In the history of European literature, music, and pictorial art, one style has ordinarily evolved into the next. There was no great leap from Romanesque to Gothic. Their relationship was and remains simple to track. Even in cases in which a sharp break occurred—between Enlightenment rationalism, for example, and the Romantic rebellion against it—the transformation is coherent. This linear model explodes into a thousand shards with the rise of modernism. Its confusion of artistic languages recalls the biblical Tower of Babel. The one language seems unconnected to any other. Painting seems disconnected from poetry or music. The spectacular efflorescence of modernist styles and forms has appeared chaotic to most observers. There ought to be a common denominator, a unified field embracing various aspects. Modernism, as the conventional unifying explanation goes, opposes tradition as an outdated, dogmatic, and oppressive force.
But how helpful is a negative definition, specifying what modernism is not rather than what it is? What might serve as a more exacting counter-definition? In this book the defining issue will be art’s relation to the real and to the true, the here and now, but also its unfolding over time and with special attention to the refusal of fixity and formula. In “The Painter and Modern Life,” Baudelaire famously characterizes modernity in art as the awareness not only of the established, enduring truths but also being alive to the ephemeral qualities that are just as real but impossible to grasp with the tools at the disposal of Realism. Mimesis must reveal yet not reify or otherwise immobilize “the transitory fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid.”1 According to Paul Valéry’s even more radical view: “Whatever is not ineffable has no importance.”2 Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos despairs of ever doing justice at all to this element of experience. Yet he also eloquently confesses to being moved by what is unnamed or barely nameable in even the most commonplace human experience.3 In his unmediated encounter with the real, there is a clue to the nature of aesthetic modernism.
These well-known forays into understanding preconceptual experience have a bearing on establishing what modernism is. Baudelaire’s key point is that the characteristic moment of modernism is this: modernism seeks out ways to come to terms with those exceptional, unnamed aspects of lived experience, including everyday experience, that elude conventional representation.4 In our lives there are, so to speak, nonconforming realities, singularities that do not fit into any pre-established framework. Nothing in our inventory of established forms corresponds to them. Because they are unique, they defy categorization and they resist conceptualization. Yet even if it is impossible to represent such unpredictable experiences in a positivistic way—the way an engineer might mathematically represent a bridge’s structural dynamic, relying on the certainty that physics is always the same—it does not lie beyond the power of art to shed a revealing light on those realities not bound by laws, as Baudelaire, Valéry, and Hofmannsthal avow.5 Nietzsche, too, should be mentioned in this context because he tirelessly asserts the superior reality of dynamic becoming over static being. In consequence of unending metamorphosis, mimesis addresses the sense of and pleasure in what is exceptional or unique rather than what is always alike. According to Nietzsche, art revels in “nuance (which is real modernity), in what is not general, runs counter to the drive that takes its pleasure and force in the typical…”.6 Representation operates according to the abstract laws of sameness and certainty. Mimesis, sensuous rather than abstract, shapes itself to follow the mobile contours of otherness: the new, the different, the momentary, the unpredictable, the not yet known. Modernists seek strategies of mimesis to disclose these elusive realities without reifying them and so making them seem, falsely, to be merely novel iterations of the same old familiar truths and eternal verities. Art’s task is not to reconfirm the familiar but to reveal what is not yet known. This claim raises the question of how we might clarify modernism’s still uneasy, unsettling relationship to the real and to the truth.
Virginia Woolf, for one, felt uneasy. “Have I the power of creating true reality?” she wondered.
7 It is the central question for any artist, not just modernists. But her odd phrasing gives pause. In what sense might art
create rather than represent something true and real? Good artists represent the known world in arresting and striking ways. The best artists, though, do more. They can see and shed light on what the others can’t, or won’t, or at least don’t see. They make the real and the true available to the rest of us, even when the reality in question is transitory and fugitive.
Vincent van Gogh is probably the most obvious example of a powerfully disclosive vision of this sort. He revealed the landscape of Provence—before him a mere provincial boondock—as lively and beautiful. Similarly, Proust notes the
way Renoir disclosed but also created the world for his skeptical contemporaries:
Lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, the Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages too are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky….8
By seeing and showing the elusive aspects of its being, the artist also transforms the perceived world, reveals a truth and in so doing creates a reality. According to Paul Celan this creation of reality is not only possible but the artist’s most pressing responsibility. “Reality does not exist as such; reality needs to be sought and achieved.”9 Living experience, new experience, is not easy to grasp or disclose, because it likely does not conform to art’s pre-established patterns. New art requires a talent for fresh, unprejudiced looking—a species of naïveté—plus the ability to translate that fresh, unobstructed vision into words or pictures, sound and rhythm.
The artist attends to her unmediated experience of the world as it presents itself in the here and now. That attention flows over into expression as music or story, picture or poem. Expression need not be understood as the “representation” of reality but should be taken more along the order of Woolf’s ambition to actually create it. “The business of art,” explained Gertrude Stein in a lecture of 1926, “is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present.”10 Interestingly, she says nothing about representation. The emphasis falls elsewhere: art, she says, must live. This fidelity to the living moment, but also to a work’s ongoing life in time, is the key ambition of modernism and not, as is often objected, elite intellectualism or novelty for the sake of novelty. Sometimes modernism entails a rejection of conventional or traditional forms, but not always. Portraits and landscapes continue to be painted. The longstanding prestige of sonnets and the sonata form largely fall by the wayside, but the novel remains supple and strong as a living form, even as continual adjustments are being made to it, like rebuilding a ship at sea.
Modernism’s adversarial relation to tradition has been exaggerated, despite prominent skeptics. “I cannot insist enough,” wrote Clement Greenberg in 1960, “that Modernism has never meant, and does not mean now, anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling, of tradition, but it also means its further evolution.”11 In this same spirit I will argue, for example, that what is ordinarily thought to be modernist fiction’s breakthrough masterpiece, Ulysses, is, when seen precisely—as T. S. Eliot saw it—not a radical departure from Victorian fiction, but its grand culmination, a final deepening of that tradition and not a radical break.
Ulysses appeared in 1922, the same year in which Kafka wrote The Castle, a very different book and not the culmination of any tradition, though Kafka was no antagonist of tradition. Kafka wanted to see the world with unclouded eyes, as he thought Goethe and Flaubert had been able to see. Like them, he translates what he sees into clean, clear prose, but into his own era’s frugal idiom rather than an expansive style of the past. In addition, his understanding of mimesis differs markedly from Joyce’s concept of representation. “I am an ending or beginning,” said Kafka of himself.12 As I argue in the next chapter, his novel (a beginning) and not Joyce’s (an ending) marks the step into so-called high modernism.
The difference between these two exceptionally accomplished works of art raises a key question for understanding the nature of modernism: how does any artist go about actually living in the present as a writer or painter or composer without reverting to established forms? Even Baudelaire stayed with conventional verse forms in his radical Les Fleurs du mal (1857). How is form entwined in the living experience of an artist’s present? Tradition is powerful, for it circumscribes the available means of expression. This framing occurs in the languages of form. To write or paint or compose outside of the familiar forms and styles threatens to render the work of art unintelligible. Surely a central element would be to create a style that embodies the truth of a given age, and not one that imitates the past. A new age needs a new style, but that style must also remain intelligible.
Consider the artistic plight that faced Emperor Franz Joseph’s architects. In 1857 he ordered that Vienna’s medieval city walls be torn down to make way for new building. A major European capital suddenly had open space in the city’s center. It was a momentous opportunity for modern and even modernist expression of the new era’s fresh spirit. What style, then, would best express imperial Austria’s modern identity, its future? Where would the modern style come from? How might the artist go about expressing the living present without copying models of the dead past? As Hermann Broch and many others have pointed out, Vienna’s architects failed. They erected neo-Baroque, neo-Classical, neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, and many other such eclectically historicizing buildings. These structures were and are grand, but they also pose modernism’s founding riddle.
What sort of art expresses who we were and are after the end of the nineteenth century? No unified defining style emerged, at least not in the sense of historical period styles. Consequently, the basic question is different from that of earlier ages. Without a unifying style against which to proof and judge individual works of art, it makes sense to look for some other sort of family resemblance. It will not do to settle for the view that all the different “modernisms” are unrelated and must be discussed in discrete contexts. In the absence of an overarching style, a set of key issues will serve as a framework within which the seeming anarchy of modernist movements, forms, techniques, and individual artworks—especially those that have become canonical—might make sense.
I will adumbrate these key issues now, briefly and abstractly, then bring them into sharper focus over the course of this introduction and continue to develop them throughout this book. The first feature of common culture in modernism is its drive toward simplicity. The conventional idea that modernist art is characteristically “difficult” will not stand scrutiny. Second, the idea that modernism valorizes subjectivity will also stand in need of revision. In fact, the larger modernist impulse is to overcome subjectivity. Third, the view that modernism snubs the average person by skewing toward the esoteric high culture is a problem that looks much different now, a century distant from modernism’s beginnings. Fourth is a related point: modernist art is predicated not on cultural and intellectual sophistication but on a recovery of the frank directness—the naïvité—that both elite culture and mass culture have suppressed. Fifth is the question of mimesis. I will argue that mimesis and representation overlap but are not the same. Modernist art aimed overall not at “the representation of reality,” no matter whether that reality is thought objectiv...
