Rodstein - The Concept of Modernism

8/12/2019 Rodstein - The Concept of Modernism

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The Concept of Modernism by Astradur Eysteinsson

Review by: Susan De Sola RodsteinMLN, Vol. 106, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1991), pp. 1082-1085Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904608.

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In his denouncement of Humbert's morals, Alexandrov bypasses thedeeper moral dilemma of reading Lolita: that of the reader's growingsympathy with a child molester. The ethical and moral force of this novelis not a statement about ethics or morals; rather it is the horrifying real-ization of writing's seductive possibilities and an ensuing consciousness ofthe slide into unconsciousness, a critical awareness of an immanent seduc-tion. Just as Humbert is shockingly aware of Lolita's seduction of him inthe hotel room, of his slip beyond the boundaries of fantasy and action, soreaders become uncomfortably sensible of Lolita's seductive powers, thebook's ability to press on the limits of moral categorization.Nabokov's Otherworld thus provides a long-overdue counterbalance toyears of work on Nabokov's ironic style, his metaliterary reflections, hisallusive (and elusive) contexts; and yet the critical polemic so engagesAlexandrov as to build into his project a number of rigid resistances.Alexandrov's book eventually serves best as the opening of a new door inNabokov criticism, an opening that will lead critics to the recognition thatNabokov's aesthetics and ethics are interwoven and that humorous textsmay have serious thematics within them.Nabokov's Otherworldbrings one other unexpected offering; in the lasttwenty pages of the conclusion, the influences of Russian symbolism andAcmeism on Nabokov's aesthetics are carefully mapped out. Six years ago,Alexandrov published an excellent study of Russian symbolism, and thoseinterested in Nabokov's Russian literary context and the impressions madeon the young artist by the works of Bely, Gumilev, and Evreinov will findAlexandrov's established expertise on these authors well-demonstrated inhis subtle depictions of aesthetic conjuctions in the Silver Age of Russianculture.

TheJohns Hopkins University CHRISTY L. BURNS

Astradur Eysteinsson, The Conceptof ModernismIthaca & London: Cornell U.P., 1990. x + 265 pages.Astradur Eysteinsson approaches modernism as neither a broad culturalcategory nor a canon of representative works but as a concept shaped,indeed created, by critical and theoretical forces. In The Concept of Mod-ernism he analyzes dozens of formulations of the modern, ranging fromthe theories of Adorno, Brecht, Shlovsky, Wellek, Greenberg, and Gilbertand Gubar to the novels of Kafka and Musil and the sound poems of HugoBall-to name just a few of his foci.Such a study-classificatory criticism on a grand scale-faces nearly in-surmountable obstacles of generality and abstraction. The only point ofloose consensus that Eysteinsson allows is the notion that modernism is a

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concept broadly signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginningin the mid and late nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary andaesthetic traditions of the Western world reaching-the crucial words-an explosive climax in the first three decades of the twentieth century.This momentous shift, he argues, cannot be precisely located in literature,consciousness, everyday life, or historical phenomena. He rejects reflec-tion theories on the grounds that they reduce modernism to a simplifiedreverberation of social modernity and, more controversially, becausemost of us do not experience modernity as a mode of disruption, howevermany disruptive historical events we may be aware of. Modernism israther an attempt to interrupt breaking communicative contracts, blow-ing open the social strata of false normativity ) the modernity most of uslive and experience as normal. In Eysteinsson's model, literary history-aterm he never quite defines but which for him designates the inevitablelocus of any theorization of the modern-mediates modernism's relationto (and substitutes for) history in the broader sense, while literary tra-dition (chiefly the norms of nineteenth century realism) encodes the falsenormativity through which we process social modernity. The theoretical(i.e. literary historical) construction itself of the modernist paradigm isthus both a historical event and a radicalizing, disruptive tool.

Eysteinsson's metaphors of shattering, disruption, and explosion (rem-iniscent of Morris Peckham's rage for chaos ) are of course a sustainedchallenge to the autonomy, organic unity, ambiguity, and anorgasmic un-resolved tensions the New Critical paradigm persistently associated withmodernism. Although he emphasizes the crises of representation and ofthe disunified subject as defining components of a modernist paradigm,Eysteinsson is at pains to reject post-structuralism as a theoretical modelfor modernism. Post-structuralism's ubiquitous (and therefore ameliora-tive) detection and celebration of these crises differs from modernism's (inhis view) more selective and self-conscious practice. Although he findsmore productive models in Russian formalist defamiliarization and Ador-no's theory of negative mimesis, his arguments are nevertheless saturatedwith post-structural assumptions. His argument that post-structural theoryissues from modernist literary practice (which has, he asserts, taught us toread this way) risks a simplifying teleology for modernism the end ofwhich is chiefly to dismantle the critic's idea of what literature is andmeans.

Eysteinsson's concept of the modern seeks definition within the contextof differential readings of post-modernism, the avant-garde, and realism.In formulations of the post-modern, he identifies a frequent desire to posita strong break with modernism with insufficient historical or analyticalinquiry into the mutation. Most problematic are those formulations thatwould re-cast modernism as a conservative aesthetic project against whichthe post-modern appropriates the qualities of disruption, and in which



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modernism takes on the very qualities it had imputed to realism. Eysteins-son's careful examination of the claims of post-modernism (to produceuncertainty, to synthesize modernism and realism, to bridge high andpopular culture, to reflect a de-centered world, etc.) leads him to concludethat modernism has already done all of these things more effectively.

Eysteinsson is eager, however, to preserve within modernism the radi-calizing potential of the avant-garde (expressionism, dadaism, surrealism,and futurism) in both its general adjectival meanings and as a historicallycontemporaneous project. Allowing the terms modern and avant-gardeto slide apart would either reduce the avant-garde to a preparatory stagefor modernist achievements or, more threateningly,judge the avant-gardeas the only true revolt. Less thorough than in his treatment of post-modernism, Eysteinsson refuses to analyze the avant-garde's own articu-lations of its aims, rashly dismissing the manifestos as atypical produc-tions-whereas in some instances they were the only productions. He in-sufficiently differentiates the extremity of avant-garde anti-art negationfrom modernism's creative urges; in fact, his concept of the modern isoften indistinguishable from definitions of the avant-garde.Realism, as consolidated in nineteenth century fictional norms, althoughantithetical to modernism, is to be valued on those grounds. The conven-tionality of realism supplies the dialectical opponent against which togauge modernity and the modernist aesthetic of interruption Eysteins-son develops. Yet, this model may make realism too monolithic, given thecomplexities of its conventions and its self-critical variants such as satire(which also defines many strands of modernism).If Eysteinsson finds modernism's strength to lie in its marginal, elitist,oppositional status, and finds little grounds for a distinctive post-modernism that would not vitiate or distort modernism (or for unassimi-lated avant-gardes, or for a realism that has become fully historical), theconsequences of these positions for his own theory of literary history re-main unexplored. The embattled defining

characteristic of modernism-revolt-threatens to lose all historical specificity. The refusal to stabilizemodernism opens the vertiginous possibility of a modernism denied thehistorical mutations that shape other period concepts, reserving a special,on-going status for high modernism even as we depart the twentiethcentury. Eysteinsson's arbitrary origin designated in the mid nineteenthcentury (presumably standing for Baudelaire and Flaubert) is seemingly agesture toward historical coherence, which leaves him in the awkwardposition of invoking TristramShandyand Jacques le Fataliste as examples ofmodernist interruption, only to reject them as too early. Eysteinsson is alsoleft presupposing a model in which we are still at war with the nineteenthcentury-a model which paradoxically (and conservatively) nullifies thevery real and radical departures from that world which modernism bothrepresents and helped to create.



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Although Eysteinsson calls for resistance to the insulation of literature,modernist rupture may be only incidentally and negatively part of histor-ical consciousness. The conflation of literary tradition with communicativeand social norms assumes that all modernisms locate oppression in thesame place (parallel to the we that does not experience modernity as amode of disruption) and neglects the uniquely modernist sense of loss,which often issues less in a desire to rupture than in a desire to salvage andto heal.While Eysteinsson analyzes literary history, he suggests little that wouldunseat conventional, canonical designations. His skeptical analysis of thetheories of periodization and canonicity that place modernism in literary

history yields few surprises: modernism's difficulty serves as ajustificationof the professional academic; women authors are excluded; there is An-glo-American bias; and a small group of superwriters is privileged overthe historical texture of broader literary movements. Despite gestures tohistory, Eysteinsson's model is perhaps itself ahistorical. If, as he acknowl-edges, the majority of literary production in the twentieth century has notbeen recognizably modernist, he nevertheless leaves us to continue mak-ing period designations and canonical inclusions on the basis of cataloguesof perceived, formal characteristics which facilitate the paradigm of rup-ture rather than on the basis of historical particularity and a considerationof the spectrum of literary activity existing at any particular moment.This formulation of modernism neglects the extent to which modernistworks may become conventional, overemphasizes and simplifies the holdof the nineteenth century, and potentially reduces modernism to a nega-tive, contentless practice which works to unsettle wherever it goes (mod-ernism is writerly, a skeptical hermeneutics, a pedagogic project thatfosters a critical attitude )-thus homogenizing wildly and excitingly dif-ferent works; and perhaps constituting the most sweeping formalism ofall. Once modernism is lifted from the process whereby what was oncerevolutionary comes to seem familiar, modernism, properly speaking, isno longer a literary period at all.The view that the modernist revolution is impossible, always deferredor held in abeyance, places Eysteinsson's conceptualizations in the uto-pian strain often identified, by Calinescu and others, as uniquely modern.Yet, if modernism is that which permanently unsettles the academy, it isalso that which invokes its aid and buttresses its traditions; it calls upon thecanon Eysteinsson would have it leave behind. The conceptual history hasyet to be written of modernism's continuities with the past-and of theintensity of the engagement of many moderns with even the immediatepast.TheJohns Hopkins University SUSAN DE SOLA RODSTEIN


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Rodstein - The Concept of Modernism

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