The Crisis of Modernism?

As I've mentioned before, I'm reading What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici as part of my prepatration read all of Proust again beginning in 2013, the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Volume one of The Novel.

The publication opens with an odd, and I suspect unintentional, juxtaposition of sentiments. In the preface, Josipovici begins by describing how he sat down to read some writers who were being touted as the promising new voices in 1958. The sentiment this inspires in him is disappointment.

The second sentiment, crisis, appears four pages later at the start of chapter one.

In 1864 Mallarmé, aged twenty-three, wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis: 'I feel like I'm collapsing in on myself day by day, each day discouragement overwhelms me, and lethargy is killing me. When I emerge from this I'll be stupefied, nullified.'

Lest anyone think I am being unfair in describing "crisis' as a sentiment, note that Josipovici describes the crisis of modernism entirely in terms of the feelings of leading artists: Mallarmé is followed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Josipovici assures us he could also make his point by quoting Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Schoenberg, Francis Bacon or Geörgy Kurtág.

But Josipovici says the piling up of examples is unnecessary and that the feelings of these few is enough to make his point.

Let these four examples stand for a century of pain, anxiety and despair on the part of writers, painters and composers, and let their words stand for what has been called the Crisis of Modernism.

Keep that thought in mind and read this from some guy named Jim Todd speaking of the Crisis of Modernism in 1995:

We live in an age of global transformation and uncertainty on all levels: economic, political, religious and cultural.

I remember studying The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl back in the early 1980s and my professor beginning the class by saying, "the problem with modernism is that it is always in crisis." He meant that as a putdown but you wouldn't have to look very far to find defenders of modernism who would immediately cheer at that and say, "That is exactly what we have been trying to convey."

And that is why I begin with Josipovici's initial feeling of disappointment; because a feeling of disappointment is not the way to respond to a crisis. Here is how he expresses his disappointment at reading what had been identified for him as leading English novelists in 1958:

... when I borrowed their work from the library I was disappointed to find that they seemed to have nothing whatsoever in common with the writers I had been reading. They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the very core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust.

And it's telling that, when it comes the moment to make a key point, Josipovici, who is, after all a novelist and university professor and is, therefore, someone whom we should expect to be good with language, falls back on an appalling cliché: "touched me to the very core of my being".

I also wonder what counts as the criteria to establish that something "touched me to the very core of my being"? The temptation is to say, "I don't need to explain because I can feel it," with lots of emphasis on the feeeeeel! But that is simply another way of saying "this meaningful to me" and, in that case, "So what?"There are people for whom violent porn is meaningful.

To say anything at all, Josipovici, has to establish that modernism is not only meaningful to him but that it should be meaningful to you too. And that means he has to establish that the crisis of modernism is also your crisis. We need to believe not only that there is a crisis but that there is a superior way to experience that crisis and that we all should turn to, not just modernist art, but modernist artists to learn what we are experiencing and how we ought to experience it.

I don't think Josipovici is unaware of this. I think the problem is that he doesn't believe it. What he points to is something that operates like a religion. It has its beliefs and rituals and these make sense to the people who have invested a lot of time and effort on modernism. But he does not explain why we should care in the first place. Unless he can do that, he will have to admit modernism is just a  style, something you could sell in a book: "You too can dress, decorate your apartment and stock your library just like Don Draper."

And remember that style is always about feeling. Fashion editors cheerfully begin articles with phrases like: "The attitude of today's trend setters is ..."

This matters when we read Proust. Do we see his success in his ability to write well or do we think he has valuable lessons to teach us about how we should experience life?

Feu Marcel Proust

Today is the anniversary of Proust's death.

Just a few days ago, I commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. If we do the arithmetic, we can see that Proust had just nine years to finish his masterwork following the publication of volume one.

The temptation is to think he didn't know this but the truth is that he did. Always a sickly boy, he knew he wasn't going to have a long life. As he wrote The Novel, he grew increasingly convinced he would die. If anything, he may have been too aware of his coming death.

On my other blog I was writing of the modernists desire to make certain modernism was not just a  style. They wanted to change the culture. Ironically, the explosion in the popularity of modernism in recent years has been precisely because people like it as an historical style. Looking at Proust and his ill health and his constant awareness of his coming death, we can not only easily understand but also easily sympathize with his desire to be more than a stylist.

But should we? Wanting to do more than contribute to a style is a very ambitious thing to want to do. Perhaps too ambitious. I mean that both prudentially and morally.

I have, as I have noted elsewhere been reading What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici to prepare myself for rereading all of À la recherche du temps perdu beginning  next year (I think this will be my third time of reading the whole thing through, although I have read certain volumes and parts of volumes many times more often). One of the points Josipovoci hammers when he discusses The Novel is that Marcel the narrator is a better person than Charles Swann. And you'd have to say that if you were, as Gabriel Josipovici is, an unreconstructed modernist.

Josipovici's argument is worth reading at some length:

Our existence is radically contingent. And yet the story of Swann himself, placed by the author near the start of his novel, demonstrates that despite the the uniqueness and contingency of each of our lives, there are general laws of existence as well, which make us all behave in similar ways: the story of Swann's love for Odette parallels that of Marcel for Gilberte and then Albertine. At the same time the novel shows us it is possible to react to similar experiences in very different ways, to learn or not to learn from what one goes through. Swann, with that slight coarseness of spirit which characterizes him, says Marcel, dismisses his affair with Odette with the remark" 'To think that I gave up the best years of my life to a woman who was not my type.' Marcel, on the other hand, more intelligent, more dogged perhaps in his desire to understand, comes to see that suffering and joy are not to be dismissed like that, but form part of the fabric of existence, the exploration of which becomes the theme of his life as a writer. All this makes nonsense of the claim, sometimes still heard, that Proust is merely the exquisite chronicler of the upper echelons of French society in the years leading up to 1914.

I'll start with the last sentence for the word "merely" along with some rhetorical sneering is doing a lot of work here. For while Proust certainly is not only an exquisite chronicler he most certainly is an exquisite chronicler and a lot of people read him solely for that reason. Who are we to prevent them from getting the enjoyment they get out of reading it the way they like to read it?

Next, let's return to the first two sentences and particularly to the expression "radically contingent". What can that mean? Does it mean anything that isn't, on more careful analysis, trivial? And how does the second sentence, with it's claim "there are general laws of existence as well" coexist with "radically contingent"? When someone make those two claims one after another is there any reason to believe that they are using words in a meaningful way?

Obviously, I  meant those questions as rhetorical. I think the expression "radically contingent" is just jargon for a modernist like Josipovici. It's the modernist's version of the consultant con, the lit crit version of "applying creative solutions in today's business environment", which is to say, it's a case of throwing words that sound impressive together with the intent of being obscure so was to impress the rubes.

I'm skipping a lot of steps in a long argument here but I think that if we peel away all that consultant con talk, we might ask some very old-fashioned questions about the relative moral stature of Swann and Marcel. For Swann does achieve marriage and his marriage lasts until his death. Marcel achieves no such union. His relationships are either obsessive and yet failed, as is the case with Gilberte, or they are obsessive and creepily possessive as is the case with Albertine. For all Swann's supposed coarseness, if we had to pick between his life and Marcel's, I don't think many of us would pick Marcel.

Ask yourself the heartless question. Here is Proust lying in bed at the end of a life that he has largely wasted on social climbing and the pursuit of crude sexual experience and looking for so0mething to redeem it. Looking at Charles Swann, we can see how the urge to draw parallels between their lives would be tempting can't we?

I'm not sure we should go the next step, though, and imagine that Proust himself saw Marcel the narrator as a better person than Swann. I think that if we read The Novel more carefully than Josipovici has, we will see that the implicit criticism that Proust makes of Marcel is far harder than the explicit criticism our narrator levels at Swann.

"Ninety-nine?" "Yes, Max."

Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of THE NOVEL, was published ninety-nine years ago today, which explains why next year is the year of reading Proust.

I was writing on my other blog just this morning that "modernism" has gotten rather long in the tooth. It doesn't make sense to speak of a style that began more than 100 years ago, never really caught on and is now over for all intents and purposes as "modern". But we do because we are stuck with the term "modernism". That anomaly is because the modernists didn't intend to be a new style. They believed that the world had changed in a radical way such that the old styles were no longer possible  and sought to create a new culture in response. They were wrong about the former and failed at the latter.

Some people argue, by the way, that Proust isn't really a modernist but a late romantic. I don't think you can really make that argument stick but you can read him as if he were and get a coherent reading out of the book. I do.

More Proust Love

Here is a passage to ponder:

If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little discs of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms and the people and places she knows ... the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects and the designs of others upon her; and that what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes.

There is a sense that all that makes sense. We could read it in certain moods and think, I recognize that sentiment.

It also seems to me that much of it is slightly unhinged. Notice how he starts with expressions such as "enter her life" and "link it to our own" but ends with a desire to penetrate the "impenetrable" and "possess" her. Again, we might think ordinary male attitudes towards love. But how much can these be justified? Especially the second?

And note that there is something here that simply isn't true. We can tell what other people are thinking and feeling from looking at them. No, we can't do it perfectly and we can't actually read minds. But much of the time, we can read people's intentions and feelings towards us from their facial expressions. Well, most of us. There are people who cannot.

The sense in which all the above is most credible is if we imagine these as the thoughts of an adolescent boy.

It is well, well, into the volume entitled A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs that the five girls whom young Marcel finds himself in the shade of make their appearance*. In some ways they are more boy-like than girl-like but I think any heterosexual male can identify with this thought of young Marcel's when he tells us the various things he thought about the girls:

Certainly, in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste.

Not because it is impossible to imagine women as chaste but you tend not to when you are sexually attracted to them.  

Which leads to odd tensions. You sit down and have a pleasant conversation about Proust with the woman you just a few hours ago were imagining what it would be like to dribble chocolate sauce on her nipples, which you have never seen, and watch it form little dark  streams down over her white, white breasts. And you wonder, "Does she know what sort of things I think of her?" and "Would she be pleased or horrified?" All the while you keep up the pretense.

Now, the normal course of events is that you meet a woman and the two of you get closer and slower and get a better and better understanding of your thoughts about one another. She doesn't know about the chocolate precisely but she knows you and gets a good notion of how you are likely to have thought about her and you get a better understanding of her and how she is likely to respond to being told that you have thought such things. And away you go.

But in adolescence such things seem impossible. Girls are older and more knowing than you and, at the same time, your thoughts of them seem so over the top that you cannot imagine connecting.

What sort of world was the one from which she was looking at me? I could not tell, any more than one could tell from the few details which a telescope enables us to descry on a neighbouring planet whether it is inhabited by human beings, whether or not they can see us, or whether their review of us has inspired any reflections in them.

Naturally, you are attracted to girls but, equally naturally, girls whose outward behaviour is a little more vulgar and openly sexual, and who perhaps belong to a new and rising class not so beholden to all the manners and mires that make direct expression between boys and girls more difficult. And thus the five girls who come down the beach at Balbec.





* Why does this second volume take so long to get to the point? Why make your reader beat his way hundreds of pages in, more than 60 percent of the text, before justifying your title? The answer to that, I think, is that the first volume was self-published and Proust was limited in the number of pages he could print. As a consequence, he cut the third section of volume 1 way down. When he found an actual publisher to print volume 2, he revisited at the beginning the stuff he would have liked to have put in Volume1.

I know this is heresy, but I rather wish he hadn't. I think Proust needed an editor and there isn't a single volume of the novel that couldn't have been cut quite a bit and thereby have been made even better.