s
death, when Wells left a copy of his satire Boon for him at his London club. We may imagine
the Master settling into a comfortable armchair, anticipating a pleasant hour of reading his
friend’s latest confection, only to find Wells letting fly with a cruel parody of the
Jamesian literary style.
His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more
if God himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And all for
tales of nothingness [. . .] It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost
[. . .] upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things, it
insists, are beyond it, but it can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness
of mind, pick up that pea.
There can be no doubt that James was deeply wounded by this screed, but he responded with
a dignified restatement of his long-held aesthetic credo: ‘It is art that makes life, makes
interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know
of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.’
James’s emphasis on the value of art qua art is central to modernism. But I want to
suggest that the nature of this valuation is often misunderstood. Many early critics
of modernism went so far as to equate it with aesthetic purism, thereby concluding that
it was indifferent to social problems. Edmund Wilson’s influential book Axel’s Castle,
first published in 1931, presented T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats
as inheritors of a Symbolist movement that was compromised by a renunciative aesthetic.
Worrying about the future of modern writing as exemplified by these authors, Wilson suggested
that post-War disillusionment had created an atmosphere in which ‘the Western mind
became peculiarly hospitable to a literature indifferent to action and unconcerned with
the group’, a diagnosis that George Orwell echoed eight years later when he concluded
that for most contemporary authors there was ‘nothing left but quietism – robbing reality
of its terrors by simply submitting to it.’ Modern literature, Wilson and Orwell argued,
was intrinsically escapist. It either retreated into private reverie or concocted nostalgic
fantasies of a mythical bygone age. Many commentators found Wilson’s account
persuasive. It is frequently repeated in early codifications of modernism. Cyril Connolly,
for example, maintained in Enemies of Promise (1938) that writers ‘from Pater to Joyce
[. . .] believed in the importance of their art, in the sanctity of the artist and in
his sense of vocation. They were all inmates of the Ivory Tower.’ Instead of valuing
a ‘socialized form of art’, these writers promoted an aestheticised individualism, which
amounted to a new ‘religion of beauty, a cult of words, of meanings understood only
by the initiated’. Stephen Spender, in turn, postulated that modernism severed art from
politics in order to elevate the aesthetic to heady heights and to leave behind the grubby
realities of everyday life. The ‘essence of the modern movement’, he claimed, ‘was
that it created art which was centred on itself and not on anything outside it’. Reflecting on the pressure put on authors to be politically committed, he concluded that ‘the moment thirties writing became illustrative of Marxist texts or reaction to “history” [. . .] it ceased to be part of the modern movement’. Spender thus defines modernism as an apolitical
literary mode; so much so, indeed, that it is said to betray itself the minute it addresses
contemporary social problems. Wilson, Connolly, and Spender are representative
voices. The account of modernism they delineate has been influential, and it crops up again
and again in more recent discussions. I propose in this inaugural lecture to contest this
view of modernism, especially its concept of a singular literary ethos, a way of thinking
that can be traced back to Georg Lukács’s 1957 essay ‘The Ideology of Modernism’.
But before I turn to my reservations about this way of thinking I want to delve a bit
further into the case against modernism, a case that has ramified over the years. The
initial claim – that modernism is aestheticist and formalist – has been expanded to four
further charges: firstly, that it is resolutely elitist and deliberately seeks to debar readers
from its riches; secondly, that it is unrestrainedly subjectivist in orientation, dissolving social
reality into the privatised imagination; thirdly, that it is neither radical nor oppositional
but is the purest expression – in the cultural realm – of capitalism itself; fourthly,
that it is fraudulent, at best an amusing leg-pull and at worst a preposterous and self-defeating
farce. The problem of modernism’s alleged elitism
preoccupied critics from the outset. Wilson, so often an originator of debates about its
significance, observed in Axel’s Castle that modernist literature is ‘extremely
difficult, subtle and refined’ and thus ‘forbidden to most readers’. F. R. Leavis,
in turn, worried about the deleterious consequences of a social division that pitted a ‘minority
culture’ against a ‘mass civilisation’, even though he was a staunch defender of elites,
which, he argued, ‘keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition’;
in ‘their keeping’, he maintained, ‘is the language, the changing idiom, upon which
fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By “culture”’,
Leavis explains, ‘I mean the use of such a language.’ Literary works like ‘The
Waste Land, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Ulysses or To the Lighthouse’, he maintained, ‘are
read only by a very small specialised public and are beyond the reach of the vast majority
of those who consider themselves educated.’ This was a disastrous situation, for Leavis,
because it cut off ‘the finest consciousness of the age’ from the majority of people,
forcing them to make do with the jejune entertainments promoted by what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
a decade later would call ‘the culture industry’. Neither Wilson nor Leavis suggested that modernism
was deliberately trying to be obscure in the hope that by being so it could divide the
hoi polloi from an artistic aristocracy. This conspiracy theory became popular in later
years. It was left to John Carey to state it in its most uncompromising form. ‘The
early twentieth century’, he declared, ‘saw a determined effort, on the part of the European
intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become
known as modernism.’ The claim that modernism is elitist and exclusionary
has received a lot of support. We should note here that this sociological indictment is
closely related to a philosophical argument. It is well known that numerous modernist texts
enacted an inward turn, setting themselves the task of exploring the slippery operations
of the human mind. Under the influence of philosophers like Henri Bergson and William
James, as well as the psycho-analytic theories of Freud and his followers, the ‘stream
of consciousness’ became a major feature in the work of such writers as Joyce, Dorothy
Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. For modernism’s detractors, however, this
inward turn eroded a shared, intersubjective sense of social reality, isolating the individual
in a private world of fantasy. This critique is associated primarily with the Marxist tradition,
but it cuts right across the political spectrum, including such otherwise different writers
as Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis all of whom were united in maintaining
that modernist subjectivism dissolved public reality and compromised human agency.
This position was most consistently articulated from within the Marxist tradition. Lukács
is the key figure here, and Joyce the main exhibit, but the basic argument features prominently
in the work of the English Marxists Christopher Caudwell, Ralph Fox, A. L. Lloyd, and Alick
West, and it was developed in the pages of the journal Left Review in the mid-1930s,
following Karl Radek’s dismissal of Ulysses as ‘a heap of dung, crawling with worms,
photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope’. According to the Marxist
account, modernism’s inward turn resulted in a privatised view of reality that destroyed
not only the social dimension of human life but also people’s faith in history, politics,
and collective action. Identifying what he called ‘the ideology of modernism’, Lukács
averred that it saw man as ‘by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships
with other human beings’, a perception of reality that gave rise to an undialectical
view of history and a defeatist politics. The symptomatological approach taken by Lukács
pays scant attention to the problem of form, which he dismisses briskly as a ‘bourgeois-modernist’
obfuscation. This move permits him to present form as a cloak that conceals the modernist
‘ideology’ it is his Marxist duty to uncover. But Lukács’s inattentiveness to the stylistic
and structural differences between literary works results in a crude account of modernism,
which, we are asked to believe, leads not just to ‘the destruction of traditional
literary forms’ but ‘to the destruction of literature as such.’
The Marxist critique of modernism suggests that it destroys literature because of its
remorseless subjectivism and lack of form. A different kind of problem arises with art-works
that differ markedly from existing paintings, novels, or poems, for they are thought to
offend so deeply against established canons of taste that they cannot be accepted as art
at all. We see this kind of reaction in John Ruskin’s response to Whistler’s Nocturne
in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875). Outraged by this act of ‘wilful imposture’,
Ruskin admitted that he had heard ‘much of cockney impudence before’ but had ‘never
expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the
public’s face’. Variations on this furious dismissal later played themselves out in English
critics’ incandescent responses to post-impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism, the latter
being accused during the First World War of exemplifying German Junkerism in art. Jonathan
Jones suggests that Ruskin’s violent rejection of Whistler’s Nocturne enacted ‘the definitive
rejection of modern art as fraud, and [that] every subsequent diatribe against beds, bricks
or the lights going on and off reproduces it.’
We can only wonder what Ruskin might have made of a painting titled Sunset Over the
Adriatic, which was exhibited at the Salon des indépendants in Paris in 1910. It was
presented as an example of the Excessivist’ movement, except that no such movement existed;
the painting had been produced by a donkey called Lolo, to whose tail a paintbrush had
been attached by the writer and critic Roland Dorgelès. It is here that a significant anti-art
tradition begins to develop, its aim being to destroy not just particular artistic canons
but the idea of aesthetic value, especially its association with individual creativity
and with what Walter Benjamin would call the ‘aura’ of art. Lolo puts paint on a canvas
but has no artistic goals. This act offers an early assault on the category of art, which
is presented here as a meaningless game in order to mock its cultural pretensions. The
very idea of intentionality is banished, the skill and vision of the individual creator
being treated as no more significant than the swishing of a donkey’s tail.
Dada and Surrealism are central to this anti-art tradition, and they act out an impassioned
critique of bourgeois society in the name of irrationality, the absurd, the unconscious,
the dream, the chance event, and freedom from aesthetic norms. Richard Huelsenbeck asserted
that Dada was ‘against art’ because it had ‘seen through its fraud’ and he concluded:
‘Art should altogether get a sound thrashing, and Dada stands for that thrashing with all
the vehemence of its limited nature.’ André Breton, in turn, defined Surrealism as ‘[p]sychic
automatism’, a way of unfettering the mind and freeing the writer to record images at
random. For Breton, the mind’s real nature was perverted by bourgeois culture’s emphasis
on instrumental rationality; thought, he argued, should be freed from ‘any control exercised
by reason’ and from ‘any aesthetic or moral concern’. Surrealism viewed the artist
not as an active agent but as a passive receptor, a conduit for images that came and went of
their own accord, rather like the blobs of paint that Loulou the donkey splattered on
his canvas in some weird foretaste of action painting.
Dada and Surrealism were highly performative, frequently staging ‘happenings’ that aimed
to enrage the stolid bourgeois by shattering the canons of taste. The 1936 International
Surrealist Exhibition, which took place at the New Burlington Galleries in London, attracted
enormous interest from the public and the press. But many exhibition goers went along
to laugh at the Surrealists rather than to engage with the work on display. This shouldn’t
surprise us, for among the exhibition’s provocations was a lecture delivered by Salvador
Dalí, dressed in a diving suit from which he had to be rescued when it appeared that
he was about to be asphyxiated; the presence of a ‘Surrealist Phantom’ who strolled
around the gallery in a white gown carrying a pork chop in one hand and a human leg in
the other, her entire head covered in roses; and Dylan Thomas handing round tea-cups filled
with string, asking spectators if they took the national beverage weak or strong.
Many observers considered Surrealism to be beyond the pale, and its critics dismissed
it as a gimmick or a trick. This critique, however, misunderstood the change in orientation
the Surrealists wanted to bring about, since they sought to elevate the unconscious to
a supreme position and to celebrate the confections of chance. Automatic writing had nothing to
do with skill, Breton insisted, while Max Ernst described the Surrealist painter as
‘a mere spectator of the birth of the work’, arguing that critics were ‘terrified to
see the importance of the “author” being reduced to a minimum and the conception of
“talent” abolished’, a position that Roland Barthes and other post-structuralist
theorists would later develop in full. The charge-sheet against modernism is a substantial
one. It is said to advocate an artistic purism that severs it from social issues; to be elitist,
erecting a high wall between its artefacts and a mass readership; to promote a solipsistic
view of the world that leaves it with no path to social or political action; and to be a
fraud that altogether does away with the very concept of ‘art’. But if modernism is
all these things how are we to make sense of the injunction ‘Kill John Bull with Art’,
which I’ve taken as the title of today’s inaugural lecture? For these words are a clarion
call, a rallying cry, a demand for immediate action. They proclaim a modernism that seeks
to shatter the assumptions of that self-satisfied symbol of national identity known to us from
John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull (1712) and the cartoons of Gillray, Rowlandson,
Leech, and Tenniel. This modernism situates itself firmly in a social realm that it wants
to radicalise. I borrow the phrase ‘Kill John Bull With
Art’ from Wyndham Lewis, one of the most active of English avant-gardists – a writer
and painter who sought to change society by transforming its culture, driving his backward-looking
fellow citizens out of ‘their melancholy tête-à-tête with what remains to them of
the past.’ An aggressive, oppositional, and vigorous spirit is clearly visible in
the ‘little magazine’ Lewis launched in 1914 – simply titled BLAST. This outrageous
artefact – which Richard Aldington described as ‘the most amazing, energised, stimulating
production I have ever seen’ – proclaimed its polemical intentions through its size,
its brash front cover, and its cascade of typographically inventive manifestos.
BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND CURSE ITS CLIMATE FOR ITS SINS AND INFECTIONS
DISMAL SYMBOL, SET round our bodies, of effeminate lout within.
VICTORIAN VAMPIRE, the LONDON cloud sucks the TOWN’S heart.
The Victorian period and its wan afterlife are figured here as bloodsucking revenants
that need to be destroyed once and for all. England is blasted because it is stuck in
a past it can’t shake off and, unaware of its moribund plight, blindly protects itself
from the ‘drastic winds’ of change that seek to blow it into the more bracing reality
of modern life. BLAST did not, however, offer a naively celebratory view of twentieth-century
existence. It mocked Italian Futurism’s love of technology, sought to criticise modern
life, and urged the creation of a visionary art. Lewis believed that social life should
be improved by means of the techne of civilisation and he pinned his faith to modernist aesthetic
principles as the means by which change could be effected. BLAST aimed to demolish a dead
culture preparatory to building it afresh in the form of Vorticist texts and paintings
that reimagined everyday life in bold new ways. Of Vorticism Lewis wrote: ‘It was
a new civilisation that I – and a few other people – was making the blueprints for.’
BLAST was quickly overtaken by a far more significant explosion, and only one other
issue appeared: the ‘War Number’, with Lewis’s bleak depiction of the stasis of
the war symbolically dominating its cover. But in 1919, a time of post-War reconstruction,
Lewis returned to the cultural fray with a polemic he described as ‘another Blast’.
The Caliph’s Design – sub-titled Architects! Where is Your Vortex? – insisted that the
seeds of the future lay in the present, which had to be remade in the here and now. Eschewing
idealist transcendentalism in favour of a commitment to the material world, Lewis urged
modernists to make ‘a new form-content for our everyday vision’ and to refashion the
modern city from top to toe. Modernist art was to bestow aesthetic significance on all
aspects of the urban environment, from clothes and jewelry to lamp-posts and gates, from
cutlery to chimney pots, from matchbox packets to buildings. The artist’s task, Lewis averred,
was ‘to desire equity, mansuetude, in human relations, [to] fight against violence, and
work for formal beauty, significance and so forth, in the arrangement and aspect of life.’
This is not the stance of a solipsistic ivory-tower formalist. But it doesn’t follow that other
modernists held similar views. The danger here is that we fall into the trap of operating
with simple binaries, pitting a ‘good’ modernism (active, engaged, progressive) against
a ‘bad’ modernism (passive, escapist, reactionary). Such an opposition reduces a
congeries of disparate practices into two monolithic camps. It is modernism’s fissiparousness
that we must hold in mind, refusing the abstractions from complex phenomena that result in easy
generalisations. That said, we need to acknowledge, and try to understand, those modernisms that
refused to retreat to an aestheticist nirvana because they saw themselves as engaged in
a battle for the future of English culture. The term ‘culture’ is notoriously imprecise,
and attempts to define it are often limited. T. S. Eliot, sensibly noting that it ‘includes
all the characteristic activities and interests of a people’, then offers us this unintentionally
amusing list: ‘Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final,
the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into
sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.’
Raymond Williams sees the word ‘culture’ as ‘one of the two or three most complicated
[. . .] in the English language’ and draws our attention to its many overlapping meanings,
among which we may include husbandry, spiritual and intellectual development, shared values,
common practices, habitation, the arts, and tradition. For Williams, when we trace the
meanings of the word ‘culture’ we put ourselves in touch with ‘a real social history’;
he concludes that the term’s ‘complexity’ lies ‘not in the word but in the problems
which its variations of use significantly indicate.’
This complexity is everywhere apparent in modernist discourse about culture. But a broadly
agreed set of assumptions is discernible in attitudes to what Leavis in the early 1930s
described as ‘the plight of culture’ and which, as I’ve already mentioned, span the
political spectrum. We witness a Tocquevillean sense of democracy’s tendency to bring about
a cultural levelling down; anger about far-reaching processes of standardisation and bureaucratisation;
fear of fragmentation; and dark warnings about the erosion of value conferring criteria.
There is a commitment to the indispensability of cultural hierarchy here, and it typically
goes together with a firm belief in a stratified society. Leavis believes that the preservation
of culture depends on the maintenance of a small minority, who have it in their keeping.
Eliot, in turn, asserts that if his reader finds it ‘shocking that culture and equalitarianism
should conflict [. . .] I do not ask him to change his faith, I merely ask him to stop
paying lip-service to culture.’ And letting himself go, he concludes Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture with a chilling philippic: ‘there is no doubt that in our rush to educate
everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of
those subjects by which the essentials of our culture [. . .] are transmitted; destroying
our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future
will encamp in their mechanised caravans.’ There’s a significant contradiction here.
For the ‘essentials’ Eliot invokes in this passage refer to what we can only describe
as ‘high culture’, whereas his earlier account sees culture in inclusive terms and
understands it as a form of life. There’s a good deal of the curled lip in Eliot’s
denunciation of the wider populace, and it suggests that what he most values about culture
is not boiled cabbage cut into sections or the cup final but rather the work of Virgil
and Dante. In short, despite his claim that in his conception ‘a “culture” is conceived
as the creation of the society as a whole’ and ‘is not the creation of any one part
of that society’, we are really in the world of another text published in 1948 – Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty Four – where ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal
than others.’ This hierarchical view of culture is even
clearer in Leavis’s extensive writings, which not only denigrate everything associated
with popular pursuits but also see them as active threats to the literary values he wants
to preserve and promote. For Leavis, society is menaced on all sides by transistor radios
playing popular music, which is listened to only by the working classes and is ‘a means
of passive diversion’; by bingo (that ‘most pathetic of vacuum-fillers’); by cinema
(which involves ‘surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional
appeals’); by magazine supplements in which culture is a decorative appurtenance; by fish
and chips; by middle-brow writing; and by increased participation in education. But
then Leavis didn’t like much of anything at all apart from his beloved Lawrence whose
notorious novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was summed up more critically by Louis-Ferdinand
Céline: ‘600 pages for a gamekeeper’s ***. It’s way too long.’ Discussing a
lecture Leavis gave at Nottingham University, J. B. Priestley reported that in it he ‘declared
that apart from D H Lawrence there has been no literature in his time. He knocked hell
out of everybody [. . .] Virginia Woolf was a “slender talent”; Lytton Strachey “irresponsible
and unscrupulous”; W H Auden “the type career” fixed at “the undergraduate stage”;
Spender “no talent whatsoever”; Day-Lewis [a] “Book Society author”; the whole age
“dismal,” the outlook “very poor”.’ The upshot of this jeremiad, Priestley sardonically
observed, was that ‘By the time Dr Leavis caught his train back to Cambridge there was
hardly anything left to read in Nottingham.’ I’ve suggested that it’s a mistake to
see modernism in a unitary way. A particularly noteworthy tension manifests itself as the
conflict in modernism between hostility to the majority and a desire to enlarge people’s
minds – in Arnold’s memorable words, ‘to make the best that has been thought and known
in the world current’. This educative zeal leads Eliot to participate in adult education;
Lewis and Ezra Pound to establish the Rebel Art Centre; Lawrence and Bertrand Russell
to plan lectures on religion and ethics; and Pound to proffer a new paideuma for the age,
which he described as ‘the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal [. . .] conditioning
actively all the thought and action of its own time.’ It is also visible in the copious
amounts of criticism the modernists produced to explain their work to as wide a readership
as possible. Indeed, this educative tendency was so prevalent that it allowed Gertrude
Stein to mock Pound – that most ardent of modernist edifiers – as a ‘village explainer,
excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.’
A similar pedagogic drive informs the culture of ‘little magazines’ through which modernist
writing first surfaced and which Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker have helped us to understand
in all its complexity. Although they differed from each other in details, most of these
magazines disclosed an educative impulse, which manifested itself either as a meliorative
agenda or as a revolutionary one. Little magazines sought to intervene in cultural life in order
to suggest how it might be reimagined, to create readers for their new modernist literature,
and to develop counter-public spheres. When Ford established two such journals – the
English Review in 1908 and the transatlantic review in 1924 – he did so with the express
intention of reviving modern literature, defending the value of the arts to society, creating
a literary nucleus, and forging a literary ‘league of nations’. Eliot started the
Criterion with ‘the aim of bringing together the best in new thinking and new writing in
its time, from all the countries of Europe that had anything to contribute to the common
good.’ And Lewis’s BLAST announced that it had no interest in being a coterie product;
it would, rather, ‘be an avenue for all those vivid and violent ideas that could reach
the Public in no other way’ and would be ‘popular’, speaking not ‘to any particular
class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of
people’. This is a radically democratic vision. As
in Dada and Surrealism, everyone has the potential to be an artist here, and the Vorticist magazine
that makes this claim has, we are explicitly told, been created for readers of all classes.
Ford rightly saw that a battle for English culture was under way here, and that avant-gardist
pugnacity served a serious social purpose. Writing of the Futurists and Vorticists, he
suggested that they ‘not only drove the old – oh, the horribly wearisome! – Academies
out of the field, the market, and the forum’ but also created [. . .] a “public” that
had never looked at a book otherwise than to be bored with it; or considered the idea
that an Art was an interesting, inspiring, or amusing appearance.’ This mattered, Ford
went on, because the arts and the public exist in a reciprocal relationship, each requiring
the other if culture is to play a meaningful role in social life.
If we now return to one of the charges against modernism with which I began – its alleged
elitism and its desire to exclude readers from its purview – we can see that the picture
is an infinitely complicated one. The modernists were acutely aware that they were creating
an often rebarbative literature but, far from celebrating its obscurity, they mitigated
the ensuing tension between artist and public as best they could, while refusing to compromise
what most mattered to them about the new work they were producing. If, as Eliot suggested,
modern writing was ‘difficult’, this was certainly not because its progenitors were
devoted to a self-defeating opacity. In keeping with their belief that the new art to which
they gave their allegiance was socially important, modernists saw themselves as a cultural vanguard
whose writing they hoped ultimately would be read widely, even though they recognised
that it might first be misunderstood and denigrated. Eliot, for example, wrote that poets should
express emotion in ‘the common language of the people – that is, in the language
common to all classes’. Ford deployed an everyday idiom, which he described as ‘the
vocabulary of the hatter, of the pharmaceutical chemist, and the policeman, used over counters,
at street corners’. Pound, in turn, asserted that he was interested neither in ‘“minority
culture”’ nor in ‘writing [. . .] for the few’ because serious literature eventually
‘forms the mass culture’. Theodor Adorno remarks that ‘Style represents
a promise in every work of art.’ This may not, in modernism, always be Stendhal’s
promesse de bonheur but modernism’s multiple styles enact its openness to the many-hued
world it sought to evoke. That this perplexing world was experienced as difficult to comprehend
is central to modernism’s modus operandi, which is why it so often explores the relationship
between representation and form. Lost on Margate Sands, a version of the author in Eliot’s
The Waste Land can ‘connect / Nothing with nothing’, and the poem ends by suggesting
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’. When Pound was grappling with his
early Cantos he, too, worried about the adequacy of his chosen form to the modern life he was
trying to render in words. Addressing Robert Browning, one of his strong precursors, Pound
asks: ‘You had one whole man? / And I have many fragments, less worth? Less worth? / Ah,
had you quite my age, quite such a beastly and cantankerous age?’ This sense of social
and cultural fragmentation leads the poet to wonder if his mode should be a capacious
one that renounces the dream of organic form and aesthetic unity from the outset: ‘say
I take your whole bag of tricks, / Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s
an art-form, / [. . .] and that the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all
its thought in’. This tortured self-questioning addresses the
problem of expression and of the vexed relationship between form and function. A no less disturbing
issue for modernists was the question of art’s social impact – the role it actually played
in everyday life. It was all well and good to fantasise about transforming culture but
what if nobody was paying any attention? Worse still, what if the public was merely amused
by modernist provocations, dismissing them as playful but meaningless jeux d’esprit?
In what has become a familiar critique, modernism is now seen by many critics as a mode that
was co-opted and de-fanged from the outset by a capitalist culture for which the cult
of the ever-new simply functioned as a further spur to the market. From this perspective,
the more ‘radical’ modernists thought they were, the more deluded they became, since
in truth their work was simply an epiphenomenon of capitalism itself. ‘Modernism’, John
Xiros Cooper emphatically asserts, ‘is, and always has been, the culture of capitalism’.
Or, as Lewis put it when he looked back on his youthful avant-gardism: ‘“Kill John
Bull with Art!” I shouted. And John and Mrs. Bull leapt for joy, in a cynical convulsion.
For they felt as safe as houses. So did I.’ I want to suggest that this negative reappraisal
of modernism’s social and political impact is informed by the very avant-garde assumptions
it professes to dismantle and disavow. What lies behind it is the dream that modernism
could have been an emancipatory artistic practice capable of delivering a decisive, once-and-for-all
cultural revolution. When this revolution doesn’t materialise, modernism is said to
have failed in its entirety. But this argument, I believe, is compromised by two mistaken
assumptions: firstly, it relies on a monolithic view of history, which sees anything less
than the transformation of society as a total defeat; secondly, it operates with an insufficiently
supple view of the mediated relationship between social processes and aesthetic forms, which,
in the absence of the desired social and political transformation, are said to be utterly negated
by an all-embracing capitalist order. The analysis, in short, is driven by a profound
sense of disenchantment that misconstrues how modernism actually intervened in the culture
it sought to change, ignoring both the effect it had on many individuals and its continuing
influence on present-day creativity because it is unwilling to accept that these effects
and influences were and are piecemeal, partial, unpredictable, and ongoing.
Modernism may not have changed the political structure of society but it altered the entire
landscape of music, dance, literature, and the visual arts, producing so many offshoots
that it has proved hard to keep up with them. One of my favourites is a recent homage to
Lewis’s BLAST, which is at once a nod of respect and a self-mocking parody. Titled
BAST and coming out of a small town in Wales, it signals its status as a belated imitator.
You will recall the lay-out of Lewis’s 1914 production. BAST’s opening page mimics BLAST’s
first manifesto but updates and repurposes it, adapting the latter’s sentiments to
a different national context:
BLAST First (from politeness) WALES CURSE ITS CLIMATE FOR ITS GREY PRECIPITATION
DISMAL WETNESS, STRAFE’S its subjects without heart.
NON-CONFORMIST CHAPELS, LOOM their Temperance – the past’s
WET BLANKET.
Borrowing its precursor’s structure, BAST echoes BLAST’s humour and commitment to
critique but positions itself as a playful, reiterative intervention in the full awareness
that, a century later, it can’t hope to have the impact of the original magazine.
This is a tongue-in-cheek reversion to modernism, which stresses its waggishness. But, witty
though it is, it can’t help us with the deeper issues I’ve been trying to highlight.
We are still left to ponder the question of modernism’s inaccessibility, which is linked
to the charge that the whole movement is fraudulent. Its verbal difficulty, indeed, frequently
is read as the sign of its literary rascality. Thus we find Stanislaus Joyce announcing that
he wouldn’t have ‘read more than a paragraph’ of Finnegans Wake if Jim hadn’t been his
brother; outraged, he concluded that ‘the drivelling rigmarole’ the latter had thrust
upon him must have been ‘written with the deliberate intention of pulling the reader’s
leg’. Several decades later, Philip Larkin made the same point in a more earthy manner.
‘What a poet has to do’, he wrote, ‘is create a new language for himself. And more
– it has to be a good one. Pound, for instance, I ***. Likewise Joyce’. Objecting to an
assault on his own anti-modernism, Larkin wondered why his critics assume he hasn’t
read essays like ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘I have,’ he responds, ‘and
think it ***. [. . .] And if that chap Laforgue wants me to read his things, he’d better
write them in English.’ Understood in such terms, modernism can’t
possibly contribute meaningfully to contemporary culture. It is, rather, an excrescence upon
that culture – a deformation of its best and most permanent qualities. But this is
to take a narrow view, which not only refuses to explore modernism on its own terms but
also ignores its many ambiguities and ambivalences. Stanley Cavell suggests that when we are confronted
by a modernism we find confusing, and perhaps irritating, we might ask ‘how a man could
be inspired to do this, why he feels this necessary or satisfactory, how he can mean
this.’ Hans-Georg Gadamer makes a similar point when he remarks that ‘The work issues
a challenge which expects to be met. It requires an answer – an answer that can only be given
by someone who accept[s] the challenge.’ This doesn’t mean that we will necessarily
consider every modernist text to be meaningful or pleasing. We might well conclude, after
accepting the challenge it sets us, that it is negligible or worthless. But what it does
mean is that if we wish to engage properly with modernist texts we must attend to what
J. L. Austin would have described as their perlocutionary force, for they are – each
and every one – performative acts of very particular kinds.
The Russian Formalist account of defamiliarisation can help us further to clarify what is at
stake here. I think especially of Victor Shklovsky’s claim that ‘as perception becomes habitual,
it becomes automatic’ so that ‘all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously
automatic’. Central to Shklovsky’s thinking about literature is the claim that ‘Art
removes objects from the automatism of perception’ and by doing so defamiliarises them, enabling
them to be seen anew. Shklovsky maintains that literature doesn’t so much communicate
a particular insight as offer a different way of seeing and thinking. Through its aesthetic
performance – its way of re-envisaging a world we think we know – modernist literature
invites us to look and think again, asking us to engage with it in a critically self-reflective
manner. Modernism, then, is a call for attentiveness,
slow reading, and patience. It asks us to abide with the writer whose work we are reading
in the hope that if we bear with it we may in time be rewarded. Modernist literature
is difficult not because it is exclusionary or fraudulent but because it is struggling
with experiences that baffle the author as much as they perplex the reader. Hence Beckett’s
injunction: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
Eliot admitted to his own literary and linguistic difficulties in a haunting section of Four Quartets:
So here I am [. . .] Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating
We should not mistake this recognition of difficulty for a donnish sesquipedalianism
of the kind that Robert Graves described in Goodbye to All That when he recalled a meeting
between Lawrence of Arabia, recently returned from London, and a fellow of All Souls. Bumping
into Lawrence at the college gate, the latter inquired if it had been ‘very caliginous
in the Metropolis?’ Without missing a beat, Lawrence replied: ‘Somewhat caliginous,
but not altogether inspissated’. The difficulties modernism presents us with are of a different
order, for it puts before us the question of what literature might be or become. An
unceasingly venturesome ‘structure of feeling’, modernism asks what it means to be human in
a technocratic, globalised, and desperately politicised age even as it explores contemporary
literature’s conditions of possibility. If we’re willing to accept the challenge
it offers, it asks of us only that we keep our minds open, inviting us – like Keats’s
‘watcher of the skies’ discovering an unsuspected ‘new planet’ – to approach
its bewildering riches in a spirit of ‘wild surmise’.