The Modernist Papers

Fredric Jameson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784783464
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

The Modernist Papers is a tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarm, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarities of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon, he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression, while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Challenging our previous understandings of the literature of this period, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.

TWO

3

Form Production in The Magic Mountain

1. Reading as Content

Adventure stories obey a principle of saturation in which time and space are to be as full as possible, something conventionally indexed by the exhaustion of the protagonist, and analogized by the saturation of the scene itself, by great heat or heavy rain, elements through which all action must fray its path laboriously, like the friction of a satellite reentering the earth’s atmosphere. The bonus for the reader lies probably not so much in the reenacted spectacle of difficulty itself, as rather in the Utopian glimpse of a human time every moment of which is redeemed by human meaning, or, if you prefer, from which the dead zones of boredom and habit have miraculously been banished. Yet as Benjamin put it, “boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience”;¹ empty time is the condition for filled time, or at least for our possibility of perceiving it in the first place; and no doubt the first empty time in question here is simply that of the reader of adventure stories in the first place, whose leisure strangely inverts the overstrenuous exertions of the hero, the one acting as a foil to the other, every daring climb up the cliff’s surface producing its harvest in the contented yawning and stretching of what comes to be called relaxation or entertainment (a concept that blocks further thinking and should probably at this point be bracketed or suspended altogether).

What is even more interesting is to find traces of just such empty times within the mass-cultural work itself, inscriptions of the reading process there where we have been mainly taught to observe the absence of self-consciousness or reflexivity. Thus Martin Beck is able to seize a few moments from his harried schedule, clear the overtime away, send the family on a weekend trip, and in the clearing of this empty space and time organize his leisure decisively:

Among other things he bought a bottle of Grönstedts Monopole cognac and six strong beers. Then he devoted the rest of Saturday to putting down the deck of the model of the Cutty Sark, which he had not had time to touch for several weeks. For dinner he ate cold meatballs, fish roe and Camembert on pumpernickel bread, and he drank two beers. He also drank some coffee and cognac and watched an old American gangster film on television. Then he got his bed ready and lay in the bathtub reading Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, every now and again taking a sip of cognac which he had placed within reach on the toilet seat.²

Neither the notion of the busman’s holiday (it is the very title of a novel by Dorothy Sayers) nor that of the hobby are particularly startling when we have to do with detectives; policemen, to be sure, are likely to want to have more prosaic hobbies than those of the most famous and eccentric private detectives (who notoriously cultivate their orchids, play the violin, and take cocaine). But the sailing ship is itself the very marker and epitome of adventure as such, and the model a pretext for the deployment of that space which it was surely physically the most intolerable to cross long day after day and yet which counts as the most exciting thing to read about. Nor does the mise en abîme of Americanism seem to mean much in the context of the satiric realism of this triumphantly Swedish procedural. Still, it is worth asking ourselves why even the insert of Beck’s leisure adds to our enjoyment of his more general drudgery and harassment, and whether this particular self-designation of the mass-cultural product cannot be added to all those Brechtian and reflexive features that Jane Feuer, against all doxa, found to throng thick and fast in so characteristically commercial a genre as the Hollywood musical.³

Perhaps the “high cultural” text has to be more circumspect about such references: I remember a moment in Zola’s novel of the Franco-Prussian war—a form to be sure itself poised on the very brink of modern mass culture and already bristling with all those “techniques” we have mentioned for the filling of space and time and the systematic physical exhaustion of the characters—a wondrous moment in which the soldier “en perm” revels in a whiteness one is tempted to compare with that of the page itself:

dans la joie de la nappe très blanche, ravi du vin blanc qui étincelait dans son verre, Maurice mangea deux oeufs à la coque, avec une gourmandise qu’il ne se connaissait pas …⁴

The gourmandise in reality solicits its equivalent in the reader: reading is itself this furlough—Hegel’s (and Queneau’s) “dimanche de la vie”—which then allows for a contemplative proxy enjoyment of what can otherwise scarcely be imagined to be enjoyable, down to the smallest details (the smell of the trenches, the permanent wetness of the socks, the well-nigh vertiginous want of sleep) of a content that must, not by accident but virtually by definition, be the very opposite of enjoyable.

Whatever the paradoxical deferment structure of human reality to which writing as such corresponds, of which it may furnish an emblem or a reactualization, we must accustom ourselves to thinking of reading as an altogether unnatural act (Mallarmé says “une pratique de désespoir”): and indeed something of this monstrous artificiality is captured in the concomitant deconstructive account of a reading which always necessarily breaks down and fails of an achieved meaning it must then ideologically claim to have triumphantly achieved and completed. Here, however, in these examples of the use of reading in figuration, it may be preferable to recall Freud’s interpretation of the capacity of money to serve as a vehicle for symbolic meaning: “In later years … the interest in money makes its appearance as a new interest which had been absent in childhood.”⁵ He goes on to explain that it is this adult belatedness and novelty of the theme that “makes it easier for the early impulsion [the interest in feces] … to be carried over to the newly emerging aim.” It is as though such adult preoccupations remained essentially unoccupied by libido in the form of childhood desires (the desires of the stages of the maturing organism): historically new “aims” or “interests” (to use Freud’s expressions), which can then be perceived to be artificial in the sense in which they correspond to developing “civilization” (or capitalism), rather than to the familial structure of older, more organic societies, and which can therefore also be seen to have something in common with each other (the earliest form of writing has indeed been associated with processes of accounting, if not with money itself), now offer themselves as figures to be invested with very different kinds of unconscious content. The new figures are in other words available for symbolization in much freer ways than the infantile desires themselves identified more literally. Nor does it matter much that Freud himself binds money as such back ever more tightly into symbolization, and stresses a seemingly more absolute link between money and the anal stage; what interests us here is rather the floating nature of the other adult theme—that of reading—particularly when it is reincorporated into a text itself ostentatiously written to be read.

But, as our preceding account may have suggested (with its less than acceptable language of the organic and the natural), certain kinds of guilt attach to these new experiences or phenomena that have no childhood equivalence. That of money (complicated, to be sure, by the reintegration of this theme into the complex of childhood desires described by Freud) is related to the class system itself; that of reading, and the leisure and instruction it implies, is mediated by the more general guilt of culture which also emerges from class society. It would seem likely that societies in which both money and reading are still reduced and relatively marginal activities tend to feel less guilt about their structural inequalities (I’m thinking of Aristotle’s views of the “good life” and of slavery).

At any rate the guilt of culture, the guilt associated with leisure and with reading and negotiated in rather different and more complex ways when it is a question of the guilt of instruction or “cultural capital,” is not likely to find itself brandished with abandon by those modern works that seek ever more intensely to engage and simultaneously to escape their own guilty complicity with culture as such. They do so most often by separating high art from culture in general, and by assigning some uniquely transcultural value to the former (a value which can range from the political to the philosophical or the religious).

It is therefore not as surprising as it ought to be that, in the works of intellectuals in whose lives reading has taken up a disproportionate percentage of their waking time, reading plays so little role. Few are the novels—and they stand out sharply as sports and oddities: Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, for example—whose pages are given over generously with an account of the main characters’ reading experiences; and when a book does exceptionally play a role, it generally stands for something else (as Freud put it when recounting the theories of that lone tribe that had developed a sexual interpretation of dreams, with the logical exception of dreams having a specifically sexual content).

All the more remarkable, then, is the complacency with which Thomas Mann exhibits the scholarly activities of Hans Castorp, who “had ordered certain books from home, some of them bearing on his profession … But these volumes now lay neglected in favour of other textbooks belonging to a quite different field, an interest in which had seized upon the young man: anatomy, physiology, biology, works in German, French and English, sent up to the Berghof by the book-dealer in the village.”⁶ To be sure, it may be noted that Mann displaces and inflects the conventional stereotype of an intellectual’s reading in two different ways: first, by insisting on the physicality of the volumes and on everything opaque and thing-like implied by the foreign languages (and the technical or scientific languages, at that!) in which they are printed. This way Borges lies: a materiality of the book itself substitutes a thematics of objects, collections, and manias or obsessions for the evaluation of an activity. But in a second and more basic way it is the very non-intellectuality of Hans Castorp himself (this very ordinary young man, as Mann never tires of insisting) which, by turning the act of reading into an unusual event, something inhabitual and out of the ordinary, makes it over into a figure that would seem to demand interpretation. Still, we must note with some satisfaction that Hans Castorp’s starting point retains some distant kinship with Martin Beck’s hobby, even though the principal business of his native city, as well as his own chosen profession motivate and naturalize the choice of Ocean Steamships as the one volume to accompany the more high-literary traveler on his three-week holiday.

But it should not be thought, by analogy with the Freudian account of money, that the experience of reading, carefully isolated in this way, set off and defamiliarized, will in Thomas Mann be reconverted into a specialized symbolic meaning of some kind: rather, it remains in The Magic Mountain the occasion for the possibility of a perpetual reflexivity of experience as such. Identified as the essential or fundamental feature of art—something which is not obvious from the start, for the modernist alternatives include language, absence, the image, libido—reading, since by definition we are always in it, offers the permanent possibility of analogical demonstration, of the reality we can always reach out and touch (like Martin Beck’s cognac): the analogon, to use Sartre’s technical expression for that remnant of a somewhat more external reality which the mind is able to compare with its own idea, as though reminding itself of the fact of externality itself—more on the order of comparing notes than of pinching yourself, and probably some primitive starting point, some elementary mental operation, in an ascending ladder of Hegelian or phenomenological forms of self-consciousness.

This means, however, that it is not so much reading itself whose significance we need to determine, but rather that with which it is thus, virtually without distance, compared. To call that more fundamental construction art or the monad would be premature; to describe it as the meaning of Der Zauberberg is perhaps more acceptable at this stage, although that really tells us nothing. To identify what is “modernist” in Thomas Mann here, in this process of substituting a primary experience indissociable from the book or work itself for its representational contents—for its “narrative,” which is simply the pretext for the deployment of that more concrete reality of the experience of reading, and of extended, indeed dilated, reading time—is structurally accurate, provided we add to this canonization the ambiguity of its popular success, which tends to draw Mann’s work in general from the high modern over into the middlebrow category, and which can at this point be accounted for by the relative naiveté of this very systematic utilization of reading itself, tending as it does to mobilize some mid-cult pride in getting through long and difficult books, staying the course, and carrying off a more advanced reading certificate.⁷

But it would be wrong to think that reading is here a particularly abstract or elite starting point, or even a rarefied and specialized experience: for in order to be foregrounded as such, and to become audible as the very ground bass of our time with these pages, the body must be awakened as a participant in the process, indeed the only participant. Like Hans on his balcony—

And in the evening, when the almost full moon appeared, the world, enchanted, turned magical. There reigned far and wide the scintillation of crystal, the glitter of diamond … etc.

(LP267, W271, D380)

—and note that the night-time shadows cast by the moonlight are something like the mimetic objects of representation in the Zauberberg itself (as in Plato’s cave)—all this must now be interiorized, so that it is understood that the body itself is the inner sky of this work: the starry heavens depicted in the passage just quoted (which were for Kant the very epitome of Law) must now be somehow recreated with the muted energies and hum of the body at rest, reading.

2. The Blushing Monad

That all modern writing tends in one way or another towards the sensory can abundantly be documented, beginning with Flaubert and Baudelaire; but it is within this very modern “tradition” (if the word is not a misnomer) that Thomas Mann’s style has an originality all of its own and a distinctiveness that demands biographical explanation no doubt, but also its specific place in the history of form. For this language practice systematically betrays, and I may even say sets out to betray (as its inner logic), a wide-ranging affinity for the symptom as such, for a symptomatology that is at one and the same time the detection of the most minute symptoms and their expression, which is to say their complacent encouragement, an incitement of these minute bodily and perceptual tics and stirrings to unfold and to develop. Who says “symptom” obviously always means the body in some fundamental sense; for even a paranoid alertness to clues in the outside world—and nothing is less alien to Thomas Mann than just such moments when his characters read dimly ominous omens (the snub-nosed man on the cemetery wall in Death in Venice)—is at one with a bodily stance, the furtive gaze, a certain way of welcoming the world’s events and judging them. Yet equally clearly the symptom is a game we play with ourselves, insofar as it comes into being as a substitute for desire and a way of outsmarting the latter. Complacency then itself, as an instrument of ever greater consciousness, has something louche about it, and may be said to exhibit Thomas Mann’s decadent side (something he himself was only too complacent about reveling in), for it seems to offer a peculiar misreading of the Freudian ethos (“wo es war …”) in which not stoic heroism but rather a giving in seems recommended, a laisser-aller approximating the dangers of Circe’s island (“You will be going on all fours—already you are inclining toward your forward extremities, and presently you will begin to grunt—have a care!” [LP247, W243, D347]). Indeed, this ambiguity can stand as a first demonstration of Mann’s specific dialectic: its paradoxes are only apparent, for clearly enough it is the peculiarity of repression that is responsible for a situation in which being able to let yourself go is an active conquest, in which laisser-aller is heroic: the discipline of free association itself, in Freud, marks the visible official version of this duality of a passivity which is activity, a weakness which is strength, not to say an evil that is also good—like disease itself? or living organic matter? or the air of Davos?

Yet it is clearly enough only at the price of affirming and encouraging just such symptomal complacency, and of developing a specific style of awareness of the body in which perception consists in a narcissistic and hypochondriac flattering of the organism’s velleities, that Mann’s style is possible. Its effects do not consist in those specifically writerly and expressive moments that he shares professionally with the other great modern writers, scriptable moments of le mot juste, which produce sentences as such, sentences which are events (“man lies die Flachkelche klingen und leert das erste Glas auf einen Zug, elektrisierte sich den Magen mit dem eiskalten, duftigen Geprickel” [LP570, W561, D810]). Indeed, there are occasional refusals of the gambit, and not merely in the let-down of Mann’s characterizations of music here and in Doktor Faustus, which do not rise linguistically to the occasion like comparable moments in Proust or Joyce. One must also reckon in the deeper repudiation of a certain conception of physical experience as such as an object of writing and expression or mimesis: as with those “assurances, given, not during that reported conversation in the French tongue, but in a later interval, wordless to our ears, during which we have elected to intermit the flow of our story along the stream of time, and l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Names