I want to talk about modernist literature.
No, wait! Come back!
I promise I won’t mention Freud. Or Nietzsche. And I’ll continue to write in English. I have nothing to say about fertility cults, dead kings or metaphysical poems that you haven’t read.
What I want to talk about is how we think about modernism now – if at all. I want to find out about the prejudice against it – demonstrated by the fact that in a clearly unfair and borderline absurd paragraph like the one above, you’ll know exactly where I’m coming from.
But first, let me take you to a social situation I encountered just the evening before I sat down to write this article. I was at the opening of an art exhibition (I know). In attendance were some distinguished authors: I was lucky enough to be chatting to a few of them, and everything was rather pleasant. Since I had been writing about Ford Madox Ford here on the Reading group over the course of the past month, and as I was toying with the idea of writing this article, I said: “Can I ask you about modernism?”
There was a brief pause to let the tumbleweeds pass, a moment of bemused tittering and then I saw a row of faces looking at me aghast. If I had asked them to inspect my verrucas, or attend an all-day performance-poetry marathon, I couldn’t have invoked more horror. You won’t be surprised to learn that soon afterwards, I found myself standing alone.
I had a similar reaction when I asked on Twitter for a kneejerk response to the question: “What do you think about modernism?” A few people made positive noises – academics in particular got interested and started asking me to define exactly what I meant. But the majority of responses went more like this:
“Its practitioners/their critics think they’re more clever/revolutionary than they actually are.”
“Aspects of what is called modernism was wilfully elitist – I’m wary of stuff that aims for purity (like Ezra Pound’s poetry).”
“I like proto-modernists (James, FMF) more than the real thing, who I dismiss as arid snobs.”
“Mostly that I’m not allowed to say I think the majority of it is pretentious, sweaty and elitist balls.”
Yes, that’s right, sweaty. My correspondent (a respected publisher) explained: “Oh yeah, I imagine all the modernists to have sweat patches under their arms.”
A quick Google also brought up the following: “Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning (‘That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all’ laments Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form.”
It’s pleasing to note that such objections have a long history. Those great surfers of the zeitgeist at the Vatican lay claim to coining the phrase at the turn of the last century: “The word seems to have been forgotten, till the time of the Catholic publicist Perin (1815-1905), professor at the University of Louvain, 1844-1889. This writer, while apologising for the coinage, describes ‘the humanitarian tendencies of contemporary society’ as modernism.” Naturally, Perin didn’t like it since it sought to “banish God”. In turn, Pope Pius X produced an oath against modernism, “to be sworn to by all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries”.
Elsewhere, I saw modernism dismissed as elitist high art and a mass of contradictions. Ezra Pound may have insisted that modernist writers should always “make it new”, but many dedicated themselves to burrowing into early literatures and weaving obscure allusions into their works. At the same time as they strived to change everything on the page, these same writers were often socially authoritarian conservatives such as Eliot, Yeats, Wyndham Lewis. Ezra Pound, notoriously, became an outright fascist.
And, I suppose, there’s some weight behind these complaints. The fascism is particularly obnoxious. It’s also probably true that like any artistic movement that hangs around for a long time, modernism eventually trundled deep into the dark alley of reader boredom.
But this longevity is also a big argument in its favour. In one form or another, modernism was a major force for a sizeable chunk of the 20th century (and even some of the 19th, depending on who you talk to). It took in writers as various as Joseph Conrad, TS Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and David Jones. And surely they have more that separates them than they have in common?
The truth is that those academics on Twitter were right to ask for particular definitions. I was asking a silly question in talking about “modernism” and encouraging people to generalise. Had I asked about any of the individual writers I mentioned above – or Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes or even Gertrude Stein – I imagine I would have received a more positive response.
When you get down to specifics, the objections to modernism melt away. This month’s Reading group subject, The Good Soldier, is a case in point. The book is often called an early classic of modernism. It clearly has some of the hallmarks of the movement. It has a narrative that weaves in and out of different time frames in complicated ways. It has a narrator who is very aware of the manner in which he tells his story, and is as unreliable as they come.
Even so, I would argue that for all its technical brilliance and frequently dazzling trickery, the form of The Good Soldier is actually one of its less important aspects, certainly in terms of reading experience. The things that have most struck me every time I’ve read the book (and in flat contradiction of all those who claim that modernism is somehow arid, elitist and clever-clever) are its deepness of feeling, its willingness to lay bare matters of the heart and the good old-fashioned virtues of a gripping story, well told. What’s more, although I’ve tried to talk about the impressive technical aspects of Ford’s writing in my previous Reading group articles this month, I notice that I’ve kept on coming back to character and morality. I’ve kept coming back to emotion.
Yes, this emotion largely centres on bitterness and anger. The hearts the novel investigates are dark and corrupt, and the story ends in near-universal disaster – but you could say the same thing about Hamlet. It is gripping, primal stuff. If there are formal experiments, they are there to serve the broader story – to allow the narrator to agonise over events as he recalls them, and to revise his opinions in the time it takes to tell the story. If he is unreliable, it is because so too is the human heart. As Reading group contributor Palfreyman explained in a series of superb posts last week: “In the course of writing Dowell himself is beginning to reflect on these revelations and revise his opinions of the people involved in them. So over the course of half-a-year’s writing he goes from poor Edward, poor Florence and poor Leonora to thinking of them as sentimental, hard and cold.”
And if it takes modernism to get that kind of natural, human, emotional process on to the page, I’m all for it. If it takes modernism to produce a book as wonderful as The Good Soldier, we should celebrate it. In fact, I’m really keen to talk about it some more … But at this stage I should probably hand over to you. So tell me, what do you think about modernism?
