Lecture 2:
Modern Times, Modernist Responses
Henry Adams in the Gallery of the Machines at the Paris Exposition of 1900, looking at the great electrical dynamos and
imagining "his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new," symbolizes the dawn of American
modernism. The term was widely used among German artistic and philosophical circles of the 1890s. Its currency spread
rapidly, especially among the great urban centers of Europe-Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Paris, London--where the pressures of
modernization were most intensely felt. By the first decade of the twentieth century it had wide currency in New York
intellectual circles as well.
Unlike terms such as "neoclassicism" or "realism," the word "modernism" does not refer to distinct stylistic signatures
of artwork during a particular period. Rather, as Adams's remark suggests, the term marks the sense of an absolute break
with the past. A sense of radical change, in other words, but change so accelerated, so exponential in its revisionist
potentials, as to have made "the new," "the modern," into the only certainty in an otherwise utterly uncertain condition.
Rather than the replication or variation of a period style, modernism depends on constant innovation, a sense of continual
challenge to the accepted criteria and conventions for making and understanding art. In modernism, the only absolute criterion
is to "make it new"; as poet Wallace Stevens put it, "the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."
Historians generally see modernism as the consequence of a society transformed by industrialism and technological change,
from the mid-nineteenth century on. Yet this affiliation, of socioeconomic modernization with aesthetic modernism, needs to be
re-examined. In the first place, there is no question that the pace of technological change relates to calls for radical
innovation in the arts. When Henry Adams, for example, examines the acceleration of acceleration itself, through the
progressively greater speeds achievable with the steam engine, the gasoline engine, then the electrical engine, and finally
the use of x-rays traveling at light-speeds, he then draws from this progression a lesson about cultural change, about radical
innovation in the domain of ideas: his "historical neck" is broken.
In the second place, however, there is a counter-tendency in modernization that seldom attracts comment: it is the move in
modern times towards standardization and stability. Modern economy and industry depended, after all, on the
simplification and standardization of objects and processes. Everything from the sizes of pipes and bolts, to consumer goods
such as shirts and shoes, as well as the measurement and management of time and work on assembly lines, had to be regularized
and standardized. In this sense, one of the earliest signs of the dawning modern age was the standardization of the time
zones by Congress in 1883. During the 10 or 15 years following, the sizing of clothes was standardized for off-the-rack sales,
and mechanical standards were promulgated for the first time by craftsmen such as plumbers and pipe-fitters.
Modern manufacturing and consumer interests both depended on such developments. Beyond the standardization of things,
however, we should also remark on their general stability. To illustrate, consider for a moment the Revere Ware saucepan
that likely as not sits among your pots and pans at home. The design, in 1938, was by one of the famous industrial designers of
the mid-twentieth century, W. A. Weldon. His strategy, like that of all moderns, was to let "form follow function," and the
result was a design elegantly simplified in its general principles: spun stainless steel pan and lid, copper-clad for the even
distribution of heat, with two bakelite handles (one on the lid, another on the handle), each attached by stainless steel rivets.
This design remains essentially unchanged in over fifty years of production. Yet this tendency towards stability is constant,
across the range of products. Consider the typewriter, for example, which except for changes in its outer shell or "fairing"
after the 1880s went virtually unchanged until it was electrified in the 1960s, then outmoded by desk-top computers in the
1980s; or the household refrigerator, another Weldon design of the early-1930s, since then basically unchanged in its outward
appearance except for the addition of ice-dispensers in the doors. Even the current movement towards automobiles with
tortoise-like forms, with their low coefficient of air resistance, can be traced to designs put on paper in the late-1920s in
the wake of wind-tunnel research carried out earlier that decade. Form follows function: this design principle meant that
once applied science could determine the formal features that best enable a product to perform its function, the design itself
had achieved a certain stability which, except for minor stylistic flourishes, might go unchanged.
This is not to deny how modernization is driven by the dissemination of new products. It is merely a way of observing that
the scientific design of products tended to standardize and stabilize the material culture of modernity. The ordinary domestic
culture of Americans in this century is, on one view of it, driven by rapid innovation, but also is, on another view, an
experience of standardization, of sameness.
What then were some of the artistic consequences of these two different tendencies of modernization? One way of telling the
story of modernist art has been to organize it as the narrative of "movements." Innovative, avant garde movements like Futurism,
Vorticism, Imagism, Dadaism, Surrealism and others too numerous or quirky in their aesthetics to mention here all emerged
rapidly during the decades we are studying; these movements jostled one another for position on the artistic stage (or market),
then just as quickly faded. A comparison of these movements to commercial products that come, and go, is irresistible; it would
imply the ways that modernist art was similar to, or complicit with, technological and market forces of modernization. In this
story of modernism we would emphasize its commitment to radical change. We would note that American literature was often
involved in such movements. At one time or another such different modernist writers as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and
William Faulkner were either regarded as leaders of, or at least interested in, some of the movements mentioned above.
Another way of telling the story of American modernist art would be to observe it in reaction against the drive towards
modernization. No longer complicit with technological and market forces, modernism in this narrative would be notable for its
resistance to the standardization of work processes and material culture objects. This too is a commonplace story about
modernism. In it, the modernist painter or writer is seen in reaction against the alienation of the worker, in factory
environments, as well as against the frustration of consumers who increasingly move in a world of boringly similar goods and
entertainment. Edward Hopper's depictions of washed-out, bored, alienated Americans at automated restaurants and lunch
counters, in paintings like "Automat" (1927) and "Nighthawks" (1942), are one with T.S. Eliot's similar depictions of modern
alienation in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) or Arthur Miller's character Willy Loman amidst his cars and
refrigerators in Death of a Salesman (1949). Other American artists react against modernization by becoming more openly
anti-modern. Robert Frost's interest in rural environments and in agrarian manual labor-in which the worker has intimate
contact with both the tools and the products of his or her work-are typical of this strain of modernist writing.
Still another way of telling the story of modernism is to see the arts adapting for their own purposes the principal of
"form follows function." In this way, just as the technological design of everything from saucepans to skyscrapers depended on
formal simplification, for instance in the elimination of all unnecessary ornament and filigree, so too does modern painting or
poetry or novel-writing develop along the same lines: of formal simplification, the elimination of unneeded ornamental stuff,
the retention only of those aesthetic elements that enable the work to function, as poem or painting. In many ways this is one
of the most engaging ways of approaching modernist art, for this is where artistic technique intersects with the stuff of the
art itself. Take painting for example: it happens in two-dimensional space, with pigment, applied to canvas with brushes and
knives. Since the Renaissance painters had been striving for the illusion of three-dimensional space on canvas, but modernist
painting rejects those conventions, emphasizing instead what painting is: color and line, pigment and texture. Painting no
longer has to represent visual reality, rather it presents images composed of the basic elements of painting itself, summarized
above. The result: the abstract images, sometimes only colored blocks or lines, typical of high modernism.
What about poetry? Reading the poetry of Robert Frost you'll notice that he typically uses the poem to tell a story: even
his shorter lyrics tend to rely upon a narrative sequence with definable beginnings, middles, and ends; his longer poems are
full-bore narrative or dramatic depictions, with characters, settings, and plots. Frost's traditionalism, his anti-modern
strain, is again evident in these techniques. By contrast the poetry of T.S. Eliot seems to ask, and answer, the more radical
question: What is poetry? (Or, similarly, what does poetry do?) Eliot's answer, like that of many other modernists,
is that poetry need not tell stories, it is not narrative: the work of storytelling can be left to novelists and dramatists.
The function of poetry, in contrast, is to invoke sensory images (as of smell, sound, sight) by means of words; and a poem,
in this modernist definition, becomes the formal orchestration of images. Again, form follows function. In large measure this
principle is what organizes poems like "The Waste Land." Still more radical is a definition of poetry as--simply--words, placed
dynamically in lines that may be voiced, just as painting is pigment applied by various means to canvas. The poetry of Wallace
Stevens illustrates this tendency in its radical play with words, in strikingly unexpected combinations: read, for example,
"The Emperor of Ice Cream."
The American modernist novel illustrates similar processes of innovation. Building from Henry James's realization of the
potentials for storytelling in the manipulation of point-of-view, already apparent in an early James novel like Daisy
Miller, the novelist will begin to understand fiction as a presentation of the mind in thought. The "stream-of-consciousness"
narrative technique, for example in Irish novelist James Joyce's, Ulysses (1922), has a profound effect on American
writers such as John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. Faulkner's 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying, thus presents us with 18
different narrative voices and viewpoints, orchestrated in 59 separate sections, all providing different perspectives on a
single event-sequence.
American modernist writers as different as Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner had inherited a cultural
tradition that both empowered and constrained their work in significant ways. Looking back to Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Walt Whitman, they could see themselves as inheritors of a legacy stressing the capacity of individuals to invent
and define themselves through their own inner resources, thus to create their own vision of the good life beyond the demands of
family, community, or history. In the days of Emerson and Whitman, American civilization was beginning to be dominated by those
who stressed money and profit, democratically available to anyone in a new, industrially produced society. Taking command of
an American empire that stretched from ocean to ocean, and authorized to take command of it by the doctrine of democratic
equality, citizens in the United States were promised untold opportunities for the acquisition of wealth and leisure. But in
our readings for the first half of this course we have already seen writers expressing a sense of uncertainty about these
promises. Wealth and leisure weren't always equally apportioned. The rise of privileged elites, and the establishment of
rigid boundaries hemming in people according to class, gender, or ethic background, were facts of imperial American society to
which nineteenth century American writers had responded,very critically.
American modernist writers inherited this struggle between the acquisitive and the individualistic ideals of our culture.
Often, becoming a heroically self-reliant individual meant that one would proceed along paths just as lonely, and alienating,
as the paths trod by those bent on becoming independently wealthy. Such recognition--that the person of independent wealth and
the person of independent thought are both equally alone, thus deeply cut-off and typically unsatisfied-have already been
apparent to us in The Awakening (1899). Reading Chopin's novel, it's tempting to argue that the differences between
Leonce and Edna Pontellier aren't so great after all, that his pursuit of money, and her pursuit of art, have set them both so
much apart from family and community that her actual, physical death is equaled by his virtual, spiritual death.
In this century the number of writers who have emphasized that the individual is inescapably tied to other people is
relatively small, and on our syllabus Frost and Faulkner are rather unique in this regard. Other writers such as Eliot,
Hemingway, and Miller depict (however critically) the alienated individual as an absolute fact of modern living. In a more
advanced course of study, one would want to explore the ways that these literary depictions of the isolated individual are part
of an industrial culture that needed such people in order to maximize its productivity. In such an approach we would be
analyzing a most uneasy alliance between industrial modernity, and modernist art. We would have to examine the ways that the
writers' oft-expressed sense of modernity as a post-heroic age functioned more or less in the service of modernization.
(After all, factories need steady laborers, not heroically rebellious individuals.) But such a course of study would take us
well beyond the goals of our survey in this course.
Here, in summarizing the main themes we shall want to explore in the readings that follow, the following will set our agenda:
- modernism as an aesthetic program emphasizing innovation, "the new";
- but modernism, also, as a reaction against the standardization of modern work and material culture;
- modernism as an aesthetic emphasizing the same "form follows function" principles used in industry;
- but modernism, also, as a complex response to the alienated individual, lacking the solidarity of family
and community, created by modernization.
These themes will be played out in all of the readings that we now take up.
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