Modernism/Postmodernism

Peter Brooker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317898757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The concepts of 'Modernism' and 'Postmodernism' constitute the single most dominant issue of twentieth-century literature and culture and are the cause of much debate. In this influential volume, Peter Brooker presents some of the key viewpoints from a variety of major critics and sets these additionally alongside challenging arguments from Third World, Black and Feminist perspectives. His excellent Introduction and detailed headnotes for each section and essay provide an indispensable guide to interpreting the many different opinions, and prove to be valuable contributions in their own right.

Part One

Modernist Positions

Until well into the post-war period, studies of modernism followed two main paths, the first in Anglo-American criticism, the second in Western Marxism. The ways in which a modernist orthodoxy was assembled and then defended, rewritten, or discarded in the first tradition are considered in the Introduction (pp. 5-13). The second, beginning in debates in Soviet and European criticism and philosophy in the late nineteenth century, reached its classic formulations in the twenties and thirties. Until the sixties, these traditions showed little cognisance of each other (and are still rarely discussed together), in spite of the fact that the second had already moved its base (albeit forcibly) to the scene of American criticism in the thirties and forties, when the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, headed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, was relocated in New York, and when many artists of the European avant-garde sought work and refuge in the United States. The Institute for Social Research is said to have experienced the constraints of 'the rabidly counter-revolutionary climate of American culture at the time' (Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977),Verso Edition 1980, p. 105) and to have neutralised the politics of its publications accordingly (including alterations to Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in 1936). A figure like Brecht also found life and politics uncongenial in the United States, especially in Hollywood. The times perhaps did not allow for dialogue across the intellectual or artistic traditions of societies at war. Yet the American cinema was much influenced by European Expressionism, and Adorno in particular pursued a subtle and somewhat ascetic defence of modernism close to the hearts of earlier American critics, if unrecog-nised by them until well into the post-war period. One might think too that the debates in which Adorno, Brecht, Lukács and Benjamin were involved had already given one set of answers to Harry Levin's question 'What Was Modernism?' in 1960.

The topics examined in 'Western Marxism' (on the use and effects of new technologies, on art and mass culture, on avant-garde experiment and realist convention) have also continued to be relevant to discussions of postmodernism. Benjamin and Brecht remain instructive, as suggested in the Introduction, (pp. 28-29) and Brecht's use in his 'epic theatre' of discontinuous narrative, historicised tableau and gesture, contrapuntal music and stage design seems strikingly in tune with the decentred strategies of postmodernism. (See Linda Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, pp. 218-21). Adorno's work, secondly, spans the moments of modernist and postmodern debate as well as raising questions of their continuity and difference — as, for example, in his admiration for Samuel Beckett, a figure claimed otherwise by both camps. Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School who, exceptionally, exerted an influence on the counter-cultural movements of the sixties, identified in the concepts of 'repressive tolerance' and 'desublimation' — the assimilation of dissent and the satisfaction of needs in mass consumer society — what many see as the distinguishing features of cultural postmodernism. Also, even though few would now endorse it in its original terms, Georg Lukacs's dismissal of modernism as a nihilistic and subjectivist symptom of alienation under capitalism has returned as a judgement upon the later postmodernism. Many too would draw still on Lukács's arguments in favour of realism. Fredric Jameson, for example, having suggested that the now 'automatised' conventions of modernist disruption and fragmentation have become a cultural habit, argues that they themselves require the corrective jolt of realism — 'a more totalising way of viewing phenomena' (Aesthetics and Politics, 1977, p. 211). The intensified reification and opacity of late capitalist society, he argues, if they are to be understood and resisted, stand in need of a new realism, and 'It may be Lukács —wrong as he might have been in the 1930s — who has some provisional last word for us today' (ibid, p. 212; see also Introduction, pp. 21-4).

This is not to suggest that the debates on modernism pre-empt those on postmodernism. It does, however, show, in the invariably conjoined description of these formations, how earlier concepts and perspectives can become redundant or assume a new application.

The work of the figures cited above is readily available and much discussed. The volume Aesthetics and Politics is especially useful and contains important work by Adorno, Brecht, Lukács and Benjamin, as well as excellent commentaries. The following extracts have been selected both to introduce this work and because of their interest in relation to later contributions on postmodernism.

1 George Lukács, from The Meaning of Contemporary Realism
Bertolt Brecht, from ‘The Popular and the Realistic’*

The debate between Lukács and Brecht in the thirties on the forms and political effect of 'critical' or 'socialist realism' has continued to rank as a major theme in Marxist criticism. Lukács valued the literary realism of novelists such as Balzac and Thomas Mann as a correct reflection of the important determining factors of 'the full process of life'. In the condensed unity of the individual and universal comprising its 'intensive totality', the realist novel corresponded, Lukacs argued, to the 'extensive totality' of the social whole, faithfully recording its progressive movement. In the thirties he attacked modernist Expressionism, particularly, for its failure to meet these criteria, and returned later to a sustained critique of modernism in his The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Here Lukács sees modernism as a subjectivist and decadent reinforcement of capitalist alienation, a view opposed in different terms by both Adorno (who viewed modernism as the negation of that reality) and by Brecht. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Lukács praised the realism of certain of Brecht's plays (Galileo, Mother Courage, Caucasian Chalk Circle), but his terms were never Brecht's own. Brecht sought to radicalise the innovatory artistic devices of modernism. In answer to Lukacs's 'formalist' model of realism he therefore proposed a flexible popular realism, open to experiment and the use of new media and to changed circumstances. The object of this dialectically conceived 'Marxist modernism' was to provoke a critical knowledge of society's 'laws of development' and thus make a popular control of present reality and of the future possible.

Developments in postmodernist theory, including the influence of psychoanalysis and deconstruction upon Marxist criticism would seem to have left Lukács's reflectionism and his ideas of literary unity and the social totality far behind, making Brecht once more our contemporary. However, the discussions referred to above (see also the Introduction, p. 28) show that there is no simple consensus on these matters.

For further discussion, see Klaus Völker Brecht: A Biography (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1979); and Lunn Marxism and Modernism (1982).

George Lukács, from The Meaning of Contemporary Realism

The literature of realism, aiming at a truthful reflection of reality, must demonstrate both the concrete and abstract potentialities of human beings in extreme situations of this kind. A character's concrete potentiality once revealed, his abstract potentialities will appear essentially inauthentic. Moravia, for instance, in his novel The Indifferent Ones, describes the young son of a decadent bourgeois family, Michel, who makes up his mind to kill his sister's seducer. While Michel, having made his decision, is planning the murder, a large number of abstract —but highly suggestive — possiblities are laid before us. Unfortunately for Michel the murder is actually carried out; and, from the sordid details of the action, Michel's character emerges as what it is — representative of that background from which, in subjective fantasy, he had imagined he could escape.

Abstract potentiality belongs wholly to the realm of subjectivity; whereas concrete potentiality is concerned with the dialectic between the individual's subjectivity and objective reality. The literary presentation of the latter thus implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world. Only in the interaction of character and environment can the concrete potentiality of a particular individual be singled out from the 'bad infinity' of purely abstract potentialities, and emerge as the determining potentiality of just this individual at just this phase of his development. This principle alone enables the artist to distinguish concrete potentiality from a myriad abstractions.

But the ontology on which the image of man in modernist literature is based invalidates this principle. If the 'human condition' — man as a solitary being, incapable of meaningful relationships — is identified with reality itself, the distinction between abstract and concrete potentiality becomes null and void. The categories tend to merge. Thus Cesare Pavese notes with John Dos Passos, and his German contemporary, Alfred Doblin, a sharp oscillation between 'superficial verisme' and 'abstract Expressionist schematism'. Criticizing Dos Passos, Pavese writes that fictional characters 'ought to be created by deliberate selection and description of individual features — implying that Dos Passos' characterizations are transferable from one individual to another. He describes the artistic consequences: by exalting man's subjectivity, at the expense of the objective reality of his environment, man's subjectivity itself is impoverished.

The problem, once again, is ideological. This is not to say that the ideology underlying modernist writings is identical in all cases. On the contrary: the ideology exists in extremely various, even contradictory forms. The rejection of narrative objectivity, the surrender to subjectivity, may take the form of Joyce's stream of consciousness, or of Musil's 'active passivity', his 'existence without quality', or of Gide's 'action gratuite', where abstract potentiality achieves pseudo-realization. As individual character manifests itself in life's moments of decision, so too in literature. If the distinction between abstract and concrete potentiality vanishes, if man's inwardness is identified with an abstract subjectivity, human personality must necessarily disintegrate.

T.S. Eliot described this phenomenon, this mode of portraying human personality, as

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.

The disintegration of personality is matched by a disintegration of the outer world. In one sense, this is simply a further consequence of our argument. For the identification of abstract and concrete human potentiality rests on the assumption that the objective world is inherently inexplicable. Certain leading modernist writers, attempting a theoretical apology, have admitted this quite frankly. Often this theoretical impossibility of understanding reality is the point of departure, rather than the exaltation of subjectivity. But in any case the connection between the two is plain. The German poet Gottfried Benn, for instance, informs us that 'there is no outer reality, there is only human consciousness, constantly building, modifying, rebuilding new worlds out of its own creativity'. Musil, as always, gives a moral twist to this line of thought. Ulrich, the hero of his The Man without Qualities, when asked what he would do if he were in God's place, replies: 'I should be compelled to abolish reality.' Subjective existence 'without qualities' is the complement of the negation of outward reality.

The negation of outward reality is not always demanded with such theoretical rigour. But it is present in almost all modernist literature. In conversation, Musil once gave as the period of his great novel, 'between 1912 and 1914'. But he was quick to modify this statement by adding: 'I have not, I must insist, written a historical novel. I am not concerned with actual events . . . Events, anyhow, are interchangeable. I am interested in what is typical, in what one might call the ghostly aspect of reality.' The word 'ghostly' is interesting. It points to a major tendency in modernist literature: the attenuation of actuality. In Kafka, the descriptive detail is of an extraordinary immediacy and authenticity. But Kafka's ingenuity is really directed towards substituting his angsf-ridden vision of the world for objective reality. The realistic detail is the expression of a ghostly un-reality, of a nightmare world, whose function is to evoke angst. The same phenomenon can be seen in writers who attempt to combine Kafka's techniques with a critique of society — like the German writers, Wolfgang Koeppen, in his satirical novel about Bonn, Das Treibhaus. A similar attenuation of reality underlies Joyce's stream of consciousness. It is, of course, intensified where the stream of consciousness is itself the medium through which reality is presented. And it is carried ad absurdum where the stream of consciousness is that of an abnormal subject or of an idiot — consider the first part of Faulkner's Sound and Fury or, a still more extreme case, Beckett's Molloy.

Attenuation of reality and dissolution of personality are thus interdependent: the stronger the one, the stronger the other. Underlying both is the lack of a consistent view of human nature. Man is reduced to a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments.

Bertolt Brecht, from ‘The Popular and the Realistic’

We now come to the concept of 'Realism'. It is an old concept which has been much used by many men and for many purposes, and before it can be applied we must spring-clean it too. This is necessary because when the people takes over its inheritance there has to be a process of expropriation. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of: conditioned down to the last small detail. As we have in mind a fighting people that is changing the real world we must not cling to 'well-tried' rules for telling a story, worthy models set up by literary history, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not abstract the one and only realism from certain given works, but shall make a lively use of all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put living reality in the hands of living people in such a way that it can be mastered. We shall take care not to ascribe realism to a particular historical form of novel belonging to a particular period, Balzac's or Tolstoy's, for instance, so as to set up purely formal and literary criteria of realism. We shall not restrict ourselves to speaking of realism in cases where one can (e.g.) smell, look, feel whatever is depicted, where 'atmosphere' is created and stories develop in such a way that the characters are psychologically stripped down. Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent of convention. Realist means: laying bare society's causal network/showing up the dominant view-point as the viewpoint of the dominators/writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society/emphasizing the dynamics of development/concrete and so as to encourage abstraction.

It is a tall order, and it can be made taller. And we shall let the artist apply all his imagination, all hi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Editor's Preface
• Introduction: Reconstructions
• Part One
• Part Two
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index