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Forever Modernism

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00295132-7738785

1945-8509

Mark Goble,

Race, History, and American Society

On or about April 2018, human character changed. At least it did at Coachella, when Beyoncé took the stage in all her majesty—as pan-African royalty, HBCU homecoming queen, pop icon, Southern heroine, and more—for two hours of brilliant spectacle and beautiful exertion. Whether it was as radical as the inspiration for Virginia Woolf's original declaration from 1910 that I stole shamelessly to start, Beyoncé's show definitely had more marching bands and better costumes. It was a performance that worked, and worked hard, on several registers at once, and explication in emoji started almost instantly on Twitter and beyond. From the aesthetics of black nationalism to the status of her marriage, Beyoncé was explicit and ambiguous at the same time, and even now—weeks later as I am writing, months later as you are reading—there is still more to say. “To address modernism,” writes Jed Rasula in History of a Shiver, “is to grapple with its endlessness, conceptually and materially if not temporally.” Or, as Craig Jenkins observed online the morning after, “We'll Revisit Beyonce's Coachella Performance for the Rest of Our Lives.”1 I will admit that this parallel began for me with the coincidence of an onrushing deadline and an irresistible distraction. But I want to take it further, and not simply because Beyoncé's show embodied so much of what Rasula terms the “maximal grandeur” of modernism in its totalizing aspirations, its attraction to the Gesamtkunstwerk (219). There are many lines of inquiry in History of a Shiver, and not all of them are best illuminated by reference to Beyoncé, which is almost certainly too small a slight for the Beyhive to notice. But any fan will recognize the unabashed and unironic ardor of Rasula's love for modernism, and though there are moments when his feelings get the best of his analysis, his book also reminds us why, from time to time, it is good that we are occasionally overwhelmed. Modernism, for Rasula, is the aesthetic and cultural history of the “intended big thing”; it retains a hold on us that is worth remembering, no matter where or when it finally happens and no matter what form it takes (21).Of course it feels a little strange to borrow Woolf's famous statement on her epoch to force the question of Beyoncé's “modernism,” and not just because Bloomsbury was one of the few places that we can all agree was even whiter than the audience at #Beychella. As shows of “impudence” go, to borrow from the full title of Rasula's History of a Shiver, I am being more ridiculous than sublime. And self-interested: at this point in its long history of innovation and exhaustion, modernism gets a lot more from a connection to Beyoncé than she does from it. Such a pairing is made stranger still considering History of a Shiver's noticeable silence on race in general and on modernism's particular indebtedness to African American culture. This absence limits the scope of Rasula's achievement, even if it often accurately reflects on the cramped horizons of his central figures despite the cultural reality they experienced. Yet Rasula has still written a commanding study of modernism that significantly expands our sense how it emerges and why it compels. His book demonstrates a deep commitment to a whole world of lesser-known and esoteric projects spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on the influences of Wagner's music and aesthetic programs on a range of figures that come after. This terrain might seem familiar, but Rasula makes consistently provocative discoveries and finds new ways throughout to argue that, perhaps especially, literary scholars have handed down to us a sense of modernism's origins that has focused on the small and local to the neglect of the grand and transcendental. We have gained a better understanding of modernism's dispersed social geography not just as a language spoken in a few salons in London or Paris but as effectively “planetary” or “global” (as in the work of Susan Stanford Friedman's Planetary Modernism or Mark Wollaeger's Handook of Global Modernisms). But Rasula reminds us that what made modernism big was not just that it eventually spread almost everywhere but that its brashest promoters and most ardent practitioners also promised it would change everything. The aesthetic movement that interests Rasula, in other words, has less to do with the more circumscribed plural “modernisms” that critics and scholars have been recovering. But Rasula is not revisiting the standard-issue canons of high modernism either. Though there are signs of The Pound Era, for instance, in the swagger of his prose and the speed at which he processes examples, History of a Shiver largely avoids personifying the period's genius in any single figure. Wagner may loom large, but even here it is not so much the works themselves Rasula says we must acknowledge but rather the sheer variety of experiments and responses—admiring, contradictory, critical, or all of these at once—that they allowed.Rasula's book conceptualizes modernism as a species of “Wagnerism,” as he terms it, and he pursues this point to challenge notions about just how long modernism has been around but also about its goals and motivations (12). Wagner's music, according to Rasula, offered an almost inexhaustible store of ideas and techniques, many of which were rampantly adaptable to different media in large measure because Wagner himself sought a “reunification of all the arts in a single enterprise” (14). “Infusing the arts with boundless amplitude,” as Rasula puts it, Wagner was instinctively resistant to any hint of the restraints and protocols that later modernists would codify around terms like medium specificity in the orbit of Clement Greenberg (15). More importantly, Rasula suggests that even when critics such as Greenberg, with a nod to Walter Pater, celebrated music as art to which all others “aspire,” they nonetheless did so in ways that scrimped and circumscribed the impact of Wagner's ideas. Greenberg is never less than respectful toward music in his firmament of modernist formalisms, but music's supposed purity as nonsemantic, sonic experience is really only marshaled to confirm that the other arts should similarly isolate themselves to narrower sensory bandwidths and abjure from too much narrative or literary content. Rasula returns to a version of this “melomania” to propose instead that, for visual artists and writers over the long turn of the twentieth century, “the prestige of music” was linked to dreams of visual music and “synesthetic revelation,” to elaborate spiritual systems and mythologies, and to wildly expressive desires for artworks that were capaciously informed by the vagaries and noise of life itself (24). In calling Wagnerism “the first ism and launching pad of the modern as an ism,” Rasula knows he is echoing the work of Daniel Albright and others, but he is also willing to take seriously some of the most outlandish aspects of this genealogy (11). Rasula's Wagner is not just treated as a brilliant mechanic of leitmotifs and production design; nor is he indicted as an architect of chauvinistic nationalism and worse. Rasula embraces—and insists that modernism was the product of a similar embrace more than a century ago—the strains of mystical enlightenment and transformation that we have tended to downplay in both assessments of Wagner's formal genius and debates over his politics. “The pursuit of synesthesia in the nineteenth century,” writes Rasula, “gradually shed its various theosophical and other period associations until, by ‘1910,’ it was understood in the simple exhortation to make it new, whatever it was” (11). History of a Shiver wants to give us these “associations” back, whether or not we missed them in the first place.This means that Rasula prompts us to reconsider strands of discourse that, for the most part, new modernists of the past twenty years have tended to ignore or to treat as symptomatic expressions of desires and anxieties that were always actually grounded in the social contours of a changing world. Rasula does not exactly argue otherwise, but in studiously explicating the heady mix of hyperbole that distinguished theorists and practitioners alike in Wagner's wake, he lets us take the measure of their ideas on their own terms. Thus his chapter on Symbolism (“Drawing a Blank”) starts by tackling the absolute ambitions of this movement, declaring that the “salient feature of symbolism that persisted into modernism” was a dramatic and categorical “propensity to vacate the stage, reconvene space as magnitude, and generally clear the ground to start from scratch” (116). Instead of tracing the devices and metaphors that Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens borrowed from French exemplars, Rasula begins with Strindberg's plays and the experiences of sensory chaos and confusion that their author hoped they would inspire. Symbolist drama, Rasula notes, “perpetuated the dream of scintillating interplay among all the arts after the model of the Gesamtkunstwerk” (120). But this is not just a point that Rasula makes to remind us that figures such as Strindberg, Ibsen, and Maeterlinck were central to the period and that drama remains relatively marginal to many studying modernism now. Playwrights working in the spirit of “a kind of gnostic Wagnerism” sought to produce effects on stage that were “exactingly obscure” and that would “overwhelm semantic and pictorial specificity” (121). At one level, this attention to the rhetoric that elite artists deployed is provoking and corrective: where many standard accounts of late nineteenth-century drama tend to itemize the character traits and plot devices that structured symbolism as a genre, Rasula describes a project of expanded consciousness beyond cognition as we know it, with audiences and, later, readers conceived as witnesses to “a magnified, synesthetically charged sensorium” (140). As Rasula accumulates examples, it is easy to get caught up in this heady, abstract language and the structures of feeling it reflected and inspired. There is also a way in which Rasula's methodology—which mixes and combines primary texts with delirious abandon—assumes either that his readers can supply the social context for themselves or that questions of the market and its politics, or about the segmentation of elite and popular audiences, were too prosaic to penetrate the heads of writers variously obsessed with spiritual concerns.This is not to say that Rasula's book feels narrow in scope or whiggish in its approach to modernism's canon. Though the “history” at hand is largely that of self-conscious intellectuals and the discourse of their aesthetic pursuits, both parallel and collective, Rasula is devoted to the archive, and with every chapter adds more characters to an astonishingly large dramatis personae. Consider just this set of names from the first three paragraphs of Rasula's chapter on dance and pictorialism: Arnold Genthe, Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, Bliss Carman, Ezra Pound, Ted Shawn, Fred Holland Day, Kahlil Gibran, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Dudley Murphy, and George Antheil. Rasula is especially drawn, he admits, to “the less trampled thickets of early modernism” and to “intriguing figures who resemble those Tinker Toy hubs into which spokes can be inserted, radiating out in different directions” (165). The symbolism here is eminently colloquial, but it summons up the image of a network diagram, with nodes and links that can be mapped in order to discern centers of gravity and exchange that have been overlooked. Wagnerism, synesthesia, “visual music,” and Jena Romanticism are similarly handled as toys for Rasula's connective play, and some of the best sections of History of a Shiver are precisely those where he becomes enamored with things that others have abandoned. His chapter on pictorialism's “American Arcady” of course sees the lingering influence of Wagnerian aesthetics on everything from Loïe Fuller's physicality to Steiglitz's selection process for the pages of Camera Work. But Rasula gets us to these more familiar sites of modernist invention by way of the vogue for elaborate and at times preposterous civic pageants in the first decades of the twentieth century. While events like The Paterson Strike Pageant (1913) are routinely cited in American cultural histories of the period, Rasula looks to a far wider assembly of mass spectacles, from small-town shows of civic pride like The Pageant of Thetford (Vermont) to proto-environmental performances like Sanctuary, A Bird Masque, which featured actors playing birds in pantomime for President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson (174–75). The poet Witter Bynner, Rasula deadpans, “took the role of the trespassing birch poacher who must learn the lesson of ‘Freedom and sanctuary for the birds’” (175–76). Though documented in Genthe's photographs for the accompanying pageant book—alas, no Instagram for this #Birdchella—Rasula's recovery of Sanctuary does not seem likely to upend our canons or change our syllabi. But the plain fact that it happened and left a cultural trace behind is enough for Rasula, whose hyperdetailed historicism performs a kind of argument about the ubiquity and reach of modernist aesthetics. A shiver, after all, may start somewhere in particular but it happens to our bodies as a whole. And so for Rasula with modernism, which moves and ripples through two centuries of Western culture as if a single, energizing action for the totality it disturbs, if only for a moment.Rasula's enthusiasm for his subject is profound, and given that his book features hundreds of individuals scattered across a transnational cultural landscape spanning at least three academic periods, it feels weird to call it narrow. I guess totality has its limits. A few references to jazz and ragtime only make me wonder about the other musical and stage traditions he might have traced and about all the interesting ways that figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, with their own attachments to Germany and its classical traditions, were translating Wagner's precepts and priorities into African American idioms and institutions. In a book where countless individuals enter and exit in a single paragraph, it is hard to argue that there was not room for more. Rasula gives us a cast of thousands, but a lot of them are backup dancers following in the steps of bigger names who have enjoyed the spotlight for a while. History of a Shiver is not concerned at all with modernism's sociology, so it is perhaps not entirely surprising that Rasula says nothing about what the scale of his own enterprise can tell us about the object of his inquiry. Modernist studies has always tended, I think, to valorize the small and singular. Of course the major players end up as monuments and legends—Picasso, Eliot, Faulkner, Cezanne—for whom, like all the biggest stars, we only need one name. But the scholarship almost always begins with our heroes at the bottom and reminds us that, despite all the capital that such figures will eventually acquire, they too were nobodies once upon a time, publishing in little magazines and only finding viewers in private salons where almost everyone could afford to buy a painting if they wanted to—but almost no one did. Rasula, however, confirms that modernism also started big: Wagner represents an institutional aesthetic and a popular phenomenon that showed how money, prestige, and politics could come to dominate an artworld. The modernists who chased his dreams and followed his example in complicated, contradictory ways come to look, in Rasula's work, less like isolated underdogs and more like aspiring franchisees—refiguring the formulas from corporate headquarters for customers with local tastes and preferences. Wagnerism was a template for artistic entrepreneurs who did not see themselves as frontrunners but were still trading on an established brand. I'm making this sound like something more cynical than much of what we find in History of a Shiver, but I do not think it is a scandal or should count against the period's achievements. Beyoncé commanded the stage as a “black Bill Gates in the making.” This might be what it looks like when modernism wins, and maybe too, as Rasula concludes, why modernism has “no end in sight” (258).