R.I.P. “proto-modernism”
If you’ve ever taken a college-level English course on literature written before 1900, the odds are pretty good that you’ve encountered a strange beast known as “the proto-modernist text.” Very often, this is a text written by a 19th century poet (Whitman, Swinburne, etc.), but that’s not absolutely required. It can be Huysmans. It can be Baudelaire. It can be Swift or Sterne. According to critic J. Hillis Miller, Miguel Cervantes was not a mere proto-modernist. He was, in fact, a proto-postmodernist! I’ve heard the same claim made about Chaucer. Perhaps the further back you go, the more modern it gets.
Of all the hopes I Ziploc’d away in my dissertation, two were quite straightforward. First, I hope more people read Finnegans Wake. Second, I hope everyone stops using the term “proto-modernist” (to say nothing of “proto-postmodernist”). It is wrong, it is unnecessary, and it leaves us confused about both modernism and its predecessors.
This may seem like a trifling matter of academic semantics, but in fact a great deal is at stake. The modernists experimented with literary form for a reason. They were not, for the most part, radicals from the get-go. They began experimenting because they were concerned about the political situation in Europe. They wanted to create literature capable of affecting politics, promoting freedom, and bettering people’s lives, and they felt that realist literature — the “novel of purpose,” epitomized by writers like Dickens and Zola — had been unsuccessful.
Realism was too literal. Every reader was encouraged to do the same things. (For example, in A Christmas Carol, the theme is giving away money. In Little Dorrit it is eliminating debtors’ prisons.)
Realism’s proposed reforms were too incremental. If a rich man gave away money, that was a kind act, but it did nothing to change Europe’s unjust economic systems.
Finally, realism itself was too oppressive from a modernist perspective. To them it was another species of propaganda. For all of these reasons, the modernists started writing experimental texts in order to create a viable alternative to realism.
I will return to the subject of 19th Century writers in a moment, but for now, it should be plain enough that any text written before the heyday of Realism cannot be “modernist.” What appears “modern” in earlier writing is mere coincidence. Every literary era has had its radicals, its experiments. We accomplish nothing by calling such texts “proto-modernist.”
Because modernism was so political, it is intensely frustrating when I see modernism confused with eccentricity and zany behavior. For example, I recently read through a syllabus that chose Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven as the quintessential modernist, not because of what she wrote, but because of her strange and wonderful hats. Many modernists, notably T. S. Eliot, were conservative in both politics and temperament. These writers backed into radical forms because there seemed to be no choice. There is nothing wrong with studying the more colorful modernists, but there is a great deal wrong with using them to make modernism seem a superficial cult of personality. Using Freytag-Loringhoven to understand James Joyce or Ezra Pound is a bit like using Salvador Dali to interpret “Guernica.”
Of course, there was a movement against realism prior to modernism: Aestheticism, which spread from France, to England, to Italy and the United States. Calling an Aestheticist like Oscar Wilde a “proto-modernist” is unhelpful. It is hard to see how “The Importance of Being Earnest” anticipates “The Red Wheelbarrow.” It would be more accurate to say that modernism is the last phase of Aestheticism. It had the same political concerns. It had the same concerns about realism. It too believed that art could regenerate society. All of the modernists read the Aestheticists avidly, and were in dialogue with them throughout their careers. Virginia Woolf rejected Walter Pater. Joyce got a feeling of freedom from Gabriele D’Annunzio. Eliot called out Matthew Arnold in one essay after another. Calling modernism an offshoot of Aesheticism makes a great deal more sense than calling every Aestheticist clairvoyant.
Finally, modernism was effectively over by the 1950s. Modernism ended because its political hopes were dashed, not because writers were done trying out experimental forms. To call something “postmodern” is really to say that the text despairs of modernism’s extremely utopian ambitions. A book like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, with its lofty vision of Tesla inventing machines that could solve our energy crisis, is really a modernist work. It is therefore an anachronism — that’s why Against the Day seems so isolated, excessive, and quaint.
The popular conception of modernism as either an elegiac movement, or a carnival of daring forms, is a whitewash. Calling modernism despairing or elegiac makes it narrow; there’s nothing all that elegiac or traumatized about Ulysses, although there is conflict and regret. Calling modernism “experimental” is misleading, especially when one considers influential writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example) who were far more conventional than their predecessors. When Ezra Pound said, “Make it new!” he was not using “new” in the same way as someone saying dubstep is the “newest big thing.” In fact, that pernicious overlap was one of the many things that brought modernism low.
When somebody calls a text “proto-modernist,” they are trying to sell us on it. The term is like MSG — instantly, the text becomes more interesting, the author more of a maverick. Relevance begins to rise like incense from every page. We no longer have to fear becoming bored! All this says a lot about us. It speaks to our ingrained consumer tendencies and our ambivalence towards literature. But I am not willing to trade modernism, with its dream of a better society, for that sales pitch. Instead of using one set of texts to make the others seem new, let us try to give our own era the literary identity it lacks. Let us make a new modernism.
It seems odd to say that modernism is, simultaneously, an offshoot of Aestheticism, with its art-for-art’s-sake mentality, and a response to realism’s failure to effect political change. The second of these two claims seems especially dubious since modernists were reacting as much against Dickens’ moral hectoring as much as his realism. I’d be curious to hear your case for modernism as a political project, because otherwise I find your account of modernism unconvincing.
Yes, it may be difficult to show how “The Importance of Being Earnest” (a play) anticipates “The Red Wheelbarrow” (a poem), but this argument is made of straw. One could just as easily look at Whitman, about whom both Pound and Williams wrote about as an intellectual and artistic forbearer and from whom they both took free-verse. To call Whitman proto-modernist isn’t to call him clairvoyant but rather to point out that Pound wasn’t making it as new as he claimed. Frank Kermode made this argument 50 years ago when he said that modernism was the last phase not of aestheticism, but of Romanticism. We call things “proto-modernist” to contest the myth of modernism as a world-historical event that radically broke from the past.
This is also an incredibly Eurocentric vision of modernism. How do you fit the Harlem Renaissance into this? While modernism may have been dead in Europe by the 1950s, it was still thriving in the US with the rise of abstract expressionism, Charles Olson’s projectivist verse, Frank O’Hara, and not to mention Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and the entirety of Partisan Review.
Yes, people throw “proto-“ around a lot, but doing so is less misleading and damaging than rehashing tired narratives of modernist exceptionalism.
BG: great comment. I appreciate your taking the time.
Aestheticism has been grievously misunderstood as an “art for art’s sake” movement. It was nothing of the kind. Pater was in crisis about whether or not he could abandon religion for art. Matthew Arnold wrote about the political necessity of culture. John Ruskin and William Morris were outspoken socialists, as (significantly) was Oscar Wilde, in major works such as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” as well as in lesser known texts like “The Happy Prince.” Henry James was certainly concerned with what we could broadly term “feminism”; he was also much more concerned with the class struggle than many critics realize. Even writers like Huysmans and D’Annunzio, who were less overtly political, wrote works of indirect political significance. D’Annunzio was a fascist, and Huysmans considered Pater’s question (“Can art replace religion?”) and (in Against Nature) answered, “no.”
In other words, when people like Wilde defended “art for art’s sake,” they were mounting a rhetorical campaign against censorship, not imprisoning art within a sterile formalist cage.
I don’t think Pound was making it as new as he claimed either, and naturally I agree that the Transcendentalists were an important influence on the sentiments and styles of the Aestheticists and the modernists. James’s father was a member of Emerson’s circle and a failed Transcendentalist theologian, after all.
Kermode’s argument is essentially correct, but it’s awfully broad, so much so that I wonder how much work it can do. I’m talking about writers who knew each other, who directly influenced each other, quarreled with each other, and so on. I’m not trying to just sweep Shelley and Goethe along with Eliot and God-knows-who-else into a huge category that hardly means anything.
I think what really upsets people about the myth of modernist exceptionalism is that it seems to suggest that the modernists were better, that they did more than the writers of other periods or continents. I certainly don’t feel that way. I’m a modernist exceptionalist, to be sure, but I’m also a Renaissance exceptionalist, a Realist exceptionalist, and so on.
Honestly, I really don’t know enough about the Harlem Renaissance to try to contextualize it here. That movement had numerous tactics and concerns that were its own, such as racial equality and incorporating the music of the blues. You could perhaps describe those texts as a school of modernism that, because it had a somewhat different political vision, was both more sustained and more successful.
It’s not that modernism is impossible post-WWII. It’s that it has trouble preserving its credibility. But in some cases writers reinvented it in small, successful ways: Frank O’Hara is a good example, with his “personist” verse. (Olson might be too. I haven’t read him.) I don’t consider Baldwin a modernist, and I’m surprised you do.
You could compare the contemporary situation of modernism with that of the Communist Party in the United States. Is there a Communist Party here? Yes, there is. Does it have the credibility, influence, or relevance that it did decades ago? Absolutely not.
I don’t know. I use the term “proto-modernist” quite incessantly in my PhD (which is soon to be book). I use it because I’m talking about (among other things) the development of a certain stance toward narrative temporality that I think is definitely modernist, but emerged before “modernism” proper. In particular, the book starts with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It doesn’t make sense to call that a modernist work, but on the other hand it definitely inaugurates (or at least announces) some of the major technical shifts to come – free indirect discourse, impersonality, etc. Hard to imagine modernist narrative taking the same shape without Flaubert. Thus, his “proto-modernism.”
AWP:
I have to say, that seems like a pretty legitimate use of the term, which is pretty much what I’d expect from your first book. Most of the people (Hillis excluded) who use the term “proto-modernism” badly aren’t good scholars in any respect. You are.
Still, the term continues to concern me because it seems backwards. If Flaubert is such an influential figure for the modernists, shouldn’t we simply call modernism “a movement greatly influenced by Flaubert’s formal innovations”? After all, we don’t call Shakespeare a “proto-Milton,” or Mozart a “proto-Beethoven.”
In addition, many of the supposed hallmarks of modernism are less self-evident than one would think. I have a particularly big problem with both of the features you mentioned, FID and impersonality. FID is all over the place in the 19th Century; Joyce’s use of it (particularly in Ulysses) strikes me more as a fantasia on Victorian fiction than a peculiarly modernist tic. Impersonality is even more complicated. First of all, most modernist works are not impersonal by any standard (including many of Eliot’s poems). Second, Matthew Arnold really invented Eliot’s “impersonality” back in 1865, in Culture and Anarchy. (Also, note that BG nominated Frank O’Hara for inclusion in the “modernist” canon, and O’Hara advocated “personism,” the opposite of “impersonality.”) I’m not disputing that Flaubert’s notions of objectivity influenced modernism, not at all — I just don’t see modernism as the necessary telos of those qualities in Flaubert’s prose merely because some modernists used Flaubert’s forms to their own ends.
Really enjoyed this post. In the literary periodization game, it will always be possible to offer counterexamples and question how the dots have been connected — “Sure, but did *modernism* even *exist*?” — but this is an inevitable result of the rules of the game. Simplification is the whole point. I had never seen the dots connected in this way before, and the picture makes sense — at least as much sense as any of the alternatives. Great post!