Modernism’s challenge

Gabriel Josipovici has a stimulating piece in the November 30 TLS arguing that the modernists pose an enduring challenge to contemporary culture, particularly the contemporary novel.

Modernism, he suggests, began with the French Revolution, when it was declared that “everyone was equal now and everyone, in principle, had equal opportunities. By the time Napoleon was crowned Emperor not only did every soldier feel that he had a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack, every citizen felt that he too might become Emperor.” It soon became apparent that there was room only for one emperor at a time, and “what happened in post-Napoleonic Europe was that educated and ambitious young men found themselves in menial employment as minor civil servants or badly paid tutors to the children of aristocrats when in their hearts of hearts they felt they were Napoleons.” This is the condition of Julien Sorel and Raskolnikov.

This post-Enlightenment mentality put enormous pressure on artists. In Doctor Faustus , Thomas Mann’s character discuss the fact that Haydn wrote a hundred symphonies and Beethoven only nine, “because Haydn did not feel he had to start from scratch. What he had to do was fill a form, a mould.” Modernism is the recognition of these impossible demands placed on the artist, expressed in the often annoying complaint (voiced here by Kafka) that “I can’t write. I haven’t written a single line that I can accept.”

According to Josipovici, the novel had never been able to capture the “double vision” of “man with all his hopes and longings, and the larger vision of a world in which men’s lives are short and of only passing significance.” Epic poets can achieve this because they speak for the community, but the novel cannot since the novel is “narrated by a single individual who speaks for no one but himself or herself.” Modernism is, from this angle, the attempt to capture this double vision in a novelistic form. But many critics, he says, go along their way as if the novel could go on in the way of Defoe or Dickens, ignoring the lessons learned from Kafka, Beckett, and Eliot.