Modernism and Postmodernism

 

These days, being in the arts is generally thought to mean being politically on the left. Despite the fact that some of the biggest names have let slip that they are not really with the program: Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol.

Folks forget that a couple of generations ago, such literary lions as W. B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot or Hermann Hesse were publicly on the political right.

I think this marks the difference between modernism and postmodernism. The modernism of the early 20th century saw Western civilization as in a state of collapse, lamented the fact, and sought with little hope for solutions. The postmodernism of the late 20th and early 21st century sees Western civilization as in a state of collapse, and wants to hasten the process by whatever means necessary.

Eliot or Yeats celebrated the old aristocracy, as a class freed from the tedium of making a living and able to live the aesthetic life. Yeats referred to the need to earn as “this rock” we all live under. Re-reading “The Waste Land,” it is clear Eliot feels contempt for both the working class--Sweeney and Mrs. Porter; and the bourgeoisie--Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant. He mocks popular art, the music hall and the gramophone, contrasting it with the old high art of the landed aristocracy, which he considers superior. Hesse similarly laments the gramophone.

In sum, when Yeats or Eliot mourn the decline of Western civilization, they are thinking of the decline of the old ruling class; Yeats’ “ceremony of innocence.” This is what died in the First World War. They see this as meaning the decline of the culture itself, into crass “bourgeois” values.

The left, in theory, champions the working class, not the old aristocracy; they agree on hating the bourgeoisie. But this looks like a con. The working class has its own traditions and tends to be conservative. Who the left really are is the remnants or wannabe successors of the old privileged class. They react to their own declining fortunes by wanting to pull down the entire culture instead. 

It seems to me the notion that the landed aristocracy has a finer appreciation of the arts is not tenable. Why should it be so? 

No doubt the argument is Plato’s, that they are educated into it. But art is inspiration, and the spirit goes where it wants. How many mute inglorious Miltons, in the words of Grey, does a class system exclude from consideration? Shakespeare was from the petit bourgeoisie. Blake was working class. Given all their free time, the aristocracy has contributed surprisingly little to the arts, other than appreciation.

This preference for the upper classes in the judgement of art also violates the teaching of the Bible. That ought to matter to Christians. In the Beatitudes, Jesus calls specifically to the “little ones,” to the poor, the meek, and the oppressed, to “let their light shine,” to be “the salt of the earth,” to express themselves through the arts.

 Moreover, they are those who will understand the arts: “those who have ears to hear.”

With Andy Warhol, I find greatest beauty in the folk arts, in popular art, and in commercial art. Most recently, in comic books, in folk music, in rock and roll, in some film and TV. Yes, most of it is junk. Most of everything is junk. Great art of the past is just that 5% that was good enough to survive. But much of the current sense that art is moribund is due to looking in the wrong places, at the galleries and concert halls and academies. 

There are good cultural and technological reasons for the decline of the old ruling class. What that really was all about was the rise of the lower classes, to greater prosperity, more leisure time, better communication, better access to information, to the arts. The upper class is increasingly superfluous.

We should see as a result a great blossoming of the arts. What we see now is the academy and the old mainstream in a rearguard effort to suppress this great blossoming.

That bloom may come soon.

The Waste Land

Dali, "The Persistence of Memory"

Western civilization has never recovered from World War I. It has PTSD and has been trying to commit suicide ever since.

We saw Yeats’ prophecy of this in “The Second Coming,” first published in 1920. But there was another great poem published just two years later, in 1922: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Many consider it the first great trumpet blast of Modernism. Which is to say, the general nervous breakdown of the arts in the West.

Yep.

It was written by Eliot when he was himself suffering from what we now would call depression: "nervous exhaustion," they called it then. The poem is a profoundly accurate depiction of the experience of depression. If we really want to understand depression, we ought to be studying it carefully. It is hard to see spiritual things. We need someone with Eliot's talent to show them to us clearly.

Thomas Stearns Eliot. "T.S." to you.

The most notable aspect of the poem, of course , is that it is all frustratingly incoherent. That is the point; that is the essence of depression. There is no protagonist, no consistent sense of self: "depersonalization," the shrinks call it. Instead, a seemingly random parade of narrators take up seemingly random threads, as if an invisible hand were turning a radio dial. Sensible narratives carry on for a while, then are interrupted by something else. Shrinks call this "inability to concentrate." Most notably to my mind, there is a sense of meaninglessness: things seem to mean something, but the meaning always remains just beyond reach, ephemeral, like a will-o-the-wisp. A lot of dead-end allusions. "A lack of interest in anything," the good doctors will conclude. There is certainly a pervasive sense of anxiety: something bad is always coming. Sorrow? Perhaps there is sorrow; you decide, reading through. I do not see anything resembling ordinary sorrow. A sense of loss, agreed. But sorrow is not, in fact, the defining element of "depression."

It is, in sum, a "Waste Land." A barren landscape. It is the desert sands of Yeats' prior poem. But Yeats was foreseeing this state; Eliot is living in it. The image is so apt, for what Western civilization has been struggling through, that we have been writing about it ever since. Becket's Vladimir and Estragon inhabit the same landscape. So does Orwell's Winston Smith. Dali paints it in "The Persistence of Memory." Ginsberg's angelheaded hipsters prowl it in the predawn of "Howl." Steinbeck's Okies experience it as the Dust Bowl. More recently, it has appeared as Mad Max's Australia, Dylan's "Desolation Row," Blade Runner's decaying LA, Luke Skywalker's Tatooine, Katniss Everdeen's Panem, and the Georgia of The Walking Dead. Not to mention ten dozen other zombie matinees. Steppenwolf secretly lived there. The Waste Land, perhaps originally inspired by the No Man's Land of the World War I trenches, has become the ruling metaphor for the modernist era, and for modern life. It is also sometimes known as "the rat race." 

Duchamp's "Fountain," 1917.

We have been wandering these barrens for the past hundred years. Our art is at a dead stall; we cannot find our way out of this maze; we have never yet managed to discover a new centre for our cultural mandala, a new cosmic organization of truth, goodness, and beauty. There was a brief period of optimism, true, in the 20's, and a longer one after the Second World War, but things soon settled back into permanent twilight. We have been doing nothing but repeating Eliot's Waste Land and Duchamp's "Fountain" ever since.