Satirizing Modernism

Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Emmett Stinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501329098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Satirizing Modernism examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels-such as Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things -were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication, but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. Satirizing Modernism analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism, which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics, these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today.

1

Introduction: Autonomy, Satire, Romanticism, Avant-Garde

1 Autonomy

In a notorious episode of the television show Seinfeld (1989–98), the characters George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld go to the headquarters of the major TV network NBC to pitch a show “about nothing.”¹ When the executives attempt to glean some meaningful detail about the contents of the show, George becomes irate, insisting “No! No! No! Nothing happens!” On one level, his protestations serve as a tongue-in-cheek metacommentary on Seinfeld’s quotidian plots about riding the subway, going to the cinema, or having dinner at a Chinese restaurant. But George and Jerry’s anti-pitch for a show that would subvert the formal conventions of a situational comedy also appears to parody the aesthetic autonomy and formal experimentation usually associated with modernist works. Indeed, Costanza later defends his angry replies in the meeting by saying, “I, for one, am not going to compromise my artistic integrity”; while this claim is clearly ironic, given that George lacks both moral and artistic integrity, it nonetheless implies a belief in art’s self-justification, which has often been seen as a hallmark of modernist aesthetics. As this example suggests, at the end of the twentieth century, modernist autonomy was popularly understood to be motivated by an elitist view of its own value—a position that seemed comically out of step with the economic and cultural realities of the contemporary world.

This popular view of modernist autonomy echoed scholarly positions that had been developing over the previous thirty years; by 1984, in his landmark essay on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson could confidently write aesthetic autonomy’s obituary, stating that, under late capitalism, “aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally.”² For Jameson, globalized capitalism made it virtually impossible for artists to claim independence from economic or commercial imperatives, given the hegemony of technocratic, neoliberal managerialism, and the concomitant privatization of the public sphere. Andreas Huyssen, writing about changes in museum culture in the 1990s, similarly noted that appeals to “the myths of aesthetic autonomy . . . can no longer be used by anyone with a straight face.”³ As Huyssen attests, modernist notions of autonomy no longer held sway within institutions that had become conscious of the inherently political nature of cultural intermediation. From these perspectives, modernist aesthetic autonomy seemed both impracticable and politically naïve.

But these popular and academic views of modernist autonomy tended to ignore an important fact: the concept of a “pure” autonomy had already been critiqued in many modernist works. Even George and Jerry’s parodic TV show in which “nothing happens” was anticipated by André Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters (1925), where the character Edouard strives to produce a “pure novel” stripped of “its concern with a certain sort of accuracy,” which also eschews “dialogue . . . drawn from life” and the description of “characters,” “accidents,” “traumatisms,” and even “outward events.”⁴ Gide appears to have viewed the pure novel as a sort of ideal form⁵ and Eduoard’s comments explicitly mirror Flaubert’s own desire to write “a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style.”⁶ But Eduoard’s complete failure to realize this aesthetic project presents a complex and ironic undercutting of this idealization. Gide’s modernist aesthetics, as The Counterfeiters demonstrates, do not simply argue for either art’s self-justification or the creation of “pure” forms, but rather involve the self-reflexive acknowledgment of the fundamental impossibility of a “pure” autonomy. Gide’s ironic and reflexive aesthetic method presents something more complex than an elitist belief in art’s immanent value.

Over the last decade, there has been a renewed scholarly interest in modernist autonomy, which has increasingly sought to examine and understand this phenomenon within its own terms and contexts. This approach has been necessary because prior views on modernist autonomy frequently reflected polemical positions deriving from two of the most significant and prolonged aesthetic debates of the twentieth century. The first such debate, which mainly occurred among Marxist critics, grew out of Ernest Bloch and Georg Lukács’s disagreement about German Expressionism’s relationship to fascism. This dispute would develop into an ongoing exchange—taken up by such figures as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and others—about whether what we now call modernist art was either elitist and reactionary or else radical and utopian.⁷ Of equal importance were the postmodernism debates, in which both Jameson and Huyssen played important roles, which sought to define the mode of cultural and aesthetic production that had developed after modernism; as I will discuss in Chapter 5, proponents of postmodernism typically associated autonomy with a retrograde or conservative modernist aesthetics that had been superseded by a postmodern heteronomy. In both of these debates, positions on autonomy could not easily be separated from larger disagreements about culture and politics; while this resulted in intriguing and spirited exchanges, considerations of modernist autonomy as a specific historical and cultural phenomenon were often sidelined by what seemed to be more urgent questions—in particular the question of whether autonomy should be seen as reactionary or progressive.

While I am not seeking to dismiss the importance of these prolonged debates or account for all of the many positions articulated within them, I do want to suggest that three broad approaches to autonomy developed in their wake. The first of these approaches presupposes autonomy to be a logically coherent concept or aesthetic program, which is then situated as one pole in a binary opposition. Representative examples include Peter Bürger’s influential definition of autonomy as art’s separateness from life⁸; Richard Murphy’s argument, itself reliant on aspects of Bürger’s account, that modernist autonomy sought “to resist any kind of co-option which would limit the work’s meaning”⁹; and many post-structural accounts of autonomy, such as Craig Owens’s description of modernist autonomy as the “autonomy of the signifier” in its “liberation from the ‘tyranny of the signified’.”¹⁰

The second approach, associated with such thinkers as Bloch, Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, treats aesthetic autonomy as being, in some manner, a model for utopian social transformation. While it is important to note that many of these accounts are so conceptually rich that they cannot be simply reduced to such a formula (particularly in the case of Adorno, for whom autonomy cannot be understood, as Christoph Menke has argued, without reference to the categories of negation and sovereignty¹¹), this association between aesthetic autonomy and utopia has nevertheless constituted a significant approach to the concept.

The third approach involves the claim that modernist autonomy is not integral to modernism itself. There are two variations of this argument. The first, articulated by Astradur Eysteinsson, contends that the modernist view of the work as an autonomous and “isolated aesthetic whole” cannot be reconciled with “the equally prominent view of modernism as a historically explosive paradigm”—a contradiction that leads Eysteinsson to conclude that the concept of modernism is incoherent.¹² The second, as exemplified by Fredric Jameson, views autonomy as an epiphenomenon of a deeper cultural shift, which is “the radical disjunction and separation of literature and art” from other popular and populist forms of culture.¹³

More contemporary research, however, has tried to approach autonomy in new ways by combining theory, historical research, and textual analysis to understand modernist autonomy in its own terms. Such critics as Jennifer Ashton, Charles Altieri, Nicholas Brown, Lisa Siraganian, and Andrew Goldstone have all argued that aesthetic autonomy is of key significance for any understanding of modernism, while also seeking to depict such autonomy as a complex phenomenon that is simultaneously aesthetic and political in nature. In so doing, these critics have sought to locate understandings of autonomy outside of the three traditional positions I have noted above in a manner that also transcends the traditional antipathy between aesthetic autonomy and politically committed art.

Virtually all of these more recent accounts argue that modernist claims of autonomy have typically been misunderstood. Even today, aesthetic autonomy is still commonly represented as “insisting on the retreat of art from society,” disavowing any concern “with life praxis in any direct way,” and seeking “to locate art in a sphere evacuated of all purposiveness.”¹⁴ In such accounts, modernist autonomy is essentially equated with the art-for-art’s-sake positions articulated by Le Parnasse and the various decadent authors of the late nineteen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Autonomy, Satire, Romanticism, Avant-Garde
• 2 The Romantic Satire of Romanticism: Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey
• 3 Modernism Against Itself: Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God
• 4 Exhausting Modernism: Satire, Sublimity, and Late Modernism in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions
• 5 Aporia and the Satiric Imagination: The Limit-Modernism of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
• 6 Conclusion: Satire and Radical Apophasis in Evan Dara’s The Easy Chain
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright