Modernism: The Basics

Laura Winkiel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317537892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modernism: The Basics provides an accessible overview of the study of modernism in its global dimensions. Examining the key concepts, history and varied forms of the field, it guides the reader through the major approaches, outlining key debates, to answer such questions as:

• What is modernism?
• How did modernism begin?
• Has modernism developed differently in different media?
• How is it related to postmodernism and postcolonialism?
• How have politics, urbanization and new technologies affected modernism?

With engaging examples from art, literature and historical documents, each chapter provides suggestions for further reading, histories of relevant movements and clear definitions of key terminology, making this an essential guide for anyone approaching the study of modernism for the first time.

1

What is Modernism?

“DIE in the Past/Live in the Future.”

Mina Loy, Aphorisms on Futurism (1914)

“One must be absolutely modern!”

Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (1873)

“Literature is news that STAYS news.”

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)

“Colonial idiocy will be purified in the welder’s blue flame.”

Suzanne Césaire, “Surrealism and Us” (1943)

This book introduces readers to the basics of modernism. It is addressed to students located throughout the English-speaking world. You, the reader, may be coming to modernism with no prior knowledge of it, studying for an exam in secondary school or university, teaching it for the first time, or seeking to update your seasoned understanding of it. The aim of this book is to provide you with two key tools essential to the study of modernism:

• how to closely read modernist texts and paintings;
• how to contextualize those close readings in the histories, locations and intercultural exchanges that inform modernist works.

How a work of modernist literature or art registers its social, political, intercultural and historical surroundings is subject to much scholarly debate. Accordingly, this book will also inform you about the history and current developments in the study of modernism. In the end, it hopes to persuade you that understanding modernism is a valuable endeavor – despite its sometimes off-putting first encounter – because it will give you a sense of and appreciation for the tectonic shift in social and political relations, philosophy and artistic representation that occurred in the early to mid part of the twentieth century, the reverberations of which are still felt today.

The basic story about modernism goes like this: something extraordinary happened in the arts around the beginning of the twentieth century. This new art was chaotic and fragmented in its form, and allusive and indirect in what it meant. It was often difficult to understand because it was so fragmented, allusive and indirect in what it meant. Though only a small group of artists and writers practiced this groundbreaking art, it gradually became central to the study of the literature and painting during this time period. It came to be called “modernism” – meaning “the new and the now.” Helping to popularize the study of these difficult modernist texts after World War II in the Anglophone (English-speaking) university system, a group of professors and scholars crafted a special kind of expertise – a set of close reading skills and formal analyses that came to be known as New Criticism – and successfully made this method predominate in the teaching of literature. Generations of readers came to see these difficult texts – such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – as monuments of art and works of modernist genius. And while these works are certainly worth studying, as we will see, we will also discuss how this emphasis on difficult literature obscures from view other kinds of modernist writing underway during this same period of time, the study of which we will be calling “the new modernisms.”

Traditionally, modernist scholars consider the period 1890–1910 as the prehistory of modernism, when only a few artists and writers, mostly in France, experimented with new forms. (In recent decades, this period has been stretched back to 1850 to include poet Charles Baudelaire and novelist Gustave Flaubert.) The period between 1910–30 is called “high” modernism and denotes the time when the most recognizably modernist works, such as Ulysses and The Waste Land, were created. Finally, “late” modernism, 1930–55, supposes modernism’s gradual extinction in favor of postmodernism. Even under this traditional periodizing rubric of modernism, certain disciplines – modernist architecture, for example – have always challenged this time frame. International-style modernist architecture arguably held sway until around 1972, when Robert Venturi published Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, a book that embraced post- modernist styles (for a discussion of postmodernism, see the Afterword).

Given this story, it is likely that if you have any previous conception at all regarding what modernism is, you probably assume that modernism is difficult and that we need to study the important “high” modernist texts and paintings carefully in order to decipher their meanings. To give you a sense of modernism as it is understood this way, we will begin this chapter with a close reading of portions of the canonical masterpiece of modernist poetry, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922), followed by an examination of the visual abstractions of cubism, as demonstrated in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), the breakthrough painting by Pablo Picasso. While the emphasis in this book is on modernist literature, we will occasionally use painting as a visual teaching tool. For instance, we turn to Picasso’s painting in order to understand important formal qualities of modernist literature and painting, especially in terms of how they differ from realist representation. Realism is a mode of literary and artistic representation that aims to convey its subject matter in a faithful or true-to-life manner. (Although we are here distinguishing realism from modernism in order to define modernist formal qualities, the two terms, “modernism” and “realism,” are not mutually exclusive, as we will discuss in Chapter 4.)

Then we will consider our second point: why it is no longer sufficient to think of modernism as strictly the domain of experimental art by white European men, with perhaps a sprinkling of experimental women artists, such as Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein, thrown into the mix. For those readers whose interest lies primarily with the canon of modernist authors, you are invited to consult the “further reading” section at the end of this chapter for introductions to modernism that concentrate on difficult “high modernist” texts and paintings. A strict emphasis on the canon, however, curtails a fuller understanding of how modernism took place in many locations and in many forms. It misses the forest for a few difficult trees. Modernism: The Basics is different from other introductions to modernism because it includes the most recent developments in the study of modernism, what are often called “the new modernisms.” In short, our emphasis on “the new modernisms” reflects the growing awareness that modernism arose around much of the world, often through social movements (such as women’s, labor and national independence movements), and during an ongoing period of great technological, economic and political change. New media – print, sound, visual and communication technologies – also transformed how artists and writers saw the possibilities of their art. This dynamic version of modernism will show the reader that there are many kinds of modernism, sometimes at odds with one another, but often sharing similar concerns and formal inventions.

The word modernism derives from the Latin modernus (modo, “just now”); it relates to “mode,” or fashionable novelty, as well as to a break from tradition, the orthodox or inherited way of doing things (Latham and Rogers 19). How did modernists “make it new,” as the poet Ezra Pound termed it? To understand the formal techniques and content of the “newness” of modernism, we need to extend our understanding of the contexts in which modernism arose. By contexts, we mean the various conditions in which a text is produced: how, when, where, why and by whom was it written or painted? In exploring the many historical, conceptual and locational contexts of modernism, the reader will learn that modernism:

• arose through intercultural borrowings;
• travels around the world and takes different forms in different locations;
• expresses forces “from below,” whether new media, popular culture, or social movements.

Of course, it is impossible to cover fully these developments or to discuss modernism as if it were a single “thing.” Modernism, a notoriously vague and slippery term, can denote many different things. It has been used to designate a historical period (usually 1890–1940), an experimental form of artistic production, and a rethinking of all aspects of life, from industrialization to religion and from sexuality to interior design. To manage this complexity, this book introduces the reader to one possible way of mapping the vast terrain of modernism: with an attention to the “histories,” “forms” and “concepts” of modernism. In addition, this particular map refers the reader to other sources so that you can choose to focus on one point, widen your gaze or find a different map, depending on your interests.

Close Reading: The Waste Land and Les Demoiselles D’avignon

Close reading refers to the activity of carefully analyzing a text or painting in strictly its own terms: content, language, style and form. This critical practice began after World War I in Anglo-American literary institutions in order to assess how a work of art creates meaning in ways that go beyond “mere” words. Let’s see how this activity works by closely reading a section of The Waste Land, a long poem that served as a preeminent cultural resource for the development of close reading techniques and for the initial Anglo-American definition of modernism. We take the following quotation from Section Two, “A Game of Chess.” In this scene, the narrator describes a painting hung above a fireplace in a sitting room in early twentieth-century London (when poetry describes a painting, it is often called ekphrasis):

Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

(8, #97–103)

At a first read, this quotation seems almost illegible, so densely packed are its literary allusions to other poems, sparked by the narrator’s reflections as he/she gazes at the painting. The allusions, once we understand them, will allow us to perceive the underlying conceptual and formal structures, or what Eliot calls the “mythical method” (178). Eliot explained this method while reviewing James Joyce’s experimental novel Ulysses, but critics have often pointed out that this method equally applies to Eliot’s The Waste Land. Let’s begin: above the old-fashioned fireplace, the narrator sees a picture of Philomela changed into a nightingale, a story told by the Latin poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) in The Metamorphosis, an allusion that Eliot makes explicit for the reader in a footnote. “As though a window gave” suggests a sudden, unexpected glimpse of paradise that brings a moment of relief to the narrator. But “sylvan scene,” an allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 4, darkens the mood because it describes Satan’s approach to Eden and prefigures the fall of humankind from paradise. It also describes the narrator’s disillusioned state in present-day Europe, just after the First World War, and his/her own sexual sterility and paralysis. The narrator’s despair is mirrored by Philomela’s song. Though she was changed into a nightingale after her rape and mutilation (her tongue was cut off) by the barbarous King Tereus, she nevertheless sings of her woes: her voice is inviolable; it won’t be silenced. The desolation and sterility of her song is suggested by the use of “desert” rather than paradise and “cried” rather than “sang.” With the use of the adverb “still” twice in the last two lines, the poem flashes forward from the myths of antiquity to the present moment. The world, like the barbarous king, still pursues – and violently destroys – beauty and nature. “Jug Jug,” though a conventional Elizabethan poetic reference to the nightingale’s song, hardly sounds like a beautiful, if mournful, song. It suggests a vaguely sexual, threatening and vulgar sensibility, especially because “dirty ears” are hearing her song in this way. The courage and beauty of Philomela’s song is negated by its sordid reception by the current state of civilization. (See also Wilson 92–93.)

There is much more that we can closely read and analyze in this quotation. We could pay attention to line breaks, noting where a statement seems to hang in the balance and how the breaks leave the reader to imagine what the poem does not say, such as the actual violation of Philomela. We could note that the diction, or the way in which the poem says what it says, is generally commonplace. Outside of classical and Renaissance allusions, the language is neither frilly nor archaic. The meter is in iambic pentameter, a traditional poetic form, something that much of the rest of the poem rejects. The last line, beginning with “Jug Jug,” is shorter, jarring the reader awake with its opening spondaic (long, long) foot, suggesting in formal terms what the words also convey: that the unlettered masses who now dominate Western European societies disregard high culture. Their conversations, rendered in free verse (vers libre), which is unmetered and uses colloquial or ordinary speech, in the next part of the poem, also testify to this fact. Now, let’s take these raw analytic materials and make some observations about what seems particularly modernist about this poem.

The first thing we might note is the extraordinary compression in these lines. An early (1931) explicator of modernist poetry, Edmund Wilson, quantifies this compression:

In a poem of only four hundred and three lines (to which are added, however, seven pages of notes), [Eliot] manages to include quotations from, allusions to, or imitations of, at least thirty-five different writers (some of them, such as Shakespeare and Dante, laid under contribution several times) – as well as several popular songs; and to introduce passages in six foreign languages, including Sanskrit.

(93–94)

Why such dense allusiveness, and what makes this technique modernist? In a 1932 essay, F. R. Leavis argues that “the seeming disjointedness” related to Eliot’s allusions and abrupt jumps in time, place and reference “reflect the present state of civilization” (173–74). In this, he is echoing Eliot’s own words in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) where Eliot states that the “variety and complexity” of the contemporary world necessitates that the poet be “more comprehensive” by referencing other works of art and culture, and more indirect in order “to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into meaning” (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• User’s guide
• 1 What is modernism?
• 2 Concepts
• 3 Histories
• 4 Forms
• Afterword: modernism today
• Glossary
• Modernist time line
• Index