Modernism and Cultural
Conflict: 1180-1922 by Ann L. Ardis.
United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 187 pp.
A book review published in NQ
Quarterly, late 90's or early 00's
This is a good book, but for certain kinds of readers, it will go down
hard.
Let me describe those kinds of readers, for I am one. As high
school students in the early 50's, we somehow discovered T.S. Eliot and
Wallace Stevens and D.H. Lawrence, all on the same day, at laest as we
remember it. We could not have given an adequate paraphrase of any line
of those poems, but we felt worlds were opening for us and that our
lives were being transformed. Now, half a century later, lines and
images from Yeats' "The Second Coming," Eliot's "Prufrock," Joyce's
"The Dead,"Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Stevens "Snowman" and Pound's
Cantos still inhabit our mind, as dense and implacable as childhood
memories.
These works told us that beyond the world of our crew cuts and
double-breasted suits and saving for college, and middle-class
striving, and Ike's grin, and slow dancing to "Harbor Lights" played
badly by a combo of our friends from Algebra II--wonderful as all those
things were--there was Something. We could not have told you what that
Something was and cannot tell it adequately even now, but it was as
beautiful and new as difficult and remotel. We knew it was difficult
because it involved foreign languages, which were often quoted in the
epigraphs to the poem. Despite its difficulties, or perhaps because of
them, it was Final and Beyond as nothing else did.
Reading steadily (if not always competently), we threw ourselves into
that world, which we learned to call Modernism. When we found we could
get paid for this reading, some of us became English majors. Assisted
by our teachers, we put these works into a master narrative that seemed
as true and inevitable as our family histories: Modernism was a noble,
even heroic, effort to reconstitute a culture that had grown moribund
and corrupt, whose corruption stood starkly revealed by the horrors of
the First World War. Modernism gave the world strategies to survive and
endure, even to triumph, in a world that had become in many ways
intellectually inhabitable.
Now comes Ann Ardis and "revisionary critics of modernism." They are
here to tell us it is all much more complicated than it seemed back
then. There were one, two, three, many Modernisms. And worse: What
Ardis calls the"Joyce-Pound-Eliot strand of modernism" was at least
partly a scam. Somehow it "secured its own cultural legitimacy" or had
"disciplinary legitimacy thrust upon it." It shouldered its way on the
cultural scene, became a monolith, filled the landscape. At times,
blocked out the sun. It was elitist, conservative, unspeakably male and
white. All those secrets have been out for a long time, but And those
of us who worshipped at the altar of Modernism need to hear them again,
and we are grateful to see them put forward with learning and acumen.
But we are bound have mixed feelings.
Ann Ardis's book is under 200 pages, but it acknowledges--deftly for
the most part-- a lot of scholarship,. The "Select Bibliography" has
more than 120 items, most of them written since 1990, and the endnotes
add to that.
Her strategy is to set modernism in the context of cultural history. As
she says, "My province . . . has been turn-of-the twentieth-century
studies, not modernist studies per se.". Drawing on the work of Raymond
Williams, Andreas Hyuyssen, Bruno Latour, and on feminist scholars such
as Deborah Jacobs and Rita Felski, and incorporating plenty of
up-to-date critical vocabulary ("gendered discourses,"
(re)organisation," "multiple modalities," "subverted," "liminality,"
"binarry oppositions"), Ardis sets out to offer us an infinitely more
complicated picture of literary history than readers like me were
exposed to in the 1960's.
In this, she certainly succeeds. The book is nothing if not
complicated. Only with with some difficulty I have been able to extract
seven separate arguments from the book(distributed a bit oddly, it
seems to me) through five chapters. Let me state her findings as
clearly as I can, acknowledging that I distort them as I simplify them.
1) Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Fabian socialists, were widely attacked by
Modernists, particularly Pound, for being pretentiously scientific and
thus oblivious or even hostile to the arts. But in fact, Beatrice
Webb's sociological writings, when read carefully, are novelistic, and
besides, the Moderns thought of themselves as scientific when it it was
to their advantage to do so.
2) The Moderns presented themselves as socially and politically
radical. To be consistent, they should have celebrated Oscar Wilde's
sexuality. In fact, they ignored it, or in current terminology,
"erased" it.
3) Modernists contradicted themselves when, on one hand, they claimed
"universality" for Shakespeare, while on the other hand calling
attention to his subversive pessimism and his veiled homosexuality.
4) In criticising the cinema in his novel The Lost Girl, D.H. Lawrence
is rejecting his working class origins, since the cinema later became
the preferred medium for the working class.
5) In praising Wyndam Lewis' novel Tarr, which contains a violent rape
scene, Pound and other modernists chose to focus on its experimentalist
technique at the expense of commentary on other serious issues the
scene raises.
6) Netta Styrett, a prolific and competent turn-of-the-century
novelists remains overlooked because Modernism's categories were so
dominant and so restrictive.
7) The journal New Age, conventionally seen as the house organ of
Modernism, was in fact, diverse and heterogeneous in its approach,
publishing satires of Modernism and essays critical of it.
Do all those points seem interesting and plausible? They are even more
so in the book itself, were they are carefully documented and
vigourously argued. Do they seem a little random? They seem so in the
book itself, for reasons that may tell us something about where we are
in literary and cultural studies at the moment.
Ardis's strategy is to point out contradictions in the conventional
picture of modernism, that is, to de-construct it. But any nimble and
well-stocked mind (and Ardis's mind is as nimble and well-stocked as
any) can point out contradictions easily enough, especially in
something so massive as the "Eliot-Joyce-Pound strand of modernism." No
matter how well done, the finding of contradictions is bound in the
end, to seem niggling.
Yes, the monolith needs to crack. It was flawed, as all important
movements are. And even if it were not, its time it past. We need new
ways of seeing the world. Revisionary work is necessary, and we can be
grateful that thoughtful readers such as Ann Ardis are doing it. But a
couple of questions remain. One is, when will we declare the old
structures torn down? When do we start building something new? Our
critical terms postmodernism and post-structuralism signal their
dependence on what has gone before even as they declare we have moved
on to something else. When will we begin to say what that something
else is?
The other question is this: Even as we deconstruct, could we not
proceed with some sense of respect and gratitude toward the thing we
are deconstructing? Could we not acknowledge the the achievement of the
Moderns, even as we point out their flaws? Could we not acknowledge we
are standing on the shoulders of giants, even as we point out their
feet of clay? If Modernism became at last a monolith and blotted out
the sun, perhaps that was because it was, for a time, doing real work
and meeting real needs.
From the depths of the Joyce-Pound-Eliot strand of modernism-- in
fact from Canto 81--came a cry that still resonates:
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
But to have done instead of not doing
This is not vanity
To have with decency, knocked
That a blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a
live tradition
for from a fine old eye the conquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here, error is all in the undone
all in the diffidence that faltered.