bajin580

High modernism: from situation to ideology

A SINGULAR MODERNITY: ESSAY ON THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PRESENT
Fredric Jameson
Verso, 2002, p. 199

Yet the late modernists took that modern vision of the artist who is more than a mere artist as their model: and here we meet the paradoxes of repetition, which, as has so often been said, can never take place in any first time, but is always second when it first happens. I can try to say this another way by suggesting that the situation of the first or classical modernists can never be repeated since they themselves already exist. The classical modernists came into a world without models (or at best with religious and prophetic ones), a world without any pre-existing social role to fill. For they did not for the most part wish to become professional artists in any standard nineteenth-century sense of the métier and the apprenticeship. Nor did they wish to endorse a system of artistic genres in which the task of the artist is simply to replicate a given form and to supply new examples of it (with whatever distinctive twist). These first moderns seeks support in patronage wherever possible, rather than in the market; and for the learning of the métier, they substitute fantasmatic images of the supreme works of the past, such as Dante’s Commedia. Their freedoms are utterly blind and groping; they know no identifiable public (‘I write for myself and strangers,’ Gertrude Stein famously said). And in the absence of any determinate social status or function — they are neither artists in the conventional sense nor intellectuals — they borrow all kinds of windy notions of genius and inspiration from the Romantic era, and surround themselves as much as possible with disciples who endorse these private languages and offer a simulacrum of the new Utopian community.

Not to be confused with The Sea, The Sea

THE SEA
John Banville
Knopf, 2005

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. i would not swim, no, not ever again.

Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.

Banville’s Booker Prize winner was on my radar for years. The blurbs compare him to Nabokov, setting expectations for metafiction.

So far it strikes me as ultra-naturalist in a great way! Sure, it’s non-linear, but nothing is ontologically up for grabs.

The stylistic verve is there. The prose has a driving rhythm that approaches straight iambic pentameter: “I wonder why the house was built like that, sideways-on, turning a pebble-dashed windowless white end-wall to the road; perhaps in formal times, before the railway, the road ran in a different orientation altogether, passing directly in front of the door, anything is possible.”

And there’s the narrator’s vocabulary: a mixture of archaic, idiomatic, medical jargon, and annoyingly formal word choices.

Before Anna’s illness i had held my physical self in no more than fond disgust, as most people do — hold their selves, I mean, not mine — tolerant, necessarily, of my sadly inescapable humanity, the various effluvia, the eructations fore and aft, the gleet, the scurf, the sweat and other common leakages, and even what the Bard of Hartford [Wallace Stevens??] quaintly calls the particles of nether-do.

Max Morden is an overread fellow. He strikes me as someone like the historical Nabokov, curmudgeony, casually snobby, not one to blame themselves. But Max is a lot more depressed than Vladimir ever was, I imagine. Also a shamelessness about their verbal resources.

This aspect annoyed the literary press a little. Would people be irritated by a painter who used obscure techniques or revived ancient ones? It’s not a great analogy, because language is still conventional, is expected to be more socially integrated. But that seems like a good approach to the dramatic material here, the grieving, the resentment, the aloofness.

Who are the gods in that opening narrative block? The wonderful seascape description, Max’s literary consciousness, and with Joyce never being far off in the constellation, we can assume it’s the Greek gods. We have an old world vacating the space. And of course the last line, announcing the work as a narrative from beyond the grave. It’s a sharp shift from the pictorialism above to a referential moment. The opening block in its entirety is something like a shifter, a way of re-inscribing the traces of the classical world in a hope to understand the present one. That salvo kicks the whole novel off, in lieu of an erudite epigraph. I guess you can have that or erudite prose, but not both!

Provisional position paper

FOX
Dubravka Ugresic tr Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams
Open Letter, 2018

Like a comet with its parabolic orbit, I keep returning after long flights away to the damn postmodernism question.

I’m pretty sure that, whatever it was, it’s over now. Even within bourgeois literary theory, the concept is being phased out, according to some statistical evidence in a paper published in 2011 in the journal TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE. I hear a reconstructed version of phenomenology is on the come up.

Of course as a Marxist I view postmodernism as a project: the idealist rejection of our materialist dialectical method, arriving at a time when international communism was experiencing its biggest setbacks, namely capitalist restoration in the USSR and then the PRC a decade later, roughly.

However, we have to make a distinction between ideological postmodernism (the French boys) and aesthetic postmodernism. The latter could simply be art after modernism. The obvious and clear meaning of post, is after. But postmodernity doesn’t feel like some decisive turning point. Rather than a chronological demarcation, “post” to me is more about “postness,” which I take to be the recognition that certain fundamental terms are still here, but they have somehow become unworkable.

Some Marxists, like Callinicos, have argued that there is no postmodern art, that it’s just more modernism. It’s true I think that postmodernism does not represent the same kind of rupture that modernism did at the turn of the century. Lenin’s analysis still holds: we’re in an advanced phase of centeralized, monopoly, imperialist capitalism, and in that way we are still living and working under modernity, and the advanced art of our time is still formulating modernity (to use a phrase from Badiou I don’t understand fully but still like).

So we can’t link postmodernity to a new world-historical break called “late capitalism,” like Fredric Jameson does. Every revisionist take on a hypothetical third phase of the history of capitalism doesn’t seem to work. And the dark promise of yet another imperialist war (which our beloved woke members of the literary community are beating the drums for) means this notion is losing more conviction every day.

For now, I accept the use of the term postmodernism to describe literary texts that fall between 1966 and December 26, 1991. (Okay I’m joking a little.) What was the qualitative shift? In short, the contradiction between high art and mass culture resolved itself. High art did not degenerate into pop art. Mass culture did not receive an apotheosis. Both terms liquidate. Of course we still hear discourse about fancy pants Lit Fic versus genre hackwork. But this is a residual division. High fantasy can go to auction for a big publishing house just as well as the next great American novel. There’s a phrase from a paper by Nicholas Brown that could be a slogan for our time: There is no good and bad art, only expensive and cheap art.

LORD JIM by Conrad is a great example. As a novel it is split in two: the first part is a dark meditation on how obscure human motivations can be, and there are tons of little mysteries that lead to digressions and broken up chronology. The second feels more like a pulpy boy’s adventure novel in the tropics. Here is high and low at the moment of its split. Romance and heroism don’t make sense anymore in modern capitalism: they are evicted from regular literature and continue to develop in genre fiction. Modernism’s contempt for both Romanticism and commercial appeal means it has to assert its apartness from the world, to assert its objective formal workings beyond subject and spectator.

Fast forward to the wave of postwar mega novels in the US, GRAVITY’S RAINBOW as the crown jewel. Such an explosion of literary production is both a result of the economic expansion that came with the Cold War imperialist welfare state that carried the US along till the rise of neoliberal policy, as well as a jubilee after the fall of the genre wall. Now we don’t have to worry about our novels keeping pure of populist tropes. When the conditions for high modernism close, a whole new field of possible mixtures opens up. For a couple of decades.

A qualification. Of all the art forms, literature is one of the least affected by postmodernity. Literature and language are even further displaced from the center of bourgeois culture than it already was. Postmodernism is the realm of cinema, photography, architecture, comics and graphic novels. These mediums are “built.” Writing is “liquid.”

In the past I was naive about postmodernism’s anti-humanism. I thought it was cool to problematize and/or dissolve the stable bourgeois liberal individual subject. It seemed like a worthy goal that was only embryonic in high modernism. But now I recognize that, with very important exceptions, modernism and postmodernism are classically liberal in their ideological character. Postmodernism has even worked to restore bourgeois values, which is the feeling I get every time I read John Barth.

This comes from Siraganian’s analysis of Gertrude Stein I posted about. Aesthetic autonomy for the most part feels like a libertarian assertion of individual freedom. Postmodernism preserved the militant experimentation of high modernism but also legitimated didacticism and open political commitment once again.

But is that such a great thing? We hear calls for writing that is more in touch, that cares about representation of the marginalized, that flawlessly transcribes the network of social oppressions as outlined by the petty-bourgeois social justice intelligentsia. But getting that close to phenomena can prevent you from seeing the whole thing accurately. Notice also how the emphasis shifts away from form to the psychology of the readership. I can’t help but notice that the influential writers who are the most savvy on identity politics and systematic oppression and so on, are also the most hardcore advocates of neoliberal economics and for demonizing Russia in order to impeach Trump/start a war. Of course “art for art’s sake” is false. But methinks the stick has been bent too far the other way. “Be intersectional” too often means “stop organizing as a communist. Stop talking about proletarian dictatorship.” Class is supposed to be a “classism” like racism or sexism, a valence of (social) oppression like any other. Despite the fact that class is not a contingent identity but a position constructed by material practice.

Class is not part of the intersection of oppression but the very medium of that intersection. We are too quick to forget that the “systematic” part of systematic oppression is the class structure of economic exploitation. Identitarians obscure this fact by framing ruling class ideologies like white supremacy and patriarchy as the cause of oppression rather than the historically produced results of the division of labor in class society. They can always cry class reductionism when we try to correct this error. They seem to think the Marxist emphasis on production is narrow-minded. I suggest that it is in fact a great broadening of a political horizon circumscribed by bourgeois liberalism.

So in this moment when bourgeois letters are just about completely putrefied; where our most celebrated writers among the social justice crowd are in a permanent meltdown over the 2016 election to the point of hawking conspiracies; where the national literature (fully subsumed under capital at this point) has taken a rightist turn, deploying liberal anticommunism and neoliberal common sense that the customer is always right, as well as a vile mentality of “literary citizenship” and the civic duty to vote for imperialist warmongers (some more ideological programming left over from the Cold War), what is the militant writer to do? What resources from the debris field of modernism and postmodernism can we use as an answer to this situation?

And — good God — what does all this have to do with Dubravka Ugresic’s new novel?

I meant to post about that. But next time, I guess. Till then, we can make like Robinson Crusoe and do some double book-keeping.

Postmodernism

Greater willingness for linguistic/structural experiment than modernism…
…but more amenable to liberal humanism (“humanism in cooler clothes” was Eagleton’s formulation).
A sense that all historical styles are available…
…but only as a superficial pastiche, which leads to a loss of meaning and history.
A radical questioning of the great tradition and the ruling class ideologies that constitute it…
…but it’s obvious now that these progressive challenges serve neoliberal economics.
With the collapse of high art elitism, culture has been liberated for the masses…
…but at what cost? Modernism is commercialized, literature continues to lose its prestige, relevance, credibility, and reasons to still be read by a broad public.
An exhilarating embrace of pop art and the subjective experience of consumer society in the capitalist metropoles…
…but it’s an experience of lost meaning, both in life and art; if a novel or painting is now a legitimate commodity form to be exchanged, then that is also what makes it unexceptional; there is no meaning except in whatever hits the psychology of consumers in various market groups; literary criticism is now antiquated; we need only consult publishing agents and insiders who can interpret the market.
In literature at least, a focus on ontological confusion: the collision of incommensurable worlds and ways of being…
…but the big ideological blinders of the progressive petty-bourgeosie right now are not ontological but rather epistemological (only X identity knows X oppression and only they can resist it as a group, with no room for solidarity from a revolutionary proletarian perspective); and it’s paired with a crude positivism which confuses phenomena for essense (without the anaylsis of class, identity-based oppression can be distorted into a reified “thing” with no material grounding in production).
A possibly misplaced happiness when confronting the loss of foundations in modernity, opening the way for individual consumer preferences under the guise of insurrectionary politics (Hot Topic anarchism if you will)…
…but that does come with a pragmatic, whatever works mentality; a nice antidote to everyone being down in the dumps about language and representation.
Even the best old and contemporary metafiction novels are hard to recommend; who besides a few cognoscenti want to read a novel about other novels?…
…but maybe that’s an honest acknowledgement of true exhaustion for our culture; and there are determining factors in what gets translated that may be part of this one tendency.

Steppe up

THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
Alexander Pushkin, tr Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
NYRB Classics, 2014

I can’t remember the last time I read a novel in a single sitting, at such a fast clip. But Pushkin’s book is so much fun, and so smart, and such an interesting case for how to think about a text dialectically.

Marxist literary theory has identified a plethora of contradictions within literary texts. There’s proletariat and bourgeoisie of course, and also material labor and mental labor; then there’s phenomena and essence, Realism and Modernism, and the social position of art (its role in propagating ruling class power) and the Utopian impulse of art (the progressive aspects of the bourgeois tradition). But since western Marxism was/is idealist, these contradictions haven’t been dealt with in a systematic way. It’s difficult to identify which contradiction is principal, and to track how these contradictions have intensified, or weakened, or disappeared, or emerged, or transformed themselves at any given phase in literature’s historical development.

Fredric Jameson’s own take, in his concluding remarks to the AESTHETICS AND POLITICS reader, is that the fundamental contradiction is between material history itself and the apparatus of discourse that tries to inscribe it through language.

I need to study a lot more before I can say with confidence what the principal contradiction of literature is. But the meaning of what literature has changed a handful of times over its life span, which becomes clear when we change our view of literature from a static canon of monumental works to a historical process, a complex grouping of material practices and contradictions. Every shift in literature, I suspect, can be marked by a certain contradiction becoming the principal one, which determines the nature of the others.

Jameson’s POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS offers a powerful and convincing method of interpreting texts. Narratives, he argues, offer symbolic resolutions to social contradictions that are often in fact antagonistic, in which one of the terms can and must win over the other absolutely.

Now Pushkin in his novel stages a symbolic resolution to the contradiction of the old versus the new. It’s an all but explicit argument, put forward in moral terms. At the same time, the old-new dialectic is inscribed in the novel’s very texture and structure.

Like other early novels, this one presents itself as a memoir, that of a soldier, Pyotr Grinyov, who witnessed the peasant-Cossack uprisings of the late 18th century. He narrates his life from his upbringing as the son of a landed nobleman. Then it’s off to the soldier’s life in a southern fortress on the Eurasian steppe, where he falls for the captain’s daughter Maria. The fortress is attacked by Pugachov, leader of the peasant rebellion. Pyotr gets by through verbal duels rather than fencing duels. There’s an escape, and a quest to rescue Maria from an unscrupulous romantic rival, which is answered by Maria’s own quest to clear Pyotr’s name at a tribunal that has taken Pyotr’s activities behind enemy lines for treason.

The old: the rhythm and world view of the peasant life. The new: the refinement of western European culture (Catherine the Great is in power). It’s most compactly expressed in the epigraphs to each chapter (added by Pyotr’s children for publication). The tension is displayed in the novel’s form, which unfolds as a complicated series of narrative doubles: Pyotr gives his hare skin coat to a wayfarer (Pugachov in disguise) as thanks giving, which is answered later by Pugachov gifting Pyotr another coat; there are two duels; there are two framed and glazed documents which change in their significance; and at the end there are two quests. But under these devices, Pushkin preserves the logic of fairy tales and chivalry.

These values do get subverted in small and funny ways. Here is Pyotr describing life at Fort Belogrosk.

Several weeks passed by and my life in the fortress grew not only bearable but even enjoyable. I was received in the commandant’s house as one of the family. Both Ivan Kuzmich and his wife were the worthiest of people. Ivan Kuzmich, a soldier’s son who had risen from the ranks, was simple and uneducated but extremely honest and kind. His wife ruled him, and this suited his easy-going disposition. Vasilia Yegrovna made no distinction between military and domestic affairs and ran the fortress exactly as she maned her home.

It’s a military fortress without military discipline–and ruled by a matriarch. The captain’s family name is Mironov, derived from the Greek for sweet perfume. An institution of war kept on the peace footing.

But Pushkin gives the game away when Mironov gets ready to torture a Bashkir caught with “seditious papers.” The Bashkir is mutilated, nose and tongue cut off, for having participated in a prior uprising. Here Pyotr interjects into his narrative:

When I remember that this happened in my own lifetime and that I have lived to see the mild rule of Tsar Alexander I cannot but feel astonished at the success of enlightenment and the rapid spread of the principles of respect and love for humankind. Dear young reader, if these notes of mine have fallen into your hands, remember that the best and most enduring changes are those that come about as a result of an improvement in morals, without any violent upheavals.

Indeed, the new must supersede the old. But for Pyotr as he narrates (and for Pushkin at the time he wrote this) this is a steady and harmonious process, not a rapid transformation achieved through revolution. In this idealist argument, great changes are necessary for Russia at this historical conjuncture, but they happen by changing the way we think, not the material situation.

In the narratives of modern novels, such a harmony can be symbolically expressed through the pattern of doubling mentioned earlier, arguing for the value of kindness to make a society where the values of the old are preserved without its brutality. The newness of the historical novel, as opposed to the folk tale, can pull off this necessary move.

Or can it? Check out the final pages. Maria heads to St. Petersburg to petition the Empress on behalf of Pyotr, who couldn’t defend his actions at the tribunal since he didn’t want to get his betrothed involved. She arrives at the suburb of Sofia, where the Court retreats for the summer.

The next day Maria Ivanovna woke early, dressed, and slipped out into the park. It was a splendid morning; the sun had already turned yellow. The broad lake lay still and gleaming. Stately swans, also only recently awoken, were sailing out from beneath the bushes that overhung the banks. Maria Ivanovna came to the beautiful meadow where an obelisk had just been erected to commemorate Count Rumyantsev’s recent victories. All of a sudden a little white English dog ran barking towards her. Maria Ivanovna felt frightened and stood stock-still. She heard a gentle voice: “Don’t be frightened, she won’t bite!” And Maria Ivanovna saw a lady sitting on a little bench opposite the monument. Maria Ivanovna sat down at the other end of the bench. The lady was looking at her intently. Maria Ivanovna, for her part, kept glancing discreetly at the lady; very soon she had surveyed her from head to toe. She was wearing a night mob-cap, a white morning gown, and a fur-lined waistcoat. She looked about forty years old. Her plump, rosy face was calm and dignified; her slight smile and her light blue eyes had an ineffable charm. The lady was the first to speak.

Coincidence grants Maria quick access to the Empress. Her clothes, her dog, and even the obelisk are from a portrait of Catherine the Great by Vladimir Borovikovsky, as the book’s notes tell us. But it’s not seamlessly worked in: these are not summer clothes. The whole denouement is broadly working like a fairy tale.

So love conquers all, Pugachov is hanged, despite the genuine admiration and mystique the narrative builds around him, and Pyotr and Masha live happily ever after, with social relations restored to their proper equilibrium. And yet Pushkin takes us there by inserting a painting, deliberately making the details incongruous. Moreover, the notes also tell us this is a reworking of a climactic scene from a Walter Scott novel. Old and new may have its own resolution, played out in the novel’s ideology, its moral arguments. But formally the narrative stops on its most modernist note, that one can’t help but take as a wink from Pushkin, acknowledging that in our own sequence, resolving this and other contradictions will be quite different in its character.