Preface 1
Part 1: Paradoxies 7
Chapter 1: High and Low in Modernist Criticism 8
Chapter 2: Old and New in Modernist Art 38
Chapter 3: Poetry and Rhetoric in the Modernist Montage 96
Chapter 4: Hard and Soft--Joyce and Others 123
Part 2: Paradoxes 147
Chapter 5: Durable Fluff--The Importance of Not Being Earnest 148
Chapter 6: Iridescent Mediocrity--Dornford Yates and Others 167
Chapter 7: Formulaic Creativity--Simenon's Maigret Novels 202
Part 3: Doxies 225
Chapter 8: Model Artists in Paris--Hastings, Hamnett, and Kiki 226
Chapter 9: The Aesthete in the Brothel--Proust and Others 264
Works Cited 289
I have a personal stake in this book, which I want to mention here, partly because I think you have a right to know about it, and partly as a way of explaining why I have written the book and what kind of result I am hoping to achieve with it. I have loved stories for as long as I can remember, and loved them rather indiscriminately--high and low, serious and funny, long and short--so long as they did what stories can do: hold my interest and provide the pleasures that we all derive from emotional investment in artificial beings. Moving from those (relatively) innocent pleasures through various academic modes of studying literature and art, I have regularly run into ways of dividing the texts I enjoyed into those that I should indeed enjoy and those that I shouldn't be enjoying at all. Offended at this regular correction of my taste, I have naturally sought to justify my choices, and, over the years, have written about science fiction, about crime stories, and about other kinds of texts that I like. Part of my motivation in writing this book, then, is just a continuation of that project, but there is a second part as well.
Born in 1929, I grew up with Modernism as a part of my heritage, and, attending
Yale just before the mid-century, I was more or less indoctrinated into the
New Critical account of aesthetic value, which I see now as a distinctly Modernist
account. At Yale, too, I encountered the great teacher of art history, George
Kubler, who directed me to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which, as it
happens, was also born in 1929. Visiting MoMA in the late nineteen forties,
I absorbed semi-consciously the museum's doctrine that "modernism is the
art that is essentially abstract" (now made explicit on their web site).
I shall return to both of these views (that of the New Critics and that of MoMA)
in later parts of this work, which may be seen as a continuation of my long
attempt to extricate myself from these views, while continuing to learn about
Modernism.
On the literary side, my further academic studies, partly by design and partly
by accident, led me deeper into Modernism as a field of scholarship, with special
emphasis on writers like James Joyce, whose papers I catalogued at Cornell University
, and William Faulkner, who was at the University of Virginia when I first taught
there, so that, when I taught Absalom, Absalom! in an undergraduate honors
seminar, he sat in on the class. My pedigree in Anglo-American literary Modernism
was strong enough, then, but my contact with these major writers, whose work
I admired, never prevented me from continuing to be interested in their less
exalted contemporaries--as they were, of course, themselves. There is no real
equivalent for visual abstraction in the literary arts, of course, though a
number of attempts have been made to provide literary studies with a notion
of Modernism as clear and powerful as MoMA's "art that is essentially abstract."
Even so, critics and scholars kept attempting to define literary Modernism in
terms of verbal experimentation or some form of departure from grammar, representation,
or narrative structure.
Thinking about all this, studying the verbal and visual texts from Modern period,
and discussing them with students, colleagues, and friends, it seemed to me
that my own understanding of Modernism, and the understanding of it by other
people as well, was far from accurate, and, even more important, far from useful
in sorting out our own situation and understanding the art and culture of our
own time. So, I began to reconsider Modernism, casting a wider net for useful
texts, and recognizing that this was not my time, but a very different time,
where other views and values prevailed, which could only be understood by an
immersion in the texts of that time, accompanied by a critical acceptance of
my own position as a foreigner, an alien in that territory, who needed to make
a serious effort to understand the ways and values of the original inhabitants.
As I did this, over a period of many years, I began to be more and more aware
of a problem which has shaped this book as a whole and every chapter within
it--the problem I have named in my title.
We have been familiar with the notion of paradox as a literary value ever since
the New Critics popularized it a half century or more ago. But paradoxy? What
is that? I am using the word to indicate a kind of confusion generated by a
terminology that seems to make clear distinctions where clear distinctions cannot--and
should not--be made. In particular, I shall be examining the terminology that
has been deployed in definitions and discussions of Modernism in literature
and the other arts--a terminology generated at the time when what we know as
Modernism was establishing its place in the culture of the English-speaking
world, and sustained by the critics and scholars who sought to interpret Modernism
and teach others about it. This terminology was based on apparently clear and
simple binary oppositions--high/low, for instance, or old/new--which turn out,
upon examination, to be far from simple and anything but clear. Taken together,
these oppositions often function to suppress or exclude a middle term, forcing
many admirable works into the lower half of an invidious distinction. The four
chapters comprising Part 1 of this book are devoted to explorations of four
major paradoxies that have shaped Modernist critical discourse.
These paradoxies share a tendency to reject or suppress any middle term that
might mediate between their extremes. My project, then, has been to look into
this critical terminology and explore the confusions and contradictions lurking
there, hoping, among other things, to recover the middle that they exclude.
In doing this I regularly capitalize the first letter of key terms, as a way
of calling attention to their status as objects of investigation rather than
solid critical assumptions on which to build--capitalization being less intrusive
than such other possibilities as scare quotes or italics. I shall begin with
a chapter on the distinction between High and Low, which has been the founding
binary opposition for all Modernist critical terminology.
In the second chapter, I propose an examination of the paradoxy of Old and New
in the visual arts, not from MoMA's perspective but from that of a weekly magazine,
appearing in the crucial years from 1910 to 1914. In these excerpts from The
New Age, we will hear the voices of artists and critics, as those voices
argued about what should be the proper art for modern culture--and we will look
at images of the works they were discussing. The critical vocabulary of Modernism
began with the visual arts, and was to some extent--and not always happily--adopted
by literary artists and critics. Writers like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford,
for example, borrowed the term Impressionism to describe their own literary
work, and Virginia Woolf was discussing Cézanne with her sister and Roger
Fry even as she began her own career as a novelist.
After the investigation of Old and New in art, we shall conclude Part 1 of this
book with two more considerations of the workings of paradoxy in the definition
of Modernism in literature: the distinction between Poetry and Rhetoric in Chapter
3, and that between Hardness and Softness or sentimentalism in Chapter 4. In
Part 2, the focus will shift to discussions of works of Modern literature that
are excluded or marginalized by Modernist paradoxy. Part of what we miss when
we regard Modernism through the lenses provided by its polemicists and writers
of manifestos is the importance of traditional values in establishing the durability
of works of literature and visual art. And by traditional values I mean things
like empathy with characters and concern for their fates in fiction, the pleasures
of recognition and seeing freshly in visual art, and the defamiliarizing effects
of poetic language. I also mean wit and grace, whether verbal or visual. The
one thing that distinguishes the arts from other kinds of texts is that their
aim is pleasure. They can please by representing pain and ugliness, but please
they must--or they are not art but something else. We do not take pleasure seriously
enough, I believe, and Modernism, with its emphasis on the connection between
greatness and difficulty, is to some extent responsible for this. Therefore,
I shall have something to say in the following pages about the importance of
being earnest about pleasure, running the risk of a certain paradoxy myself.
The emphasis in Part 2, then, will be on particular writers or texts representing
paradoxical categories--with paradox itself functioning here as a kind of antidote
to paradoxy: Oscar Wilde and "Durable Fluff" in Chapter 5, Dornford
Yates and "Iridescent Mediocrity" in Chapter 6, and Georges Simenon
and "Formulaic Creativity" in Chapter 7. Then, finally, in Part 3,
we will consider what I call "Doxies": lives and texts concerned with
prostitution or the bohemia that exists on the border of the brothel, where
artists and models exchange places and aesthetes get down and dirty. Some of
these texts are journalistic or cast in the form of casual memoirs. Such texts
are the doxies of Modernism, represented here by letters and memoirs from women
who modeled for Modernist painters in Chapter 8. Others reveal High Modernist
authors descending to low places, as with Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce in the
world of prostitutes and brothels in Chapter 9. This whole book, then, will
constitute a sort of descensus ad avernum (Did I tell you that Virgil came to
my class when I taught the Aeneid? Actually, he didn't, but the ghost of Miss
Jennings, my high school Latin teacher, was there I assure you.) Anyway, the
descent is easy, the poet said, and I hope you will find it so.
Parts of Chapters 1, 4, and 6 appeared in an essay published in Narrative (Vol.
11 No. 3, October 2003). I am grateful to the editor, James Phelan for very
helpful advice at that time and also for permission to use those materials in
this book, where they appear in extensively revised and expanded versions. Part
of Chapter 8 appeared in the Hemingway Review (September 22, 1999), and I thank
Susan Beegel for permission to use it here. All materials drawn from The New
Age, have been taken from the digital edition of that journal available at <www.modjourn.brown.edu>,
where they may be accessed and used freely by anyone, and I strongly recommend
visiting that site to all those who share my interest in Modernity and Modernism.
The manuscript of this book was read by John Kulka, of the Yale University Press,
by Carl Klaus, James Phelan, and an anonymous reader for the Press. They saved
me from many follies, and I am grateful to them all. The faults that remain
are, I am afraid, necessary aspects of whatever virtues this book may claim.