Rethinking American modernism

By the middle of the twentieth century, the New Critics had installed in the academy a brand of modernism that must have looked quite strange, even alien to the New Negro Renaissance artists of the teens, twenties, and thirties. It wasn't simply that the New Critics' version of modernism excluded New Negroes entirely, though this was certainly the case. More to the point, what would come to be known as “high modernism” robbed the era of the animating ideas and agendas that largely defined New Negro participation. The American modernism focused on Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, Crane, and “lost generation” fiction (and perhaps a few “minor”figures, often women); or a modernism devoted to epistemological crisis, fragmentation, alienation, and cultural exhaustion was for New Negro artists (and, indeed, a much larger group of American writers) but one dimension of a vibrantly multifaceted, tumultuous, often contradictory cultural moment. Much more than the practice of elites, but rather a “full-fledged historical culture,” the modernism to which New Negroes contributed was a multivalent, often discursive era, capable of expressing unbridled optimism and chronic despair in the same breath. It was a moment that saw World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as both the end and the beginning of modern Western civilization, an era that celebrated democratic renewal, cultural plurality, and potential in mechanization, urbanization, and migration. And yet it was a moment that lamented the death of Christianity, the indeterminacy of language, and the demise of the cohesive self. Put more succinctly, a discussion of the New Negro Renaissance and its relation to American modernism begins not with our received New Critical sense of the era, but with a look at the constellation of ideas, movements, publishing venues, and artistic communities that comprised a heterodox modernism in which New Negroes participated fully.

In the past twenty years, the voluminous work done by scholars of feminism, gender, and sexuality has helped to restructure the field of modernist scholarship. Women writers who had been excluded from canonical consideration have become the subjects of extensive literary study; gay and lesbian networks that had been cursorily overlooked or underread have been revalued as matrices of modernist aesthetic experimentation; recent theoretical elaborations of sexual identity and gender formation have been put to use in new and sometimes startlingly revisionary interpretations of modernist texts. The sources of these new paths of inquiry have been many. Some were groundbreaking works of historical scholarship, like John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's 1988 account of American sexuality, Intimate Matters, or Nancy Cott's 1987 study, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Feminist reconsiderations of canon formation, popular culture, and the sociological force of women's burgeoning entry into public life owe debts to foundational works like Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank (1986), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's three-volume study, No Man's Land (1988-1994), and Ann Ardis's New Women, New Novels (1990). Perhaps one of the most farreaching essays from this period of scholarship, in terms of the wide debates it immediately produced, was Andreas Huyssen's “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other”(1986), which triangulated the relations among mass culture, modernism, and gender with its provocative claim that turn of the century mass culture was “consistently and obsessively”gendered as feminine by a male-dominated high culture.

As far back as the seventeenth century, when Descartes realized that much of the essential work of eyesight, beginning with the inversion and synthesis of the retinal images, is done by the mind, then the basis for the study of visual culture was established. In 1953, however, when Leo Steinberg published “The Eye is a Part of the Mind,” the title was a polemical assertion intended to rebut the influential position of Clement Greenberg, who insisted that “aesthetic judgements are immediate, intuitive, undeliberate, and involuntary.” Since that time, the idea that vision is not an automatic, unvarying process has been a part of important controversies in philosophy, history, aesthetic theory, and literary studies. In their very different ways, scholars such as Richard Rorty, Norman Bryson, and Jonathan Crary have worked to replace a mechanistic, essentially mimetic model of vision with one that is physically, historically, and culturally determined.

The idea that vision is at least affected by culture may have occurred to so many scholars at this time because the culture of their period seemed so predominantly visual. It has been common at various different times over the last century or so to bemoan the fact that society has come to be dominated by images, a lament based on the assumption that images require less thought to process than words. The term visual culture has also come to stand, therefore, for a host of practices including photography, film, television, and the Web, which together sometimes seem to have assembled a purely spectatorial society. In fact, these two different usages reveal a good deal about the term visual culture and the culture that uses it. With the emphasis on the noun, visual culture designates a highly intellectualized scholarly practice based on the idea that vision is itself a physically, historically, and culturally intricate process; with the emphasis on the adjective, the term designates a dumbed-down culture, force fed on spectacle.

Any attempt to link regionalism to American modernism may seem, at first blush, a perverse enterprise. After all, definitions of modernism tend to cast it as nearly the antithesis of regionalism. If regionalist fiction between the 1890s and 1910s typically focused on matters of domesticity in rural localities, modernism was an international movement, encompassing the fine arts as well as literature. In so many of its manifestations, from Cubism in painting to atonality in music and stream-of-conscious narration in fiction, modernism bespeaks a self-conscious difficulty intended to shock the middle class out of its complacency and to create the possibility of fresh perception. The radical formal experiments of modernism often are accompanied by an equally radical politics, from Ezra Pound's open embracing of fascism to the many American authors who were drawn to Communism in the 1930s. Not surprisingly then, modernism is typically associated with urban centers, places where the arts flourish; Vienna, Paris, London, and New York more immediately come to mind when thinking of cutting edge aesthetic and political thought than, say, Red Cloud, Nebraska; Richmond, Virginia; or even Oxford, Mississippi.

The years this volume covers (1890–1939) also create problems for seeking the ground of regionalism and modernism. In an American context, modernism is typically thought to “happen” between World Wars I and II, as writers respond to T. S. Eliot’s diagnosis of the spiritual wasteland of modernity, a world in which all the institutions (the Church, the State, the University) that previously had sustained value seemed for many intellectuals to have failed. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner all specifically engaged The Waste Land so that, even when critical of Eliot, they nevertheless signaled their membership in the club of international modernism. No one would call Eliot (born in St. Louis, Missouri) a Midwestern writer. Nor, for that matter, would Midwestern literature typically claim Hemingway or Fitzgerald, despite their being from, respectively, Oak Park, Illinois, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Approaching the topic of jazz and modernism, one might begin with the emergence of bebop, which was routinely called “modernist” in the 1940s. While the debate about bop replicated aspects of earlier disputes about literary and artistic modernism, the parochial nature of the debate (largely confined to fans, journalists, and record collectors) insulates it from the more compelling issues associated with modernism. An alternative approach to the topic might enumerate encounters with, and opinions about, jazz by recognized modernists. Ezra Pound, for instance, backed George Antheil's concert hall amalgamation of jazz with futurism, even as he disparaged the piano as an agent of jazz (confusing it with ragtime). But most of the modernists had little interest in jazz, and to detect fugitive traces of their encounter with it one would have to scrape deep recesses of the biographical barrel (and, in most cases, the evidence would illustrate a larger pattern of Negrophilia or Negrophobia, adding little to the study of jazz). A third approach, adopted here, is to regard jazz as a conspicuous feature of modernity as it was manifested during and after the Great War. In that capacity, jazz unquestionably informed modernism as intellectual challenge, sensory provocation, and social texture.

Around World War I, because of widespread uncertainty about what it was – a kind of music, an attitude to life, a mannerism, cheap vulgarity, or a spirited emotional impulse – the social career of jazz was launched with opportunities for interested parties on all sides of the issue to hold forth. “The word ‘jazz,’ in its progress toward respectability, has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of war.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous pronouncement has served as the decisive link between jazz and modernism for seventy years. Although it is no longer tenable to associate jazz with anything he meant by the term, nonetheless, he pinpoints the controversy that made jazz appear responsible for upending genteel America with its Gilded Age proprieties.

When did modern poetry begin? Who are among its key figures? What does their work have in common? What are the most compelling accounts of the development of modern poetry that we can offer? Is there good reason to distinguish American poetry from developments in other countries taking place at the same time? At what if any point can we say modernity came to an end to be replaced by different practices in a more recent period? These are among the questions that have both vexed and inspired modern poetry scholars since the 1980s. For our answers to all these questions have changed dramatically over that time.

What is increasingly clear as scholars recover the work of forgotten poets and read more widely in original sources, among them not just books but also newspapers and magazines that regularly published poetry, is that American poetry of roughly the first half of the twentieth century is unexcelled in its richness, inventiveness, and diversity. The variety of poetry written and published in the United States in the last century represents a unique explosion of literary creativity. Its range of forms, styles, and preoccupations are in a fundamental sense uncontainable. They exceed any single story we might try to tell about them. And it is a field that continues to change, not only because poetry long out of print is being made available again and given thoughtful analysis but also because scholars continue to discover important early and mid-twentieth-century poetry that missed being published for various reasons. Our literary past is very much a work still in progress.

Measuring density

The modern city, as astute critic and vast walker of European cities Walter Benjamin noted, seems at once to epitomize and refute Marx's famous description of Capitalism: All that is solid melts into air. A location understood at its roots to be solidly constructed of bricks and mortar, of concrete and steel, it is full of the ephemera of paper handbills flying down a windy alley, discarded trash left on a street corner, myriad faces glimpsed momentarily in the flow of the crowd: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The city as site of modern life is a cliché by now. In America, modernism was always an afterthought. So, in Nineteen Nineteen, when ace pilot, Lieutenant Charley Anderson, returns from the war to New York, he looks up Paul and Eveline Johnson in their Greenwich Village apartment because they are the only people he knows in the city after meeting on a ship crossing over, flirting, and drinking together in the mad joy of armistice. “‘My brother wanted me to go into a Ford agency with him out in the Twin Cities, but how can you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ ‘But New York’s the capital now,’” replies his hostess.

As disconcerting as it may be, C.W. E. Bigsby's observation about the “casual disregard” American drama has suffered is true, perhaps even understated. Indeed, writing just a few years earlier than Bigsby, Susan Harris Smith more pointedly characterized American drama as an “unwanted bastard stepchild,” the most “maligned” and “unjustly neglected” area of American literary studies. She's right. Consider, for example, the paradoxical situation in which well-known critic Harold Bloom found himself in introducing two books on Arthur Miller, whose plays Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), among others, remain central to the American theatrical repertory. In his “Introduction” to a 1987 collection of critical essays on Miller, Bloom identifies what he regards as the “half-dozen crucial American plays”: Death of a Salesman, which he disparages as reading “poorly”; Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1939, first produced, 1947) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1939-1941, first produced, 1956); Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story (1958). This list is striking not only because of its brevity, but because of the implication that no drama prior to the 1940s - the decade in which four of these six plays had their premieres - is “crucial”to the American stage. Bloom wonders aloud how a country that can claim such novelists as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, and poets like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens can “offer us only O'Neill, Miller, and Williams as its strongest playwrights.”

Slightly ahead of his time, Walt Whitman welcomed the new energies of American modernism with his 1876 poem “To a Locomotive in Winter.”In it, he hailed the steam engine as “type of the modern - emblem of motion and power - pulse of the continent.” Only seven years earlier at Promontory Summit, Utah, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads were linked by a golden spike driven into the final tie of the nation's first transcontinental rail network. Dynamic, transformative, and “unpent,” modernism's new social, cultural, and technological economies of scale would rapidly remap space, time, and distance in ways that were heretofore unimaginable. Such accelerating velocities of change would increasingly define the quickened “pulse of the continent.” Soon, American modernism would exceed the parochial limits of nation formation in the global reach of its imagined community. Such was the pace of modernization that by 1880 the steam locomotive would be eclipsed by Thomas Edison's demonstration of the electric train in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Two decades later, Harvard professor Henry Adams would be so awed by the giant electromagnetic dynamos on display at the Great Exposition of 1900 that he would “see only an absolute fiat in electricity” defining the modern age. Reflecting on the major scientific advances of the 1890s such as Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays, Edouard Branly’s and Guglielmo Marconi’s experiments with radio waves, Marie Curie’s detection of radium in pitchblende, Adams “wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo” (381). Extending Whitman’s celebration of the “unpent” forces mobilized in modernism’s newer technologies, Adams’s fascination with the “supersensual world” of fin de siécle science described a modern world outlook defined by “Multiplicity, Diversity, Complexity, Anarchy, Chaos” (455).

On June 15, 1915, a sweltering day in Manhattan, Marcel Duchamp, then twenty-eight, arrived in New York on the SS Rochambeau. “I am not going to New York, I am leaving Paris,” he announced to his American artist-patron Walter Pach. Like a number of other European avant-gardists, Duchamp was escaping the Great War - a war in which both his artist brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, were already serving and in which the latter was to be killed in 1918. Duchamp himself was exempt from military service because of a heart murmur, but the very idea of war struck him as insane: “I must say,” he later told an interviewer, “I admire the attitude of combating invasion with folded arms.”

But it was not only the war that brought Duchamp to America. Increasingly, he had come to dislike the Bohemian “artistic life” of Paris, where scores of artists worked in small suburban studios vying to emulate the great Cubist painters. America, as he told an interviewer in September 1915, was different:

London was a Mecca for modernist writers and visual artists, with its Bloomsbury experiments in aesthetics and lifestyles, its avant-garde exhibitions and arts workshops, its audacious poetry readings, and its fiercely independent small presses and little magazines. But as Hugh Kenner has noted, none of the “masterpieces” of modernist literature (Ulysses, The Waste Land, or the first third of Ezra Pound's Cantos, for instance) were written by English writers. Moreover, the English language and English literature itself had become decentered: Kenner went on to argue that “by midcentury . . . English was the language not only of the Three Provinces but also of several masterpieces best located in a supranational movement called International Modernism.” The literature that he espoused - primarily the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, Marianne Moore, and Samuel Beckett - all, in Kenner's view, belonged to this “supranational movement.” Indeed, modernism has often been conceptualized as a stridently international phenomenon across art and literature.

But if we accept such a vision of modernism as international, what could the phrase “American modernism” possibly mean? Does it refer to a specific subset of international modernism (that is, work produced by American modernists), or to a different kind of writing altogether? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American writers (modernist or not) were grappling with the “American-ness” of their own writing, seeking to understand what could define their literature as a national literature and not simply as a provincial footnote to English literature. American literary nationalism proved a powerful cultural force even as modernists began to engage with international avant-gardism. The national (or international) identity of modernism was by no means as lucid then as later scholarly assessments, including Kenner’s, might suggest.

Introduction

There is no need for us to quarrel with Alfred Kazin when he writes in the introduction to On Native Grounds (1942) that modern American fiction is “at bottom only the expression”of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. No one cause or project can be singled out as the defining feature of this diverse body of writing. “Everything,” says Kazin, “contributed to its formation.” Its roots were “nothing less than the transformation of our society in the great seminal years after the War” and its project was ultimately a cognitive one: “the need to learn what the reality of life was in our modern era.”

The social transformation in question has been characterized in many different ways, both before and since Kazin’s day. The historian Warren Susman saw the period as marking a transition from a producer-capitalist culture (with a focus on work, thrift, and self-denial) to a new culture of abundance (with a focus on leisure, spending, and self-fulfillment). This broad shift, he observed, was partly the consequence of new communications media, which affected not only the distribution and circulation of goods and ideas, but altered perceptions of time and place and thereby changed consciousness itself. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose U. S. A. trilogy (1938) is a veritable archive of the technological, political, and linguistic changes that shaped the nation from the turn of the century to the Great Depression, saw these years in terms of the “crystallization” of monopoly capitalism out of an earlier, more individualistic competitive capitalism.

If by “modern American literary criticism ” we mean the evaluative and theoretical discourse most closely related to the high modernist literature of the United States, we would need, in this kind of survey, to focus mainly on statements by that literature's makers. Undoubtedly, the most illuminating criticism of modernism is to be found in polemics such as Pound's Imagist manifesto, Hughes's delineation of the racial mountain, and Stein's lectures in America, as well as the poetry, prose writing, and plays that - just as a longstanding commonplace holds - execute the most potent criticism of all in their formal ruptures, their surprising modes of being, their nervy materializations of the unexpected. The writers in question tried hard to outdistance assimilation by criticism as such, and for the most part they succeeded: although their experimentalism was noted at once, it was only around midcentury that modernism as we now think of it began to be written about as a coherent formation. And this recognition, as we will see, was inseparable from a sense that what had rendered modernism visible was nothing other than its recent death.

We might, however, construe “modern American literary criticism” in a different way: as the discourse produced in this period by writers who regarded themselves principally or significantly as critics. This discourse had much to say about the literature of its own moment, but it was at least as concerned with the Elizabethans as with the moderns, at least as apt to dwell on Dryden or Poe as to take up Frost or Cather. Moreover, this discourse failed to take most of the makers of literary modernism especially seriously as critics, however vigorous or groundbreaking their polemics. Why, then, should a reader interested primarily in American modernism bother with this body of writing?

Sex and Gender in the Age of Justinian

Sex and gender are not the same. Sex is biologically determined: except in extremely unusual circumstances, humans are born male or female. Gender is historically determined and relies on social practices that change across time and geographical location: codes of behavior that are culturally specific teach women and men to act in ways “appropriate” to their sex. That is why it is sometimes said that a woman is “acting like a man” or that a man is “acting like a woman”: they are behaving in ways that are believed, at the time, to be more suitable to the opposite sex. Masculinity and femininity are not, however, universal qualities shared by all cultures but are understood in different ways by different groups, and this understanding changes over time. Procopius - a sixth-century historian closely associated with Justinian and his general Belisarius - provides a good example of how gender roles were understood in the Age of Justinian when, in his History of the Wars, he describes the “manly valor” of Amazon women on the battlefield. In Procopius’s mind, men rather than women were the appropriate warriors: women who fought well must, by definition, exhibit male traits and be described in masculine terms. This gender “transgression” troubled Procopius sufficiently that he took pains to explain it away, arguing that “there never was a race of women endowed with the qualities of men and … human nature did not depart from its established norm.”