Modernism:

An Exercise in Graduate-Schoolese
in Rebuttal of David Antin

There seems to be a fundamental assumption about the period of art we term modernism--that it was a radical break with what went before. This single observation seems to be a common element in virtually every description of the work done in all the art forms between 1910 and 1945. While on the face of it the paradigmatic shift embodied in modernism may seem to be a radical shift when viewed against the background of essentially traditionalist figures such as the British World War I poets, there are other angles to observe, angles from which modernism (in all its manifestations) is not nearly as radical a redefinition of the artistic landscape as one might think.

David Antin's take on modernism is that it is "definable in terms of a single fundamental axiom." Although the axiom that follows is a singularly broad one, it perforce reduces the range of modernisms. In Antin's scenario, modernism is centrally an act of definition, or more properly redefinition. As Antin puts it, "a radical act of definition or redefinition of the domain of the elements and the operations of the art or of art itself."

Unpacking this statement and some of its implications leads in interesting directions. As Antin proceeds to define it, to (re)define the domain is essentially an act of meta-art in the metafictional sense. If the domain is merely a move from the theme-based to the form-based, or only to the multivalenced world of collage, then the modernist premise not only leaves itself open for numerous ethical questions, but also for challenge on the grounds that this is not a new development in the least. The move to a collage-based art is not in and of itself a "radical" anything; one can see collage elements in Renaissance art and for that matter Hellenistic Greek art. To (re)define operations of art is even less of a break, for it is indeed the constant process of art itself, undeniable and certainly inevitable, not to be channeled by any single label or even by any gross paradigmatic shift such as what we perceive as modernism.

The paradigm shift of which I speak is a gradual one, one in which there are no radical breaks. The truly radical break had taken place over the course of several centuries, and can be termed the rise of empirical thought. Although the various intellectual antecedents to modernism have been endlessly traced before, it it worthwhile to note that one of the central features of the period was what might be termed an increase in relativist thought, which certainly fits Antin's collage theories, according to which Gertrude Stein is the only truly modernist writer. The domain that Antin sees Stein as moving into is one based on form, on an interest in language itself. She performs collage operations on language itself at the level of words in Tender Buttons, at the level of phrases in her portraits. This is a shift in domain--Stein is no longer working the traditional thematically based territory literature is supposed to occupy. Rather, she moves towards an investigation of the formal elements of writing and language itself. This is a manifestation of the relativist paradigm shift in that it abandons the realm of what we might call making sense; in an extreme sense, passages of Tender Buttons are as close as one can come to complete relativism in English. To go any further would be to cease being English. Thematics are no longer a concern, and the focus instead is on the multivalenced nature of the words when juxtaposed, on the way their function as signifiers is subverted, and on the potential for artistic expression that exists in treating the words as music.

In Stein the domain has moved from theme based to form based--certainly, a full manifestation of the paradigm shift. This alteration of the domain is not complete in Stein, for to make it complete words would have to fragment as well, leading to a poetry based on letters alone, or even on letters, words and drawings perhaps all combined (as several contemporary language poets have been demonstrating)--but it is a rather full assimilation of the zeitgeist. Her world is one where there are few operations of art simply because elements are multivalenced to the point of incomprehensibility in normal sense-making structures:

MILK
Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter needles and a guess a whole guess is hanging. Hanging hanging.

However, her building blocks are nonetheless those of language, and like any artistic building block, they provoke emotional reactions at perhaps even the instinctual level. More so than any other artistic element, perhaps, language is apt to channel our perceptions into only a few possibilities. What makes Stein's work so exhilarating is that she manages to break these preconceptions as much as she does. Where she fails to fully move beyond the domain of theme-based work is in her choice of media. A true break with thematically based art would imply a break with language. Stein's collages of words are not capable of breaking the basic organizational principle of language--the serial principle, as opposed to the parallel--and our linear experience of them forces us to create contextual thematics. The words do not arrive discrete enough in our minds. They relate to one another and therefore cannot escape entirely from traditional patterns of "meaning." In the example above, adding a title such as "MILK" immediately contextualizes what follows; the repetition of (or, as she would have it, insistence upon) words such as "hanging" which carry such strong connotative themes further pushes the reader's mind in the direction of a thematically-based poetics, preventing total attention to the new domain the poetry inhabits.

Given this essential premise, all the other writers of the modernist period fall even shorter of the ideal shift of domain and paradigm as Antin envisions it. The artist who most avidly pursued the ever elusive (and arguably unattainable) goal of the death of the significator was Marcel Duchamp; yet even his work cannot be said to effect a complete domain shift. Many people's enjoyment of "found art" is based on political or social narratives imposed upon the artwork--similar weak points can be found throughout his career. However far Duchamp attempted to move from the significator, people were likely to find a thematic meaning in the work.

Perhaps Antin's (re)definition can be extended and expanded in the light of recent understandings of computer-based culture. Where he speaks of a redefinition of domain perhaps we should read 'polyvalence' in the sense that a hypertext offers, or even that an old-fashioned text-based adventure game offers. When he discusses the new framework for the use of elements our focus should be on the delicate balance between authorial control and reader-based text interactions. Finally, the operations of the art would come to signify not formal relationships withn art itself even, but rather the permutations to which the art can be turned. A full freedom is never within reach, but when the goal ceases to be serial expression (and therefore thematically based readings) and moves to the new paradigm of simultaneous multiple interactions (or as Antin describes his pet collages, "bristling with signification") it becomes, to use another computer term, multi-threaded. The human attention cannot be directed towards more than a few at once, and certainly there are countless impositions of perspective which we are often hardly aware of. Where collages attempt to give us a massively parallel view of experience, offering an array of signifiers in supposed simultaneity, a multi-threaded aesthetic would accept the fact that there can be no such thing by our current understandings of physics.

Examples of this can be found everywhere. Given this new paradigm and alternate version of Antin's axiom, the Modernist era can indeed be termed the era of Eliot and Pound. Allusions are merely hypertextual connections in this framework, potential locations for multiple avenues of inquiry. Particularly in Pound, there is no sole channel for text interaction, nor is there the heavy hand of authorial control over us. Pound's use of the extensive culturally derived references in effect releases the reader from what may have been his original intent. This is not collage in the sense that Antin describes it, for collage fundamentally depends on a non-linear absorption of material. If we were discussing in terms of painting, the analogy would be that Antin speaks of Schwitter and Arp, whereas Poundian aesthetics resemble the movement of a Pollock or a Klee, providing multiple potential linear paths through a given work of art. The Cantos are constructed along these lines unintentionally perhaps--but given the serial nature of language it cannot but be so. The place where Pound moves beyond Stein in providing for relativism is precisely in his obsessive cataloguing of human culture. Take this passage from Canto lxxiv:

Time is not, Time is evil, beloved
Beloved the hours [snippet of Greek I can't get HTML to display]
    as against the half-light of the window
    with the sea beyond making horizon
le contre-jour the line of the cameo
profile "to carve Achaia"
    a dream passing over the face in the half-light
    Venere, Cytherea "aut Rhodon"
    vento ligure, veni
"beauty is difficult" sd/ Mr Beardsley

A true relativism demands multiple meanings, and where Stein leads is to no meanings in particular. Pound is more sympathetic to a multi-threaded view of art in that his Cantos�must be experienced serially (that is, you must read an individual canto starting at the beginning and moving to the end); the allusions, the Greek, the Italian, the mention of Aubrey Beardsley, all act as collage elements that do not�allow the reader control of the text but rather channel the reader in particular directions, allowing the reader to explore different directions and return to them at leisure. Each is an open door, whereas Stein's words upon words act more as a river. The Poundian view that one must read everything important thus becomes more acceptable, since what he is saying is that a reader must recognize the hypertextual "rooms" that are present in order to read fully. Pound's view also implicitly argues that a densely allusive text such as his own is not required to fully engage in the multivalenced play of signifiers, but that it can be done with any text given a certain awareness and knowledge on the reader's part. Each item may be considered a part of a Great Conversation, and therefore none need represent all the possible meanings or permutations within a given signifier. In the end, Pound's Cantos do something Stein cannot do with her Tender Buttons: provide the connective tissue between texts, making all texts multi-threaded. Pound is not cataloguing Western culture--he is cross-referencing it. The difference is crucial.

Given what I regard as the basic axioms of the paradigm shift (formal domain rather than thematic, and the multivalenced nature of signifiers) it is clear why New Criticism and other ossified schools of literary scholarship focus their attention on feeble substitutes such as 'irony' or even deconstructionism. The object is never to reduce signifiers to nothing, they tell us, and of course the manner that something is said is just as important as what is said.

This is really ignoring the true question that all the attempted modernisms address, which is fundamentally a representational one. What modernists want the art to be is a world, one in which possibilities are expressed. But modernists do not (as later artists would attempt) try to remove all channeling and authorial intent from their small universes of possibility. The endless allusiveness of a Joyce, an Eliot, a Pound, can perhaps be understood as moves in the direction of inclusiveness, an extending of thematic threads into the works of others. It is certainly possible and even appropriate that a work like "The Wasteland" could be schematically defined much in the manner of a map or flowchart--once again putting us in the territory of the computer. A truly hypertextual "Wasteland" would provide the complete text of the poem, plus the complete text of every reference, plus all commentaries, plus anything else even vaguely related.

Yet Eliot's later work does not move in the direction of "The Wasteland." Instead, it assumes what may be considered a traditionalist stance. It is hardly a stretch to psychoanalyze Eliot and declare that he was seeking order in his life, an order provided by Catholicism. Aside from all that, which may well be true, Eliot is expressing the age in his own way, just as they all do. There is no contradiction inherent in any of the actions he might take, for the multi-threaded nature of art as he saw it does not preclude any aesthetic direction. It is important to remember that by Antin's definition, a rupture with what went before is required to keep modernism from stagnating; therefore "what went before" is integral to modernism, and cannot be done away with, for it will be at the very least overwhelmingly present in its absence from "modern" works. "Murder in the Cathedral" or the "Four Quartets" are densely allusive, referring not just to history but to religion and thus to a whole realm of other questions; "Cathedral" in particular is a strongly narrative tale that has traditionally been one with no clear moral or signification. It is no surprise that Eliot moves from "The Wasteland" to "Cathedral" for they are hardly more than a few inches apart. They are works that recognize relativism in the world and refuse to let it have free play, preferring instead to channel it into narratives and binaries.

There are of course entire areas left open for debate here. Discarding theme-based poetics is a questionable enough endeavor; even the falsely radical move towards multivalence raises ethical questions about the role of the artist in society. Antin favors narratives precisely because stories (and the myths which are the archetypical versions of said stories) provide channeled yet polyvalenced entrances into a dialogue. I imagine that Antin, if faced with a story that in itself carried so many meanings that it in effect communicated none, would regard it as a failed experiment.

Yet nobody has suggested that "The Wasteland" fails because it limits itself to only carrying a few potential meanings. Its allusiveness moves it into the realm of the multi-threaded--Pound's collage cuts are nice but not necessary--but also prevent it from becoming sound with no sense.

The basic concept can best be explained by analogy. Think of a house with many rooms, and each room can only be occupied by a few things at a time. As a reader we are allowed to wander from room to room, discovering secret passages that lead magically in unexpected directions. Pound's poetry is a map of passages. Eliot's is a sample of rooms, connected precisely where the author chose. Stein's is snapshots of several rooms, with no connections between them, a collage of blueprints that does not provide paths. You might also describe it as the house, with the walls taken down. It seems like a nice ideal, until you try to walk around in the house that isn't there anymore.

Which raises the specter of social responsibility. Langston Hughes is a perfect example of a modernist poet who knew full well the beauty of sound and sense both. He would never tear down the walls of the house altogether; instead, he tries to build more doors. His tool is the narrative, which has always had that multivalence lurking in it, that ability to make us regard things from another point of view. He is a fundamentally traditionalist poet--in a tradition which is not that of Pound or Eliot. And he refuses categorically to allow complete relativism into the world of his poetry. He channels the reader--forcefully at times, as in his overtly political poems--but cannot be said to retain complete authorial control over the reader. Consider a poem like this one:

Uncle Tom
Within--
The beaten pride.
Without--
The grinning face,
The low, obsequious,
Double bow,
The sly and servile grace
Of one the white folks
Long ago
Taught well
To know his
Place.

Hughes carefully expresses things in binaries; even if by the end of the poem we have forgotten the "beaten pride" that still resides within this man, it is there, and we cannot ignore it. With just the one line, Hughes suggests a whole other way to look at the situation. Similarly, his use of slag can usually be counted upon to provide the same sort of hypertextual allusiveness that Pound or Eliot employ. And of course, his use of the traditional blues forms is in itself a subtext worth exploring. Hughes' oh-so-simple poems turn out not to be simple at all, precisely because they refuse to abandon context.

None of this can seem radical to us. The domain of the elements has not been redefined by these poets, not really. Even Stein simply extends the domain, and performs within the extended domain familiar operations--some are operations she cannot help but perform because of the medium of language. I offer as an alternative set of axioms regarding modernism the following:

That the fundamental act of modernism is not to shift the domain to the formal but rather to establish a context which includes the formal among many other things. That the relativistic climate is expressed more truly by multi-threaded texts rather than form-based text. That the work of Toomer, Williams, Stevens, and all the others can best be understood as attempts to create more connective tissue between their individual rooms in the house of literature. The elements used are traditional, commonplace, heavily thematized, and the operations performed on them are essentially of a communicative nature. The followers of these writers (whether of the school of Stein or Stevens or Pound) who move in the direction of non-thematic poetry are not working the same vein as the modernists, wo were far more concerned with the multiplicity of themes than in getting rid of them. If anything, the essential goal is similar to what Antin described collage as doing, but the formal approach differs, no matter how many common elements the two seem to share: both are concerned with saying many things at once, but modernist writers never thought they were saying it all, and surely never try to say nothing, either by saying it all at once or by studiously avoiding communication. None of them were sure enough of their own significance to wilingly erase themselves from their work, and so their poetry has stood and even developed since they died, for their work is more like a river delta than like a canal or a pond: it flows all in the same direction, along many parallel channels, and we are invited to go from channel to channel, one at a time.

It will be fascinating to see how writing reacts to what is already going on (far more complex than mere hypertext) in the realm of computer game design and virtual reality--modernism cubed is here, and we had yet to come to terms with modernism squared... a new paradigm shift is upon us--but that's another essay and another day.

Modernism:

An Exercise in Graduate-Schoolese in Rebuttal of David Antin

An Exercise in Graduate-Schoolese
in Rebuttal of David Antin