Rossetti conducted daily household affairs because he had to, and since he worked at home, his domestic concerns and his artistic practice blended. Like many a middle-class and upper-class Victorian woman, he felt harassed by the "servant problem." But for him the issue had a twist: he continually felt the lack of models, and sought them either on the street (the "stunners" were both sexual and artistic prey) or among the serving class. "What I really want," he writes to Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, who has been advising him on the servant issue, "is a very handy man or youth, capable of turning his hand to odd jobs of carpentry, etc. . . . another desirable quality would be that he should be fit for a model" (LDR, 483). Just as such a handyman must be fit to enter the studio, so the women hired as models must be fit for the workroom; he requests, for example, that Alexa Wilding mend the fabric and then remake the dress to be worn as she sits to him. Fanny Cornforth acts not only as model, but also as housekeeper, for several years. At Kelmscott Manor a local serving girl becomes the model for Marigolds. A curious circularity of domestic and artistic activity develops. As completed paintings are sold and money flows in, it must be disbursed to cover household and studio expenses. Such expenses make it possible for the next painting to be completed, but also bring on the next round of bills for canvas, paint, artists' dinners, and models'/servants' wages.
Over the course of the years, Rossetti engaged three men to ease his dual domestic and aesthetic burdens: W. J. Knewstub, Dunn and, toward the end, Caine. Rossetti required Dunn, in particular, to find his way among the complexities of a household that was part nest, part artistic factory (with himself the principal pieceworker) and part artistic salon. Dunn's memoirs indicate his initial enthusiasm for the job of artistic factotum, because he feels at last that he is entering the world of London art. He reminisces about a particularly vivid scene of domestic sublimity that takes place in Rossetti's studio as a thunderstorm crescendos, and with it, Swinburne's verse declamation:
Faint electric sparks played round the wavy masses of his luxuriant hair. . . . I lay in the sofa in a corner of the studio and listened in wonder . . . for it appeared to me as though the very res in the pictures that were on the easels standing about the room were conscious of and sympathised with the poet. . . . The 'Proserpine' gazed out more mournfully than I had been wont to see her gaze. [RDR, 64]
Dunn understands that the vibrations of weather (brought indoors), fellowship (Rossetti returns soon after, and he and Swinburne sit up until dawn together), and works of art (conscient) lead, one to the other, at 16 Cheyne Walk. He not only fabricates frames, scale models, and drawings to Rossetti's specifications, but also shops for artistic props, advises Rossetti on appropriate household budgets, and searches the house for misplaced items during his employer's absences. He absorbs visits from angry merchants, kills rats, mails information, books, and furniture, and even goes house-hunting for Rossetti, making sketches of promising properties. But all of his activities require of him artistic talent, aesthetic judgment, and sympathy with his artist-employer's special needs. Spaces must be filled with appropriate light, objects must be located or bid upon, projects must be finished so that "tin" for Dunn's, at best, intermittent salary might be forthcoming.
Although the term exploitation comes to mind, it is important to remember that Rossetti himself never drew a sharp line between work on paintings and domestic concerns. William finds in his brother's writing book the following contiguous scraps:
5. From John Marshall. Eat meat, poultry, game, fish, oysters, kidneys, green vegetables, stewed fruit, ripe fruit. . . . Avoid or reduce much bread, potatoes, sugar, beer, spirits, cocoa, chocolate, olive oil, eggs, bacon.
6. For plain scarlet: try laying ground with venetian or Indian red, and white, to the full depth of tone, and glazing with orange-vermilion. 29
The slimming man and the accomplished artist are one. Domestic upsets easily became artistic incidents--such as Fanny's alleged breakage (or hiding) of a blue and white jar he needs for a painting. A misplaced medieval costume means a slowdown in work.
Household matters, however, may also have unexpected value for artistic work. When Rossetti receives a sofa ordered through Howell, he discovers it "covered with the most lovely chintz of a Japanese pattern admirably designed and coloured like greyish blue china" (LDR, 1205). To pay for actual blue and white china--cherished as decoration for both paintings and living quarters--he paints a picture, and makes it worth £200 "to cover a previous account" (RP, 62, 70). It is perhaps only part of the story to say that Rossetti knew at heart that he had "sold out" as an artist by engaging in the impure world of the marketplace. If he sold out, he also, as homemaker, bought in. Pots, paintings, sofas, pounds sterling, models, dresses, create a complicated pattern. To keep house, however frantically, is to manage affairs in the name of beauty--the hallmark of modernist aestheticism. And to write poetry is to make aesthetic arrangements that include, as part of their very composition, personal and domestic arrangements.
Consider, for example, the "lustral rites" in the introductory sonnet to The House of Life:
A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death. 30
"Look that it be, / Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, / Of its own arduous fulness reverent": Rossetti includes as the aims of poetry the creation of an autonomous object and the care of art's readers by purification, illumination, and warning--and all this by placing them in the presence of special, even magical objects. As Rossetti invited poets into his company, he wrote sonnets in order to bring his poetry into a community of readers. The view of art as "lustral rite" bespeaks a cyclical process (the lustrum was originally conducted every five years by the censors at Rome), meant to purify a people, a piece of land, or even the community's home, the city. A ritual cleansing, it conducts us to the realm of the spiritualized domestic. Sonnets themselves become the objects used in lustral rites or as dire portents; they must be carved, decorated things. In fact, the sonnet as Rossetti conceives it is another "medley of bric-à-brac" like that of the paintings. 31
"The Sonnet" is, to summarize, arduously full, carved in ivory or ebony with a flowered and impearled crest, and also rounded, flattish, and engraved differently on each side. Such a medley, whether it appear in a sonnet or a painting, might then be recognized for what it is: the modern jumble of life sanctified, arranged by the artist-priest-householder (or, later, by Stevens's "Man on the Dump") into an intimacy of related aspects rather than an organically conceived unity. Details and ornaments cannot be clearly distinguished from the things themselves (who can tell the engraving from the coin?), and we feel ourselves moving toward an abstraction of texture that signals the presence of the modern. As David G. Riede acutely notes, "the paradox is that [Rossetti] consistently saw surfaces as the most profound symbols of emotional and psychological depths.32
Furthermore, when it came to composing poetry--arranging words, images, and sounds artfully--Rossetti retained habits he had formed as a householder. His writing often involves the actual staging of complex and artful arrangements of people he knows as he links his verbal "compositions" to acts of generosity performed or received that make it possible to paint or write. Simply stated, for Rossetti, the personal favor becomes an element of creation that works in tandem with inspiration--his insistence on "fundamental brainwork"--and execution. His dealings with people can be considered as so many scripted dramas, first acted, then captured forever in beautiful objects: poems and paintings which themselves insist on their source in a personal, contingent, and often sentimental milieux.
Late in life, for example, Rossetti wrote a series of sonnets entitled "Five English Poets" (CW, 337-9). The sonnet on Blake exemplifies a confused mirroring of sentimental word and tender action.
William Blake
(To Frederick Shields, on his sketch of Blake's work-room and death-room, 3 Fountain Court, Strand.)
This is the place. Even here the dauntless soul,
The unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook,
As on that very bed, his life partook
New birth, and passed. Yon river's dusky shoal,
Whereto the close-built coiling lanes unroll,
Faced his work-window, whence his eyes would stare,
Thought-wandering, unto nought that met them there,
But to the unfettered irreversible goal.
This cupboard, Holy of Holies, held the cloud
Of his soul writ and limned; this other one,
His true wife's charge, full oft to their abode
Yielded for daily bread the martyr's stone,
Ere yet their food might be that Bread alone,
The words now home-speech of the mouth of God. [CW, 338]
Here is a confusing field of reflection. This is a poem about an artist by an artist. It describes the domestic life of Blake--bed, nook, cupboard, bread--as intimately linked to his "thought-wandering" and to the speaker's vision of heaven. Artistic creation at home is artistic creation as home for both Rossetti and his imagined Blake, the sentimental home-speech that is both human and divine.
Less obvious than these echoes and links, however, are the artful arrangements of Rossetti's life that made this sonnet possible in the first place. As one artist writing about another, Rossetti does not address Blake's poetry or pictures directly, nor does he himself visit Blake's house at 3 Fountain Court. Instead he turns to a "picture by another artist of a room once inhabited by Blake." 33 Such a choice indicates Rossetti's love of arrangements as part of his fascination with domestic scenes. That Frederick Shields probably made the sketch after Rossetti suggested he do so; that Shields sent him the sketch and the floor plan of the rooms; that Rossetti could then reciprocate with the gift of a sonnet based on Shields's gift; that both Shields and Rossetti, along with William Michael Rossetti, helped the widowed Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist complete her husband's Life of William Blake: all of these circumstances speak of Rossetti's continual efforts to create bonds of mutual attention that would literally make art out of human arrangements as well as words. Taking into consideration all these aspects of the poem, "inlaid with reflected glass" as it were, we feel the very texture of Victorian modernism: complexity so fine-grained that it verges on abstraction. And we feel it, too, within Stevens's sentimental elegy for George Santayana, so similar to Rossetti's elegy for Blake: "The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns / The candle as it evades the sight" equally acknowledge the vision of "The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme / Of the unknown"(CP, 508).
Domestic arrangements are not the centralizing force of Victorian modernism; they are but one of its energies. It happens that for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, such arrangements provide a relational energy that offers him the experience of--and the words and images for--a pragmatist and empiricist building out of reality from the flux. When William James tries to explain the finding and making of pragmatist truth by the following out of connections, he writes, "If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself." 34 To understand that Victorian "coziness" provides both an actual laboratory and a philosophical metaphor for truth in the making that pervades art in the twentieth century is to see both "the modern" and "the Victorian" in a usefully mingled way. The aesthetic and the domestic pragmatically entwine to create an important Victorian modernist pattern.
Rossetti does not, of course, found Victorian modernism. Rather, he provides for the moment a contingent center from which we might set out in exploration, and he leads us to reexamine some truths which might have slipped into truisms. We should question, for example, the modern conception of the actual Victorian home--as opposed to its Gothic metamorphoses--as a place of Philistine prejudices, airless and overstuffed. 35 That the Victorian parlor, well before the turn of the century, might have been a testing ground for modern culture, that it might have provided both the space of reaction and the space of rebellion, is a possibility we must consider. Within this familiar context, Rossetti envisioned the very aesthetic values that would be taken up by decadent artists in England and the creators of art nouveau in France and enter the mainstream of what we regard as high modernism. 36
The highly particularized, crowded, and flattened surfaces of Rossetti's paintings, like the abstraction-strewn, sentimental surfaces of his poetry and the strange decorations of his drawing room, are protomodernist, or what we should more accurately characterize as Victorian modernist. Modern artists introduce "ornamental" patterns into paintings and literary works, such as the decorative borders and actual textile patterns of Matisse, the patterned furniture of Picasso's portraits, the incantatory repetitions or iconic images of modernist verse, or the odd collection of objects in surrealist texts. These works of art represent not a rupture from the immediate Victorian past, but its flowering. Victorian sensibilities live a renewed life in modernist art. Because Proust simultaneously describes in detail the rooms his characters inhabit, depicts remembered rooms, furnishes the rooms of his capacious sentences, and memorializes the ornate Gothic buildings beloved of John Ruskin, he invites us to set out in search of his Victorian modernism. As we do so, we may link it, perhaps, to Ruskin and through him to the domestic practices of best-selling American women writers of the nineteenth century. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augusta Evans, Elizabeth Stoddard, and many others, acolytes of Ruskin all, take their place in an emerging filigree of Victorian modernism.
Many are the directions we might take, the writers and works we might bring into relation, as we explore a literary terrain that is richer for its detailed, complex, and confused minglings than it ever was for its clean breaks and firm categories. Overlooked or deliberately ignored aspects of high modernism will catch the light--for example, its sentimentality. Old concepts will take on new shapes: perhaps the sublime is a phenomenon of Willa Cather's communities on the plains, as much as it is the effacement of social relations and even human identity before fearsome mountain peaks or ocean furies. Aesthetics might even pragmatically link hands with ethics, as we come to see that Stevens's questions of "How to Live," the adverbial and adjectival styles we adopt, can make their way toward questions of "What to Do," the actions that make us human (CP, 125).
Jessica Feldman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Victorian Modernism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
1. Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry," in The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969), 239; hereafter abbreviated as CP.
2. For a discussion of the importance of surface in Ruskin's view of architecture, see Kristine Ottesen Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture: His Thought and Influence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973).
3. Two studies have made this connection, although without emphasis on the intermingling of Victorian and modernism. See Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). For an example of a single author study, see Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls, eds., Ruskin and Modernism (New York: Palgrave, 2000).
4. William Butler Yeats, "Introduction," The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), ix; hereafter abbreviated as OMV.
5. See, for example, Carol Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirits: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970); and Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1-21.
6. George Eliot, "Notes on Form in Art," in Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1990), 231-6.
7. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 52.
8. William Butler Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier Books, 1996), 193.
9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Portable Coleridge, ed. I. A. Richards (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 516.
10. For a succinct history of the gendering of notions of form and matter, see David Summers, "Form and Gender," New Literary History 24 : 243-71.
11. Gertrude Stein, Writings 1932-1946 (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 197; hereafter abbreviated as W.
12. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 126-7.
13. Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, Lolly Dinks' Doings (Boston: William F. Gilt, 1874), 80.
14. Ibid., 80.
15. For a history of ornamentation and detail in art, and their relation to gender issues, see Natalie Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987).
16. "Ornament and Crime," in Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, ed.Ludwig Munz and Gustave Kunstler (NewYork: Frederick A. Praeger,1966), 226-31.
17. Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holthen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 43.
18. 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The Valuable Contents of the Residence of Dante G. Rossetti (London: T. G. Wharton, Martin and Company, 1882); hereafter abbreviated as VCR.
19. Walter H. Godfrey, The Parish of Chelsea (Part I). Being the Second Volume of the Survey of London, and the Eleventh Publication of the Committee for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London (1909; New York: AMS Press, 1971).
20. H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life (London: George Bell and Sons, 1899).
21. Ibid., 121, 224-7.
22. For Meredith, see Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letters,Vol. 4, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-7), 464; hereafter abbreviated as LDR.
23. Theodore Watts, "The Truth About Rossetti," The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 13 : 404-23.
24. T. Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Elliot Stock, 1882), 16-8. For Henry Treffry Dunn, see Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Circle, ed. Gale Pedrick (New York: James Pott, 1904); hereafter abbreviated as RDR.
25. Oswald Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Romantic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), 310.
26. Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Furnishing, from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (New York: G. Braziller, 1964), 368.
27. Elizabeth Bishop, "At the Fishhouses," in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 66.
28. Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 289.
29. William Michael Rossetti, ed., Rossetti Papers, 1862 to 1870 (New York: Charles Scribner's and Sons, 1903), 201; hereafter abbreviated RP.
!IR"30". Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The House of Life," The Collected Works,Vol. 1, ed. William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1897), 176; hereafter abbreviated as CW.
31. William E. Fredeman, "What is Wrong with Rossetti? A Centenary Reassessment," Victorian Poetry 20, nos. 3-4 : xv-xxviii. For a definition of the term "lustrum," see The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2d ed., s.r. "lustration."
32. David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 159.
33. Robert N. Essick, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederick Shields, and the Spirit of William Blake," Victorian Poetry 24, no. 2 : 163-72, 170. See Essick, also, for valuable information about the history of the sonnet's composition, including a list of pictures on which Rossetti might have based the sonnet and an account of its earlier versions.
34. William James, Pragmatism, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 98.
35. J. Hillis Miller, "The Mirror's Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art," Victorian Poetry 29, no. 4 : 335.
36. See Deborah Leah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and Cecil Y. Lang, The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), xxiv-xxvi.
What is modernity? What is or was modernism? Why is the energetic, expanding, multidisciplinary field of modernist studies so filled with contestation over the very ground of study? Definitional activities are fictionalizing processes, however much they sound like rational categorization. As such, I will begin with three stories, allegorized but rooted in my own experience in an evolving field. 1
Imagine a young woman starting graduate school in 1965 in an American land grant university. Remember the suburban dream of the 1950s for middle-class (white) girls: the penny loafers and saddle shoes; the poodle skirts and prom chiffon; the cheerleaders and Elvis screamers; college for the MRS degree; the station wagon and four kids. NO books. NO art. NO ideas. NO passion. Conformity was the name of the game. Conformity and materialism. Then. The first butts of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Fuck. Shit. Sex. Pot. Buttons. Pierced ears. Long hair. Unisex style. Civil Rights. Vietnam. Pigs. Feminism. Gay Rights. Welfare Rights. Union Rights. "What was modernism" to a graduate student in English and American literature in the heady days of the 1960s? Modernism was rebellion. Modernism was "make it new." 2 Modernism was resistance, rupture. To its progenitors. To its students. Modernism was the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation.
Picture an aging scholar in 1995, past the half-century mark, entering into her first graduate seminar on modernism in a land grant university. "What was modernism?" she asks. A circle of eyes and silences. A couple to the side shift uncomfortably. She has cropped purple hair and kohled eyes.  A tidy tail of silky golden hair flows down his back. So thin in black, so pale in whiteface, they are their own shadows. They know "what modernism was." Modernism was elitism. Modernism was the Establishment. "High Culture" lifting its skirts against the taint of the "low," the masses, the popular. Modernism was the supreme fiction, the master narrative, the great white hope. To its Po-Mo descendents, Modernism is the enemy. Postmodernism is the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation.
Listen in on an exchange between two scholars, the one graying and the other balding in the wisdom of their seniorities--she a cultural critic, he a social scientist. Children of the 1960s, teachers of the 1990s. It is 1995 as their manuscripts cross through snail mail. "What was modernism?" they ask, both acknowledging it as a historical phenomenon, but neither willing to assert that it is fully over and done with. For both, modernism both was and is. But what was modernism? She knows. It is the (illusory) break with the past, a willed forgetting of tradition, continuity, order. It is the embrace of chaos. It is the crisis of representation, fragmentation, alienation. It is indeterminacy, the rupture of certainty--material and symbolic. It is the poetics of modernity--change--and the aesthetic inscriptions thereof. (Pace cyberpunks, for whom modernism no longer "is" as it recedes into the deadness of postmodernism's past.)
He knows too. Modernism is state planning. Modernism is totalization, centralized system. Modernism is the Enlightenment's rational schemata. "Progress"--"Science"-- "Reason"-- "Truth." Modernism is the ideology of post-Renaissance modernity--conquest--and the inscriptions thereof. (Pace cyborgs, modernism still lives in the danger of ever-forming centralized hegemonies and utopian totalitarianisms.)
Moral of the Stories: Just what IS modernism in an exchange where the word means not just different things, but precisely opposite things?
* * *
The opposition of meanings produced over time (from Story 1 to Story 2) morphs into a binary of oppositions existing across space (Story 3). In toto, the stories represent a conjuncture of temporal and spatial oppositions. So. Let's move from storytelling to another kind of conjuncture: parataxis--the juxtaposition of things without providing connectives. Parataxis: a common aesthetic strategy in modernist writing and art, developed to disrupt and fragment conventional sequencing, causality, and perspective. Parataxis: the opposite of hypotaxis in linguistics, thus the opposite of hierarchical relationships of syntactic units. Parataxis: a mechanism of the "dream work" in Freud's grammar for the unconscious processes of disguised expression of the forbidden, indicating unresolved or conflicting desires.
| Modernism | Postmodernism |
| Romanticism/Symbolism | 'Pataphysics/Dadaism |
| Form (conjunctive, closed) | Antiform (disjunctive, open) |
| Purpose | Play |
| Design | Chance |
| Hierarchy | Anarchy |
| Mastery/Logos | Exhaustion/Silence |
| Art Object/Finished Work | Process/Performance/Happening |
| Creation/Totalization/Synthesis | Decreation/Deconstruction/Antithesis |
| Presence | Absence |
| Centering | Dispersal |
| Genre/Boundary | Text/Intertext . . . |
| Hypotaxis | Parataxis . . . |
| Signified | Signifier |
| Narrative/Grande Histoire | Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire |
| Master Code | Idiolect |
| Genital/Phallic | Polymorphous/Androgynous |
| Origin/Cause | Difference-Differance/Trace |
| Metaphysics | Irony |
| Determinacy | Indeterminacy |
| Transcendence | Immanence14 |
Moral 1: As terms in an evolving scholarly discourse, modern, modernity, and modernism constitute a critical Tower of Babel, a cacophony of categories that become increasingly useless the more inconsistently they are used. We can regard them as a parody of critical discourse in which everyone keeps talking at the same time in a language without common meanings. When terms mean radically different or contradictory things to people, then their use appears to threaten the project of scholarship/teaching altogether.
Moral 2: As contradictory terms resisting consensual definition, modern, modernism, and modernity form a fertile terrain for interrogation, providing ever more sites for examination with each new meaning spawned. As parody of rational discourse, their contradictions highlight the production of meaning possible by attention to what will not be tamed, by what refuses consistency and homogenization. Their use ensures the open-ended ongoingness of the scholarly/pedagogical project whose first task is to sustain the continuation of interrogation, to ensure, in short, its own perpetuation.
* * *
Modernisms is one thing, but modernism as absolute contradiction is quite another. Definitions spawn plurality in the very act of attempting to herd meaning inside consensual boundaries. Definitions mean to fence in, to fix, and to stabilize. But they often end up being fluid, in a destabilized state of ongoing formation, deformation, and reformation that serves the changing needs of the moment. They reflect the standpoint of their makers. They emerge out of the spatio/temporal context of their production. They serve different needs and interests. They accomplish different kinds of cultural work. They change dramatically over time and through space. Definitions wear the mask of synchronic abstraction, but they are always subject to diachronic histories and spatial geographies of continuity, change, and difference. I have no expectation, therefore, of determining or discovering a fixed meaning for terms like modern,modernity, and modernism. I expect differences.
But opposition of meanings is something else. It goes beyond difference, beyond resistance to totalizing metanarratives, beyond the provisional, strategic, fluid, permeable, and situationally adaptable meanings that characterize the most useful definitional exercises. I don't seek fixity or plurality. I seek instead to confront directly the contradictory status of meanings. 17
* * *
The stories began with the problematic of modernism, but drew us inexorably into a web of words--modernism and its siblings, modern, modernity, and modernization. Not only does the meaning of the concept deny fixity but so do its grammatical and semantic aspects. The root word modern is both noun and adjective, whether signifying descriptively or normatively. The different suffixes herd the word into different grammatical functions that carry semantic weight. The -ity of modernity limits the word modern to a noun--a status as a thing or condition that is distinguishable from other things or conditions. The -ism of modernism turns the noun modern into an advocacy, a promotion, a movement presumably centered around a systematic philosophy, politics, ideology, or aesthetics. The -ization of modernization signifies a process, an evolution or revolution from one condition to another, with modernity as the condition achieved by modernization. 18
And what about the cousins of the siblings--premodern,postmodern,postmodernity, postmodernism? How do pre- and post- inflect the root meanings? To what extent are these categories distinctly separate when they appear to merely qualify modern, modernity, and modernism? 19 In what way is the entire family of terms dependent on their variously implied or invoked antonyms-- traditional,classical,ancient,feudal,agrarian,past?
Once upon a time, literary and art critics used modernism--especially with the orthographic marker of the capital, Modernism, or the intensifying adjective high, as in High Modernism--to delineate movements in the arts based in loose affiliations or parallel developments. In contrast, social theorists, historians, and social scientists used modern,modernity, and modernization to refer to historical periods, conditions, and processes. But now, such disciplinary boundaries have ceased to function, as people appropriate all forms of the root concept to serve their different purposes.
Symptomatically and provocatively, the interdisciplinary journal yokes two of these terms, as if the slash between them signaled their interchangeability on the one hand and yet their permanent separation on the other. The slash is a bar that forever connects and disconnects (like the Saussurian/Lacanian bar between signifier/signified). This is yet another contradiction that demands attention. Is there a slash/bar separating and conjoining modern/modernity/modernism/modernization with all its cognates and antonyms as well?
* * *
A Psychoanalytic Detour: The family romance of squabbling siblings and cousins invites a psychoanalysis of definitional debate. The dissonance of meanings--particularly the opposition of meanings--opens the possibility of a psychodynamic reading that looks for the irrational and covert processes of repression, return, and transference in modernist studies across the disciplines as these processes reflect unresolved complexes within modernity itself.
The scene of analysis for Freud is a psychodynamic one, a stage onto which the analysand and the analyst transfer repressed desires and complexes long since seemingly forgotten. Transference (and countertransference) in analysis involves the repetition of what cannot be consciously remembered, the reenactment of repressed patterns not yet consciously faced. Freud's clinical practice involved the deliberate incitement of the transference so that the drama of repetition could become the grounds for analysis itself. 20
The terminological quagmire of modernist studies may be the result of a transferential process in which people become caught in a repetition of the unresolved contradictions present and largely repressed in modernity itself. The stories and parataxes of this essay deliberately stage this dissonant drama to shift the focus from the debate about signifieds for the disputed terms to an analysis of what produces the dissonance in the first place. I am adapting and blending Julia Kristeva's notion of the "textual unconscious," Fredric Jameson's concept of the "political unconscious," and Shoshana Felman's psychoanalytic interpretations of contentious critical literatures on Edgar Allen Poe and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. 21 Particularly heated and unresolvable debates about literary meaning, Felman argues, can be read as transferential scenes of resistance and repetition. Such scenes, often confrontational and even bitter, have an "unconscious" that can be read psychoanalytically as a "case history" that brings to light hidden complexes repressed and unresolved in the original literary texts. Adapting Jameson's notion of the political unconscious for this scenario allows for a reading of how oppositional views encrypt a politics not immediately evident or intended.
Similarly, multidisciplinary modernist studies spawns terminological debates that reenact contradictions already present within the terms and the phenomena to which they allude. What then is hidden within the proliferation of meanings for modern,modernity, and modernism? How might the dissonances and oppositions constitute fault lines inviting interpretation in and of themselves? What might such fault lines tell us about the contradictory and complex-ridden meanings and politics of the phenomena to which the terms refer as they change and vary in different historical moments and spatial locations?
Pathways in the Wanderland of Modernist Studies: How to enter into and perhaps emerge out of the maze of contestation and opposition in modernist studies? I suggest two routes for definitional excursion--the first, grammatical and philosophical; the second, political and cultural. They engage the issue of oppositional meanings in complementary ways. Without resolving anything, they open up different routes to the contradiction of meaning, different ways of negotiating definitional debate, each necessary in its own way. Without resolving or silencing it, they clarify what is at stake in the debate and why interrogating what produces it can loosen fixed loyalties to partial meanings.
Grammatical/Philosophical Route: This pathway starts with the recognition of the difference between nominal and relational modes of definition--that is regarding the terms (the siblings, modern/modernity/modernism) as nouns with a specific, definable content (however debated) and viewing them as adjectives implying comparison to some other condition of being. 22 The difference between these approaches to definitional tasks accounts for some of the opposition in modernist studies, but not all. Contradiction exists not only between the modes but within each mode as well. 23
In nominal terms, the words modern, modernity, and modernism signify a specific content: a set of characteristics with particular material conditions and spatio/temporal locations. This is not to say, however, that there is always agreement about this specific content. But for those working within or seeking a nominal framework, the definitional project centers on fixing the categories to a set of meanings to which others might be persuaded. Whether canonical or revisionist, such projects assume the nominal status of modernism or modernity: it is a noun, with a specific meaning, albeit subject to disagreement about its potential explanatory power.
Nominal discussions of modern/modernity/modernism tend to be very field specific, with definitional dissonance and even outright contradiction developing as a result of disciplinary boundaries and considerable isolation of disciplinary discourses from each other. The most radical disjuncture of nominal meanings exists in the chasm between the social sciences and the humanities. Social theorists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists tend to follow the lead of historians of Europe, who typically periodize their field into the subfields of classical, medieval, early modern, and modern, thus defining modern as the initial break with medieval institutions and outlooks that evolved over time. Within this context, modernity signifies a specific set of historical conditions developing in the West, including the industrial revolution, conquest of and expansion economically and politically into other continents, the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation state, and growing power of the bourgeoisie. Consistent with this periodization, philosophers often regard the theories of reason in Locke, Kant, and Hegel as the embodiment of a distinctly modern secularism and humanism. For political scientists, modernity often involves the development of specific kinds of political systems, away from feudalism to limited monarchies, democracies, and various autocracies; for economists, types of markets, capital, or labor; for anthropologists, the eradication or (forced) assimilation of traditional cultures through conquest or encroachment by nation states, market systems, more "advanced" technologies, or hegemonic cultural groups. Postcolonial theorists often link modernity with imperialism and the national struggles for emergence within the contradictory conditions of hybridization and continued dependence on the colonial power. And so forth. 24
In the humanities, on the other hand, modernity and modernism are most often associated with the radical rupture from rather than the supreme embodiment of post-Renaissance Enlightenment humanism and accompanying formations in the West. Artists and writers, within this view, constitute an avant-garde of change, seeing sooner and more searchingly the profound significance and future effects of epistemological, ontological, political, technological, demographic, cultural, and aesthetic transformations. The dating, location, and forms of rupture associated with a modernist style sometimes overlap, sometimes vary considerably. Critics of modernist poetry often identify a poetics of fragmentation, parataxis, image, and idiosyncratic rhythms and sound patterns. Art historians often focus on the rupture from realism in the heightening attention to form, especially pure geometric shapes and planes. Architectural historians often look to the stark, functionalist minimalism of Bauhaus design or cityscape towers as the expression of modernity and its aesthetic in the age of the machine. For music historians, the embrace of primitivism and atonality in a composer like Stravinsky might constitute modernism. Media critics look to the radical impact of the new mechanical means of reproduction--photography, radio, cinema, television--for the sights and sounds of modernity. And so forth. 25
However debated, modernism in the context of the humanities is most often understood as the loosely affiliated movements and individuals in the arts and literature that reflect and contribute to the conditions and consciousness of modernity in Europe, Britain, and the United States. 26 Periodization, however much it varies among different subfields, differs sharply from that proposed by social theorists and historians. Moreover, the epitome of modernity for those in the social sciences is precisely what modernity dismantles for those in the humanities.
At first glance, this definitional divide seems arbitrary, produced through the accident of disciplinary location and isolationism in the academy and thus not particularly interesting for definitional interrogation. However, several factors challenge such a view.
First, the opposition between the social sciences and the humanities cannot be so easily dismissed as arbitrary or insignificant because some fields like cultural anthropology, history, geography, political theory, media studies, ethnic studies, women's studies, and postcolonial studies are multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary. They exist on the liminal threshold between the two divisions, equally engaging in questions of representation, theory, social organization, power relations, and empirical as well as imaginative formations. Consequently, the oppositional meanings of modern/modernity/modernism often coexist within certain disciplines, fields, and institutional units in the academy.
Second, the borders between disciplines and divisions of knowledge have become increasingly porous in the past thirty years with the re-legitimation of interdisciplinarity. Such cross-disciplinary work with modernity produces rich hybridities, but also some confusion. For example, in his collection Modernist Anthropology, Marc Manganaro (who holds an appointment in a literature department) brings together anthropologists and literary critics to examine the interplay between literary modernism and modernist anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. The result is an exciting interdisciplinary examination of the intermingling of aesthetic and ethnographic projects in the period. But the term modernism slips and slides between oppositional meanings--from rational ordering sought in Boasian or Malinowskian anthropology to anarchistic disordering found in avant-garde art and poetics. This oscillation is never directly confronted anywhere in the volume and is even reproduced in many individual essays. The collection intensifies rather than illuminates the definitional problems evident in an uninterrogated mixing of social theory and aesthetic meanings of modernism. 27
To take another example, the geographer David Harvey begins his influential book, The Condition of Postmodernity, with an invocation to Charles Baudelaire's notion of modern life as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent," cites the literary critic Marshall Berman on modernism and modernity in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and then quotes W.B. Yeats's paradigmatic modernist lines in "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" (CP, 10). Firmly entrenched in the conventional literary meanings of modernism as disruption, Harvey develops his discussion of postmodernism with a thoroughgoing association of modernism, particularly what he calls High Modernism, with the Enlightenment project of the "development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought" (CP, 12). Having detailed the formalist ruptures of modernist epistemology, ontology, and representation, he then cites Ihab Hassan's famous schematic chart asserting the absolute break between modernism and postmodernism over modernism's supposed alignment with the Cartesian subject and Enlightenment reason (CP, 42-44). In his splendid book, influential across the disciplines in modernist studies, Harvey slides back and forth between "anarchy" and "organization" as the defining modes of High Modernism with only occasional allusion to the tension between these meanings.
Third, the insistence on arbitrary disciplinary difference obscures what is shared across the social sciences and humanities--namely, the emphasis on rupture from the past; debate about the politics of modernity/modernism, and a pervasive Eurocentrism. Just what "past" modernity abandons differs, but transformative change is a constant component of definition. Social theorists and art critics alike argue fiercely among themselves about the value of modernity and modernism in debates that are more similar than different across the methodological divides. Is modernity or modernism liberating or oppressive, progressive or regressive, something to be reinforced or dismantled? Do its ideas and ideals require the oppression or exclusion of some for the benefit of others? Or do they open doors for ever-expanding, ever-more inclusive conditions of freedom and plenty? The questions are similar, whether addressed to issues of revolution and slavery or avant-garde art and mass culture. Some defend modernity/modernism; others attack it. Underlying all these nominal debates is the problematic assumption that modernity/modernism originated in the West and is either forced upon or imitated in diluted form by the Rest. Given these similarities, the dissonance in the core meanings of modern/modernity/modernism is deafening.
A nominal approach to defining modern/modernity/modernism presumes the possibility of consensual agreement about the meanings of the terms as nouns with a specific content: a set of characteristics existing within discernable boundaries of meaning, space, and time. However, a closer look reveals little consensus, either across disciplines or within them. This capacity of the nominal approach to spawn diverse and even opposite meanings undermines the naming function of nouns. If what a noun signifies cannot be consistently named, of what use is it as a category?
A relational approach to the meaning of modern/modernity/modernism looks for the latent structure rather than the manifest contents of the root term. Instead of locating modernity in the specific time of the post-Renaissance or post-Enlightenment West, a relational definition stresses the condition or sensibility of radical disruption and accelerating change wherever and whenever such a phenomenon appears, particularly if it manifests widely. 28 What is modern or modernist gains its meaning through negation, as a rebellion against what once was or was presumed to be. Just as adjectives such as tall or big have meaning only in reference to other adjectives like short or small, the relational meaning for modern (and its siblings) exists within a comparative binary in which the opposite is traditional. Neither term has a fixed or universal meaning in and of itself, but rather acquires meaning only in relation to its implied opposite. Where tradition signals the unfolding of the future within the continuous pathways of the past, modernity calls for perpetual subversion of the past as the precondition of the future.
Relationally speaking, modernity is the insistence upon the Now--the present and its future as resistance to the past, especially the immediate past. It establishes a cult of the new that constructs retrospectively a sense of tradition from which it declares independence. Paradoxically, such a tradition--or, the awareness of it as "tradition"--might come into existence only at the moment of rebellion against it.
Precisely because a relational definition does not seek the fixity of nominal definitions, modernity need no longer reside solely in a specific set of institutional, ideological, or aesthetic characteristics emergent in the post-Renaissance West, radiating globally along the pathways of empire and postcoloniality, and appearing as pale copies of western genius. Instead, a particularized modernity located in space and time could potentially emerge wherever and whenever the winds of radical disruption blew, the conditions of rapid change flared up, or the reflexive consciousness of newness spread--whether these were eagerly sought or resisted; whether imposed from without or developed within.
But the relational approach to defining modern/modernity/modernism raises as many questions as it appears to resolve. First, there is the impossibility of perpetual disruption or revolution as change becomes institutionalized. What begin as multiple acts of rebellion against prevailing hegemonies become through their very success a newly codified, often commodified system. Margins become centers with the proliferation and dissemination of rupture. In intellectual and aesthetic realms, for example, outsiders become insiders; pariahs become icons; the rebels become the Establishment. The new science of the Enlightenment that overturned the symbolic order based on religious faith itself became the hegemonic norm based in a faith in Reason. The avant-garde artists initially greeted with hoots of derision--the impressionists, postimpressionists, cubists, abstract expressionists--are now the great masters whose works are mainstays of museums and sell for fabulous sums. Rejected, banned, ridiculed, and often unread in the beginning, res like Freud and Joyce are for many the supreme avatars of the age, essential reading in any history of ideas and literature. As Raymond Williams argues, the antibourgeois origins of modernism are lost as modernism is canonized in the post-World War II era. 29 As the principle of disruption, the more widespread modernity becomes, the more codified and authoritative it becomes, thus undermining its character as the spirit of explosive rebellion and change. Institutionalized, the avant-garde of rupture becomes the new Establishment to be revoked in the making of new avant-gardes. The very success of modernity (and its modernist expressivities) evident in its institutionalization accomplishes its demise--the imperative of postmodernity.
Second, for all its insistence on the new, a relational modernity is inevitably part of a generational dynamic. Modernity rebels against its parental precursors, only to be rebelled against by its inheritors: yet another form of the family romance. It occupies an uneasy location between the pre-modern that it disrupts and the post-modern that disrupts it. Never fully stable, it exists in the middle of a prepositional chain, defined by its coming after the traditional and before the postmodern.
Third, this chain of prepositions in generational succession challenges the relational assumption of freedom from history. The (self)consciousness of modernity--the sense of radical rupture from the immediate past--refuses the principle of historical continuity and evolution in its insistence on origin, newness, and revolution. Indeed, it denies its own production as a historical formation. History produces change as well as continuity; the new cultural and institutional formations of modernity are themselves the product of historical process.
Moreover, the relational notion of modernity tends to resist just the immediate past, often leapfrogging the prior generation in a reinvocation of a more distant past as an inspiration of rebellion. To justify this rejection, inaccurate or heuristic readings or even demonizations of one's recent precursors are common, much as the modernists (inaccurately) condemned the Victorian realists to epistemological and psychological naïveté, much as the postmodernists (inaccurately) reduce the modernists to mere makers of Enlightenment grand narratives. As Paul de Man suggests in echoing Nietzsche, modernity involves a form of "ruthless forgetting," the "desire to wipe out whatever came earlier," not the actual erasure of the past. 30 As such, the relational consciousness of modernity is based in historical illusionism--an insistence on "making it new" as a manifesto that refuses to acknowledge the presence of the past in the present and future. The more modernity protests its absolute newness, the more it suppresses its rootedness in history. And the more that history is repressed, the more it returns in symbolic forms to haunt and disrupt the illusionary and ideological mythology of the new.
A relational approach to defining modern/modernity/modernism presumes the possibility of consensual agreement about the meanings of the terms as the structural principle of radical rupture--wherever, whenever, and in whatever forms it might occur. Freed from the fixity a noun suggests, the relational definition appears to garner more agreement across and within disciplines. However, a closer look reveals a pattern of contradiction just as the nominal approach does. Like the noun modernity, the adjectival form slips and slides between meanings rooted in the possibility and impossibility of "making it new." If the adjectival form of modernity signifies both revolution and evolution, both the break from history and its return, of what descriptive use is it?
* * *
Both nominal and relational meanings of modern/modernity/modernism end in contradiction, signaling a phenomenon that signifies both the formation of hegemonies and their dissolution, the production of grand narratives and their dismantling. As noun and adjective, modernity is a term at war with itself, a term that unravels its own definition, a term that codifies the principle of indeterminacy and in so doing opposes its own commitment to perpetual change.
In sum, the grammatical/philosophical approach to a definitional project confirms the partial and misleading nature of any definition that focuses on only the nominal or only the relational meanings of modernity. Modernity is not solely a fixed set of characteristics that might have appeared in a given space and time, such as the European Enlightenment or the twentieth-century avant-garde in the arts. Nor is modernity exclusively the principle of rupture. Modernity is best grasped as a set of meanings that encompasses both the specificities of nouns and the relational structures of comparative adjectives. Additionally, this combined approach suggests that meaning does not lie exclusively with either the formation of hegemonies or their dismantling. Instead, modernity encompasses both centripetal and centrifugal forces in contradiction and constant interplay. I pose this neither as a concept of historical stages nor as a utopian dialectic. Rather, I insist upon a meaning produced liminally in between, a dialogic that pits the contradictory processes of formation and deformation against each other, each as necessary to the other.
Political/Cultural Route: The grammatical/philosophical excursions lack historical and geographical contextualization, lack reflexivity about the production and consumption of meaning, lack attention to issues of power and the institutionalization of knowledge in the definitional project itself. Definitions don't come into being or function in an abstract cosmos of pure reason or arbitrary signification. (Pace linguists and philosophers: decontextualized definitions have their place, but only a partial one in the arena of contestation.) The textual unconscious of definitional debate is also a political unconscious. More issues must be posed under a broadly defined umbrella of cultural studies in historical, global, and comparative contexts.
We need to ask: Who is producing a given set of meanings for modern/modernity/modernism? For what audience? From what position or standpoint in space and time? For what purpose and with what effect? What cultural work do these meanings perform? In what way was and is modernity a set of cultural formations with diverse parts and functions, manifesting differently in various temporal and spatial situations, with different effects? How do power relations condition the production, dissemination, and reception of contested meanings? In short, how do questions of power and politics shape both the concept of modernity and the historical phenomena to which the term refers? These are questions upon which a cultural studies approach to definitional power relations focuses. 31
Modernist studies tends to produce three distinct conrations in the politics of definition: the binary, the circle, and the metonym. Recognizing all three helps to expose the flows of power in the institutionalization of knowledge.
The definitional act itself typically depends upon a binary of inclusion and exclusion. Depending on who does the defining, certain phenomena belong to the category of modern,modernity, or modernism. Other phenomena do not. By definition. Definitional acts establish territories, map terrains, determine centers, margins, and areas "beyond the pale." Attempts to establish permeable borderlands instead of fixed boundaries and liminal spaces of considerable intermixing between differences diffuse to some extent the territorial imperative of definition but cannot ultimately eliminate the function of categories to demarcate some phenomena in opposition to others which do not belong. As Toni Morrison writes about canon formation (a type of definitional act in literary, art, and religious history), "Canon building is Empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range . . . is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested." 32
Take, for example, the conventional social theory concept of modernity as the invention of the West, as reflected in this assertion by a leading sociologist of modernity, Anthony Giddens:
When we speak of modernity, however, we refer to institutional transformations that have their origins in the West. How far is modernity distinctively Western? . . . [T]wo distinct organisational complexes are of particular significance in the development of modernity: the nation-state and systematic capitalist production. Both have their roots in specific characteristics of European history and have few parallels in prior periods or in other cultural settings. If, in close conjunction with one another, they have since swept across the world, this is above all because of the power they have generated. . . . Is modernity distinctively a Western project in terms of the ways of life fostered by these two great transformative agencies? To this query, the blunt answer must be "yes." 33
To what extent does this definition reflect the western standpoint of Giddens and social theorists like him--not only as products themselves of the West but also as specialists in western societies and history? Without a sufficient knowledge base in the civilizations of Asia, Africa, and the non-Anglo Americas, is it any surprise that the definitional binary of inclusion/exclusion is profoundly Eurocentric, all the more so when the approach is more nominal than relational? (No.) Such Eurocentrism is pervasive in the field whether the writer is celebrating (like Habermas) or critiquing (like Harvey) western modernity. Left intact is a center/periphery model of globalization in which the West invents and exports, while the periphery assimilates and copies. Left unexamined is the degree to which the production of western forms of modernity resulted from the heightened interaction western societies had with nonwestern others--with the Other of the western imaginary; and, with the real, heterogenous, multiplicitous others outside the West. Also left unexplored is the production of different modernities through the histories of nonwestern peoples.
Listen to the difference between Giddens's binarist logic and that evident in Sanjay Subrahmanyam's view, which originates in his standpoint and knowledge base outside the West, foregrounds intercultural contact among civilizations as constitutive of modernity, and assumes multiple nodal points for the modern around the globe:
I have tried to argue that modernity is historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse phenomena--the Mongol dream of world conquest, European voyages of exploration, activities of Indian textile traders in the diaspora . . . and so forth. 34
Subrahmanyam's notion still establishes an inside/outside for modernity, but the center is not by definition western and singular. Rather, it is scattered, interactive, and multiple. His approach invites a rethinking of the times and places of modernity. Where else might accelerated societal change brought about by a combination of new technologies, knowledge revolutions, state formations, and expanding intercultural contacts contribute to radical questioning and dismantling of traditional ontologies, epistemologies, and institutional structures? What about the Tang Dynasty in China, with its great metropolis as the cultural/political center of a vast empire (about 600-900 a.d.)? Or Mughal India? Or Timbuktu, a large city and mercantile hub in West Africa at about the same time the cities of Europe were, relatively speaking, backwaters to the great centers of learning and trade in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East?
The approach of Giddens and Subrahmanyam to defining modernity--however different their politics--exhibits the familiar problem of the hermeneutic circle as well as the binary of inclusion and exclusion. 35 Defining historical periods and conditions or movements in the arts and writing depends upon a circular process. Definers often identify the characteristics of the modern, modernity, and modernism by describing the qualities of the phenomena that they have already assumed to exist within the boundaries of the category. Put differently, definitional mapping relies upon prior assumptions of where the boundary belongs, assumptions that reflect the preexisting beliefs or standpoint of the mapmaker. Such circularity has a politics--all the interests are vested, as Morrison says.
Take for example the literary history of modernism. Periodization, canonization, and the naming of the defining characteristics of modernism are all based on a pool of tenets, people, and/or events whose selection depends upon preexisting notions of the period. Thus, Hugh Kenner declares that expatriate internationalism is a central defining characteristic of High Modernism and uses writers like Pound, Eliot, and Joyce to demonstrate his assertions. On this basis, he asserts that Williams, Faulkner, and Woolf are "provincial" or "regional" writers, not modernists. But if he had included these writers in his pool of modernists to begin with, his generalizations about modernism would have been different. So might his concept of the internationalism of modernism if his pool had included writers from Africa, South America, and Asia. 36
The case of the Harlem Renaissance in modernist studies is even more striking. The literature, arts, and music of African Americans centered in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s are simply missing from conventional maps of modernism. Not even represented with an occasional token re, as female modernists like Woolf and Stein sometimes are. Simply not there. Picasso's primitivism, Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, Eliot's apelike Sweeney, Sherwood Anderson's "dark laughter," Faulkner's racially divided South--all exist on the terrain of canonical modernist studies. But not the primary producers of jazz, not the black artists turning to an imaginary (or real) Africa, not the blues singers and the folk, leaving the rural South for the urban North in the Great Migration, not the soldiers returning from a brutal war to demand more freedoms. Their linguistic and rhythmic experimentation, intertextual "signifyin,'" Africanist mythmaking, parodic mimicry, revolutionary fervor, and self-identification with the New do not seem to qualify them for literary modernism in most histories of the movement even though these same histories frequently list formalist experimentation, citation, mythic analogues, irony, and self-reflexivity as definitional markers. Since the Harlem Renaissance is largely absent from the pool of texts out of which literary historians generate definitional characterizations of modernism, the particular formulations of modernity produced by African Americans are also missing. 37
Another form the politics of definition takes is the identification of certain res or qualities to stand for the whole. This metonymic substitution of the part for the whole is widespread in the establishment of the reigning characteristics of the historical condition of modernity or the aesthetic constellation of modernism. To some, Locke or Rousseau are supreme embodiments of Enlightenment modernity; to others, Joyce is the defining icon of modernism. Similarly, some might characterize western modernity in terms of the rise of the bourgeoisie, democracy, and science; others might define modernism in terms of utopian social planning or the poetics of disruption. Common to all such definitional generalizations is the heuristic tendency to characterize the whole in terms of what the historian retrospectively believes to be its most influential or significant components. In this way, categories like modernity and modernism govern or contain different cultural formations, absorbing their specificities within the definitional boundaries of the privileged metonymic part. And such categorical discipline returns us to the locational question of who is producing these metonymic histories. Who and what has been left out? For what purposes? With what effects?
* * *
The tendency of binarist, circular, and metonymic definitional acts to reproduce the play of power relations within institutions of knowledge might lead some to affirm the need for epistemological anarchy--the elimination of all such periodizing categories. However, the problematic of definitional history should not, in my view, result in its abandonment. Rather, as Jameson writes, "The problem of periodization and its categories, which are certainly in crisis today . . . seem to be as indispensable as they are unsatisfactory for any kind of work in cultural study" (PU, 28). Without historical categories, we would face an infinity of singularities, an approach to knowledge that requires some form of selection that is no more politically neutral than the heuristic construction of historical narratives. Without some definitional categories, the politics of choice would be driven further underground, rendered even less visible.
Given our need for definitional categories, however imperfect they are, what, then, does the political/cultural route have to offer? I regard the binarist, circular, and metonymic problems inherent in definitional acts not as dead ends but rather as opportunities for interrogation that lead right into the heart of the dialogic meanings of modern, modernity, and modernism. They insist upon a recognition of how such terms are themselves historical constructions--with their own history, development, function, and effect, all of which invite interpretation and critique. Different conrations of modernity reflect the different positionalities of their producers, serve different interests, and have different effects. It is this which returns us to the question of politics--how power relations inform not only the cultural artifacts of modernity but also the subsequent readings of them.
BangClash: In a Nietzschean (or perhaps Fanonian) mood, Amiri Baraka writes:
Harlem is vicious
modernism. BangClash.
. . .
Can you stand such beauty.
So violent and transforming. 38
Whether the BangClash of definitional contestation produces such transformative beauty is doubtful. But this excursion--through the byways of story, parataxis, hypertextual detour, aphorism, and collage--has an end point. I have been resisting the desire to come up with my own product, yet another definition of modernity and modernism for others to argue about or ignore. (Resistance is never easy. The magnetic slide toward fixed meaning feels irresistible at times.) Instead, I have attempted to shift attention to the processes and patterns of definitional contestation.
In these terms, there is a conclusion of sorts to be made. Definitional dissonance matters. The fact of not only diverse but downright opposite meanings signifies. These differences should not be ignored as accidental or arbitrary, the ordinary product of disciplinary background or semantic disagreement. Nor should they be tamed within the deceptive inclusiveness of pluralism. In practice, the pluralization of modernity and modernism runs the risk of covertly reinstating a center/periphery pattern in which a hegemonic norm is covertly privileged over marginal variations. 39 Instead the BangClash should be confronted directly.
The grammatical/philosophical and political/cultural routes I explored suggest that the oppositional meanings of modern/modernity/modernism point to the contradictory dialogic running through the historical and expressive formations of the phenomena to which the terms allude. Order and disruption are symbiotically necessary to each other for each to have its distinctive meaning. The center comes into being as it dissipates. Modernity's grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling. The lifeblood of modernity's chaos is its order. The impulse to order is the product of chaos. Modernism requires tradition to "make it new." Tradition comes into being only as it is rebelled against. Definitional excursions into the meanings of modern,modernity, and modernism begin and end in reading the specificities of these contradictions.
Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin. Her essay is part of a book-in-progress entitled "Transnational Modernism: Spatial Poetics, Politics, and the New Modernist Studies."
1. This essay is a short version of a chapter in my work-in-progress, "Transnational Modernism:Spatial Poetics, Politics, and the New Modernist Studies." An even shorter version was presented at the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, May 2000, and at the Modernist Studies Association conference, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, October 2000. I am indebted to these audiences for their questions and encouragement and to Rita Felski for an astute reading and critique.
2. I echo here Ezra Pound's famous slogan and two influential early essays, Harry Levin's "What Was Modernism?" in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 271-95, and Maurice Beebe's "What Modernism Was," Journal of Modern Literature 3 (July 1974): 1065-84.
3. "Introduction," Modernism, 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 27.
4. Anthony Giddens, Foreword to NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity, ed. Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xii.
5. Robert Caserio, The Novel in England, 1900-1950 (New York: Twayne, 1999), 82.
6. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 139.
7. Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 26.
8. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 89-90.
9. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 151.
10. "Introduction: Subjectivity and Modernity's Other," in Modernity and Identity, ed. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 1. But they also write, "modernity is a matter of movement, of flux, of change, of unpredictability" (ibid.).
11. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Conrations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 25.
12. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii-xxiv.
13. Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 6.
14. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 267-8.
15. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 10-2; hereafter abbreviated as CP.
16. Ibid., 35. I end this chain of paratactic pairs with quotations from the same author to highlight the existence of unexamined and seemingly un-self-reflexive contradiction within the work of the same person.
17. In ways different from my own, others have noted contradictions in passing or in an attempt to resolve the conflict. See for example Rita Felski's The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), where her succinct summary paves the way for her advocacy of a cultural studies approach to western modernity from the Enlightenment to its break up in the early twentieth century (12-3); hereafter abbreviated as GM; Bernard Yack's The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1997), where he reviews four distinct concepts of modernity in the West (philosophical, sociological, political, and aesthetic) and argues that for all their differences they share "an emphasis on innovation and challenge to traditional authority" (35, 1-40); hereafter abbreviated as FM; Eric Rothstein emphasizes the heterogeneous distributions of modernity within the modern while refusing nominal, relational, and stagist approaches in "Broaching a Cultural Login of Modernity" in Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 2 : 359-94; and Marshall Berman's All That Is Not Solid Melts into Air resolves the contradictions with a notion of evolutionary stages within modernity.
18. I do not examine the term modernization because there is more consensus about its basic meaning as the process that brings about modernity (however that may be defined); debates about the causes, effects, and politics of modernization of course abound.
19. The relation between the terms modern/postmodern and modernism/postmodernism is as contested as the meanings of the root words and beyond the scope of this essay. Many social theorists use postmodern or postmodernism to refer to the rupture from Enlightenment modernity, regarding the aesthetic dismantlings of this modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as early harbingers of the change to come later and more broadly in the twentieth century. What many others understand to be modernity and modernism are thus folded into postmodernism. See for example Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. Because of the inconsistency in terminology, their critiques of societal modernism are often misunderstood to be attacks on aesthetic modernism as well. The difficulty in determining whether postmodernism represents an intensification of modernism or a radical rupture from it is compounded by these differing uses of the terms modernity/modernism and postmodern/postmodernism. Left unexplored is the possibility that the most significant break from modernity is just now in the making, through the knowledge revolution instituted by the computer and the related effects of accelerating globalization.
20. See Freud's Papers on Technique, especially "The Dynamics of the Transference" and "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through," volume 13 of the Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 85-327. In The Fetishism of Modernities, Yack characterizes the postmodernists' attention to modernity as an "obsession" and a "fetishism" that leads to misleading totalizations of a epoch much at odds with their advocacy of petits recits and heterogeneity (1-16).
21. See especially Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36-91; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981); hereafter abbreviated as PU; Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 94-207; and Shoshana Felman, Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 27-51.
22. I am indebted to Noel Carroll for bringing to my attention nominal and relational modes of definition in the discipline of philosophy. I have added to his observation the grammatical dimension, emphasizing the distinction between nouns and adjectives in definitions of modern/modernity/modernism.
23. Although some scholars invoke one mode rather than the other, many use both. See for example Anthony Giddens's nominal assertion in Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 14-5: "I use the term 'modernity' in a very general sense, to refer to the institutions and modes of behavior established first of all in post-feudal Europe, but which in the twentieth-century increasingly have become world-historical in their impact. 'Modernity' can be understood as roughly equivalent to 'the industrialised world', so long as it is recognised that industrialism is not its only institutional dimension." But in a relational mode, he writes, "Inherent in the idea of modernity is a contrast with tradition." The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 36.
24. See for example, Giddens; Harvey; Lyotard; Scott; Yack; Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3-14, and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Arjun Appdurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Model Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, et al. (Malden, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1996).
25. See for example, Modernism, ed. Bradbury and McFarlane and The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), collections which in spite of their exclusions maintain a seminal position in defining the meanings and canon of aesthetic modernism. For more recent definitional overviews, see Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Margot Norris, "Modernist Eruptions," in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 311-30; Marjorie Perloff, "Modernist Studies," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Publications, 1992), 154-78; Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1987); Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); TheGender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Clark; and Jardine.
26. The association of modernism and modernity with Europe and the United States in the humanities not only excludes nonwestern locations but also contains peripheries within "the West"--including, for example, margins based on gender, race, and geography, namely those of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and locations such as Spain, Portugal, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, Brazil, and the Caribbean. See for example Scott; DeKoven; Felski; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Joseph Allen Boone, Libindinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988-1994); Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Alice Gambrell, Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference: Transatlantic Culture, 1919-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Ned J. Davison, The Concept of Modernism in Hispanic Criticism (Boulder, Colo.: Pruett Press, 1966).
27. Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3-50.
28. In developing a "scalar" model of modernity in "Broaching a Cultural Logic of Modernity," Eric Rothstein works with a relational mode in describing societies as "hot," "warm," or "cold" in reference to how intense or pervasive the phenomenon or phenomenology of rupture are in a given time and space. His relational approach to periodization takes into account the heterogeneity within any so-called period at the same time that some measure of nominal generalization is acknowledged.
29. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Thomas Pinkney (New York: Verso, 1989), 32-36. The first essay in this collection, "When Was Modernism?" alludes to and revises the earlier essays by Levin and Beebe.
30. Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity," in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 147-8. See GM, CP, 36-8, and FM, 12-3 for variations on this argument.
31. See GM, and "New Cultural Theories of Modernity," in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000), in which she claims that the blend of aesthetics and sociology that characterizes cultural studies fosters consideration of not only elite culture but also the cultural practices of everyday life, popular and mass culture, and the voices of those often marginalized or regarded as sheer victims.
32. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (winter 1989): 1-34, esp. 8.
33. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 174-5.
34. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400- 1750," Daedalus 127, no. 3 : 99-100. Himself part of the South Asian diaspora, Subrahmanyam lives and works in Paris. His essay is part of a special issue of Daedalus edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter entitled "Early Modernities" that critiques the use of the West as "the major yardstick" by which other modernities are measured and calls for the exploration of alternative early modernities . Eisenstadt followed up this pathbreaking issue with another special issue called "Multiple Modernities," Daedalus 129, no. 1 . For another attack on western diffusionist models of modernity, see Charles S. Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era," American Historical Review 105, no. 3 : 1-47.
35. I am indebted to Cyrena Pondrom's application of the notion of the hermeneutic circle to definitional issues in modernist studies (unpublished paper). For related critiques of the circularity of literary history, see for example Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Meaning, 1910-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 9-12, and Jameson's The Political Unconscious, 27-8.
36. Hugh Kenner, "The Making of the Modernist Canon," Chicago Review 34 (spring 1984): 49-61.
37. This absence has begun to change with the publication of literary histories that incorporate black writers into the landscape of a diverse modernism, although some critics still segregate black modernism and others discuss only white appropriations of black art forms. See for example Gilroy; Baker; DuPlessis; Boone; Nelson; Gambrell; James De Jongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellectuals, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Laura Doyle, Bordering the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);and Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
38. Amiri Baraka, "Return of the Native," cited as epigraph for De Jongh's Vicious Modernism.
39. See for example, Nicholls's Modernisms; its plural title suggests heterogeneity, but its contents devote twelve chapters to western, white, male modernism and female modernism is herded into one chapter entitled "At a Tangent: Other Modernisms." In my book in progress, "Transnational Modernism," I argue for the resingularization of modernity and modernism, suggesting that these phenomena take on historical and geographical specificity within a transnational and global landscape.
Welcome to the first MSA conference issue of . The essays appearing here and in future issues will be culled from some of the best work presented at the annual conference of the recently founded Modernist Studies Association. This issue will not be a proceedings volume, but a collection of full-length journal articles by modernists generating the most exciting work in the field at this pivotal moment of its renewal. Now in its third year, the MSA meeting continues to assemble a rapidly growing community of modernists seeking a forum for vital scholarly exchange; and I hope to reproduce that enthusiasm and intellectual energy annually. In this venture, I share the aims of the MSA and of my co-editors to provide an international and interdisciplinary forum for the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts.
Generally speaking, the essays in this issue present some recent approaches to modernism and modernity. Four of its more topical articles examine variously: the "witnessing"of war (John Whittier-Ferguson); the interaction between poetry and avant-garde film (Susan McCabe); gender and classical, ritual performance (Edward P. Comentale); and the influence of the mid-century rather than the late-Victorian period (Jessica R. Feldman). Two nontraditional, speculative essays frame the issue, an intricate polemic on the marketing of modernism (Jennifer Wicke), and a "definitional excursion" into the meanings of modern/modernity/modernism across space and time (Susan Stanford Friedman). More specifically, all six essays might be organized around the theme, "mak[ing] it new," both as that enterprise recalls the association of Pound's famous dictum with aesthetic innovation, and in its application to the "new" modernist studies' engagement with interdisciplinary, cultural, social, and historical critical angles arising in the academy from the 1970s to the present. Thus, Wicke and Friedman interrogate (among other things) the long-term politics of the "new modernisms'" self-designation as "new." McCabe and Whittier-Ferguson focus on aesthetic innovation, across disciplines (poetry and film), and as mediated by history (war). And Feldman and Comentale reject modernism's claim to spontaneous renewal entirely, searching out its cross-fertilizations with Victorian or classical tradition. Given their differing orientations toward the new, the following essays often represent contradictory, even dissenting, discourses of modernism and modernity--on the potentially transformative or supremacist affinities of the avant-garde's preoccupation with violent rupture, for example.
The first MSA conference issue begins appropriately with Wicke's inquiry into the resurgent retailing of modernism, "Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism's Speculative Bubble." Using economic metaphors and provocative conceits, she speculates widely on what happens when modernism becomes (once more) a brand name. What ventures or misadventures attend its rebranding? Wicke advances another frame for the "new" modernist critical enterprise drawn from Ernst Bloch's Novum and his related conception of "colportage," an ever-shifting, culturally transformative, market version of bricolage. Wicke's illumination of the new "lying immanent in colportage" includes modernist artifacts ranging from Leopold Bloom's anomalous reading matter to the unexpected commercial success of insurgent Mexican cinema.
McCabe's timely "'Delight in Dislocation': The Cinematic Modernism of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray" explores the impact of avant-garde cinema's dislocated, automaton bodies on Gertrude Stein's disjunctive, repetitious, "continuous present." While she devotes much needed attention to the juxtaposition of experimental poetry and avant-garde film--here exemplified by Man Ray's self-described "cinepoem," Emak Bakia, and Stein's "Mrs. Emerson"--her essay more broadly interrogates the role of bodily volition and processes of attention in modernity. McCabe thus investigates the intimate relation of Stein's cinematic modernism to comedy--iconized for Stein and the avant-garde by Charlie Chaplin's trademark, nonpurposive "jerky gait"--and to hysteria--formalized by Jean-Martin Charcot's Tuesday lecture/performances of hysterical bodies suffering the "disease of attention."
In Whittier-Ferguson's "The Liberation of Gertrude Stein: War and Writing," Stein, the examplar of anti-narrative innovation (further elucidated by McCabe's essay) competes with a more historically accountable Stein, who is also a war writer and public re compelled to bear witness to her experience of World War II. Defining war as a "crucial cause of the excitements and horrors of modernity [which were] as much aesthetic and ontological as . . . sociopolitical and military," Whittier-Ferguson argues that Stein's war writings display her modernity "as fully as . . . her gnostic, avant-garde writings." Moreover, Stein's vacillation between referential and nonreferential writing is uniquely suited to depicting the state of war.
Both Feldman and Comentale's very different essays reject the modernist aesthetic of renewal, dislocation, and rupture from the past for, respectively, a Victorian modernism and a ritualized classical modernism emphasizing continuity and interrelation.
Disputing the strict periodization that has defined modernism in reaction against the mid-century Victorian era, Feldman's "Modernism's Victorian Bric-à-brac" delineates a hybrid, interdisciplinary, Victorian modernism which considers "works of art as webs of relations and ideas with multiple centers and gaps, a filigree-in-progress." Accordingly, Feldman focuses here on domestic, decorative art, using Dante Gabriel Rossetti's home at 16 Cheyne Walk as an example of Victorian modernism's rich arrangements of "things, people, and works of art." The example of Rossetti's bric-à-brac affords an alternative view of modernist literary history which includes nineteenth-century, domestic women writers, experimental poets, and high modernists as well as avant-garde painters.
Comentale revisits the modernist debate between romanticism and classicism in "Thesmophoria: Suffragettes, Sympathetic Magic, and H.D.'s Ritual Poetics," asserting that both avant-garde movements--such as surrealism, impressionism, and futurism--and bourgeois society's investment in revolution stem from an oppressive, romantic metaphysic. Their shared binary logic, which demands "the presence of some fallen other" and the belief in an (artistic or divine) realm transcending the fallen world, predisposes modern art and the common man to fascistic violence and discourses of masculine, racial, and cultural superiority. Comentale posits an alternative classical modernism embraced by women protesters--from the suffragettes and classical scholar, Jane Ellen Harrison, to classical poet, H.D.--who discovered in classical ritual a counter praxis whereby communal, bodily, symbolic enactments of desires rooted in the material world serve to expose, challenge, and reshape social relations.
This MSA conference issue concludes with Friedman's "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism," a confrontation of the glaring contradictions adhering to modernist studies, and not incidentally, to the essays collected here. Describing her essay as an "excursion" "through the byways of story, parataxis, hypertextual detour, aphorism, and collage," Friedman asks, "What is modernity? What is or was modernism?" Is it the poetics of change, the (illusory) break with the past, the crisis of representation, fragmentation? Is it totalization, tradition, industrialization, imperial conquest? Such contradictions exist across generations, disciplines, and within the same fields, even the same texts. How do we begin to unravel them? Can they be dismissed as arbitrary, or "tamed" through pluralization, given the increasing interdisciplinarity of modernist studies? Friedman shifts her attention from resolution to interrogation as she charts the processes and patterns of modernist definitional contestation using conceptual frames improvised from philosophy and cultural studies. What is assumed? Shared? Bypassed?
By 1934 Gertrude Stein retrospectively claimed that her writing had been "doing what the cinema was doing," and she acknowledged film as key to her historical moment:
I cannot repeat this too often any one is of one's period and this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production. And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing. 1
Kenneth Macpherson, editor of the premiere film journal Close Up (1927-33), recognized the cinematic quality of Stein's writing and widely recruited "anything [she] might send," stressing that "the kind of thing [she] write[s] is so exactly the kind of thing that could be translated to the screen." 2 Stein appeared in three issues of the journal, and in 1927, published her portrait, "Mrs. Emerson," which was placed next to a piece by Man Ray about his first full-length experimental film, Emak Bakia. 3 That these texts appear side by side is no accident.
While the importance of modern painting to the development of Stein's art has been amply demonstrated, her specific connections to film have been, for the most part, unexplored. I contend that avant-garde cinema newly illuminates her strategies of representation and embodiment; the adjacency of Man Ray's article to "Mrs. Emerson" foregrounds the complicity of the apparently distinct aesthetic discourses of modern poetry and cinema. Film embodies Stein's notion of "a groping for a continuous present" and "an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again," 4 what she earlier designates as "all living as repeating." 5 Maya Deren refers to this kind of film measure as a "telescoping of time," "a continuous act of recognition," that becomes "like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double exposure." 6 With the relentlessly mechanical moving picture, memory becomes a form of erasure, and Stein, obsessed by the processes of forgetting, compared her written portraits to the cinema in which "one second was never the same as the second before or after" ("PR," 195). Stein praised the cinema's ability to render the temporal displacement of "existing" in which "the emphasis is different [with each repeated moment] just as the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to make it all be moving. And each one of us has to do that, otherwise there is no existing" ("PR," 179). With its elements of succession and variation, amnesia and movement, film seemed to solve the apparent conflict between inanimate mechanical reproduction and "existing," and formed Stein's prototypic medium for embodying the vital flux and crisis of a "continuous present."
The modernist crisis of representation became, for many artists, a crisis of embodiment; and experimental film made visible a body never visible before--one at once whole and in pieces. Like other modernists, Stein had to negotiate the literal, posttraumatic, bodily disrements caused by World War I. 7 Further, although prevailing modernist paradigms sequestered the mind from the body, the corporeal became metonymic with film's materiality and haunted the literary works of this period. Stein's confessed attraction to film, however, contrasted with the more dismissive stance taken by other "high" modernists (among them T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens) who associated film with the reviled, ephemeral body. Stein, by contrast, rejected the resources of the past, simultaneously insisting upon a willed forgetfulness--as if the shock of the present obliterates the capacity or desire to remember--and an expansion of bodily, sensory pleasures which Peter Nicholls has called the "bodily allure" of her words. 8 Yet Stein's recuperations of viscerality did not assert bodily wholeness; rather, Stein's alternate modernism depended upon the incarnated, "existing," and, dismembered body materialized by avant-garde film.
Here I explore specifically how the fragmented, repetitive bodies and techniques of modernist experimental film (represented largely by Man Ray's Emak Bakia) impact upon the decentered plots and bodily disjunction of Stein's poems, and particularly of "Mrs. Emerson." Stein's cinematic modernism relies upon the mechanical, circumambulatory bodily depictions of both hysteria--the Freudian disease of modernity--and modern comedy, iconicized for the avant-garde by Charlie Chaplin's trademark gestural slapstick. I hope to show that the considerable attention Stein devoted to the often interchangeable, cultural representations of the hysteric and the comic originated from, respectively, her early fascination with experimental psychology at Radcliffe in the 1890s (which culminated in a coauthored article, "Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of the Character in its Relation to Attention"), and her abiding fascination with Chaplin whose comedic semiotics of the body she associated with the practice of her poetry. I further argue that the modernist crisis of embodiment pervading the discourses of psychology and the comedic connect the techniques of experimental film with those of modern poetry.
Before exploring the relationship between these diverse res (Stein, Man Ray, and Chaplin), however, it would be useful to establish how modern poetry converged with the aesthetics of film montage, linking the dislocated, automaton body of modernity with the avant-garde subordination of plot to somatic, disjunctive rhythms. Sergei Eisenstein theorized the connection between poetry and film by drawing, as Pound had done, upon haiku and ideographic language, invoking rhythm and the "concept of intervals," for instance, to explain montage. 9 "The whole charm of poetry" emerges, his theory explicitly states, from the "reconstruction of the event in montage fragments" where "the plot is no more than a device" ("DA," 60-1). Evoking Flaubert's ideal of a book "about nothing," charged by the "force of its style," Eisenstein emphasized that dramatic tension revolves around "the methodology of form--not content or plot!" ("DA," 49). These aesthetic criterion resonate with the antimimetic imperative in avant-garde film and Stein's poetic credo.
The kinship between modern poetry and film that I examine in this essay hinges upon the subordination of plot to rhythm, but also upon a montage aesthetics that privileges the fragment and its abrasion of other fragments. Film "pieces," as Eisenstein defines montage, orchestrate in a "rhythm" produced through the "collision of independent shots" ("DA," 49). He emphatically asserts that artistic dynamism emerges out of the "irregularity of the part in relation to the laws of the system as a whole" ("DA," 47; emphasis added). Similarly, the dislocated bodies of modernity, as we will see, depend upon the part as detachable from the whole. Like Stein and Man Ray, Eisenstein foregrounds the fragmentary moment--"[t]he shot is a montage cell"-- while giving it corporeal, relational consequence ("DA," 53). Film art, like poetry, insists upon the body in flux, not as transcendental signifier; Eisenstein consistently construes montage as embodied poesis, even as that body composes itself through the collision of fragments.
However, while modern poetry and film intersected through the dislocated body, the very somatic traumas of modernity made, as Walter Benjamin writes in his famous essay on Baudelaire, the "possibility of lyric poetry questionable." 10 Film threatened to supplant poetry as a medium more suited to the immediacy and eviscerated attention of modernity: "There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle" ("SM," 175). Baudelaire's capacity to place "shock experience at the very center of his artistic work," Benjamin claims, enabled his unique success, but raised the stakes for the body of the modern poem in competition with an emergent film medium ("SM," 163). Cinema more capably induces an automatic "reaction to shocks," Benjamin elaborates, since the "rhythm of production on a conveyer belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in film" ("SM," 175). 11 I hope to demonstrate, however, that Stein's poetry rendered this characteristic automatism issuing from overwhelming shock experience the "kinaesthetic" ground of her modernism. Like Benjamin's cinematic "conveyer belt," which relies on mechanical repetition, Stein's writing strove to reproduce dislocated experience where "one second was never the same as the second before or after" ("PR," 195).
Finally, Stein embodies Benjamin's model of modernity's accelerated shock experience as it impinges upon "remembrance"--the crystallizing of experience through reflection. According to Benjamin, reflex takes over as modern consciousness strives for "protection against stimuli" ("SM," 161). Modern consciousness, in this way, approximates the fragmenting shutter mechanism in film, and attention is held at the expense of contiguity. Visceral shock jolts the body into grasping an experience and simultaneously threatens to blot its memory. By contrast, Proustian memory (in Benjamin's essay) commits itself to disinterring what is uncovered by the "mémoire involuntaire," that which has "not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an experience" ("SM," 160). If, as Benjamin claims, it is necessary for Proust to chance upon an object that will unfold unconscious memories, Stein makes an art out of such stumbling for its own sake. Her writing forgets itself as it perambulates. Lacking the high modernist desire to monumentalize the past as interior or collective memory, Stein enacts a consciousness embodied through automatic gesture and immersed in the porous breakdown of continuity. Her writing--a kind of shock absorber--resists remembering: "We in this period have not lived in remembering, we have living in moving being necessarily so intense that existing is indeed something, is indeed that thing that we are doing" ("PR," 182).
Thus, the "series production" of Stein's modernism mechanizes and fragments corporeality, creating a cinema of vivisection in which the reflexive body does not quite hold together or congeal. Similarly, Man Ray describes Emak Bakia in Close Up as adamantly serial and partial, a "series of fragments, a cinepoem with a certain optical sequence [that] make up a whole that still remains a fragment." 12 A still of repeating frames from the film accompanying Man Ray's article illustrates this emphasis on the part ( 1). Precluding ultimate cohesion, Stein similarly articulates: "A whole is inside a part" in "Salad Dressing and an Artichoke." 13 The "period of the cinema" consequently became for Stein the period of the fragment. "[I]t is not possible," she writes of her era, "to choose a completed sentence a completed thing." 14 (Oddly, Stein responded with terror the first time she saw her "speaking body on screen" in a 1930s newsreel. 15 I propose that Stein's terror emerged from seeing herself as a whole, animate body in a reproduction that did not match her sense of dislocated corporeality.) Stein's emphasis on the fragment suggests Kaja Silverman's observation that "a unified bodily ego comes into existence only as the result of a laborious stitching together of disparate parts." 16 While film allows for a continuous motion or present, the spliced pieces perpetuate its seeming smoothness.
The first part of this essay develops the theme of Stein's (and to a lesser extent, Man Ray's) debt to cinematic bodily representations of plotlessness and the fragmented continuous present. It focuses particularly on Charlie Chaplin's aimless, "jerky" gait as iconic for the avant-garde in general and for Stein and Man Ray's art practices in particular. The second section explores Stein's early experiments in behavioral psychology and her understanding of the hysterical body (or approximations of it) which culminated in her first publication "Motor Automatism." While these experiments remain largely unexamined, regarded as irrelevant to Stein's poetic experiments, they dramatically prere her cinematic embodiment of distracted and forgetful attention. The third portion of this essay examines how modernist representations of the hysterical and comedic body (already hinted at in "Motor Automatism") overlap, becoming interchangeable through Henri Bergson's definitions of comedy and Jean-Martin Charcot's formulations of hysteria. The essay concludes with a detailed delineation of Stein's incorporation of these cultural tropes of bodily dislocation in "Mrs. Emerson" through juxtaposition with Man Ray's Emak Bakia.
While many other texts might serve to demonstrate Stein's cinematic writing (as Macpherson suggests), "Mrs. Emerson" forms an exemplary "collection of repeated references," filmicly scored (CM, 25). Margaret Dickie suggests that Stein's "willingness to detach words from referential meaning" and to arrange them in abstract designs often overshadows her anatomizing of the body. 17 Yet "Mrs. Emerson" is at once both abstract, and explicitly sensory and physical: "I do not share unless you are coming unless you are coming to caress country." 18 Similarly, Man Ray's films are abstract and plotless (particularly Emak Bakia), and as Inez Hedges observes of Man Ray's L'Etoile de Mer, place the "human body on equal footing with objects." 19 Neither Stein nor Man Ray in their apparently "pure" antinarrativity forsakes embodiment, but instead focuses upon the body in segments and gestures. As popular icon, Charlie Chaplin haunts these texts, linking the gestural body, modernist comedy, and experimental representation. Like Chaplin and Man Ray, Stein abandons the illusionist ambitions of theater, and instead shows the piecemeal body engaged in nonpurposive gestures. By triangulating these res, I hope to reveal how Stein bridges an embodied slapstick with an abstract film aesthetic.
Stein, as I have said, devises an aesthetic indebted to film's capacity to track and splinter the shock of a "continuous present." Man Ray's films, in turn, pivot upon a "series of fragments" that develop in several instances out of his contact with avant-garde poets similarly invested in the fragmentary and serial. The surrealist, trance-inspired poet, Robert Desnos, for example, inspires Man Ray's second full-length film, L'Etoile de Mer , and Mallarmé's "A Throw of the Dice Can Never Do Away with Chance" ignites his Mystère du Chateau . Emak Bakia begins with shots of a brightly lit revolving merry-go-round to emphasize the inscriptive capacity of film, "its status," Inez Hedges elaborates, as "'writing motion in lights' (kinematographein and photo-graphein)" ("CV," 99). And just as Man Ray is "adamant that there be no script," no progress in Emak Bakia, 20 Stein's writing foregrounds its break from linear plot in a repeating and circular "communication":
If heating is beside the meal and the selection of masterpieces makes communication, communication is ardently rechosen, communication is suddenly respected, communication is suddenly resumed, communication is suddenly rested, communication is suddenly respected, communication is suddenly chosen communication is suddenly chosen. ("ME," 25)
The passage "selects" its parallel abstract strips and measured "beats," yet dramatizes the passive or involuntary; what "is suddenly chosen" knits together words buried in other words by linguistic dislocation, as with "rested" in "respected."
Further, neither "Mrs. Emerson" nor Emak Bakia, despite their titles, follows a single character. In Stein's piece, an "I" shifts to a "she" or "he"; pronouns are merely instrumental. Nowhere does "Mrs. Emerson" (only a ghostly transcendental re) materialize, and "characters" appear and quickly evaporate. "Mrs. Evangeline Henderson came in" only to vanish immediately ("ME," 23). Like Stein's writing, Man Ray's film denies a stable subjectivity. Emak Bakia, he tells us, is the name of his patron's estate and comes from a Basque saying that means "leave me alone." Both "Mrs. Emerson" and Emak Bakia resist propriety and continuity, and yet grapple with embodiment as self-consciously aware of its filmable, evanescent and fragmentary character. Hedges points out in her essay on Man Ray's L'Etoile de Mer, that "pellicule"--Latin for "little skin"--designates "the idea of celluloid as skin," a fact that becomes resonant with Man Ray who "would typically write on his film"; in this context, each shot denotes a temporal marking and shedding of skin or bodily surface ("CV," 99).
Man Ray's actual relationship with Stein ended abruptly, but further reveals their interart cross-hatchings. P. Adams Sitney observes that Man Ray's photograph, used for the frontispiece of the successful The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, featured Alice in a doorway and eclipsed Stein "deep in shadows as she sits writing at a table." 21 And Man Ray recollected in his Self Portrait that his "portraits of Gertrude Stein were the first to appear in print, to give her small circle of readers at the time an idea of how she looked." 22 At this time he exchanged some prints for Stein's "portrait of [him] in prose" (SP, 260). With the subsequent publication of The Autobiography, she required publicity photographs, but when Man Ray sent a "modest bill," Stein refused payment on the grounds that "we were all struggling artists" (SP, 260). Their exchange of portraits led paradoxically to their estrangement from one another.
Stein's meeting with Chaplin, by contrast, points towards an imagined identification. She viewed her art as a necessary precursor to his, or at least as a simultaneous mirror of it,acknowledging Chaplin's iconic importance for the Parisian avant-garde crowd in The Autobiography: "The clowns had commenced dressing up in misfit clothes instead of the old classic costume and these clothes later so well known on Charlie Chaplin were the delight of Picasso and all her friends." 23 Chaplin himself summed up Stein's admiring perception of his work as avant-garde plotlessness when they met in the 1930s, "She would like to see me in a movie just walking up the street and turning a corner, then another corner, and another" (MM, 159). And Stein extolled Chaplin's early gestural films during and before World War I rather than his later plot-driven ones. For her, the poet and the comedian vie for an inaugural role: "he wanted the sentiment of movement invented by himself and I wanted the sentiment of doing nothing invented by myself" (MM, 160); implicitly, she saw herself as initiator of both. 24
When Chaplin screened in Paris, " 'the little tramp,'" or "Charlot," as he was called, emerged as "the new hero of the literary avant-garde," 25 the very "embodiment of modernity" in his "resistance to meaning" ("CR," 92). Walter Benjamin observed that the surrealist poet Philippe Soupault,
realized that Chaplin was the first (and the Russians have followed his example) to construct a film with a theme and variations--in short, with the element of composition--and that all this stands in complete opposition to films based on action and suspense. 26
French film critic Robert Aaron specifically paired Chaplin with Man Ray in their "delight in dislocation" whereby "they create peculiar breaks in the narrative, each of which strangely never returns to what went before." 27 Jean Epstein remarked Chaplin's "photogenic neurasthenia," observing that his "entire performance consists of reflex actions of a nervous, tired person." 28 And for Louis Aragon, such narrative and somatic dislocations reflected the "discovery of the mechanical and its laws . . . to such an extent that by an inversion of values each inanimate object becomes a living thing for him, each human person a dummy whose starting-handle must be found." 29
This small compendium of Chaplin as iconic re adumbrates a dislocative body that animated and haunted the antimimetic work of avant-gardists like Stein and Man Ray. Accordingly, Fernand Léger memorialized the cubist Chaplin as living machine in Ballet Mécanique ( 2). One shot in Emak Bakia used a diagram of a jumping man from Jules-Etienne Marey's scientific motion studies, a borrowing that accents automatic dissolutive locomotion. Importing his own collage-sculpture Dancer/Danger made of cogs and wheels for another image, Man Ray rendered it kinetic with a spiral of smoke, its ambivalent sign Dancer/Danger perhaps suggesting Léger's earlier mechanical and endangered (about to fall apart) body. This mechanistic trope owed precedence to Chaplin himself who, Benjamin observed, is "his own walking trademark" with his spasmodic, nonpurposive gait. 30 It seems that Chaplin "cannot walk. He cannot put one foot in front of the other. He cannot move forward," Willy Hass remarked in 1923 ("CR," 106). Gilles Deleuze further describes this trajectory as a function of time: "Charlie caught in the instant, moving from one instant to the next, each requiring his full powers of improvisation; finally, the line of the universe which he describes in this way, the broken stroke which makes itself felt even in the angular swerves of his walk." 31
Chaplin's gait as both a continuous present and a "broken swerve" is symptomatic of the modernist obsession with nonteleological movement. Pound found an early form of such kinesthetic gesture in Noh theatre that rendered an "art of splendid posture, of dancing and chanting and of acting that is not mimetic." 32 Elizabeth Grosz accurately summarizes Nietzsche's notion of an embodied practice of knowledge: "Philosophy itself was to be written walking--or, preferably, dancing." 33 Such embodiment, she adds, roots itself in the corporeal "incapacity to grasp all": "There is nothing beyond the multiplicity of perspectives, positions, bodily forces" (VB, 128). Yet both Pound and Nietzsche's delight in dance miss the nuance introduced through mechanical reproduction in its ability to expose the body's loss of control, dislocation, and propensity to automatism. This aspect of modernity's nonmimetic art crystallizes in Chaplin who may assume the sudden ability to skate with acrobatic grace in The Rink , but whose elastic body is never rendered entirely volitional. In the opening of The Tramp , for example, Chaplin is successively knocked down by a motor car; no sooner does he dust himself off than he is once more struck down, as if aware only of the discrete moment and the purely reflexive. Each repeated motion undoes itself so that it appears both that Chaplin will never progress across the road and that he must "pull himself together" with each tumble. 34
Significantly, Stein's circumlocutory comic mode, her "broken stroke," is intertwined with her cinematic impulses. As with avant-garde film, "what matters" in silent film comedy "is that the units follow each other uninterruptedly, not that their succession implements a plot." 35 Similarly, in his book on silent comedians, Walter Kerr cites Chaplin's sense of existence as incessantly "unstable and malleable," 36 constituting a "reflexivity" that foregrounds the comic "interchangeability of things" and the instability in metaphor itself. 37 Chaplin becomes paradigmatic of the successive slippages Stein performs in her modernist experiments. Chaplin's "awareness of instability," Kerr further proposes, taught him to dance, a practice which acts like a "crowbar to detach him from the action" (SC, 92). And Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire's "jerky gait," his very physical "art of being off center" likewise anticipates this modernist method of detachment from plot, and the way Stein manages to "keep centre well half full" ("SM," 176, "ME," 23). Indeed, locomotion, intentionally of a mistaken or circular kind, is a recurrent motif in Stein. These comic one-liners exemplify her balancing act and rejection of continuity: "Call me semblances.  "What do you do to stop. / What do you do to go on. / I do the same," she writes in Lifting Belly, followed a few lines later with "what do you do to turn a corner" (ibid.). Such lines, indicating propulsion along with relapsing, reverberate with her sense of Chaplin's endless circumnavigation.
These kinds of bodily dislocations also point towards the modern trope of the evasive hysteric, culminating in Freud's frustrated attempt to master Dora's body by pinning down her symptomatic acts in a coherent narrative. Before Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot's "theater of living pathology" at the Salpetrière Hospital in the 1870s and 1880s preres the cinematic reproduction of bodily movement, his photographs of hysterical gestures here suggestive of the dislocated bodies of Stein, Chaplin, and Man Ray. 38
Stein distanced herself from both psychoanalysis and surrealism, yet was early on compelled by the re of the "hysteric" and the automaton. 39 Pavlov's lesser-known version of hysteria-- pivotal in experimental psychology--formed part of the tributary of influences upon Stein, describing reflexivity as manifesting when "the excitatory processes are weakened, while the inhibitory prevail." 40 The hysteric in these cultural renderings slides into the comic gestural body, montaged "together in pieces" (LB, 27). The comic/hysteric body drifts, without pathos and detached from plot, into the end of "Mrs. Emerson"; the "inhibitory" and absurdist ennui of refusal erupts:
Not to-day.
Yesterday, not some day.
Yesterday.
Wretched creature.
Wretched reason for winter. Really not at all.
["ME," 29]
This "wretched creature" suspends in temporal indeterminacy and dislocation. Similarly, Man Ray's mistress, Kiki of Montparnasse, the most recognizable "whole body" in Emak Bakia, will turn "upside down" at the end of the film, her vacancy italicized by staring eyes painted on her eyelids that suddenly, mechanically flutter open.
Stein studied with both William James and Hugo Münsterberg, author of the seminal Photoplay , at Radcliffe in the early 1890s and became acutely interested in psychophysiological models of human behavior. 41 After conducting experiments in automatic writing under the supervision of Münsterberg, Stein's 1896 debut in publishing, "Motor Automatism" (in the Harvard Psychological Review), tellingly belonged to the emergent field of experimental psychology. She published this piece with Leon Solomons along with an addendum, "Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in its Relation to Attention," written solely by herself. These articles reveal Stein's early obsession with the relationship between bodily sensation, attention and memory. Ultimately, Stein's comic and filmic sensibility relied upon acts of willed automatism that heighten the fragmentariness and dislocations within reiterative gesture.
In order to understand Stein's rendering of bodily gesture--and her link to both Chaplin and Man Ray--I will look in some detail at these first publications. Linda Wagner-Martin describes them as an early discounting of "automatic writing," a point corroborated by Stein's disavowal in The Autobiography: "Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions, nor was she a successful subject for automatic writing." 42 However, while "Motor Automatism" examines the "limits of normal automatism" and the acts of so-called normal people as opposed to those of hysterical subjects, the article determines that automatism permeates the everyday activities of the nonhysterical subject. 43 (Stein and Solomons, I should note, are the only "normal" subjects of the experiment in the first article.) At the same time, they consider hysteria as linked to automatism especially in terms of the phenomenon of "double personality," the experience of dissociation often red by the detachment of a bodily organ from consciousness, or rather as the detachment of motor impulse from consciousness of it as proprioceptive ("MA," 9).
The enmeshment of the psychical with the kinesthetic as well as the dislocation between these domains constitute the basis for Stein's comedy and her cinematic modernism. Significantly, Stein and Solomons anchor "the feeling of personality" in an "expectation represented by the group of feelings we have called, for convenience, the motor impulse" ("MA," 26). They assert that the "writing of a word at dictation" involves "the formation of a motor impulse" that "consists of a melange of visual and kinesthetic material--whatever ordinarily innervates our writing--as well as other elements not easily described" ("MA," 14). The absenting of consciousness from motor impulses leads then, as they formulate it, to automatism, or in more severe cases, to hysteria.
In their first experiment, they instructed their subject to "get himself as deeply interested in a novel as possible" and at the same time to ready himself to take dictation ("MA," 10). They conclude that "although the arm does not really move spontaneously, yet any movement once started up tends to continue of itself" unless "deliberately checked by the will of the subject" ("MA," 11). Induced automatic writing leads to an experience of the "extra personal" or put more bluntly: "It is not he but his arm that is doing it" (ibid.). The subject, when sufficiently distracted, loses a sense "of intention or desire," producing the "tendency to movement from purely sensory stimuli, independent of any conscious motor impulse or volition" ("MA," 12; emphasis added). This dissociation between "personality" and attention forms an early example of the automatism issuing from the sensory bombardment of modernity Benjamin will describe, and preres Chaplin's comedic body, his automaton, jerky reception of shocks.
Furthermore, the experiment implies not only that bodily movement or reflexive sensation can become dislocated from consciousness, but also questions the efficacy of memory or its coincidence with motor impulses in the act of writing. Knowledge emerges "by sensations from the arm." The subject
was conscious that he just had written a word, not that he was about to do so. While mere scribbling went on the subject would scarcely be conscious that he was doing anything. . . . Small words would usually be completely written before the subject knew about it. ["MA," 12-3]
These observations denote ruptures or "lapses in consciousness"; only belatedly does the subject remember the activity of his arm. Thus memory does not function to bolster identity, but contributes to a feeling of dislocation. Knowledge comes late, after the fact, in the "memory after image" ("MA," 15). Similarly, simultaneous action--reading and taking dictation at once as in Stein's experimental study--further fractures the experience of the body which is paradoxically both attentive and distracted in its dispersal among activities. 44 Chaplin in Sunnyside , for example, embodies this kind of forgetfulness resulting from multiple actions: herding cows while reading a book, he wanders until he falls unconscious in a ditch.
While the article is written collaboratively, "Motor Automatism" is prescient of Stein's writing processes, particularly her penchant for repetition and its somatic impetus. 45 For instance, one paragraph of the essay delineating the characteristics of "unconscious memory and invention" reads:
A marked tendency to repetition.--A phrase would seem to get into the head and keep repeating itself at every opportunity, and hang over from day to day even. The stuff written was grammatical, and the words and phrases fitted together all right, but there was not much connected thought. The unconsciousness was broken into every six or seven words by flashes of consciousness, so that one cannot be sure but what the slight element of connected thought which occasionally appeared was due to these flashes of consciousness. But the ability to write stuff that sounds all right, without consciousness, was fairly well demonstrated by the experiments. ["MA," 21]
In this passage, repetition is not connective, but rather functions much like a reflexive motor impulse. Anticipating Eisenstein's delineation of a montage style that exceeds plot and the dislocated body accompanying it, the passage also suggests that grammatical writing which "fits together" is not necessarily "connected thought." 46 The interruptive "flashes of consciousness" produce only dilatory coherence.
The language of "Motor Automatism" uncannily both resembles Man Ray's kinematographein and echoes William James's "Stream of Consciousness" where he describes consciousness as "a kaleidoscope revolving," with the flight between repeating images taking precedence over the resting upon a final or static assemblage of images. 47 As if referring to Man Ray's experimental film and the avant-gardist's use of the camera, James depicts a mobile consciousness engaged in continual rearrangement, governed by shifts between "magical rapidity" and "relatively stable forms" ("SC," 180-1). Stein and Solomons import this sense of fractured and contingent subjectivity and link it more fully than James to kinesthetic experience. A shifting in tempo and rhythm become a visceral fluctuation between distraction and belated attention, demonstrated by this semi-confessional observation: "Miss Stein found it sufficient distraction often to simply read what her arm wrote, but following three or four words behind her pencil" ("MA," 21).