Art History and Postwar Fiction Kevin Brazil Full Chapter PDF

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction Kevin
Brazil
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/art-history-and-postwar-fiction-kevin-brazil/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Writing Mary I : History, Historiography, and Fiction

Valerie Schutte
https://ebookmass.com/product/writing-mary-i-history-
historiography-and-fiction-valerie-schutte/
Jansonu2019s Basic History of Western Art (History of

Art) 9th Edition – Ebook PDF Version
https://ebookmass.com/product/jansons-basic-history-of-western-
art-history-of-art-9th-edition-ebook-pdf-version/
Post-Digital, Post-Internet Art and Education: The

Future is All-Over Kevin Tavin
https://ebookmass.com/product/post-digital-post-internet-art-and-
education-the-future-is-all-over-kevin-tavin/
African American Art (Oxford History of Art) 1st

Edition, (Ebook PDF)
https://ebookmass.com/product/african-american-art-oxford-
history-of-art-1st-edition-ebook-pdf/
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 7: Postwar
to Contemporary, 1945-2020 Patrick Hayes
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-oxford-history-of-life-writing-
volume-7-postwar-to-contemporary-1945-2020-patrick-hayes/
Philip V of Macedon in Polybius' Histories: Politics,

History, and Fiction Emma Nicholson
https://ebookmass.com/product/philip-v-of-macedon-in-polybius-
histories-politics-history-and-fiction-emma-nicholson/
Art History, Volume 1 6th Edition, (Ebook PDF)
https://ebookmass.com/product/art-history-volume-1-6th-edition-
ebook-pdf/
Art History Vol 1 (6th Edition ) 6th Edition
https://ebookmass.com/product/art-history-vol-1-6th-edition-6th-
edition/
Art: A Brief History (6th Edition ) 6th Edition
https://ebookmass.com/product/art-a-brief-history-6th-
edition-6th-edition/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/08/18, SPi
OX F O R D E N G L I S H M O N O G R A P H S
General Editors
PAULINA KEW ES LA URA MA RCUS P E T E R M c C U L L O U GH
HE ATHE R O ’ DON OG H UE S EA MUS PE R R Y L L O Y D P R A T T
FION A S T A FFORD
Art, History, and

Postwar Fiction
KEVIN BRAZIL
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Kevin Brazil 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948213
ISBN 978–0–19–882445–9
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
This book is for my parents

Acknowledgements
This book began life as a DPhil thesis under the sage supervision of Laura
Marcus, without whom, in more ways than one, what follows would not
have been possible.
I am grateful for the valuable readings and advice offered at various
stages by Rebecca Beasley, Michael Whitworth, Jean-Michel Rabaté, David
James, Sianne Ngai, Andrew Dean, Alys Moody, Jarad Zimbler, Peter
Riley, Katie Fleishman, and Alexis Brown, all of whom improved what
follows no end. For guidance through authors’ archives I would like to
thank Mark Nixon of the Beckett International Foundation, University of
Reading; Joel Minor of the Olin Library, Washington University, St Louis;
and Pat Fox of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present early drafts
of chapters at a number of conferences, and would like to thank their
respective organizers for their invitations: Peter Fifield for the Samuel
Beckett Debts and Legacies Seminar, University of Oxford; David James
and Urmila Seshagiri for Modernist Reformations and Reactivations at
the 15th Modernist Studies Association Conference at Sussex University;
Elleke Boehmer for Planned Violence at King’s College, London; Egzi
Aranyosi and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay for the Unconventional Archives
Workshop at Ertegun House, Oxford; Clare Bucknell and Mary Wellesley
for Periodization: Pleasures and Pitfalls, at All Souls College, Oxford;
and Alexandra Kingston-Reese for a panel on Reading the Novel with Art
at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 2017. At Oxford
University Press, Eleanor Collins and Catherine Owens provided exem-
plary editorial advice and efficiency.
I would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by an Arts
and Humanities Research Council Studentship and a 1379 Old Members
Scholarship from New College, Oxford. I am grateful to the School for
Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, and the Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst for providing funding for further research visits that
sharpened this book’s evidence and arguments. The Department of English
at the University of Southampton provided further financial support
that helped bring this book to completion, as well as providing the most
collegial of environments in which to complete it.
My greatest debt is not financial—it is to my parents, to whom this
book is dedicated.
Permissions
Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s manuscript of The Unnamable and an

image from the same are reproduced by kind permission of the Estate
of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London.
Extracts from William Gaddis’s archive are reproduced by kind permis-
sion of the Estate of William Gaddis and the Wylie Agency, New York.
Extracts from the letters of John Berger and Fredric Warburg from the
Random House Group Archive are reproduced by kind permission of The
Random House Group Ltd.
Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in slightly different form in ‘Beckett,
Painting, and the Question of “the Human” ’, published in the Journal of
Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Spring 2013), pp. 81–99. They are
reproduced here by kind permission of Indiana University Press.
Contents
List of Figures xi
Introduction: Reviewing Postwar Fiction 1

1. Pig Vomit: Beckett’s Art Historical Necessities 23
2. Canvas in the Cold War: William Gaddis and
the Context of Art 63
3. The Moment of History: John Berger’s Modernism
After Realism 97
4. Art’s Swindle: W. G. Sebald and History After Trauma 129
Conclusion: The Perspective of the Present 166
Bibliography 173
Author Index 193
List of Figures
1.1. Drawing by Samuel Beckett in the manuscript of L’Innommable,
Notebook 2, page 41. © The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Image
by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas
at Austin 57
1.2. L. Debricon, ‘La Sensation’, in Descartes: choix de textes avec étude
du système philosophique et notices biographique et bibliographique;
16 gravures et portrait par L. Debricon; préface de Labescat (Paris:
Louis Michaud, n.d.), 200. © The British Library Board 59
2.1. Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, ca. 1955, San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/DACS, London/
VAGA, New York, 2017 78
Introduction
Reviewing Postwar Fiction
In 1957 Jasper Johns covered a book with red and yellow encaustic paint
and stuck it to a blue wooden frame. An object became a work of art, a
book became Book (1957). That book was Lost Worlds by Anne Terry White,
a popular history of archaeological adventures. The pages Johns painted
describe the moment when Carter and Carnarvon, on the threshold of
their discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, begin to feel ‘strangely suspended
in time and space’, and suddenly not ‘the unbelievable tomb, but the
actual world of the twentieth century seemed unreal to these enchanted
explorers’.1 Buried under layers of paint, these words are invisible to the
naked eye: like the tomb in the desert, exposed and disguised, they are
hidden in plain sight. Some tantalizing and carefully chosen fragments of
text can be glimpsed, if you look hard enough: ‘first sight’, ‘swathed’, ‘folds’,
and down at the bottom, ‘that is what he found’. Yet there is nothing to be
found at first sight in this Book, where seeing and saying are in opposition.
Paint disguises words, yet knowledge of the book they came from is neces-
sary to grasp Book’s ironic attitude towards the resistance between text and
image upon which its formal effects depend. By painting over a book
called Lost Worlds, Johns signals an awareness of past explorations of the
relationship between text and image, and incorporates an archaeology of
this past into his own historically self-conscious investigation of the dif-
ferences between artistic media. In Book the past is an inescapable part of
the object presented for consideration: the relationship between art and
literature in the ‘actual world’ of Johns’s twentieth-century present.
1 Anne Terry White, Lost Worlds: Adventures in Archaeology (London; Toronto; Wellington;
Sydney, 1943), 119; James Coddington and Suzanne Siano, ‘Infrared Imaging of Twentieth-
Century Works of Art’, in Tradition and Innovation: Advances in Conservation, ed. by Ashok
Roy and Perry Smith (London, 2000), 39–44. I am grateful to Katherine Hinds, Curator of
the Margulies Collection, Miami, and James Coddington, Chief Curator of the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, for this information about Johns’s Book.
2 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction
That relationship is the subject of another book: this one. Art, History,
and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists since 1945 have
viewed, commented upon, and often vociferously complained about visual
art. It argues that as well as offering a surprisingly vital means for reflecting
on the aesthetic implications of political developments like McCarthyism,
the rise of the New Left, or the memorialization of the Holocaust, engaging
with art provided novelists with new ways of conceptualizing the novel’s
relationship to history. The sense that not only the novel but culture and
society more broadly had become unmoored from history was pervasive
in the postwar decades. This was most influentially expressed in Fredric
Jameson’s detection of a ‘waning of our historicity’ in the representations
produced in Western late capitalism, and a scepticism about historical
change was central to many theorizations of postmodernism.2 Yet post-
modernism never became the dominant cultural logic of the postwar
decades: it quickly passed from emergent to residual over the course of a
decade or so. In showing the ways in which visual art, especially modernist
painting, enabled postwar novelists to imagine diverse ways of relating
their work to history, this book argues that attention to one of the oldest
topics in aesthetic theory, interactions between artistic forms, also offers
the literary critic new ways to think about an equally perennial question:
the relationship of literature to history.
Pursuing this argument concentrates the scope of this book primarily
on the work of four writers, each of whom develops out of their engage-
ments with art a distinctive way of figuring the relationship of the novel to
history: Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald.
If the scope of these chapters is focused, and that focus is part of an argu-
ment for sustained and close attention to manuscripts, composition, and
literary form in studying the relationship between text and image, the
scope of the arguments they collectively inform expands outwards into
broader considerations of the comparative study of literature and visual
culture. You don’t need to take as obvious an example as Johns’s Book to
show that an artwork’s relationship to the history of art is often central to
its meaning—often its primary, even exclusive theme for the critics and
novelists who view it. But the history of art is not the same as the history
of literature, and as a consequence of what was once quaintly called the
‘new art history’, it would be more accurate to speak of an artwork’s rela-
tionship to a range of institutionally formed and contested histories of
2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London,
1991), 20.
Introduction 3
art.3 In studying literary engagements with art in the postwar decades, this
book proceeds from the argument that the histories of art are multiple,
non-simultaneous, and often generatively out of sync with the formal
and institutional histories of literature. It is the difference between art and
fiction, and the differences between art history and literary history, that
make art important to the study of postwar fiction.
Novelists’ responses to works of art are neither passive reflections of
their content (whatever ‘content’ might mean), nor of their institutionally
codified histories; rather, they are a form of interpretative work, whose
outcome can be traced in the form and style of a novelist’s prose. In focus-
ing as much on the ways in which fiction is made through an engagement
with art as on the final published work, this book provides a hermeneutics
of poeisis which tracks the moments in which writers produced their
own interpretations of works of art, and used these simultaneously as
interpretations of their writing and the form of the novel. In doing so,
this book offers a different way to approach the self-reflexivity and self-
referentiality that has long been seen as one of the characteristic traits of
the postwar novel: as a process of productive self-interpretation through
a different medium rather than a metafictional closure where ‘forms of
fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed’,
or as a terminal self-consciousness that leaves writer and reader alike ‘lost
in the funhouse’.4 By drawing attention to the historicizing ways in which
writers interpreted art as part of the production of their own work, this
book foregrounds the ways in which postwar writers historicized them-
selves and the novel more broadly. It therefore revises our understanding
of the postwar novel as characterized by a waning of historicity, arguing
instead for an understanding of modern and contemporary historicity as
complex, plural, and articulated by visual and verbal forms, and it shows
the different modes of thinking about the relationship of the novel to
history developed from the aftermath of the Second World War to the
beginning of the twenty-first century.
History emerges as a central concern of these writers’ engagements
with art not only because of their shared if diffuse sense of a waning of
historicity, or because a reflection upon the art of the past, whether by
Vermeer or Pisanello, reveals historical difference in a fairly obvious way.
Visual modernism of the postwar period was theorized, institutionalized,
and practised according to a historical periodization that was very different
3 For an overview, see John Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London,
2001).
4 William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York, 1970), 25; John Barth, Lost
in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (London, 1969).
to that of literary modernism, or rather, the version of literary modernism

these writers had themselves periodized in order to relate themselves to it.
Whether in Beckett’s perfect-tense description of T. S. Eliot’s poetry as
‘the new thing that has happened’, Gaddis’s transformation through
satire of modernist style into a commodity, or Sebald’s doctoral research
on Döblin, these novelists, like many others of the period, saw themselves
as coming after, if not exactly fully escaping from, the moment of literary
modernism. But when faced with French tachisme, American Abstract
Expressionism, or postwar British sculpture, or with the hugely influen-
tial criticism of Clement Greenberg, it was as clear then as it is now that
visual modernism extended well into the 1950s and 1960s. It is a testa-
ment to Greenberg’s influence that the art historians who have provided
the most developed justifications for the extension of visual modernism
backwards as well as forwards in time, T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, have
both positioned themselves as inheritors of different strands of Greenberg’s
criticism.5 This striking difference between what modernism means across
literature and art opened up for these writers a necessarily more complex
and differentiated understanding of the periodicity and historicity of
their own work. Furthermore, this extension of modernism was enabled in
theory and practice by a distinctive historicist modernism, according to
which certain forms were the product of a logical historical development
and which expressed that sense of historical continuity as their primary
meaning. To paraphrase a famous claim made by Michael Baxandall, if
‘[a] fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship’, then
a postwar modernist painting is the deposit of a historical theory.6
Modernism thus has an important place in this book, and the arguments
it makes concerning modernism’s relationship to postwar and contemporary
fiction and about periodicity more generally are part of a broader series of
debates about the historicity of modernism and its relationship to the
present. The geographical and historical expansion of the scope of mod-
ernist studies has brought to the fore the question of the periodization of
modernism as the cultural response to modernity. One response to the
theoretical difficulties this entails has been to reject the periodization of
modernism and modernity altogether, whether because it is merely a tool
of institutional legitimization, according to Eric Hayot, or inherently
5 T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry, 9/1 (1982), 139–56;
Michael Fried, ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark’, Critical Inquiry, 9/1
(1982), 217–34; T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes From a History of Modernism (New
Haven; London, 1999); Michael Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, in Art and
Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago; London, 1998), 1–76.
6 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the
Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1988), 1.
Introduction 5
ethically dubious, according to Susan Stanford Friedman.7 Another

response would be to complicate our understanding of the concept of a
period and the practice of periodization, a practice which, as David James
and Urmila Seshagiri have pointed out, is undertaken by novelists as well
as critics and thus cannot be ignored without sandpapering over a signifi-
cant feature of postwar and contemporary writing.8 Attending to the dif-
ference between visual and literary modernisms and their postwar critical
constructions is one way to achieve this complexity. It breaks apart the
view of modernism as taking place within a single historical period with-
out the concept of periodicity being discarded altogether; related develop-
ments in different forms can be seen as taking place on different timescales
and according to different rhythms; and it is this lack of fit that makes the
questions of periodicity and historicity more rather than less pressing for
the literary critic.
The problem of the uneven development of cultural formations (since
that is what modernist art and modernist literature ultimately are) was
suggestively raised in Marx’s Grundrisse, which speculates on ‘[t]he uneven
development of material production relative to e.g. artistic development. In
general, the concept of progress is not to be conceived in the usual
abstractness. Modern art etc [italics original]’. Furthermore, ‘this is the
case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of
the arts . . . The difficulty consists only in the general formulations of these
contractions’.9 That, it might be observed, has proved to be no small dif-
ficulty. These speculations have been elaborated by subsequent Marxist
theorists, as in Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar’s notions of dif
ferentiated and relatively autonomous temporalities interacting in a
conjecture, or Raymond Williams’s model of emergent, dominant, and
residual formations.10 But this issue also has a long genealogy within the
discipline of art history, intersecting with Marxist theory in the writings of
Ernst Bloch. Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit, or the ‘non-synchronous’,
attempted to address the issue of the differential development of culture
raised by Marx in the context of twentieth-century modernity.11 But this
concept, as Frederic J. Schwarz has written, was lifted ‘out of a debate
7 Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York, 2012); Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary
Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York, 2015).
8 David James and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and
Revolution’, PMLA, 129/1 (2014), 87–100.
9 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft),
trans. by Martin Nicolaus (London, 1973), 109; 110.
10 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 121–8; Louis Althusser
and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. by Ben Brewster (London, 1997), 91–118.
11 Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, trans. by Mark
Ritter, New German Critique, 11, 1977, 22–38.
among art historians and theorists of culture about periodicity and the
nature of historical time’, specifically the response of Wilhelm Pinder to
the historicism of Aloïs Riegl, Max Dvorák, and Heinrich Wölfflin.12
Reflecting upon the use of different styles within the same historical
moment, Pinder concluded that ‘[t]here is no simple “present” because
every historical “moment” is experienced by people with their own differ-
ent senses of historical duration’, and that different cultural artefacts must
be analysed through the concept of ‘the non-simultaneity of the simulta-
neous’, a concept which retains a notion of a historical period but allows
for a more complex sense of its internal differentiation.13 Like his more
well-known contemporaries Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, Pinder
was theorizing the experience of time, but his objects of analysis, as
Erwin Panofsky pointed out, were cultural artefacts.14 It is from the non-
simultaneity of styles that the non-simultaneity of history is inferred, and
not the other way around.
This overlap between the problematics of Marxism and art history is
one example of the ways in which both fields have complex and rich
theorizations of the relationship between form and historicity. These over-
laps provide the grounds for understanding that the uneven development
of modernism across media does not reflect but in a concrete sense is a
manifestation of the differentiated temporality of modernity. Of course,
this insight has long been central to accounts of modernism within indi-
vidual disciplinary confines, whether those offered by T. J. Clark in art
history, or Michael Levenson in literary studies.15 The aim of this book is
to use comparison not to generate a more unified understanding of mod-
ernism—usually the goal of comparisons between the arts—but a more
disaggregated one. For the writers discussed in this book, the striking dif-
ference between what modernism meant across the arts in the postwar
decades opened up a more multifaceted understanding of modernism and
of the historicity of their present. The argument that visual-verbal com-
parison opens up differentiated understandings of history for novelists and
critics alike underpins this book’s methodological claims for how to
undertake comparative work on literature and art, how to relate modern-
ism to the contemporary, and how to bring together literary studies and
art history in the study of postwar culture. By showing that an engagement
with visual art was a means by which postwar novelists produced their own
12 Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder: Out of Sync’, Grey Room,
3 (Spring 2001), 55; 57.
13 Quoted in Schwartz, ‘Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder: Out of Sync’, 62.
14 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Reflections on Historical Time’, Critical Inquiry, 30/4 (2004),
697–8.
15 Clark, Farewell To An Idea; Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven, 2011).
Introduction 7
understandings of the relationship of their work to history, it follows that

this engagement can be used retrospectively to understand postwar fiction
in history. In history, and as history, for how to historicize postwar litera-
ture has emerged as a pressing debate in recent literary scholarship. As
many critics are now asking: when exactly does literary history begin?
H I S TO R I C I Z I N G P O S T WA R F I C T I O N
Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events’, newly created one moment

from the next? No links? Is it the end of history?16
Moving chronologically from the end of the Second World War to the turn
of the millennium, this book concerns itself with what Amy Hungerford
has influentially defined as ‘the period formerly known as contemporary’.17
On the one hand her argument is disarmingly simple. With the passing of
time, and of the authors of that time, the decades since the war are now
‘history, not memory’, and that distance—or rather the methodological
adoption of such a distance—is ‘an advantage when it comes to the business
of historicizing’.18 On the other hand, distinguishing a past constructed
through the adoption of historicizing distance from the contemporary makes
any definition of the postwar as a period d ependent upon a definition of
the contemporary. What ‘the contemporary’ means has been the subject of
a wave of recent reflection in work by Giorgio Agamben, Terry Smith,
Lauren Berlant, Robert Eaglestone, and particularly Peter Osborne, who has
provided the richest account of what it means to think the contemporary,
offering a suggestive model for literary studies.19 Osborne draws a distinction
between the postwar and the contemporary from the opposite perspective
to Hungerford. He wants to preserve the ‘increasingly complex temporal-
existential, social, and p
olitical meanings’ of the contemporary against its
reduction to ‘a simple label or periodizing category’. The ‘distinctive
conceptual grammar of con-temporaneity’, he writes, expresses ‘a coming
together of different but equally “present” temporalities or “times”, a temporal
unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times’, and ‘[t]his
16 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 1973), 56.

17 Amy Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, American
Literary History, 20/1–2 (2008), 418.
18 Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, 416.
19 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’, in What Is an Apparatus? And Other
Essays, trans. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, 2009), 39–54; Terry Smith,
‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry, 32/4 (2006), 681–707; Lauren
Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham; London, 2011); Robert Eaglestone, ‘Contemporary Fiction
in the Academy: Towards a Manifesto’, Textual Practice, 27/7 (2013), 1089–102; Peter Osborne,
Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London, 2013).
problematically disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward,

historicist uses of “contemporary” as a periodizing term [italics original]’.20
As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, there is nothing particularly ‘con-
temporary’ about this definition of the contemporary as a disjunctive
relationship towards one’s present: it goes back to Nietzsche’s critique of
nineteenth-century historicism.21 For Osborne, it is in fact the historicizing
gaze which produces the difference between the time of the contemporary
and the time of the historicized past. Hungerford and Osborne end up
neatly symmetrical: what the philosopher of contemporary art wants to
avoid, the historian of postwar literature wants to embrace.
This embrace of the historicizing gaze has underpinned much recent
revisionary work on postwar fiction. Steven Belletto, Julia Jordan, and
Alex Houen have found common ground between British and American
literature in their concerns with chance and potentiality, discerning
aesthetic and thematic concerns as responses to Cold War politics and
postwar disciplinary transformations in game theory, economics, and
existential philosophy.22 Like these critics, when historicizing the relation-
ship between logical positivism and postwar fiction, Michael LeMahieu
has uncovered its impact on a group of writers—John Barth, Saul Bellow,
and Iris Murdoch—that cuts across boundaries between national cultures
and so-called experimental and conventional authors, forming the kind of
unexpected but suddenly convincing constellation that makes such revi-
sionary work so important. In contrast, when Mark McGurl, Stephen
Schryer, and Michael Trask have historicized the institutional role of the
university and its discourses of professionalism in defining postwar
American literature, they show just how distinctly American this develop-
ment was. As McGurl admits, professionalized ‘[c]reative writing is, in
sum, as American as baseball, apple pie, and homicide’. Less convincing is
his claim that the spread of the writing programme throughout the world
is not an instance of ‘Americanization’ but part of the overall process of
‘reflexive modernity’.23 One central insight of postwar art history has been
that the American institutionalization of forms of modernism and mod-
ernization elided in their constitution the national political contexts from
which they emerged, and this elision was witnessed in action by the writers
20 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 17.

21 Agamben, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’, 40–1; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, ‘On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. by
R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1997), 57–124.
22 Steven Belletto, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American
Narratives (New York, 2011); Julia Jordan, Chance and the Modern British Novel (London, 2011);
Alex Houen, Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (Oxford, 2011).
23 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
(Cambridge, MA; London, 2009), 364–5.
Introduction 9
discussed in this book.24 For both novelist and critic, engaging with postwar
art involves entering a transnational field shaped by national and political
commitments in a way which enables writing beyond the confines of a
single nation while remaining sharply aware of the slippage between the
trajectory of one national culture and the wider development of modernity.
Just as influential for the impetus towards revisionary work on postwar
literature and recent theoretical attention to the contemporary has been
the perceived waning of postmodernism as the postwar era’s dominant
cultural logic, with David James and Lisa Siraganian making strong cases
for the continuing relevance of modernism to postwar and contemporary
fiction.25 When Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls compiled one of the
first literary histories of England spanning the twentieth century as a
whole, they observed that ‘the notion of the Postmodern, in apparent
violation of its own terms, has not proven to be an efficient periodizing
concept that clearly situates us in a context distinct from modernity;
rather, it affirms a continuing and troubled relation to a modernity we
cannot evade’.26 On the other side of the Atlantic, both postmodernism
and postmodernity are absent from Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus’s
A New Literary History of America.27 As Jason Gladstone and Daniel
Worden reflected in response to that volume, postmodernism now seems
understood either as ‘a symptom for the postwar condition’ or ‘one aes-
thetic among many’.28 Intentionally or not, this is a direct refutation of
Jameson’s central claim: ‘I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction
between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) style among
many others available and one which seeks to grasp it as the cultural
dominant of the logic of late capitalism’.29 ‘Late capitalism’ was always the
weakest link in Jameson’s thesis, never quite recovering from Bill Warren’s
retort: ‘late for what?’30 But Jameson’s account of postmodernism was as
much motivated by the need for periodization as by the need to schematize
a cultural dominant to follow realism and modernism: it was, after all,
24 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago; London, 1983).
25 David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel
(Cambridge, 2012); Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life
(New York, 2012).
26 Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge History of
Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge,
2004), 4.
27 Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America (Cambridge,
MA; London, 2009).
28 Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden, ‘Introduction: Postmodernism, Then’,
Twentieth-Century Literature, 57/3–4 (2011), 292.
29 Jameson, Postmodernism, 45–6.
30 Quoted in Fred Halliday, ‘The Ends of Cold War’, New Left Review, I, 180, 1990, 18.
‘a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception

of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed’.31
It is on the problems of periodization and historicization that Jameson
and his successors converge.
David J. Alworth has observed that for all that such revisionary work on
postwar literature rejects Jameson’s claim that postmodernism is the cul-
tural logic of the period, it adheres closely to a different claim of his work:
his imperative to ‘Always historicize!’.32 Like a number of other critics, he
worries that if scholarship on postwar literature succumbs to a routine
historicism, it will fail to respond to calls for surface, enchanted, or distant
readings, or even simply more temporally wide-ranging methodologies in
which we ‘historicize differently’, as Sianne Ngai has written.33 These crit-
ics have caught a postwar strain of what Jennifer Fleissner has diagnosed as
the ‘Historicism Blues’. She points out that across the discipline of literary
studies historicism has been cathected with a complex of anxieties con-
cerning the political salience, moral purpose, and seeming theoretical sta-
sis of criticism since the 1990s. Fleissner doesn’t have a cure; instead she
suggests the couch. For her, the inescapable urge towards historicization
and the anxieties it generates show the ‘constitutive elusiveness of the his-
tory that is its aim’, and turns to Nietzsche, Freud, and Dominick LaCapra
to prompt critics to theorize more fully what is assumed and produced by
the act of historical explanation.34
It is important to point out that the historicism under discussion in
these debates, and that targeted by a strand of critique running from Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick to Rita Felski, is not historicism tout court but rather
New Historicism.35 As the name for a methodology of interpretation,
historicism signifies a diverse range of approaches. It can be a philosophy of
language in which linguistic meaning is contextual, as in Schleiermacher’s
hermeneutics or Cambridge School historiography; it can be a Hegelian
belief in a teleologically unfolding process of development according to
31 Jameson, Postmodernism, 3.
32 David J. Alworth, ‘Hip to Post45’, Contemporary Literature, 54/3 (2013), 630.
33 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations,
108/1 (2009), 1–21; Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge,
MA; London, 2012), 14; other attempts to historicize postwar literature differently include
Michaela Bronstein, ‘Ng˜ug˜ı’s Use of Conrad: A Case for Literary Transhistory’, Modern
Language Quarterly, 75/3 (2014), 411–37; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as
Origin of the Present (Stanford, 2013); David J. Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social
Form (Princeton, 2016).
34 Jennifer Fleissner, ‘Historicism Blues’, American Literary History, 25/4 (2013), 707.
35 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity (Durham; London, 2003), 123–51; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago,
2015).
Introduction 11
a unifying principle; or it can be an evaluative approach to the diversity

of individual cultures, as in Herder’s anthropology or contemporary identity
politics. New Historicism involves a rather different set of assumptions,
largely descending from Foucault’s archaeologies.36 It is the continuous
and therefore contingent relationship between literature and the totality
of culture considered as a text that has triggered anxieties about the
reduction of literature to its contexts, and it is the belief that power
circulates on the surface of the text yet still requires the act of critical
exposure that has led to fatigue with the hermeneutics of suspicion and
calls for modes of enchanted or surface reading—with the metaphor of
surface ironically describing two contrasting approaches, as Felski has
pointed out.37
Although methodological debates about historicism have been taking
place across the discipline of literary studies, they have a particular salience
for critics working on postwar literature. If only because it is being done
for the first time, thinking about your relationship to the most recent past
is a different task than engaging with a past already assumed as separate
from the present. That assumed separation is the condition for the dra-
matic finale of much literary scholarship on earlier eras: the revelation that
we remain Victorians, still share Enlightenment print culture, are socially
networked like early modern intellectuals, and so on in the upending of
naïve presentist assumptions. Historicizing the recent past, in contrast,
cuts a line through a present in which we think we still belong. Part of Eric
Hayot’s critique of periodization is that it is ‘the untheorized ground of the
possibility of literary scholarship’.38 For Joshua Kates, periodization in
contemporary literary studies homogenizes its temporal objects, pointing
instead to Althusser’s elaboration of a theory of periodization governed by
a ‘differentiation at once temporal and object oriented’, with different
classes of events answering to various structures of time.39 Yet the reasons
the postwar period might now be so generatively unsettling for assumptions
about periodicity and historicism have been theorized by both Hannah
Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno. Countering the homogenization of
historical time and the assumption that periodizing claims are merely
pragmatic acts for the convenience of scholarship, impulses they developed
out of a shared engagement with Walter Benjamin while rejecting Benjamin’s
complete historical relativism in the service of politico-theological redemp-
tion, Arendt and Adorno both identified a temporal relationship called the
36 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago,

2000), 1–19.
37 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 52–6. 38 Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 154.
39 Joshua Kates, ‘Against the Period’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,
25/2 (2012), 137; 143.
‘vantage point’ of the ‘most recent’: a unique and ever-shifting alignment

between the present and the past from which it has just departed.40 This
was their formulation of the historiographical problem given metaphorical
expression by Hegel’s famous claim that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of dusk’, arguing that we ascend to knowledge
of history, the apprehension by the ideal of the real, only when an event
has come to an end.41
What we call ‘the postwar’ is now simply this ‘most recent’ past, and in
this book I argue two things: that some of the novelists of this recent past
used an engagement with art to develop their own ways of thinking about
the relationship of literature to history, and that studying these engage-
ments can offer the critic a way to navigate between the reductive under-
standings of historicism and formalism that tend to emerge in response to
the eternally recurring question of the relationship of literary criticism to
historical explanation. By carefully tracing acts of commentary and com-
position, and by approaching these as mediating interpretations rather than
continuities or reflections, this book avoids the affective anxieties generated
by New Historicism’s arbitrary use of a single text as a metonymic encap-
sulation of a historical period. By approaching literary form as having its
own historical developments, often out of sync with political history, and
by seeing writers’ uses of forms as acts of self-historicization, I argue that
not all objects of historicist analysis are the same: productively, challengingly,
and generatively so. In doing so, this shows there are better ways to attend
to literary form as a justifiable reaction against an overtly contextualizing
historicism than becoming naïve and uncritical readers enchanted by the
surface of our texts. And simply by the fact of not focusing only on litera-
ture, but by working comparatively across fiction and visual art, this book
shows up the frequent lack of interdisciplinarity in debates about historicism
or a putative postwar studies and uses such comparisons to show what a
more interdisciplinary analysis of the period looks like. Worries that the
study of postwar literature is suffering, as Nietzsche wrote of his own time,
from a ‘surfeit of history’ are misplaced. After all, Nietzsche’s counsel was
that ‘the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the
health of an individual, of a people, and of a culture [italics original]’—and,
one might add, a discipline.42
40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn (Chicago; London, 1998), 5;
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), 359.
41 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox
(Oxford, 1942), 13.
42 Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, 63.
Introduction 13
H I S TO RY B E T W E E N A RT A N D F I C T I O N
When Susan Sontag offered in ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966) one of the first
attempts to define a new postwar sensibility by detecting a ‘flight from
interpretation’ into formalism across the art of Frank Stella and Jasper
Johns and the fiction of Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs, she was
doing more than fulfilling her self-appointed role as her era’s most sensitive
cultural antenna (or perhaps its hippest cultural consumer).43 In basing
her claim for a new historical period on a comparison between the arts, she
was relying on an art historical assumption that dates all the way back to
Vasari, and forward through Vico and Hegel into the works of Riegl,
Wöllflin, and Panofsky, that laid the foundations for the field as a profes-
sionalized academic practice.44 Vasari developed ‘a historical point of
view’, according to Panofsky, in proposing the periodization of the history
of art, and that each period be evaluated according to the criteria of its own
time, on the basis of a connection between different art forms in the same
historical epoch.45 This assumption is almost always latent in acts of
comparison between art and literature—as Jacques Lacan once quipped,
‘everybody is a Hegelian without knowing it’—but self-consciousness
about it surfaced in the more astute comparisons between art and litera-
ture during the postwar decades.46 In trying to show that ‘the post-war years
gave birth to a period of artistic achievement quite distinct to modernism’
that nevertheless could not be reduced to postmodernism, Christopher
Butler compared techniques across the arts because it is in technique ‘that
the close analogies between the arts can be appreciated and an implied
Zeitgeist discerned’.47 In studies of postwar poetry, when Charles Altieri
wanted to discuss John Ashbery’s ‘contemporaneity’ with his time, he
turned to ‘Ashbery’s relationship to the experiments in visual art that first
set themselves the task of constructing a postmodern sensibility’, although
as he subsequently reflected, the ‘postmodern’ too unreflectively replaced
what was primarily an attempt to use comparison to theorize a writer’s
contemporaneity with his time.48
43 Susan Sontag, Essays of the 1960s & 1970s (New York, 2013), 16; 733–44.
44 See Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, 1985).
45 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The First Page of Giorgio Vasari’s “Libro”’, in Meaning in the Visual
Arts (Garden City, NY, 1955), 205.
46 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in
the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge, 1988), 73.
47 Christopher Butler, After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde (Oxford,
1980), 160; x.
48 Charles Altieri, Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts (University
Park, PA, 1998), 55; 7.
Altieri’s unease about how postmodernism too quickly suffocated other

attempts to use comparison to theorize the relationship between literature
and history was not widely shared. Reflecting on the theory and practice
of the 1960s and 1970s, on Robert Smithson as much as Paul de Man,
Craig Owens defined postmodernism in terms of its ‘allegorical impulse’.
Postmodern allegory proposes a ‘reciprocity . . . between the visual and the
verbal: words are often treated as purely visual phenomena, while visual
images are offered as a script to be deciphered’. This reciprocity stems from
the belief that all representations are contingent, fragmentary, and incom-
plete—all melancholy ruins—and this carries with it ‘a conviction of the
remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present’.49 But that
history only gets recovered as a signifier, and the desire to redeem the past
produces the lack it cannot fulfil. A postmodernist allegorical blurring of
the difference between visual and verbal representation has been explored
in the work of writers such as Angela Carter, Alasdair Gray, and Salman
Rushdie.50 Relating art and fiction through allegory extends to these
writers’ ambivalent rejection of history as a meaningful frame for their
writing: as Amy J. Elias has written of the ‘postmodernist metahistorical
romance’ more broadly, history is their sublime object of representation at
the same time as it is a reality they want to deny.51 Linda Hutcheon has
argued that parody is a major form of ‘inter-art discourse’ in postmodern-
ism. However, the contrast she draws between the Russian Formalist
emphasis on the ‘historical role of parody’ in marking formal change and
her own definition of parody as ‘imitation with critical difference’ pro-
duces a contradiction in an argument that attempts to make parody a
defining form of inter-art discourse relating literature and visual art in the
twentieth century.52 As with Owens’s allegorical impulse, attempts to
make postmodernism a stylistic and periodizing category fray under the
pressure of the history that postmodernism seeks to escape.
For all its paradoxes, postmodernism was a cause with which many nov-
elists explicitly allied their engagements with the visual arts. While postwar
feminism was never identical with postmodernism, writers such as Angela
Carter and Kathy Acker did see themselves as practising a ‘conjuncture of
49 Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’, October,

12 (1980), 74; 68.
50 Katie Garner, ‘Blending the Pre-Raphaelist with the Surreal in Angela Carter’s Shadow
Dance (1966) and Love (1971)’, in Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, ed. by Sonya
Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips (London, 2012), 147–64; Robert Crawford and Thom
Nairn, eds., The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh, 1991); Ana Cristina Mendes, ed., Salman
Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders (London, 2012).
51 Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore, 2001), xiv.
52 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms
(London, 1985), 2; 36.
Introduction 15
feminism and postmodernism’, a practice of transgression in order to liberate

desire.53 This conjuncture equated social transgression with transgressing
the boundaries between different art forms and saw more use in rejecting
the legacy of art historical modernism rather than engaging in the kind of
revisionary project advocated by Griselda Pollock—who distances herself
from Carter’s dismissal of Picasso—of differencing the canon of modern-
ism and rethinking its relationship to the present.54 Although the focus of
the chapters that follow is on writers who engaged with the legacy of
modernist art in order to rethink their relationship to history, and who saw
the visual as resistant to language rather than easily transgressed, a number
of comparisons developed throughout this book spotlight moments when
such approaches were not taken, and what in contrast was gained or lost.
Gertrude Stein’s engagement with Cubism was an ambivalent model for
both Beckett and Gaddis, yet her investment in modernist issues such as
the tension between convention and representation was denied by a later
generation of writers who came to see her as a harbinger of poststructural-
ism. Berger and Doris Lessing were equally committed to the cause of
postwar social realism as an initial reaction against modernism, but while
Berger went back to Cubist painting to develop a revolutionary historiog-
raphy of deferral and delay, Lessing soon drifted out of any engagement
with art into explorations of a post-historical and increasingly post-human
future. Kathy Acker’s work shows the most sophisticated literary engage-
ment with postmodern art and theory: as she said of her own practice of
appropriation: ‘[w]hen I did Don Quixote, what I really wanted to do was
a Sherri Levine painting. I’m fascinated by Sherri’s work’.55 Like Gaddis,
Acker saw stylistic authenticity as almost irredeemably threated by post-
war consumer capitalism, but if for Gaddis that was a wound which art
helped him salt, for Acker it enabled a l iberation from the historical strait-
jacket of style and the release of the timeless libidinal energies of the body.
Yet as Gaddis’s prefiguration of what Michael Fried termed the problem of
art and objecthood shows, the rejection of history in favour of immanent
bodily desire mystifies the body’s own h istorical formation and contingent
relationships to sites of spectatorship and display.
53 Kathy Acker, ‘Kathy Acker Interviewed by Rebecca Deaton’, Textual Practice, 6/2
(1992), 275; Angela Carter, ‘Angela Carter’, in Novelists in Interview, ed. by John Haffenden
(London, 1985), 76–96.
54 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (London, 2003), 218; Griselda Pollock,
‘Feminism and Modernism’, in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–85,
ed. by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker (London, 1987), 79–124; Griselda Pollock,
Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London, 1999).
55 Ellen G. Friedman and Kathy Acker, ‘A Conversation with Kathy Acker’, The Review
of Contemporary Fiction, 9/3 (1989), 12.
The impact of photography on postwar fiction was decisively shaped by

suspicion of its role in facilitating what was increasingly critiqued as the
‘society of the spectacle’; or as Sontag wrote in her influential On Photography
(1979): ‘the narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption
requires the unlimited production and consumption of images’.56 This
tempered an earlier generation’s enthusiastic and r etrospectively somewhat
uncritical embrace of what Julian Murphet has termed the shifting media
ecology of the early twentieth century.57 For writers like Ralph Ellison,
Richard Wright, and Michael Ondaatje, photography was often more of
interest in its relationship to questions of documentation, memory, and
autobiography rather than its status as a putative ‘art’, or in offering access,
as André Bazin argued, to an ontological confirmation of reality.58 Strange
as this may seem, the view that the significance of photography as a tech-
nology and cultural form is lost when it is reduced to the fine art practice
of, say, Ansel Adams or Diane Arbus has been a major strand of photog-
raphy theory and art history, and there is much to commend in separating
inquiries into the history of art from those into photography, not to men-
tion media history more broadly.59 Indeed, Friedrich Kittler’s histories are
a refreshingly strange picture of what the history of art looks like when all
history is the history of media.60 Nevertheless, this use of photography as
an ‘anti-art’ is discussed in this book’s chapter on Sebald, and the opposition
in his work between photography and painting is his own characteristically
muted engagement with this broader issue of photography’s relationship
to art and aesthetic theory as well as to the novel.
No book aiming to work across a historical period, unless it were to
model itself on Borges’s Book of Sand, can ever be fully comprehensive,
and to borrow again from Borges, these are the paths this study has not
taken. But the paths it does take in the following chapters do link up with
the work of these other novelists and their critics, as well as tracing a
56 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith

(New York, 1994); Sontag, Essays, 654.
57 Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-
Garde (Cambridge, 2009).
58 Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth
Century (Princeton, 2007); Lee-Von Kim, ‘Scenes of Af/filiation: Family Photographs in
Postcolonial Life Writing’, Life Writing, 12/4 (2015), 401–15; André Bazin, ‘The Ontology
of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly, 13/4 (1960), 4–9.
59 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, in The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 131–50; Douglas Crimp, ‘The
Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject’, in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of
Photography (Cambridge MA, 1989), 3–11; Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays
and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax, 1984).
60 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. by Anthony Enns
(Cambridge, 2010).
Introduction 17
coherent journey of their own in identifying the different ways in which

postwar novelists used an engagement with art to relate their work to history.
For Samuel Beckett in the aftermath of the Second World War, the necessary
development of visual modernism offered an example of how artistic forms
could develop in ways not determined by the political necessities pro-
claimed by Marxist humanism, and of how the forms of his postwar novels
could express his sense of historical changes in understandings of space,
humanism, and embodiment. For William Gaddis, the issues of art and
objecthood raised by Abstract Expressionist painting brought into sharp
relief the ways in which the meaning of all novels, not only his own,
threated to become context-dependent during the Cold War. For John
Berger, the failure of postwar social realism forced a reconsideration of the
revolutionary potential of Cubism and the capacity of art to escape the
historical contexts of its production through modes of anticipatory and
retrospective activation. And for W. G. Sebald, the different models pho-
tography and painting offered for writing enabled the development of a
literary form that could memorialize the traumatic impact of the Holocaust
without that trauma becoming the form of that literary memorialization.
In conclusion, this book turns to the ways in which contemporary writers
are using the work of these novelists as reference points in their own
attempts to use art to engage the contemporary, inscribing them into their
individual intellectual histories, as well as into the literary history that is
the focus of this book.
M O D E R N I S M ’ S A RT H I S TO RY
For all that this is a work of literary history, it is informed throughout by

art history. These are two fields which have had rather little to say to each
other in the study of postwar culture when compared to studies of the
Victorian or modernist periods, for example, and the exceptions that
prove the rule, such as David J. Alworth’s use of the concept of site speci-
ficity to rethink the novel’s relationship to the social, show what can be
gained from engaging with the highly elaborated aesthetic concepts
developed by art critics in the postwar decades.61 Criticism, theory, and
historiography were frequently intertwined in the writings of critics such
as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind
E. Krauss, or in the writings of artists such as Robert Morris, Adrian Piper,
Robert Smithson, and the Art-Language group. The postwar historiography
of modernist art is both a developing context for the writers under
61 Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form.

discussion in subsequent chapters as well as the source for one of their

assumptions—that a painting’s form can express a theory of h istory—
and it informs this book’s own claim for the particular importance of
modernist painting to these writers. As such, one aspect of its tangled
development requires a short exposition: why did this critical discourse
come to view the meaning and value of painting as lying in its expression
of a theory of history? What critical contortions had to happen for this
to be a description of viewing a painting by Frank Stella?
One part of what we were seeing was a kind of history, telescoped and
assessed; and the other part was the registration of feelings generated by that
historical condition. I never doubted the absoluteness of that history. It was
out there, manifest in a whole progression of works of art, an objective fact
to be analyzed. It had nothing to do with belief, or privately held fantasies
about the past. Insofar as modernism was tied to the objective datum of that
history, it had, I thought, nothing to do with ‘sensibility’.62
This description of what Rosalind E. Krauss claims a whole generation of
critics saw in a whole generation of postwar artists achieves its effect
through an act of defamiliarization. Visual modernism, seemingly charac-
terized by its gradual expunging of the figuration that would represent
history—Napoleon, a steam engine, a washerwoman—reveals in this
expulsion a process of historical evolution that is illuminated by the form
of each modernist work worthy of the name.
Postwar art criticism developed what I call a peculiarly historicist mod-
ernism: a modernism which developed according to a necessary and
teleological logic and whose individual manifestations—specific paintings
and sculptures—were self-reflexive expressions of this theory of historical
continuity through change. Although historicist versions of modernism
were central to the criticism of figures like T. S. Eliot, in the postwar period
this ‘[p]rofoundly historicist’ view of modernism, as Krauss has written,
developed primarily out of Clement Greenberg’s criticism.63 Greenberg’s
theory of modernism has been most frequently criticized for its awkward
appropriation of Kant’s critique of judgement; that is, when it is not being
slated for calcifying an American avant-garde into a sterile abstraction,
participating in the bureaucratization of the senses, or facilitating American
cultural imperialism in Europe.64 All of this is true, albeit to an extent, for
62 Rosalind E. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA; London, 2010), 126.

63 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, MA; London, 1985), 1.
64 Diarmuid Costello, ‘Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary
Art Theory’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art History, 65/2 (2007), 217–28; Caroline A. Jones,
Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago;
London, 2006); Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language (Cambridge, MA; London,
Introduction 19
if essays like ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960) did all they were accused of one
really would have to admire the power possessed by their author. This is
not to claim that the criticism of Greenberg and his successors influenced
the writers in this book, even if it was known to all of them in degrees of
different mediation. Instead I argue that many of the concerns of postwar
art history were foregrounded in their own ways by postwar writers:
Beckett’s historicist explanation of form, Gaddis’s concern with the differ-
ence between art and objecthood, Berger’s rethinking of the belatedness of
the avant-garde, Sebald’s use of visual readymades. If one aim of this book
is to bring literary history into a closer relationship with the postwar art
history of modernism, we first need a sense of what that art history is.
If Greenberg’s writings are the beginning of that history, then that
beginning is more prolific and diverse than is often recognized, with his art
criticism embedded within discussions of literature, philosophy, Jewish
identity, and a political journey, as he infamously wrote, where an ‘anti-
Stalinism which started out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for
art’s sake’.65 Yet the continuities between these two positions lie behind his
argument that visual form expressed historical continuity, and what
Donald Kuspit called Greenberg’s historical determinism was noticed
from his earliest critics onwards.66 ‘A superior consciousness of history—
more precisely, the appearance of a new criticism of society, an historical
criticism’ is what made ‘avant-garde culture’ possible.67 As T. J. Clark has
written of this salvo from ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), for ‘avant-garde
culture’ we can read modernism, and for ‘historical criticism’ we can read
Marxism.68 The following year Greenberg wrote that this superior h istorical
consciousness was expressed in modernism’s form, above all its develop-
ment of abstraction. There is ‘nothing in the nature of abstract art which
compels it to be so’; rather, its ‘imperative comes from history, from the
age in conjunction with a particular moment reached in a particular
tradition of art’.69 Tenuous as it is, this justification of abstraction is derived
from a dynamic conjunction between the spheres of political economy,
theorized along the lines of a fairly vulgar Marxism, and the sphere of
artistic production. Twenty years later in ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), the
1991), 1–28; Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom, and the Cold War, 101–64.
65 Quoted in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4:
Modernism with a Vengeance 1957–1969, ed. by John O’Brian (Chicago, 1993), 19.
66 Donal Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic (Madison, 1979), 6.
67 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and
Judgments 1939–1944, ed. by John O’Brian (Chicago, 1986), 7.
68 Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, 139–56.
69 Greenberg, Perceptions and Judgments, 37.
essence of modernism lies ‘in the use of the characteristic methods of a

discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but to
entrench it more firmly in its area of competence’, and ‘[i]t quickly emerged
that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with
all that was unique in the nature of its medium’.70 Between these two
positions a reduction occurs: a theory of historical determinism devised to
explain changes in modes of production and cultural forms is compressed
into explaining visual form and visual form alone. Modernism’s imperative
no longer comes from history as a teleological process guided by a unifying
principle, but from the history of a medium. Hence the curiously intense
way in which a drip or a smudge expresses historical continuity—it is the
only thing for Greenberg in modernity that can.
The problem with this, as Michael Fried pointed out, was that once the
nature or ‘essence’ of a medium was revealed, the historical process that
was modernism could only enter an endgame where it cancelled itself out:
if a modernist painting’s essence is the acknowledgement of its literal
support, then as Greenberg was forced to admit, a tacked-up piece of
canvas is conceivably a painting.71 Fried’s move to maintain modernism as
a historical process was not less historicism but more. Both ‘Art and
Objecthood’ (1967) and ‘Three American Painters’ (1965) were attempts
to ‘historicize the concept of essence’ by turning to Cavell and Wittgenstein:
modernist art thus revealed not only the historicity of social life but, more
grandly, the historicity of ontological essence deflated to convention.72
The priority that historicist explanations of visual modernism acquired
through Fried’s revision of Greenberg can be seen as one motivation for
Krauss’s subsequent attempt to develop a self-professedly anti-historicist
theory of modernism, defining it as a delimited set of possibilities generated
out of structural oppositions between signifier and signified, figure and
ground, or the look and the gaze, using the same structuralist tools to replay
within American art history Claude Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Jean-Paul
Sartre’s historicism two decades before.73 Much of the revisionist art histories
of modernism of the 1980s can be seen as continuing this use of poststruc-
turalist theory to dismantle Greenberg’s historicist theory of modernism—it
was Lacan against the historicists, to appropriate Joan Copjec—although
such work never quite seemed clear whether it was seeking predecessors in
70 Greenberg, Modernism with a Vengeance, 86.

71 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
(Chicago; London, 1998), 151–2.
72 Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, 38.
73 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 1–32; Claude
Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London, 1972), 245–70.
Introduction 21
modernism for a properly postmodern present or re-conceptualizing the

nature of modernism itself.74
Testifying to the slippery nature of the term, visual postmodernism was
also theorized and criticized as a historicism, but this historicism was
meant in a more specifically stylistic sense, an eclectic pastiche and parody
of previous styles. Paradoxically, the accusation levelled by Jürgen Habermas
against postmodern architecture, or by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh against
Anselm Kiefer, was that to reduce style to mere signifiers of the historical
past abandoned the motivated connection between history and style, and
the sense of the historicity of form that was still seen, however strained, in
postwar iterations of modernism.75 A more lasting disciplinary formation
born out of the waning of modernist art history was visual studies,
although if W. J. T. Mitchell is correct in arguing that visual studies began
with Berger’s Ways of Seeing, it might be more accurate to say that visual
studies arose out of the literary engagements with the legacy of modernism
that are the subject of this book. One argument for the capacious terrain
encompassed by visual culture is Mitchell’s claim that ‘the history of cul-
ture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for the dominance between
pictorial and linguistic signs’.76 Visual studies has looked away from art in
order to tell its version of that story, but this book argues that novelists’
engagements and struggles with art have been their way of developing
narratives about history and the relationship of their work to it. So for all
that this book is not about the postwar novel’s relationship to visual cul-
ture as a set of objects—television, CCTV, social media—it does pick up
and extend the historicizing bent of visual studies as a discipline to make a
methodological claim that comparative work on art and literature as well
as on text and image should be informed by the differing histories of visual
and verbal forms, and be aware of how these differences can be at the
centre of literary responses to art. This emphasis on the difference between
the visual and the verbal even in their interaction has been a second signal
contribution of visual studies. Although claims for a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic
turn’ themselves enact a periodizing move through declaring shifts in the
relationship between visual and verbal—performing what they claim to be
analysing—this book does draw on such work to push back against the
74 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
75 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modern and Postmodern Architecture’, in The New Conservatism:
Cultural Criticism and the Historian’s Debate, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
1989), 3–21; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes
on the Return of Representation in European Painting’, October, 16, 1981, 39–68.
76 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago; London, 1986), 43.
‘linguistic turn’ as a totalizing context for the study of postwar literature.77

It is this difference between the visual and the verbal, its resistance to writ-
ing rather than its solicitation of allegorical reciprocity, that makes art an
object of fascination to the writers in the following chapters.
In returning to claims for the difference of ‘the visual’—no matter how
qualified, nuanced, and focused on the dry technocracies of academic
disciplines and journals as against what Greenberg saw as ‘the whole of
what is truly alive in our culture’—visual studies and art history have
returned to what was for decades dismissed as a central plank of a mystify-
ing modernist ideology. One accusation central to these attacks was that
modernist ideologues from Pater onwards turned historically contingent
differences between artistic media into transcendental laws; in contrast,
the chapters that follow document a range of engagements where the
historicity of even the most abstract visual forms was acknowledged and
embraced to think through the historicity of literary works. If a second
accusation was that such attempts to demarcate different aesthetic media
grounded their claims in an illusory separation between sensory modalities—
as happens with Greenberg and Fried—the contingencies of corporeality,
spectatorship, and perspective probed by these writers show that the visual
can be figured as resistant to language without that resistance ignoring
the basic phenomenological insight of the unity of sense perception or
denying the situatedness of all viewing. Both these elements—a historicist
rather than transcendental reading of visual form and the failure of the
body to ground differences between aesthetic media—were central to
Beckett’s engagement with visual art, and both in turn were part of a nego-
tiation of the politics of aesthetics after the Second World War and of
Beckett’s response to a previous generation’s modernism. That response
has often been figured as a belated exhaustion of modernist aesthetics and
techniques, and for this reason Beckett has long been seen as one the most
important figures bridging modernism and postwar writing. This was
equally true in his belated and exhausting embrace of his own version of a
historicist modernism in order not to fantasize about an art cut free from
the determinations of history, but to give that autonomy its own historical
justification.
77 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The Pictorial Turn’, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation (Chicago; London, 1994), 11–34; Keith Moxey, ‘Visual Studies and the
Iconic Turn’, Journal of Visual Culture, 7/2 (2008), 131–46; Richard Rorty, The Linguistic
Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, 1967).
1
Pig Vomit
Beckett’s Art Historical Necessities
In a 1981 conversation with the artist Avigdor Arikha, Samuel Beckett

claimed that ‘[l]iterature and painting are like oil and water . . . like fire
and water they are separated by a zone of evaporation’.1 These two similes
condense into material terms the core assumptions underlying Beckett’s
lifelong reflections on the relationship of visual art to his work. The first
expresses the belief that in spite of repeated attempts to explain his writ-
ing in terms of painting, the two media are irreconcilably different, and
it is this failure of one medium to translate into another that makes the
attempt part of Beckett’s art of failing and going on. The zone the second
simile posits as separating literature and painting harks back to an allu-
sion in Beckett’s first work of fiction, Dream of Fair to Middling Women
(1932), to ‘the profound antagonism latent in the neutral space that
between victims of real needs is as irreducible as the zone of evaporation
between damp and incandescence (We stole that one. Guess where)’.2
The answer? Proust’s Du côte de chez Swann (1913), and its description
of what comes between consciousness and an external object as a ‘zone
d’évaporation . . . qui m’empêchait de jamais toucher directement sa
matière’ ‘(a zone of e vaporation . . . that prevented me from ever touching
its substance directly)’.3 Proust’s ‘empêchement’, which Beckett elsewhere
equated with a ‘rupture of the lines of communication’ that has left a ‘no
man’s land’ between subject and object, became a key concept in Beckett’s
postwar writings on art.4 In 1949 he wrote that Bram van Velde’s
attempted refusal of figurative painting paralleled his turn in the Trilogy
into ‘the only terrain accessible to the poet . . . the no man’s land he projects
1 Quoted in Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London, 2001), 112.
2 Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London, 1993), 191–2.
3 Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols. (Paris, 1987), i, 83; Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
(London, 1981), 90.
4 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London,
1983), 70.
round himself, rather as the flame projects its zone of evaporation’.5 Across
decades, Beckett equated the zone between literature and painting with
the zone between subject and object, with the resistance between artistic
media replaying the resistance of the world to our consciousness.
Beckett’s hostility towards the adaptation of his works from one medium
to another, and his use of titles like Words and Music (1961), Film (1963), and
Play (1965), suggest that the commitment to medium specificity underlying
these reflections was central to his work. Philosophical interpretations of
Beckett’s work have emphasized its tendency to focus on the distinct
features of artistic media: Gilles Deleuze’s view that it exhausts the langues
of the name, the voice, and the image; Alain Badiou’s argument that it
aims to show ‘those functions to which writing can and should restrict
itself ’; Theodor Adorno’s claim that it exemplifies ‘the tendency of modern
art to make its own categories thematic through self-reflection’.6 Each of
these thinkers saw Beckett’s thematizing of the medium as expressing one
of modernism’s defining features. It was also, as we have seen in the
Introduction, central to the historicist modernism theorized by Clement
Greenberg and Michael Fried. Like these critics, Beckett saw visual mod-
ernism as driven by a logic of internal formal evolution. In 1948 he wrote
that ‘[t]he history of painting is the history of its relation to its object, a
relation evolving, necessarily, first in terms of extension, then of penetra-
tion’, a history wherein ‘the instinctive shudder of painting from its limits
is a shudder towards the confines of those limits’.7 In Beckett’s art criticism
of the 1940s, this view of modernist form as determined by a necessary
search for the limits of its medium was opposed to a different kind of
necessity: Marxist humanism’s claim that all artistic forms were necessarily
determined by a historical process ending in the ‘recognition of man by
man’.8 Beckett’s encounter with Nazism in 1937 left him allergic to claims
for historical necessity. As Mark Nixon notes, he recorded in his diary
that the expressions ‘ “historical necessity” and “Germanic destiny” start the
vomit moving upwards’.9 But a vomit, like a shudder, is also a necessary
5 2 March 1949, Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 2: 1941–1956, ed.
by Gordon Craig and others (Cambridge, 2011), 131.
6 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, in Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. by Daniel
W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London, 1998), 152–74; Alain Badiou, On Beckett, ed. by
Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manchester, 2003), 3; Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), 340.
7 Samuel Beckett, ‘The New Object’, Modernism/Modernity, 18/4 (2011), 878–9.
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: The Communist Problem, trans. by
John O’Neill (Brunswick, NJ, 2000), 116–17.
9 Quoted in Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 (London, 2011), 87;
15 January 1937, Samuel Beckett, ‘German Diaries’, 1937, Beckett International Foundation,
University of Reading.
Pig Vomit 25
process: necessary but involuntary, purposeful yet without intention. It is

one of the many reflexes, tics, and spasms that animate Beckett’s bodies,
and which this chapter aims to show come to replace painting as a figure
for a formal act expressive only ‘of its impossibility, of its obligation’.10 But
it was only through an engagement with what Beckett saw as modernist
painting’s foregrounding of medium specificity, the separation of the
senses, and the problem of anthropomorphism that the compulsive body
could come to occupy this position in his work.
However, unlike Greenberg and Fried, Beckett did not see modernism’s
evolution culminating in abstraction, since that made painting’s ‘lack of all
relation’ to self and world the foundation of a new certainty.11 Instead,
when asked why painting should refuse both figuration and abstraction
and attempt to depict the ‘empêchement’ between subject and object,
Beckett replied that the form of expression he was seeking could only be
the product of an ‘unintelligible, unchallengeable need to splash colour on
it [a canvas], even if that means vomiting one’s whole being’.12 Beckett’s
writings on art thus oppose two kinds of art historical necessity: form’s
necessary determination by history, and the necessity of form’s exhaustion
of the limits of its medium in order to express a failed relation between
subject and object, self and world. This wriggling between historical deter-
minism and formal autonomy articulates what Steven Connor calls
Beckett’s ‘finitive modernism’, one which recognizes that if ‘the assertion
of a given historical essence is one evasion of this finite (because indefinite)
freedom from determination, the identification with an absolute freedom,
or illimitability, is another’.13 Beckett’s engagement with art was crucial for
developing his sense of how the novel, as well as art, could manifest this
‘finitive modernism’ and the tensions it involves between the necessities of
history and the necessities of form.
Peter Boxall has written that Beckett’s work can seem ‘difficult to place
historically . . . to be sealed into an historical and geographic cylinder’, a
tendency cemented by his reception first as an existentialist humanist and
second as a harbinger of the timeless aporias of deconstruction.14 In con-
trast, this chapter argues that Beckett’s art criticism of the 1940s engages
and responds to specific postwar debates about Marxist humanism and the
politics of aesthetics, and to the extent that this criticism explains the tril-
ogy of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), the
same can be said of his fiction. Beckett’s study of the history of art during
10 Disjecta, 145. 11 9 March 1949, Letters 2, 140.

12 9 March 1949, Letters 2, 141.
13 Steven Connor, Beckett, Modernism, and the Material Imagination (Cambridge, 2014), 10.
14 Peter Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (London,
2009), 3.
the 1930s and 1940s also enabled him to situate his work in relationship to
a broader history of Renaissance humanism, a worldview Beckett saw as
manifested in the symbolic form of single-point perspective. Tracing
Beckett’s engagement with art provides us with a double lens on the rela-
tionship between his fiction and history. First, it enables us to precisely
historicize his fiction in relation to debates about the politics of aesthetics
in the 1940s. Second, because those debates were dominated by the
demand that form should be determined by historical necessity, we can see
in Beckett’s figuring of form as the product of necessary yet involuntary
bodily acts an attempt to oppose the necessities of history with the neces-
sity of form. The turn to the body was also a rejection of criticism, since it
substituted theoretical explanations of form’s relationship to history with
a figuring of form as the debased product of corporeal compulsions. By
following Beckett’s mutating concerns with art historical necessities, we
can see the Trilogy, especially The Unnamable, as thematizing in fiction
what Beckett saw to be the key concerns of modernist painting. And we
can see how his writings on art were a failure necessary for the writing of
his Trilogy—but what could be a more Beckettian form of art criticism
than that?
T H E A C T O F A N O B S E S S I O N A L N E U ROT I C :
B E C K E T T ’ S S T U D Y O F A RT
In the diary Beckett kept on a six-month tour of Germany in 1936 and

1937, his notes on art became so extensive that towards the end of his
travels he dismissed what he called his absurd diary with its lists of pictures
as the act of an obsessional neurotic.15 As Mark Nixon has written, ‘[a]ny
reader glancing at the German diaries could be forgiven for thinking that
they were written by an art critic, and not a creative writer’.16 This is equally
true for Beckett’s correspondence of the 1930s, especially with the poet
and art historian Thomas MacGreevy. This neurotic listing of pictures was
not wholly without motivation. Beckett had applied for a position at the
National Gallery in London in 1933 and his aspirations towards a career
as an art historian are recorded in ‘Lightning Calculation’, a fragment
written in London around September 1934.17 One Quigley, sharing
Beckett’s address in S.W. 10, is working on an art historical monograph on
15 2 February 1937, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.

16 Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, 132.
17 Samuel Beckett, ‘Lightning Calculation’, 1934, UoR MS2902, Beckett International
Foundation, University of Reading.
Pig Vomit 27
The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Campendonk; unable to bring himself

to enter the National Gallery to carry out his research, like many a scholar
since he prevaricates instead with tea and biscuits.
Neither Quigley nor Beckett completed this survey of the emotional
expressivity of landscape from sixteenth-century Holland to Blaue Reiter
modernism. Yet the notes Beckett took on his countless visits to museums
across Europe and the views expressed in his correspondence enable us to
piece together the distinctive set of judgements and interpretations that
characterized Beckett’s view of the history of art. Beckett rejected the pri-
macy accorded to the narrative painting of the Italian humanist tradition
and its formal and philosophical centring of humankind in a world of
coherent and knowable time and space. Instead he largely focused on
Dutch landscape and genre, paintings he defined as still and unsaid
because they could not be translated into narrative through ekphrasis,
or because they presented the natural landscape as alien to and independ-
ent of humanity. This was the argument about the pathetic fallacy latent in
Quigley’s monograph, and it continued into Beckett’s equally selective
judgement of modernist painting, where Cézanne’s work was seen as real-
izing painting’s capacity as medium to express the independence of the
natural world from the human subject. Over and against what he called in
his diary the impeccable tedium of French painting between 1900 and
1910—Fauvism and Cubism—Beckett turned to German Expressionism
for the way in which, as he saw it, painters like Franz Marc raised the pos-
sibility of a visual form that would express (or fail to express) the no-man’s
land between subject that object that would become the focus of his postwar
art criticism.18
As James Knowlson has written, Beckett’s study of art history began in
the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, where ‘he was weaned on the
Gallery’s eclectic collection of Old Masters and developed an abiding
passion for seventeenth-century Dutch painting’.19 This preference can be
seen in the names that appear most frequently in his obsessional lists:
Hendrick Avercamp, Adriaen Brouwer, Aelbert Cuyp, Adam Elsheimer,
Dirck Hals, Frans Hals, Meindert Hobbema, Salomon van Ruysdael,
Jacob van Ruisdael, Hercules Seghers, Gerard ter Borch, Jan van Goyen,
and Jan Vermeer. His knowledge of their lives and works was drawn in part
from R. H. Wilenski’s An Introduction to Dutch Art (1929), which he read
in 1933.20 Beckett’s notes were mostly directed to these painters’ landscape
and genre pieces, and although often brief, they reveal something of what
18 22 November 1936, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.

19 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996), 57.
20 Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, 133.
Beckett saw in these paintings. In a visit to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in

1936, Beckett pinpointed the historical novelty of how fifteenth- and early
sixteenth-century Flemish and Dutch artists treated landscape. Comparing
the work of Albrecht Altdorfer and Adam Elsheimer, he wrote in his diary
that Altdorfer was a revelation since the sacred subjects were a pretext for
landscape, unlike in Elsheimer’s work. In Altdorfer’s religious paintings,
literary narratives like the Flight into Egypt are the pretext for the presenting
landscape as a setting for a story, unlike in Elsheimer’s night landscapes,
which merely show, as Beckett noted, water, moon, shepherds, fire, and a
glade.21 Instead of drawing out the narrative Altdorfer presents, Beckett
lists the elements in Elsheimer’s static scene. The merely generic and
descriptive titles of the paintings recorded by Beckett on other visits to the
Hamburger Kunsthalle give a sense of these paintings’ lack of narrative
incident: Hugellandschaft, Winterlandschaft, Hirtenlandschaft, or simply
Landschaft.22
This emancipation from narrative defined sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Dutch landscape. In the words of Wolfgang Stechow, once land-
scape painting ‘had shed—with what after all are few exceptions—its
bonds with religion, mythology, and allegory, it was landscape and little
else’.23 These were part of the larger category of genre pieces, first defined
by Denis Diderot: ‘One calls genre painters, without distinction, those
who busy themselves with flowers, fruits, animals, woods, forests, moun-
tains, as well as those who borrow their scenes from common and domestic
life’.24 Depictions of common people and objects made such paintings
resistant to discursive narrativization and the communication of a moral—
what flower ever undertook the biblical flight into Egypt?—and therefore
they occupied the lowest place in the neoclassical hierarchy of genres.
Beckett described other works in similar terms. In his diary he praised
Giorgione’s Self-Portrait (c.1510) in Brunswick for its profound reticence,
and its quality of what he called the unsaid.25 He also used the concepts of
stillness and the unsaid to praise the more modern work of Willem Grimm
and Karl Ballmer, an equation which associated the lack of narrative in a
still image with its inability to be translated into words or speech.26 That
the representation of movement in a visual image is the condition for its
21 18 December 1936, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.

23 Wolfgang Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century (London,
1966), 11.
24 Quoted in Christopher Comer and Wolfgang Stechow, ‘The History of the Term
Genre’, Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin, 33 (1975), 89.
25 6 December 1936, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.
Pig Vomit 29
translation into verbal narrative through ekphrasis has been central to

European art theory since Vasari’s Lives (1550–68), which Beckett owned,
and was further emphasized in Lessing’s Laocöon, which Beckett referenced
in a discussion of Joyce in Munich around this time.27 In Beckett’s own time,
both Aby Warburg’s theory of the Pathosformel and Freud’s interpretation
of ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’ (1914) were based on the association
between the portrayal of frozen movement and the capacity of an image to
be translated into a verbal narrative.28 Beckett’s interpretations work within
these longstanding frameworks whilst reversing their terms of value: what
is praised is the still image, the unsaid that resists translation through
ekphrasis. These oppositions were made clear in a note on the optical rela-
tions in Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657–9) in
Dresden.29 This painting presents an asymmetry between optical relations
and verbal narrative: the letter the woman reads is hidden, leaving the
viewer with nothing to do other than to trace the relations of seeing and
invisibility around which the painting is constructed. What Beckett’s
interest in Dutch genre shows is an interest in visual images that resist
translation into words, that emphasize the difference between painting
and literature, and thus generate different ways of writing about the visual
than narrative ekphrasis. As Beckett wrote to MacGreevy after his trip to
Germany: ‘I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature, but
now that need is gone’.30
Only being happy with a picture if we can turn it into literature, Svetlana
Alpers has argued, is a legacy of the fact that the interpretative practices of
academic art history were developed in response to Italian humanist paint-
ing, a mode of picturing defined by ‘its susceptibility to such narrative
evocations—to the rhetorical device known by the name of ekphrasis’.31
Although more recent discussions of ekphrasis have attempted to expand
its meaning to include ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’,
or even ‘a fundamental tendency in all linguistic expression’, Alpers has
argued that ekphrasis has always meant a specifically narrative translation
27 Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013), 219; 26 March
1937, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.
28 Aby Warburg, ‘Dürer and Italian Antiquity’, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:
Contributions to the Cultural History of the Italian Renaissance (Los Angeles, CA, 1999),
729–30; Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Volume XIII (1913–1914): Totem and Taboo and Other Works, trans. by James
Strachey (London, 1955).
29 5 February 1937, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.
30 28 November 1936, Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 1: 1929–1940,
ed. by Lois More Overbeck and Martha Dow Fehsenfeld (Cambridge, 2009), 388.
31 Svetlana Alpers, ‘Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation’, New
Literary History, 8/1 (1976), 17.
of a visual image into verbal representation.32 The contrast between narrative

pictures susceptible to ekphrasis and the ‘descriptive’ art of Dutch genre,
with its detailed rendering of individual objects without an implied narra-
tive or central perspective, brings out deep-seated assumptions about how
we think pictures should mean: ‘Time and again the hierarchy of mind
over sense and of educated viewers over ignorant ones has been summoned
to round out the argument for narration with a blast at an art that delights
the eyes’.33 Beckett had little interest in the narrative art influenced by the
Italian Renaissance, writing to MacGreevy of his ‘impatience with the
immensely competent bullies and browbeaters and highwaymen and
naggers, the Rembrandts & Halses and Titians and Rubenses, the Tarquins
of art’, wondering if it is ‘a pettiness to move away from the art that takes
me by the scruff of the neck’, suggesting an aversion to the demands of a
narrative that controls the viewer’s interpretation. He was just as d ismissive
of Panofsky’s narrative-based approach to pictorial interpretation, dismissing
it as ‘notre iconographie de quatre sous’ (‘our three-penny iconography’).34
Beckett’s preference for genre over narrative painting again saw him
reversing the values of academic art history, privileging in his responses to
art sense over mind, ignorance over education, and direct appeal to the
fleshy eye over the unfolding of a narrative. This was a distinctively modernist
reading of art history. Wilenski—and indeed Proust—saw Dutch painting,
especially Vermeer, as the ‘heralds of the Modern Movement of our day’,
and Roland Barthes explains why: ‘To paint so lovingly these meaningless
surfaces, and to paint nothing else—that is already a “modern” esthetic of
silence [sic]’.35 This preference for genre painting’s aesthetic of silence
shows that Beckett’s judgements on the history of art were part of his own
modernist aesthetic of the ‘unsaid’.
If a painting is to narrate a story, it needs a space in which to narrate that
story, and as Michael Baxandall has shown, the development of Albertian
perspective was driven by the need for a coherent space in which to present
Christian narratives.36 Reciprocally, pictures structured according to single-
point perspective relate their objects in potential narratives. As Rosalind
E. Krauss has written:
32 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago,

IL, 1994), 152; 153.
33 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago,
IL, 1983), xxi.
34 Beckett, Disjecta, 118.
35 R. H. Wilenski, An Introduction to Dutch Art (London, 1929), xix; Roland Barthes,
‘The World as Object’, in Critical Essays (Evanston, IL, 1972), 3.
36 Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and
the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford, 1971).
Pig Vomit 31
Perspective is the visual correlate of causality—that one thing follows the
next in space according to a rule. In that sense, despite differences in historical
development, it can be likened to the literary tradition of the omniscient
narrator and conventional plot . . . perspectival space carr[ies] with it the
meaning of narrative: a succession of events leading up to and away from this
moment; and within that temporal succession—given as a spatial analogue—
[is] secreted the ‘meaning’ of both that space and those events.37
It was precisely because of the way single-point perspective organized time
and space into rational relationships of cause and effect, independent of
yet always in theory knowable to a disembodied spectator, that Panofsky
saw it as the symbolic form of modernity and the humanist subject, or
what Foucault called the regime of ‘Classical representation’.38 Beckett’s
view of perspectival space, and his view of its associations with narrative
and humanism, is best shown by a letter written some ten years after view-
ing Antonello da Messina’s Saint Sebastian (1477–9) in Germany. Recalling
the painting’s ‘[p]ure space by dint of mathematics, tiling, flagstones
rather, black and white, with long Mantegna style foreshortenings’—a
technique emphasizing single-point perspective—Beckett saw ‘the whole
thing invaded, eaten into by the human [mangé par le humain]. In front
of such a work, such a victory over the reality of disorder, over the pettiness
of heart and mind, it is hard not to go and hang yourself ’. The bleeding
and eroticized body of Saint Sebastian is realized within the ordered space
of perspective; yet if this is what realizes the humanist subject, it shows ‘the
illusion of the human and the fully realized’.39 This is an illusion as absurd
as the compatibility of ‘distinguished conation and utilitarian splendour’,
of will and reason, that characterized for Beckett a rumoured reconciliation
of André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1948, evidence of how, as is com-
mon in his postwar criticism, his engagement with art enabled him to
place his critique of humanist politics in a longer historical and aesthetic
context.40
Beckett’s study of modern art in the 1930s was shaped by many of the
same ‘neurotic obsessions’. Cézanne was the central figure in his historicist
modernism. He completed a process of formal evolution in the medium of
painting where its inability to represent the passing of time, which for
Beckett defined human subjectivity, became the source of a new ability to
provide a non-anthropomorphic view of the world, and Cézanne’s work
also showed how these changes in visual form were related to technological
modernity. In 1934 Beckett wrote of the ‘relief [of ] the Mont Ste. Victoire
37 Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, 123.

38 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, 1991); Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things (London, 2002), 3–18.
39 27 July 1948, Beckett, Letters 2, 86. 40 27 July 1948, Beckett, Letters 2, 86.
after all the anthropomorphised landscape—van Goyen, Avercamp, the

Ruysdaels, Hobbema, even Claude, Wilson & Chrome Yellow Esq., or
paranthropomorphised by Watteau . . . after all the landscape “promoted”
to the emotions of the hiker, postulated as concerned with the hiker (what
an impertinence, worse than Aesop & the animals)’. ‘Cézanne’, he
declared, ‘seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material
of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions
whatsoever’. He did so because he understood ‘the dynamic intrusion to
be himself & so landscape to be something by definition unapproachably
alien, unintelligible arrangement of atoms, not so much ruffled by the
kind attentions of the Reliability Joneses’. The definition of subjectivity
as a ‘dynamic intrusion’ into the material world shows how, as in his
interpretation of Old Masters, Beckett’s criticism focused on time and
movement, what he called the ‘discrepancy between that which cannot
stay still for its phases & that which can’: subject and object, self and
world. This was overcome by Cézanne working with what was specific to
painting in contrast to photography and cinema, unlike the ‘Impressionists
darting about & whining that the scene wouldn’t rest easy!’ and the ‘snapshot
puerilities of Manet & Cie’.41 By presenting a static landscape rendered in
atomistic dabs of paint that was in no way a vehicle for the emotions of a
human subject living in time, Cézanne showed there was no ‘possibility of
relationship, friendly or unfriendly, with the unintelligible . . . precisely the
absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa or Ruysdael’, artists of the
past.42 This seemingly paradoxical expression of the absence of relation—
the task Beckett set himself and which became the rock on which his
postwar attempts at theorizing foundered—was through Cézanne histori-
cized as a departure from the art and techniques of previous centuries. His
work was ‘the one bright spot in a mechanistic age—the deanthropomo-
phizations of the artist’.43 If visual forms expressed the historicity of our
understanding of nature, they also expressed the historicity of our under-
standing of ourselves, and the fact that Cézanne had begun to dehumanize
the self is one reason why the revival of humanism after the war would be
the target of Beckett’s intense criticism.
Beckett’s interest in German Expressionism during the 1930s was also
driven by what he saw as its attempts to depict the lack of relation between
subject and object, rather than what he later described as the absurd idea
of a painting liberated from the object as in the abstraction of Kandinsky.
That shirks the more difficult task of representing the conditions because
41 8 September 1934, Beckett, Letters 1, 222–3.

42 16 September 1934, Beckett, Letters 1, 227.
43 8 September 1934, Beckett, Letters 1, 223.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Special Delivery
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Special Delivery
Author: George O. Smith
Illustrator: Frank Kramer
Release date: May 6, 2022 [eBook #68007]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Street & Smith Publications,

Incorporated, 1945
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIAL

DELIVERY ***
Special Delivery
By GEORGE O. SMITH
Illustrated by Kramer
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Don Channing grinned at his wife knowingly. Arden caught his glance
and then laughed. Walt Franks leaned back and looked highly
superior. "Go ahead and laugh, darn you. I tell you it can be done."
"Walt, ever since you tried that stunt of aerating soap with hydrogen
to make a floating soap for shower baths, I've been wondering about
your kind of genius."
"Oh no," objected Arden.
"Well, he wondered about it after nearly breaking his neck one
morning."
"That I did," grinned Walt. "It's still a good idea."
"But the idea of transmitting matter is fantastic."
"Agreed," admitted Walt. "But so is the idea of transmitting power."
"It would come in handy if possible," remarked Don. "At slightly under
2-G, it takes only four hours to make Luna from Terra. On the other
hand, shipping stuff from Melbourne, Australia, to New York City, or to
the Mojave Spaceport takes considerably longer. With spacecraft as
super stratosphere carriers it isn't too good, because you've got to
run in a circle. In space you run at constant acceleration to mid-point
and then decelerate the rest of the way. Fine for mile-eating, but not
too hot for cutting circles."
"Well, having established the need of a matter transmitter, now
what?"
"Go on, Walt. You're telling us."
"Well," said Walt, penciling some notes on the tablecloth, "it's like this.
The Carroll-Baler power-transmission tube will carry energy.
According to their initial experiments, they had some trouble."
"They had one large amount, if I recall."
"Specifically, I recall the incident of the hammer. Remember?"
"Barney Carroll got mad and swung a hammer at the tube, didn't he?"
"It was one of them, I don't recall which."
"No matter of importance," said Don. "I think I know what you mean.
He hit the intake end—or tried to. The hammer was cut neatly and
precisely off, and the energy of the blow was transmitted, somehow,
to the wall."
"Through the wall," corrected Walt. "It cracked the plaster, but it went
through so fast that it merely cracked it. The main blow succeeded in
breaking the marble facade of the city hall."
"Um. Now bring us up to date. What have you in mind?"
"A tube which scans matter atom by atom, line by line, and plane by
plane. The matter is removed, atom by atom, and transmitted to a
sort of matter bank in the instrument."
"A what?"
"Matter bank," said Walt. "We can't transmit the stuff itself. That's out.
We can't dissipate the atomic energy or whatever effect we might get.
We can establish a balance locally by using the energy release to
drive the restorer. According to some initial experiments, it can be
done. We take something fairly complex and break it down. We use
the energy of destruction to re-create the matter in a bank, or solid
block of local stuff. Let it be a mass of stuff if it wants to, at any rate,
the signal impulses from the breakdown will be transmitted, scanned,
if you will, and transmitted to a receiver which reverses the process. It
scans, and the matter bank is broken down and the object is rebuilt.
"I hope we can get free and unrestricted transmutation," offered Don.
"You can't send a steel spring out and get one back made of copper."
"I get your point."
"The space lines will hate you," said Arden.
"Too bad. I wonder if it'll carry people."
"Darling," drawled Arden, "don't you think you'd better catch your
rabbit first?"
"Not too bad a thought," agreed Don. "Walt, have you got any rabbit
traps out?"
"A couple. I've been tinkering a bit. I know we can disintegrate matter
through a power tube of slight modification, and reintegrate it with
another. At the present state of the art, it is a mess."
"A nice mess," laughed Don. "Go ahead, though. We'll pitch in when
the going gets hard."
"That's where I stand now. The going is tough."
"What's the trouble?"
"Getting a perfect focus. I want it good enough so that we can scan a
polished sheet of steel—and it'll come out as slick as the original."
"Naturally. We'd better get Wes Farrell on the job."
"I wonder what by-product we'll get this time."
"Look, Walt. Quit hoping. If you get this thing running right, it'll put
your name in history."
"After all," grinned Walt, "I've got to do something good enough to
make up for that Channing Layer."
"Kingman is still fuming over the Channing Layer. Sometimes I feel
sorry that I did it to him like that."
"Wasn't your fault, Don. You didn't hand him the thing knowing that
the Channing Layer would inhibit the transmission of energy. It
happened. We get power out of Sol—why shouldn't they? They
would, except for the Channing Layer."
"Wonder what your idea will do."
"About the Channing Layer? Maybe your space-line competition is
not as good as it sounds."
"Well, they use the power-transmission tubes all over the face of the
Solar System. I can't see any reason why they couldn't ship stuff from
Sidney to Mojave and then space it out from there."
"What an itinerary! By Franks' matter transmitter to Mojave.
Spacecraft to Luna. More matter transmission from Luna to Phobos.
Then transshipped down to Lincoln Head, and by matter transmitter
to Canalopsis. Whoosh!"
"Do we have time to go into the old yarn about the guy who listened
in and got replicas?" asked Arden.
"That's a woman's mind for you," grinned Channing. "Always making
things complicated. Arden, my lovely but devious-minded woman,
let's wait until we have the spry beastie by the ears before we start to
make rabbit pie."
"It's not as simple as it sounds," warned Walt. "But it's there to worry
about."
"But later. I doubt that we can reason that angle out."
"I can," said Arden. "Can we tap the power beams?"
"Wonderful is the mind of woman!" praised Don. "Positively
wonderful! Arden, you have earned your next fur coat. Here I've been
thinking of radio transmission all the time. No, Arden, when you're set
up for sheer energy transmission, it's strictly no dice. The crimped-up
jobs we use for communications can be tapped—but not the power-
transmission beams. If you can keep the gadget working on that line,
Walt, we're in and solid."
"I predict there'll be a battle. Are we shipping energy or
communications?"
"Let Kingman try and find a precedent for that. Brother Blackstone
himself would be stumped to make a ruling. We'll have to go to work
with the evidence as soon as we get a glimmer of the possibilities.
But I think we have a good chance. We can diddle up the focus, I'm
certain."
Arden glowered. "Go ahead—have your fun. I see another couple of
weeks of being a gadgeteer's widow." She looked at Walt Franks. "I
could stand it if the big lug only didn't call every tool, every part, and
every effect either she or baby!"
Walt grinned. "I'd try to keep you from being lonely, but I'm in this too,
and besides, you're my friend's best wife."
"Shall we drag that around a bit? I think we could kill a couple of
hours with it sometime."
"Let it lie there and rot," snorted Channing cheerfully. "We'll pick it up
later. Come on, Walt. We've got work to do."
Mark Kingman glowered at the 'gram and swore under his breath. He
wondered whether he might be developing a persecution complex; it
seemed as though every time he turned around, Venus Equilateral
was in his hair, asking for something or other. And he was not in any
position to quibble about it. Kingman was smart enough to carry his
tray very level. Knowing that they were waiting for a chance to prove
that he had been connected with the late Hellion Murdoch made him
very cautious. There was no doubt in any mind that Murdoch was
written off the books. But whether Murdoch had made a sufficiently
large impression on the books of Terran Electric to have the
connection become evident—that worried Kingman.
So he swore at each telegram that came in, and then sent the desired
object out with the next ship. Compared to his former attitude toward
Venus Equilateral, Mark Kingman was behaving like an honor student
in a Sunday school.
Furthermore, behaving himself did not make him feel good.
He punched the buzzer, told his secretary to call in the shop foreman,
and then sat back and wondered about the 'gram.
He was still wondering when the man entered. Kingman looked up
and fixed his superintendent with a fish glance. "Horman, can you
guess why the Venus Equilateral crowd would want two dozen gauge
blocks?"
"Sure. We use Johannson Blocks all the time."
"Channing wants twenty-four blocks. All three inches on a side—
cubes. Square to within thirty seconds of angle, and each of the six
faces optically flat to one quarter wave length of Cadmium light."
"Whoosh!" said Horman. "I presume the three-inch dimension must
be within a half wave length?"
"They're quite lenient," said Kingman bitterly. "A full wave length!"
"White of them," grunted Horman. "I suppose the same thing
applies?"
"We're running over thin ice," said Kingman reflectively. "I can't afford
to play rough. We'll make up their blocks."
"I wonder what they want 'em for."
"Something tricky, I'll bet."
"But what could you use two dozen gauge blocks for? All the same
size."
"Inspection standards?" asked Kingman.
"Not unless they're just being difficult. You don't put primary gauges
on any production line. You make secondary gauges for production
line use and keep a couple of primaries in the check room to try the
secondaries on. In fact, you usually have a whole set of gauge blocks
to build up to any desired dimension so that you don't have to stock a
half-million of different sizes."
"It's possible that they may be doing something extremely delicate?"
"Possible," said Horman slowly. "But not too probable. On the other
hand, I may be one hundred percent wrong. I don't know all the
different stuff a man can make, by far. My own experience indicates
that nothing like that would be needed. But that's just one man's
experience."
"Channing and that gang of roughneck scientists have been known to

make some fancy gadgets," said Kingman grudgingly.
"If you'll pardon my mentioning the subject," said Horman in a
scathing tone, "you'd have been far better off to tag along with 'em
instead of fighting 'em."
"I'll get 'em yet!"
"What's it got you so far?"
"I'm not too bad off. I've come up from the assistant chief legal
counsel of Terran Electric to controlling the company."
"And Terran Electric has slid down from the topmost outfit in the
system to a seventh rater."
"We'll climb back. At any rate, I'm better off personally. You're better
off personally. In fact, everybody that had enough guts to stay with us
is better off."
"Yeah—I know. It sounds good on paper. But make a bum move
again, Kingman, and we'll all be in jail. You'd better forget that hatred
against Venus Equilateral and come down to earth."
"Well, I've been a good boy for them once. After all, I did point out the
error in their patent on the solar beam."
"That isn't all. Don't forget that Terran Electric's patent was at error
too."
"Frankly it was a minor error. It's one of those things that is easy to
get caught on. You know how it came about?"
"Nope. I accepted it just like everybody else. It took some outsider to
laugh at me and tell me why."
Kingman smiled. "It's easy to get into easy thinking. They took power
from Sirius—believe it or not—and then made some there-and-back
time measurements and came up with a figure that was about the
square of one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. But you
know that you can't square a velocity and come up with anything that
looks sensible. The square of a velocity must be some concept like
an expanding area."
"Or would it be two spots diverging along the sides of a right angle?"
queried Horman idly. "What was their final answer?"
"The velocity of light is a concept. It is based on the flexibility of space
—its physical constants, so to speak. Channing claims that the sub-
etheric radiation bands of what we have learned to call the driver
radiation propagates along some other medium than space itself. I
think they were trying to establish some mathematical relation—which
might be all right, but you can't establish that kind of relation and
hope to hold it. The square of C in meters comes out differently than
the square of C in miles, inches, or a little-used standard, the light-
second, in which the velocity of light is unity, or One. Follow? Anyway,
they made modulation equipment of some sort and measured the
velocity and came up with a finite figure which is slightly less than the
square of one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. Their
original idea was wrong. It was just coincidence that the two figures
came out that way. Anyway," smiled Kingman, "I pointed it out to them
and they quick changed their patent letters. So, you see, I've been of
some help."
"Nice going. Well, I'm going to make those gauges. It'll take us one
long time, too. Johannson Blocks aren't the easiest thing in the world
to make."
"What would you make secondary standards out of?"
"We use glass gauges, mostly. They don't dinge or bend when
dropped—they go to pieces or not at all. We can't have a bent gauge
rejecting production parts, you know, and steel gauges can be bent.
Besides, you can grind glass to a half wave length of light with ease,
but polishing steel is another item entirely."
"I'm going to call Channing and ask him about glass blocks. It may be
that he might use them. Plus the fact that I may get an inkling of the
ultimate use. They have no production lines running on Venus
Equilateral, have they?"
"Nope. Not at all. They're not a manufacturing company."
"Well, I'm going to call."
Kingman's voice raced across Terra to Hawaii, went on the

communications beams of the sky-pointing reflectors, and rammed
through the Heaviside Layer to Luna. At the Lunar Station, his voice
was mingled in multiplex with a thousand others and placed on the
sub-ether beams to Venus Equilateral.
Don Channing answered the 'phone. "Yes?"

"Kingman, Dr. Channing."
Don grunted. He did not care to be addressed by title when someone
who disliked him did it. His friends did not, and Kingman's use of the
title made it an insult.
"Look," said Kingman, "what do you want to use those blocks for?"
"We've got a job of checking dimensions."
"Nothing more? Do you need the metal for electrical reasons?"
"No," said Don. "What have you in mind?"
"Our toolshop is nicely equipped to grind glass gauges. We can do
that better than making Jo-blocks. Can you use glass ones?"
"Hang on a minute." Channing turned to Walt. "Kingman says his
outfit uses glass gauges. Any reason why we can't?"
"See no reason why not. I've heard of using glass gauges, and
they've got some good reasons, too. Tell him to go ahead."
"Kingman? How soon can we get glass ones?"
"Horman, how soon on the glass blocks?"
"Two dozen? About a week."
"We'll have your blocks on the way within four days, Channing. Four
days minimum, plus whatever wait is necessary to get 'em aboard a
spacer."
"We'll check from this end on schedules. We need the blocks, and if
the wait is too long, we'll send the Relay Girl in for 'em."
Don hung up and then said: "Glass ones might be a good idea. We
can check the transmission characteristics optically. I think we can
check more, quickly, than by running analysis on steel."
"Plus the fact that you can get the blocks back after test," grinned
Walt. "Once you tear into a steel block to check its insides, you've lost
your sample. I don't know any other way to check the homogeneity
than by optical tests."
"O.K. Well, four days for glass will do better than a couple of months
on steel blocks."
"Right. Now let's look up Wes and see what he's come up with."
They found Farrell in one of the blister laboratories, working on a
small edition of the power-transmission tubes. He was not dressed in
spacesuit, and so they entered the blister and watched him work.
"Have a little trouble getting the focus to stay sharp through the
trace," complained Wes. "I can get focus of atomic proportions—the
circle of confusion is about the size of the atom nucleus, I mean—at
the axis of the tube. But the deflection of the cone of energy produces
aberration, which causes coma at the edges. The corners of an area
look fierce."
"I wonder if mechanical scanning wouldn't work better."
"Undoubtedly. You don't hope to send life, do you?"
"It would be nice—but no more fantastic than this thing is now. What's
your opinion?"
Wes loosened a set screw on the main tube anode and set the anode
forward a barely perceptible distance. He checked it with a vernier
rule and tightened the screw. He made other adjustments on the
works of the tube itself, and then motioned outside. They left the
blister, Wes closed the airtight, and cracked the valve that let the air
out of the blister. He snapped the switch on the outside panel and
then leaned back in his chair while the cathode heated.
"With electrical scanning, you'll have curvature of field with this
gadget. That isn't too bad, I suppose, because the restorer will have
the same curvature. But you're going to scan three ways, which
means correction for the linear distance from the tube as well as the
other side deflections and their aberrations. Now if we could scan the
gadget mechanically, we'd have absolute flatness of field, perfect
focus, and so forth."
Walt grinned. "Thinking of television again? Look, bright fellows, how
do you move an assembly of mechanical parts in quanta of one
atomic diameter? They've been looking for that kind of gadget for
centuries. Dr. Rowland and his gratings would turn over in their
graves with a contrivance that could rule lines one atom apart."
"On what?" asked Don.
"If it would rule one atom lines, brother, you could put a million lines
per inch on anything rulable with perfection, ease, eclat, and savoir
faire. You follow my argument? Or would you rather take up this slip
of my tongue and make something out of it?"
"O.K., fella. I see your point. How about that one, Wes?"
Wes Farrell grinned. "Looks like I'll be getting perfect focus with the
electrical system here. I hadn't considered the other angle at all, but it
looks a lot tougher than I thought."
He squinted through a wall-mounted telescope at the set-up on the
inside of the blister. "She's hot," he remarked quietly, and then set to
checking the experiment. Fifteen minutes of checking, and making
notes, and he turned to the others with a smile. "Not too bad that
way," he said.
"What are you doing?"
"I've established a rather complex field. In order to correct the
aberrations, I've got nonlinear focusing fields in the places where they
tend to correct for the off-axis aberration. To correct for the height-
effect, I'm putting a variable corrector to control the whole cone of
energy, stretching it or shortening it according to the needs. I think if I
use a longer focal length I'll be able to get the thing running right.
"That'll lessen the need for correction, too," he added, cracking the
blister-intake valve and letting the air hiss into the blister. He opened
the door and went inside, and began to adjust the electrodes. "You
know," he added over his shoulder, "we've got something here that
might bring in a few dollars on the side. This matter-bank affair
produces clean, clear, and practically pure metal. You might be able
to sell some metal that was rated 'pure' and mean it."
"You mean absolutely, positively, guaranteed, uncontaminated,
unadulterated, perfectly chemically pure?" grinned Don.
"Compared to what 'Chemically Pure' really means, your selection of
adjectives is a masterpiece of understatement," laughed Walt.
"I'm about to make one more try," announced Wes. "Then I'm going to
drop this for the time being. I've got to get up to the machine shop
and see what they're doing with the rest of the thing."
"We'll take over that if you wish," said Don.
"Will you? I'll appreciate it. I sort of hate to let this thing go when I feel
that I'm near an answer."
"We'll do it," said Walt. "Definitely."

Art History and Postwar Fiction Kevin Brazil Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Art History and Postwar Fiction Kevin Brazil Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction Kevin

Writing Mary I : History, Historiography, and Fiction

Jansonu2019s Basic History of Western Art (History of

Post-Digital, Post-Internet Art and Education: The

African American Art (Oxford History of Art) 1st

Philip V of Macedon in Polybius' Histories: Politics,

Art History, Volume 1 6th Edition, (Ebook PDF)

Art History Vol 1 (6th Edition ) 6th Edition

Art: A Brief History (6th Edition ) 6th Edition

Art, History, and

This book is for my parents

Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s manuscript of The Unnamable and an

Introduction: Reviewing Postwar Fiction 1

2 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

4 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

to that of literary modernism, or rather, the version of literary modernism

ethically dubious, according to Susan Stanford Friedman.7 Another

6 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

understandings of the relationship of their work to history, it follows that

Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events’, newly created one moment

16 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 1973), 56.

8 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

problematically ­disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward,

20 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 17.

10 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

‘a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception

a unifying principle; or it can be an evaluative approach to the diversity

36 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago,

12 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

‘vantage point’ of the ‘most recent’: a unique and ever-shifting alignment

14 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Altieri’s unease about how postmodernism too quickly suffocated other

49 Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’, October,

feminism and postmodernism’, a practice of transgression in order to liberate

16 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

The impact of photography on postwar fiction was decisively shaped by

56 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith

coherent journey of their own in identifying the different ways in which

For all that this is a work of literary history, it is informed throughout by

61 Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form.

18 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

discussion in subsequent chapters as well as the source for one of their

62 Rosalind E. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA; London, 2010), 126.

20 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

essence of modernism lies ‘in the use of the characteristic methods of a

70 Greenberg, Modernism with a Vengeance, 86.

modernism for a properly postmodern present or re-conceptualizing the

22 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

‘linguistic turn’ as a totalizing context for the study of postwar literature.77

In a 1981 conversation with the artist Avigdor Arikha, Samuel Beckett

24 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

process: necessary but involuntary, purposeful yet without intention. It is

10 Disjecta, 145. 11 9 March 1949, Letters 2, 140.

26 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

In the diary Beckett kept on a six-month tour of Germany in 1936 and

15 2 February 1937, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.

The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Campendonk; unable to bring himself

18 22 November 1936, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.

28 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Beckett saw in these paintings. In a visit to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in

21 18 December 1936, Beckett, ‘German Diaries’.

translation into verbal narrative through ekphrasis has been central to

30 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Introduction: Reviewing Postwar Fiction 1

problematically disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward,