Modern Isms

As I continue reading responses to postmodernism by people who were never really on the fronts of it, I find there's a problem with the definitions of modernism used by people who have encountered it primarily in English. They seem to leave out aspects related to the futurisms in Italy and Russia; and Dada, Surrealism and Cubism in France, Spain, and Germany.

Americanists seem to have the greatest problem, perhaps since their attitudes seem colored by responses to TS Eliot's New Criticism. Eliot wrote some bold and beautiful poetry, but for all of his perception, the movement was retrogressive on several counts.

• His near-fascist politics


• He cast the issues of "hard language" and the "objective correlative" as an eschewing of emotion instead of a recognition of perspectivist dissonance between author and reader.


• He incorporated the essentialist Anglican metaphysics and many aspects of 18th Century French symbolism as parts of modernism as it became institutionalized. In doing so, he marginalized in the US and Britain the anti-essentialist concepts that had been the heart of modernism in the teens and twenties, including the irrational, the unconscious in its various forms, zaum, decentering of the author.

These issues finally returned in various ways in the 50's and thereafter, but adherents of the various schools, critics perhaps more than artists, often miss the larger synthesis of the earlier movement that included the innovations on the continent.

For what it's worth, a good sampling of at least the poetry that they lack can be found in Rothenberg and Joris' Poems for the Millenium VOL I. The second volume is grand, too, but the first covers the area that most of us would call modernism.

Framing the Margins, Blow-by-Blow

Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. NY: Oxford, 1994.

"My aim with this book is to substantiate such claims as [Bell] Hooks makes about socially marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodern 'uncertainty,' but also -- and more importantly -- to suggest that marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness is itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the 'general' postmodern condition" (4).

So, one might hope here for a position that will unite formal and social interests, but Harper's aims appear otherwise.

. . . if formalist aestheticism appears to us as the dominant tendency of 'high modernism,' as it is currently apphrehended, then it must be acknowledged as well that this aestheticism derives its significance from the its status as a reaction against the apparent meaninglessness and absurdity of contemporary life, which was seen as reflected in the modernist works that thematized chaos and contingency. In other words, the dis-integrated, fragmentary nature of modern human existence is always a subtext of high modernist aestheticism, which is also precisely a defensive hedge against the former. Conversely, modernist explorations of discontinuity and disorder always funciton in the context of aesthetist endeavors that counterbalance them and keep them in cjeck.

Given this view of the matter, it becomes possible to see how postmodernism can constitute both a break from and a continuation of the modernist undertaking. Postmodernism breaks with the formalist aestheticism that functioned to suppress modernism's full playing out of the ramifications of experiential disjunctutre, and, this unrestrained exploration that postmodernism accedes to what I have identified as one of its prime characteristices, the thematization of subjective fragmentation, over the more modernist concern of subjective alientation, a distinction invoked by Jameson that we would do well to clarify a bit here (21).

We we have a quick binary opposition of "formal" modernism "restraining" by "aestheticism" a response to "meaningless." Further, "contingency" is somehow related to "chaos." The resulting field of categorization neatly cuts anything of formal interest from anything involving full and appropriate response to the human needs that Harper treats as "fragmentation" or "alienation," as opposed to, say, poverty, oppression, disempowerment, or social dysfunction.

Since art or thought can no more be "formless" than "pure," such divisions must be intended loosely. Does Harper fight the ghosts of Eliot's minions, actual experimentalists like the NY, Objectivist, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and fellow travellers, or is he even crass enough to try to mix them?

He gives Woof's Dalloway as immediate example, describing a "subjective dispersal" that "greatly resembles postmodern alienation" (22), finally concluding that Woolf's is a modern, not postmodern novel for its lack of "emphasis" on the fragmentation. But there's more. It's VW's "aestheticist hedge against experiential fragmentation that I have identified as a key component" (23). This is apparently so because Clarissa "resolves herself" in time for her party (23-24).

This really does not explain how Harper would deal with Dada, Khlebnikov, Marinetti, Breton, Artaud. It doesn't even describe what he might do with Pound, whose Cantos might reasonably considered fragmented. Is Oppen modern and Pound postmodern? Let's see if a suitably postmodern example is given.

Before this is resolved, I find another issue: "Nin and Barnes depict a psychic fragmentation that is unique to women and actually constituted in femininity" (25). So, women are PoMo, men modern? Let's keep Yin and Yang apart, they'll have little dialectics. But no, no explanation is forthcoming. Harper gives a quick catalog of following chapters, and jumps into individual studies.

WEST

So the next chapter deals with Nate West, author of Day of the Locust. H cites some dialog from Snell, two characters considering something vaguely like Zeno or Parmenides. Apparently we are to deduce from this that West's characters' quite coherent discussion is fragmented, whereas, say, Faulkner's Benjy is not.

Oh! He's on to Apollonaire! But he associates GA with "concrete poetry," something that the de Campos brothers or Pignatari would deny, since GA's shapes don't relate to syntax, whereas those in true concrete poetry do. He is onto something here, though, since he appears to be trying to describe a single sign, symbol, or icon (it's not clear which or whether the distinction is part of his appraisal) that means in two ways. So, yes, GA's calligrammes fit roughly if one doesn't want to really examine the mechanism (36-37).

"Linguistic signification can in no way be divorced from human physiology" (42).
'Nice.

Nin, Barnes, Critical Feminist Unconscious

"For women is man's creation, in the view of Nin's characters. . . "

It's been a while, but I don't recall anything special about that in Nin. Perhaps it's just that I do not share certain conventions about men and women being independent of each other. One survives; one is blue. How much suffering constitutes dependency? Nin's characters do produce several believable images of being "split" over love. But frankly, I don't see why one shouldn't react to Nin as a late Romantic humanist working in forms that date from Baudelaire or Rimbaud's old Foolish Virgin, What's-His-Name.

H does engage N's persistant freudian (we're really talking about Otto Rank here, N's analyst). The awkwardness of Freud's boys-only terminology runs through the discussion, but not in any way that Nin herself would find overwhelmingly strange. Nin's romantic personae are fruity and abundant, but why I should think the remove or discontinuity of the post-symboliste imagery and Freud-via-Rank-and-Artaud reflexive gestures constitute a more complete response to anything, I have no idea.

Barnes may be more interesting. Her women are, of course, incomplete (74). Of course, the paunchy guy she roasts in the opening pages can hardly be complete without his Hedwig, hein? Hedwig who thrusts her baby from her, hands it some ridiculous name, and dies. Who's complete? Female desire, or "incompleteness," if we must, occupies Barnes more than any corresponding male anything. All of which is fine, but doth not an ideology make. Harper's take:

. . . Barnes's work, along with Nin's, is informed by a feminist political unconscious that actually provides the narrative tension necessary to bind the work in a choherent whole. The suppression of that feminist content beneath the depiction of a generalized existential malaise reproduces the very disenfranchisement of women that the text simultaneously represents, in the form of psychic fragmentation (89).

All this seems pretty arbitrary. Social and sexual desires have always been as political as they have been anything else, since at least Simone de Beauvoir explicitly so. If all we mean is that the authors have unresolved desires that relate to politics, point granted. What is or is not "conscious" or "repressed" remains unclear. Nin certainly seems somewhat occulted behind the veils of symbol, and I for one would be more willing to call this "aesthetization" than I would use the term for a modernist, which Nin is not. Yet surely, Barnes' evocative, biting text should not be subject to the same criticism just because Nora and Robin don't ride off into the sunset.

A politically conscous criticism will entail the excavation of that feminist content through a reading designed to illuminate the various specific conditions that will become inscribed in the postmodern moment of the late twentieth century (89).

Gwendolyn Brooks.

Here we're establishing black female subjectivity. So in the poem "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," we're to understand that the parallel sentences are not parallel. If I understand the intention, the personae are not in symmetrical situations, and H finds the latter sentence priviledged grammatically. The semiotics used to further describe this are strange.

"One reason for this lies in what Saussure has identified as the linear nature of linguistic signification" -- if indeed it is the signification that can be considered linear. Signification requires comparison of earlier and later grammatical elements, which requires recursion. A Saussurian system must involve a comparison of said elements with the entire system, so the recursion might be rather involved. H considers that ". . . what is under our consideration at any given moment must necessarily predominate . . ." (100). The reader may judge whether that is always so.

Cleanth Brooks, New Critics

"The Formalist Critics." Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Cleanth Brooks was one of the "New Critics" that followed T.S. Eliot in ushering the wild WWI and '20's poetry back into political and aesthetic conservatism. He gives about as good a summation of New Critical dogma as one could ask:

That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object.
That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity -- the kind of whole in which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole.
That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed, those of logic.
That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated.
That form is meaning.
That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic.
That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction, but got at through the concrete and the particular.
That literature is not a surrogate for religion.
That, as Allen Tate says, "Specific moral problems" are the subject matter of literature; but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.
That the principles of criticism define the area relevant to literary criticism; they do not constitute a method for carrying out th e criticism" (22).

I find the explanation that follows the list bland, sadly, so I'd rather send people to T.S. Eliot, whose objective correlative more or less underlies all of the above.

It's interesting to compare these men with Russian formalism. Brooks' insistence on "symbolism" seems to favor Jakobson's "metaphoric" as opposed to "metonymic" operation of language. Mind you, Jakobson uses "metonymic" oddly enough that I wonder about translation issues. He seems to mean something like semantic for metaphoric and syntactic for metonymic.

This seems part of the sharp division between Eliot and William Carlos Williams, the more progressive wing of the imagist cum vorticist cum objectivist camp. In "The Language of Paradox," originally in A Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks misses completely the idea behind Williams' "things," and lapses back into what amounts to a rehash of Hulme.

Williams' red wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All, to take a familiar example, touches the sublime because the verb depends throws the objects under description (the nouns) into sudden arrangement so that the issue of arrangement itself becomes highlighted, in part by the very lack of direct description of Williams' beloved things, and we catch the undescribed human in the act of arrangement that constitutes human perception. To see how ideal Williams' things are, crack a volume of Robert Lowell open to any page, and compare.

The Russian formalists, for whatever reason, had no such problems. Jakobson and Schklovsky and Eisenberg's theories included and accounted reasonably well for the most radical work of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and for Mandelshtam thereafter.

Would that Trotsky and Stalin have been so comprehensive!

One can watch an odd interaction of Eliot's late symbolism crossed with Pound's truly modernist work in The Wasteland, particularly if one examines the facsimile edition. It's Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland: A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound. Valerie Eliot. Ed. London: Harvest, 1971, though Amazon has no listing. One can observe at length the extensive distinctions between mellifluous early work like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and quieter later work like The Quartets. The Wasteland, of course, was hewn and scraped by Pound, a very different compositor than Eliot, and one who extensively suits Jakobson's metonymic in ways that Eliot would not care to. Pound makes the elements tense against each other through juxtaposition of startling contrasts. Eliot, in all cases, retains a more transparently unified approach, laden with transitions and fundamentally predicative.

But the fact that I find myself talking about Williams, Pound, and Eliot in this entry says most of what I personally have to say about Cleanth Brooks.