This is so brilliant because it is at the same time an acute assessment of how England relates to Europe, a sending up of what ‘Europe’ in this equation stands for, and a covert thumbs up to traditional English ways. For who, reading this, would not opt for customs rather than history, for Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson rather than mad mullahs and pogroms? But is that really the choice? You cannot escape from history with a few comic phrases. As historians, not all Marxist, have been pointing out for rather a long time now, naturally Britain has had a history, but it has preferred to ignore that history. Perhaps the best one can say is that it has had the luxury of not having that history thrust upon it as most of the European nations have.
So many English novelists today confess to wanting to write like Dickens that it might be thought that the difference between England and France and Germany is that we have no great model to look back to, who might give us an understanding of what it might mean to have a European sensibility, that is, to be as English as they come and yet have a real historical awareness. But there is one, as I have suggested: Wordsworth. Unfortunately within English culture he has been consistently misrepresented as either a bucolic poet or a political reactionary. This is a travesty. He occupies the same place in English literary history as, say, Hölderlin and Baudelaire occupy in German and French: someone with all the powers of the Romantic poet at his fingertips but aware of the deep paradoxes of his calling in an age when art itself is in question. Wordsworth, James, Eliot and Virginia Woolf all flourished on these shores. We need to go back and try to understand what they were up to as writers, not dismiss them as reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.
14. Stories Of Modernism
Naturally I think the story I have just finished telling is the true one. At the same time I recognise that there are many stories and that there is no such thing as
the
true story, only more or less plausible explanations, stories that take more or less account of the facts. I am aware too that these stories are
sites of contestation
; more is at stake than how we view the past. That is what is wrong with positivist accounts of Modernism, which purport simply to ‘tell the story’, like Peter Gay's
Modernism
These make a show of impartiality but are of course just as partial as any other account.
What I characterised at the start as the prevalent English view, epitomised by Waugh, Larkin and Amis, that Modernism was just a blip in the serene history of the arts, might appear at first sight to be not very different from Gay's position, but it is in fact profoundly different, for it is deeply polemical, even if the polemic is fuelled by anxiety rather than anything else. A slightly more sophisticated version of this is the one espoused by those I have just called, borrowing the term from T.J. Clark, the false friends of Modernism. This sees Modernism, in a very English way, as a Good Thing because it debunks Romanticism and idealism. Modernism, according to this story, is the equivalent of Realism, a view which allows those who espouse it to feel both that they are in the vanguard and that they are upholding essential English values.
The opposite but equally misleading view is the one taken by certain artists in particular, that there is nothing of any interest in the arts before Duchamp. Thus the American artist Joseph Kossuth claims that ‘As far as art is concerned, Van Gogh's paintings aren't worth any more than his palette is’, and that ‘all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually’. Parallel to this is the view of the critic who is only interested in the art of the past to the degree that in it are to be found hints of the Modernism to come, a view that even so intelligent a critic as Barthes at times comes dangerously close to espousing.
Despite such extreme claims as those of Kossuth, the fact remains that it is in the domain of art rather than literature and music that the most interesting and sophisticated explorations of Modernism are to be found, as my quotes from Joseph Koerner, Rosalind Krauss and Thierry de Duve in the course of this book demonstrate. I think this has to do with the fact that literature is too embroiled with the world while music can only properly be discussed by those with the technical know-how; painting, on the other hand, is ‘purer’ than literature, so that one can see more clearly what is at stake in painterly choices, while being, in principle at any rate, accessible for anyone to comment on.
The most powerful exponent of the purist view of Modernism was the New York art critic Clement Greenberg in the middle years of the twentieth century. ‘I identify Modernism’, he wrote,
with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency, that began with … Kant … The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticize the discipline itself — not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.
Thus art is seen as searching for its essence, for that which is only art and nothing else — for all else is frippery, ‘mere’ convention. In this story all art is seen as moving towards abstraction, and then finally to Abstract Expressionism, New York style, as inevitably as history moves towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. The trouble with this is that it is deeply puritanical, and behaves towards the past rather as Mary Douglas accused Protestantism of behaving towards sacred history: it certainly has a vision of history, but it is a thin and selective one. Here, for example, is Greenberg on Mondrian: ‘His pictures … are no longer windows in the wall but islands radiating clarity, harmony and grandeur — passion mastered and cooled, a difficult struggle resolved, unity imposed on diversity. Space outside them is transformed by their presence.’ This says something about Mondrian and helps us look at his pictures. It does so largely by means of a stark contrast between his pictures and all those that preceded them: they were windows let into the wall; his are islands of purity placed on the wall. That, in a way, is beautifully put, and illuminating (it occurs in a moving obituary of the painter). But after a while we start to ask: Are all pictures before Mondrian ‘windows’? And, even if they are, are not the differences between them, between the windows of Leonardo and Rembrandt, say, or those of Vermeer and Cézanne, more important than the fact that they are all ‘windows’, that all of them ask us to look at some form of representation of the world isolated within the frame? Perhaps the answer is no, but Greenberg would have to do a lot more work to persuade us.
Thierry de Duve's book on Duchamp and Modernism, from which I have had occasion to quote, is similarly absolute, though more sophisticated. He brings out well how Duchamp's art as it evolved in the second decade of the twentieth century was aimed at subverting the pretensions of the pioneers of abstraction, especially Kandinsky, as much as the prejudices of the traditionalists. He quotes a lyrical passage from Kandinsky's Reminiscences, which ends: ‘And then comes the imperious brush, conquering [the canvas] gradually first here, then there, employing all its native energy, like a European colonist who with axe, spade, hammer, saw, penetrates the virgin jungle where no human foot has trod, bending it to conform to his will.’ And he comments: