Anna Balakian

SOURCE: "Problems of Modernism," in The Snowflake on the Belfry: Dogma and Disquietude in the Critical Arena, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 24-43.

[In the following essay, Balakian considers the variety of meanings and manifestations of Modernism.]

Each generation of writers had the habit of reacting against the past by declaring itself "modern." The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns used to be a cyclical phenomenon. "New" is in itself empty of meaning, a connective word between what was and what is to come. In early uses the word had a pejorative meaning, implying that what was new and modern could not be as good as what had the prestige of approval over a period of time.

Baudelaire as both poet and critic was one of the first to splice the meaning of "modern" in a modest article relating to his viewing of the art of his time. In his piece called "La Modernité" he first gives the image of a little man running around searching for the modern and expresses the normally accepted derogatory meaning: "the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent," but then adds "that which is capable of drawing the eternal from the transitory."

Since the middle of the nineteenth century critics as well as artists in the broader sense of the word have compounded ambiguities on "modern" by using it in both senses. Succeeding generations have been calling themselves modern and allowing the word to lose gradually its defensive tone and instead assume an attitude of contestation and even arrogance. It has become in many cases a cry of rebellion, and sometimes what the late Renato Poggioli called agonism, no longer apologetic but rather challenging. Others have claimed the label "modern" in the Baudelairian sense that while reflecting the passing climate of the time, what is modern has caught "the eternal and the immutable." Critic-readers have learned to distinguish between these two definitions by calling the protesters avant-garde and have retained for the latter the label "modern" and even "high modern" cast in solid gold.

In both cases there has emerged an added aspect of the confusion. There has developed a tradition of the antitraditional, and the label of "modern" has been retained for works of the past. Let me explain. With the passage of time each era claiming the advantage of a little distance used to delimit what had passed with a more precise label and claim for its own rebellion or renewal in the arts its own modernity. Ours is the first era on record in which succeeding waves of moderns carry on their backs the memorabilia of their ancestors and sustain the myth that modernism, proclaimed and acknowledged at a moment in time for a group of works, forever retains that label in reference to those works, that it survives in a cumulative form, generation after generation, and that avant-gardes as well as golden-seal moderns can follow each other without a posteriori appraisal, which might result in a more permanent label than the temporal one of "modern."

Seen from the Anglo-American perspective, Joyce, Proust, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, all so different from each other, remain under the label of "modern" on the basis of their capability of retrieval of the eternal from the transitory, and writers as different from each other as Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, AndreéBreton remain "modern" from the avant-garde angle of protest and rebellion. The French, more pedagogical in their classifications, have adhered to Baudelaire's definition in one sense but, unable to define their own modernism, have virtually abandoned the label itself and created newer "ism" labels. The Spanish still cling to "modernismo" with its special reference to Rubén Darïo and his particular brand of Symbolism. They complicate the chronological problem by following up with "postmodernismo," which is not of the vintage of the Anglo-American postmodernism. The Germans associate modern with Expressionism and Dada, the Russians hang on to Futurism as the ultimate modern before the curtain came down on any further movement in the arts. The common agreement among all of them is to call a certain moment in time modern and surrender the word to it for eternity. In calling the past modern the commentators would let their elders retain the label and in amazing timidity would relegate to their own era the rank of reargarde, paradoxically labeling the contemporary scene "postmodern." Then the sometime literary critic, sometime philosopher Jean-Franc̈ois Lyotard comes along to usher us into the post-postmodern in his book entitled The Postmodern Condition. Has there ever been such ancestor worship recorded on the part of writers and artists themselves or of critics and literary historians? In terms of literary criticism the ambiguity simply tells us that out of the plethora of books on the market on "modernism" or "the avant-garde" there is very little chance that they are discussing the same artists or writers or the same period in literary history.

Jean Weisgerber, in structuring his two volumes on modernism in the twentieth century for the monumental project of the Comparative History of Literature in European Languages, tried to eliminate the problem by using the collective title Les Avant-gardes littéraires. But thereby he raised a new problem; in borrowing a term metaphorically from military terminology one expects the garde itself after the avant-garde. For more than two decades in the course of various communications I have been asking, "Where is the garde of the avant-garde?" I have heard no answers. Instead we observe in studies of theories of the avant-garde such terms as "old avant-garde," "the return of the avant-garde," "post-avant-garde" (although I can't quite see how you can be out front and at the tail end simultaneously), "academy of the first avant-garde," "other avant-garde," "the twilight of the avant-garde," and most recently "the neo-avant-garde." The implications of these two labels, the meaningful and meaningless one of "modern" and the uncomfortable one of "avant-garde," suggest the inability of the current moderns to provide self-determination or in retrospect attribute to past "moderns" more precise and discrete qualifications. It is no solution to suggest, as Ihab Hassan has in relation to Surrealism, that "these movements have all but vanished now, Modernism has proved more stable." Existentialism and Minimalism, the two most recent efforts at group classification, have already outlived their recentness. The end of the century that has had in its existence so many ruptures with the past has not yet had the vision and the courage to proclaim the past moderns as pre-something that would define changes in literature and art in our era reflecting our society and at the same time preserving those of its qualities that may have resilience and permanence.

The reason that one sometimes denigrates a phenomenon or task is the realization that one cannot cope with it. That is perhaps why literary history is a bad term these days and the practice of analysis has priority over attempts at synthesis. We have dwelt on the most comfortable assumption that ruptures in the realm of arts can be paralleled with political revolutions, but in doing so we may be overlooking the fundamental cohesions that existed beneath the many "isms" of the first half of our century, alternately called modern and avant-garde.

My perspective tells me that there is something else that is understressed: throughout the century all literature and art that could be termed modern in its time and that laid the foundations of what exists today as "the arts" and qualifies as our modernity is related to radical concepts, not politically radical but scientifically so, that have altered our philosophy of existence and thereby reshaped our notions of aesthetics, mimesis, representation, and creativity. Such are the drastic changes in concepts of reality, time, nature, causality and chaos, indeterminacy, and above all, in terms of all the arts, the notion of communication and reception.

As the spectrum of reality enlarges, replacing the old opposition between real and supernal, a progressive distinction is perceived between mimesis and more sophisticated representations of the relative notion of reality. And we have gradually understood that the unconscious is not simply the opposite of the conscious but part of a continuum within the totality of human experience. The old and sage dichotomies between the real and the unreal, the conscious and the unconscious, simply no longer hold, and the dialectics involving them have been run into the ground. The famous phrase of the early decades of the century, "the juxtaposition of distant realities," so often cited as the basis of daring associations created in poetry and paintings by the still so-called moderns and a governing principle of so many works of art and poetry, has lost much of the meaning it had at its inception because we know now that distance exists only in the eye of the beholder, and that if the creative artist has brought two entities together, it is because on some level of sensorial lucidity a connection was made.

In the same way, disordinate perceptionis—such as what Rimbaud called the reasoned disorder of the senses—and their representation reflect disorder only if the natural world is perceived as a network of determinable and tested physical laws producing predictable results. But we have discovered that every law of physics does not have a Newtonian regularity or if it does it is not yet within our capacity to grasp, and we have also learned that there are phenomena which cripple at least temprarily our perception of a logical, precise universe. And in accepting these facts we, as a society, have had to develop the ability to express with mathematical precision the indeterminacies of the material world. Because this ambiguity or presumed randomness is part of our reality, it can be said that the writers or painters who once were considered avant-grade because they performed in an unrealistic or irrational way are from a more educated view no longer avant-grade because they are still holding the mirror up to nature when they represent this indeterminacy: it is not that the mirror is distorted but that nature is discovered to have parameters beyond those previously known and areas of the unknown but not unknowable realities. In other words, the perceived disorder is part of the system of laws whose supposed randomness may be only an appearance manifested in our partial knowledge of the totality.

Early in the twentieth century, Guillaume Apollinaire, whose voice was more European than French, said in his essay Les Peinters cubistes: "Great poets and great artists have the social function to renew unceasingly the appearance that nature assumes in the eyes of humans." Obviously even then he did not consider nature a constant but an ever changeable factor.

From hard ground to soft terrain, the writer moves with the scientists, stunned by his own ignorance, which he characterizes as indeterminacy, replacing previous attitudes of positivism and determinism. In his isolation and sense of loss of control, he drifts into a nonanthropocentric universe. And whereas most observers of the strong element of alienation in the literature of our century may continue to attribute it to psychological disturbances and social maladjustments, the alienation may more correctly be explained by cosmic causes.

The sense of dispersion emphasized by neophilosophers such as Derrida and Foucault is not new to modernism. All self-named moderns have had it. An early avant-gardist, Hugo Ball, often too exclusively associated with Dada but closer in reality to Rimbaud, described the condition of the modern man of his time in an article on Kandinsky in 1917 during a devastating war. Curiously, his apocalyptic fresco is not politically inspired but reflects a metaphysical anxiety: "The world showed itself to be a blind juxtaposition and opposing of uncontrolled forces. Man lost his divine countenance, became matter, chance, an aggregate. He became a particle of nature… no more interesting than a stone: he vanished into nature… a world of abstract demons swallowed the individual… psychology became chatter."

If, in responding to the effect of this condition on the arts, Ortega y Gasset coined the phrase "dehumanization of the arts," "dehumanization" means something quite different today from what it meant in the early part of the century. We can each select a cast of characters to reflect this dehumanization from the annals of literary and art history of the seventy-five years since Hugo Ball's statement and Ortega y Gasset's definition: from Marcel Duchamp's mockery of art in his ready-mades to the latest involutions of abstract art, from the boldness of collage to the whimperings detected in the techniques of fragmentation in all the arts, from the suddenly meaning-stripped world of Sartre's then modern, now classic character Roquentin in La Nausée to the nameless soldier in Alain Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth, from destruction of time-perspective in John Hawkes's novels to the randomness of images in William Burroughs's writings. All were "modern" in a moment in time, and all can be said to hold the mirror up to nature as nature was perceived at that moment in time. In that sense, in each case the classical dictum of a Boileau or a Pope was applicable to his aesthetics and in that sense his forms of representation are from our vantage point mimetic. If his expression of nature is being called antirealistic by some contemporary critics it is so only in terms of previous definitions of reality and nature. The minute one considers our changed perception of reality, such writings and art expressions fit the changed definitions of reality. The disparity between the perception of the critics and the artists is due to the fact that critics are clinging to the older notions of reality and nature, and they are not as agile in grasping the ontological changes. They are bridging the gap between their superannuated notion and the artist's more updated one with the convenient use of the label "modern."

One of the most important transitions—oh so gradual but so irreversible once it is made—in the changing characterization of "modern" is the manner in which the "modern" artists are reacting to the passing of a centrality of purpose and of a supernal presence. Instead of mourning they are accepting the plurality of the universe, of which their predecessors had been warned three centuries earlier but had not seriously implemented, that changes their art forms. There was to be a giant difference between the Nietzschean proclamation that God was dead and the proposition that God never existed. As the poet-artist Jean (or Hans) Arp observed, "Dada was the revolt of the nonbelievers against the disbelievers." The concept was there, but not many practitioners in the arts were implementing that view. It had not yet been ingrained. The revolution in the arts that I would call a postapocalyptic posture is a more radical one than reactions to the kind of sociopolitical events that are generally attributed to avant-garde manifestations and their reflections on the arts. I would suggest that modernism today, responding primarily to passing political winds and ideologies, is modern only in terms of the first part of Baudelaire's definition, "transitory, fugitive, contingent," or in my own words I would call them contemporary works dependent on circumstantial events, reserving the label "modern" for those which anchor their vision on phenomena relating to decentralization and decontrol in what is perceived to be an indifferent universe.

Among those who share these deeper disquietudes there are some who reject the continuity more generally perceived between themselves and earlier moderns; instead they sense grave schisms separating them from their predecessors. Nathalie Sarraute has expressed this distance with some irony: "The works of Joyce and Proust already loom in the distance like witnesses of a closed era. It will not be long before we shall be taking guided tours of these historic monuments in the company of schoolchildren in silent respect and in somewhat mournful admiration." By habit and respect, Joyce, Yeats, Thomas Mann, Proust, and others of their generation may still be called modern, particularly from the Anglo-American perspective because neither England nor the United States had an early-century onslaught of "isms." But the fact is that in terms of their works, the signifier "modern," still applied to them, has subsequently acquired another set of signifieds. These great writers of the recent past are indeed part of what Mallarmé called an interregnum; they are waiting for literary historians to give them a more permanent classification than the temporary and provisional "modern" can sustain, and if such a designation does not come forth they will simply join the ranks of the classics without any special label of their own.

Even if we isolate the writers and artists who gave form as well as expression to their sense of the decentralization and instability of the dimensions of reality and apply to them the label of "modern" in our time, we will find great disparities in the ways they reject or represent their adjusted vision of human and physical nature according to Freud and according to Einstein (just to mention two of the many shakers of our reality).

From this angle it is now possible to view as premodern some of those who are still being called modern in literary history and in books on modernism. Such are the makers of Symbolism and Dada and other refugees into language. Of the Symbolists, an early twentieth-century critic, Raoul Hausman, denigrated their resistance to a drastically changing world; he called their act a "naive nostalgia to see the world through human will as if it was imagined by man." The symbolist nihilism, and in some countries it was called aestheticism, was quiet and introverted. In man's quicksand entrapment, the literary icon was able to create an artificial world to serve as the vitalizing power of the writer's slipping individuality. The second mode of the premodern was a direct attack on the growing notion of a nonanthropocentric world. It was a much more hostile and sometimes teasing reaction in verbal terms. It was flamboyantly represented as we know by Dada: "Dada wants nothing, it is a sure thing that they will achieve nothing, nothing, signed by Francis Picabia who knows nothing, nothing." This was a modernism of rupture, asserting that the assumption of a meaning-free cosmos reduces the perceiver to an equally meaning-free status. Simultaneous with a rejection of language expressed in such structures as phonetic poems was the development of a language of rejection. This rejection was paralleled in the plastic arts with a challenge of the objects to which aesthetic qualities had been attributed.

If the rejection of language developed a language of rejection, it is also true that in the reality of language others sought their sole comfort and strength, a replacement of the divine Logos by a new confidence in language which would equate naming with the act of creation. Stephen Hawking, an eminent popularizer of science, suggests in A Brief History of Time that neophytes viewing the changes catalyzed by recent scientific activities take the advice of the philosopher-mathematician Wittgenstein and in their perplexities seek refuge in language. Earlier poets had done that in a premodern era. Vicente Huidobro, Pierre Reverdy, James Joyce, the early surrealists had perceived language as an armor and a staff in the resistance to chaos. To quote Hugo Ball again, "You may laugh, language will one day reward us for our zeal, even if it does not achieve any directly visible results. We have loaded the word with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the word (logos) as a magical complex image." And a number of years later, Octavio Paz: "Against silence and noise I invent the Word, freedom that invents itself and invents me every day." To this day language has had a main hold both on poets and in major areas of philosophy.

But I see three other modes directly confronting the decentralized universe, modes in which language is not an end in itself but a means of making responses to the cosmos. They are the modernisms dealing with identification, representation, and revision, all responding to the expanded definition of nature.

Identification (or imitation) with the decontrolled universe is expressed by simulation of it, signaling direct involvement with it. This form of mimesis is demonstrated in the random spirit of collage, in happenings theatrically staged, connective structures suggesting sequence replaced by gaps suggestive of dark holes in thought, action, or human perception of time, in the fragmentation of language or object in text or canvas or celluloid to suggest correspondences between the dislocated narrator and his incohesive surroundings, wherein anger and indifference are personalized not in pathos but through irony and complacency, as if the joke were not on man but on the universe. If life is a travesty, let art be a game! In adopting an amorphous structure and discarding even the elementary codes of art, it is as if the writer or artist were confirming that nothing short of the negation of art can be the symbol of a terminal era. It is this involvement of the perceiver with the perceived chaos, using irony as the only weapon against total dissolution and silence, that has become the literary fortune of Dada among those modernists of today, self-identified as postmodern.

If indeed there are many evidences of authors and painters who identify with flotsam and chaos through their subjective and lately minimalist response, there is also in evidence the representation of human dispersion in the form of personas who are not identified with the narrator but are his cast of characters in a dramatic narrative, creating a distance that protects the narrator from pathos and self-entrapment. I view as such the works of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, John Hawkes, Günter Grass, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and many so-called neorealists or antirealists in British, Italian, and South American literature. When Molloy, and not Beckett, says "I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world under a faint and untroubled sky," we, the readers, are joining the author in the act of observing his characters struggling with a redefined notion of reality, and in sharing the detachment of the author we are immune to the element of the tragic. (The voice is not necessarily that of the author; why do critics assume that every somber utterance must necessarily represent the author's attitude?)

It is significant that some of the most prominent writers who have taken the decontrolled, decentralized universe in their stride use the myth of the labyrinth.

Molloy searches for the lost center in the metaphor of the return to the Mother. Robbe-Grillet's nameless, faceless character searches out his memory-stripped consciousness in a void. In neither case is mere an Ariadne in sight. These new Theseuses are engaged in what RobbeGrillet calls "an interminable walk through the night," going nowhere, dying everywhere. A situation of impasse is very structurally staged, the decor is selected, landmarks on the journey are consciously chosen; the central character pirouetting has no recourse to human support, or reliance on a benevolent nature or outside force. There is no possibility of battle or an act of courage at the end; because no single danger can be identified, diere is no opportunity for risk and no need to manifest resistance.

Robbe-Grillet's unidentified protagonist copes with the ambiguities not only of space but also of time. We have the excellent example here of architectonic form without a content of supplied meanings. There is the structure of allegory, explicit in the title and implemented in the geometric engineering of the composite events, but the author warns us that there is no allegory of values implied; if no interpretation is invited, then all meaning is exterior and polysemous. If human memory is emblematically present in a box that the protagonist carries around in an eternally present moment, there are no questions as to where or why. The loss of identity is spelled out in a series of maneuvers, compounding each other, and yet the character never says "I am lost." This is not an imitation of the randomness perceived in nature or a thrusting of the author into the whirlpool of nothingness but a staging of it.

Similarly, in Claude Simon's The Grass the author tackles the age-old theme of the devastations caused by the passage of time; the metaphor of the grass is used as the emblem for the imperceptibility of the passage of time, as a measure of growth whether on a physical or a psychological basis. To demonstrate the difference between Proust's handling of time and the newer manipulations of the time dimension, let us presume that Proust views the past as a contained package of memories that he can retrieve according to the power of the faculty of remembering: voluntary memory, involuntary flashback, association memory, etc. The newer novelists represent not so much hindsight as the degree of clarity of their troubled eyes, which are not at all sure that anything remains; they believe only in the centrality of the moment. In describing the precarious quality of the moment, man's meager and sole possession, Octavio Paz sees it as a form of instantaneous eternity in his meditative essay "The Dialectics of Solitude," included in The Labyrinth of Solitude.

Previous novelists, modern in their time, have presented alienated heroes. Famous among them are Kafka's protagonists, Dostoevsky's underground man, and Sartre's nauseated Roquentin. But it is important to note that in the case of Kafka and Dostoevsky the social rather than the ontological factor underlies the alienation; in the case of Sartre's hero, there is strong author identification rather than objective representation of character, and at the end there is a therapeutic solution to the malaise with autobiographical overtones.

Characters not judged, time deprived of continuity, space used circularly, objects distanced from their functional associations, characters unidentifiable with their creators, acceptance of inconsistencies in personality attributed to the normal interplay of degrees of consciousness, use of verbal and phenomenal chance as acceptable factors of life as of art: these features prevalent in recent modernist writings separate them from earlier concepts of the modern and necessitate newer classification for past moderns.

I have referred to identification and representation. The other mode, that of modernism, of revision, is the mode of those who, instead of representing a changed perception of the universe, take artistic control of it. André Breton's most important contribution of the groundwork of the literature of modernism as it is shaping up today was his earlier adjustment to the new factors in a way to make literature and art and their need for determined absolute values viable in a relativist world. He called upon a moral rather than an aesthetic motivation to free the various forms of art from engulfment in the unreliable. The so-called moral value of such willed revision would make both writer and painter, as well as reader and beholder, better able to cope with daily life, as he thought. Such an objective contains a philosophy directed to a concrete and pragmatic achievement rather than to abstract levels of dialogue.

Viewing surrealism in the context of realism—a correction Breton made in his definition as he proceeded from the First Manifesto to Surrealism and Painting—he explained that there can exist a process of transformation of the real into the artifact. The primary function he demanded of himself and of his fellow surrealists was to recuperate the random and the senseless, the automatic and the fortuitous, and to submit them to the control of the artist. The artistic universe need not be decontrolled to match a decontrolled universe. Beauty, for instance, can survive the demolished canon of an art representative of an orderly world only if it is made to correspond to an unpredictable universe: it has to be convulsive in order to suggest that convulsive nature the poet or artist accepts; but here we have a process neither of imitation nor of representation; instead the surrealists resort to subterfuges of controls to recreate the turbulence on their own terms: not through breaks in grammar or ruptures of syntax but through self-referential associations opening up limitless meanings and interpretations, not the destruction of familiar objects but their dislocation or recycling. It is not an attempt to represent the indeterminacy of nature but a creation of indeterminacies in those very aspects of nature that are presumed to have remained constants. But expecting neither sympathy nor meaning in nature, the poet or painter began to project his own countenance onto the world around him.

The poets and painters acted according to consorted theories that brought about great understanding of each other's work. But the painters' manifestations, as it turned out, can be more graphically perceived: the defiances of the laws of gravity painstakingly manifested in the paintings of René Magritte; the dislocations of familiar objects, their change of function in Dali and his imitators; the annihilation of the barriers between the kingdoms of the animal, vegetable, and mineral in the spectacular amalgams of Max Ernst; the efforts to create new objects and new horizons in the case of Yves Tanguy; the surrealist signets such as the Minotaur and the Mandragora that suggest a correction of nature's separation of man and animal. All these manifestations can be summarized as the poet-painter's effort to engender purpose where we can outwardly perceive none. The ultimate question proposed to modernisms of the future is whether human desire can give direction to objective chance. In their self-referential structures the best of surrealists appeared to think so.

The prophetic Apollinaire had foreseen two kinds of artists in modern time. One instinctively and intuitively lets the representation of modern humanity seep through him into the work of art; in that respect the postmoderns are justified in claiming that there is a touch of everyman in the so-called work of art and that it is therefore a collective possession. The other category, in which Apollinaire named Picasso as the original force, recreates a universal model, an aggregate of stylized projection to what might be called a cosmic scale of naturalism. Picasso has been much more recognized of course than his counterpart in literature, Breton. But even in Picasso's case, I wonder whether that admiration has been sufficiently focused on that moment of epiphany when he slipped out of his blue period into the stream of light coming from the depths and the edges of night.

A fundamental argument emerges among moderns concerning the destiny of the metaphor. Robbe-Grillet declared some twenty-five years ago that in view of the absence of human meaning in the universe, the practitioners of the arts should eliminate analogy in their works and thereby suppress the metaphor. But the neosurrealists, particularly the poets of Hispano-America, have increasingly sharpened the image as the sole device to guard what Breton had recognized as the creative spirit in its efforts to overcome what would otherwise be a solipsistic existence "when the primordial connections have been broken." The aim would then be to readjust and conciliate the apparatus of the poetic analogy to the new materialistic data. To quote Breton again: "For me the only evidence in the world is controlled by the spontaneous relationship, extra-lucid, and insolent, which becomes established under certain conditions, between such and such things which common sense would avoid confronting.… I am hopelessly in love with all that adventurously breaks the thread of discursive thought, takes off suddenly into a stream of light, illuminating a life of extremely fertile relationships." In fact Breton and those who have followed him into today's modernism are compelled to inquire into the nature of nature, which is the ultimate subject of modern inquiry.

As we know, the element of rebellion, which is an essential feature of any and all modernism, can be expressed—and indeed was spectacularly expressed early in this century—by deconstructions in perceptions of aesthetics and in sociopolitical activisms. But the rebellion involved in the moral concerns of any serious artist penetrates a deeper level of the art of expression.

Apollinaire described the evolution of Picasso as the calm after the frenzy; "calm" in that context means mastery of process as an answer to unilateral, belligerent attitudes toward the conditions of life in the twentieth century. What Apollinaire perceived in the development of the art of Picasso is the transformation of circumstantial rebellion into the multitiered image of subversion in painting, in poetry, in film, whereas frenzy is the overt exercise of uncontrolled, unsparing movement. One of the great changes in subsequent manifestations of modernism is the channeling of these energies of rebellion so that they are no longer the outer garment of the artist but assume through shocking analogies the double-edged meaning of reconstruction, constructing while deconstructing, espousing no single issue but catalytic of any issue.

It is too early to take inventory of all the avant-gardes that constitute the self-perpetuating modernism of the twentieth century. What matters for the moment is to proceed beyond the attempt to understand motivations, beyond tolerance of each and every one, because indeed to love the avant-garde has become as popular and trendy as it previously was to shun it. Instead it may well be time to go beyond tolerance to critical discrimination. The distinctions between modes should be helpful in discerning the degree of craftsmanship in any such modes. If there emerges what appears to be sloppy composition, is it because the artist wants to represent a sloppy state of existence or is it simply a sloppy state of composition for lack of technical and aesthetic expertise? If the plot dissolves, if character remains flat, is the structure an intentionally reductive form of art, an act of artistic minimalism, or is it due to a lack of imaginative resourcefulness or a unilateral desire to shock and nothing more? If there is no ending, is it because the author believes that the elimination of a sense of ending suggests the quagmire in which humanity is engulfed or does it betray on his part a lack of inventiveness or a weakness in the mastery of the particular art? When does the excremental image lose its power of analogy to return to its original signification of waste? When does erotic language and its objectification lose its luxurious quality to become standard pornography? Are awkwardly shaped figures on a canvas or tedious repetitions of geometric lines a statement about the destruction of human form or a sign of haphazard bluff? Is it time to ask at what point even the most flamboyant avant-garde artist gets repetitious, tired, boring? Or, on the other hand, when do minimal linguistic discourse and gaps of total silence, hailed as achievements of the most recent examples of modernism, become merely indicative of clinical aphasia or verbal deficiencies?

One of the greatest powers of the modernisms of the past has been the overtone of sincerity and commitment; how far can the ironic element of author distancing from reality be carried out without bringing about reader-spectator distancing as well from the work declared as art?

The time has come, I think, when answers to this type of questioning may have to replace the more current, simplistic responses to the avant-garde—which have consisted either of rejecting it totally and in principle or accepting it and embracing it totally and without reservation and without even recognizing that in a single writer or artist there are better and lesser degrees of achievement. I bought some time ago at a book fair the latest work of a very personable playwright whose fame as a "neo-avant-garde" is fast rising. The title was "Burn This," and after reading it I had the feeling that the title was very appropriate. But this piece of trash received acclaim and an award. Audiences used to be too resistant to the avant-garde; now either they have become pushovers if the work is overt or they run away if it is a bit subtle—and the artists are becoming too eager to please.

Renato Poggioli, whose Theory of the Avant-Garde has become a universal reference in any serious discussion of the question of modernism in spite of the availability of many books subsequently written on the subject, thought that it was too early to evaluate. He therefore made his classifications according to the sociological factors involved. But his book is of 1950 vintage. It is hard to believe that we are designating moderns in the same way more than forty years later. Political protest and social negativism are still being rated as the basic elements of modernism and it is no longer too early to begin evaluation. It is time to look empirically at achievements rather than intentions. There is good and bad avant-garde no matter what standards of evaluation we use. A torso on canvas hanging on the wall may shock the viewer. Maybe it is a protest against violence and as such it is perhaps a sociological document, but it has to fulfill certain other criteria to be classified as art, and to be judged as modern it has to have a quality that extracts out of the transient something of the eternal. I have suggested certain categories of the modern. My distinctions are arbitrary and have to do with my own reading lists and philosophy of art. My intention is not to impose them on anyone else but to indicate that it is time to establish values, or at least guidelines, whereby we can regroup the moderns of the past with a good triage in the bargain, and gauge what to expect in current and even future moderns as eventually viable classics. With the everchanging political and social scene, it is time to minimize the element of protest as a signal of the modern and to ask, what else is there? It is time to scrutinize the various powers of construction rather than be overwhelmed by the destructive intensity of the work. It no longer matters who shouted loudest, who shocked most widely. The question now is who shaped a permanent ticker tape of pleasure behind the instant notoriety, who went beyond talk about the unconscious to really give verbal approximation of unconscious or dream discourse, who conveyed the power of reality in the midst of concurrent processes of awareness and unawareness, whose work nourished the works of others instead of cloning itself endlessly?

Underlying the great variety of forms and attitudes loosely grouped and retained under the provisional title of "modernism" there emerge new encodings in search of new classifications. Writers and artists have had to make choices between identifying with new challenges to new notions of time, space, chance, consciousness, and reality and distancing their art from these factors, revising the parameters of the arts accordingly. The transitory label of "modern" must be passed along to new editions of modernism while the great work of separating the chaff from the wheat is carried out as we weigh the viability and degree of meaning and change of meaning of previous modernisms.

I am concerned as I read from the pen of scholars with solid reputations such subservient remarks as "from Lacan we know," "from Foucault we learn," "Derrida tells us." Academic scholars acquiesce too much and thereby plant in their disciples dangerous seeds of docility. Has it occurred to some that Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida could learn a few things from those of us who have been reading literature rather than psychology, archaeology, and philosophy?

As the post, post, post accumulate they seem to announce the ultimate end. Whereas some commentators on our era are eager to proclaim the death of literature, others obsessed with the prefix "post" are laboring under the assumption that we are witnessing the inevitable afterglow of a setting sun. How discouraging this attitude must be both to young writers and to their prospective critics! The paradox is that with the radical changes in the meaning of meaning, the broadening of the channels of communication, and the multiplication of the inner and outer aspects of nature, there has never been such an auspicious moment for the creator as well as the receiver to discover the imminent modern.

Malcolm Bradbury

SOURCE: "The Nonhomemade World: European and American Modernism," in American Quarterly, Vol. 39, Spring, 1987, pp. 27-36.

[In the following essay, Bradbury focuses on the divergent origins and development of Modernism among American and European writers.]

At the beginning of A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975), Hugh Kenner performs an elegant act of metaphorical magic by yoking violently together two items in the history of modernity separately much celebrated, but not usually associated. One is the flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the first serious proof of powered flight, and a clear triumph of American technological inventiveness. The other is a work of fiction started the next year in which the image of the artist as modern flyer has a striking place. That fiction, of course, is Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus's flight into the unknown arts provides us with a figure for the rising spirit of artistic modernism. Metaphorically juxtaposing the one with the other, Kenner can now link two powers, those of American modernity and those of European modernism. As he says of the Wrights: "Their Dedalian deed on the North Carolina shore may be accounted the first American input into the great imaginative enterprise on which artists were to collaborate for half a century." The cunning connection gives him his book. American flyers came to the First World War, and also to the not much less embattled bohemias of Paris and London, where the new arts were being forged. At this stage American technological dominance and European forms were separate. To most Americans, Modernism was foreign; but since it was modern they wanted it, but made in a homemade way. Poets like William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, and many American novelists, musicians, and painters obliged, becoming Modernist without even going to Europe, exploring the new preoccupations as an aspect of the problems of the American language, the needs of American perception and American consciousness, American plenitude and American emptiness. This Kenner explains: "That doctrine of perception, like general semantics, seems peculiarly adapted to the American weather, which fact helps explain why, from Pound's early days until now, modern poetry in whatever country has borne so unmistakably American an impress."

I have done little justice to Kenner's cunning book; but I start with it because it serves as an example of a familiar historiographical process, providing as it does both a narrative of an American act of artistic appropriation and a skillful critical mechanism for reinforcing it. It is a way of telling Modernism's story largely by dislodging the venturesome modern spirit in the arts from a European soil, in which it appears unrooted, to modern American soil, where it prospers and fertilizes, grows with the American grain, and then, an abundant crop, returns to the world market, rather like Frank Norris's nirvanic wheat. Modernism bears the American impress, even outside America, it and American modernity being natural kin. Such narratives are, of course, not new, but they have flourished powerfully since the 1940s when, with F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941), the modern history of American literature began to be seriously written, and the idea of the native grain, of an encompassing and modern American tradition based on American vision and American mythology, enlarged. Matthiessen's brilliant book, the first truly convincing exploration of the way the American writers of the Transcendentalist pre-Civil War period constructed a new art that seemed to pass beyond inherited forms, constructing itself anew, released a fresh idea of the relation between the American imagination and American culture. In the same year, Alfred Kazin, in On Native Grounds, made a similar case for American Naturalism, which might well have been thought to owe much to European ventures of the same kind; after all Frank Norris had studied art in Paris and was seen around the Berkeley campus with a volume of Zola in his hand, and the European Naturalists were much in vogue among the young American writers. But Kazin seeks to establish a difference: where in Europe Naturalism had the force of a literary doctrine, in America it "just came,… grew out of the bewilderment, and fed on the simple grimness of a generation brought face to face with the pervasive materialism of American capitalism"—and it "had no center, no unifying principle, no philosophy, no joy in its coming, no climate of experiment." It was the art of an American process, of industrialization and modernization; and all done on native grounds.

This sense of the power of native soil, the guiding texture of the American grain, stimulated a splendid new generation of critical studies which have shaped all our thinking. In Richard Chase's fine The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) the novel-form comes to the United States in rather the same way, countermanding the European tradition of the social and moral novel and generating its own neo-mythic form, the romance. This was a season for nativizing literature, valuably giving the modern American arts a tradition, a sense of a usable past. American mythographies arising from American beliefs and motifs, ideologies and theologies, American institutions and landscapes, American notions of election, mission and destiny powerfully illuminated a literature that, while it might run curiously in parallel with the arts of Europe, and assimilate much from them, had self-creating powers in the homemade world. And this notion was reinforced by another—that the American arts had from the beginning a special relation to the modern itself. That view owed as much to the European Enlightenment as America itself, and its notions of the course of empire—according to which, as Bishop Berkeley reminded Americans, history moved ever westward, and brought the new arts in its train. When the Revolution brought into being the First New Nation, itself a startling appropriation of modern history, the motif intensified, supplementing the Calvinist sense of mission that came with settlement with the diachronic notion of rising modernity that came with continental spread and intensive development of industry and resources. As Hegel famously said, America was "the land of the future where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world's history shall reveal itself" (we sometimes forget that he saw that revelation taking the form of a conflict between North and South America). Such ideas had a natural appeal to Americans, and applied alike to society and the arts. As Melville declared in Pierre, the Americans were history's own avant-garde, a people advancing into the wilderness of untried things. In Whitman the message grew clearer, modernity in society and experience leading to modernity of form in the arts. "One main contrast of the ideas behind every page of my verses, compared with establish'd poems, is their different relative attitude towards God, towards the objective universe, and still more (by reflection, confessional, assumption, &c), the quite changed attitude of the ego, the one chanting or talking towards himself and towards his fellow-humanity," he wrote in A Backward Glance, going on to add that the material, inventive, and war-produced revolutions of the times, but above all the moral one, had produced what he called a change of army-front through the whole civilized world. And this meant modern form: "For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic new forms and expressions, are inevitable."

This sense of alliance—between America's modern history and modernity of form—Gertrude Stein took with her when, with the twentieth century in her blood (she meant, she said, to be historical, from almost a baby on, and was there "to kill what was not dead, the nineteenth century which was so sure of evolution and prayers"), she went in 1903 to settle in bohemian Paris, where among the refusés the spirit of twentieth-century modernism was in process of birth. "So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901," she wrote in Paris France. The new century was widely summoned in the United States as "the American century" and Stein shared the view, saying that the twentieth century came in America even though it had to go to France to happen. England was consciously refusing the new era, "knowing full well that they had gloriously created the nineteenth century and perhaps the twentieth was going to be one too many for them," while France took it all in its stride, since "what is was and what was is, was their point of view of which they were not very conscious." They were soon made conscious, in part by the Americans who came to Montparnasse, collecting, hunting the new, purchasing modern art on an extraordinary scale which can best be tested by inspecting the collections of the major American galleries and their dates of purchase, and stirring modernity into action. It had to be admitted that the novelties had a European source, and that the United States was puritanical and unartistic—"a half-savage country, out of date," said Ezra Pound, who played a somewhat similar role in motivating and stimulating London with American energies at around the same time—and so, argued Stein, Americans needed Paris because they could not be artists, they could be dentists at home. But she carried with her the familiar American conviction, that the United States was a nation with a special disposition toward progress, and with its technological advance, democratic social order and distinctive space-time continuum it required the "new composition." By this interpretation Modernism was a progressive movement of the arts aptly suited to a progressive nation, and we can see how powerful this kind of account of Modernist evolution has been in the development of the new arts in America.

It needs hardly be said that these ideas have been held in Europe also, both by those seeking to fund the modernity of Modernism and those attempting to expel it and all its works. Al Alvarez said for English-language writing, Modernism "has been a predominantly American concern"; Philip Larkin was happy to hand over to Americans "the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage," and stay near the line of Hardy, and sanity. European Modernists often acknowledged their connection with the American spirit, Picasso observing that if Modernism was born in France it was the product of Spaniards and Americans. The images of rapidity and synchronicity that came from American culture, the beat of American popular music, the rhythms of jazz and the American dances, had great appeal to those artists in Paris who were moving toward both spontaneous primitivism and a new abstraction. The American motif was widespread, in Picabia, Duchamp, Cocteau and many more. Mondrian explained that "True Booogie-Woogie I conceive as homogenous in intention with mine in painting." Mayakovsky saw the skyscraper American city as the heart of the modern, and read the implications of Brooklyn Bridge with the same radical intensity as Hart Crane. The motif has lasted, in Sartre, Butor, RobbeGrillet, and has much to do with the engagement of many European critics with American literature and culture. The "modern" image of America which so strongly affected Russian and Italian Futurism, and German Expressionism even made its mark in Britain. Indeed, D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) recovered, in a remarkable and visionary way, from the little-read classic American tradition the same sense of modernity: "Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to come to the real verge: the Russian and the American.… The furtherest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The Europeans were all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them today."

Yet if Modernism was to become, as Alvarez said, "a predominantly American concern," it hardly started as such. It began in Europe, and took a long time to cross the Atlantic; indeed the American writers from the 1890s to the War were largely preoccupying themselves with a Zola-esque Naturalism that in Europe was mostly considered exhausted. Indeed the full impact of the Modernist tendency came in America at least a generation later than it did in Europe; we normally date it from the ferments around 1912, when Freud and Cubism, the abstract art of the Armory Show and the new poetry that Pound sought to press upon Poetry, Harriet Monroe's magazine, begin to implant in American soil. This is no place, with no space, to expatiate at length on what we mean by Modernism, a contentious matter now as it always was, in part because on detailed inspection it dissolves into a plurality of different, often substantially conflicting, movements or tendencies, with many different sources, many different philosophies and culture-readings, many different versions of the modern, and the deliverances required of the modern arts. The complex problems of definition I and James McFarlane sought to address are discussed at length in the "Introduction" to Modernism: 1890-1930, where we note the heterodoxy of ideas that have gone into most of the attempted definitions. But let me here suggest that for many Western writers and thinkers a nineteenth-century synthesis seems to dissolve or come to crisis in the 1880s and 1890s—when positivism struggles with intuitionalism, sociology with psychology, naturalism with aestheticism, when there is a deep sense of perceptual crisis which throws attention onto consciousness, when world-views pluralize, and dusks and dawns both in the arts and civilization are much thought of. The result in ideas and forms is a period of remarkable intellectual and aesthetic innovation, a general upheaval manifest also in science and philosophy; this all has some prophetic or precursory relation both to the dislocation of the Great War and the postwar synthesis. These changes and disorientations are strongly manifested in the arts, displacing the role of artists, privatizing and specializing them, in some sense dislocating them from the familiar or the homemade. All this has social roots in the processes of late nineteenth-century change, the political upheavals of growing democratization and radical if not revolutionary feeling. It was an international affair, and if any thing distinguishes modernism it is surely its international interfusion—which is to say that whether through simultaneous generation or traceable flows of ideas and influence related artistic phenomena occur right across the Western nations, from Oslo to Rome, Moscow to Chicago. One then should add that they do not occur at quite the same time, in the same order, with the same aims or underlying philosophies, with the same degrees of hope, or despair, or the same historical expectations.

And since the familiar perspective in much English language-centered theory of Modernism sees it largely as an affair of Paris, London and New York, let us consider how wide a matter it was, and how enormous was the thought-flow passing through the European cities, making some capitals and some provinces at different times. Ibsenite Naturalism started in Scandinavia, went to Germany to happen, and turned with late Ibsen and Strindberg toward Expressionism. In France Zola-esque Naturalism turned toward aestheticism, symbolism and the art of the soul and the senses; both of these traditions seemed to cross over in German Expressionism in the immediately prewar years. Paris gave London much of its 1890s Naturalism and its aestheticism, but Germany won some attention, especially via Nietzsche and Ibsen, and D. H. Lawrence of course was drawn by Frieda toward Expressionism. In Russia another version of Symbolism moved toward Futurism; in Vienna another compound evolved which linked modern music, psychology, and new linguistic theory. In Paris, Marinetti was inventing and disseminating Italian futurism, though there were many other crucial movements, including Unanimisme, to the point where Pound, constantly visiting, felt that movements were just what London needed to stir the pot. Imagism in London derived in part from French symbolism, in part from the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, and to some not very great degree from Whitman, with whom Pound contracted a painfully slow pact. It did have a significant American constituent, though Pound denied America as the main source of its ideas, and credited, amongst others, Selwyn Image, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint, as well as the Chinese ideogram. Vorticism, on the other hand, was both borrowed from Worringer and the Futurists and was in revolt against them, and suitably one of its founding figures, Wyndham Lewis, was born on a ship at sea. Dada came in a wartime Zurich that, as Tom Stoppard shows, contained the odd synthesis of Tristan Tzara, Lenin, and Joyce. The war over, it took off in two directions—to Berlin and to Paris, where it interacted with French surrealism, which inherited from earlier symbolism, the impact of Cubism, and generated the Revolution of the Word, which brought together, or apart, contingents from France, Germany, England, Ireland, Romania and the States, to name but a few.

What we can say is that Modernism was an affair of many movements, of a common avant-gardizing tendency, with international origins and a massive and constant change of personnel, and considerable capacity for transit. It was also an affair centered in certain cosmopolitanizing cities capable of concentrating the flow of art-news and sustaining a large bohemian population of polyglot character. And one of the marks of Modernism was that it seemed to have no home. That flight Stephen takes in Portrait of the Artist into the unknown arts is a voyage of broken ties, fracturing the bonds of kinship, religion and country as he goes off to Paris, certainly to forge the uncreated conscience of my race, but from an anxious expatriate distance which set over Joyce's tales of Dublin, the paralyzed city, a modern pluralism and polyglotism. Homelessness was part of the story. As George Steiner says, it was largely an art unhoused, an art of "extra-territoriality," and it was no accident that multilinguists have been the major artists of our age. Indeed, he says, of Nabokov, so clearly a part of this tradition, "It seems proper that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism in which so many are made homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across language." That wandering of language, that separation of the signifier from the signified which Saussure was intuiting in the immediately prewar climate, that "defamiliarization" of which the Russian formalist critics began to speak at much the same time, indeed seems near to the heart of Modernism. Thus what Kenner domesticates, and makes friendly with modern society and modern change, Steiner deracinates, and associates with modern anxiety and historical suffering. There are indeed many versions of Modernism.

In this Americans, essentially the expatriate ones, played their part from the early stages, a part which intensified in quantity and influence as time went on: James and Henry Harland, Pound, Eliot, Robert Frost and John Gould Fletcher in London; Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris, to be followed by the expatriate wave of the 1920s, and so on. But support funds at home were not great, as Pound discovered when he tried to transmit European news back to Harriet Monroe. When Pound explained that American bards had to study Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Regnier, Francis Jammes and Tristan Corbiere, her magazine waved its homemade banner in behalf of its version of Modernism: "Mr [Vachel] Lindsay did not go to France for The Congo or General William Booth Enters Into Heaven. He did not even stay on the eastern side of the Alleghanies.… " It was the midwestern "moderns" like Lindsay, Masters and Sandburg that the magazine took pride in, while the great modern epic Monroe was looking for was not "Prufrock," which Pound sent her and which she tried to edit down, but a nativist epic celebrating the Panama Canal. Much of what Pound was saying was in fact an embarrassment. Nonetheless a "home-made" school did evolve, with Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and others, who may not have headed for Europe but who took much of their funding from Pound, Imagism and French symbolism. Williams may have felt that The Waste Land set back poetry by twenty years, but his Imagist debts are clear. Stevens for some time impersonated a French symbolist poet, and submitted poems under the dandy-name of "Peter Parasol," taking many of his titles from French poetry and paintings. American writing itself bred many modernisms, from the cultural despair of Eliot and Pound to the contrary affirmation and surer nativism of Stein or Williams. Indeed an assimilation took place, so that we see the American arts as modern not simply because they explore the cultural experience of an advanced or futuristic society, but because they have incorporated into that culture the lore of the modern art forms.

Not all saw the elegant equation of American modernity and European modernism as virtue. Stein's tactics of takeover, representing Cubism as an art that, though invented by Frenchmen and Spaniards, was really American, fitting prairie space, skyscraper cities, and filmic speed, were not universally accepted. Braque, in the famous transition testimony against Gertrude Stein, said: "Miss Stein obviously saw everything from the outside and never the real struggle we were engaged in. For one who poses as an authority on the epoch it is safe to say that she never went beyond the stage of a tourist." Certainly she perceived in terms of abstract, detachable styles justified by broad reference to twentieth-century needs, and never touched the deeper historical and perceptual anguish behind much modernism. Yet in her way she was right. Americans had a taste for stylistic radicalism, for forms that suggested a modern version of life, for new structures. American modern style did assimilate much from modernist style, in architecture and art. Indeed modernism seemed to pull together the apparently lonely and eccentric history of American artistic endeavor right through the nineteenth century. By the middle twenties, Americans seemed in one fashion or another major participants, and a modernism of sorts settled as an acceptable American style, along with Freud and Jung, Picabia and Picasso, the skyscraper and the futurist lines of the motor car, the radical spontaneity of jazz. And when in the 1930s the rise of Hitler and Mussolini reversed the tide of intellectual and artistic migrations, the alliance between Modernism and modern America seemed secured. Mann and Brecht, Auden and Isherwood, along with many of the intellectual supporters and major figures of theater, and architecture, found themselves on American soil, and in the American grain. In 1939, the year of new war, Joyce published Finnegans Wake, that summative and polyglot myth; a year later he died, displaced back to Zurich, and around the same date so did Virginia Woolf, a clear casualty of war. Of the two great American expatriate figures who had so much to do with the transaction, Pound, staying in Italy, ended with threatened charges of treason, and Stein, remaining in France, just survived the war, still asserting that America was her country and Paris was her home town. In America modernism seemed settled, and Bauhaus became not so much our house as the American corporate office building. Stein's prophecy for the century seemed fulfilled. Modernism had become the twentieth-century American style, the language of its progressivism, pluralism, cultural convergence; its commerce, its aesthetic drive, its modernity.

Thus, we seem to agree now, Modernism both endured and ended, fractured by the war but leaving its overwhelming trace on the Modern. Its demise left us with a problem, at least of nomenclature, for what comes after the modern, what follows the future, what happens when now turns suddenly into then, is not easy to define. But after the war there came, as Sartre said, a "third generation" of writers, called by the historical fracture and the collapse of entire social orders to new responsibilities. Modernism was now historicized, something came after, and we have come to talk of Postmodernism. No one has been more helpful and thoughtful than Ihab Hassan in trying to interpret the transition and gloss the term, and I quote him in paracritical flight: "If we can arbitrarily state that literary Modernism includes certain work between Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896) and Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), where will we arbitrarily state that Postmodernism begins? A year earlier than the Wake? With Sartre's La Nausee (1938) or Beckett's Murphy (1938)? In any case, Postmodernism includes works by writers as different as Barth, arthelme, ecker, eckett, ense, lanchot, orges, urroughs, utor. …" The list, you will notice, is provisional, capacious and international, with a large European contingent. So is that in another fine and undernoticed book on the same matter, Christopher Butler's After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant Garde (1980), which also takes the wake as a break, the break as a wake, but sees a distinctive new phase of style developing after Existentialism, during the 1950s, with the nouveau roman, the nouvelle vague in cinema, a new music and a new painting. "For better or worse," he says, identifying this Postmodern time, "this is the age of Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, of Cage, Messiaen, Boulez, of Pollock, Rothko, Stella, and Rauschenberg." Butler not only emphasizes the internationality of the matter but draws less than usual on contemporary literary theory, concentrating on the statements of artists themselves. And I would suppose that most Europeans (and even the British now call themselves European, or certainly when it is in their interest to do so) would recognize some such history, seeing the after-modern or postmodern tendency or aesthetic equation as owing much to the postwar evolution of Existentialism, with its struggle between the humanistic and the absurd, and the subsequent challenges to it in successor arts and philosophies, the reassimilation of some aspects of Modernism, the rejection of others, the pervasive sense of the "imaginary museum" of plenitude and emptiness that passed through so many Western arts, the spirit of what Nathalie Sarraute calls "the ear of suspicion," when, as RobbeGrillet puts it, in an era beyond humanism and tragedy art lives with "the smooth, meaningless, amoral surface of the world."

What is clear is that Postmodernism does have a larger American constituent, reflecting in part the fortunes of Modernism, and the dominance of America as modern art patron, high stylistic consumer, and eḿigré haven. It is surely equally clear that its great marking figures include Beckett, an Irishman writing in Paris in French; Nabokov, a Russian refugee writing in his native language, German, French, and latterly English; and Borges, an Argentinian writing in Spanish and with a Latin American, Iberian, French and Anglophile background. Thus it draws on a tradition that had moved through Modernism and the Absurd toward a new minimalism, a tradition based in a latter-day adaptation of early Russian symbolism, and a South American tradition which relates the fantastic to historical realism. Its present centers certainly include South America, Paris, Italy, Germany, to some degree Britain, and to some further degree the Indian subcontinent, Australasia and Canada. Its intellectual sources appear to be, amongst other things, Russian formalism, Saussurian linguistics, later Surrealism, Existentialist philosophy, and what has followed it, that Deconstructionist revolution that spread throughout the entire Gallic World (as I believe Yale University is sometimes called). It includes, I would say virtually by definition, an eclectic principle of multiple quotation, stylistic pluralism, creative misprision. There has indeed been a strong American contingent, which Saul Bellow, who has made clear his resistance to the tendency, has distinguished from the nouveaux romanciers and European writers "whose novels and plays are derived from definite theories which make a historical reckoning of the human condition and are particularly responsive to new physical, psychological, and philosophical theories." In this matter, he says, American writers are again the modern primitives, writing in the same spirit but "seldom encumbered by such intellectual baggage, and this fact pleases their European contemporaries, who find in them a natural, that is, a brutal or violent acceptance of the new universal truth by minds free from intellectual preconceptions." If this is not entirely true, some part of American Postmodernism having a clear intellectual face related to those European philosophies, it does seem that there is a Postmodernism of the homemade world.

Today the tendency indeed seems to have been domesticated within the cultural heterodoxy of American culture, and become a convention. As Alan Wilde ways with some irony in Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (1980), "postmodernism is an essentially American affair." The term has been generalized to apply to the broad eclecticism of forms and referents in contemporary American writing, architecture and art, a way of speaking of an art that appears "self-creating" and "in the American grain." Indeed this is the form of modern writing that has grown particularly exemplary, so literary that Post-modernism often seems to mean innovative American fiction read—or rather misread—with the methods and slippages of French Deconstructionist criticism. It is, in effect, the art of the "homemade world," a consequence of American stylistic abundance, provisional form, intermedia arts, futurism and, often, optimism. So, says one American critic, James Rother, "to be American is, quite simply, to be postmodern, and to be postmodern entails nothing more than knowing (in the full light of a communally held fiction) that one is."

I have suggested here that for a sufficient account of Modernism we need many Modernisms, and a far more challenging and international perception of the relation between American and broader international culture. By necessary logic the same would apply to Postmodernism, which has inherited, certainly, the pluarlity and multiple signification of Modernism and a good part of its philosophical, linguistic and formal skepticism. If the term means anything, it surely means an art of stylistic plurality and cultural synchronicity, rebarbative plenitude and decultured emptiness, formal enquiry and parodic self-reference, random signification and infinite quotation, that marks much of world-culture in our multimedia, high-noise, wide-traveling internationalist age. To attend to it we need a capacious attention, if we are to construct not only a sufficient historiography of the immediate past of our arts but of their present. For we live, after all, in the age of Marquez, Calvino, Handke, Eco, Fowles, Pinter, Stoppard, Wittig, Coetzee, and many many more, and there is a major international literature of extraordinary power which needs drawing into any cogent mapping of the late twentieth century arts that both succeed to and react to the overwhelming Modernist inheritance. The arts of Postmodernism, like those of Modernism, are of no single and unidirectional kind; they are a contention, a quarrel, seeded in many places, often floating free of them in a large extraterritoriality, and funded by polyglot and multistylistic sources. It is almost forty years after the wake, as indeed the wake was just around forty years after Ubu Roi. The task of charting this is immense, and hardly begun in terms of a conceptual historiography. But as we begin to assimilate theoretically the arts of our own long time, we will find almost certainly that in our age of cultural melting-pot and extraordinary global interfusion they are hardly the arts of a homemade world.

Lawrence B. Gamache

SOURCE: "Toward a Definition of 'Modernism,'" The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, Associated University Presses, 1987, pp. 32-44.

[In the following essay, Gamache illuminates the origins and meaning of the term "Modernism " in both literary and nonliterary contexts.]

Because the ambition to define modernism completely would be almost Miltonic, I will begin this study with an explanation of its limitations. By considering the history of the words modern and modernism and by adumbrating the cultural context that defines their literary usage, I intend to suggest several essential constituents of both literary and nonliterary modernism and to provide several examples of modernists whose lives and works manifest those constituents.

My initial intent was to clarify the uses of modernism and modernist to describe some twentieth-century writers and their works. I considered referring to four major figures—Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, and Lawrence—to represent what I think are the constituents of a cultural phenomenon that reaches back at least several centuries in its genesis. This I found difficult: much clarification was needed before the examples could be discussed.

The word modernism, given its complex range of uses, has all the traps of others like it, for example, romanticism; it presents even greater difficulty just now because of the proximity in time of the phenomena it pretends to identify. My revised ambition has not been overreaching, I think, but it has, nevertheless, led to a very cumbersome project. Previous studies have dealt with rather limited literary and artistic applications of the word, and have discussed points of specific agreement and disagreement about the phenomena it usually refers to; but little has been done to relate nonliterary uses of the word, especially its earliest uses, to descriptions of the larger cultural context that frames recent literary history. A larger study might seem more appropriate than this attempt to outline a difficult subject, but in the context of the series of essays to which it will relate, what I have undertaken is apropos. The apparently disparate cultural phenomena referred to in a number of contexts by uses of modern, or many of the modifications of that word current in theological and religious, scientific and technical, linguistic, philosophical, and psychological study, in social, economic, and political practice as well as ideology, make an unequivocal usage impossible. Studies of the literature and art from origins other than Anglo-American, French, German, and Italian (most often treated as the mainstream sources of the "modernist tradition") and of its nonliterary uses can help to identify what is basic to the phenomena the word refers to. My final intent has been to clarify the literary meaning of this term by identifying its earliest usages, in particular the religious, the first context in which it gained currency, and to suggest parallels between appropriate literary and nonliterary figures who illustrate essential modernism.

It is the core of the meaning of modernism, then, for which I will suggest an explanation. I think there is a felt sense of crisis in human existence reflected in many late nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural products to which the following constituents of modernism can be attributed: (1) a preoccupation with the present, usually urban and technical rather than rural and agricultural in its sense of place and time, is related to the loss of a meaningful context derived from the past, from its forms, styles, and traditions; (2) this sense of loss gives rise to a search for a new context—cosmopolitan, not provincial, in scope—and for new techniques to evolve an acceptable perception of reality, often, paradoxically, in the form of an attempt to rediscover roots in the depths of the past; (3) but this search tends to an increasingly relativistic, inward, often disillusioned vision and a compulsive need to develop techniques to embody it. As Monroe K. Spears suggests, however, the modernist may also react to modern cultural changes "as emancipation, a joyful release from the dead hand of convention, from stale pieties and restrictions." The culmination for many modernists is the rejection of the present in favor of the values of the past (Eliot), a singular vision of the future (Lawrence), a substitute reality (Yeats), or the diminishing conviction that there is any stable external reality to which that inward search relates (Joyce). For a writer to be a modernist, each of these constituent elements should to a noticeable degree be not just arguable but evident preoccupations; someone may be modernistic in some ways without being a modernist, as is true of George Bernard Shaw, the early Yeats, Robert Frost (at least in much of his work), and the later Eliot.

My proposed description of modernism is really a fairly basic reduction to a common ground of what most commentaries on modernism state as defining constituents. What has been most revealing during the study of this common ground is the extent to which it applies to the wide range of phenomena in our culture referred to above, that is, to our struggles as artists, scientists, philosophers, even technologists, to deal with that sense of crisis in our evolution that has increasingly pervaded human life through at least the last two centuries. Although a specifically modernist period, analogous to the romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, can be argued to have existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, based on the prevalence to a significant extent of its defining characteristics in the rhetorical and poetical products of writers, be they artists, philosophers, or scientists, the word itself must be allowed to function descriptively, unfettered by temporal constraints, as are romanticism or classicism. Certain ancient authors, therefore, might be legitimately said to manifest modernist attitudes or responses, without the assertion being considered absurd. For example, Euripides, for some critics, at times reflects very modernist reactions to certain human quandaries. In 1938, Robert L. Calhoun argued this point as he defined the meaning of humanitarian modernism in contrast to traditional Christian religious views. He applied his definition to several sociocultural contexts without limiting himself to a purely twentieth-century frame of reference. He said that "its key note is active, conscious preoccupation with the present" and that "the obstinate, urgent past embodied in living tradition is disparaged." Confidence in a "new critical insight," which may issue in "rationalism, in positivism, or in skepticism," he attributes to the modernists' cutting away of "spiritual bonds which else would hold present and future to the past." While I would qualify Calhoun's sense of the modernists' perfect-abilitarian optimism and decisiveness in divesting themselves of the past and a pride and confidence about themselves and their programs, his awareness that the phenomenon is not a "school of thought" and is a "particular recurrent mood of temper, which in essence is very old, which during the past two hundred years has become more widespread," are insights uncharacteristic of early considerations of the meaning of "modernism," especially in a religious context.

It is very difficult to discuss any examples of modernism in isolation, and, for that reason, I will preface my examples of a prototypical form of modernism with a consideration of the word as such and with what I hope will be sufficient acknowledgment of the appropriate larger context necessary for a coherent discussion of representative patterns of moral, religious, and existential crises drawn by the examples I will cite. According to the OED, modern was first used in the sixth century A.D. by analogy with the modification of hodie to hodiernus; modo became modernus, meaning "just now." It would seem both by virtue of analogy and etymology that a preoccupation with "just now," rather than with the past or the future, is fundamental to what modern suggests, in particular when it is modifying statements of attitudes or states of mind, not simply designating what is coeval. In England, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, it usually referred to qualities of thought, style, or workmanship that were current rather than classical in sympathy or affinity, often with pejorative connotation.

This long history of usage is, in part, the source of some of the confusion in the use of modernism (that is, one that assumes apparently differing significations in differing contexts while, at the same time, retaining a core of meaning). When the suffixes-ism and -ist are added to modern, an irresistible and fascinating challenge to the ingenuity of lexicographers and semioticians develops. Defining it for use as a descriptive term in literary-cultural history is no less challenging. The addition of -ism and -ist to a word can make it refer to a set of tenets, an attitude or complex of attitudes held in common by a more or less identifiable group. Individuals, and the phenomena related to them for which the word is also used as a modifier, must in some significant measure adhere to those tenets or manifest those attitudes. The danger is to reduce complex human phenomena to the -ism, making it a vague tag, rather than to have it point at a perceivable propensity whose identification clarifies a complex idea; it can help us to be aware of an underlying coherence amid confusing diversity. Any definition of such a term that comes to grips with the fundamental problem—the relationship of the literary to the larger context of cultural influences that, in the final analysis, define it—will necessarily have to be relative: flexible, yet have the precision to suggest more than a meaningless set of ambiguities or, worse, a distorting category.

Some evidence of the scope of a study of Western intellectual traditions affected by modernism is provided by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson in The Modern Tradition, a seminal anthology of source materials that goes as far back as the eighteenth-century roots of twentieth-century thought for evidence. Their collection of bits and pieces suggests the range and richness of a modern tradition for which no single concept, no matter how complex its explanation, seems appropriate. Considering the multitude of -isms and -ologies they touch on (for example, in philosophy, Kantianism, Hegelianism, Marxism; in the arts, impressionism, surrealism; in psychology, Freudianism, Jungianism; in socioeconomic theory, socialism, liberalism), it might appear that this tradition is nothing more than an amorphous slagheap of ideologies that volcanizes out of the heat of human evolution. The tradition is, however, far more real and has, in its reality, touched individual lives far more powerfully than such a conception would allow for; such a conception admits no distinction between the living heat of the volcanic eruption and its residue.

The longstanding practice of identifying the time span from the early Renaissance to the present as "the modern period" (the source of much ambiguity in its current usages) to distinguish it from the medieval, was based on an awareness of a shifting focus of attention from a medieval God-centered to a man-centered vision of this world. In this context, the so-called modernist span, considered most broadly to begin in the last third of the nineteenth century, peaking between 1900 and 1930, and continuing to about World War II or shortly thereafter, is the period of the failure of Renaissance and post-Renaissance aspirations; but between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the center had shifted from man to nature—seen at first abstractly and analytically, then more imaginatively and emotionally by some and more empirically by others—in reaction to the incompleteness of the optimistic programs, for example, of the Baconians and Cartesians.

Valuable studies done earlier in the century by such scholars as Arthur O. Lovejoy, Erich Auerbach, Joseph Warren Beach, Basil Willey, Paul Oscar Kristeller, and Meyer H. Abrams have helped to clarify this pattern: there has been a progression from the optimistic attempt to discover the real world, studied confidently as the proper object of philosophy and science and as the artist's guide, to man reduced to skepticism and to his own subjectivity. The individual, considered to be full of potential (as in the Renaissance), was gradually replaced by mass consciousness and individual subconsciousness or unconsciousness. Nature has changed from an object to know and control to a noumenal universe beyond our minds' direct grasp, and Nietzsche's "death of God" has been succeeded and completed by Michel Foucault's "death of man." The process of this succession constitutes the history of the modernist era.

The effects of these shifts on efforts to understand fundamental reality are primary indicants of the modernist temperament; by looking into the earliest attempts to embody these effects in the forms of our culture, especially in its religious forms, we can clarify them somewhat and apply them to literature by more precise use of analogy than is usual. The majority of studies of modernism thus far tend to isolate the object matter of the study—be it art, literature, philosophy, or religion—from the other areas of human activity that manifest the incursion of the modernist spirit, thereby rendering our perception of that phenomenon piecemeal and our understanding fragmentary. I have chosen to use the development of modernism in Roman Catholicism to exemplify what I think are its major constituents because religion touches most directly on those facets of human thought and feeling affected by modernism and because, historically, Roman Catholic intellectuals were the first to pursue consciously and deliberately the modernist enterprise as I am defining it.

Evidence of the spirit, the motivations, and the genesis of modernism can be studied in particular in the careers and thoughts of two exemplary figures from the history of the Roman Catholic modernist controversy, that is, in the personal and religious development of Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell. Each of these men is considered the founder of Catholic modernism in his own country, France and England respectively; their lives suggest the terms of a crisis indicative of not only what religious modernism was at the turn of the century, but also of what it cost, and why it, too, is identified by those defining constituents mentioned above. These men were concerned with their own times, with the moral and intellectual issues they themselves felt and also saw others troubled by, both Catholic and not Catholic, in their own countries and beyond. They were aware of a loss of belief in the efficacy of religious traditions, in form and in content; they turned to new methods to discover new foundations for spirituality, but, in the case of Loisy in particular, became increasingly relativistic and disillusioned. Characteristic of the scholarly endeavors of each of these men was an awareness of the intellectual pursuits, in their own and in other fields, of colleagues in other countries. This cosmopolitanism was, in fact, the source of some of their difficulties with their more provincially-minded and ultramontane superiors. Each of these qualities contributed to Roman Catholic modernism and to the controversy surrounding it.

Pope Pius X, in his encyclical Pascendi (1907), identified a complex of attitudes and theories, especially certain avant-garde approaches to biblical study and to doctrine, as embodying the "modernist heresy." According to J. J. Heaney, a Catholic spokesman, "[Pascendi] condemned theories on dogma and Biblical criticism which had agnostic, immanentist-evolutionary and anti-intellectualist bases." He also claims that "immanentism, neoHegelianism, and agnosticism were the terminal point rather than the point de depart" for some modernists only. This judgment would apply to Loisy, but not to Tyrrell.

From such a point of view, Pascendi focused on the negative influence of current, often conflicting, varieties of epistemological phenomenalisms like those of Mill, Spencer, Pierce, and Comte; of philosophical idealisms like Bradley's, Hegel's, Bergson's or Croce's; of forms of scientific and historical determinism as preached by Thomas Henry Huxley or Hippolyte Taine; and of the religious historicism of such scholars of religion as Schleiermacher, Ritschl, von Harnack, and Renan. The views of these last supported, in varying measure, and paradoxically, scientific historicism in biblical and doctrinal studies—a relativistic development in matters of faith, and subjectivism, that is, feeling, as the basis for a commitment to religious belief in the absence of intellectual certitude. It is the force of intellectual currents such as these, in particular those that affected twentieth-century man's confidence in his knowledge of the world outside his mind, and, for that matter, the worlds of his mind as well, that have influenced modernists in literature from Joyce, the rational technician, to Lawrence, the intuitive man of feeling.

According to Leighton Parks, an early twentieth-century Protestant modernist, what was "somewhat contemptuously" condemned by Pius X was more than a series of explicit, highly formulated positions; it was, rather, a complex of "certain social, philosophical, and historical movements in the Roman Catholic Church" that the Pope stigmatized as heretical. To Parks, modernism "is not a body of doctrine. It is a state of mind. It is an attempt to 'justify the ways of God to man,' that is, to man in the twentieth century." To many, both inside and outside the Catholic Church, it was that "state of mind" the Pope condemned. The examples of Loisy and Tyrrell support Parks: they did not uphold the same theses; they were involved in different ways, as scholars and as idiosyncratic minds, with different areas. Yet they did share common attitudes, those I have cited above as specifically constituting the modernist spirit.

Alfred Loisy has often been called the father of Roman Catholic modernism. He was born in 1857 in Ambrières, Marne, and began studying for the priesthood at the age of seventeen. He was ordained five years later. He became a student and, later, Professor of Hebrew and Biblical Exegesis at the Institut Catholique in Paris, between 1881 and 1893; he was dismissed in 1893 as a result of an article on the Bible and inspiration. He served as Chaplain to the Dominican Sisters at Neuilly, Seine, from 1893 to 1899. In 1900 he was Biblical Lecturer at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris but had to retire in 1904 because of his controversy with Rome; a number of his books were placed on the Index by Pius X in 1903. He was finally excommunicated in 1908.

In 1909 he became Professor of the History of Religions at the Coll`ege de France. He abandoned Catholicism and eventually Christianity in any traditional sense, but continued to publish studies of the Bible and other religious subjects until his death in 1940. His career spanned the modernist era, but his earlier years are the most important.

In 1913, Loisy revealed his earlier torments while a student of theology:

Just in the degree to which certain objects of faith had impressed me when employed as sources of religious emotion, to that same degree their Scholastic exposition in terms of naked intellect filled my mind with an ill-defined disquiet. Now that I was required to think all these things rationally, and not merely to feel them, I was thrown into a state of prolonged disturbance. For my intelligence could find no satisfaction, and with my whole timid, immature consciousness I trembled before the query that oppressed, in spite of myself, every hour of the day: Is there any reality which corresponds to these doctrines?

The conflict felt by Loisy as a sickly, delicate young seminarian might be used, mutatis mutandis, to describe James Joyce during his adolescence.

Loisy was but eleven years old when the doctrine of papal infallibility was declared during Vatican Council I (1869-70); but the sources of tension within and outside the Catholic Church that led to that declaration lie behind Loisy's declared "four years of mental and moral torture," during which he was introduced to the study of Roman Catholic theology. Joseph Ernest Renan (1823-92), an agnostic and author of the highly controversial Vie de Jésus (1863), had used textual-historical critical tools in treating the New Testament story of Christ as a romance, reducing Christ to a purely human historical figure; David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), a German theologian, had mythologized the Christ figure. These uses of "modern" textual-critical approaches, compounding the effects of current archaeological discoveries in the Middle East and the unsettling effects of popular Darwinianism, deeply disturbed many of Loisy's contemporaries. It was as a response to such influences that Rome declared infallibility and that Leo XIII published his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) in support of neoscholasticism for an approved method in philosophical and theological studies.

In his late adolescence, Loisy entered religious studies in a milieu of heated controversy and a deeply-rooted historical division between "liberal" and "fundamentalist" Catholicism. Those who stood on a middle ground or who, like the Baron von Hügel and Giovanni Genocchi (both contributors to religious studies associated with Loisy during his controversy with Rome), attempted to mediate the "modernist" cause with traditionalists, were caught, often painfully, between two irreconcilable extremes. As Loisy developed in his studies of scripture, he became the spokesman of the "modernist" extreme. It was in his mid-twenties, after he took his degree in theology, that he embarked on his career as a modernist student of the Bible. By 1882, he expressed his awareness of the conflict that would eventually lead him to break with Roman Catholicism and, in the long run, with any traditional notion of Christianity:

On the one hand [is] routine calling itself tradition; on the other, novelty calling itself truth.… These two attitudes are in conflict as to the Bible, and I wonder if anyone in the world is able to hold the scales even between faith and science.

That same year, he became a student of Renan at the Collège de France.

By 1890, when he published his first piece of biblical scholarship, the way before him was becoming clearer and his direction was being set. In 1893 he lost his position at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In 1900 he criticized the notion of inspiration in Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus (1893). Loisy's claim that theologians "are as able as others to write… free criticism, because in the field of biblical history, as in every other subject [emphasis added], faith directs scientific investigations" was, paradoxically, the source, according to Genocchi, of his pronouncements that contradicted traditional teaching. Genocchi warned Loisy against the inevitable conflict he would engender between biblical textual history and philosophical and theological analysis. To Genocchi there was a fundamental difference between historical-critical and philosophical methods: they must not be confused or reduced the one to the other. Loisy began to treat purely philosophical and theological questions, "though protesting that he wished to write a purely historical work." The philosophical and theological methods to which Genocchi referred were neo-scholastic, more specifically neo-Thomist. Genocchi was a declared devotee of Thomas Aquinas from his earliest years of study. Loisy sought in these years to apply new, nonscholastic methods to biblical studies as an apologist; he in fact referred to his work concluded in 1899 as an "apologetic." The final section, according to Francesco Turvasi, served as the rough draft for chapters on the historical Jesus and on Christian dogma and worship in L'Evangile et l'Eglise and Autour d'un petit livre (1903), two works that seriously disturbed many of his confrères, and evidently caused a number of young clerics to question their religious convictions. This work was originally entitled La crise de la foi dans le temps présent: essais d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses; he clearly saw himself in the vanguard of a new approach to religious studies.

Loisy believed he was being maligned, not because of his audacity in implying radically different theological and philosophical (particularly implicitly epistemologica!) positions, but because of his accusers' ignorance of the true nature of the crisis and of the methods of modern study that might resolve that crisis. This seems, at least, to have been his sense of the conflict at the turn of the century. He was moving consistently toward an evolutionist view of church teaching, and an immanentist (anti-transcendent) view of God's relationship to the world and man, and toward a "Catholic" agnosticism in his view of the person of God and of Christ's divinity: he evidently wanted to remain in the Church while, at the same time, teaching views inconsistent with its traditions in theology. In 1913, he acknowledged the impossibility of maintaining these two positions.

Loisy's "ill-defined disquiet," his intense sense of a mission, felt early in his intellectual development, to find new techniques for dealing with the issues of faith he recognized as increasingly troublesome for his contemporaries, and his desire to open his quest to the discovery of new, rational grounds for a new kind of religious faith offered by research outside the strict confines of traditional religious study, are the areas I think suggestive of analogies to be drawn to the urgency shared by literary and visual artists contemporary with him in their thematic preoccupations, and in their search for new techniques to embody those themes (whether products of thought or of feeling or, in Pound's words, of an "intellectual and emotional complex [experienced] in an instant of time." Loisy's gradual movement away from the given heritage of his religious ancestry toward an agnostic, relativistic approach to biblical and doctrinal interpretations presages similar developments in other, equally sensitive products of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural evolution.

George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy have often been linked in studies of Roman Catholic modernism as the leading lights of the movement, because both were excommunicated after Pascendi was promulgated and because both resisted the attempt to stop their endeavors to change basic conceptions of Catholic teaching; however, these two men could hardly have differed from each other more completely in their backgrounds and personalities. Loisy was born into a peasant farm family, very traditionally French Catholic, was destined very early in life for the priesthood, and was educated from his earliest years wholly in Church schools; Tyrrell was born in Dublin, in 1861, into a Protestant Irish family, made fatherless just before his birth, and was constantly moved about (eighteen times by the age of eighteen). He was exposed "to a variety of religious traditions, including Methodism, Calvinism, and Evangelicalism." His older brother, a very important influence during his formative years, was an agnostic. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, George Tyrrell claimed he did not believe: "It was simply my first self-chosen attitude in regard to religion; I did not cease to be a believer, but, from a non-believer, I became an unbeliever at about the age of ten." His family were believers, except for his brother Willie, but they were not aware of his attitudes. A childhood friend later wrote, "for Tyrrell, his change of religion was a necessary precondition to his gaining of his soul spiritually or intellectually."

Tyrrell found his direction toward religious faith in his fourteenth year; he discovered Grangegorman, an Anglican High Church in Dublin. Of this experience, he said he "felt instinctively what I, long afterwards, understood clearly, namely: that the difference between an altar and a communion table was infinite." Ellen Leonard describes Tyrrell's progress toward Catholicism by contrasting it with that of Newman, a figure of importance in Tyrrell's early modernist thought: "Whereas Newman began with a belief in God's presence in the voice of conscience, which led him ultimately to a belief in Catholicism, Tyrrell began with Catholicism, which led him to Christianity and then to Theism." He became a Roman Catholic after having moved to London in 1879, and almost immediately he decided to become a Jesuit priest.

Tyrrell's "spiritual odyssey," according to Leonard, was the result of his "strong 'wish to believe'"; it was an urgent search for a conception of order that would provide meaning for people living in a modern, not medieval, world. He was guided by a "strong sense of mission, a conviction that his search was not for himself alone.… His concern was for others who were experiencing the same darkness through which he had come." The introduction, during his seminary studies, to neo-scholastic methods had a long-lasting influence on him; he felt St. Thomas Aquinas gave him the intellectual instruments to pursue his quest:

Whatever order or method there is in my thought… I owe… to St. Thomas. He first started me on the inevitable, impossible, and yet not all-fruitless quest of a complete and harmonious system of thought.

It is ironic that his condemnation was, in part, for not acquiescing to the authority of neo-scholasticism in the teaching of Church doctrine.

Tyrrell's acceptance of the Jesuit discipline was based on a conviction "that the originality of Ignatius [founder of the Jesuits] lay in his willingness to adapt new means to meet the needs of his time." It was to revive this Ignatian spirit, that is, to seek again the means, suitable to the realities of the turn-of-the-century, to speak to the people of a modern world, that he dedicated himself. He gradually came to believe that what he called Jesuitism had become "the maintainer of the status quo, rather than an innovative force within the Church." He felt it contributed to an exaggerated sense of Church authority that stultified attempts to accommodate Church teachings to the research of modern science and scientific criticism. It became his hope to "historicize" St. Thomas, who "represents a far less developed theology than that of the later Schoolmen.… I would study Aquinas as I would study Dante, in order that knowing the mind of another age we might know the mind of our own more intelligently." Tyrrell here sounds much closer to a Gadamer than to any neo-scholastic of his own time. His attempts to use this critical approach to Thomas as a teacher of philosophy at Stonyhurst, between 1894 and 1895, led to his removal from teaching and to his early difficulties within the Society. At this point he began to search for alternative ways of understanding and interpreting Catholicism. John Henry Newman seemed to offer such an alternative.

From Newman, Tyrrell adapted the conception of Christianity as developmental, that is, that the teachings of the Church in any age are the articulation of Christ's revelation for that age—that the Church itself evolved and is evolving continuously. He said that Newman recognized "the fluctuating character of science and religion" and that Newman wanted "to make the preambles of faith in some sort independent of, and indifferent to, those very fluctuations." Tyrrell wanted to establish the critical bases of faith upon which subsequent studies, such as Loisy's adaptation of German criticism in his work on the Bible, could rest without need or fear of authoritative censure from Church officialdom. His was the position of mediator: "The Church may neither identify herself with 'progress' nor isolate herself from it. Her attitude must always be the difficult and uncomfortable one of partial disagreement and partial assent."

At the close of the century, Tyrrell published an article on the dogma of Hell; in the course of his statement, rejecting the scholastic position, he remarked:

In a saner spiritual philosophy born of a revolt against materialism—the last and lowest form of rationalism [e.g., scholasticism]—a basis is found for a certain temperate agnosticism, which is one of the essential prerequisites of intelligent faith;… the essential incapacity of finite mind to seize the absolute and which governs and moves everything towards itself, the natural necessity of seeming contradictions and perplexities in our estimate of God's thoughts and ways are accepted as inevitable.

This article led to the conflict with the authorities of his Society and of the Church in Rome that culminated eight years later (22 October 1907) in his excommunication, a little more than a month after Pascendi was promulgated.

Tyrrell's way of dealing with this conflict—without denying his basic acceptance of Catholicism, on the one hand, or of acquiescing to the pressures of authority, on the other—was to see himself as one who "will stand on the doorstep and knock and ring and make myself a nuisance in every possible way." He had a sense of his own faith that echoes Newman's of A Grammar of Assent (1870), in rejecting "extravagant claims for what reason can prove about God. We have assents based… on the total response of the whole person to a concrete fact." He also had to deal with uncertainty:

As to faith, it is my hope that there is a solution yet to be discovered; and that not very far hence. I think there are crises in human thought comparable to those in evolution when life, sense and reason first come on the scene; and that after such crises there are seasons of great confusion pending readjustment;… How far away even Newman seems to one now! How little he seems to have penetrated the darkness of our day!

His answer to the darkness, and his urgent reason for knocking at the door of the Church rather than retiring, is contained in his conception of the proper relationship between Catholicism and the modern world:

If a religion is to influence and leaven our civilization and culture it must be recognized as a part of it, as organically one with it; not as a foreign body thrust down from above, but as having grown up with it from the same root in the spirit of humanity.

Death did not come to Tyrrell suddenly; he had expected to die even sooner than he did, but the spectre did not deter him from his convictions or his chosen course of action. Up to 1909, when the effects of Bright's disease and, undoubtedly, the strain of the conflict he was in took their toll, he continued to adhere, within himself, to his Catholicism, hoping that he might contribute to making it adapt more coherently to the ways of the modern world.

Earlier in the nineteenth century, Tennyson had expressed his fears of the image of nature being proffered by biological science (In Memoriam) and technology ("Locksley Hall Sixty Years After"), but he did not grasp the challenge to his most basic perception of reality that would evolve by the time of Tyrrell and Loisy. And Arnold's "darkling plain" in "Dover Beach" was perhaps his most extreme expression of human prospects after the withdrawal of the "Sea of Faith." On the whole, Victorians saw the direction of coeval developments in human knowledge positively or, at worst, fearfully; but the fearful did not realize the radical effect on their sense of the past and of the present about to invade their basically stable perceptions of the right order of things. The apparent darkness of modern human horizons became evident to religious searchers sooner than it did to most of their contemporaries, and their perception of that darkness—unlike, for example, a Hardy's—was framed by a modernist's sense of place and time and of the general human condition in a modernized world. The careers of both Tyrrell and Loisy echo the mind and world of a Stephen Dedalus or a Paul Morel far more than they do a Michael Henchard, or any of the Forsyths for that matter.

The patterns of the modern novel described by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending or Alan Friedman in The Turn of the Novel, that is, their openendedness and apocalyptic, urgent struggles for an intellectual and emotional vision to give a meaningful context of belief in which to act out human life, are more applicable to Loisy's and Tyrrell's biographies than they would be to their mentors' life stories, such as, for example, Renan's or Newman's. The descriptions of literary modernism presented by such commentators as Spears, who acknowledges the importance of religious modernism in his Dionysus and the City, or Bradbury and McFarlane, who never allude to it in their collection of essays entitled Modernism: 1890-1930, are clearly relevant to a study of religious modernism; and a knowledge of religious modernism does make clearer and more vividly real the intensity and nature of the human conflict the growth of modernism in our culture represents. I have attempted to sketch, briefly, the outlines of that conflict, in particular as it is represented by the lives of two of its most famous and most painfully intense figures.

In discussing the attempts of modern artists to produce their works, William Graham Cole offers the following description of modernists:

Many modern artists have portrayed the predicament of twentieth-century man with jarring expressiveness.… In [all the arts], the creative mind has found the old forms hollow and mute. They no longer communicate; they have ceased to contain or convey. The search for new media, new symbols, new techniques is everywhere painfully apparent.… Those who peer at the present age, penetrate its mask and probe into… themselves no less than [into] the world outside… : for [modern artists] there was a chaotic breakdown of all traditional forms of communication. Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surealism [sic], Dadaism are all late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century efforts to understand and to express what is happening to modern man and his world, they are exercises in the attempt to bring order out of disorder, to manage the unmanageable, to express the ineffable.

Cole's remarks can be used to comment almost as well on the motivations and actions of Loisy and Tyrrell. It is his reference to the "painfully apparent" search of the artists for the means to voice their sense of the breakdown of meaning that is particularly apt in describing the religious quest of the two priests. It is, perhaps, the sense that the pain is no longer so acutely apparent in many works of writers and artists of more recent years that suggests the passing of the dominance of modernism. It is as though we have gotten used to a sore and are no longer quite so sharply conscious of its continued presence.