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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 279-288 Modernism, the Word Marianne Thormählen, ed., Rethinking Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; xiv+286 pp.; ISBN: 1403911800; LC call no.: PR478.M6 R46; £50 Modernism, the word, was loosely circulating in the late 19th century. Thomas Hardy could drop it casually, as when describing the passage of time and the workings of change: "the influence of modernism had supplanted the open chimney corner by a grate" ("Interlopers at the Knap," ch. V, in Wessex Tales, 1888); or offer it portentously, as when Angel Clare is surprised by a touch of rarity in a milkmaid: "She was expressing... feelings which might almost have been called those of the age — the ache of modernism" (Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 1892, ch. XIX). In Dangerous Ages, a bright young novel by Rose Macaulay published in 1921, modernism still lacks precision, being voiced here somewhat uncertainly between the casual and the pompous: "'After all, Rodney, you've your job. Can't I have mine? Aren't you a modernist, an intellectual, and a feminist?' Rodney, who believed with truth that he was all these things, gave in" (ch. 3.i). Such indifferent usages of modernism may be the more remarkable when we invoke and recite some of the books that bear the name in their titles. From one year alone we can cite three: A.L. Lilley, Modernism: A record and review (1908); Paul Sabatier, Modernism (1908); George Tyrrell, The Programme of Modernism (1908). It is hardly a wonder that by 1910 somebody (Anon) should need to sum up the debate in a book whose title might express the views of any student of culture in the past half-century: Modernism and What It Did for Me (1910). It is not the case that modernism was clearly defined by 1908 or 1910. The year after Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages appeared, another novel was published, somewhat better known today, and a poem. In that same year of 1922, along with Ulysses and The Waste Land, a book was published that might well be thought to be offering an instant explanation. The author is the well-named O.C. Quick, his book entitled Liberalism, Modernism and Tradition. In 1924 Leighton Parks supplies the guide that every student of Joyce and Eliot must have been craving, What Is Modernism? The next year, one Warrington Dawson seems to offer some sort of sequel to, or [end page 279] even parody of, the doings of Bloom and Stephen: The Green Moustache: A fantasy of modernism (Chicago, 1925). 1929 sees the publication of a work by M. Haldeman of uncertain genre, but clearly of conservative bent: A King's Penknife, or Why I Am Opposed to Modernism. We recall that 'cunning' is a word of peculiar import in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): "the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning." One is struck all the more, therefore, by a book entitled Cunningly Devised Fables: Modernism exposed and refuted (n.d., c. 1915?). Has some cunning old artificer conjured these phantom volumes, devised a Borgesian bibliohoax? Few if any of these titles are recorded in the standard handbooks and reference guides to modernism: it is in Google we trust. Why are we not paying attention to these works? To a genealogical uncovering of modernism, and to the realization that in chronological terms, the modernism of Joyce and Pound and Eliot was already post- some other tendency or movement that went by the name of modernism. A clue might have been supplied by another work published in 1908, J. Godrycz, The Doctrine of Modernism and its Refutation. A host of other titles would have confirmed suspicion: Modernism and the Vatican (1912), Modernism and the Reformation (1914), Modernism and the Christian Faith (1921), and in the year of Ulysses, 1922, Modernism in Religion. In 1920 the eminent and revered Oxford theologian, William Sanday, in the seventy-seventh and last year of his life, confessed: "I do not disclaim the name of Modernist. The name describes justly what I aim at being. I aim at thinking the thoughts and speaking the language of my own day, and yet at the same time keeping all that is essential in the religion of the past." It has long been a source of unease that the term 'modernism' originates in theological dispute, naming a heresy denounced by Pope Pius X in 1907 in a decree memorably known as the Lamentabili. Hence the plethora of works on modernism appearing in 1908, of which we have cited only from among those in English. Malcolm Bradbury, whose Pelican Guide to European Literature: Modernism, of 1976, was (and remains) a work of canonical force and authority, ignores entirely the theological dimension, or genealogy, even in his otherwise impressive survey of "The Name and Nature of Modernism." The earliest work of non-theological concern to carry the word modernism in its title — at least in English — is A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) by Laura Riding and Robert Graves. (One notes that the order of the authors' names is customarily inverted in bibliographies, in, for example, both Bradbury's Pelican Guide and the volume under review: even the neutrality of bibliographical description is threatened by the ideological unconscious.) This was followed in 1933 by G.W. Stonier's Gog Magog: An [end page 280] anatomy of Modernism in literature, but, until the 1940's at least, literature has not yet appropriated the still theological term. In 1930 we find L.T. Dunne's The Heart of Modernism, whose subtitle indicates that Conrad may not be the subject: Or, the morals of a Modernist: a startling disclosure. Yet that full title does not seem entirely irrelevant to the story of Kurtz, and it may be worth enquiring how and why the theological and the literary terms play off, or are implied in or imbricated over each other. It is clear that only after theological modernism has ceased to be an issue — a waning perhaps to be marked by H.L. Stewart's Modernism Past and Present of 1932 — does the term modernism become widely available for literary, artistic, and cultural description. The great figures of theological modernism, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) in France, George Tyrrell (1861-1909) and Baron von Hügel (1852-1925) in England, had been promoting their programme of modernism since the 1880's. The name however does not occur in its English form, except in some private letters of Tyrrell of c. 1901, until after the Pope has used it as the name of the heresy to be condemned. The papal condemnation, merely by bestowing a name on the movement, thus had the effect of bringing modernism out of narrow academic circles and into public debate: hence the proliferation of polemical and explicatory works on modernism after 1907. Of these names one at least will be familiar to students of literature, for von Hügel was a friend of Yeats, celebrated — recalled in being dismissed — at the end of Yeats' poem "Vacillation" (in The Winding Stair and other poems, 1933): Must we part, Von Hügel, though much alike, for we Yeats, who has always seemed a little misplaced in the company of modernists, is yet of all the great writers of his age the one most entitled to the name inherited from theology. As Richard Greaves has argued as recently as 2002 — and I cite indirectly, from the book under review — it is time to see Yeats as something other than 'as a partial example — or failed example — of modernism in literature.' By 1968 one could begin to be surprised at the residual use of modernism in its older application, in J.J. Heaney's The Modernist Crisis: Von Hügel, while wondering whether von Hügel might not be, through Yeats (and others), at the crux of the shift in the word's use. [end page 281] It is a salient virtue of Rethinking Modernism that it draws our attention to our own unwitting acceptance of the authority of modernism. Marianne Thormählen, the editor, points out that modernism was a term not normally applied to the literature of the first half of the 20th century until well into the second half, even up to 1970; very few works in English contain either Modernism or Modernist in their titles until the 1960's, and it is only since the late 1970's that the word occurs in bibliographies with any frequency. As late as 1960 Graham Hough "lamented that there was still no name for the revolution in English poetry that took place between 1910 and the Second World War." Thormählen further points out that the Pelican Guide to English Literature, published in 1961, makes no mention of modernism. It is only by such means of piling up such titular and indexical instances that readers may be persuaded of the change that occurred in the 1970s: a shift of which Bradbury & McFarlane's Pelican Guide in 1976 was the chief symptom and is now the enduring monument. Yet 1960 also marks the year of Harry Levin's classic essay, "What Was Modernism?" The essay at least provided the name Hough lacked: however, the preterite wit of Levin's question has itself given rise to the mistaken supposition that the question in the present tense — What is modernism? — must have been asked many times before 1960. In a theological sense, yes; but in a literary sense, not at all. Levin's question does however mark accurately the sense of rupture, that, whatever modernism had been, by 1960 it was felt to be over. In a comprehensive and invaluable "Bibliography of Modernism," Thormählen notes that though widely accepted as a label, and often contested in essays and prefaces, 'modernism' was, as a label, not subjected to detailed academic scrutiny until 1990, with the publication of Astradur Eysteinsson's The Concept of Modernism. This history of bibliographical modernism follows received practice in ignoring the theological background: even von Hügel is absent. The neglect is sometimes registered in the modifier 'literary modernism,' though other kinds are not specified. And the bibliographical argument is augmented, if also somewhat qualified by the editor in her own essay, citing Pound in a review of 1913: "Whatever may be said against automobiles and aeroplanes and the modernist way of speaking of them..." where the usage seems most akin to that of Hardy's grate. Lennart Nyberg further identifies E.E. Cummings as "the first Anglo-American poet, to my knowledge, to use the term 'modernist' for characterizing his own work," and that as early as 1923 (46). Stan Smith (181) claims that only a single instance of the word 'modernist' is to be found in all the writings of T.S. Eliot. This comes from 1930 and is, exceptionally, in an application both literary and theological: "the modernist Protestantism of Byron and Shelley." However, in asso-[end page 282]ciation with Romantic poets, one must assume the primary sense of 'modernist' in Eliot's usage to be theological. Each of these citations increases one's sense of the fascination of the word and its diverse users and usages in the first half of the 20th century. The essays in Rethinking Modernism are for the most part concerned to challenge 'modernism' in terms of that to which it has been opposed in the formation of literary and cultural history: the Classical, the Romantic, the Edwardian & Georgian, and the postmodern. Modernism both breaks with tradition and reconstitutes tradition. It is keen to "make it new," but will not waive its right to speak for the old. Pound, Eliot and Joyce are perhaps the last writers in English who can take for granted among their readers an easy familiarity with the classical tradition. One wonders whether the awareness, so strong in the 1970's, that modernism mattered, that it might have been — and remain — the last great cultural movement in western civilization, was not the expression of an anxiety as to what would happen in the absence of a classical education. Modernism was named when it was felt to have ended: when it lacked adequately educated readers. Those of an earlier generation, such as Leslie Stephen or Edmund Gosse or George Saintsbury, would have been able effortlessly to hear the allusions in the early poetry of Pound and Eliot; men brought up on Homer and Virgil would have had little trouble elucidating Ulysses and those other works that for the most part they disdained to read. It is as though the valuation of a modernist text stands in inverse ratio to the reader's ability to understand it. In its combination of learning with an apparent mockery of the tradition sustained by that learning, modernism has had one unmistakable effect: it has given rise to literary scholarship in English, and in the other vernaculars of Europe. That is to say, modernist texts — at least, Pound, Eliot, Joyce — require scholarship and annotation as do few other texts in English. And they are designed to be so provided with commentary, unlike a work such as Paradise Lost, which was not intended to be as difficult as it has become for readers without a classical education. Further, in the past fifty years, scholarship has had to maintain its institutions, but not all those whom it engages have had the classical training once associated with scholarship. The vernacular may have had its rise towards the end of the Middle Ages; however, only very recently has it taken over the world of scholarship. Modernism created and advocated the conditions for vernacular scholarship; and as the classical itself implies un grand récit, one might say that this vernacularism of learning is precisely what distinguishes the postmodern. And, thus, what allows the conflation of senses in the term postmodern: both post-modernist, in the journalistic sense, of culture since 1945 or 1960 or last week, and in Habermas' anxiety that the postmodern [end page 283] marks the end of Enlightenment, of the subject's contract with Reason, the end, in short, of European civilization. In the late 19th century the educational curriculum for young gentlemen was overwhelmingly classical: over three-quarters of one's hours in school would be occupied with classical subjects. The transformation that was effected within little more than fifty years is one with whose broad consequences — post-classicalism — we are barely beginning to reckon. A number of distinguished scholars have been assembled for the rethinking of modernism: in this volume are essays by Derek Attridge, Christopher Innes, Edna Longley, Claude Rawson and David Trotter, among others. Trotter, without explicitly addressing scholarship, writes about the "fundamental transformation of English society and culture... by expertise of one kind or another" (31). It is a transformation effected by directing education towards the acquisition of particular skills or the mastering of specific areas of competence: it entails the rejection of liberal education and its ideal of broad culture in the name of what we might term vocational fundamentalism. As we know too well, this is a process that has by no means lost its momentum. Vincent Sherry takes a long view, noting the theological background — in which reason would be invoked against the passive acceptance of dogma — and yet pointing to C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards as representing a skepticism about reason, one that is finely qualified by Sherry: "for Richards... feels the power of poetry, not in the absence of a language of logic, but in the fully present irrelevance of reasonable speech" (15). Sherry's italics are themselves at first of disconcerting irrelevance, and instructively so. Sherry points to the startling irrelevance of Mrs. Flanders' written words at the opening of Virginia Woolf's novel of 1922, Jacob's Room: "the major linguistic inventions of the 1920s... might be said to have evolved a prosody of the mock-logical, a grammar of the pseudo-propositional.... 'So of course': the gesture of logical conclusion that opens this novel... the ordinal force of that conceit is of course the pressure this unspeakable war has brought to bear on the older vocabulary and grammar of Reason." Here modernism already supposes, or discloses, a discontent with Enlightenment. The editor takes up the cause of the Georgian poets, and insists that we take note of such apparent anomalies in literary history as the fact that the first volume of Georgian Poetry contained poems by D.H. Lawrence and Robert Graves. Thormählen's argument is that the Georgians and the Modernists did not see themselves as opposed, but that the opposition is an invention of much later literary historians. This would be endorsed by the detail that Rupert Brooke had in 1910 published a favourable review of Ezra Pound's Personae. Such awkward contiguities tend to be sup-[end page 284]pressed in the official histories: see instead, Christopher Hassall, A Biography of Edward Marsh (1959), 182. This in turn helps to explain another detail that might at first be taken as evidence against Thormählen's argument. One of Pound's biographers, Humphrey Carpenter, tells us (A Serious Character: The life of Ezra Pound, 1988: 179) that "[b]y 1915 [Pound] was referring to the Georgians as 'the stupidest set of Blockheads to be found in any country'.... Only Rupert Brooke now seemed tolerable to him." Read again with care, and note that 'the Georgians' are not among Pound's cited words: they have been supplied by the biographer, thus exemplifying Thormählen's case that distinct identities, and the antagonism between them, were created much later, and are sustained by literary historians. In assessing the merits of Georgian poetry, Thormählen poses a most important question, one that has been asked before, as by George Steiner in "On Difficulty" (1978), but that has proved too discomforting to bear a considered response: "Have we valorized the 'modernists' because they provided us with more material to work on — because, to put it crudely, they were more difficult than the others and so needed us as explicators?" (89) We are thus, ourselves, complicit in the process of transforming our own selves from broadly cultured scholars into specialists and experts: technicians who can fix texts. Derek Attridge takes up the problem of difficulty in a less self-reflexive manner. He would contrast the concentration demanded by modernist texts with "the relatively passive mode of reading that almost all texts allow" (152). This gives one pause. Attridge goes on to consider early reviewers and their confessions of irritation and confusion in the reading of Ulysses, and contrasts this with the relative ease of reading (in a recent re-translation into English) a Norwegian classic, Sigrid Undset's trilogy, Kristin Lavransdottir, the last volume of which was also published in 1922. Attridge himself adopts the confessional mode in expressing an anxiety that his admiration of both novels, what he terms "a dual allegiance," does not reflect "a hopeless inconsistency in my literary taste" (157). 'Dual allegiance' is a phrase symptomatic of the divisions and rivalries in early twentieth-century literature invented by literary historians. One would hardly confess a 'dual allegiance' to, say, both Jane Austen and Shelley, or both Marlowe and Spenser. Our view of modern literary history remains thoroughly vitiated by the polemics of modernism: where to place Lawrence (a question addressed here by Michael Bell), Robert Frost, Edward Thomas (the one 'Georgian' never to have been entirely neglected, since Leavis made his gracious exemption from the general condemnation, in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Wallace Stevens, treated here by Stefan Holander, or Yeats, MacNeice and [end page 285] Muldoon around whom Edna Longley weaves an entertaining plea for a provincial or even insular modernism. And yet, there are dozens of writers still excluded from the modern canon by the criteria of modernism, and even in spite of meeting them, for reasons hardly separable from the anecdotes of groupings, personal enmities and, above all, whether or not one went forth blest by Pound. (David Jones receives no mention at all.) Dorothy Richardson would seem to satisfy every modernist requirement, yet Pilgrimage remains overshadowed by Woolf's rather less original and far less substantial works. Of the contributors to this rethinking, only Attridge alludes to her. There is one woman who has always been visible on the edge of Modernism, and who in recent years has achieved recognition as a major writer: Hilda Doolittle. (Calling her H.D. is as unhelpfully 'respectful' as lower-casing cummings, and to more grievous effect: she tends to disappear in the index, and wherever alphabetical searching is required.) Her early poetry is the subject of the most impressive and searching essay in this volume, "Modernism and the Classical Tradition: The examples of Pound and H.D.," by Lars-Håkan Svensson. Here we witness a scholar not at work but at ease, hearing classical echoes, seeing the shapes of epigrams and Sappho's fragments, attentive to Pound's uses of neo-Latin verse and neo-Latin versions, tracing a path through Pound and Doolittle, having taken a hint and a cue from Ashbery's "Syringa." Though this is never stated as the essay's aim, one finds that one has been instructed also in the reading of Ashbery. Svensson hears in Pound and Doolittle a use of classical texts that is neither translation nor imitation, and that he tentatively names appropriation. One would question the appropriateness of 'property' in any term to designate this poetry. For what we hear are many voices, that can be placed in no one time or space, but from which, if we must trace a voice to its source, we can extrapolate only non-sequent times and uncoordinated places: "The characteristic feature of such an imitation is that it transcends its model, transforming it into a text fully integrated with the historical conditions of the initiator's own era" (128). Yet also, one protests, remaining elsewhere and elsewhen. We are reminded of Attridge's contrast between modernist texts (difficult) and "almost all" the others that allow for a "relatively passive mode of reading": for that passivity is surely based on the idea (albeit the illusion) of authorial presence, of the author either speaking in one voice, or centrally in command of a variety of voices, and of a coherence of time and space from which that voice issues. Of Pound, Doolittle, Eliot, there is no single hearing: we cannot be monophonic readers. By contrast, we can hear the individual and personal voices of Yeats and Hardy and Frost and Edward Thomas. In neither sort of poetry, [end page 286] of course, should we be concerned with "what the poet is trying to say," but we should recognize that in the case of traditional, orally-derived and one-voiced poetry, the assumption is forgivable, for the textual illusion of a speaker's meaning remains hard to resist. Modernist poetry, however, would be utterly betrayed by such a reading, and has been rendered absurd by many such. The clue to the continuity in modernism from theology to literature may be found in a substantial book from 1925, The Famous New York Fundamentalist-Modernist Debates. The significant antithesis of modernism is not Classicism or Romanticism or Georgianism, but fundamentalism. For what must characterize modernism is a freedom from hermeneutic pieties, from the supposed identity or proximity of voice and reason, text and meaning, intention and utterance, language and subject. We know now that any text can bestow those freedoms, if read awry and warily resisted. But modernist texts are the ones that disable reading in any other way: the conventional measure of the primacy of Mallarmé remains entirely just. Modernism has become our guide to reading. Reading elsewise is mere escapism: so of course one could while away many hours with Kristin Lavransdottir. Or The Years. There can be no such misreading of The Cantos. Modernist texts may be said to embody something of that fully present irrelevance that we have read so enigmatically italicized. Irrelevant because what is present, the text, makes nothing else present: no mind, no voice, no author, each of which could achieve relevance only as an absence. The critique of logocentric reading — itself reaching back about one hundred years, though not named (or treated as a heresy) until 1967 — is unthinkable without the texts of modernism. Not to read in order to establish meaning, but to read in order to understand the transience and contingency of meaning: that is the newness, and the outrage to classical scholarship, for which philological learning was pointless if not dedicated to the hermeneutic project and the maintenance of tradition. Modernism as a term, across the span of its usages, cannot be understood without awareness of the equally unlikely history of the word fundamentalism. The earliest citation for 'fundamentalism' in the OED is from as late as 1923, and, in accord with those once-famous New York debates, the OED defines fundamentalism as "belief in the literal inerrancy of scripture... opp. liberalism and modernism." Modernism was exclusively a Roman Catholic heresy, though a tendency elsewhere; fundamentalism is an almost exclusively Protestant phenomenon. As Vincent Crapanzano has recently demonstrated in Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the pulpit to the bench (2000), fundamentalism is by no means restricted to religious discourse; it takes [end page 287] what can be termed 'constitutional fundamentalism' to uphold, for example, the right of all citizens to bear arms. Crapanzano's argument is that we are suffering from a massive revival of fundamentalism. Four years on, his book has not dated, nor his case been weakened by events. The neo-literalism of our age might even be in collusion with what passes under the name of the postmodern. To reject the logocentric is to have identified another form of fundamentalism. In this context the call of modernism remains unfulfilled, always to be heeded: not, then, "What was modernism?" but, to cite and adjust some titles of almost one hundred years ago, that we might still pursue the programme of modernism: modernism and what it might yet do for us.
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