Modernism

The devastations of World War I created a social trauma that lasted a generation and intensified the ambitions of the arts. Beginning shortly before the war and continuing through the following decade, an astonishing variety of technically audacious works appeared. A community of artists, readers, viewers, editors, and curators created a receptive context encouraging ever more experimental work, including the move to abstraction in the fine arts (Wassily Kandinsky in painting, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Vladimir Tatlin in sculpture); the development of new cinematic styles (Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Dziga Vertov); the architectural revolution of Le Corbusier (modern materials in abstract forms); the theatrical extravagance of the Ballets Russes accompanied by the music of Igor Stravinsky; the twelve-tone technique of Schoenberg; and the experiments in narrative consciousness of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. This profusion has been called the "the last literary season of Western culture" (Moretti, p. 209). A claim of modernism to historical distinctiveness rests first of all on the sheer abundance of formally provocative art and the wide attentiveness to it.

A frequently noted aspect of modernist form is its fragmentation: the dissolution of continuity in speech, wholeness in the body, consecutiveness in narrative. The one-or two-lined lyrics of imagism, the abrupt focal shifts in the work of Gertrude Stein, the disintegration of the face in analytic cubism, the rapid editing in the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, all present decomposing forms shorn of the usual contexts of meaning. "Image," "vortex," "moment," "epiphany" were some of the names given to these radiant fragments. A prominent concern then became the passage from these shorter forms, however resonant, toward more encompassing structures: longer poems, more capacious novels, larger paintings, more ambitious films and music. The later phase of modernism, which contains some of its most striking artifacts (Eliot's The Waste Land, Picasso's Three Musicians, Joyce's Ulysses, Eisenstein's October, Schoenberg's unfinished Moses und Aron), turns toward synthetic forms that might arrange fragments into broader patterns. The use of myth was a dominant resource for Joyce, Eliot, and Stravinsky; in Eliot's formulation, the mythic method gave a form of order that made "the modern world possible for art." Eisenstein's development of cinematic montage, the conceptual and metaphoric linking of separate images, was another manifestation of synthesis.

Was high modernism then a new aesthetic order or a new antiorder? This question circulated among artists and their critics. Despite the theoretical justifications brought forward to explain the difficult art, it is clear that modernist masterworks contained much that was contingent and resistant to explanation. The sheer eruptive energies, the sense of play, the pleasure in accident, and the linguistic and visual anarchy cannot be safely ordered as examples of a new "method." The implications of this disruptive aesthetics were most fully drawn by the avant-garde groups that developed during and after the war, especially expressionism, dadaism, and surrealism. These groups differed significantly, but they shared a commitment to aesthetic radicalism and direct public challenge. In Germany a group of poets, painters, and filmmakers began to work under the heading expressionism, aiming not to receive the world's impressions but to express irrational and intuitive states of mind. They opened the visual world to exaggeration, heightened gesture and emotion, and deformed space and time in their refusal of a corrupt social order. Beginning in Switzerland and spreading quickly to France and Germany, dadaism saw the war as marking the failure of civilization and developed the practice of antiart as a gesture of defiance. In 1916 Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where performances included cacophonous music, nonsense poetry, comic recitation, and costumed theatricality. Dada put in question the most central assumptions of Western art: its seriousness, its coherence as an artifact, its separation from the everyday social world. The dissolution of dada in the early 1920s led some of its members to join André Breton's surrealism, which emphasized the recovery of repressed sources of the imagination and their release into arational art. Rimbaud's call for a derangement of the senses was one major influence; Freud's theory of the unconscious was another. Automatic writing, hallucination, and dreams were seen as instruments of liberation from a constrained and destructive reality. Many of the surrealists, like many of the Dadaists, understood their place within the avant-garde as part of a more general program of political and cultural revolution.

Useful distinctions have often been made between the high modernism of Yeats, Eliot, Rilke, Joyce, Proust, and Mann, deeply committed to the integrity of the artifact, and the "historical avant-garde" constituted by these socially active movements that questioned the coherence of art and its withdrawal from social life. Historically attentive scholarship has shown, however, that these are not rival camps or opposing sides of a cultural dyad. Within high modernism one finds both signs of radical indeterminacy in form and strong statements of social engagement. Ezra Pound's assertion that "the artists were the antennae of the race" (p. 67) represents a characteristic modernist demand, sometimes from the political right and sometimes from the left, for social change founded on the basis of revolutionary art. Similarly, within the avant-garde, one finds scenes of consolidation, where the discord resolves into determinate artifacts. The "avant-garde" and "high modernism" are best seen as moments within the conditions of cultural modernity: an ongoing dialectic between openness and indecidability, on the one hand, and formal integrity, on the other.