Modernism and Its Environments

Michael Rubenstein, Justin Neuman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350076044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

Modernism and Its Environments surveys new developments in modernist studies inspired by ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Taking a fresh view of familiar topics in modernist studies such as the city, this book also introduces new topics and perspectives on modernism, such as: nature and wilderness; conservation and preservation; energy and fuel; waste and pollution; the animal and the human; and weather and climate. Ecocritical and environmentalist approaches have fundamentally altered our understanding of both modernism and the field of modernist studies. This book accounts for the transformation, and offers readers a host of resources with which to continue exploring and rethinking. Covering a wide range of writers and artists including Edvard Munch, Paul Valéry, Robert Musil, A.A. Milne, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, Richard Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, Olafur Eliasson, Zadie Smith, and Kate Tempest,

1

Modernism’s Energy Environments

Gasoline is divine

—F. T. Marinetti

Power

Power! Power like a paw, titanic power

ripped through the earth and slammed

against his body and shackled him

where he stood. Power! Incredible,

barbaric power! A blast, a siren of light

within him, rending, quaking, fusing his

brain and blood to a fountain of flame,

vast rockets in a searing spray! Power!

—Henry Roth

“Nothing is easier, than to point out in history books the omission of remarkable phenomena that have occurred so slowly as to be imperceptible.” So wrote the French poet Paul Valéry in 1931. “An event that takes place over a century does not figure in any document or any collection of memoirs.” That could describe the geological pace of climate change, but climate change was not what Valéry had in mind. He was thinking, he writes, of “the discovery of electricity and the conquest of the earth by its different uses.” This brings him to a bold and startling claim: “This general energizing of the world is more pregnant with consequences, more capable of transforming life in the immediate future than all the ‘political’ events from the time of Ampère to the present day” (1962: 10). By putting the word “political” in scare quotes, Valéry signals that the distinction between political history and “general energizing” is exactly what he means to cast into doubt.

The “Ampère” to whom he refers is Andre-Marie Ampère, an early experimenter with electromagnetism after whom the ampere—the standard measuring unit of electric current—was named. Ampère’s life straddled the French Revolution; born into a monarchy, he lived his adult life in the French Republic, whose utopian energy became closely associated with the promise of electricity. By name-dropping Ampère in this passage, Valéry reveals that the “political” events he mentions might in fact serve as a way to obscure the importance of one political event in particular: the republican revolution, and perhaps the enlightenment more generally, as the crucial origin of the political order of liberal democracy under which we currently still live in the West, at least by most accounts. Valéry’s claim appears both bold, insofar as it foregrounds energy as a political force, and sheepish, insofar as it stops just short of positing a causal relationship between the general energizing and the republican revolution, a relationship that remains suggested rather than stated outright.

It is only relatively recently that historians have begun to attend to the omissions of which Valéry accused them. And more and more, they are agreeing with him. According to J. R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz, editors of the seventh volume of the Cambridge World History (2015), “Human energy use has multiplied somewhere between fifty- and one hundred-fold since 1750, with the largest increases coming in the twentieth century,” though they warn that even that figure “greatly understates the increase in effective human energy use, as the efficiency with which our technologies convert combustion into the motion, heat, or light we desire has increased anywhere from 35 times (today’s best diesel engine versus a 1750 steam engine) to 1,600 times (today’s halide light versus a tallow candle)” (10). Since humans started burning fossil fuels, according to McNeill in another essay in the same volume, “Our species probably used more energy . . . than in all of prior human history,” making “our time wildly different from anything in the human past” (55). McNeill therefore considers this general energizing to be “the most revolutionary process in human history since domestication” (55). In this radical acceleration, modernism emerged.

By and large, the modernists would probably have been flattered by Pomeranz’s characterization of their era’s wild difference from the one that preceded it. They would have professed a devout faith in the ability of technology to deliver them from one victory to the next. Discussing the new developments in theoretical physics for a generalist audience, Frederick Soddy, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1922 for his work on radioactive isotopes, recognized in 1912 that “discoveries in connection with the recently explored field of radioactivity have put an entirely different complexion on the question as to how long the energy resources of the world may be expected to last” (16). Long before nuclear power was industrially viable, Soddy and others understood that the mass-energy equiva­lence portended “sufficient potential energy to supply the uttermost ambitions of the race for cosmical epochs of time” (17). Lewis Strauss, then the chair of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, speculated in 1954 that it would not be “too much to expect . . . that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter” (9). In 1923 Leon Trotsky claimed from the USSR that “Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming,” and he looked forward to a world in which “Man” will “earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste” (Kolocotroni et al. 230). When Trotsky penned this utopian vision, global carbon dioxide levels were around 300 parts per million, according to the most recent NASA data; now, with carbon dioxide levels over 411 parts per million, we have realized, perhaps belatedly, that the world of our creation is one not of fantasy but of nightmare. Our children are unlikely to enjoy energy too cheap to meter, but our children’s children’s children on down for 20,000 years will inherit a world bearing the signature of the radioactive isotopes released in pursuit of that dream.

Like Trotsky, Valéry was exuberantly optimistic when imagining the political revolution of the enlightenment as a function of the technological revolution of electricity. Almost eighty years later, Dipesh Chakrabarty, in an essay addressing itself to the Anthropocene, would suggest a very similar relationship between energy and politics, but with much less optimism: “The m ansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive” (208). This is a realization as terrifying as Valéry’s was once, to the moderns, inspiring. It is weakly mitigated by the qualification “so far,” which nevertheless strongly suggests the need to imagine new freedoms that might not depend so heavily on the energy intensity that produced the old ones.

Fredrick Buell describes the fossil fuel era, including the nuclear age, as an “‘age of exuberance’—an age which is also, given the dwindling finitude of the resources it increasingly makes social life dependent on, haunted by catastrophe” (276). When viewed from the retrospect of the Anthropocene, the first electrical age appears as an age of relative innocence regarding the environmental costs of energy production. Jean-Francois Mouhot argues that “we have arrived at the present situation (mostly) in good faith, with the conviction that modernity would bring the masses freedom from toil, and without any chance of knowing the climatic consequences of our burning of fossil fuels” (qtd. in Johnson xii). “The average consumer [in the United States],” writes Bob Johnson in Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy, “has until recently participated in carbon’s jubilee with an unmetered innocence” (xii).

This past age—characterized by the combination of a general energizing enabled by the burning of fossil fuels with a general innocence about their environmental and climatic consequences—is also the age of the emergence and dominance of modernism as a set of aesthetic forms and recurrent themes. That age of innocence and exuberance is now over. And because it is over, we feel more intensely the paradoxes and contradictions of modernist art, particularly where they come to bear on the environment. Some of the stranger, more uncomfortable aspects of modernism, like the strident manifestos of the Futurists, as well as some of its lesser-known works—like Valéry’s “Outlook for Intelligence”—take on a new centrality for understanding modernism from the present historical vantage of the Anthropocene. And many of modernism’s most revered texts can and ought to be productively reread and understood anew. It might even be true to a certain extent to say that now—in the time of catastrophic mass extinctions and accelerating climate change—is the first time we’ve been able to see them properly at all.

Electricity

In May of 1936, five years after Valéry wrote about general energizing, the French painter Raoul Dufy was commissioned by the electrical authority of Paris—La Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’ Électricité—to paint a large fresco as part of the 1937 International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life. The result, titled La Fée Électricité (The Electricity Fairy), was a huge 600-square-meter mural pulsing with vibrant color that covered one of the concave walls of the Pavillon de la Lumière et de l’Électricité. It was a grand narrative, done on a grand scale, one in a long tradition of modernist monuments to technological progress, including Thomas Hart Benton’s panorama America Today of 1931, composed of ten room-sized canvas panels, and Diego Rivera’s 1931 portable mural Electric Power, a fresco of plaster supported by steel and concrete, depicting New York power plant workers surrounded by the industrial sublimity of generators and turbines.

Dufy’s mural—still on display in what is now the Paris Museum of Modern Art—narrates the history of the discovery and domestication of electricity from the eighteenth century to the modernist moment and represents 110 key figures significant to that history, including Ampère. In the center section of the mural is a deep blue depiction of the Ivry-sur-Seine power station with the generators at the bottom, a ball of lightening in the center, and a few Greek gods perched on the top, looking as if they might be stone sculpture sentries—a pantheon in honor of the power station’s Promethean modernity. Dufy’s enchanted vision was a pitch-perfect representation of the dominant modern attitude toward electricity: a tremendous secular pride in the accomplishments of science and technology combined with a rapturous wonder produced by electricity’s illuminated spectacle.

In 1915, on a smaller, more reproducible scale, the American art journal 291 published Francis Picabia’s “mechanomorphic,” a series of relief prints titled after people but depicting, in the style of mechanical drawing, technological artifacts. The most famous and most often reproduced among these mechanomorphic portraits is Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (Figure 1), which depicted, underneath its title printed in all caps, a mechanical drawing of a spark plug from a typical car engine. Much like the “ready-mades” of Marcel Duchamp, the effect of Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity relies on wrenching the mechanical drawing from its utilitarian context, resituating it in the world of art, and captioning it to create a wholly new, often wryly humorous, meaning.

FIGURE 1 Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity, Francis Picabia.

There are a number of ways to read Picabia’s intent, but one of them is to see in the juxtaposition of the title and the represented object an attempt to connect the presumed beauty of the young girl’s nude body to the supposed sexiness of the automobile; to equate the spark of attraction with the spark of ignition; to mix the exhilarations of sex and speed. Picabia’s young American girl and Dufy’s fairy both gendered electricity as feminine, suggesting an attractive, wild, and dangerous force of nature whose power could be harnessed, if at great risk, by the heroic efforts of rational men of science and politics. At the Hoover Dam, which in 1937 began feeding water and electricity to parts of Arizona and Southern California, a commemorative sculpture and plaque makes the danger of the undertaking explicit. “They died,” the plaque says of the ninety-six men who perished in accidents during the five-year construction of the dam, “to make the desert bloom.”

Of all the ways that the moderns imagined and figured “general energizing,” electricity was perhaps the most prominent as well as the most exuberantly optimistic. For a lot of artists, cultural commentators, and politicians in the first part of the twentieth century, electrification stood as a synecdoche for the astonishingly rapid and intense general energizing that characterized the period. Valéry makes this move in the passage from The Outlook for Intelligence when he substitutes electrification for “general energizing” in successive sentences. Dufy’s fresco does something similar by making electricity the centerpiece of a painted narrative of modern progress. Picabia’s mechanomorphic spark plug was yet another approach.

The modernists were by no means the first to understand the symbolic potential of electricity and fossil fuels. Inspired by a variety of theories about the energetic basis of human life from vitalism to the second law of thermodynamics, nineteenth-century writers embraced the idea of the electric text, drawn especially to the possible analogies between electrical energy and the figurative power of art, understood in terms of its capacity to “move” its audience, as Bruce Clarke and Linda Henderson in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (2002), Paul Gilmore in Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (2009), and others argue. Following a different trajectory of technological imagery and influenced by Freud’s use of thermodynamics to explain psychic energy, Peter Brooks suggests that in novels by Zola, Verne, Balzac, and others, “plot is, most aptly, a steam engine” (44). More importantly, Brooks argues that machines in nineteenth-century texts “are a mise-en-abyme of the novel’s narrative motor, an explicit statement of the inclusion within the novel of the principle of its movement” (45). Electrification is everywhere: it inflects Emerson’s theories of literary inspiration in “The Poet,” where he describes the poet as a “conductor of the whole river of electricity; it becomes an “immense reservoir of electrical energy” for Baudelaire; and it wells up in Whitman’s poetry of “the body electric” with its “instant conductors” in Leaves of Grass.

In 1920 Vladimir Lenin hit a similar note with the full force of his exuberant faith in the Russian revolution when he defined communism as “Soviet power plus electrification” (419). The idea took popular hold in the USSR to such an extent that, as Susan Buck-Morss recounts, “the kilowatt hour was proposed as ‘an index of cultural progress’” (140). Fast-forward to April 1986 when a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, then a part of the USSR. The human and ecological catastrophe that ensued was among the largest in human history; it killed thousands, displaced hundreds of thousands, and created an uninhabitable exclusion zone for a thousand-mile radius around the plant. And it produced “a major political and social shock that contributed to shattering confidence in the communist system and the myths that helped to hold it together” (Yergin 380).

The USSR’s worship of the kilowatt ended, four years after the Chernobyl accident, with the end of the USSR. The West’s worship of general energizing is still ongoing. What is striking about reading Valéry’s assertion together with Lenin’s is that electrification becomes the leitmotif for both capitalist and socialist development; two warring modes of production, and two warring narratives of human progress, united under the sign of electrification. In the early 1970s, when the United States, along with much of the rest of the world, found itself in the grip of another energy crisis, the architectural historian Rayner Banham echoed Valéry and Lenin from about five decades away when he called electrification “the greatest environmental revolution in history since the domestication of fire” (qtd. in Kern 29). What all these examples have in common is a sense of wonder and utopian hope that vested electricity with the power to transform politics, culture, and society. What distinguishes Banham’s remark is that, instead of political revolution—implied in Valéry, explicit in Lenin—he lights on something they both passed over: environmental revolution.

There can be no doubt that electrification transformed society and that it did so in time with the rise and reign of high modernism. A simple analogy, with all its obvious and serious limits, might help carry the point: what the railroad was to the nineteenth century and to the Victorian period, electrification was to the twentieth century and high modernism. In his 1934 Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford argued that electrification marked an epochal transition out of what he called the paleotechnic age, whose spirit lived, as it was formed, in the coal mine: “From the mine came the steam pump and presently the steam engine: ultimately the steam locomotive and so, by derivation, the steamboat. From the mine came the escalator, the elevator . . . the subway for urban transportation. The railroad likewise came directly from the mine” (158). Mumford called the age of electricity the neotechnic age, which implied an escape from the mine, although that turned out to be only so much ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The New Modernist Studies, Environmentalism, and Ecocriticism
• 1 Modernism’s Energy Environments
• 2 Modernism’s Urban Environments
• 3 Modernism’s Animals
• 4 Modernism in the Wilderness
• 5 The Climate of Modernism
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright