English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory De Man on Modernism, by Jennifer Thompson, UC Irvine Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 Many critics see modernism as either a literary and artistic movement, as a period of literary history, or both. An literary movement, as I'm sure you'll recall, consists of the work and theories of a circle of writers who either collaborate closely or experience similar literary, historical, and theoretical influences. Movements are usually bounded by time or geography. San Francisco's conceptual movement, Italian futurism, Germany's Young Hegelians, and the Yale School of deconstruction are all "movements." A movement typically makes up a part of a larger historical period. This period transcends the lives of individuals, and may be marked off by political and historical events rather than literary ones. For instance, futurism is associated with Italian Fascism and proto-Fascism; the Young Hegelians participated in both German Romanticism and Communism; many critics place conceptual art and Yale-School deconstruction under the heading "postmodern." When considered as an historical period, modernism is thought to have begun after World War I, and to have ended at the conclusion of World War II. Critics typically call the period from 1945 to the present "postmodern." Paul de Man, himself a member of the Yale School, rejects these familiar criteria. In his essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity," he argues that modernism is neither a movement nor a literary historical period: rather, it is a tendency or mode present in all literature. He does provide compelling evidence that "the modern" is hardly new: "[O]ur usage of the word [modernism] goes back to the late fifth century of our era ... there is nothing modern about the concept of modernity" (144). De Man's simplest definition of modernity is as follows: "Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. This combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with action that is also a new origin reaches the full power of the idea of modernity" (148). Here, de Man follows Friedrich Nietzche's notion of "life" from "Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life," the second of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations. The impulse to wipe out--or at least transcend--earlier work is fairly clear. Each writer or artist must somehow come to terms with the past. Thus the Romantics mocked the Neoclassical writers, and the Victorians slandered the Romantics. We moderns, in turn, despise what we think of as the prudishness and social conservatism of the Victorians. The second part of de Man's formulation is less clear. Essentially, he argues that to wipe out the past, one must dismantle it piece by piece. Ironically, this requires intimate knowledge of history. Here, de Man quotes Nietzsche: "History itself must resolve the problem of history, historical knowledge must turn its weapon against itself--this ... is the imperative of the ‘new times,' if they are to achieve something truly new, powerful, life-giving, and original" (de Man 150). To reject history, one must understand it; to understand history, one must critique it rigorously; any critique assumes detailed historical knowledge. The modernist is hardly a cheery ignoramus, then--or even a nihilistic one. She must know history and resolutely turn it against itself, and against the remnants of the past within herself. Or, in de Man's words, "the rejection of the past is not so much an act of forgetting as an act of critical judgement directed against [the self]" (149). This critical self-judgement is the essence of literary language because each generation's need to dissect and slice away the past actually produces literature. Without this longing for a "true present" stripped of the past, there would be no reason to write new literature. We could sit back and savor Homer and Milton without any impulse to contribute something new. If de Man is right, what do his ideas mean for Happy Days, and for the other plays we've studied this quarter? 1. So-called "high modernist" work--Happy Days and Artaud's The Theater and Its Double, for example--is no more or less "modern" than Shakespeare; 2. Though literature always strives to do and say new things, it remains tied to the past, and those ties should be apparent to the reader; 3. Common criteria for modernism--M.H. Abrams', for instance--cause misreading and historical inaccuracies. In fact, if accept de Man's argument, any attempt to carve up literature into periods must seem misguided. In de Man's terms, Homer and Aeschylus are no more "classical" than Artaud and Beckett are "modern." Artaud on the Modern: From "No More Masterpieces" "Written poetry has value for one single moment, and should then be destroyed. Let the dead poets make room for the living ... the time for masterpieces is past" (qtd in de Man 147-8, his translation). "Let us ... recognize that ... an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another, and that the theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice" (Artaud 75). "If Shakespeare and all this imitators have gradually insinuated the idea of art for art's sake, with art on one side and life on the other, we can rest on this feeble and lazy idea only as long as the life outside endures. But there are too many signs that everything that used to sustain our lives no longer does so, that we are all mad, desperate, and sick. And I call for us to react" (Artaud 77). John Baldessari on the Function of Representational Art: From Canvasses
Painted 1967-8
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