religious piety or certainty, and emotional depth, it offers humor, irony, intellectual complexity, technical beauty, and a catalogue of the forms of unknowing.
I should say in conclusion, before we leave modernism altogether, that the modernist direction in all the arts is a movement from what might be called the organic to the inorganic. Traditional painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, drama, and, lesserly, music since the Renaissance deal in organic forms in which materials as it were flow from each other. The work moves and grows across time with an imitated living energy; cause precedes effect, âleaf subsides to leaf,â chord yields to chord tonally, and the leg bone attaches to theâ¦hip bone. Modernist forms, on the other hand, are inorganic, as a triangle is inorganic, as a model of the atom is fixed and unmoving. (At least half of paintingâs major movements in this century have promoted inorganic structures: Constructivism, Suprematism, some Futurism, Orphism, Analytic Cubism, Abstraction-Créationism , Geometric Abstraction, and color field painting.) We can watch Mondrian transform an apple tree, and a drawing of an apple tree, into a grid of inorganic forms. Cézanne found the cylinder in the thigh. Yeats enjoined his actors not to move; Beckett props prevented their moving. Schönberg purged chromatic movement of tonal content and won through to a scaffolding of pure form. And contemporary modernist fiction disassembles human life in time. It dissects the living, articulated joints and arranges the bright bones on the ground.
Where Is the Mainstream?
The description I have given of contemporary modernist fiction is piecework. It extracts, collates, and examines as a unit such diversities as say, the characterizations of Borges or Pynchon, the narrative collages and surrealisms of Burroughs or Barthelme, the ironies of Beckett or Disch, the aesthetics or metaphysics of Barth or Calvino, and the cryptographic surfaces and reflexive structures of Nabokov. In fact, no single writer matches in all his work every aspect of this theoretical description. My coarse distinctions between two kinds of fiction are useful heuristically, but they give a damaging impression of clear boundaries and a misleading impression of two armed camps.
I have not yet stressed that most contemporary writers write largely traditional fiction. Many excellent writers, like Graham Greene, John Updike, Joyce Cary, Anthony Powell, and many others, are writing a fiction whose virtues are largely those of realist or naturalist fiction. After all, if we posit traditional fiction at one extreme of a spectrum and contemporary modernism at the other extreme, we see that not only do most living writers of serious fiction belong near the spectrumâs center, but so also do the historical Modernists themselves. The ModernistsâKafka, Proust, Faulkner, Joyceâwere interested in society, deepened time, verisimilitude, complex character, and authorial austerity. They were a sincere lot. They wrote big books. Contemporary modernists alter their aims by isolating them.
In fact, on a very gloomy day one could say this: that contemporary modernism accurately puts its finger upon, and claims, every quality of Modernist fiction that is not essential. It throws out the baby and proclaims the bath.Joyce wrote parodies and made puns and allusions on his way to elaborating a full and deep fictional world called Dublin. Now people write little parodies full of puns and allusions. Kafka wrote fiction rooted in profound cultural criticism and in metaphysical and theological longing; along the way he had a character turn into a cockroach. Some contemporary writing has jettisoned the rest and kept the cockroach for a laugh. Joyce and Woolf bade their characters think on the page to deepen the characters, not to flatten the world solipsistically. Proust and Faulkner fiddled with time to create an artful simulacrum of our experience of
I should say in conclusion, before we leave modernism altogether, that the modernist direction in all the arts is a movement from what might be called the organic to the inorganic. Traditional painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, drama, and, lesserly, music since the Renaissance deal in organic forms in which materials as it were flow from each other. The work moves and grows across time with an imitated living energy; cause precedes effect, âleaf subsides to leaf,â chord yields to chord tonally, and the leg bone attaches to theâ¦hip bone. Modernist forms, on the other hand, are inorganic, as a triangle is inorganic, as a model of the atom is fixed and unmoving. (At least half of paintingâs major movements in this century have promoted inorganic structures: Constructivism, Suprematism, some Futurism, Orphism, Analytic Cubism, Abstraction-Créationism , Geometric Abstraction, and color field painting.) We can watch Mondrian transform an apple tree, and a drawing of an apple tree, into a grid of inorganic forms. Cézanne found the cylinder in the thigh. Yeats enjoined his actors not to move; Beckett props prevented their moving. Schönberg purged chromatic movement of tonal content and won through to a scaffolding of pure form. And contemporary modernist fiction disassembles human life in time. It dissects the living, articulated joints and arranges the bright bones on the ground.
Where Is the Mainstream?
The description I have given of contemporary modernist fiction is piecework. It extracts, collates, and examines as a unit such diversities as say, the characterizations of Borges or Pynchon, the narrative collages and surrealisms of Burroughs or Barthelme, the ironies of Beckett or Disch, the aesthetics or metaphysics of Barth or Calvino, and the cryptographic surfaces and reflexive structures of Nabokov. In fact, no single writer matches in all his work every aspect of this theoretical description. My coarse distinctions between two kinds of fiction are useful heuristically, but they give a damaging impression of clear boundaries and a misleading impression of two armed camps.
I have not yet stressed that most contemporary writers write largely traditional fiction. Many excellent writers, like Graham Greene, John Updike, Joyce Cary, Anthony Powell, and many others, are writing a fiction whose virtues are largely those of realist or naturalist fiction. After all, if we posit traditional fiction at one extreme of a spectrum and contemporary modernism at the other extreme, we see that not only do most living writers of serious fiction belong near the spectrumâs center, but so also do the historical Modernists themselves. The ModernistsâKafka, Proust, Faulkner, Joyceâwere interested in society, deepened time, verisimilitude, complex character, and authorial austerity. They were a sincere lot. They wrote big books. Contemporary modernists alter their aims by isolating them.
In fact, on a very gloomy day one could say this: that contemporary modernism accurately puts its finger upon, and claims, every quality of Modernist fiction that is not essential. It throws out the baby and proclaims the bath.Joyce wrote parodies and made puns and allusions on his way to elaborating a full and deep fictional world called Dublin. Now people write little parodies full of puns and allusions. Kafka wrote fiction rooted in profound cultural criticism and in metaphysical and theological longing; along the way he had a character turn into a cockroach. Some contemporary writing has jettisoned the rest and kept the cockroach for a laugh. Joyce and Woolf bade their characters think on the page to deepen the characters, not to flatten the world solipsistically. Proust and Faulkner fiddled with time to create an artful simulacrum of our experience of
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