The paradox of modernism

• Robert Hughes twists himself into knots talking about modernism in The Guardian.

My first introduction to the concept of modernism came in a 10^th-grade social studies class, when the teacher cracked open a phone book in the middle of a description of Dadaism and started reading names at random; some in a dark, serious timbre, and others in a comic, singsong lilt. The idea appealed to me because it treated the rules -- such as they were -- as eminently flexible, if not altogether disposable.

Hughes’ piece is focused primarily on the influence of modernism on painting and sculpture, and bolsters the connection by linking the Industrial Revolution to the explosion of radical design work. Makes sense to me; what is most commonly referred to as “modernist” literature includes writers like Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, et al, all contemporaries of the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, and all of whom likely felt their work was a reaction against the threat of absolute technological perfection. (Thank you, Robert Hughes, for pointing that out to me. I read that and I was all like, duh.)

But here’s the most interesting part:

Either we throw out the vestiges of culture, all of them, dream romantic dreams of blank slates, reject everything that makes claim to humane and rational discourse, all that our parents called "adult", and call ourselves dadaists. The name "dada" parodied a child's first utterance; it was meant to symbolise the act of beginning again from nothing, having rejected the past in all its weighty totality - a cultural impossibility, but at least a challenge for disoriented self-made radicals in 1917.

Or we put our bets on transferring fantasies about the future back into the present, make enormously inflated claims about a technological millennium that hasn't arrived and isn't likely to appear just yet, and call ourselves futurists, a rhetorical stratagem that works best among the whimsical and operatic Italians.

Or else, we say that Europe, dire as its condition is, can actually be improved. So we must invent a new environment of buildings, cities, images and tools, whose end will be to create new societies of men and women. This engineering will get a name: modernism. It will be buoyed up by an immense and irrational hope shared, as cultural movements tend to be, by a small number of like-minded people who only have the haziest notion of, and generally rather despise, what the majorities around them want.

The appeal of modernistic techniques -- and remember, the exact definition of “modernism” is as fluid as language itself -- to those that embrace it is because it is so very different than anything else out there. But you can be packed to the eyeballs with all the artistic innovation the world has ever known and still get scuttled by the one thing that always gets in the way: the fear of the unknown that is inherent in every single person on this planet. Where some people fly from the unknown, others run straight into it, but there are never enough to turn the tide.

The hopeful rhetoric of modernism was always way, way out in front of its actual products. Modernists were always hoping that big business, big planning, big government would latch on to their designs and make them generally available to people (preferably workers) who would recognise their benefits and gratefully use them. Alas, it didn't happen that way. There was not enough demand for "radical" designs of common household things, let alone buildings or whole suburbs, to attract anything like a mass market... What ordinary people wanted was culture they could relax into - the middle-class comfort of the upholstered armchair, not the bracing, challenging austerities of chrome tubes and leather thongs... At the root, there was always something penitential about modernism, with its stern abjuration of the world's sensuous pleasures in the interest of higher ones. You were never left in any doubt that the monk's cell was a better place to be than the capitalist's study, let alone his wife's boudoir.

A pungent point; there is indeed something suffocating about experimental work of any kind, in its strict eschewing of normal guideposts, which is why people throw up their hands at movies from David Lynch or Guy Maddin, or shake their heads at a painting by Man Ray or Jackson Pollock and turn away. The great paradox of innovation is that a truly ingenious, revolutionary idea is rarely recognized as such when it first makes it out into the open. Some seeds take generations to bear fruit. But that shouldn’t stop anyone from trying to sow them.

Knocking on the fourth wall (quietly, so no one hears)

Notes on modernism

People are drawn to art because it provides something calming, taming. Regardless of how your emotions are flamed, you still give yourselves over to the experience. You surrender something of yourself to the whim of the storyteller and his lyre; passivity is what you give in exchange for transcendence. It’s a tonic; like any other, you can get drunk on it, addicted to it.

So when someone taps on the fourth wall -- that no-fly-zone where artists aren’t supposed to travel -- it’s no surprise when the alarm is sounded. The furor isn’t over content but the delivery of it. Modernism in art has become the equivalent of getting handed a grenade, inside of which are the keys to the kingdom. Yeah, you can get ‘em out, but why the hell would you want to?

The basic disconnect is between writing and storytelling. We grow up with stories ringing in our ears, the lessons of Aesop and Grimm and the Bible attempting to shape our lives and experiences with morality and sense and decency. Storytelling is another name for the great tradition of oral histories, the passing-down of intricate, interconnected tales via the music of words and the quicksand of memory. But the vessel that brings us these stories is never questioned; what matters is only what they say, and not how they say it.

Then along come these upstarts. Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne, all the way down the line to Joyce, Faulkner, Pynchon and Barth. Whatever the purpose, one thing is clear: the story and characters may or may not be there, but the writer sure is, and he's the real star of the show. Other writers might chafe at this, but the best way to go about it is to write what you know, and whom else do you know better but yourself? Sometimes writers will go all the way and make themselves major characters in their own stories. Barth did it with Coming Soon!!!; Roth did it with Operation Shylock; even Stephen King does it in the later installments of his Dark Tower series. Is it experimental playfulness or just egomaniacal pretension? Well, it's probably a bit of both. Once you master the training bike, it's only a matter of time before you're trying to pop a wheelie.

A writer ultimately answers to no one but himself, and those that realize that they don’t sit down to write like Dan Brown or Tom Clancy but to get at something else altogether drive themselves crazy (and everyone else around them). The path to progress is strewn with the bodies of a bunch of writers who’d have done a lot better putting pencil to paper instead of their own throats. Stories are complete, tangible. They begin and end. They’re stepping stones -- they’re terrestrial. Storytellers build them for us. Ideas, however, aren’t so compliant. They're pliant, liquid, untouchable. If they’re your stock in trade, you’ll probably end up in a rubber room, because they're also like cockroaches -- they’re impossible to kill, and they breed quickly. You go crazy just trying to keep up.

Modernism is exhausting, to be sure. Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel is an enormous, bratty, tiresome novel that revels deliciously in the fact that it has no real story to tell, and has only the ammunition of outrage to offer. Reading it in one sitting is much like having teeth pulled. Yet you step away from it and are able to see its inventiveness of structure, playfulness of language, and sheer narrative bravado that you can’t believe it isn’t required reading in first grade. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is basically one long joke on the reader, and as such, it’s a howl, just as experimental and wildly imaginative as Gargantua, but Sterne is just as exasperating at times as Rabelais, and not quite as willing to shock and provoke. Yet the book's exuberance is infectious and, like the madman that banged his head against the wall because it felt so good when he stopped, you can’t put it down for very long.

And the whole modernist bent -- a form that flouts form -- sticks around, and always finds places to take root. Animators at Warner Brothers took many cues from surrealist and Dadaist art of the time period and filled the classic Looney Tunes cartoon shorts with stylistic and narrative devices that never let the viewer forget they were watching a cartoon. Monty Python’s entire reputation is built on their willingness to peel back the curtains, point and laugh. And writers themselves are always doing the same, even though many profess to abhor revealing the tricks of the trade. So many writers have written about writing over the years -- introductions, forewords, afterwords, notes to the reader, essays, whole books -- that it’s almost become de rigueur to put out the obligatory nonfiction collection of essays on the craft at some point. So much for the magician and his secrets.

If anything, modernism reveals our inmost secrets and most embarrassing frailties, which is why it’s never received with adulation. It’s annoying to keep having the rug yanked out from under you. Your ass starts to hurt after a while. But that’s the thing about pain -- it lets you know the engine's still working, that you still can feel.