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Modernism
and Mimesis
Stephen D. Dowden
Modernism and Mimesis
Stephen D. Dowden
Modernism
and Mimesis
Stephen D. Dowden
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
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in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
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and institutional affiliations.
Cover image: Franz Marc’s Grazing Horses IV , 1911, Harvard Art Museums/Busch-
Reisinger Museum, Bequest in Memory of Paul E. and Gabriele B. Geier, accession no.
2014.301 © President and Fellows of Harvard College
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
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Acknowledgments
About the time the manuscript for this book was going to the publisher,
I wrote to a friend commenting on a book he had just seen into print.
He responded with a gracious letter in which he thanked me by saying it
felt good to know he was not writing into a void. It pleased him to find
that he had a Mitstreiter, a Weggefährter, a Mitdenker. It is an appealing
way of thinking about the friends, scholars, and other lively minds who
accompany the writing of a project like this one. In the same spirit I
would like to thank my own Mitstreiter. Some were willing partners, and
a few others were accomplices who shaped my thinking without directly
addressing modernism. Either way they have seconded me along the path-
ways of composing this book: Sham Anand, John Burt, the late Jane
Curran, Donatella Di Cesare, Amir Eshel, Abby Gillman, Joe Lawrence,
Jim McFarland, Sabine von Mering, Tara Metal, Robin Feuer Miller, Silvia
Monteleone, Vonda Nichols, Evan Parks, Thom Quinn, the late Bob
Szulkin, Harleen Singh, Avinash Singh, and Charles Stratford. Helmut
Smith provided sound compositional advice. Meike Werner helped me
understand what I had written. As a special bonus, she gave the book
its title. Agnes Mueller critiqued each chapter at the time of writing. Our
conversations left a deep imprint on the thought expressed in these pages.
I am grateful to all my Weggefährten for their many generosities.
v
Contents
1 Uneasy Modernism 1
Encountering the Real 6
Art as a Way of Knowing the World 9
The Question of Ethics 18
Modernism and Reënchantment 22
Mimesis 24
vii
viii CONTENTS
References 255
Index 269
List of Figures
ix
CHAPTER 1
Uneasy Modernism
In the history of European literature, music, and pictorial art, one style
has ordinarily evolved into the next. There was no great leap from
Romanesque to Gothic. Their relationship was and remains simple to
track. Even in cases in which a sharp break occurred—between Enlighten-
ment rationalism, for example, and the Romantic rebellion against it—the
transformation is coherent. This linear model explodes into a thousand
shards with the rise of modernism. Its confusion of artistic languages
recalls the biblical Tower of Babel. The one language seems uncon-
nected to any other. Painting seems disconnected from poetry or music.
The spectacular efflorescence of modernist styles and forms has appeared
chaotic to most observers. There ought to be a common denominator, a
unified field embracing various aspects. Modernism, as the conventional
unifying explanation goes, opposes tradition as an outdated, dogmatic,
and oppressive force.
But how helpful is a negative definition, specifying what modernism is
not rather than what it is? What might serve as a more exacting counter-
definition? In this book the defining issue will be art’s relation to the real
and to the true, the here and now, but also its unfolding over time and
with special attention to the refusal of fixity and formula. In “The Painter
and Modern Life,” Baudelaire famously characterizes modernity in art as
the awareness not only of the established, enduring truths but also being
alive to the ephemeral qualities that are just as real but impossible to
grasp with the tools at the disposal of Realism. Mimesis must reveal yet
Virginia Woolf, for one, felt uneasy. “Have I the power of creating
true reality?” she wondered.7 It is the central question for any artist, not
just modernists. But her odd phrasing gives pause. In what sense might
art create rather than represent something true and real? Good artists
represent the known world in arresting and striking ways. The best artists,
though, do more. They can see and shed light on what the others can’t,
or won’t, or at least don’t see. They make the real and the true available to
the rest of us, even when the reality in question is transitory and fugitive.
Vincent van Gogh is probably the most obvious example of a powerfully
disclosive vision of this sort. He revealed the landscape of Provence—
before him a mere provincial boondock—as lively and beautiful. Similarly,
Proust notes the way Renoir disclosed but also created the world for his
skeptical contemporaries:
Lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for
all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us
entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in
the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs,
the Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages too are
Renoirs, and the water, and the sky….8
By seeing and showing the elusive aspects of its being, the artist also trans-
forms the perceived world, reveals a truth and in so doing creates a reality.
According to Paul Celan this creation of reality is not only possible but
the artist’s most pressing responsibility. “Reality does not exist as such;
reality needs to be sought and achieved.”9 Living experience, new experi-
ence, is not easy to grasp or disclose, because it likely does not conform to
art’s pre-established patterns. New art requires a talent for fresh, unpreju-
diced looking—a species of naïveté—plus the ability to translate that fresh,
unobstructed vision into words or pictures, sound and rhythm.
The artist attends to her unmediated experience of the world as
it presents itself in the here and now. That attention flows over into
expression as music or story, picture or poem. Expression need not be
understood as the “representation” of reality but should be taken more
along the order of Woolf’s ambition to actually create it. “The business of
art,” explained Gertrude Stein in a lecture of 1926, “is to live in the actual
present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express
that complete actual present.”10 Interestingly, she says nothing about
representation. The emphasis falls elsewhere: art, she says, must live. This
4 S. D. DOWDEN
fidelity to the living moment, but also to a work’s ongoing life in time, is
the key ambition of modernism and not, as is often objected, elite intellec-
tualism or novelty for the sake of novelty. Sometimes modernism entails a
rejection of conventional or traditional forms, but not always. Portraits
and landscapes continue to be painted. The longstanding prestige of
sonnets and the sonata form largely fall by the wayside, but the novel
remains supple and strong as a living form, even as continual adjustments
are being made to it, like rebuilding a ship at sea.
Modernism’s adversarial relation to tradition has been exaggerated,
despite prominent skeptics. “I cannot insist enough,” wrote Clement
Greenberg in 1960, “that Modernism has never meant, and does not
mean now, anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution,
an unraveling, of tradition, but it also means its further evolution.”11 In
this same spirit I will argue, for example, that what is ordinarily thought
to be modernist fiction’s breakthrough masterpiece, Ulysses, is, when seen
precisely—as T. S. Eliot saw it—not a radical departure from Victorian
fiction, but its grand culmination, a final deepening of that tradition and
not a radical break.
Ulysses appeared in 1922, the same year in which Kafka wrote The
Castle, a very different book and not the culmination of any tradition,
though Kafka was no antagonist of tradition. Kafka wanted to see the
world with unclouded eyes, as he thought Goethe and Flaubert had been
able to see. Like them, he translates what he sees into clean, clear prose,
but into his own era’s frugal idiom rather than an expansive style of the
past. In addition, his understanding of mimesis differs markedly from
Joyce’s concept of representation. “I am an ending or beginning,” said
Kafka of himself.12 As I argue in the next chapter, his novel (a begin-
ning) and not Joyce’s (an ending) marks the step into so-called high
modernism.
The difference between these two exceptionally accomplished works
of art raises a key question for understanding the nature of modernism:
how does any artist go about actually living in the present as a writer or
painter or composer without reverting to established forms? Even Baude-
laire stayed with conventional verse forms in his radical Les Fleurs du
mal (1857). How is form entwined in the living experience of an artist’s
present? Tradition is powerful, for it circumscribes the available means
of expression. This framing occurs in the languages of form. To write or
paint or compose outside of the familiar forms and styles threatens to
render the work of art unintelligible. Surely a central element would be
1 UNEASY MODERNISM 5
to create a style that embodies the truth of a given age, and not one that
imitates the past. A new age needs a new style, but that style must also
remain intelligible.
Consider the artistic plight that faced Emperor Franz Joseph’s archi-
tects. In 1857 he ordered that Vienna’s medieval city walls be torn down
to make way for new building. A major European capital suddenly had
open space in the city’s center. It was a momentous opportunity for
modern and even modernist expression of the new era’s fresh spirit.
What style, then, would best express imperial Austria’s modern identity,
its future? Where would the modern style come from? How might the
artist go about expressing the living present without copying models
of the dead past? As Hermann Broch and many others have pointed
out, Vienna’s architects failed. They erected neo-Baroque, neo-Classical,
neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, and many other such eclectically histori-
cizing buildings. These structures were and are grand, but they also pose
modernism’s founding riddle.
What sort of art expresses who we were and are after the end of the
nineteenth century? No unified defining style emerged, at least not in
the sense of historical period styles. Consequently, the basic question is
different from that of earlier ages. Without a unifying style against which
to proof and judge individual works of art, it makes sense to look for some
other sort of family resemblance. It will not do to settle for the view that
all the different “modernisms” are unrelated and must be discussed in
discrete contexts. In the absence of an overarching style, a set of key issues
will serve as a framework within which the seeming anarchy of modernist
movements, forms, techniques, and individual artworks—especially those
that have become canonical—might make sense.
I will adumbrate these key issues now, briefly and abstractly, then bring
them into sharper focus over the course of this introduction and continue
to develop them throughout this book. The first feature of common
culture in modernism is its drive toward simplicity. The conventional idea
that modernist art is characteristically “difficult” will not stand scrutiny.
Second, the idea that modernism valorizes subjectivity will also stand in
need of revision. In fact, the larger modernist impulse is to overcome
subjectivity. Third, the view that modernism snubs the average person
by skewing toward the esoteric high culture is a problem that looks
much different now, a century distant from modernism’s beginnings.
Fourth is a related point: modernist art is predicated not on cultural and
6 S. D. DOWDEN
back to the personality and biography of the artist. Science offers objec-
tive truth, hard facts, which meant, or seemed to the Romantics to mean,
that art must counter with subjective expression. The paradigmatic case is
Beethoven, whose music was taken to be the expression of his tormented
genius, his personal struggles, failures, loves, sorrows, triumphs, and so
forth. The biographical, psychological Romantic approach thrives even
today. The monotonous literature about Picasso’s personal life and its
supposedly illuminating bearing on the pictures he painted appears to be
interminable. Modernism asks us to look at the pictures, listen to the
music, read the words, and set the artists’ lives aside.
Modernism and modernity overlap. The origins of modernism lie
deeply embedded in modernity, i.e., since the end of the Middle Ages
rather than in the short-term changes that occurred toward the end of
the nineteenth century. The technological, economic, political, and social
transformations usually offered as the immediate “causes” of modernist
art are better understood as parallel symptoms that are intertwined with
art, not as cause and effect. What is crucial to modernism is the thought
that art is not a passive reflection of these changes but an active way of
exploring, understanding, and knowing the world, of actively situating
ourselves within it. Art establishes the real as real for us by making it
intelligible.
only with modernism does the truth claim of art and literature finally
register as a loss to be made good. For the modernists, the point of art is
first and foremost to afford a view of the real that is truthful, even when
it is necessary to abandon representation to get at that truth.
So Gertrude Stein’s pithy view that the task of art is to live in the actual
present and to completely express that complete actual present, is a good
modernist credo, and certainly better than Pound’s “make it new.” Art
must live, which is to say, thrive, flourish, increase. Note that she does not
talk about the artist’s personal subjectivity finding expression but about
living art and its mission to give a voice what is. Nietzsche was a strong
hand at forceful and pithy, too. Here is his concise view of poetry in The
Birth of Tragedy (1872): “The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the
world, like some fantastical impossibility contrived in a poet’s head; poetry
aims to be the very opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth.”17
Poetic invention (from invenire, to come across or find something) is a
matter of giving truthful form to as yet undiscovered realities. Nietzsche
knew as well as anyone else did that Hegel had declared art to be done
for in the age of science. Still, Nietzsche and Stein—emblematic here of
the modernists in general—refuse to concede that art’s highest calling is
dead.
Modernism seeks to reestablish the legitimate claim of art on truth.
Some of these attempts to find bedrock were doomed. One failed attempt
to rescue art from marginality in the modern age was to elevate it into
a secular religion, an object of cultural veneration, as in the works of
Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin. However, elevating art lifted it right
out of the world, leaving most actual people behind. It casts down and
slanders reality rather than illuminating it. Some of modernism suffers
from this exclusionary approach. Think of T. S. Eliot for example and his
insistence, in 1921, that modernist poetry be difficult:
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche also wrote (three times, just to make
sure we get his point) that the world can be justified only as an aesthetic
12 S. D. DOWDEN
Nun wurde die letzte Hand an die Ausrüstung und Möblierung der
Fähre gelegt, das Gepäck an Bord gebracht und das Küchengeschirr
in der Nähe des Herdes auf dem Achterdeck geordnet. Das Zelt
wurde auf der Plattform aufgeschlagen, seine herabhängenden
Säume an den Außenrändern des Bretterfußbodens festgenagelt
und im Inneren ein in munteren Farben gehaltener Teppich
ausgebreitet. Das Möblement wurde so eingerichtet, daß das
Feldbett an die Backbordlängsseite gestellt wurde und an seinem
Fußende eine der Kisten stand; die beiden anderen standen auf der
Steuerbordseite und dienten auch als Tische, auf denen stets eine
Menge Instrumente, Karten und andere Dinge in malerischer
Unordnung umherlagen. Am vorderen Rande der Plattform, in der
Zeltöffnung selbst, hatte ich meinen aus der Proberöhrenkiste
bestehenden Arbeitstisch, dessen Untergestell ein Koffer mit
Winterkleidern bildete. Das Futteral des großen photographischen
Apparates diente mir als Arbeitsstuhl. Öffnete ich die hintere Zelttür,
so hatte ich freien Zutritt zum Kajütendach, auf dem allerlei Sachen,
die nicht vom Wind fortgeweht werden konnten, wie Segel und
Ruder, Strommesser u. dgl., aufbewahrt wurden. Hier war auch das
Wetterhäuschen aufgestellt. Es umschloß den Baro- und
Thermographen, die Maximal- und Minimalthermometer, das
Psychrometer und drei Aneroide. Der Windmesser stand obendrauf;
doch was er während der Flußreise mitzuteilen hatte, war von
geringer Bedeutung, denn das Flußtal war durch Wälder und hohe
Ufer geschützt, die den Wind zum großen Vorteile für den
ungestörten Gang des Schiffes abhielten. Was Baro- und
Thermograph auf vierzehntägigen Streifen aufzeichneten, war von
größerem Interesse: man sah deutlich, wie das Barogramm das
langsame Abfallen des Flusses nach Osten angab, während die
gezähnte Linie des Thermogrammes immer niedriger wurde, je
weiter der Herbst vorschritt und je mehr der Winter herannahte.
Die Fähre lag dem linken Ufer so nahe, als es die hier
angehäufte Sandbank erlaubte. Doch um dorthin zu gelangen,
mußte man eine ziemliche Strecke in dem seichten Wasser waten.
Mit aufgekrempelten Kleidern zog eine ganze Karawane von
Dörflern und Kindern zum letzten Lebewohl hinaus und bestürmte
uns noch einmal mit Geschenken, die eiligst bezahlt wurden (Abb.
21).
Das Bild, das sich dem Blicke an Bord darbot, war so
ansprechend und urgemütlich, daß ich die, welche im Wasser stehen
blieben und uns lautlos die große Wasserstraße hinunterziehen
sahen, beinahe bedauerte. Sie hatten den Vorbereitungen mit
skeptischer Miene zugesehen und waren erstaunt darüber, wie gut
sich schließlich alles gestaltet hatte. Es war Punkt 2 Uhr, als ich
Befehl zum Aufbruch gab. Die Fährleute stießen das Schiff mit ihren
langen Stangen in die Stromrinne hinaus, die Ufer glitten vorbei, und
nach der ersten Biegung verschwanden die erinnerungsreichen
Gegenden von Lailik und Merket.
Ich ließ mich sofort am Schreibtische nieder, wo ich monatelang
wie festgenietet sitzen sollte; hier hatte ich meine Kommandobrücke
und meinen Observationsplatz (Abb. 23). Ein Stück weißes Papier
lag bereit; das erste Kartenblatt, Kompaß, Uhr, Diopter, Zirkel, Feder,
Messer, Gummi, Fernglas usw., alles war zur Hand, und der Tisch
stand so weit vor in der Zeltöffnung, daß ich sowohl nach vorn wie
nach den Seiten freie Aussicht auf die Landschaft hatte. Jolldasch
und Dowlet fühlten sich vom ersten Augenblick an völlig heimisch;
während der heißen Stunden des Tages lagen sie keuchend unter
Deck, in der Dämmerung aber kamen sie hervor und leisteten mir im
Zelte Gesellschaft.
Wenn der Leser sich wundert, weshalb ich eigentlich diese
Flußreise unternahm, und fragt, welchen Gewinn in geographischer
Hinsicht ich von ihr erwartete, so antworte ich, daß dies erstens der
einzige Weg durch ganz Ostturkestan war, den ich noch nicht
kannte, und daß zweitens bisher noch nie eine Karte vom Laufe des
Tarim aufgenommen worden war. Von Maral-baschi bis Jarkent
waren Pjewzoff, ich und noch ein paar andere Reisende auf dem
Karawanenwege am Flusse hingezogen, zwischen Schah-jar und
Karaul waren Carey und Dalgleish und später auch ich durch die
Uferwälder gegangen, und längs des untersten Teiles des Laufes
war zuerst Prschewalskij, dann Prinz Heinrich von Orléans und
Bonvalot, Pjewzoff, Littledale und zuletzt ich entlang gewandert.
Aber die Wege und Stege, die dem Flusse folgen, berühren nur hin
und wieder seine Krümmungen: die Wege sind, als wären sie
zwischen den äußersten Kurven der Flußbiegungen auf einem der
Ufer gezogen worden. Durch sie erhält man keinen Begriff von dem
Verlaufe, dem Aussehen und den sonstigen Eigentümlichkeiten des
Flusses. Unsere Kenntnis des Tarim war bisher auf derartige
flüchtige Beobachtungen von geringem Werte gegründet gewesen.
Als ich schließlich meine große Karte vom Tarim fertig hatte, fand
ich, wie unähnlich ihr das bisherige Bild des Flusses war. Es war
dies eine geographische Eroberung, die der Monate, die ihr geopfert
worden, wohl wert war. Nie ist die Karte eines außereuropäischen
Flusses so genau aufgenommen worden. Und wie interessant war
es, das ganze Leben des Flusses so eingehend zu studieren, sein
Steigen und Fallen, sein von verschiedenen Ursachen herrührendes
Pulsieren, seine launenhaften Formationen und sein wechselndes
Aussehen in verschiedenem Terrain! Nicht allein, daß ich so in
täglicher, ununterbrochener Arbeit Material zu einer außerordentlich
eingehenden Monographie über den größten Fluß des innersten
Asien sammelte und einen Weg wählte, dem bisher noch nie jemand
gefolgt war, sondern ich machte auch eine so idyllische, so
angenehme Reise wie noch nie. Wenn man gewohnt ist, zu Pferd zu
reisen oder die Gegenden von dem Rücken eines sich wiegenden
Kameles aus zu betrachten, ist es ein Genuß sondergleichen, sich
von der Strömung eines ruhigen, friedlichen Flusses befördern zu
lassen, die ganze Zeit an seinem Arbeitstische im Schatten zu sitzen
und sich die Landschaft entgegenkommen zu lassen, die sich selbst
aufrollt wie ein ständig wechselndes Panorama, dem man wie von
seiner abonnierten Theaterloge aus folgt und zusieht. Und es war
ein großer Genuß, die ganze Zeit zu Hause zu sein, sein
Arbeitszimmer, seine Schlafstube und seine Instrumente Tag und
Nacht bei sich zu haben und sein Haus wie eine Schnecke durch
das ganze innerste Asien mitzunehmen.
Meiner Ansicht nach hatte ich es weit besser und gemütlicher als
auf einem europäischen oder amerikanischen Flußdampfer. Denn
erstens war ich allein und brauchte mich vor niemand zu genieren.
Wenn es mir zu heiß wurde, konnte ich mich entkleiden und vom
Schreibtische direkt ins Wasser springen, was auf einem
europäischen Dampfer nicht üblich ist, und ich konnte bleiben, wo
und wie lange ich wollte, wenn wir an einer Stelle vorbeiglitten, die in
irgendeiner Beziehung einladend aussah. Meine Mahlzeiten wurden
mir am Schreibtische serviert, wann es mir paßte, und wenn sie
auch weniger lukullisch waren als die europäischen, so haben mir
diese dagegen selten so gut geschmeckt wie die an Bord meiner
eigenen Fähre. Frisches Wasser und eine Luft, die der balsamische
Duft der Pappeln alle Augenblicke erfüllte, hatten wir reichlich zur
Verfügung. Ich hatte Bilder von denen, welche ich liebte und für die
ich betete, in meiner Nähe aufgestellt und begegnete täglich ihren
Blicken, die mich auf meiner einsamen Wanderung mit ihrer Liebe
und guten Wünschen begleiteten, und es war herrlich, sich außer
Hörweite der Verleumdung und der eingebildeten Klugheit zu
wissen, welche der Unternehmungslust ebenso treu und sicher
folgen wie die Delphine im Kielwasser eines Schiffes. Auf den
provisorischen Tischen, die jedoch ihren Zweck vollständig erfüllten,
lagen Bücher; ich hatte aber selten Zeit, darin zu lesen, denn jede
Minute war von Arbeiten, die getan werden mußten, in Anspruch
genommen. Und diese Arbeiten interessierten mich in solchem
Grade, daß der Fluß doppelt so lang hätte sein können.
Viertes Kapitel.
Zweitausend Kilometer auf dem
Tarim.