The origins of Modernism lie in disillusion or, more precisely, in what the German poet Friedrich Schiller called "the disenchantment of the world.". . .In the mid-16th century, the old certainties, the immemorial rituals, the hierarchies of the heavens and earth seemed to crumble. As Mr. Josipovici explains, Schiller's phrase was taken up early in the 20th century by the sociologist Max Weber, who used it to explain the radical transformation of the world that occurred after the Protestant Reformation, from a divinely appointed cosmos, alive with numinous presences, to a bustling marketplace of enterprise, production and rampant individualism.
In such a disenchanted world, the world we inhabit now, it's not only pointless but dishonest to write or paint or compose in traditional ways, as though nothing had changed. The old human narrative has been fatally disrupted; it is false to pretend otherwise. Modernism is the anguished response—for Mr. Josipovici, the only valid response—to this irreparable fracture of the world and the self.
So what we have here is an attack on conventional narrative as false to the way we actually experience life, rooted in a view of history that is nothing but a conventional narrative as false to what actually happened as any sentimental novel is to human life. This notion that the world of human experience was radically altered in the 16th to 18th centuries is a story. It is, I think, a good story, a useful way to organize many things about the period into something we can ponder, but it is a story nonetheless. By the standards of Becket and Proust, it is a lie, a false understanding draped over a landscape of chaos. If Mr. Josipovici finds this story compelling, he might pause to reconsider the value of traditional storytelling as a way of understanding human life.
3 comments:
You might try reading the book because your condescension is aimed at a book that doesn't exist. In the final chapter Josipovici himself admits his story of modernism is itself a story but one he hopes is persuasive.
And the "traditional storytelling" and "conventional narrative" of which you speak is shown in the book (and in many other places) to be anything but traditional and conventional. It's limited to very specific periods of history (Euripidean Greek drama, Victorian novels, contemporary English and US fiction).
Yes, conventional narrative helps us to understand human life - the book doesn't deny that - but it risks repression and falsification. Some of us think the latter are too important to risk.
If Josipovici says that traditional European storytelling is limited in time and space, I agree with him. I have here in my office a shelf of myths from around the world, many of which are barely comprehensible to modern readers. The traditions of storytelling in much of the world seem very strange to us. That much about the modernist critique of European tradition I fully agree with.
I submit, though, that there is no understanding that does not "risk repression and falsification." Every kind of storytelling is false in some way to life as we experience it. I do not find the modern fiction I have read (Joyce, Proust, Mann, Becket) to be any more true to my experience than Shakespeare or Jane Austen. Modernism, as far as I am concerned, is just another style, another sort of falsification. Sometimes it yields insights, but no more, so far as I can see, than many other modes of storytelling.
And, I might add, modernism seemed fully compatible to many of its practitioners with repression of the most violent sort; after all, many of the leading modernists had communist or fascist sympathies.
I for one am not surprised that J. includes these caveats or confessions; authors often put these in books, which reviewers interested in simplifying and clarifying the author's position then ignore.
One may also say that J.'s admission that he has told a "story" seems very modernist, in the sense that, as I understand it, modernism has always quested for something truer and less false than narrative, without actually finding it. This kind of modernism has an austerity and dedication to truth that are admirable, but also forlorn, doomed to failure.
A third point I would note is that the linear, "traditional" narrative against which modernism rebelled was in many ways an artifact of the nineteenth-century novel--that is, the narrative that modernists claim is "no longer possible" is in fact a construct of the age in which it was no longer possible. Medieval fiction and chronicles are not notably linear; they can happily present streams of apparently motiveless, episodic actions, and medieval authors love to play with the illusion of verisimilitude, often by inserting their own voice (not only in fiction but in chronicles).
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