But I realise that this may be largely because of who and what I am. The late R.B. Kitaj compared Cézanne's rootedness in his native Provence to what he called the ‘diasporist’ (horrible term) imagination of the uprooted Picasso, and he suggested that at some deep level Modernism and the diasporist imagination go together. This may be true if we have a flexible enough notion of diaspora to accept that an apparently rooted Frenchman like Bonnard or Englishwoman like Virginia Woolf could also have created a ‘diasporic’ art — and then one would want to look at Bonnard's relocation to the South of France in the latter part of his life as a kind of exile into which he went with his problematic wife, and at Virginia Woolf's sense of herself as a woman excluded from a male-dominated society. To that extent the Marxist critique of Modernism I mentioned at the start may have a point: Modernism may not be a consequence of the crisis of the bourgeoisie but it may be the product of a general European rootlessness in the wake of the French and Industrial revolutions. All will then depend on whether we see such rootlessness as pathological or as giving those who are imbued with it a certain vantage point, allowing them to see things which might otherwise have remained hidden. In other words, are we to see our own history, that which makes us what we are, as something which blinkers us or which sharpens our vision? This is, in itself, of course, a very Modernist question.
NOTES
page 1, ‘I feel I'm …’ Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin, Gallimard, Paris, 1965, vol. I, 1862–71, pp.150–1.
‘My condition is this …’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter, tr. and with a preface by Michael Hofmann, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1995, p.9.
page 2, ‘Everything fell into pieces …’ ibid., p.11.
‘I hoped to cure myself …’ ibid., pp.11–12.
‘For it is something …’ ibid., pp.12–13.
page 3, ‘I lead a life …’ ibid., pp.17–20.
‘towards the end …’ The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964, p.62 (3 October 1911).
page 4, ‘I can't write …’ Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, tr. Richard and Clara Winston, John Calder, London, 1978, p.70 (15 December 1910; modified).
‘During last night's insomnia …’ ibid., p.333 (5 July 1922; modified).
‘I speak of an art …’ Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Calder and Boyars, London, 1965, p.103.
page 5, Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, William Heinemann, London, 2007.
page 6, ‘Señor Picasso's painting …’ The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p.214.
‘all these cheerless creeps …’ The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader, HarperCollins, London, 2000, p.295.
page 12, ‘Despite the studiously agnostic …’ Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation and the “disenchantment of the world” revisited’, The Historical Journal, Cambridge, June 2008, p.408.
Eamon Duffy …: see in particular The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 1994.
if not downright lies …: by philosophers from Wittgenstein and Heidegger to Foucault and Derrida, by anthropologists from Lévi-Strauss to Mary Douglas, by critics from Benjamin to Barthes — indeed, there is scarcely a major thinker of the past hundred years who has not had a go at unpicking the Protestant and Humanist myths.
cultural analysts such as Erich Heller …: Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1961; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), English tr., Continuum, New York, 1975; Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), English tr. MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1985; a lone English voice is Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: a study in meaning, London, 1928.
page 13, ‘Trust in the eternal laws …’ G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977, p.455.
the key Romantic concern …: almost every serious writer on the topic has tackled the issue. Among the most illuminating discussions I have come across are two fairly old books, Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1956, and Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, Chatto and Windus, London, 1971.
page 14, Heller even … once …: ‘The Hazard of Modern Poetry’, a series of radio broadcasts printed in The Listener and subsequently reprinted with The Disinherited Mind. The passage is on pp.228–30.
page 15, The idea that there was a middle state …: Diarmaid McCulloch, Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490–1700, Penguin, London, 2004, p.11.
page 17, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, tr. A.D. Lowe-Porter, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, p.466.
page 18, Even Frank Kermode …: The Romantic Image, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957, ch.8.
page 19, ‘I realize that I shall be taken …’ Farewell to an Idea, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 1999, p.409, n.10.
page 22, In his splendid book …: Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton University Press, 1955, p.156.
‘As for geometry …’ ibid., p.171.
‘The lie is in our understanding …’ ibid.
page 23, ‘I was unable to find …’ von Hofmannsthal, op.cit., pp.11–12.
page 26, ‘Why must I think …’ Mann, op.cit., p.143.
page 27, ‘Shall we see …’ Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, tr. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter le Motteux, Oxford University Press, 1934, vol. I, p.98.
page 28, ‘Idle reader …’ Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, tr. Edith Grossman, Secker & Warburg, London, 2004, p.3.
page 29, ‘I picked up my pen …’ ibid., p.4.
page 30, ‘Somewhere in La Mancha …’ ibid., pp.19–20.
page 31, ‘so convinced in his imagination …’ ibid., p.21.