Incredible Modernism

Literature, Trust and Deception

John Attridge, Rod Rosenquist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409439547
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317117544
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With the twentieth century came a new awareness of just how much an individual was obliged to accept on trust, and this heightened awareness of social trust in turn prompted new kinds of anxiety about fraudulence and deception. Beginning with the premise that the traditional liberal concept of trust as a 'bond of society' entered a period of crisis around the turn of the twentieth century, this collection examines the profound influence of this shift on a wide range of modernist writers, including James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, H.D., Ford Madox Ford, Samuel Beckett, Ralph Ellison and Wallace Stevens. In examining the importance of trust and fraudulence during the period, the contributors take up a diverse set of topics related to reception, the institutions of modernism, the history of authorship, the nature of representation, authenticity, genre, social order and politics. Taken as a whole, Incredible Modernism provides concrete historical coordinates for the study of twentieth-century trust, while also arguing that a problem of trust is central to the institutions and formal innovations of modernism itself.

Part 1 Reading and Trust

Chapter 1 Modern Proliferation, Modernist Trust

Leonard Diepeveen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315588261-1

Few critics skewered the rising presence of modernism with more vigour than J.C. Squire. Writing a verse editorial for his London Mercury in 1928, Squire complained of¹

1 J.C. Squire, ‘Editorial Notes’, The London Mercury 18, no. 106 (August 1928): 337.

The spate of senseless and amorphous verse,

Writ by ambitious simpletons who’ve found

That if you once abandon sense and sound

And put down linkless words in disarray

The critics really don’t know what to say,

Fearing that if they do say what they think

Their names may, later on, be made to stink,

Because their crassness failed to recognise

The fire of Shelley in a Snooks’s eyes –

Yet in this, as in so much, the terms of Squire’s sharp wit were hardly original – not so much for their dislike of contemporary verse, as for something larger – their distrust of the mechanisms of literary culture, broadly conceived, a distrust that ranged from writers, to the mechanisms of publication, to critics. And Squire’s lack of originality makes his stance more, rather than less, weighty. A nagging sense of distrust courses through modernism. Not without reason: trust was under new pressures at the beginning of the twentieth century, pressures that extended well beyond the bounds of literary criticism and modernist verse.

One might begin by pointing to the rise of new technologies that allowed for deception, such as photography, as Michael Leja documents in Looking Askance. And the period saw other, concomitant, pressures: the rise of advertising, of new distribution networks, and of technologies that superseded the hand-crafted. The rise, in short, of mass culture, and two of its general characteristics: proliferation and distance. Technological changes allowed products and people to circulate in much greater numbers, and with greater speed, than before. The city and its technologies increased the number and variety of anonymous encounters, and crucial interactions, which had depended on conventional signs of trust, happened more and more often at a distance. As technological innovations like telegraphs made clear, one no longer could rely on access to the origin of a communication, or to personal presence. As a corollary, things were harder to know in their individuality and history. People needed to rely more and more for trust on new signs of sincerity – not the personal, or eye contact, or the reference from a trusted friend. Trust was now often established – and hidden – at a distance, at a remove, and new ways of validating it became both necessary and suspect.

Literature, as well as the other arts, was not immune to these phenomena and the stresses they created for trust. Literary and art culture particularly noted, often with alarm, mass culture’s problem of proliferation: proliferation of anthologies, of publishing venues, of aesthetic movements. Too many anthologies, too many poems, too many isms – proliferation gave one too little time to estimate each work of art that was put before the public; judgements of quality, with the pressing claims of each new movement or work of art, had to be made quickly. The connection between originating intent and final work of art became increasingly unknowable; artists and writers became, in effect, strangers: one was simply left trying to read the distanced signs of their sincerity. Proliferation increased anonymity, and in so doing didn’t allow for the space needed for discernments about quality and about what could be trusted to be something more than the noise of modernity. Most centrally, critics like Squire argued, plenitude’s distracting noise allowed for deception, and led to complaints both about textual quality and the larger mechanisms of literary culture.

This was not the unease of a moment. Squire’s 1928 complaint about the ‘spate’ of modernist verse had its antecedents at least ten years earlier, when Squire had argued that ‘an orgy of undirected abnormality’, by its bewildering plenitude, was creating problems for trust:

We have had in the last few years art, so called, which sprang from every sort of impulse but the right one, and was governed by every sort of conceptions but the right ones. We have had ‘styles’ which were mere protests and revulsions against other styles; ‘styles’ which were no more than flamboyant attempts at advertisement akin to the shifting lights of the electric night signs; authors who have forgotten their true selves in the desperate search for remarkable selves; artists who have refused to keep their eyes upon the object because it has been seen before; musicians who have made, for novelty’s sake, noises, and painters who have made, for effect’s sake, spectacles, which invited the attention of those who make it their business to suppress public nuisances.²

2 J.C. Squire, ‘Editorial Notes’, The London Mercury 1, no. 1 (November 1919): 3–4.

The relation between thought and act had become trivialized, and, given the facts of modern life, proliferation created opportunities for the morally suspect. Squire claimed that

Bad writers will, without intellectual or aesthetic impulse, pretend to burrow into psychological (or physical) obscurities which are no more beyond the artist’s purview than anything else, provided he responds to them, but which have the advantage for an insincere writer that they enable him to talk nonsense that honest unsophisticated readers are unable to diagnose as nonsense.³

3 Ibid., 4.

It was easy to get published, create attention-grabbing art exhibitions, and garner réclame. Writing about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons in the Minneapolis Bellman, Richard Burton gave voice to a standard conclusion: ‘Was there ever in the known history of man a time when the faker and poseur had as good a chance as he has today? Or she has, for I am thinking of a woman? I think not’.⁴

4 Richard Burton, ‘Posing’, Minneapolis Bellman, October 17, 1914, 163.

Solutions did not come easily. As these kinds of statements suggest, the explosion of reviewing, as a device meant to deal with proliferation by monitoring quality and re-establishing trust, didn’t help. Subject to the same pressures of modernity, reviews had their own issues with proliferation, and their own fraught relationship with trust. As with so much of modernity’s adjustment to mass culture, the public needed to cede trust to a professionally defined group. Reviews were problematic both because of the different location in which trust had to be verified (one needed to trust the reviewer, and not, first of all, the author – another instance of distance), but also because reviewers themselves couldn’t be trusted. As did Squire and many others, T.S. Eliot dismissed reviews as mere advertising written under tremendous time pressures, which contributed to the problem of trust by bringing undeserved attention to shoddy art. Wrote Eliot in 1920: ‘If it were only possible first to abate this nuisance of reviewing, we might hope for some improvement in the condition of verse’.⁵ Now, Eliot – and others of his ilk – had allegiances different from Squire’s, of course, and directed their scorn at more traditional forms of poetry, which they thought were too easy to produce and publish. But along the entire length of the artistic spectrum there was no untroubled way to establish quality and trust: in the exchange between artist and audience neither quality nor – more fundamentally – trust were a given. While modernism undoubtedly was in crisis because of changing aesthetic principles, those changing principles created a crisis of trust.

5 T.S. Eliot, ‘A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry’, The Chapbook 2, no. 9 (March 1920): 8–9.

My purpose is not to dissect the causes of this crisis, but to look at the conflicted responses to it, ways of re-establishing or even side-stepping trust in order to manage the proliferation and forms of distance that had put it in doubt – to restore an apparently shaken confidence in art. As the example of a rapidly increasing review culture suggests, in addition to attempts to assert old standards and signs of trust, the early twentieth century was also the scene of new modes of establishing trust, modes that, at the same time, were perceived to threaten it. And the conflict about these new modes was not limited to conservatives. While turning to these new modes, many artists nevertheless vacillated, an uncertainty brought into play by values in old forms of trust that were hard to discard. Others stepped outside this economy altogether.

The scandals and uncertainties of modernism weren’t merely or even primarily about quality, then. There had always been bad art, but badness in modernism had a different origin and function, being premised on a new kind of trespass. With modernism’s bad art, trust was suspect, and not just on an individual, case-by-case basis. Trust was a bigger issue: whole modes of establishing trust were in conflict, conflict that was all the more marked since default modes of creating trust in art had been operating so unproblematically. The dominant mode for establishing trust in aesthetic experience had been premised on the centrality of a sincere, locatable origin for the work, verifiable through culturally understood signs for that sincerity. Sincerity, understood as a direct and close unity between mind and act, was a big deal. Harriet Monroe, writing in Poetry, dismissed the work of poet William Alexander Percy because Percy had created ‘an absolutely artificial product, with neither simplicity, sincerity nor emotion, three qualities indispensable in poetry’.⁶ The default aesthetic of the time, the widely accepted principles one could effortlessly put into play without needing laborious explanation, presupposed that art was possible only when you could trust that a given work was being offered sincerely. Sincere intent, and the trust it engendered, had been, in fact, categorial for art.⁷ It wasn’t the only thing that made art possible, but it was necessary in order to proceed. No sincerity, no art. As poet and Spanish professor Salomón de la Selva argued in Poetry in 1916, ‘Sincerity of expression only can bring forth real poetry’.⁸ Writing in the New Age in 1912, Wladimir Wroblewski argued that ‘No Art is good unless it is the product of three elements: Genius, Sincerity, Skill. All schools of Art agree as to the above principles’.⁹

6 Harriet Monroe, ‘A Misguided Poet. Sappho in Levkas and Other Poems, by William Alexander Percy’, Poetry 10, no. 4 (July 1917): 215. 7 For a discussion of what it means for a property to be ‘categorial’ for a given activity, see Jerrold Levinson, ‘Intention and Interpretation: A Last Look’, in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger, series: The Arts and their philosophies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 221–56. 8 Salomón de la Selva, ‘Ruben Dario’, Poetry 8, no. 4 (July 1916): 200. 9 W. Wroblewski, ‘Towards the Art of the Future’, The New Age 11, no. 11 (11 July 1912): 257.

Sincerity – and its consequence, trust – had been premised on two things: a source that was radically individual and a form of transmission that gave the appearance of transparency. Sincere works were clear examples of individual, self-expression. Writing one in a series of letters to the New Age that excoriated Roger Fry’s 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibit, art critic E. Wake Cook asserted that ‘Individuality and sincerity are the essentials of great art; and our British artists have shown more individuality than all the Continental schools put together’.¹⁰ Individuality, of course, stood opposed to both distance and proliferation – mass culture’s reorientation towards these characteristics, then, did not just deaden expression, but made it increasingly difficult to be sincere.

10 E. Wake Cook, ‘Letters to the Editor: Post-Impressionism’, The New Age 8, no. 7 (15 December 1910): 166.

There had been numerous, commonly understood ways to establish sincerity. The dominance in poetry, for example, of certain lyric conventions (short poems, ‘spoken’ from a single moment of time by an ‘I’, and not so much addressed to readers as overheard by them) created the illusion of closeness, and privileged trustworthiness as a central marker of what art was, and what made it good. Versions of poetry’s personal expression were found in other arts as well. As further signs of their individuality, sincere artworks enacted an apparent spontaneity that came not from the rigidities of theory, but from an ad hoc response to the local conditions before one. It was clear that this kind of sincere work had a single, personal origin, one that gave no signs of duplicity.

And sincerity required transparency of self-expression, through forms of art- making that gave the appearance of having removed distance – here, the distance between thought and act, and between person and person. This was often seen in a privileging of simplicity as a dominant aesthetic attribute. Working smoothly with...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Modernism, Trust and Deception—John Attridge
• Part 1 Reading and Trust
• Part 2 After Sincerity
• Part 3 Truth and Narrative
• Part 4 Trust and Society
• Afterword: Autoimmunity, Trust and Value—Rod Rosenquist
• Bibliography
• Index