Part Four 1910-1945
ⅠContexts and Backgrounds
The emergence of modernism
Quentin Anderson "Modernism" now seems oddly remote, since the literary period it refers to is thought to have ended in the late 1930s or early 1940s. The word was first widely used in Germany in the 1890s,
the decade in which modernism is said to have appeared. Unlike such terms as "romanticism" or "classicism," it does not refer to the qualities of works of art in a given period but simply suggests that they represent a break with the past. Since no such break can be complete, we must ask, when considering the various movements given this name, what it proposed to get rid of, what ideas about art and its place in society it employed, and what techniques were most often used by those associated with it. Historians assume that modernism is the consequence of the transformation of society brought about by industrialism and technology in the course of the nineteenth century. It
was in the great urban centers of Europe that the pressures of modernity were most intensely felt, and
it was in these cities that what many people viewed as the extravagant or shocking works of modernists were produced. The expressionists of the 1890s in Germany offer an example: here were city dwellers who took to the fields and shed their clothing in an almost parodic effort to
shake off the social molds they found stifling and to recapture a primal freshness in experience.
In the Europe of the two decades before World War I, and at an accelerating pace thereafter, publicly recognized authority lost legitimacy, while the arts took on more and more of the job of defining the human horizon. The challenge they posed to church and state was less direct, but rather more effective in the long run than that of anarchists and social revolutionaries. Such movements as expressionism produced paintings and plays that startled their audiences, music that provoked riots. These outbursts testify to a lively awareness among the public that cherished conventions were threatened. Some of the impulses eddying out of expressionism found their way into politics, as in the satirical drawings of George Grosz in Germany. Other developments seemed totally nihilistic, attempts to break out of all existing social forms, shapes, and values at once, as in Dada, the creation of Tristan Tzara. Carried from Switzerland to Paris, where it became the progenitor of surrealism, it even reached New York in 1915, where, however, it hardly caused
a ripple. Not all modernism was primitivist or an attempt at a blanket rejection of bourgeois reality. Marinetti's futurism went to the other extreme, cherishing technology as the promise of a new kind
of consciousness.
We may glimpse the variety and intensity characteristic of European modernism in a passage on
his childhood in Paris from Jacques Barzun's The Energies of Art: "To be born near the beginning of the decade before the first world war and at the center of the most advanced artistic activity in Paris is an accident bound to have irreversible consequences on the mind." As a youngster, Barzun had been surrounded by cubist paintings, had heard Stravinsky's music, been exposed to futurist and simultanist poetry, "modernistic" architecture, and had visited the studios of Duchamp and Villon, Gleizes and Metzinger. He describes what went on at home:
Every Saturday and Sunday and sometimes oftener, the stage was full: Marinetti acting and shouting,
Archipenko making Lé
ger roar with laughter, Delaunay and Ozenfant debating, Paul Fort declaiming se or Florent Schmitt surrounded at the piano. . . . On view at close range were also:
his ballads, Varè
Ezra Pound, Cocteau, Severini, Bérard, Kandinsky, Copeau, Bosschère, Polti, Milosz, Poeret, Brancusi, La Fresnaye, and many others fleeting or unremembered. Unquestionably, art and the discussion of art were the sole concern of all who counted in that particular universe.
Our curiosity is aroused by the presence of Ezra Pound. Can we distinguish what the experience of this scene might have meant to him, and to other Americans, as opposed to Europeans whose modernist impulses were reactions to, or efforts to break off from, European traditions?
A brief answer is that those usually spoken of as our early modernists, Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and others, inherited an American past that
both empowered and constrained them in discernibly different ways. As far back as Emerson, who was born in 1803 and died in 1882, those Americans whose chief concerns were moral, intellectual, and literary had made wide claims for the capacity of individual human beings to define themselves through their own inner resources and create their own vision of existence without help from family, fellow citizens, or tradition. In Emerson's day, American culture was approaching imaginative domination by those who lived for money and profit. Possessed of the
most fully endowed slice of the continent, and licensed by democracy and egalitarianism, the citizens of the United States had unequaled opportunities for the acquisition of personal wealth.
Yet Emerson insisted that the individual who exploited his own inner powers could claim a far wider empire. Family ties and practical necessities were felt to be secondary concerns. Emerson's extravagant claim for the visionary self as against the acquisitive one is representative of an uneasy standoff that haunted Americans with intellectual and literary aspiration into the modernist period. One had to acknowledge the need to get a living, but it was held that those who put it first obscured and distorted their capacity for a wider vision of things.
To the extent that relationships with one's fellows were defined in monetary terms, rather than those of the family, the community, or the nation, each person's capacity to see others as fully present characters on a common stage was reduced. The answer both explicit and implicit in an Emerson is to say that the resulting isolation is native to us, rather than enforced by social conditions; that it is in fact the basis of our self-fulfillment: each of us must create a picture of the world for himself, and only after doing so may we hope as Emerson liked to put it to "meet again
on a higher platform.”
The making of a picture of the whole of things such individualism required was a lonely affair,
unequaland it has an important resemblance to the loneliness of the man seeking monetary profit: both are led to think of ties to other people and of the society at large impersonally; to distance themselves from others. This attempt to stand outside or above a culture to which one was nonetheless bound persisted into our own century, and shows up unmistakably in our early modernists. Writers who,
like Nathaniel Hawthorne in his century, or William Faulkner among our modernists, see people as inescapably tied to each other are striking exceptions. For these two writers the human condition is as fatally distorted by those who claim an all-inclusive vision of things as by those who view the community chiefly as a set of conditions offering occasions for profit.
What for most of our early American modernists was seen as a continuing individual struggle was
for European modernists an imaginative encounter with climactic historical change. What now
appears to have been the essential aspect of that change that Western civilization was more and
more dominated by the search for profits was, and for American writers had long been, a settled
aspect of their condition. In this sense they were post-modern before modernism began in Europe.
No American may be said to have done what is characteristic of some of the greatest European
modernists: so written as to enforce a realization of the bearing of the Western past on the present.
As Stephen Spender puts it in describing European modernism: "This confrontation of the past
with the present seems to me . . . the fundamental aim of modernism. The reason why it became so
important was that, in the early stages of the movement, the moderns wish to express the whole
experience of modern life." Another way of putting this is to note that the presumption that artists
could offer a wholesale judgment of the Western past, while not unprecedented, had now become
widely diffused. In James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, and others there
is an inclusive effort to encounter and assess the Western inheritance.
Americans who, like Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville, had framed their work in nature,
or in a judgment of the human condition in general, anticipate the impulse of our early American
modernists to detach themselves from a culture in which, to adapt Melville's exacerbated protest,
dollars damned them. This was not the declaration of a man inwardly an expatriate, who cherished
the sense that he might find community elsewhere. All Melville's work testifies to his sense that all
human beings were as alone as he. If public space had been preempted by money-getting activities
he might still reach them in their solitude by writing about their common plight, a stance that later
appears in writers as different as T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. European modernism was, by
contrast, intensely aware of being in the forefront of momentous shifts in the cultural horizon, and
eager to define the views of the past these shifts implied.
In Marcel Proust the effort to encounter the past is played out on the scale afforded by the growth
of a single consciousness in which a social scene is reflected and its transformations are observed.
In Thomas Hardy our recession from an assured sense of our relation to the cosmos in classical
times is a recurring theme. In James Joyce's Ulysses and in much of the work of Thomas Mann,
the represented scene is a culmination, the end result of a process that refers us back to Western
origins. Joyce's novel created so strong an impression that the Western past had been
imaginatively summed up and rendered that readers were led to speak of it as putting a full stop to
the novel as a literary form as if Joyce had landed us gasping in an eternal present. Misleading as
this conclusion was, it was an understandable response to a book so successful in illuminating the
presence of the past in daily life without appearing to diminish either past or present for the reader.
There were many other modes of registering a sense of profound cultural change, as the examples
of Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke show. Although European modernism often conveys a
sense that Western civilization is in a bad way, this conviction was compatible with, or perhaps
provoked, the release of an extraordinary array of artistic energies.
Our early American modernists are far less enclosed by the awareness of changes in society, and
rather more likely to echo the mid-nineteenth-century focus on the human condition. They wrote,
as Lionel Trilling observed, at a greater remove from the idea of society. To see this continuity
between Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville and our first modernists, we require a fuller
description of those who had earlier tried to define themselves without help from human others.
What provo ked these efforts, which Thoreau spoke of as the attempt to ''build a self”？
The "commercial republic" foreseen by James Madison in The Federalist had indeed come into being, but neither Madison nor his contemporaries could have anticipated the speed with which
the recognition of individual merit implicit in the republican ideal gave way to the impersonality
of commercial transactions in the Jacksonian period. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who, in Democracy in America (183540), first saw that democracy and egalitarianism, beneficent in many ways, offered individuals radically diminished chances of securing a sense of their own inner worth, a satisfying identity. He concluded that, driven back on themselves, they would be forced
to take refuge in the family, and that public recognition could only be assured by amassing money and property.
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman pushed this conclusion about the predicament of individual Americans to its limits. In works published from the mid-1830s to the 1850s they offered an extraordinarily inclusive countering assertion. They proposed that each individual was potentially capable of fashioning himself and building a total conception of the world. This was the social meaning of what we call "transcendentalism." These three held that their activity as speakers and writers might encourage others to realize themselves as well.
To write and speak as if one were at least potentially able to survey the human condition as a whole, and to claim that "nature" revealed it, involved the equally extravagant claim that the family and the community, no matter how much one might cherish some of their members, worked to fragment and distort the sews vision of the Whole. Those whose world was defined by
the parts they played on a social scene were thought to limit each other's capacities to embrace the whole of things.
The assertion that one was the child of some universal condition of nature or of a divine power rather t
han of one's family or of the community was not, of course, literally realizable. Yet it had important practical meanings. It made a virtue out of what might otherwise have seemed an isolation imposed on those who refused to define themselves in the ways the culture afforded. Another important consequence was that in granting the chance to realize a full humanity to individuals alone, the whole world became an object for the single self, the garden in which you alone were experiencing what was essential. If your example fired others they too would be isolated by their quest. Meanwhile they were denied a full humanity. As I have noted, "transcendentalism" shares the impersonality of the practices it opposed, the impersonality characteristic of the search for profits.
Thoreau's presumption that to see the world truly each individual must find a way of obtaining a subsistence that did not blur his vision of things offers a suggestive contrast with the assumptions
of Karl Marx. In the 1840s Marx was beginning to work out his tremendous social drama, which
was to climax in a new social order that, having guaranteed food, clothing, and shelter to all, would free people to pursue their highest interests. In the same decade, Thoreau, living at Walden Pond, was preparing to write the book in which he details his success in securing food, clothing,
and shelter on terms that free him (and him alone) to carry out an exemplary expansion of his capacity
to grasp reality, a reality that those who allow acquisition to absorb them cannot glimpse.
The Civil War demonstrated that the social arena could after all engulf those who had tried to keep aloof from it. Emerson and, even more emphatically, Thoreau found that an armed power based on slavery was a threat to their very conception of the individual's capacity to embrace the whole of
things. Emerson called down blood and destruction in his journal, and Thoreau was a vehement subscriber to the murderous ethos of John Brown. Whitman, in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass, so completely identified the nation with himself, as a physical manifestation of his vision,
that he tried frantically to imagine a way to hold it together, slavery and all. By the time war came
he had surrendered his total vision. As his later editions and prose writings show, he had taken on the roles of lover and citizen, and had become a far shrewder commentator on the fate of the nation than Emerson or Thoreau. Yet, as Whitman and his literary intimates were aware, the "new man" he had loosed on the world in those first two editions of his poems, the poet who had proclaimed the "interior American republic," loomed over everything he subsequently wrote and said. As in the case of Emerson, it is Whitman's earlier and more assertive phase that gives him a representative importance in the history of our culture.
Despite the intervening literary movements we call "realism" and "naturalism," it was the imperial
or world-possessing stance of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman that most of our early modernists adopted in judging American circumstances. This was hardly the result of direct emulation of these predecessors; it was rather the consequence of the persisting and increasing pressure to distance themselves from    a commercial culture. We must, however, credit the mid-nineteenth-century figures with a fuller assurance as to the possible effects they might have
on individual listeners or readers.
What they did was to put the struggle with acquisitiveness within the self, to turn a public issue to
a private one, rejecting the hopes for a glorious collective destiny that many people still voiced before the Civil War. The question: what sort of values ought to define our nation? becomes in
their writings: how can each of us found a self free from individual greed? Clearly, the majority of
the population was too busy getting a living to be much burdened by such a question, but the relatively self-conscious minority whom Emerson addressed were pleased to be told that they had inner resources sufficient to construe the world in a way that firmly subordinated the marketplace.
But if only the socially unfettered individual could apprehend universal values, it followed that the
self was sole arbiter on questions of morals, politics, and not incidentally relations between the sexes and the nature of manhood and womanhood. Since Emerson could not conceive of women except as bound to the reciprocal duties imposed by motherhood and the care of the household, he saw them as fatally immersed in the society and incapable of self-reliance. This denial of a full humanity to women sometimes embarrassed him, as his journal shows. The fact that he clung to it
is an index of his desperate need to believe in the possibility of a wholly independent selfhood. Another formidable contradiction of the realities of the life he and others were living lay in the
fact that he and his audience were inescapably involved in the world of work. Like Thoreau and Whitman, he praised the energy, skill, and imagination of the individuals who were taking possession of the continent, while deprecating the search for profits that motivated so much of their effort. He thought of individuals as both visionary and practical, but the middle ground of associated life, the scene of history and fiction, was, as far as possible, canceled and swept bare. (p701)

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