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Cambridge Companion

Not as great as I’d hoped. Not a lot of take-home, if you know what I mean.

Except Levenson’s intro.

Levenson’s Intro

• “Nor should anyone waste tears of sympathy on figures who themselves were more than willing to cut the shape of the past to suit present polemical circumstances.” 1
  • All engaged in “Creative violence”
    • Picasso’s masks on Demoiselles D’Avignon
    • Woolf giving Shax a sister
    • Stein’s explosion of the sentence
  • And Yet, “the agon between the revolutionary artist and benighted traditionalist was a caricature”
    • ex: Rainey: “high Modernist purpose was closely wound in the web of the commercial market” 2
• How should we really see them?
  • “Rather than paint them as elite purists seeking a magic circle for the imagination, we can better see these artists as sharply conscious of their historical entanglements, their place within an epoch of accelerating social modernization that was always a challenge to cultural Modernism.” 2
    • wait, what’s cultural modernism? odd
• Enemies
  • Journalism
  • Gentility
  • Timidity
  • Orthodoxy
• Modernism has “misunderstandings” at the start b/c of the willingness of its practitioners to make statements about what they were doing
  • “setting the terms by which others would not qualify for understanding” 2
  • but now, he says, in 1980s-1999, we’ve opened it up past the “men of 1914” so that academic discourse no longer reproduces the limited menu announced by the loud Pounds and Eliots of the time
    • and b/c of it, will never get a unified account of modernism again. that’s good. He wants a minimal def of modernism, but maximal def of “modernizing works and movements” 3 hmmm
• What is left that all of them have?
  • “the recurring act of fragmenting unities (unities of character or plot or pictorial space or lyric form), the use of mythic paradigms, the refusal of norms of beauty, the willingness to make radical linguistic experiment”
  • “inspired by the resolve (in Eliot’s phrase) to startle and disturb the public” 3
  • Sense of crisis: World War I, feminism, labor struggles, empire: all destabilizing and inspire new form and new content
• Technique: not as in form, but as in “the recognition that every element of a work is an instrument of its effect and therefore open to technical revision” 3
  • esp in arguments about particular genres or media
  • you can’t really make the same arguments about diff types of art (novel, poetry, drama, painting)
• Modernist Art Affects Concepts of Social Life
  • film, new paintings, new works of literature give “consciousness of breakdown” 4
• Negativity: How Far? How Much?
  • Yes, “figures of nihilism, of degeneration and despair” 5
    • no faith, no value, suffering from war; political anxiety, general anxiety, alienation
  • Yet “the passion for technique…also opened a field of action, a theatre of conviction, within the wider social failure” 5
    • He gives The Statement on form creating meaning: “But if the fate of the West seemed uncertain and shadowy, the struggles with the metrical scheme of lyric poetry or the pictorial space of a cubist painting could seem bracingly crisp. Shining luminously from so much of the work is the happiness of concentrated purpose and the pride of the cultural laborer, believing fully in the artistic task at hand.” 5 (WORK!)
• Earnest, serious, even dour attitude helps people survive, “carry on through private hardship” (but why should this be special to modernism, I ask.) to preserve the person an in a way “decisively serve the culture”
  • “in the service of high-minded conviction that became still more explicit – more political strenuous, more religiously ambitious – as the movement wore on” 5 and then 7 he says “exposed its own weaknesses as it grew older” (answers the question of the relationship of the 20s to the 30s…that there is a continuity, but an intensification…but to me that’s a reification of “modernism” b/c of course it wasn’t the same thing in teens as it was in thirties…b/c everyone is diff and grows and history has changed; I don’t see the necessary relation between the two, perhaps.)
  • Conviction usually occurs in groups, schools, circles, “Small social cells:” “around Stein, Woolf, Pound, and Du Bois?,” collaborations like Ford and Conrad, Dadaism and Surrealism 6
    • Great Woolf quote: where in the company of others pulse rises to 120 “the blood, not the sticky whitish fluid of daytime, but brilliant & prickling like champagne….We collided, when we met: went pop, used Christian names…all easy & gifted & friendly & like good children.” “Congenial” and with similar values (“& therefore right”)
    • party in both senses of the words he notes, with militant purpose and a gathering for pleasure, “the micro-sociology of modernist innovation” 6 where artists flourish amid their own little group, growing with contact and support and criticism from each other
• Odd “mix of skepticism and ardor”
• Now we’re seeing more of their political sides, the fact that they didn’t just turn away from everything but Beauty
  • “The efforts to slay the authority of George Eliot…were a preparation for the often bombastic social politics of late Modernism.” 7
  • Pound, “I want a new civilization.” (heaving come from “Make it new.”)
  • Leftism (socialism, socialist parties, and workers’ parties in Europe, Russian rev); Right (Action Francaise, fascism)
  • 30s: now they’re older, the groups disbanded, and isolated, not being able to “age gracefully” 7
    • snobby Woolf, fascist Pound, anti-Semitic Eliot
    • he says it’s partly “uglinesses of character that are not tobe thought away” part “the pressures of an ugly age” 7

Random

• Michael Bell
  • “science as just one of the possible orders of understanding rather than as the ultimate form of truth statement” (Proust, Joyce, Mann)
  • “the relative status of the human was a central recognition of Modernism itself” 13
    • Lawrence says while writing the Brangwen narratives that he wants to throw away “old stable ego” b/c cares not about what someone FEELS, but instead “what woman IS what she IS inhumanly, physiologically, materially…a phenomenon” ALTHOUGH he notes that Lawrence in actuality does end up caring about his individual characters
    • “the fact that the world itself does not privilege the human, which was a matter of shock to Thomas Hardy and other Victorian agnostic, was incorporated into a more self-standing humanist conception.”
      • “to read them either humanistically or antihumanistically therefore is to miss the point since humanism the necessary standpoint, is acknowledged in its ultimate groundlessness”
  • Myth in modernism as showing “self-grounding character of the human world…emblem of the world as self-created”
  • says that rejection of realism is a part of rejection of historicism b/c realism had a “narrative model of history which had itself been given a strongly scientific inflection” and they see history as myth (ie Nietzsche (On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”)
  • Heidegger: the world itself replaced by world picture
  • “demise of the idealist tradition which had lasted, in various transformations, almost since the time of Immanual Kant.”
    • Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 1781 “foundational text of modern thought” “the world can be known only through the necessary categories of thought; the structure of thought is the structure of the world”
      • transcendental = “the conditions of possibility for experiencing” the world, not something beyond it
    • Schelling and Fichte revise it, but still a variant on idealism
    • Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein as against “metaphysics as such;” anti idealistic pragmatism (James), formal logic (Russell)
      • more on Nietzsche: “exposure of the whole tradition of metaphysics from Plato onwards as an enormous falsehood and psychological deceit;” the tradition’s obsession with epistemology is silly (they’ve reified consciousness and world into subject and object); and what really matters is VALUE not knowledge
      • more on Heidegger: cares not about individuals but about “sheer mystery of Being” (“Our everyday instrumental dealing with individual beings, whether human or not, deadens us to Being” and philosophy confirms it)
    • what do modernists do? they contemplate the old and the new, saw where old met new
      • says that Pound and Lawrence also felt same way as Heidegger about Being, finding “predualistic sensibility” in “mythopoeic relation to the world” 20
• Kant, Critique of Judgment 1790: aesthetic is “purposiveness without purpose”