Modernism and the Critical Spirit

Eugene Goodheart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351309103
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Complaints about the decline of critical standards in literature and culture in general have been voiced for much of the twentieth century. These have extended from F.R. Leavis's laments for a "lost center of intelligence and urbane spirit," to current opposition to the predominance of radical critical theory in contemporary literature departments. Humanist criticism, which has as its object the quality of life as well as works of art, may well lack authority in the contemporary world. Even amid the disruptions of the industrial revolution, nineteenth-century humanists such as Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle could assume a positive order of value and shared habits of imaginative perception and understanding between writers and readers. Eugene Goodheart argues that, by contrast, contemporary criticism is infused with the skepticism of modernist aesthetics. It has willfully rejected the very idea of moral authority.Goodheart starts from the premise that questions about the moral authority of literature and criticism often turn upon a prior question of what happens when the sacred disappears or is subjected to the profane. He focuses on contending spiritual views, in particular the dialectic between the Protestant-inspired, largely English humanist tradition of Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and D.H. Lawrence and the decay of Catholicism represented by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Goodheart argues that literary modernism, in distancing itself from natural and social vitality, tends to render suspect all privileged positions. It thereby undermines the critical act, which assumes the priority of a particular set of values. Goodheart makes his case by analyzing the work of a variety of novelists, poets, and critics, nineteenth century and contemporary. He blends literary theory and practical criticism.

1

Modernism and the Critical Spirit

Humanist criticism, which has as its object the quality of life as well as works of art, no longer has authority. By “humanist criticism” I mean something richer and more significant than fault-finding literary journalism or the academic study of books, though it is possible for literary journalism and academic study to rise to the condition of humanist criticism. Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, and Raymond Williams in the English tradition, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling in the American, and Ortega y Gasset in the European are major instances, though they are by no means exhaustive, nor do they together express a single ideological point of view. The most impressive expression of humanist criticism occurs in nineteenth century England. The work of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold has as its major theme the spiritual consequences of the new mechanical civilization and the French Revolution. It is a criticism inspired by a positive order of values, nourished by a moral understanding of the religious tradition and by a profound appreciation of the works of art and intellect of past and present, in Arnold’s words, “the best that has been thought and known.” Its principal expression is the essay, but it may express itself as a novel or poem. The authority implicit in such criticism has been beautifully stated by I. A. Richards:

But it is not true that criticism is a luxury trade. The rearguard of Society cannot be extricated until the vanguard has gone further. Good-will and intelligence are still too little available. The critic, we have said, is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. To set up as a critic is to set up as a judge of values ... For the arts are inevitably and quite apart from any intentions of the artist an appraisal of existence. Matthew Arnold, when he said that poetry is a criticism of life, was saying something so obvious that it is constantly overlooked. The artist is concerned with the record and perpetuation of the experiences which seem to him most worth having ... he is also the man who is most likely to have experiences of value to record. He is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself.¹

Some of our most gifted critics view the controlling impulse of criticism as an embarrassment to both the creative imagination and the life process. This view is implied in Susan Sontag’s title Against Interpretation, which sees in the pattern-finding, moralizing habit of criticism an impediment to the unfolding of creative impulses. Her title may be a misnomer, for she is an incisive pattern finder herself. She is against the kind of judgment that would prevent her from being a celebrant of the works of art she discusses. The most remarkable instance of the impulse to deny or reject the act of criticism is Marshall McLuhan, who began his career as an authoritative cultural critic with a superbly witty dissection of the clichés of advertising culture in The Mechanical Bride (1951). It is costly to the spirit, he argues in that book, to hide oneself from the reality of mass culture by sticking one’s head ostrichlike in the sand of the great books, costly not because mass culture is wonderful, but because any convincing declaration of a position for individuality and resistance presupposes a knowledge of the enemy. But McLuhan’s fascination with technological culture flipped him to the adversary side. In his subsequent work there is no answering spiritual voice to the romance of science and technology. The marvelous practical energy that has produced computers, rockets, and space ships is all. The instances of Sontag and McLuhan (and there are many others) are not so much manifestations of an inspired progressivism as they are of the erosive force of an expanding reality. When the world becomes filled with the adversary, the places of resistance become fewer and smaller.

It is a mistake, however, to see the work of McLuhan or Sontag as a willful betrayal of the cause of criticism. If the fate of criticism is linked to that of literature, then we must look for analogues, if not causes, in the career of modern literature itself. We are certainly willing to link nineteenth century literature and criticism, and until recently criticism in the academy was inspired by the moral ideals of nineteenth century literature. Administrators and scientists in institutions of higher learning still turn to humanists for moral guidance on the assumption that the humanities are determined by the literary ideals of the nineteenth century. But contemporary humanists are more uncertain about moral realities than scientists, more plagued by a sense of ambiguity and ungovernable complexity. Those who turn to the humanities for “values,” for moral guidance, are under an illusion about the nature of the humanities at the present time, an illusion that some humanists share.

The humanities are not the incarnation of an eternal spirit. They are a human and consequently historical creation—and in a specific sense. Humanism is in part an expression of contemporary literature. Its sense of the past is to a large extent mediated through the perceptions of contemporary literature. Tradition tends to be constituted by works of the past that nourish the contemporary imagination. I am uttering here the familiar wisdom of the modernist aesthetics enunciated in T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

The humanities as an expression of the ethos of modern literature provide little more than an exacerbated sense of insecurity about the world. This is the lesson of modern literature, and if one institutionalizes this lesson in the university, one is getting not moral guidance but subversion. The value of modern literature (and I mean this without irony) is to introduce anxiety into the conscience of modern man. Moral anxiety is of course an essential part of spiritual progress. There can be neither growth nor conversion nor redemption without such anxiety. But the modern literary imagination at its best remains arrested in the state of moral anxiety, unable to conceive of a condition of being at once ethically responsible, spiritually fulfilled, and freed of anxiety. If it imagines the dissolution of anxiety, it does so at the price of moral sensitivity, as in the case of Camus’s The Stranger or Gide’s The Immoralist or Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. The critical implication of modern literature is directed toward false confidence. Modern literature is not a source of confidence.

Dostoevsky’s underground man violates every rule of moral and intellectual decorum in order to achieve a sense of individual vitality which will assure him that he is alive. He is never void of the moral sense; one might say that he is constantly suffering from it. But he regards the moral sense as a disease from which he is trying to purge himself. I am not rendering the story precisely in its own terms. The word “reason” is the adversary term in the idiom of the story. But reason is clearly the “moral reason” of Enlightenment philosophy, and the underground man for all his articulateness has only half-articulately, but unmistakably, pitted himself against ethical rationality in the manner of the immoralist. The underground man is pre-Nietzschean.

Gide’s immoralist, who is post-Nietzschean, is hardly as rich in fictional reality as the underground man, but the ideological implications of his being are perhaps clearer. Michel, the hero of The Immoralist, gains his freedom and his health at the cost of his wife’s life. The freedom proves illusory, and the sense of emptiness and directionlessness from which he speaks at the beginning and the end of the tale may conceal a sense of guilt. In any event, the terms of Michel’s existence are such that he cannot at once be free and responsible to others.

In Camus’s The Stranger, morality as perceived through the consciousness of the “hero” Meursault is seen as conventionality. The sense of horror at the callous and murderous behavior of Meursault is muted by the spiritual vacuity of society’s values. Meursault’s moral idiocy is made to seem attractive, even charismatic. It is not that Camus means to moralize on Meursault’s behalf. He is rather trying to get us to suspend our conventionally ethical view of Meursault. The effect is to overcome a prejudice against him, not necessarily to create a prejudice for him.

This suspension of the ethical is precisely what is supposed to occur in our reading of the tales of Gide and Dostoevsky as well. Our view of the careers of these heroes or antiheroes is almost scientifically dispassionate. I should qualify this statement by noting that in the great novels that follow Notes from Underground the underground man is the demon within that the heroes (Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Ivan) must overcome.

Modern literature deliberately refuses wisdom for truthtelling, the witnessing of chaos. Truthtelling, in this sense, depends upon the relaxation of the moral will. And the relaxation of the moral will is a heuristic for experiencing and seeing, but not for conduct. In becoming complicit with the vision, one is turning the heuristic into a guide for conduct—which when we think about the monstrosities contemplated by modern consciousness is a monumental absurdity.

Modern literature seems to be aware of its own loss of spiritual authority. In one sense, it does not criticize modern life so much as become part of it. For example, the ethos of modern artistic creation resembles the ethos of industry and technology. Innovation and novelty are primary values, which means that artistic creation like industrial production involves planned obsolescence, though ideas of uniqueness and quality still inform artistic creation, so that the analogy with industrial production is incomplete. It is not merely that one does not expect a style to last more than several years but also that the perishability of works of art is implied by the logic of such art. The sentiment about perishability is a candid confession that eternal values do not inhere in these works.²

The perishability of modern objects derives in part from their superficiality. The image has been flattened because the invisible spiritual reality to which it once referred seems no longer available to modern consciousness. The “new novelists” in France, for example, render the surface qualities of people and things without the least suggestion of anything below the surface. If a sense of a hidden reality emerges, it is because blatant superficiality becomes suspect, perhaps as an effort at concealment. The romantic idea that there are depths to the private life has been seriously undermined, if not destroyed, according to Natalie Sarraute, by the stupefying power of mass communication, which has made banality a major industry. Whether or not Mme. Sarraute has adduced the true cause of superficiality, the fact remains that an artist of her seriousness is in complicity with this view when she renders characters simply as bundles of reactions to situations—in a word, as tropisms.³ Having lost permanence and depth, modern objects exist in an egalitarian space, which makes the critical capacity for discrimination and distinction irrelevant.

There is a paradox in the career of modern art as I describe it. The reduction of life to banality and the uncritical complacency with which it is accepted is the result of the hypertrophy of the critical faculty. The virtues of modernism are honesty and lucidity. All forms of mystification, aesthetic, religious and political, are the object of merciless, critical scrutiny.⁴ “In an age of uncertainty,” Eliot remarks in “The Frontiers of Criticism,” “no explorable area can be forbidden ground.”⁵ But the effect of the scrutiny becomes uncritical at the point that it loses its basis in a conviction about values. And the point is reached in the unchecked drive to unmask all values for what they are—maskings of egoistic motives and power drives. It was Nietzsche, the modernist philosopher par excellence, who perceived the nihilist route of modernism and engaged simultaneously in the practice of unmasking and in a critique of the perniciousness of unmasking. He understood, too self-consciously alas, the need for illusions (values, pieties, beliefs) to sustain a life.

Descartes tried to free mind from the constraints of the body, that is, the irrational, in order to allow the mind to exercise its powers to the fullest. But his dualism unwittingly subverted those powers. The advantage of having mind rooted in and limited by the body is that it assures for the exercise of the rational or critical intellect a basis in conviction—or at least makes it possible. By the body I mean something richer than its physical component, though I do not want to minimize its importance: I mean the body in its emotional, passional, even spiritual aspect, on which D. H. Lawrence bestows the phrase “the greater life of the body.” Without the body the mind cannot experience the world. Modernism is associated with the fate of science in the way in which it testifies to (without either sanctioning or condemning) the dissociation of mind from body and voice from persona. The result is a “critical” machine of extraordinary destructive power.

Beckett’s work is a locus classicus for the consequences of the Cartesian split, which he presents comically and without moral animus. His characters are disembodied minds interminably turning every moment of experience into an endless exercise in scholasticism. It is an anxious scholasticism possessing neither a center nor a terminus. The mental energy of a Beckett character has been generated to no purpose. Its continuous triviality is redeemed for significance by the undeniable anguish of the voice. Godot is the anxious expectation of a terminus that never occurs.

Modernist virtues act as corrosives, subverting all tacit, unexamined acceptances and beliefs. The impulse to bring everything into the light, to rationalize the world, may represent a will to knowledge and mastery (an ambition of modernism), but it may also undermine deep, unquestioning commitment to institutions, activities, and people, the kind of commitment that sustains life. I think Baudelaire understood this in urging the importance of mystery. For him life had to be lived as problem and predicament, the significance of which was always to be partially concealed, so that society would discover in its activity a moral tension and spiritual awareness. It is as if this great modern poet is here an implicit critic of one major tendency of modernism. But his own formulations imply not a spontaneous relation to mystery, but a fabrication of it out of a need, a condition that implies a modern problem. It is from a sense of problem that John Henry Newman, Michael Polanyi, and Michael Oakeshott have engaged in an important critique of the nihilist tendency of modernism in its arrogant rationalist version of bringing everything into the light.⁶ “Rationalist,” I might add, in its method of reductive analysis (see Dostoevsky’s underground man), not in its valuation of the life of reason.⁷ They have argued in varying ways for the tacit element in knowledge and in the moral life. Reason, with its uninh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Modernism and the Critical Spirit
• 2 English Social Criticism and the Spirit of Reformation
• 3 The Reality of Disillusion in T. S. Eliot
• 4 The Organic Society of F. R. Leavis
• 5 A Postscript to the Higher Criticism
• 6 The Formalist Avant-Garde and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Values
• 7 Aristocrats and Jacobins
• 8 Flaubert and the Powerlessness of Art
• 9 The Blasphemy of Joycean Art
• Index