Historical Modernisms

Historicizing Modernism
Series Editors
Matthew Feldman, Professorial Fellow, Norwegian Study Centre, University of
York; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University
of Bergen, Norway

Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Associate Lecturer, Goldsmiths College,

University of London, UK

Editorial Board
Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New
Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr
Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven
Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon,
Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller,
Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet
Wilson, University of Northampton, UK.

Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by

taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new
documentary sources made available over the last decade.

Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/

American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established
readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts
and working methods.

Series Titles
Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini
British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik
Tonning
Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Howard
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism, Michelle E. Moore
Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck
Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron
Ezra Pound’s Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light, Alec Marsh
Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson
Historicizing Modernists, Edited by Matthew Feldman, Anna Svendsen and
Erik Tonning
James Joyce and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen
James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie van Mierlo
John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh
Judith Wright and Emily Carr, Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones
Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson,
Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid
Late Modernism and the English Intelligencer, Alex Latter
The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman
Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler
Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle
Modernist Lives, Claire Battershill
The Politics of 1930s British Literature, Natasha Periyan
Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar
Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong
Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker
Samuel Beckett and the Bible, Iain Bailey
Samuel Beckett and Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva
Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology, Joshua Powell
Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks than Kicks’, John Pilling
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon
T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead
Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood
Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism, Jonas Kurlberg
Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology, Joshua Powell
Samuel Beckett in Confinement, James Little
Katherine Mansfield: New Directions, Edited by Aimée Gasston,
Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson
Modernist Wastes, Caroline Knighton
The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence, Elliott Morsia
Samuel Beckett and the Second World War, William Davies

Upcoming Titles
Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley
iv
 Historical Modernisms

Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics

Jean-Michel Rabaté and Angeliki Spiropoulou

 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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In memory of Hayden White
viii
 Contents

List of illustrations x
Notes on contributors xiii
Preface xviii
Foreword: Modernism, time and history Terry Eagleton xix

Historical modernisms: Introduction Jean-Michel Rabaté and

Angeliki Spiropoulou 1

Part I Historicizing modernism

1 ‘The Last Witnesses’: Autobiography and history in the 1930s

Laura Marcus 33
2 Spatial histories of magazines and modernisms Andrew Thacker 55
3 Rethinking the modernist moment: Crisis, (im)potentiality
and E. M. Forster’s failed Kairos Vassiliki Kolocotroni 73
4 ‘Well now that’s done: And I’m glad it’s over’: Modernism,
history and the future Max Saunders 91
5 Historical and rhetorical emplotments of modernism:
An interview with Hayden White by Angeliki Spiropoulou 111

Part II Stories and histories of the avant-gardes

6 Medium-New Tyrus Miller 121

7 Time assemblage: History in the European avant-gardes
Sascha Bru 141
8 Clement Greenberg’s modernism: Historicizable or ahistorical?
Rahma Khazam 159
9 Beer in Bohemian Paris: A symbol of the Third Republic
Alexandra Bickley Trott 175
10 From the marvellous to the managerial: Life at the Surrealist
Research Bureau Rachel Silveri 197
11 History and active thought: The Belgrade surrealist circle’s
transforming praxis Sanja Bahun 215

Bibliography 234
Index 253
 Illustrations

2.1 Cover of the Journal Blast, no.1, 1914. Image courtesy of The
Modernist Journals Project. Brown and Tulsa Universities,
www.modjourn.org. 64
2.2 Cover of the Journal Légitime Défense, 1932 65
4.1 To-Day and To-Morrow: Classified Index from Ralph de Pomerai,
Aphrodite; or, The Future of Sexual Relationships (London: Kegan
Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1931), end-matter 96
7.1 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, Glass (1912). Cut-and-pasted
wallpaper, newspaper (Le Journal, 18 November 1912), sheet music,
coloured paper, paper and hand-painted faux bois paper, charcoal
and gouache on paperboard, 47.9 × 36.5 cm. McNay Art Museum,
San Antonio. Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay © McNay Art
Museum/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence © 2021 Succession
Picasso/SABAM Belgium 146
7.2 Max Ernst, Katharina Ondulata d.i. frau wirtin a.d. lahn (1920).
Gouache, pencil and ink on printed paper, 31.2 × 27 cm. Inscribed:
‘Katharina ondulata d.i. frau wirtin a.d. lahn erscheint als der
deutschen engelin u. perlmütter auf korksohlen im tierbild des
krebses’. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
Purchased with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the
Art Fund 1995. © Scala, Florence © 2021 SABAM Belgium 149
7.3 Sophie Täuber & Hans Arp, Untitled (Duo-Collage, 1918). Paper,
board and silver leaf on board, 82 × 62 cm. © bpk, Nationalgalerie,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Jörg P. Anders © 2021 SABAM
Belgium 153
9.1 Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, 1878, oil on canvas, Musée
d’Orsay, Paris. Reproduction permission granted by Musée d’Orsay,
Paris 176
9.2 Édouard Manet, Rue Mosnier, 1878, oil on canvas, J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open
Content Programme 176
 Illustrations xi

9.3 Édouard Manet, Le Bon Bock, 1873, oil on canvas, Philadelphia

Museum of Art: The Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson, Jr., Collection,
1963, 1963–116-9 185
9.4 Eugène Cottin, ‘La Lutte à Entreprendre’, Le Bon Bock, no. 1,
21 February 1885, p.3. Courtesy of BnF 186
9.5 Eugène Cottin, ‘Les Effets de la Bière en Allemagne’, Le Bon Bock,
no. 10, 2 May 1885, p. 1. Courtesy of BnF 186
9.6 Eugène Cottin, ‘Les Effets de la Bière Française’, Le Bon Bock,
no. 11, 9 May 1885, p.1. Courtesy of BnF 187
9.7 Eugène Cottin, ‘Expertise sur les Bières d’Allemagne’, Le Bon Bock,
no. 13, 23 May 1885, p.1. Courtesy of BnF 189
9.8 Eugène Cottin, ‘Un Rêve’, Le Bon Bock, no. 5, 28 March 1885, p.3.
Courtesy of BnF 189
9.9 Léonce Petit, ‘G. Courbet’, Le Hanneton, 13 June 1867, p.1.
Léonce Justin Alexandre Petit (1839–1884), Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons 191
9.10 Eugène Cottin, ‘Un Toast à l’armée française au Tonkin, Le Bon
Bock, no. 7, 11 April 1885, p. 3. Courtesy of BnF 191
9.11 Eugène Cottin, ‘Notre Armée dans l’est’, Le Bon Bock, no. 16,
13 June 1885, p.1. Courtesy of BnF 192
10.1 Man Ray, Surrealist Group ‘Waking dream séance’, 1924.
Photograph of the Bureau de recherches surréalistes (Surrealist
Research Bureau) in November 1924. Standing (left to right): Max
Morise, Roger Vitrac, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Paul
Éluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault.
Seated (left to right): Simone Breton, Robert Desnos, Jacques
Baron. © Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/
ADAGP, Paris [2020], image: Telimage, Paris 205
10.2 Man Ray, Centrale surréaliste (Surrealist group), 1924. Photograph
of the Bureau de recherches surréalistes (Surrealist Research
Bureau) in November 1924. Standing (left to right): Jacques Baron,
Raymond Queneau, André Breton, Jacques-André Boiffard,
Giorgio de Chirico, Roger Vitrac, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault,
Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon. Seated (left to right): Pierre Naville,
Simone Breton, Max Morise, Louise (Mick) Soupault. © Man
Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris
[2020], image: Telimage, Paris 205
xii Illustrations

10.3 Detail of advertisement for La Machine Comptable Ellis, Mon

Bureau 164 (October 1927): page 603. Source gallica.bnf.fr/
Bibliothèque nationale de France 208
10.4 Advertisement for Société des Machines à Écrire MAP, Mon
Bureau 139 (September 1925): page 664. Source gallica.bnf.fr/
Bibliothèque nationale de France 208
11.1 Vane Bor (Stevan Živadinović), Milica S. Lazović as a Shadow, or
Two Minutes Before Crime, 1935, vintage photograph, 90 × 60 mm,
Inv. No. M112. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Belgrade 221
11.2 Vane Bor (Stevan Živadinović), One Minute Before Murder, 1935,
vintage photograph, 87 × 62 mm, Inv. No. M111. Courtesy of the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 221
 Contributors

Sanja Bahun is Professor of Literature and Film and the Dean of Postgraduate
Research and Education at the University of Essex. She is the author of
Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (2014) and the
co-editor of The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism
(2006), Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the
Extimate (2008, 2015), From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s
Aesthetic Production (2009), Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text:
New Cassandras (2011), Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions
(2012), Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013), Cinema, State Socialism
and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: Re-Visions
(2014) and Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2018).

Sascha Bru is Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven (KU
Leuven), where he is also a director of the MDRN research lab. His work studies
European modernism and avant-garde culture. His books include Democracy,
Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes (2009), The European Avant-Gardes,
1905–1935 (2018) and, as co-editor, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History
of Modernist Magazines: Europe, 1880–1940 (2013), The Aesthetics of Matter
(2013), Futurism: A Microhistory (2017) and Realisms of the Avant-Garde
(2020). His current research projects include a book on children in the avant-
gardes, and a study of issues of time and history in twentieth-century artistic
experiments.

Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor of Literature at Lancaster University

and the University of Notre Dame. A renowned public intellectual, he has
authored a number of books, including The Event of Literature (2012), Why
Marx Was Right (2011), Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God
Debate and On Evil (2009), How to Read a Poem (2008), Trouble with Strangers
(2008), The Meaning of Life (2007), After Theory (2003), The English Novel:
An Introduction (2004), Sweet Violence (2003), The Gatekeeper (memoir,
2001), Modernity, Modernism, Postmodernism: Essays (2000), The Illusions of
Postmodernism (1996), Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (co-editor, 1996), The
Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Literary Theory (1983), Body as Language: Outline
xiv Contributors

of a ‘New Left’ Theology (1970), Directions: Pointers for the Post-Conciliar Church
(editor, 1968) and The New Left Church (1966).

Rahma Khazam is a Paris-based researcher and art historian affiliated to Institut

ACTE, Sorbonne Paris 1. She received her PhD from the Sorbonne in aesthetics
and art theory. Her research, which spans the fields of modernism, American
art from the 1940s to the 1970s, image theory and speculative realism, has been
published in exhibition catalogues, edited volumes and academic journals. She
received the 2017 AICA France Award for Art Criticism, and is the editor of A
Pragmatic Poetics (2018). She is currently a researcher at ENSAD, Paris.

Vassiliki Kolocotroni is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University

of Glasgow. She works on international modernism and the avant-garde,
theory, classical reception, travel and film. She is the co-editor of The Edinburgh
Dictionary of Modernism, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents
and a European literature editor of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
She has also co-edited In the Country of the Moon: British Women Travelers to
Greece, 1718–1932 and Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism
and Travel. She is currently at work on a study of modernism and Hellenism.

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of

Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests include life-
writing, modernist literature and culture, and early cinema and film theory and
aesthetics. Her monograph publications include Auto/biographical Discourses:
Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and Their Work
(1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period
(2007, winner of the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA), Dreams of
Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014) and Autobiography: a very
short introduction (2018). Co-edited publications include The Cambridge History
of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004) and Late Victorian into Modern:
Oxford Twenty-First Approaches to Literature (2016). She is currently completing
an interdisciplinary study of the concept of rhythm in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and starting a book on early twentieth-century life-writing.

Tyrus Miller is Dean of the School of Humanities and Professor of English and Art
History at University of California, Irvine. He is the author and editor of several
books on modernism and the avant-garde, including Late Modernism: Politics,
Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (1999), Singular Examples: Artistic
 Contributors xv

Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde (2009), Modernism and the Frankfurt School
(2014) and the Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis (2016). He has
also edited and translated Georg Lukács’s post–Second World War essays in
Hungarian, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature,
Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945–1948 (2013).

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at

the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature,
co-founder of Slought Foundation and a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of more than forty books on
modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory. Recent titles
include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), After Derrida (2018), Rire au Soleil
(2019), New Beckett (2019), Understanding Derrida/Understanding Modernism
(2019), Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of Literature and Film (2020), Beckett and
Sade (2020) and Rires Prodigues (2021).

Max Saunders is Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture

at the University of Birmingham. He was Director of the Arts and Humanities
Research Institute at King’s College London. He studied at the universities of
Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He
is the author of Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms
of Modern Literature (2010); and Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and
Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923–31 (2019). In 2013
he was awarded an Advanced Grant from the ERC for a five-year collaborative
project on digital life writing called ‘Ego-Media’.

Rachel Silveri is Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Art History at
the University of Florida, where she specializes in modern art from Europe and
North America. She is currently at work on her first book manuscript, The Art
of Living in the Historical Avant-Garde. Her work has appeared in collections
published by The Museum of Modern Art, including the exhibition catalogue
Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction
(2016) and the Museum Research Consortium Dossier Picasso’s Sculpture
(2017). With Trevor Stark, she is the co-editor of Selva: A Journal of the History
of Art n.2, special issue on ‘Reactionary Art Histories’ (2020). Recipient of grants
from The Getty Foundation, the Alliance Programme, and The Pierre and
Tana Matisse Foundation, among others, she received her PhD from Columbia
University in 2017.
xvi Contributors

Angeliki Spiropoulou is Professor of Modern European Literature and Theory

at the University of the Peloponnese and Research Fellow at the Institute of
English Studies-School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the
author of Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter
Benjamin (2010), Topoi of the Modern: European Literature and Modernity (2021)
and co-author of History of European Literature: 18th–20th C (2008). She is the
editor or co-editor of ‘Gender Resistance’ (ESSE 2012), Walter Benjamin: Images
and Myths of Modernity (2007), Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Rereading
Texts (2002) and Contemporary Greek Fiction: International Orientations and
Crossings (2002). She has contributed to collective volumes, dictionaries and
encyclopaedias of modernism and is currently working on history writing by
major European modernists. She is a board member of the European Society of
Comparative Literature and is on the advisory board of the European Consortium
of Humanities Institutes and Centres.

Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at Nottingham

Trent University. He is the author or editor of several books on modernism,
including the three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of
Modernist Magazines (2009–13), Geographies of Modernism (2005), Moving
through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003) and Modernism,
Space and the City (2019). He was a founder member and the first Chair of
the British Association for Modernist Studies, and is an editor of the journal
Literature & History and co-director of the Modernist Magazines Project. He is
currently working on two projects: a cultural history of the modern bookshop
and a new series of volumes for Oxford University Press on global modernist
magazines.

Alexandra Bickley Trott is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Oxford

Brookes University, where she leads the Art and Design programmes in
the School of Arts. Her research often focuses on lesser-known figures and
collectives in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century avant-garde and her PhD,
awarded in 2015, presented the first critical monograph of the original Fumiste
collective, the Cercle des Hydropathes (1878–80). She has previously published
on the Ballets Suédois’s interaction with the Parisian avant-garde (Across the
Great Divide: Modernism’s Intermedialities, from Futurism to Fluxus, (2015); and
on the satirical caricatures of Hydropathe artist Georges Lorin (The Power of
Satire (2015)). Recent work includes a study of Duncan Grant’s Kinetic Scroll
(1914) as part of a Tate ‘In Focus’ project; as well as a larger research project
 Contributors xvii

examining the interactions between the avant-garde and working-class artists

(‘The Working-Class Avant-Garde’, OLH Special Collection (2020); and Kahoon
Projects (2019)).

Hayden White (1918–2018†) was Bonsall Professor of Comparative

Literature at Stanford University. He specialized in Modern European cultural
history, philosophy of history, literary theory, social theory and literary
history. White served as University of California Exchange Professor at the
University of Venezia, the University of Bologna (Italy), and as a visiting
professor of history at the University of Poznan (Poland). Among many other
awards, he was an elected Fellow to the American Philosophical Society and
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many books, which
have been translated in many languages, is the groundbreaking 1973 study
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe as well
as the volumes Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999); and The
Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1986).
 Preface

This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth- to twentieth-

century literary modernism within its historical contexts. Historicizing
Modernism therefore stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary
sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival
materials) in developing monographs and edited collections on modernist
literature. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and
genetic criticism, documenting interrelated historical contexts and ideas, and
exploring biographical information. To date, no book series has fully laid claim
to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. While the
series addresses itself to a range of key authors, it also highlights the importance
of non-canonical writers with a view to establishing broader intellectual
genealogies of modernism. Furthermore, while the series is weighted towards
the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone modernists whose
writings are open to fresh historical exploration are also included.
A key aim of the series is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual
and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many modernists and their critical
commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically
situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary
practices. It is our intent that the series’ emphasis upon the contested self-
definitions of modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt
various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘modernism’
itself. Indeed, the concept of ‘historicizing’ is itself debated across its volumes,
and the series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches.
On the contrary, the editors hope that the historical specificity encouraged by
Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the
way.
Matthew Feldman
Erik Tonning
 Foreword: Modernism, time and history
Terry Eagleton

There is no doubt that modernism signifies a crisis of language and

representation, of how to depict a world which appears increasingly fragmented
and opaque; but it is equally a crisis of history. This is so in a double sense:
modernism is itself the product of a peculiarly fraught historical moment,
breaking out most spectacularly in the years surrounding the First World War;
but it also poses the problem of how to represent that history, not least when
(as in T. S. Eliot’s two-way-street idea of tradition, in which the present shapes
the past as much as vice versa) one can no longer plausibly see time as either
smoothly unfurling or moving steadily onwards and upwards. That whole
ideology of history, which had served the Western middle classes superbly well
in their heyday, now lies broken and rusting on the battlefields of Gallipoli and
the Somme, along with a good deal more detritus which was once a set of noble
ideals. A rather more wretched form of history, this time that of the colonized
rather than colonialists, is the nightmare from which James Joyce’s Stephen
Dedalus is seeking to awaken – though one of the worst kinds of nightmare
is the one in which you imagine you have woken up only to discover by some
slight slippage of meaning or warping of perception that you have done no such
thing, and are still fast asleep. Many a political revolution, including the one
which came to an end in Ireland in the year of publication of Ulysses, is familiar
with such false dawns.
What is now deeply in doubt is not progress itself, since even the most ardent
postmodernist must allow that it is preferable to live after the invention of an
aesthetics than before it, but Progress; and if this is called into question, it is
because any general scheme of history at all, even a deteriorationist one of the
kind promoted by Oswald Spengler, strikes the mind of post-Nietzschean Europe
as less persuasive than a sense of history as an enigmatic, utterly incoherent text
as resistant to sense as Dadaist sound poetry or surrealist theatre. Marx takes a
rather different view: for him, modernity represents an enthralling narrative of
emancipation and, simultaneously and inseparably, one prolonged nightmare.
There is indeed a grand narrative, but it is ironically double-edged. This,
xx Foreword: Modernism, Time and History

however, was in the days when there was still something known as dialectical
thought, which in the course of time was to yield to an ideology of difference.
Once one becomes in the habit of reading narratives which begin in medias
res, curve back to some origin which turns out to be only one possible starting-
point, then leap into the future only to land up back in the present, it is clear that
what is at one level a crisis of literary form is also, more fundamentally, the loss
of a traditional kind of storytelling under turbulent historical conditions. The
genetic fallacy (the assumption that to investigate the causes of a phenomenon
is to understand it for what it is) and the teleological fallacy (the faith that to
know the ultimate goal of a process is the key to comprehending it) have both
been thrown into question. This is not the case with classical realism. The finest
specimen of that form in England is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which for all
its disenchantment with the failure of social reform continues to believe in ‘the
growing good of the world’, and implicitly portrays the history it recounts as
being in a middle march from a lower to a higher state. Contrast this faith, then,
with Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of his protagonist Mr. Verloc being driven in a
cab in The Secret Agent:
The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite extraordinary. By its
disproportionate violence and magnitude it obliterated every sensation of
onward movement; and the effect was of being shaken in a stationary apparatus
like a mediaeval device for the punishment of crime, or some very new-fangled
invention for the cure of a sluggish liver. (Ch. 8)

This impression of getting nowhere fast, of bouncing agitatedly up and down

on the spot, is the ultimate riposte to the creed of progress, of which the
conservative Conrad was deeply sceptical. The very idea of motion has now
become something of a metaphysical mystery.
For the classical realist, there is a narrative inherent in reality itself, quite
independent of how we might happen to construe it, and it is the task of fiction
to excavate this story and reduplicate it in the shapely design of one’s own work.
Modernism, by contrast, comes in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche’s conviction
that the world is no way in particular, and that only by foisting our own arbitrary
fictions upon it can any coherent sense be hammered out of the stuff. There is no
longer any such thing as what is the case – an epistemology that postmodernism
continues to promote while at the same time maintaining that women really are
oppressed and that (post)colonial exploitation is more than a convenient frame
for making sense of things. Nor in Nietzsche’s eyes is history itself more than a
collection of gruesome accidents and random events, with its murky roots in
 Foreword: Modernism, Time and History xxi

blood, toil and perpetual violence. It is, of course, Hegel whom he has in his
sights – a philosopher of history who was in fact far from the sanguine spirit he
is so often mistaken for, believing as he did that episodes of peace and fulfilment
were rare indeed in the annals of human history.
The term ‘modern’ derives, ironically enough, from classical antiquity – from
the word modernus, which became current in the medieval period and which
can be roughly translated as ‘the time of the now’. The idea of the new is not
new at all. Modernus means what is current or contemporary, but one should
note that much of what is contemporary is not new. Air travel is contemporary,
but it now has quite a history behind it. The phrase ‘the time of the now’ is
paradoxical, since the ‘now’ is both in and out of time, to be discovered at the
very heart of temporality but also its polar opposite. Nor is the new desirable in
itself: crack cocaine is relatively new, and so is failing to notice the murder of
a fellow passenger on a tube train because you are too busy fiddling with your
smart phone. Famine and sexual slavery are also bang up to date. There is nothing
inherently precious about innovation, as the victims of chemical weapons might
testify if they are still alive to do so. All new things have one feature in common,
namely their novelty, which then tends to reduce them all to the same level
rather as the commodity form does for Marx. There are times when modernism
in purely formalist spirit regards the past as its adversary simply because it is the
past, not on account of any grave offence it may have perpetrated.
What is also typical of the new is its fugitive, transient quality. It is with Charles
Baudelaire that the idea of the modern as ephemeral – as a kind of perpetual
vanishing act – is born. To celebrate the transient is a way of subverting the
classical. If novelty is no virtue in itself, why should permanence be? Warfare
and poverty have been constant factors in human history, yet we do not think the
better of them for that. So why not scribble your poems on people’s shirt fronts,
or build a self-implosion device into your piece of sculpture? Why not seek to
annihilate the past altogether in the manner of the various revolutionary avant-
gardes of the early twentieth century, burning Raphael and placing bombs in
libraries so as to create for yourself that pure space, akin in its luminous vacancy
to the space which existed before the Creation, which might then become the
matrix for your own absolutely original work?
One problem with this audacious aesthetic is that there is in fact nothing
which is absolutely original. If there were, we would not be in possession of
the language in which to identify it, let alone give an account of it. We can
only extrapolate from what we know already. This is one reason why aliens
are so disappointingly non-alien. They may be only three foot high, speak in
xxii Foreword: Modernism, Time and History

robotic voices, smell strongly of sulphur and display a morbid interest in the
human genitalia when they stretch us out on their couches, but otherwise they
look pretty much like Tom Cruise. Aliens are testimony to the paucity of the
human imagination. The real aliens are those who are squatting in our laps at
this very moment. There is nothing that is not fashioned out of pre-existing
materials, and that is therefore (as Henrik Ibsen well knew) mortgaged to the
past. That this is so is part of what Jacques Derrida means by textuality. The
call to make it new, to be (in Arthur Rimbaud’s phrase) ‘absolutely modern’, to
create a historical tabula rasa, turns out to be a fantasy. It is the Oedipal dream
of being self-creating, without parentage, sprung triumphantly from one’s
own loins. Works of art which are out to liquidate the past in the name of the
ineffably new tend to overlook Sigmund Freud’s warning that those who do not
confront the past are doomed to repeat it. All you are likely to do is thrust past
history into the political unconscious, where it will begin to fester. Not even
the most outlandishly unfamiliar work of art can give the slip to T. S. Eliot’s all-
encompassing Tradition, which will always manage to incorporate it into its own
unfathomable depths. It is as though the Tradition has seen innovation coming
and reorganized itself in order to accommodate it.
Avant-gardism is an act of oblivion, since it involves consigning all previous
cultural history to the ashcan of tradition. The past is immolated on the altar of
the present. The present and future are defined by their rupture with the past –
so that once that past is indeed buried in oblivion, avant-gardism becomes
impossible to sustain. Another problem with this avant-garde aesthetic is that
wiping the historical slate clean is far from simple. This is partly because history
is what we are for the most part made of, but also because to seek to erase
history is itself a historical act, and thus ends up simply piling more historical
material on to whatever it is you were hoping to annul. We can only transform
history with the few poor, contaminated instruments which we have inherited
from it. No thinker was more ironically aware of this than Marx, who held that
only on the basis of the fabulous accumulation of spiritual and material riches
of the middle class (the most revolutionary agent in human history, he notes
in The Communist Manifesto) might a genuine socialism be conceivable. Since
that enthralling, emancipatory narrative is simultaneously a tale of misery and
exploitation, the realm of future freedom is in part the fruit of non-freedom.
Whether what might emerge at the end of this process is then worth the fearful
price in human blood and sweat the human race has paid for it is a question on
which Marxism has been curiously silent.
 Foreword: Modernism, Time and History xxiii

Modernism, one might claim in too glib a formulation, is fascinated by time

but disenchanted with history. In fact, the former becomes often enough a
surrogate for the latter. There are modernist artists who seek a victory over time
by compressing it to an infinite singularity, a timeless instant which is the closest
one can approach to the Absolute. As Stephen Dedalus announces, we must cling
to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past. The modernist
attraction to the void or vortex, ‘vertical’ irruptions into the forward flow of
time, belongs with this vision. So too do attempts to spatialize temporality, as
with Walter Benjamin’s project of ‘constellating’ disparate historical moments
into a single dialectical image. The linear gives way to the synchronic, motion
to montage. One source of this project is the city, modernism being for the most
part an urban, rather than rural, affair. It is the city, in which different sensations
besiege you at every moment on all sides, which is one source of modernism’s
love affair with incongruous juxtapositions and unpredictable affinities – with
what Benjamin calls inconceivable analogies and connections. Another source
of this disaffection with the linear is modern physics, for which a Newtonian
world of solid objects, fixed laws and stable temporality is giving way to an
indeterminate, multidimensional sphere of flux and energy. Time for Einstein’s
special theory of relativity does not run on rails, which is no doubt one reason
why some of the Dadaists regarded him as an honorary member of their group,
along with Charlie Chaplin.
There is also, however, what one might call phenomenological time. If you
want to defeat the time of clocks and calendars, you can try turning inward,
perhaps under the influence of Henri Bergson or Martin Heidegger, to the
lived, irregular, multilayered time of the human subject, the most magnificent
literary example of which is Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Yet
the contrast between this existential richness and the dull, dreary, one-damn-
thing-after-another evolution of history is a false antithesis. For history, too,
is irregular and multilayered, an array of mini-narratives which are by no
means always synchronizable. It is a view of the historical more congenial to
the colonial margins than the metropolitan centre. Different currents of history
move at different tempos, sharply diverge or randomly intersect, curve back on
themselves or suddenly accelerate, as the structure of Conrad’s Nostromo would
suggest. If history is less linear than complexly stratified and interwoven, then
you can shake its various bits and pieces free of their chronological frame and
slice into it at any point. To a certain modernist eye, everything is perpetually
present, it is to the eye of God. The possibility of a Surrealist history, one which
xxiv Foreword: Modernism, Time and History

brings the very old and the very new into shockingly unfamiliar juxtaposition,
is now on the agenda.
Alternatively, you can adopt the Futurists’ tactic of trying to outrun time, beat
it at its game, live so fast and furiously that the present is no sooner here than
it is eclipsed by what is still to arrive. Even the contemporary is obsolete. If you
cannot transcend temporality, at least you can intensify it to the point where
it begins to warp and bend. By caricaturing conventional notions of progress,
pressing them to an extreme limit, they begin to come apart at the seams. This is
because the middle classes require a firm framework of order within which their
technological advances may take place; but if you speed those advances up in
the manner of Futurism, you risk undermining the moral and political stability
which is supposed to contain them, and history bucks wildly out of control.
In classical Marxist parlance, one is speaking of a contradiction between base
and superstructure. The capitalist economy is agitated, ungovernable, endlessly
mutable and mercurial, while the bourgeois values which hold it in place are
staid, stable and supposedly unchanging. What happens with certain currents
of (post)modernism is that the turbulent energies of the base are, so to speak,
lifted into the superstructure, so that art, culture and morality come to manifest
all the flux, relativity and ungroundedness of market society itself. Modernism
is one name for this momentous shake-up of the classical bourgeoisie, the kind
of cultivated, reputable figures one finds in Proust or Thomas Mann, who by
the time of postmodernism have more or less disappeared from the face of
the planet; but the price one pays for this cultural revolution is a steep one. It
means that the superstructure is no longer able to fulfil its classical function of
legitimating the base– which is to say, of providing pious rationales for profane
activities, justifying injustice and inequality by reference to eternal verities.
To be modern is to be post-mortal. Modern men and women die, of course, but
they also acquire a kind of ersatz immortality by belonging to a history that will
never end. The ideology of progress means that human powers are indefinitely
expandable and know no natural closure. If you cannot vanquish death as an
individual, then, you can certainly do so as a species. If history has no inherent
end then it is a form of infinity, and thus among other things a substitute for a
celestial paradise which to some in the nineteenth century is beginning to look
increasingly implausible. Heaven, so to speak, is horizontalized. The future may
be inconceivable, but at least it exists on the same plane as ourselves, even if it
lies at an immeasurable distance from our own historical moment. There is, to
be sure, a certain wilful self-delusion at issue here, since the fact that our age
is pregnant with the infinite may lead us to regard it with a certain pride, even
 Foreword: Modernism, Time and History xxv

though we know that this all-consuming Now will soon be an insignificant Then.
There is no reason, for example, why our most productive scientific hypotheses
should not turn out to be just as defective as the scientific speculations of the
past. There is thus a secretly tragic dimension to this triumphalistic version of
the modern. Besides, the more of the past we pile up behind us, the more likely it
is to weigh upon us as a tainted legacy or undischarged debt (one thinks of Ibsen
once more), thereby obstructing the birth of a finer future. The problem with the
past is that there is so much more of it than the present. And what is transmitted
from generation to generation is barbarism as well as civilization.
Modernism divides, roughly speaking, into those artists for whom there is
no salvation to be found in history, and those more buoyant, wide-eyed avant-
gardists for whom the future is what redeems the present. Both groups predate
one of the most fundamental of all historical developments: the point at which
humanity gains the ability to exterminate itself, and in doing so confirms its
universality as a species in the most frightful way imaginable. Nobody will
be exempt from the effects of nuclear war or ecological catastrophe, however
much the postmodernists may denounce the concept of universality as
spuriously ideological. One needs, then, an alternative to the idea of Progress,
and one modernist way of outflanking it is the eternal Now. This, to be sure, is
no more than a convenient fiction, since there is no pure contemporaneity –
no sheerly self-identical moment which could be lifted free of the perpetual
conversion of the past into the present. If there were indeed such a moment, it
would be insulated from both past and present and thus out of time, which is
the etymological root of the word ‘eternity’. Progress is infinite, but the moment
is eternal. As Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests, eternal life can only be here and
now, which is one reason why it cannot be represented. If, by virtue of an utterly
impossible realism, we could truly see things as they are, peer into the very heart
of them, then as William Blake maintains we would see in a cleansing of the
doors of perception that their roots run down to eternity, and that our everyday
vision is in this sense a necessary form of false consciousness. It is one of many
legacies that the modernists inherit from the Romantics.
There is, however, another modernist strategy for defeating the sad waste of
time stretching before and after, as Four Quartets puts it. This is to see history
not as linear but as cyclical, which combines the linear with the eternal. It also
involves a return to the pre-modern. Such a conjuncture of the atavistic and the
avant-garde, the very old and the very new, is characteristic of modernism as
a whole, which in order to find its paradigms of the future looks back over the
barren waste of modernity to some pre-modern, prelapsarian paradise, all the way
xxvi Foreword: Modernism, Time and History

from the Fisher King to ancient China, the south sea island to the native rituals
of Mexico, the so-called organic society of early-seventeenth-century England to
the medieval world of Dante. Cyclical time is closed, as modern temporality is
not, and innovation is of no particular value, History is locked into Nature and
the cosmos, into the seasonal and liturgical round, which furnishes it with the
stoutest of foundations. This is not true of the time of the modern, which lacks a
grounding in reality and thus must improvise, become its own norm, make itself
up as it goes along. In the pre-modern sphere of the cyclical, by contrast, time is
meaningfully organized: there is a season for planting and for harvesting, fading
and flourishing, fasting and abundance, feast days and secular occurrences. For
modernity, time is the matrix of meaning but is not itself meaningful, which is
why Philip Larkin’s question ‘What are days for?’ is the very model of a pseudo-
question. There can be no significant shape to a temporality which is infinite. The
time of the modern, however progressive it may be, is potentially tragic, since
actions, once performed, cannot be recuperated, whereas cyclical time is anti-
tragic since everything will return again with a slight difference, and nothing
in this eternal recurrence can be permanently lost. Like the idea of Progress, it
is a fantasy of imperishability. If such a vision lies at the basis of Joyce’s cosmic
comedy, with its ‘neverchanging-everchanging’ view of reality, it also lies at the
root of W. B. Yeats’s desperate, last-ditch assurance that the ousted Anglo-Irish
Ascendency to whom he has hitched his middle-class wagon will one day be
restored, and all will run on that unfashionable gyre again.
It is customary to think of the past as finished and the present as open-ended,
but this is not the view of one of the greatest of all modernist documents of
historiography, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In
Benjamin’s view, the past itself is unfinished, and it is the present which has
an opportunity of bringing it to fruition. What happens, happens; but the
significance of such apparently dead-and-done-for events lies in the keeping of
the present, so that it is up to us to determine whether, say, a man or woman
of the Neolithic age belonged to a species which ended up destroying itself.
Similarly, it is we who can invest the tradition of the oppressed with significance
by ensuring that past defeats are transformed into political victories. Until
then, past history will remain in a state of fluidity, and our judgement on it
must remain suspended. Those throughout the centuries who lost their lives in
various struggles for justice cannot literally be compensated; but their battles
can be retrospectively imbued with a different meaning by our own actions in
the here and now. So it is that for Benjamin, the tradition of the oppressed is
constructed backwards, and will be intelligible as a coherent narrative only on
 Foreword: Modernism, Time and History xxvii

Judgement Day – a Day on which the secret affinities between this or that strike
for justice over the course of human history will be revealed.
Modernism represents the most magnificent cultural flowering of the
modern age. Nothing that has happened in its wake has remotely matched its
depth and scope – one which involves nothing less than the fashioning of whole
new forms of human subjectivity. Many of the supposedly distinctive motifs of
postmodernism are merely reprises of its mighty predecessor. Yet the historical
span of the modernist project, as opposed to its well-nigh global geographical
reach, is notably brief: a few decades of the last century. Realism, by contrast,
has a far lengthier pedigree. But this is because realism is inseparable from the
emergence of a social class which took several centuries to establish itself, and
in doing so transformed the face of the earth; whereas modernism marks a
specific point of crisis in that class’s late evolution. It is from being bound up
so intimately with that highly particular historical moment that the movement
derives much of its extraordinary force; and it is thus an arresting paradox that
its relation to that history should so often take the form of negation, repression
and imaginary transcendence.
xxviii
 Historical modernisms: Introduction
Jean-Michel Rabaté and Angeliki Spiropoulou

The pandemic generated by the spreading of Covid-19 (the date of the inception
of the disease had to be grafted to its moniker) has led many public intellectuals
to voice worries about an unprecedented disruption of social interactions and
international politics. This would have ushered in a radically new situation.
Indeed, there is a widespread belief that ‘events’ like the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the attacks of 9/11 on the United States, the Arab Spring rebellions, the economic
crises of 2008, etc., gave birth to configurations that were so novel that nothing
would be the same after. As Walter Benjamin observes, this is an optical delusion
stemming from the fact that each epoch believes itself to be at the vanguard of
the modern: ‘Each age unavoidably seems to itself a new age. The “modern”
however, is as varied in its meaning as the different aspects of one and the same
kaleidoscope.’1 Our ambition in this collection is to explore the images of the
kaleidoscope and show that their coloured pageantry makes sense when duly
historicized. Whoever has kept a longer view of history, not necessarily of the
longue durée type we associate with Fernand Braudel and the Annales school,
but going back more than three generations, can call up vignettes dating from
the Spanish flu that started in 1918, a global pandemic that affected more than
500 million people worldwide and killed about 50 million in three years, thus
much more lethal than the preceding world war.2 This ‘epidemic’ (a Greek word
meaning literally ‘about the people’) was of importance for modernism, not
least because one of the main modernist poets and critics, an activist tirelessly
advocating ‘the new’ in the arts, was to succumb to it: Guillaume Apollinaire
was one of the first victims of the global infection. One of the last was Freud’s
cherished daughter, Sophie, who died of complications from the Spanish flu in
January 1920. Whereas the last bubonic plague took forty years to go round the
globe, the influenza took two years to spread everywhere, whereas the Covid-19
2 Historical Modernisms

virus took less than four months. Speed and spread have become the hallmarks
of the modern, for better and for worse.
Even if we have not completely forgotten the influenza of 1918 to which
Joyce (or a friend of his) is still alluding in 1929, when ‘A Litter’ quotes the song
‘I opened the window and in flew Enza’),3 most readers of Joyce are blithely
unaware of his first literary project, a 1900 play entitled A Brilliant Career. In A
Brilliant Career, the hero is a young doctor who has been elected as mayor in a
town where cases of bubonic plague have been reported. The mayor first shows
signs of callousness when he spurns his true love in order to marry well socially,
but then he acts resolutely, albeit with the help of the rejected lover in disguise:
together, they save the city from the pandemic. His victory is shown to be hollow
when he realizes that he has lost his true love who proved most efficient in the
struggle against the plague.4 This plot was completed in 1900, at a time when
Joyce was under the sway of Ibsen. He sent the play to the renowned critic
William Archer whose answer, polite and understanding though it was, ended
up being so devastating that Joyce destroyed the play soon afterwards.5 If Joyce
was probably right and his first play was a pale imitation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of
the People, nevertheless we can regret that the only play about a pandemic by a
famous modernist (I bracket off Camus’s Plague, a novel only) vanished to leave
no trace.
Apart from the coincidence of identical preoccupations 120 years apart, we
may want to consider that Joyce’s ambition was clear: he meant to illustrate
himself as a playwright because for him, in 1900, Ibsen embodied modernity,
and modernity was in touch with life and the actual problems of the people.
Ibsen had tackled issues of public health, the subjugation of women even in
marriage and the need for democratic governments. Joyce had a point when
he failed to see these themes treated by Shakespeare, and as late as 1916, when
he was already writing Ulysses, he would still praise Ibsen above the Bard.6
Unhappily, very few people read Ibsen today and his plays are rarely staged,
whereas Shakespeare is still performed all over the world, and in all languages.
Thus it was Joyce’s unwavering reverence for Ibsen that made his one surviving
play, Exiles, less of a bad play than a dated play.
One can try to defend Exiles against all odds, at least by arguing that a sound
knowledge of the play’s plot, characters and philosophy will provide one with keys
opening up some of the locked doors of Ulysses, but this is a hard task because
the play sounds so wooden and unmodern. If one agrees that Ulysses succeeds
where Exiles fails, the failure of one may have been necessary for the success of the
other – such a failure is what allowed Joyce to write the ‘Circe’ episode, a brilliant
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 3

variation on Peer Gynt, Faust and La Tentation de Saint Antoine together. Of

course, this is only a matter of perspective. Should one imagine Exiles as written
in 1900, instead of A Brilliant Career, it would not appear as such a bad play but
if one compares Exiles with beacons of theatrical modernity like Alfred Jarry’s
Ubu Roi (1896), Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907), Maeterlinck’s Les
Aveugles (1890), Claudel’s Tête d’Or (1889–94), Malevitch’s Victory over the Sun
(1913) or Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well (1916), to offer only few markers, one will be
sorely disappointed. Joyce, who had revolutionized the novel with A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, clearly lags behind as a playwright.
One way to save Exiles is to ‘modernize’ it by performing the kind of surgical
intervention Harold Pinter had the courage to undertake. Samuel Beckett
understood fully what Pinter was doing when in April 1969 he wrote to him:
‘You’re a brave man to take on Exiles. I understand your excitement. I often
wondered how it could be done, that speech be overcome and the deep wounding
played.’7 Pinter had sent Samuel a typescript of Silence and was planning to direct
Exiles at the Mermaid Theater in London; it opened on 12 November 1970.
Beckett highlighted the difficulties of the play, its overabundance of speech given
that very little is happening and the task of conveying suffering when the main
characters appear either too masochistic or sadistic. Beckett and Pinter both
considered the problem as a practical problem – Pinter solved it by reducing the
text considerably, which had the effect of making it sound like a Beckett play.
Can one save the play differently, that is, by historicizing it? We know that
Joyce finished writing his play during the war, and was conscious of the ongoing
slaughter and the impending armed struggle for the independence of his native
country. When in his notes he calls Exiles ‘three cat and mouse acts’,8 he refers
to the bill passed in 1913 that allowed the British police to free suffragettes and
bring them back to jail immediately. Endless political discussions point to a new
Ireland that should be free and independent. Thus Robert tells Richard in Act I:
‘If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must become European. And that is
what you are here for. Some day we shall have to choose between England and
Europe.’9 One could imagine a creative rewrite of Joyce’s play in the aftermath of
Brexit, pointing to Ireland’s role in a reduced Europe in which it is now the only
English-speaking country.
These preliminary remarks aim at showing that if one should ‘always
historicize’, especially when modernism is concerned, considerations of history
are complex and more often than not complicate the issues. We have learned that
history is not the linear progression from date to date, from king to queen via a
few battles in between. It moves by jumps and starts and rarely follows a linear
4 Historical Modernisms

development. At the same time, the usual rejection of Exiles as a waste of effort
is predicated on a correct reflex. Those who discard it follow their gut feelings
that tell them that this was not Joyce at his best, or that one can be a genius in
prose and an amateur playwright. In other words, even if they were to accept a
historicization saving the play in the name of a more capacious comprehension
of Joyce, they would still want to assert literary values and draw the line between
superb prose and shoddy theatrical dialogue. The same discussion would also
apply to Joyce as a poet: periodically, his poetry is exhumed to be ‘saved’ but it
cannot compete with that of his peers like Pound, Eliot and Stevens. This leads to
the next question: do we take modernism to mean simply a historical period, in
which case anything that would have been produced between certain dates – say
1910 to 1954, to remain conservative – falls under the heading of modernism,
or should it appear as a qualitative concept, and be regulated by criteria thanks
to which we decide who is modernist and who is not? The point has not been
settled. It has generated endless discussions about whether authors who remain
at the cusp, like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, or John Galsworthy and
George Bernard Shaw, can be called modernist.
Is Exiles modernist because it is Joyce’s only surviving play, and Joyce is
an undisputed modernist? Is Exiles then modernist because it belongs to
the workshop of Ulysses, one of the monuments of modernism? Or is Exiles
modernist because it follows and furthers patterns launched by Ibsen, who
himself can be considered an earlier modernist? Or is it not a modernist play
because its scenic language has not been rethought, and resembles the language
of the most classical theatre of the time unlike the way Jarry, Yeats, Synge,
Pirandello and a few others like Beckett revolutionized it? Again: what do we
mean by ‘modernism’? It is simply the literary and artistic vanguard of any given
period? This is the extended meaning that has been given to it by Susan Stanford
Friedman in a number of provocative essays and books.
Friedman’s maximalist thesis is that there is a ‘planetary modernism’ and that
modernity is a recurrent feature moving across centuries and various cultures.10
Thus there were pre-1500 modernities in the Tang dynasty China, and there
have been Indian or Arab modernities. Such an ample vision is seductive and
conjures up a modernism of longue durée, passing from continent to continent,
from language to language, crisscrossing the most diverse cultures. It includes
today’s modernisms in Iran, Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey, the Arab countries and
much more. Although we agree with the idea that modernism has been unduly
limited to a group of European and American writers, all white and usually
well educated, and that it gains by expanding its horizons, we believe that there
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 5

is a confusion between ‘modernity’, which, as Baudelaire knew, combines the

sense of the eternal and the transient, and ‘modernism’ as we used to know it,
say as defined by a few masterpieces produced in 1922. It is exciting to imagine
a transnational and transhistorical modernism. Even though we accept the
idea that modernism cannot be limited to one country, we remain sceptical
about the idea of a transhistorical modernism, as do all the contributors to this
volume. We all argue that modernism needs to keep some kind of historical
grounding. For instance, it seems counter-intuitive to call Claus Sluter (1340–
1406), the author of masterpieces like the ‘puits de Moïse’ in the Chartreuse de
Champmol (1405), a ‘modernist’ sculptor because his work invents naturalist
realism in portraits at the court of Burgundy and thus in Europe, also because
he would exemplify an early transnationalist ethos, being both Dutch and
Bourguignon. Let’s agree to call him ‘modern’, a term linked with ‘modernity’
and not ‘modernism’.
Another difficulty is to agree on criteria that allow one to decide what is most
‘modern’ in a given culture and at a given time. Should one measure this by
the effect of scandal created by some works? Victor Hugo became famous with
The Battle of Hernani in 1830, in which pitted battles opposed the Romantic
school and the ‘Classics’. The notorious trials of Madame Bovary in 1857 and the
censorship of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal the same year opposed the whole
group of progressive artists to Bourgeois morality. As Thomas Crow has shown,
l’Art pour l’Art was subversive in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.11 By the end of
the nineteenth century, realism and naturalism were considered subversive; Zola
would denounce the conditions of the workers, and Gerhart Hauptmann’s play
Die Weber (The Weavers) of 1892 was banned because it made heroes of the
rebellious Silesian weavers in the 1848 revolt.
On the other hand, one cannot deny that sense of being ‘modern’ defines
early Anglo-American modernism. It was in the minds of all of the writers and
artists we call ‘modernist’. Hence we have that famous letter sent by Ezra Pound
to Harriet Monroe, when he reports his ‘discovery’ of T. S. Eliot, who, he claims,
‘has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own’. Pound, having
just read ‘The Love Song of Alfred E. Prufrock’, was truly startled when he saw
how much more advanced (and autonomous) his fellow American was. This
story has often been narrated, and too often omits what was most distinctive in
the posture of Pound and Eliot: they were both reclaiming a certain tradition,
whether defined by troubadour poetics for the former or by French poets like
Gérard de Nerval and Jules Laforgue for the latter, so as to keep thinking the past
and writing the future at the same time.
6 Historical Modernisms

Indeed, one might want to argue that what modernism brought to the fore is
an awareness that its history has been underpinned by Freud’s Nachträglichkeit
much more than by any evolutionist teleology. There is first the fact that
modernism has not been a movement as such, unlike surrealism or Dadaism,
but a label applied retroactively by critics, poets and reviewers who were trying
to make sense of the amazingly original works that were produced four years
after the First World War or so. This ‘retrospective arrangement’, to quote Joyce
again, or more precisely his character Tom Kernan, who keeps using the phrase,
concerns events that often were of a traumatic nature and thus could not be
described directly. An emblematic novel from the anus mirabilis of 1922 would
be Virginia Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room, a novel of silences, absences and gaps, all
predicated on the death of the main protagonist, lost in the Great War. Similarly,
masterpieces like Ulysses and À la recherche du temps perdu were impacted by
the war, and the welcome delay allowed them to grow exponentially in size and
ambition. But modernism did not happen all at once in 1922, and it was present
before the war, in 1913 already, if not by the turn of the century.
What we call ‘history’ is most of the time imperceptible, marked by apparently
minor changes, shifts in habitus, details that betray huge shifts like the apparently
meaningless modifications of taste, as shown, for instance, by sartorial fashion.
The 2009 film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky begins perfectly by presenting as
accurately as possible the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the
Théâtre des Champs Elysées in 1913. This is done in order to prepare for a later
torrid affair between the married composer and a single and single-minded
Gabrielle Chanel. The most laudable effort in Jan Kouen’s Coco Chanel & Igor
Stravinsky is to provide an accurate reconstitution of the original performance of
the Rite of Spring – to this day, it feels shocking, new and energetic.
The main thesis of the film is accurate: there is genius in music and there
is genius in fashion. The launching of the most modern of perfumes, Chanel
number 5, in 1921, with its iconic square bottle, now in all the museums of
design, and its innovative use of synthetic components, may be as revealing as
the scandal surrounding the Rite of Spring in 1913 and its being accepted as a
modernist masterpiece in 1921. Fashion can be seen as a true marker of change.
The fashion specialist Valerie Steele provides an accurate assessment when she
describes a revolution in taste between the years 1907 and 1913. Interestingly,
she insists that the First World War did not play a major role:
Within only a few years, roughly between 1907 and 1913, a fashion world
dominated by the corset, frou-frou skirts, and pastel shades turned into one
where women increasingly wore brassieres and high-waisted ‘Empire’ frocks
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 7

or ‘Oriental’ fantasies in bright, ‘barbaric’ colors. They sometimes even wore

trousers. This is not to say that World War I had not impact, but the cultural
factors leading to change were already influencing fashion before 1914. The war
itself primarily accelerated changes that were already happening.12

Books and essays have been written on modernist fashion and Paul Poiret who
initiated a new look. Poiret asserted that he had been the first to wage war on
the corset in his ‘Art Deco’ creations; however, from today’s vantage point, his
creations look rather dated. Mario Fortuny and Madeleine Vionnet both claimed
to have abolished the corset by 1907, even before Poiret claimed that he was
responsible for this iconic gesture of freedom defining modernity. Moreover,
in 1903 already, the famous actress Gabrielle Réjane told an interviewer that
she had no need for a corset. At the same time, Leon Bakst’s designs for the
Ballets Russes became fashionable in 1910, after the first Paris performance of
Schéhérazade. Bakst gave rise to a mixture of exoticism and eroticism as he
displayed naked male and female torsos.
In his novel that served as a basis for the film, Chris Greenhalgh had the
wonderful idea of making Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel glimpse each other
not after the war, when they became lovers for a brief time, but in 1913, at the
première of the Rite of Spring. Indeed, as biographers agree, Chanel attended that
eventful performance. Greenhalgh describes her costume in opposition to rich
society women who came to the performance wearing lush Poiret dresses:
They regard her, these women, with disapproval, without quite knowing why.
It’s not as if she’s more decorative. Quite the opposite. If anything, the cut of
her clothes is austere. The simplicity of her gown, its restrained elegance, makes
them seem almost gaudy by comparison. And her silhouette is intimidatingly
slim. It is this quality of understatement, this nonchalance de luxe, they find
disrespectful. The impressions she gives is that she’s not even trying. It seems so
effortless, they feel undermined.
To Coco, conscious of the disdainful glances she’s attracting, these others
seem ridiculous in their plumes and feathers, their taffeta gowns and heavy
velvet dresses. If they want to look like chocolate boxes, that’s their affair, she
reasons. As for her, she prefers to look like a woman.13

Here is no projection or anachronism – if the ‘little black dress’ was created

by Chanel in 1926 and launched by Vogue as a garment comparable to Ford’s
Model T., Chanel already opened her first boutique at the famous address of
21, rue Cambon, in 1910, where she specialized in hats. In 1913, when she
opened a fashion boutique in Deauville, she had the original idea of combining
high fashion and casual clothing, garments suitable for sports and leisure. Her
8 Historical Modernisms

creations in Deauville in the summer of 1913 were indeed made just after she
had heard The Rite of Spring. These 1913 creations announced a simple style
that clashed with the sumptuous extravagance of Fortuny and Poiret outfits.
Chanel’s simplicity was quite artful, but it would be wrong to interpret it as a
consequence of the austerity created by the Great War – in fact, as with the arts,
fashion anticipated these radical changes that Lisa Chaney evokes aptly in her
description of the Deauville boutique:
In Gabrielle’s boutique, with its stripped awning proudly bearing the name
‘Gabrielle Chanel’, she offered clothes and hats based on simplified elements.
There were open-collar blouses; simple sweaters; loose, belted jackets and
long skirts for relaxed and outdoor living. Most famously, Gabrielle had taken
familiar items of men’s practical clothing and turned them to her advantage.
The fisherman’s shirts, turtlenecks and oversize sweaters, the polo sweater
(…), all these she modified for women. The polo shirt, for example, became
an open-necked, belted tunic with sleeves rolled up. Borrowing from those
workaday wardrobes, she amazed and delighted her audience by demonstrating
that the practical and the everyday could be the sources of high style, until then
invariably rooted in luxury and the exotic.14

Greenhalgh’s wonderfully audacious concept was to link this new simplicity with
the primitivism unleashed by Stravinsky’s fierce rhythms and stylized dance style.
Should we try to define modernism by a few keywords? Insofar as it provides an
umbrella term for a whole period, it would have to be opposed to Romanticism,
Symbolism on the one hand, and post-modernism on the other. If we look for
more formal markers, it is clear that the minimalism of Chanel’s black dresses
forces us to look at one major tendency of modern painting, namely abstraction.
Do these terms offer sufficient criteria?
Unhappily, as soon as one historicizes, one finds more messy situations. This
will be illustrated with two vignettes, drawing on the work of the two editors
of transition, Eugène Jolas and Georges Duthuit, the first one appearing before
the Second World War, and the second after. Here is why the study of little
magazines is a productive and convenient way of historicizing modernism,
as Andrew Thacker shows in his essay ‘Spatial Histories of Magazines and
Modernisms’. Drawing on his work on the transnational ‘Modernist Magazines
Project’, Thacker emphasizes the problems of periodization and even of
definition that emerge if a history of modernism is approached via avant-garde
periodicals on a global level. In assessing the role of magazines for sketching a
history of modernism, new critical tools, specific to the notable heterogeneity of
the genre, are on call while this history itself is constantly revised alongside the
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 9

questioning of traditional literary terms, such as ‘work’ or ‘author’. A genealogy

of modernism through magazines expands the movement’s geopolitical calibre
to include non-Western forms and colonial politics while a comparative
perspective between and across continents reveals international collaborations,
transnational connections and global peregrinations which remap modernism’s
history and prove periodicals to be more significant agents of the movement
than the published book. Such an ever-expanding spatial history of modernism
also questions the ideology of ‘lateness’ or ‘lagging behind’ North European and
American modernity that informs much of the discourse around the history of
modernism.15
Little magazines present to the reader the ‘monuments’ in instalments as well
as some of the controversies they trigger before they are published. For instance,
it is rewarding to read Ulysses and Tarr next to the other essays in The Egoist. The
role of editors like Dora Marsden, Eugène Jolas and Georges Duthuit then comes
to the fore. What we see confirmed here as a recurrent feature of modernism is
the need to reinvent a certain past, whether a German Romantic tradition as with
Jolas, or a Byzantine tradition as with Duthuit. Eugène Jolas can be given pride of
place as a critic, agitator, editor and impresario of international modernism. He
has not survived as a poet but his reviews, interviews and critical essays16 point to
a keen intelligence and sketch a consistent programme that presents modernism
as threading a way between the arts, philosophy and literature. Jolas was a
cosmopolitan ‘passeur’ (to use the Bishop’s term),17 a translator in an intellectual
sense, a mediator capable of establishing intercultural bridges between Joyce
and Novalis, Gide and Benn, Martin Heidegger and André Breton, Ernst Jünger
and African-American spirituals. We will argue in these pages that modernism
is not limited to one language, and indeed that it should be understood as a
cross-fertilization between several idioms. Their interaction requires new modes
of narrative, linking a general meta-history with micro-narratives, as Hayden
White, to whom this collection is dedicated, has tirelessly argued.
In the case of Jolas, it was his upbringing that accounted for his trilingualism.
He was born in Union City, New Jersey, but his Franco-German parents returned
to their native Lorraine. He spent his school years in what was Germany then
before returning to New York at the age of fifteen. A journalist in Pittsburgh, he
then presented cultural life in Paris for the Chicago Tribune. When he came back
to France, he saw himself as a naive American reporter who met, interviewed
and befriended a host of artist and writers in excellent vignettes that capture
the gist of the Parisian spirit. Jolas could translate into simple vignettes his
sudden immersion in the culture of the roaring twenties. If James Joyce figures
10 Historical Modernisms

there in good place (‘My admiration for Joyce is such that I am sure that he
is, of all contemporaries, the only one who will pass into posterity’ (CW, 9)),
his predilection for his Alsatian stomping grounds appears when discussing
Strasbourg, a city felt to be at the ‘carrefour du monde’ (CW, 11). Joyce reappears
in July 1924 through the voice of Margaret Anderson, when her interview
surveys the difficulties met by the Little Review after the censorship of several
chapters of Ulysses. Tristan Tzara confesses that Dada is over, but he announces a
return to classicism in the arts and literature. Jolas agrees with Breton’s diagnosis
in Les Pas Perdus: Dadaism and cubism can blend together; thus, surrealism will
provide a workable solution. Jolas formulates a maxim that he tirelessly repeated
throughout his career: ‘All of the work of the moderns is decidedly vertical and
tends toward a new metaphysics’ (CW, 33).
Jolas’s respect for Breton’s radicalism did not sway him from an earlier
affiliation with an Alsatian avant-garde embodied by Claire and Ivan Goll, who
had launched their own ‘sur-realism’, for a while a rival for Breton’s more visible
movement. The Golls argued that Breton was too dogmatically Freudian. Jolas
had held the belief that Goll’s sur-realism would work better because it gathered
a wider array of talents, like Joseph Delteil and Pierre Reverdy. Goll helped Jolas
express his faith in the ‘new mythos’ by rooting the new ‘international psyche’
in a German-Romantic ground – which shows the need to link the local and the
global when talking about high modernism.
Jolas’s flirtation with surrealism was lasting, to the point that transition was
considered a Surrealist magazine in English. However, when he launched it,
his model was not the Surrealist reviews or the Nouvelle Revue Française, but
Commerce, a high-end magazine whose internationalist angle derived from
the polyglottism of Valery Larbaud, a writer-translator-initiator grounded in a
cosmopolitan tradition. Jolas’s work for transition was tireless, and his critical
writings are broken down into sections like ‘Revolution of the Word: Transition
Manifestoes and History’, ‘The Language of the Night’, ‘From Romanticism
to the Avant-Garde’ and ‘Crisis of Man and Language: Verticalist/Vertigralist
Manifestoes’. Above all, Jolas became Joyce’s publisher, friend and confidant,
finding in his work the embodiment of his main tenets: literary language must
be revolutionized, the loose syntax of dreams gives access to universal myths, the
language of the night offers access to new truths. While transition gave Joyce a
steady outlet to publish his fragments, it also featured authorized commentaries.
Jolas was establishing a forceful link between Modernism and Romanticism,
which clashes with the systematic critique of Romanticism one finds with
modernists like Eliot and Pound. In fact, Jolas’s model of Romanticism was not
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 11

the British or French type (neither Rousseau nor Wordsworth, anathemas both
to Pound and to Eliot) for it derived from the earliest programme of German
Romanticism; it expanded the theory what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and
Jean-Luc Nancy have called the Literary Absolute.18 Jolas aimed at completing
the unfinished programme of German Romanticism in order to found a new
‘mythos’. He tapped the Romanticism of Hölderlin, Schelling, Novalis and the
Schlegels, and thus Jolas’s endorsement of Jung’s collective unconscious is not
so surprising. He believed in universal archetypes bridging the gap between
individual dreams and ancient religions.
However, Jolas realized after the war that German Romanticism had
brought about the assertion of the exceptionalism of the German nation, and
thus contributed to the emergence of the worst aspects of the Nazi ideology.
He played a political role in Germany then, for he had been put in charge of
a new German press agency, with the mission of de-Nazifying the language of
journalism corrupted by the regime. During the post-war years, Jolas reframed
his Romantic tenets. In 1941, he still held that transition had been ‘pan-
Romantic’ and that Romanticism was not dead. After the Second World War,
Jolas meditated on the links between Nazi ideology and the thought of Herder,
Fichte and even Novalis. He saw the myth of the pure German Volk as a reaction
against an Enlightenment that was felt to be too dry, rationalistic and ‘French’.
One observes a similar attitude facing Heidegger who is mentioned in a 1933
article on ‘Primal Personality’ for transition no 22. Jolas gives a solid account of
the philosopher’s critique of logic, the discovery of a Nothing apprehended via
fear and anxiety, and then enlists Heidegger in the cohort of thinkers who were
to launch a new metaphysic: ‘Man is beginning to think about the structure of
his being. Being as such is questioned. Metaphysics has become revolutionized’
(CW, 272). Jolas became more critical after the war. He could also report with a
smile that the German philosopher thought that the best French book was Saint
Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince: according to him, it contained a new philosophy of
technology (CW, 486).
After the Second World War, Transition was revived by Georges Duthuit; it
had folded in 1938. Beckett figures in both runs. In a letter to Duthuit from
June 1949, we hear him reminiscing: ‘Here in the loft I find an old copy of
transition (1938), with a poem of mine, the wild youthful kind, which I had
quite forgotten, and an article (also by me) on a young Irish poet (young then)
who had just published a volume of poems in the same series as Echo’s Bones.’19
The poem was ‘Ooftisch’, typical of Beckett’s transition style, and the Irish poet
was Denis Devlin. Beyond nostalgia, Beckett raises the issue of repetition, a key
12 Historical Modernisms

question if we consider the radical pronouncements made in the 1930s by the

Surrealists and the first transition group. Could one believe in an avant-garde
after the war had made such a term sound somewhat militaristic? Could there
be a ‘Revolution of the Word’ while a new division of Europe was ushered in by
an incipient Cold War?
Duthuit, connected by marriage to Henri Matisse, was interested less in
taking the flame from Jolas (Jolas was never excluded and had been invited
to contribute, writing an excellent survey of the evolution of experimental
poetry),20 than in promoting a different programme. Duthuit did not believe in
a universal and polyglottic language whose models would be the experimental
writings of Joyce and Stein. The names that appear in the first issues of the
newly capitalized Transition are Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, René Char,
Jean Wahl, Antonin Artaud, Max-Pol Fouchet, André Malraux, Maurice Nadeau
and Jean Genet. Some of these authors were known to French readers before
the war. Joyce himself remained quite present as the fourth issue announced
a James Joyce Yearbook edited by Jolas with the transition press. The second
Transition belongs to a post-war mentality when discussions were polarized
by Existentialism, Marxism and left-wing Catholicism with philosophers like
Gabriel Marcel. New names emerged like René Char and André du Bouchet next
to established writers like André Gide, Saint-John Perse and Antonin Artaud.
Duthuit had specialized as an art critic with an expertise in Byzantine art.
His main theme was how Western art after Cézanne returns to earlier forms
such as Byzantine art. Matisse’s work gives the same sense of space as Byzantine
mosaics; Masson’s new paintings and drawings open up a Zen space. What
Duthuit praises in those efforts is an ability to bridge the gap between pragmatics
and metaphysics. For the Byzantines and the Japanese, art was not meant to be
exhibited in a museum but served to elicit contemplation. ‘For what Byzantium
produces is not works of art to be exhibited or appreciated, but practical tools
overflowing with spiritual life.’21
In Venice, Duthuit saw the resurgence of the true Byzantine spirit, kept
alive in the dark vault and nave of Saint Mark, a monument bridging the gap
between religion and paganism. Such a syncretism would have been missed by
Nietzsche, according to Duthuit: ‘Nietzsche strangely undervalued this religion,
yet it seems to have accomplished as nearly as possible, through its etiquette and
pomp, what he himself on the threshold of madness dreamed of achieving: the
absorption of all anguish in joy and the alliance of the sun-god and the god of
the cross.’22 Likewise, modern painters should relinquish their individuality and
fuse with a collective delirium reached mythically or mystically. A central insight
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 13

Duthuit shared with the painters Tal Coat and André Masson was that there was
a ‘crisis of the imaginary’, which had been created by the fusion of cubism and
surrealism. Artists and writers should begin questioning a ‘reality’ whose lack
of substance had been denounced by Breton. Reality did not exist by itself and
took shape under the impact of desire. The issue was to combine desire and a
progressive political programme.
Duthuit had met Clement Greenberg when he was living in New York during
the war. He and Greenberg agreed on the connection between late surrealism
and early American abstract expressionism – one living link had been André
Masson when he had worked in Connecticut; Greenberg, who hated surrealism,
makes an exception for Masson. He notes that Masson got rid of ‘the monstrous,
the epically brutal, and the blasphemous’.23 Now, ‘Self-control, elimination, and
simplification would seem to be the solution for Masson’.24 The single risk is
that it might lead to ‘impoverishment, not simplification’.25 Masson has been
harnessed in Greenberg’s historical teleology. Masson’s evolution that led to
simplification can thus enlist him in the programme of modernism as defined
in 1960 in the groundbreaking definitions of ‘Modernist Painting’, an essay that
begins with a parallel between painting and philosophy:
Modernism includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost
the whole of what is truly alive in our culture. It happens, however, to be very
much of a historical novelty. Western civilization is not the first civilization to
turn around and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has gone
furthest in doing so. I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the
exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant.
Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of
Kant as the first real Modernist.26

It is in this context that Rahma Khazam’s essay ‘Clement Greenberg’s

Modernism: Historicizable or Ahistorical?’ introduces an important shift in
the current view, as it problematizes the alleged ahistoricism constitutive of
artistic modernism so often associated with Greenberg’s forceful theorization.
If Khazam argues for the failure of Greenberg’s attempt to purify modernism
from history by defining it in terms of formal autonomy, she also historicizes
Greenberg’s dualist model of historical/ahistorical. As she explains, such a
dualism can take its full meaning only when it is located in a comparative
context in which it moves along older and later theories. This is how it manages
to bring into play the category of the contemporary whose perspective
presents modernism not as a break but rather as an encompassing of an
ethos of separation, division and, ultimately, sequentiality. The lesson of this
14 Historical Modernisms

analysis is that a re-reading of modernism in its context of both its production

and its reception, such as proposed by Historical Modernisms, will involve
a historicizing of the critical framework in which it was received. Such a
historicization entails a greater scepticism towards the easy topos of evolution.
In the same manner, Beckett, as we saw, refused a historical narrative that
would present modernism as an inevitable evolution in the art of painting; for
him, there is no teleology moving from representation to abstraction because
there is no progress in the arts and literature, a position shared by Walter Benjamin
and also Tristan Tzara when he rejected Breton’s historical optimism. Adorno
was notoriously hesitant on this issue, moving from a teleological analysis of
music in which Schönberg was progressive and Stravinsky regressive, to the later
theses of Aesthetic Theory in which he comes very close to the position of his old
friend and mentor Benjamin. How can progress and evolution accommodate
repetition? In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu quotes a remark by Marcel Duchamp,
who was sceptical about the second school of abstract art in New York or
Paris, about the return of the same in art. Duchamp understood the evolution
as a consequence of the culture industry in quest of the new at any cost; the
capitalistic ‘market for symbolic goods’ always wants to have the illusion of the
new. Duchamp, who knew Beckett through his chess-playing, was opposed to
the spirit of the 1950s that requested ‘purity’ of the medium in art, which led him
to reject pure abstraction as promoted by Greenberg. Bourdieu writes, quoting
Marcel Duchamp:
The characteristic of the century that is ending is to be like a double-barrelled
gun: Kandinsky and Kupka invented abstraction. Then abstraction died. One
wouldn’t talk about it any more. It came back thirty-five years later with the
American abstract expressionists. You could say that Cubism reappeared in an
impoverished form with the postwar Paris school. Dada has similarly reappeared.
Second shot, second wind. It is a phenomenon particular to this century.27

There would be no difference between the rapid waves of fashion and the swift
sequence of -isms. Rejecting such a temporal awareness, Beckett opts for an
ethical position that appears even more radical than Duchamp’s famed humour.
Beckett thus wishes to find a new lever with an ethical refusal of the heroic
struggle with the object or reality. For Beckett, who cannot be excluded from the
modernist camp, an ethics of impoverishment should take precedence over an
aesthetics of abstraction as a new and ‘modernist’ sublime.
So far, our examples have shown the impossibility of reducing modernism
to a concept like abstraction or anti-Romanticism. It seems difficult to reduce
modernism to formal issues like the reinvention of language or the belief in the
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 15

autonomy of art. Or if we walk down this slippery slope, we will soon be stuck in
a corner, and will then allow for the production of an ‘other’ of modernism, an
anti-modernism defined by a list of the opposite characteristics. The programme
of this collection would consist in examining modernism historically, but
without trying to ‘overcome’ or ‘surpass’ it with a new term. This logic has been
analysed and attacked with great gusto by Andrew McNamara in Surpassing
Modernity.28
McNamara focuses on current discussions in the art world and notices ironically
that all the new movements attempt to sell themselves by inventing a new term
that will then surpass – surpass what? not the precedent labels, only modernism.
He lists the postmodern, the anti-aesthetic, the post-postmodern, contemporary,
contemporaneity, hypermodern, non-modern, digi-modernism, auto-modernism,
relational aesthetics, altermodern, metamodernisme, remodernism, militant
modernism, liquid modernity, multiple modernities, nachmoderne, the off-
modern, polymodern.29 He even provides a series of criteria that are tabulated to
show that each time modernism is taken as a straw man that the ‘new’ movement
will supplant or overcome.
Modernism Contemporary (or ‘Contemporaneity’)
Purity and rationalization Paradox and ambiguity
Demarcation/binaries Hybridity
Simplification/top down hierarchies Complexity
Eurocentrism, primitivism. Non-Western, transcultural
Elitist Democratic
Universal Cultural relativism
Aesthetic Anti-aesthetic
Synthesis, resolution. Contradiction, antinomy30

Noting wryly that none of these labels has been able to live very long, with the
relative exception of the ‘post-modern’, although the term has now lost most of
its purchase, McNamara insists that this game of one-upmanship should stop.
Moreover, in his examples that come from recent controversies in the visual arts,
he observes a recurrent paradox: many third world artists or emergent artists
keep denouncing the evil nature of the old modernism while resorting to the
same criteria, like praising the autonomy of art against corrupted regimes that
want to enlist artists in false praise for local regimes.
In another interesting move, McNamara focuses on Walter Benjamin who
was notoriously ambivalent about the new, as suggested earlier. Following the
intuitions of the Hungarian-Australian philosopher György Márkus, McNamara
highlights a creative vacillation in Benjamin.31 On the one hand, Benjamin attacks
16 Historical Modernisms

all the theories of progress, but on the other hand he seems to trust technology,
at least for media like photography and film, with the power to dispel Romantic
and lyrical illusions associated with the ‘aura’. As McNamara summarizes the
issue, this would come from the fact that Benjamin has well perceived the ‘deep
ambiguities of cultural modernity’ which derives from the ‘confluence of the
most archaic and the most modern, of the unconscious and the conscious’, thus
combining regressive aspects with utopian or transcending gestures.32
Benjamin was aware of the difficulties involved in any definition of time;
of delineating its philosophical, cosmological, technical or historical nature
or indeed its very existence, also questioned by Aristotle in his Physics where
he asks: does time ‘belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things
that do not exist? Then secondly, what is its nature?’33 Aristotle’s treatment of
these questions is more open-ended than it has generally been recognized, but
the formal division he made of time into different ‘nows’, albeit not necessarily
successive, has been interpreted as a foundational moment in spatializing and
homogenizing time in Western culture culminating in the establishment of a
uniform and global time measure in the nineteenth century.34
However, modernity’s ideological conflation of chronological sequence with
causality and historical progress has been most forcefully contested by Benjamin,
alongside a long line of modernists critical of modern times, who pinpointed the
political implications of a teleological notion of history that legitimates modernity
as the most advanced epoch in relation to the past. Such a notion, he warns,
must be rejected because it rests on the succession of ‘homogeneous, empty
time’, creating a phantasmagoria of modernity as by definition progressive.35
The famous commentary in his IX Thesis on a philosophy of history on Paul
Klee’s 1920 picture ‘Angelus Novus’ he held in his possession as depicting the
‘Angel of History’ offers a dialectical image of a historical consciousness that
looks to rescue the past and the passing present from the catastrophic storm of
what is generally called Progress.36 Moreover, Benjamin’s idea that there is a past
new to every present, or that any past which is not recognized by the present
threatens to disappear, resonates with Ezra Pound’s extreme presentism when
he writes in 1938: ‘We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may
be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here
and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from
us and from our time.’37
Sharing more than a common rejection of linear temporality with modernist
artists, Benjamin’s seminal contribution to a philosophy of history through his
imaginative topography of Parisian modernity modelled on Baudelaire’s work
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 17

does not only continue to inspire critical readings of modernist history, as is

evinced by the references to his thought in nearly all essays of the present volume,
but also, and importantly, it reads like a constructivist modernist work in its
use of montage of citations, constellations of dialectical images and micrological
approach. ‘To write history thus means to cite history’, he writes, aspiring to
render a heightened ‘graphicness’ to the Marxist understanding of history, by
carrying over
the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale
constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed,
to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the
total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp
the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. -Refuse of
History-38

However ambivalent he was of the modern cult of novelty as ‘the return of the
eversame’, Benjamin nevertheless sought to define the truly new and progressive
as is revealed by art. We read:
In every true work of art there is a place where, for one who removes there, it
blows cool like the wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows that art, which
has often been considered refractory to every relation with progress, can provide
its true definition. Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but
in its interferences – where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with
the sobriety of dawn.39

Inversely, however, it is modernism’s pursuit of novelty, its inwardness, formal

reflexivity and abstraction that has provoked its dominant perception as being
a-historical. In contrast with the factually rich and concretely figurative realist
genre, which is concomitant with the prevailing nineteenth-century positivist
spirit of historicism, modernism and the avant-garde broke away from mimetic
standards typically associated with historical referentiality. This criticism,
expressed most influentially by Georg Lukács, spurred a long-standing debate
on the political progressiveness of modernism. The ‘negation of history’ appears
to be part of the human ontology of modernist literature and, as he explains, it
manifests itself in two forms:
First, the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own experience. There
is not for him […] any pre-existent reality beyond his own self, acting upon
him or being acted upon by him. Secondly, the hero himself is without personal
history. He is ‘thrown-into-the-world’: meaninglessly, unfathomably. He does not
develop through contact with the world; he neither forms nor is formed by it.40
18 Historical Modernisms

On a closer reading, Lukács implicitly admits modernism’s attachment to its

historical actuality when he proposes that this new abstract, disintegrated and
solitary subjectivity, haunting modernist works, may be ‘an attempt to escape
from the dreariness of life under capitalism’. However, he insists that modernism
separated ‘time from the outer world of objective reality’.41 Lukács’s expressed
supposition of the pre-existence of an objective and representable reality that
modernist art fails to reflect rests on the division between fact and fiction,
between history and literature and is the product of the disciplinization of history
as a science in the nineteenth century, defined in opposition to the putatively
purely fictitious nature of literature. The universal law of historiography became
the revelation of the particulars, the reconstruction of ‘objective’ facts and the
historical context of the past ‘as it really was’ [wie es eigentlich gewesen ist] in the
Rankean historicist vocabulary. Nevertheless, historically speaking, the terms
of this antithesis were not always the same. In Aristotle’s famous distinction
between poet and historian, found in his Poetics, literature’s privileged access
to universals, ensuing from its dealing with probability, is valued more than the
singularities of what has been. Compare the following passage:
The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and
the other verse – you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would
still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the
thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry
is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its
statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are
singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of
man will probably or necessarily say or do – which is the aim of poetry, though
it affixes proper names to the characters.42

Interestingly, for Aristotle, the difference between the two types of discourse
is not one of form and, significantly, neither is it one of truth value. Facts
are not considered more truthful than poetic construction; on the contrary,
poetry is argued to have more cognitive and epistemological weight (it is ‘more
philosophic’). Artistic mimesis is thus problematized since its object does not
axiomatically coincide with empirical, historical facts as realist aesthetics would
suggest. Following from this and contrary to what is commonly thought, neither
can modernism be considered as generically anti-mimetic.
However, the formal distinctiveness between history and literature set by
scientific historicism has also been questioned in twentieth-century thinking, for
example, in Paul Ricoeur’s study Time and Narrative (1983) whose ‘touchstone’
is the ‘classical problem of the relation of narrative, be it historical or fictional,
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 19

to reality’, posing the thorny question of the referentiality of historical narrative

to events that ‘really’ happened in the past.43 Importantly, Ricoeur also draws
attention to the common linguistic basis of both history and literature when he
writes that:
The relation between fiction and history is assuredly more complex than we
will ever be able to put into words. And, of course, we have to combat the
prejudice that the historian’s language can be made entirely transparent, to the
point of allowing the things themselves to speak; as if it sufficed to eliminate
the ornaments of prose to be done with the figures of poetry.44

The problematization of the objective status of historical fact and a stress on

the linguistic basis of historical narrative lie at the heart of Hayden White’s
radical critique of modern historiographical assumptions, emphasizing the
common ground between literature and history. His critique of the truthfulness
or objectivity of realism’s factuality is based on his laying bare the mechanism by
which a fact really becomes ‘historical’ along a series of disciplinary conventions.
He writes:
The factuality of the events themselves would have to be treated as having been
based on evidence of a kind not to be admitted in historical (or, more precisely,
historiological) discourse. […] On this account, a historical fact would differ
from other kinds of fact by virtue of the rules prevailing in historical discourses
for determining when a given event could be described as the kind of event
properly characterized as ‘historical’.45

White’s underlining of our always already linguistically mediated access to the

historical past and the constructed nature of historical narration of ‘facts’ along
literary modes and figures of speech evokes Roland Barthes’s earlier pinpointing
of the paradox that ‘the fact never has any but a linguistic existence’, and ‘yet
everything happens as if this linguistic existence were merely the pure and simple
“copy” of another existence, situated in an extra-structural field, the “real” ’.46
Indeed, any contemporary investigation of narrative and history, of history
as narrative, is directly indebted to White’s quintessentially modernist theory of
history. His foregrounding of the linguistic foundation of historiography and its
narrative conventions have had a major effect on both recent historical thinking
and literary criticism which took a historical turn at the end of the twentieth
century in reverse analogy to the earlier linguistic turn of historical science
that White also steered. More particularly, White’s work brings into relief the
process and strategies of encoding historical experience in narrative plots, thus
also pushing the boundaries of historiography itself. This volume is dedicated
20 Historical Modernisms

to his memory as a minor tribute not only for his path-breaking contribution to
contemporary historical thought but also because the book would have hosted
an essay by him had its completion not been prevented by his unfortunate death
in 2018. The essay he had promised to contribute was provisionally entitled
‘History as Exception’, and was intended, provocatively as ever, to explore the
reasons why post-structuralist thinkers as a rule did not attempt to deconstruct
historiography, apart from attacking it as ‘grand narrative’, after Jean-François
Lyotard, or as a mere ideology of progression. He was interested in discussing how
‘history’ was used as a counterpoint to ‘constructionist pseudo-foundationalism’
and felt that it needed to be further radicalized. His interview – sadly, probably
the last one to be published while he was still alive – is included in the volume
in lieu of that undelivered chapter. However, albeit standing as substitute to
his undelivered chapter, this interview is highly pertinent to the theme of the
volume as it summarizes some important ways in which White conceives the
complex and productive relation of modern and contemporary literature with
history writing.
Not just the literariness of historiography but, mutually, the power of literature
as historical world-making, as an act of poesis that has the power to create the
past in any present, is also pinpointed by Wilhelm Dilthey in his 1887 essay,
‘The Imagination of the Poet: Elements of a Poetics’.47 Dilthey’s claim that ‘our
philosophical conception of history was developed from literary history’ is prescient
of White’s groundbreaking work. Similarly, in his book The Names of History,
Jacques Rancière identifies a ‘poetics of knowledge’, a literary epistemology as well
as methodology at the heart of particular historical schools. However, what he calls
‘regimes of art’, inversely, bring out art’s and art criticism’s own historicity since
such regimes define the specific ways in which a given historical epoch conceives
of the nature and logic of artistic representation or the ‘poetic systems’; in other
words, they evoke the modalities of the relationship between ‘thought, language
and world’, which determine the understanding of art in the modern world.48
In view of the acknowledged porosity between art and history, Historical
Modernisms contests modernism’s alleged ahistoricism and joins in recent
and growing research which, spurred by New Historicist critical trends
appearing in the late twentieth century, is devoted to exploring the complex
relation of modernism and the avant-garde with history, historiography and
conceptualizations of time.49 The volume aims to shed new light on aspects of
the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes cutting
across Anglophone and European traditions, also paying heed to the imperialist
overtones of dominant definitions of time and the modern. Drawing on empirical
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 21

cases of both literary and artistic modernism, it poses fundamental theoretical

questions on the subject and symptoms of history, revealing the multifaceted
relationship of modernist and avant-garde movements with historical thinking
and history making.
More specifically, the essays in the volume reassess modernism’s complex
modes of historicity across different genres of art and publications, from
autobiography, the visual arts and literature to little magazines and editions,
and address the radical contribution of literary and artistic avant-gardes on new
tropes of temporality and historiography. At the same time, they offer selective
close-ups on some of their own histories transnationally, from the Anglophone
and French paradigms to the less explored traditions of Central Europe and the
Balkans, connecting the historical trajectories of modernist and avant-garde
movements with both micropolitics and geopolitics. By investigating how
modernist and avant-garde artworks (re)define and practice time, historical
conjuncture and historiography itself, the book attempts to complicate and
revise modernism’s own history, its production and reception in response to the
new material and conceptual conditions of modernity.
The intensely fluid and antinomical nature of modernity is pinpointed by
Woolf in her 1927 essay, tellingly entitled ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, where
she wonders about the direction of contemporary writing and links it with the
historical circumstances of the modern epoch which she perceives as a break
from the past. The modern age, she contends, is ‘an age clearly when we are
not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving
ourselves’. ‘The modern mind’, she goes on,
is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the earth is
3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of
the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet
repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science
and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union have
broken.50

Although few modernists chose to allude directly to the dense historic facts of the
period, most adumbrated their effects by undertaking a critical historiography
of the present in its everyday, microhistorical, anthropological dimension,
associated with the Annales School of historiography, through the simultaneous
mapping out of the struggles of modern subjectivity and social life. The historical
subjects of modernism became ultimately dissolved in the large spaces of urban
modernity and of the unconscious, newly discovered by the modern science of
22 Historical Modernisms

psychoanalysis that pioneered the reconstructing of individual psychic histories.

Modernists’ quest for alternative models of historical movement ranged from the
nostalgic flight to an idealized past, common origins and universal time patterns
to the futurity of catastrophe or utopian dreams of a new, liberated world, often
sprinkled with allusions to primordial, mythical and ritual material.
In his ‘Foreword’ to the collection, Terry Eagleton succinctly reviews the
vicissitudes of the relationship of modernism with history in the context of
modern times. He emphasizes the double-edgedness of this relationship which
is conceived as ‘crisis’, alternating between disenchantment and emancipation,
redemption and doom, the secular and the mythical, progress and decline,
and embedded in the paradox of the recurrent ‘new’ caught in a movement of
transience forming discontinuous or cyclical patterns. Eagleton stresses that,
against progressive linearity associated with realism, modernism privileges
the synchronic, the simultaneous, the multidimensional, while it marks a
discordance between collective and individual life, and exhibits an acute sense
of a secularized present apparently adopting an attitude of ‘negation, repression
and imaginary transcendence’ toward history, proclaiming to turn inwards
instead.51
A rejection of linear development was one of the reasons why autobiography,
similarly with the historical novel, was generally unpopular with modernists,
as Laura Marcus notes in her contribution, entitled ‘“The last witnesses”’:
Autobiography and History in the 1930s’. Marcus goes on to assert the genre’s
link with both history and modernism not only by arguing that autobiography
as a form of history writing was displaced in other literary genres, such as the
Bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman, journals, diaries and autobiographical
fiction, but also by discussing the attempt at the genre taken by major modernist
writers. In their different ways and despite their categorical inwardness,
modernist autobiographical works present intricate connections with the
turbulent historical era of their production in tandem with an exilic sense of
modern subjectivity. Thus they produce new configurations of the narrative
and conceptual entwinement between the inner self and the outer world, the
dual temporalities of suspension and flow, the psychological and the historical
approach which is endemic to the genre. Refracting the historical atmosphere
of the 1930s, these works problematize the assumption of causal sequence
informing traditional autobiographical narrative by introducing discontinuity
and loss into the supposed continuum of history and of bios, while they also
reflect on the state of autobiographical ‘witnessing’ and remembrance, as both
foundational motives and tropes of historical writing.
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 23

The problem of joining internal consciousness with outside world endemic

to the autobiographical genre is paramount in modernist and avant-garde
experiments with temporality against progressive clock-time. These are
routinely connected with new philosophies of time, such as those condensed
in Henri Bergson’s concepts of durée réelle and élan vital,52 as well as the trend
of presentism and the consciousness of the ‘now’ which punctuates historical,
temporal flow in modernism which etymologically derives from the Latin
‘modus’. The evocation of the notion of the ‘moment’ could thus be seen as a
symptom of the anachronistic movement of art whose ‘moments’ become the
vantage point of the intelligible. However, in the essay, entitled ‘Rethinking
the Modernist Moment: Potentiality, Crisis and Kairos’, Vassiliki Kolocotroni
presents this time determinator not merely as interruption of linear chronological
sequence or a synecdoche of the present but rather as a critical and potentially
transformative temporal mode analogous to other time markers, as, for example,
the ‘event’, reactivated by Alain Badiou, and ‘kairos’, drawing on Erwin Panofsky.
These ‘moments’ are then read as charged points of subjective crisis pregnant
with opportunity at the same time as they entail the possibility of failure, thus
acquiring a historical momentum.
Beyond the purely temporal axis emphasizing significant moments as history
making or unmaking, the history of modernism and the avant-gardes may be said
to coincide with a history of the new as ‘Medium-new’, as is suggested by the title
of Tyrus Miller’s contribution to the volume. Setting the discussion of the poetic
medium in the context of the separation of space and time, image and language,
painting and literature that runs through artistic discourse in modernity in an
affirmative or negative mode, modernist experimental emphasis on medium,
its re-invention and assemblage is viewed as an outcome of history than a mere
formalist concern. Being more than just technique, it ‘mediates’ an artist’s
creative intention and the tradition between the artist and his audience, that is,
historically inherited conventions of aesthetic communication. In modernism,
and especially its avant-garde branches, the delegitimation of tradition is actually
inseparable from the demand for new medium-categories as the object of art,
thus marking the modernist sense of crisis as medium reflexivity. T. S. Eliot’s
‘historical sense’ aptly expresses this paradoxical interdependence of tradition
and the new, transposing the historical past to the realm of the aesthetic, when
he claims that the poet writes not only ‘with his own generation in his bones, but
with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it
the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order’.53 What is stressed in defence of the historicity
24 Historical Modernisms

of modernism is how the medium of modernist poetry, even when it seemingly

withdraws from history, is nevertheless a transfiguration of the historically
determined language of tradition or the everyday.
Furthermore, modern literature’s contested connection with the real in view
of its claim for artistic autonomy is related to its break of causality; it undoes
the intelligible link between successive moments, thus rendering the category
of the plausible inoperative. However, as Jacques Rancière has argued in tacit
response to modernism’s claim to historical autonomy, art’s plots have always
been autonomous since they have always had a time and space proper to them.54
The question is if the rupture of causality renders modernism ahistorical. The
dialectical character of modernist novel, for example, lies rather in its dealing
with the antithesis between ‘the shower of atoms’ falling on an ordinary
human mind on an ordinary day, as Virginia Woolf has described ‘life’, with
some arranged plot.55 Nevertheless, modernism’s historicity or lack thereof is
determined by the paradox of antagonistic trends, especially in activist avant-
garde, of seeking to dissolve the literary and artistic practice into life, thus
merging with history on the one hand, and on the other seeking autonomy
from the sphere of history through purity of form as was suggested by Clement
Greenberg, as noted earlier.
Apart from addressing questions of time and history in modernism, the
volume attempts to enrich its recorded history as well as foreground its unique
historiographical force. Challenging the conception that history is necessarily
about the past even if the latter is a construct of the present, Max Saunders’s
contribution, entitled ‘“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over”: Modernism,
History, and the Future’, pays heed to the publishing landscape of the interwar
period, and, importantly, to what is often neglected: modernism’s concern
with the future. Contributing to cultural history as well as to the examination
of the historical awareness of the modernist period, Saunders focuses on the
‘futurological experiment’ of the multi-volume series ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’
launched by C. K. Ogden and published by Kegan Paul throughout the 1920s.
Each volume presented the current state of a topic, and then predicted its future
practicing the oxymoron of ‘future history’. Saunders also considers a parallel
series by Ogden on the ‘History of Civilization’ and argues for the significance
of the series for modernist imaginings of the future, including the future of
historiography itself, read in the context of innovative contemporary theories
that predicted its dissolving into economics and psychology. These forward-
looking, popular series mark the epoch’s emphasis on history and the future
seeking new paradigms to serve both.
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 25

Precisely because ‘history is not a single genre but can be written in many
genres’,56 it can be read in different forms of modernist art. The historiographical
imagination of the avant-garde, turning away from conventional temporal
boundaries and pointing to new historiographical directions, is taken up in
the essay, ‘Time Assemblage: History in the European avant-gardes. In this
chapter Sascha Bru provides an overview of the variety of modes of figuring
(past) time in the visual field of the artistic avant-gardes, looking closely on
selected works of emblematic modernist artists. Bru examines how the regime
of historicity assigned to the avant-garde, against the temporalities of classic
historicism and beyond futurism (Renato Poggioli) and presentism (François
Hartog), appears to be the ‘future anterior’ that describes both the anticipatory
quality of the avant-garde and the intrusion of the past in the present as a
history of tomorrow. More than this, he argues, by exploiting the essentially
anachronic function of all art, the avant-garde movements encompassed
interchronicity and polytemporality (according to Bruno Latour), acceding
ontological primacy to no particular temporal category in the end.57 Similarly
to the claim made by Saunders, Bru views avant-garde historiographical
experiments as both running parallel and contributing to the development of
new theories of history in the twentieth century and beyond. This attests to
art’s potentiality as not purely material of historical study but as an ‘organon’
of history.58
The volume is also dedicated in historicizing avant-garde movements and
works by placing them in their proper historical context. As Walter Benjamin
urges in his 1931 essay ‘Literary History and the Study of Literature’, in any
literary (or art) history we need to include the history of a work’s entire life and
effects, its reception by its contemporaries, its translations, its fame, alongside
that of its composition.59 Alexandra Bickley Trott’s chapter, entitled ‘Beer in
Bohemian Paris: A Symbol of the Third Republic’, reflects on the histories of
modern art movements, pushing them earlier into the nineteenth century,
according to a current critical trend in modernist studies.60 The chapter reveals
the iconographic importance of beer for the bohemian Hydropathes and the
Bon Bock club of fin de siècle Paris, as expressive of a hidden socio-political
agenda. The Hydropathes are linked with the development of laïcité, and the
emergent secularism in liberal republican France, while the Bon Bock group’s
apparent obsession with beer is connected to a nationalist history in the wake
of the Franco-Prussian war. The discussion draws on original research into the
bohemianism of fin de siècle Paris and historicizes its cultural production by
viewing less studied groups as these in the light of the period’s political tensions.
26 Historical Modernisms

Surrealism is also pinned in its historical everydayness in Rachel Silveri’s

archival study presented in the essay ‘From the Marvellous to the Managerial:
Life at the Surrealist Research Bureau’, which reassesses the movement’s mode
of production at its early stages. The practices of the Surrealist Research Bureau
are historicized in relation to a broader set of social discourses, including the
rationalization of the office space, the rise of bureaucracy and the prevalence
of management practices in interwar France. Silveri argues that despite the
Surrealist demand for revolutionary action and liberated desire, the artists
themselves were mired in a network of power relationships typical of enterprise
structures. The essay, thus, revises and enriches the history of one of the most
prominent avant-garde movements, revealing its genetic oppositions.
Also focused on obscure aspects of surrealism producing new and expanded
histories of modernism and the avant-garde through archival research of
geographically or historically peripheral versions of the movement is Sanja
Bahun’s essay, ‘History and Active Thought: The Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s
Transforming Praxis’. This chapter delves into the lesser known Belgrade
Surrealist Circle placing it in the historical context of monarchical Yugoslavia,
drawing on literary, philosophical and visual material. Such historicizing attempts
indeed render a fuller view of the political affiliations, implications and charge
of the movements examined. Following surrealism’s political tendentiousness
internationally, but also due to its location at the liminal intersection of two
demising empires (Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman), and between the demands
of an imported notion of nation-state and the indigenous styles of political
action, The Belgrade Surrealist Circle produced politically engaged theories.
They focused on the aesthetic modes and strategies of representation suitable
for continual rebellion and self-critique against Western individualism and
passivity leading to reification, thus proposing an historical intervention, a
revolutionary approach to matter, history and art-making, through the category
of the irrational stemming from the unconscious.
An insistence on art as a ‘praxis’, transforming material as well as subjective
history for the future, is a constant feature of modernist and avant-garde poetics
that may in turn account for its continuing actuality. However, this does not
necessarily accord with Paul de Man’s notion, expressed in his essay, ‘Literary
History and Literary Modernity’,61 that modernity is part of the historical process
found in every epoch and every act of literature, which in fact ontologizes the
concept of modernity and thus dehistoricizes it. Rather, historicizing modernism
is meant to pay heed to the historically specific mode of thinking and/in art-
making ushered by that historical moment associated with ‘modernism’ in all its
capaciousness and its political, affective and aesthetic effects.
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 27

All the essays in the volume testify to the resilience of modernism, a term that
has been much used and abused and that still fulfils a function even without a
coherent definition. Our collection will have reached its aim if it can persuade
that one point must be maintained: modernism is historical, but this history is
not stable or written in stone, it is still in the making, which entails that we have
to keep historicizing it.

Notes

1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 545.
2 See Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the
World (New York: Public Affairs), 2017.
3 ‘A Litter to James Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination
of Work in Progress, ed. Samuel Beckett and others (London: Faber, 1972), 193.
4 This play is summarized by Stanislaus Joyce in My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s
Early Years (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003), 115. As Stanislaus mentions,
there had been a few cases of bubonic plague in Glasgow in 1900. It was stopped
relatively fast. It spread from China in 1882, and then reached India, Madagascar,
Egypt, Paraguay, Portugal, South Africa, Scotland, Russia, Australia, until it ended
in Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1912.
5 See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982),
78–80.
6 Ibid., 398.
7 Letter of 21 April 1969, in Samuel Beckett, Letters Vol. IV: 1966–1989 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 158.
8 James Joyce, Exiles, in Poems and Exiles, edited with an Introduction by C.C. Mays
(London: Penguin, 1992), 351.
9 Ibid., 158.
10 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across
Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
11 See Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998).
12 Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, rev. edition (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2017), 193.
13 Chris Greenhalgh, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (New York: Riverhead books,
2002), 16–17.
14 Lisa Chaney, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (New York: Viking), 92.
15 See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s dismantling the master narrative of
European history, according to which ‘ “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical
28 Historical Modernisms

subject of all history, including the ones we call Indian, Chinese, Kenyan, and so
on’. In ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks of Indian Pasts?
Representations, no. 37 (Winter, 1992): 1.
16 Collected in Eugène Jolas, Critical Writings, 1924–1951, edited and with an
introduction by Klaus H. Kiefer and Rainer Rumold (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2009). Hence abbreviated as CW followed by page number.
17 See Tom Bishop, Le Passeur d’Océan: carnets d’un ami américain (Paris: Payot, 1989).
18 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean–Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory
of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
19 Samuel Beckett, Letters Vol. II: 1941–1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 161.
20 Eugène Jolas, ‘From Jabberwocky to “Lettrism”’, Transition Forty-Eight, no 1, ed.
Georges Duthuit (January 1948) : 104–20.
21 Georges Duthuit, ‘Matisse and Byzantine Space’, Transition Forty–Nine, no. 5
(1949): 20.
22 Ibid., 29.
23 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Joan Miró and André Masson’
(1947), in Collected Essays and Criticism, 1939–1944, Vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 208.
24 Ibid., 209.
25 Ibid.
26 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, Modernism with a
Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 85.
27 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans.
Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 160.
28 Andrew McNamara, Surpassing Modernity: Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).
29 Ibid., 2.
30 Ibid., 9.
31 Benjamin’s structural oscillation has also been noted by other scholars, such as John
McCole, in Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1993).
32 Ibid., 35.
33 Aristotle, Physics, Vol. 1: Books 1–4, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1989), Book 4
§10 217b29-218a3.
34 Since the invention of pendulum clock in the seventeenth century and the
establishment of World Standard Time in 1884, time has become connected with
modern imperialism and globalization. See, for example, Stephen Kern, The Culture
of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983),
 Historical Modernisms: Introduction 29

1 and 314. On the modern history of measuring time in relation to literature,

see Randall Stevenson, Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-
Century Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
35 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), in Selected Writing, Vol. 4:
1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 394–5.
36 Ibid., 392.
37 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 60.
38 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolute NII,3 and N2,6. And further in Nl1,2.,
he claimed: ‘To write history means giving dates their physiognomy’. On time,
progress and historical method, see also N9a,7.
39 Ibid., N9a,7.
40 George Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in The Meaning of Contemporary
Realism, trans. John & Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 20–1.
41 Ibid., 29, 39.
42 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Baywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle; The
Revised Oxford Translation Vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 9.1451b 1–10.
43 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin and David
Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 100.
44 Ibid., 154.
45 Hayden White, ‘The Historical Event’, Differences; A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 19, no 2 (2008): 13.
46 Roland Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’ (1963), in The Rustle of Language, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), 138.
47 Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings Vol. 5: Poetry and Experience, ed. R. Makkreel
and F. Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 36.
48 See Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans.
Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Mute
Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, trans. James Swenson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011).
49 Such questions were also addressed and tested during the two-day conference,
entitled ‘Historical Modernisms’ which took place at the Senate House, University
of London, on 13 December 2016 and was organized by the Institute of English
Studies at the School of Advanced Study in the framework of the Institute’s
‘Comparative Modernisms’ Seminar convened by Angeliki Spiropoulou.
50 ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol. 4, ed. Andrew
McNeille (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), 429. This essay was first published in
New York Herald Tribune in 1927 and later reprinted under the title ‘The Narrow
Bridge of Art’ in the posthumous collections of Woolf ’s essays, Granite and
Rainbow and the Collected Essays, both edited by Leonard Woolf.
30 Historical Modernisms

51 In his book The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Stephen Kern argues that ‘a
series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes
of thinking about and experiencing time and space’, in the fin de siècle when the
sense of the present was ‘distinctively new, thickened temporally with retentions
and protentions of past and future and, most important, expanded spatially to
create the vast, shared experience of simultaneity’, also related to the introduction
of World Standard Time in 1884 and a combination of technological innovations –
the telephone, wireless telegraph, X-ray, cinema, and the bicycle, automobile and
airplane – and cultural ones, in particular the ‘affirmation of private time’ with its
radical interiority of experience (1, 314).
52 See Henri Bergson’s 1907 book, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Henry
Holt and Company, 1911). Earlier in his 1889 doctoral thesis, Time and Free Will:
An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: Routledge, 2003),
Bergson made a distinction between durée réelle (duration) and the mechanical,
spatialized measuring of time. See also Mary Ann Gillies, Bergson and British
Modernism (Montréal Que: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).
53 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays 1917–1932
(London: Faber & Faber, 1980), 14.
54 Rancière, Mute Speech, 28.
55 See Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol. 4, 160.
56 See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century’,
Representations 91, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 26–8.
57 See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Gerald Fitzgerald
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1968);
François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps
(Paris: Seuil, 2003); and Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai
d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).
58 Walter Benjamin, ‘Literary History and the Study of Literature’ (1931), in Selected
Writings Vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland and Garry Smith
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 464.
59 Ibid.
60 See, for example, Late Victorian into Modern, ed. Laura Marcus, Michèle
Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016), which addresses the continuities between Victorian and modern against
their mutual exclusion in standard accounts of literary history.
61 Paul de Man, ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, in Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1989).
 Part I

Historicizing modernism
32
 1

‘The Last Witnesses’: Autobiography and

history in the 1930s
Laura Marcus

Explorations and definitions of modernist historiography, which rest so

substantially on critiques of the linear (or teleological) and historicist (or
relativist) models associated strongly with nineteenth-century historians (and
criticized by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and by many others after him),
have not been brought to bear to any great extent on accounts of autobiography
in the modernist period, though autobiography as a genre could certainly be
understood as a mode of history-writing or, at least, as occupying the border
territory between history and literature.
Autobiography is by definition concerned with the relationship between
the past and the present. The tendency of the genre to construct a linear and
continuous life-narrative (though there are of course many exceptions to this)
was one reason for modernist writers to stand apart from the form. Few of the
most prominent modernist writers produced self-declared autobiographies,
and this, accompanied by a focus on modernist ‘impersonality’, meant that for
many decades modernism was perceived as a movement and a period either
hostile or indifferent to autobiographical representation. (There is a parallel
in the perceived opposition of modernists to history and the historical novel,
though, as Seamus O’Malley has shown with particular reference to Conrad,
Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca West, this is also a misconception.1) It now seems
clear that autobiography lay at the heart of much modernist literary production,
though most often in displaced forms: the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman,
autobiographical fiction and the fragmentary forms of journal and diary.
The writers I discuss in this chapter, which include Virginia Woolf, Stefan
Zweig and, in its second part, Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) and Walter Benjamin,
did, however, produce explicitly autobiographical texts, even if they distanced
34 Historical Modernisms

this work, as did Benjamin, from autobiography per se. Born into the nineteenth
century or at the turn of the century, they subsequently experienced the rapidly
changing conditions of early-twentieth-century modernity. The historical and
political contexts of the late 1930s, with the increasing threat and then declaration
of war, produced a sense, implicit or explicit, of the profound uncertainties of
the present and of the shape of the future. The autobiographical writings of
Benjamin and Zweig raise particular questions about historical fragmentations,
brought about by the condition of exile, but there is a more general theme of
sharp discontinuity that runs throughout this period.2
Benjamin is central here, in that his engagements with the philosophy of
history are some of the most radical in the twentieth century, and are predicated
on concepts of rupture, a deep antithesis towards conventional models of
‘progress’, an understanding of, in Christian Emden’s phrase, ‘the dynamic of
historical time strata in the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ (a conception
shared by Karl Mannheim in his ‘Historismus’ essay3) and a method which
involved constellations of juxtaposed images.4 ‘Articulating the past historically,’
Benjamin famously wrote in ‘On the Concept of History’, ‘does not mean
recognizing it “the way it was”. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes
up in a moment of danger.’5 ‘Now-time’ (Jetztzeit) is not mere ‘presentism’ but
‘a past … blasted out the continuum of history’.6 Zweig also stresses the decisive
moments (Sternstunden) of history – his autobiography, The World of Yesterday,
represents the end of the pre–First World War era (and the empire) and the
collapse of European culture in the face of fascism7 – but at the same time he
was deeply concerned with the time-dimensions of history and life-writing in a
more philosophical sense. Hence the lecture which he wrote at the close of the
1930s in which he talked of history as a literary artist (Dichterin).8 The historical
sketches he wrote under the category of Sternstunden revolve around charged
moments (of varying duration) within the individual and/or the collective life
and the relationship between inner experience and outer event.
Writing in 1928 of Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater appeared in 1821, Virginia Woolf argued that both autobiography
‘as the eighteenth century knew it’ and biography9 had been transformed by a
more penetrating focus on the interior life of the individual. Yet, she asserts:
external events also have their importance. To tell the whole story of a life the
autobiographer must devise some means by which the two levels of existence
can be recorded – the rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of
single and solemn moments of concentrated emotion. It is the fascination of De
Quincey’s pages that the two levels are beautifully, if unequally, combined. For
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 35

page after page we are in company with a cultivated gentleman who describes
with charm and eloquence what he has seen and known – the stage coaches,
the Irish rebellion, the appearance and conversation of George the Third. Then
suddenly the smooth narrative parts asunder, arch opens beyond arch, the vision
of something for ever flying, for ever escaping, is revealed, and time stands still.10

The connection between the outer and the inner is thus linked, in Woolf ’s
account, as in Zweig’s, to two different temporalities: the flow of time (the
historical continuum) and its suspension or hollowing out from within.
A dominant image in the autobiographies of the period is that of the altered
speed of the twentieth century. Stefan Zweig was representative of many when
he wrote of the middle-European world into which he was born and educated as
an ordered world with definite classes and calm transitions, a world without
haste. The rhythm of the new speed had not yet carried over from the machines,
the automobile, the telephone, the radio, and the aeroplane, to mankind; time
and age had another measure.11

Describing the cultural passions of his generation, he writes of the ‘solid masters
of our father’s time’ that ‘they no longer interested us. Instinctively we felt that
their cool, well-tempered rhythm was alien to our restless blood and no longer
in keeping with the accelerated tempo of our time’.12 But from the perspectives of
the late 1930s (and 1940, when Zweig was writing his autobiography), it was not
just that the old world had been superseded but that the world that had replaced
it was already undergoing extinction.
While autobiographical narrative must of necessity be predicated on a degree
of continuity between past and present selves, there is also a sense, in the texts
of this particular period, of a marked difference between, in Virginia Woolf ’s
words, the ‘two people: I now, I then’.13 While for Goethe, the imperative was
that ‘the individual know himself and his century, himself as the same in the
midst of all the circumstances’,14 the modernist autobiographer is much more
likely to represent a self in flux or mutation over time.15 The autobiographical
form may, however, serve to hold these disparate selves together within a single
frame and to create a relatively stable ‘platform of time’, in Woolf ’s phrase, from
the circumstances of the present on which to stand and observe the flow of
time.
Opening the first lines of her memoir, posthumously published as ‘Sketch
of the Past’, with a date – ‘Two days ago – Sunday 16 April 1939 to be
precise – Nessa said that if I did not start writing my memoirs I should
soon be too old’ – Woolf pointed both to the immediate time of the work’s
36 Historical Modernisms

composition and to a different point of origin: ‘I begin: the first memory.’

The vivid recall of her impressions of the past led her to write that they ‘can
still be more real than the present moment’,16 seeming to possess ‘an existence
independent of our minds’, and to imagine a future device which would make
it possible to ‘tap’ into time past:
Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into
the wall; and listen into the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong
emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can
get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through
from the start.17

The writing of the memoir continued into 1940 with the gap of a year between
‘19 June 1939’ and ‘8 June 1940’. ‘The present’ was now that of wartime, though
Woolf mentions this circumstance very briefly in the intermittent passages with
which she begins different sections of the text.
The present. 19 June 1940. As we sat down to lunch two days ago, Monday 17th,
John [Lehmann] came in, looked white about the gills, his pale eyes paler than
usual, and said the French have stopped fighting. Today the dictators dictate
their terms to France. Meanwhile, on this very hot morning, with a blue bottle
buzzing and a toothless organ grinding and the men calling strawberries in the
Square, I sit in my room at 37 M[ecklenburgh] S[square] and turn to my father.18

Woolf ’s account of the emotional demands made by her Victorian father, the
philosopher and writer Leslie Stephen, and, indeed, of his ‘tyranny’ after her
mother’s death suggests that the link suggested in the paragraph between fathers
and dictators is neither accidental nor unmotivated; it was a line of thinking
Woolf had already explored in detail in Three Guineas (1938). ‘Two different
ages,’ she writes of her father in A Sketch of the Past, ‘confronted each other in
the drawing room of Hyde Park Gate [her childhood home]. The Victorian age
and the Edwardian age … We looked at him with eyes that were looking into
the future.’19 She writes of her adolescent years that ‘it was the tyrant father –
the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the
alternately loved and hated father – who dominated me then.’20 ‘It was only the
other day,’ Woolf writes, ‘when I read Freud for the first time, that I discovered
that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate is a common feeling; and
is called ambivalence’.21
Virginia and Leonard Woolf had met Freud in London in January 1939,
some four months before his death. Her reading of Freud at the end of the
1930s took her to his ‘Massenpsychologie und Ichanalyse’ (‘Group Psychology
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 37

and the Analysis of the Ego’) (1921) and to his late works on civilization and
its vicissitudes. There is a connection here to the very different work of Arthur
Koestler and Stefan Zweig. Their encounters with the exiled Freud in his final
months form a culminating point to their memoirs of Europe in the first decades
of the twentieth century, marking an end point to a culture whose demise
was brought about by the forces of destruction which it was his life’s work to
analyse. ‘We must agree with Freud,’ Zweig wrote at the opening of The World of
Yesterday, ‘to whom our culture and civilization were merely a thin layer liable
at any moment to be pierced by the destructive forces of the “underworld” ’.22 At
the autobiography’s close, Zweig writes of his final discussions with the dying
Freud in London: ‘In those hours I frequently spoke with Freud about the horror
of Hitler’s world and the war. The outburst of bestiality deeply shocked him as
a humanitarian, but as a thinker he was in no way astonished.’23 Yet Freud, with
whom he had been in contact since 1908, also represents, for Zweig as for others,
turn-of-the-century Vienna in its intellectual flowering; a culture which is
understood to be much more than a thin veneer over a fundamental barbarism.
For those whose lives were made particularly turbulent by the historical forces
of the early twentieth century, assumptions of continuity had frequently become
meaningless. Psychological, and psychoanalytic, models of the self ’s multiplicity
were combined, and at times subordinated to, a sense of the radical dispersal of
identity imposed by external events. ‘My today and each of my yesterdays,’ Zweig
wrote,
my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one,
but several existences, each one different from the others … My feeling is that
the world in which I grew up, and the world of today, and the world between the
two, are entirely separate worlds … All the bridges between our today and our
yesteryears have been burned.24

The turn to the past in autobiographical writing of this time thus took a variety
of forms, but there was a shared sense that what was being recaptured in recall
and writing was either long-lost or on the brink of disappearance. Zweig,
contemplating in 1939 the work that would become The World of Yesterday
(largely composed in exile in New York and Brazil in 1940/1), wrote to his friend
Felix Braun, a younger writer who had, like Zweig, fled to Britain:
Wouldn’t it perhaps be the right thing to do, some time when you have some
leisure, to provide a portrait of Vienna and our youth, and even if they live only
as memories, still to allow them to rise again intensively and thus creatively?
I myself want to write such a book some time, not as an autobiography but a
38 Historical Modernisms

farewell to that Austrian-Jewish-bourgeois culture culminating in Mahler,

Hoffmannsthal, Schnitzler and Freud. For this Vienna and this Austria will
never exist again and never come again. We are the last witnesses.25

While Zweig, in working on the book, referred to it as an autobiography and as

the ‘story of his life’, he also insisted that it was predominantly the story of an
epoch. The text, though it is unusually frank about the sexual experiences of
his generation (a focus undoubtedly inspired by Zweig’s close relationship with
Freud, to whom he had written that, under his influence, autobiography had
become ‘more clear sighted and audacious’26), is not intimate or introspective.
Zweig, in the first chapters of the text in particular, instead charts his encounters,
in the different cities of Europe, with some of the most significant cultural figures
of the early twentieth century – Rudolf Steiner in Berlin, Emile Verhaeren in
Brussels, Rilke and Romain Rolland in Paris, Yeats and Symons in London.
The Preface to The World of Yesterday opens with a disclaimer about the act of
autobiography (a familiar rhetorical gesture throughout the entire tradition of
autobiographical writing):
I have never attached so much importance to my own person that I would have
been tempted to tell others the story of my life. Much had to occur, infinitely more
events, catastrophes, and trials than are usually allotted to a single generation
had to come to pass … Nothing is further from my thought than to take so
pivotal a place unless it be in the role of a narrator at an illustrated lecture. Time
gives the pictures; I merely speak the words which accompany them. Actually,
it is not so much the course of my own destiny that I relate, but that of an entire
generation, the generation of our time, which was loaded with a burden of fate
as was hardly any other in the course of history.27

In Zweig’s conception of history as a literary artist (Dichterin),28 he compared

historical truth to an artichoke, where peeling off the leaves never reveals the
ultimate core. Beginning to write his autobiography in Bath, without access
to his personal archive of notes and correspondence, reinforced the invented,
gedichtet, quality of the text. As one of his earliest biographers, Donald Prater,
wrote, in both his autobiography and in his historical works Zweig saw himself
as ‘the instrument of history herself as an artist’.29
Arthur Koestler, in his autobiography Arrow in the Blue, outlined the two
modes which he saw as the autobiographer’s primary choices – ‘the Chronicler’s
urge’, which ‘expresses the need for the sharing of experience related to external
events’ and ‘the Ecce Homo motive’ which ‘expresses the same need with regard
to internal events’.30 He had attempted in writing his own autobiography, he
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 39

stated at the close of The Invisible Writing, to combine ‘the historian’s and the
psychologist’s approach’.31 There was, however, for many writers a marked tension
between the model of autobiography as an inward turn and the perception that
the role of the writer, even when narrating his or her own experiences, was
to record the times – even to ‘bear witness’. ‘My desire’, the Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam wrote, in an autobiographical piece composed in the late 1920s, ‘The
Noise of Time’, ‘is not to speak about myself but to track down the age, the noise
and the germination of time. My memory is inimical to all that is personal …
and it labours not to reproduce but to distance the past’.32
Mandelstam’s work of distancing contrasts with Zweig’s acts of memory,
which have been criticized for their apolitical nostalgia and their failure to
engage with anti-Semitism in the Vienna of the early twentieth century which
he seeks to recapture.33 The trajectory described in The World of Yesterday is
one in which Zweig and his compatriots move from a position as a ‘citizen of
the world’ to, in exile, becoming a citizen of nowhere: ‘I have no compunction
about admitting that since the day when I had to depend upon identity papers or
passports that were indeed alien, I ceased to feel as if I quite belonged to myself.
A part of the natural identity with my original and essential ego was destroyed
for ever.’34 As George Prochnik suggests, Zweig was haunted by ‘the great fear of
the exile … the notion that uprooting translates into terminal disconnection’.35
The autobiography charts this disconnection, though it could be said that its
very composition was an attempt not only to create some form of continuity
between past and present lives but, more problematically, to smooth over the
embarrassing fact of his Austrian-German patriotism at the beginning of the
First World War.36
In the Preface to The World of Yesterday, one of whose working titles was ‘My
Three Lives’, Zweig writes that ‘it often happens that when I carelessly speak of
“my life,” I am forced to ask, “which life?” – the one before the World War, the
one between the first and second, or the life of today … My feeling is that the
world in which I grew up, and the world of today, and the world between
the two, are entirely separate worlds’. For many, it was the outbreak of war in 1914
that marked an absolute break with the past: Koestler wrote that ‘though born
in 1905’, he had been a ‘a true child of the nineteenth century – the century of
crude philosophies and arrogant over-simplifications which lingered on into the
twentieth, until the First World War brought it to a close with a bang’.37 Benjamin,
in his essay ‘The Storyteller’, wrote of the First World War as producing an end to
transmittable experience, and effecting absolute and ‘overnight’ changes in ‘our
image not only of the external world but also of the moral world’:
40 Historical Modernisms

For never has experience been more thoroughly belied than strategic experience
was belied by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily
experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A
generation that had gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars now stood under
the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds
and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions,
the tiny, fragile human body.38

For others, the temporal divide between the centuries – the year 1900 – acted as
a particularly charged historical marker, and one which often became an integral
part of autobiographical narratives, as in The Education of Henry Adams, the
autobiography, written in the third person, of the US historian and politician
Henry Adams. Between the two is 1910, ‘on or around’ which, Woolf wrote,
‘human character changed.’ Gottfried Benn, writing in 1955, the year before his
death, also cited 1910 as the year in which ‘the scaffolds began to crack’,39 while
Henri Lefebvre, in 1974, wrote that ‘around 1910 a certain space was shattered.
It was the space of common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of political power …
This was truly a crucial moment.’40 For Thomas Harrison, the year 1910 saw
some of the most important developments in European cultural formations and
artistic expression, but was also marked by its nihilism and its uncertainties in
relation to past, present and future: ‘Nothing in 1910 is definitively over and
nothing definitively begun …. The prewar years were a workshop of futurisme
and passéisme alike … Ten years into the century both a death and a birth seem
to have taken too long in coming.’41

Bryher and Benjamin

The English writer Bryher (the name by which Annie Winifred Ellerman, born
in 1894, was known) did not publish her full autobiography (of the years from
birth up until the outbreak of the Second World War), Heart to Artemis, until
1963. From the opening paragraphs of The Heart to Artemis onwards, Bryher
made clear her intention to position her life and experience in their literary,
historical and geographical contexts:
When I was born in September, 1894, Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam was
a secretary. Mallarmé had just retired and was no longer teaching English to
French schoolboys. The death duties that were to obliterate most of our feudal
estates had been introduced in that year’s budget while the Fram was drifting
through the polar ice and would-be explorers dreamed about Bokhara, a
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 41

fabulous city that was then more difficult to access than Tibet. I opened my eyes
upon the end of not only the nineteenth century but of a second Puritan age. An
epoch passed away while I was learning to speak and walk. Its influence remains
as the start of memory and as a measuring rod for progress that even Edwardian
survivors lack.42

Sections that would be incorporated into this text had been printed some
decades earlier. In the July 1937 issue of Life and Letters To-Day43 Bryher
published an autobiographical essay titled ‘Paris, 1900’. This short memoir
focused on a family visit in early childhood to the 1900 Paris Exposition,
the experience of which had been described by Henry Adams as creating an
absolute rupture between the centuries, as he found himself, overwhelmed by
the power of the ‘dynamo’ which was the Exhibition’s source of power, ‘lying
in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900 with his historical
neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new’.44 These ‘forces’
(material, dynamic, electrical) radically undermine the historian’s arrangement
of sequences, and his former faith in the relations of cause and effect, as well as
the ‘stories or histories’ which supported them.45 We might, for all the radical
differences between Adams’ and Benjamin’s circumstances and thought, find
some connection between the fracturing of historical causality and sequence
which Adams describes, and Benjamin’s critique of historicism as contenting
itself with ‘establishing a causal nexus among various moments in history’. The
historian who understands this fallacy ‘ceases to tell the sequence of events like
the beads of a rosary’.46
Bryher’s ‘Paris, 1900’ was published during the months of the 1937
Exposition, the last of its kind in Paris, in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union competed for symbolic power through the monumental architecture of
their pavilions, which flanked the Eiffel Tower. It opens with these lines: ‘All my
life I have suffered from “geographical emotions”. Cities are so much easier to
understand than people.’47 Bryher represents the sea-voyage to Dieppe, and the
boat-train to Paris, from a perspective which is at once a child’s eye view and
makes claims to capture the spirit of the age or the signs of the times: ‘Everything
was heavy; where possible it was solid. A historian without other chronicle to
guide him might reconstruct the age from the pictures of its luggage.’48 The
daughter of the industrialist and shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman, Bryher
was from an early age travelling the world; the journey to Paris was the first of
many voyages abroad. She records in the memoir that in 1900 there were strong
hostilities between the French and the English (Britain was in disgrace at the
time over the Boer War, and on a subsequent visit to France two years later
42 Historical Modernisms

Bryher saw Kruger making a speech from a balcony) and that her childhood self
was both nationalistic and pugilistic:
To read of fascism now is to see the picture of that Paris street. I fulfilled all
nationalistic obligations, in complete confidence that I was right, merely because
I had been born in England. Brutality is a part of primitive nature and it is a
need of childhood, atom in so vast a world, to assert its ego … Only, civilisations
should be built, not by children, but by men.49

From this observation, Bryher moves directly to an account of the Exposition.

She recalls ‘the entrance and the symbol of the Exhibition’; ‘an immense arch in
plaster’, which she calls ‘the magnified twin of a hair-ornament of the period,
a two-pronged comb over which convolvulus of many decorations ramped in
flowery dots. Everything at that time had to curl; there should exist a name to
describe the horror of 1900 over a blank space’.50 This entrance was ‘La Porte
Monumentale’, designed by the architect René Binet, an enormous, ornately
decorated arch, crowned by a statue (created by Moreau-Vauthier) called ‘La
Parisienne’ which was clothed in modern Parisian fashion and illuminated at
night by thousands of light bulbs. Both the statue and the electrical illuminations
were intended and received as celebrations of modernity; ‘La Porte Monumentale’
was a flamboyant example of the Art Nouveau style of the 1890s and 1900s, the
aesthetic which dominated the Exhibition as a whole. Bryher links the period
style not to the new century but to the previous one, represented as a dying
epoch. She writes of the galleries they visited:
Everything was carved; was either giant or dwarf. Mermaids wriggled from
mother-of-pearl water lilies that opened into a vase, the legs of a table bent like
bamboos in the wind. The glass cases were crowded; they were a snail’s shell of
surfaces, coral, garnet, enamel, or amber …. And perhaps because all sincerity
of emotion was repressed, the age, as it felt itself dying, redoubled outward forms
and put the emphasis of life upon ownership of thousands of small possessions.
It was at the Paris exhibition that modern art was born. The unconscious mind
of thousands must have begun to imagine blank spaces and straight lines, while
the eyes stared at cabinets full of miniatures, toy clocks, jewelled thimble cases,
and Fragonard paintings reproduced in beads upon tiny bags.51

Her five-year-old self was, Bryher writes, far more interested in the pavilion
containing ‘Krupp’s exhibit of long and shining guns’, at which her parents
expressed horror, than in a gallery of toys (‘[The soldiers’] red trousers displeased
me, everybody knew that the new English khaki blended much better with
the landscape’).52 The memoir is striking in the vividness of its description of
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 43

her early memories of Paris and of the tension between her delight in France,
including her first taste of galettes, and her nationalistic impulses. While her
childhood patriotism and pugilism were linked, she indicates, to her keen desire
to be a boy (a theme that runs throughout her writing and her life),53 she ends
the memoir with these words: ‘Though my later way was to be in a different
direction and in another country, it was in France that I first learned to be a
European.’54
A version of ‘Paris, 1900’ was translated into French in 1937 by Adrienne
Monnier and Sylvia Beach, who owned the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and
Company.55 Beach and Monnier had been close friends of Bryher’s since the
1920s: ‘there was only one street in Paris for me, the rue de l’Odéon’ – Bryher later
wrote in Heart to Artemis.56 In 1940 Monnier published a short piece in the final
issue of La Gazette des Amis des Livres (May 1940), ‘Our Friend Bryher’, in which
she wrote of Bryher’s commitment to France and French literature and culture.
She also referred to her French translation of ‘Paris, 1900’, ‘the account of the
journey [Bryher] made to Paris as a child, during the 1900 Exposition’, which the
Nouvelle Revue Française had published in its December 1937 issue, adding that
‘I had a small book made of them [Bryher’s memories], the appearance of which
has been delayed by events and which is coming out now’.57 This last issue of the
Gazette, published in the month in which the German army entered France, also
contained an article by Walter Benjamin on Georges Salles’s Regard.
In a letter dated 19 December 1937, Walter Benjamin, who came to know
Monnier and Beach well in the Paris of the 1930s and was helped by them, and
by Bryher58 during the Nazi Occupation, wrote to Bryher, with whom he had
previously been in contact, saying how much he admired ‘Paris, 1900’ and that
he looked forward to reading the whole of it:
I have at last had the pleasure of reading something by you. Paris 1900 certainly
attracted me because it is by you. It won me over by its own merits.
It is a completely pure-spirited text. It has something which is rare in
childhood reminiscences, the loyauté which downplays nothing and thereby
expresses the grace of childhood by displaying its often dark background. In
this dark background your little heroine sometimes recalls children in the
paintings of Reynolds and Gainsborough. In others she has the still, martial
decisiveness which one could read in the face of Alice in Wonderland in my
childhood edition. Just as you march out from the station into the midst of the
contemptible (verächtlichen) French.
I have often reflected on the importance of giving free rein to the aggressivity
(in fantasy) of children. You surely know Struwwelpeter – one of the most read
44 Historical Modernisms

children’s books in Germany. It takes full account of this aggressivity of children.

That is why they love it so much. the real horrors confronting them lie elsewhere.
As you describe in relation to the white-faced clown, ‘un danger au-delà de
l’imagination.’
One of the passages which most deeply affected me was that of the crêpes.
And how true that the highest degree of reality which something can have for a
child is that it ‘emerges’ directly out of one of their books!
You have found the redeeming word for the entrance arch of the world fair
which has often worried me. You have recognised in it the comb which crowns
the allure of Paris!
I should like one day to be able to read this text in full. Perhaps it could lead
to a small exchange. As I began to realise in 1932, at first more unconsciously
than not, that I was facing exile, I practised a kind of immunisation which would
preserve me from nostalgia for the city in which I had spent my childhood.59
At that time I wrote, under the title ‘Berlin Childhood around 1900’, a series of
short sketches. Most of them are still in print and I would be glad to send you
some.60

The letter was written shortly after the closure of the 1937 Exposition, which had
provided an opportunity for Bryher, Beach and Monnier to publicize Life and
Letters To-Day in a display of French literature, on the basis that Shakespeare and
Company was its Paris distributor. Benjamin, who had in 1936 corresponded
with Bryher about the possible translation and publication of his long essay
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’ in Life and Letters
To-Day, refers to the details of her memoir which connect closely to his own
preoccupations and writings: children’s play and fantasies, modes of recollection
and reminiscence, city portraits, urban spectacle, the telling detail which
encapsulates an epoch (here the ‘comb’ of ‘La Parisienne’ at the 1900 Exposition),
the ornamentality and ‘stylizing style’, in Benjamin’s phrase,61 of Art Nouveau/
Jugendstil. In the work now known as The Arcades Project, his radically non-
linear, image-based exploration of the Paris of the nineteenth century, Benjamin
wrote of the World Exhibitions as ‘places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’62
which ‘construct a universe of spécialités’63 and of ‘the world dominated by its
phantasmagorias – this, to make use of Baudelaire’s term, is “modernity”’.64 In
a brief fragment on the 1900 Exhibition, in the file (‘Konvolut’) on ‘Fashion’,
Benjamin referred to ‘a Palais du Costume, in which wax dolls arranged before
a painted backdrop displayed the costumes of various peoples and the fashions
of various ages’,65 a slightly flat observation which takes its colouration from the
quotations and observations surrounding it, as in the assertion that ‘Fashions are
a collective medicament for the ravages of oblivion’.66
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 45

Benjamin closes his letter to Bryher with the mention of his own
autobiographical ‘sketches’. He had composed his Berlin Chronicle in 1932 in
Ibiza; a substantial part of the text was subsequently included in his Berlin
Childhood around 1900, which he wrote between 1932 and 1938. He did not
himself define the texts as autobiographies, writing in A Berlin Chronicle, that:
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.
And these quite certainly do not, even for the Berlin years that I am exclusively
concerned with here. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and
what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of
moments and discontinuities.67

In this passage, in which Benjamin self-reflexively defines the task he is

undertaking, he argues that the city evoked in his reminiscences is not on the
side of ‘life’ – the ‘bios’ of autobiography – but bears witness to death, and in
particular the ‘brief, shadowy existence’ of the people he knew in his Berlin
childhood:
They steal along its walls like beggars, appear wraithlike at windows, to
vanish again, sniff at thresholds like a genius loci, and even if they fill whole
neighbourhoods with their names, it is as a dead man’s name fills his gravestone.68

Benjamin intertwines childhood memories, which have ‘a quality that makes

them at once as evanescent and as alluringly tormenting as half-forgotten
dreams’ with ‘images’ that belong to the second half of the nineteenth century
and which ‘constantly detach themselves from things and determine our
perception of them’. The autobiographical writings thus bear a close relationship
to The Arcades Project, which brought together the cultural constellations of
nineteenth-century Paris, in which the Paris arcades were to be explored as
paradigms of a ‘past become space’.69 They are also profoundly shaped by the
increasingly exigent political situation in the 1930s. In an afterword to the
posthumously published A Berlin Childhood, Theodor Adorno wrote that
the historical archetypes that [Benjamin] wished to develop [in the Passagen-
Werk] out of their pragmatico-social and philosophical origin were, in the Berlin
book, to flash up abruptly out of the immediacy of memory – with the force of
pain felt for the irretrievable which, once it is lost, coagulates into an allegory of
one’s own demise.70

Marcel Proust was a crucial influence on Benjamin’s writings about his Berlin
childhood. In discussing Proust in A Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin refers to the
endless unfolding of images and ‘the fan of memory’,71 but we might also find deep
46 Historical Modernisms

resonances between Benjamin’s models of illumination and Proust’s description

of the merging of present and past in the coming together of an experience and a
memory, producing ‘for a moment briefly as a flash of lightning – what normally
it never apprehends: a fragment of time in a pure state’.72 These are, Proust writes,
‘Fragments of existence withdrawn from Time’.73 But, as Peter Szondi suggests,
Benjamin’s ‘lost time’, unlike that of Proust, ‘is not the past but the future.’74
Eschewing linear sequence as it does, A Berlin Chronicle is a complex text to
navigate, and this difficulty indicates how much we habitually rely not only on
narrative sequence but also on the model of a life in relation to formation or a
journey. In A Berlin Chronicle Benjamin refers to a long-standing idea ‘of setting
out the sphere of life – bios – graphically on a map’75 on which, using a system
of signs, he would mark out the houses, assembly halls, hotel rooms, cafes, etc.,
of his childhood and youth. Later in the text, he refers to the slight role played
in memory by people and recalls an afternoon in Paris ‘to which I owe insights
into my life that came in a flash, with the force of an illumination. It was on this
very afternoon that my biographical relationships to people, my friendships and
comradeships, my passions and love affairs, were revealed to me in their most
vivid and hidden intertwinings’.76 What was made clear to him was the kind of
hold ‘cities keep over imagination’77 – a phrase which resonates with Bryher’s
‘geographical emotions’ – so that ‘the veil it has covertly woven out of our lives
shows images of people less often than those of the sites of our encounters with
others or ourselves’.78
It is this veil that was broken through in the moment of illumination, offering
him a representation of the patterns of human relationships in his life which
seemed to transcribe itself. Sitting in the Café des Deux Magots, ‘I was struck by
the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and knew at the same moment exactly
how it was to be done’. The sheet of paper was subsequently lost, and he was never
able to ‘restore it as it rose before me then, resembling a series of family trees’:
‘reconstructing its outline in thought’,79 he would instead ‘speak of a labyrinth’. In
the conditions of the modern city, it is suggested, the patterns of relationships in
lives are subordinated to, or subsumed by, the dominance of space and its modes
of social organization. But the labyrinth is also a particularly charged image for
Benjamin which, in the ‘Tiergarten’ section of A Berlin Childhood, takes the idea
of a labyrinthine ‘straying in the city’ back to ‘the labyrinths scrawled on the
blotting paper of my [childhood] notebooks’ and, behind or before that, to the
language of nature.80
Benjamin’s explicit engagement with Freud’s work is limited, but there are
nonetheless important connections between his writings and Freud’s concepts
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 47

of mental topography and, later, the language of the unconscious, as well as,
centrally, the ‘dream-work’ (with its displacements and condensations of images)
and memory-work. ‘Remembrance’, Benjamin writes in A Berlin Chronicle, ‘must
not proceed by way of narrative, much less by way of reports, but must, in the
strictest and epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and
in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers.’81 This passage, also produced in 1932
as a separate fragment, titled ‘Excavation and Memory’ uses an archaeological
motif – bringing it into relationship with Freud’s models of memory and the
unconscious. Benjamin refers to the ways in which one might seek to approach
the buried past: memory, he writes, is only a medium, like the earth in which
an ancient city lies buried, and it must be turned over and over in order to yield
up its ‘long-sought secrets’: ‘That is to say, they yield those images, that severed
from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later
insights – like torsos in a collector’s gallery.’82
While A Berlin Childhood includes a substantial part of the material in A
Berlin Chronicle, it presents it in a series of images and longer and shorter titled
sections or fragments: ‘Loggias’, ‘Imperial Panorama’, ‘The Telephone, ‘Butterfly
Hunt’, ‘Cabinets’, etc. At the opening of the final version (completed in 1938),
Benjamin refers to the beginnings of the project: ‘In 1932, when I was abroad,
it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting
farewell to the city of my birth.’83 Calling to mind ‘images of childhood’ was to
be a way, as he wrote to Bryher, of inoculating himself against homesickness:
the intention was not to ‘limit its effect through insight into the irretrievability –
not the contingent biographical but the necessary social irretrievability – of
the past’. ‘Biographical features’, as well as the ‘physiognomies’ of family and
comrades, which ‘stand out more readily in the continuity of experience than
in its depths, altogether recede in the present undertaking’.84 In other words,
this is not to be a restoration of a personal, ‘biographical’ past but ‘an effort to
get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in a
child of the middle class’. What is crucial is not the ‘continuity of experience’ –
the continuity of personhood – but the radical break between present and
past, brought about both by the extraordinarily rapid changes wrought upon
a modernized Berlin and by his own exile from that city. ‘Like a mollusk in
its shell,’ he writes, ‘I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies
hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear.’85 In a chapter on ‘Shells’
in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that ‘an empty shell, like an
empty nest, invites daydreams of refuge’.86 Benjamin, by contrast, seems not
to be dreaming of reinhabiting the shell but of using it as a listening device
48 Historical Modernisms

(comparable to Woolf ’s imaginings of the radio-like apparatus by means of

which she would be able to ‘listen in to the past’) in which might be captured
the sounds of the past, and, indeed, ‘the noise of time’.
The childhood imagination, as Benjamin depicts it, entails a merging with
the object world – the key terms are ‘mimicry’ (or ‘mimesis’), which is related
both to becoming similar (to dwelling places, furniture, clothes)87 and to the
recognition of similarities between things, and distortion (Enstellung) (which
Benjamin often framed as a mishearing of words and names which led to its own
form of magical invocation). Benjamin referred to ‘the world distorted in the
state of resemblance’ in his 1929 essay on Proust: ‘He lay on his bed racked with
homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of resemblance … To
this world belongs … the image.’88
While one interpretation of Benjamin’s project is that it is historiographical
rather than biographical, the ‘images’ he conjures up are by no means generalized
or impersonal. The ‘empty shell’ held to the ear yields less the sounds of the public
city than those of domestic space. He described the text as ‘the most precise
portrait I shall ever be able to give of myself ’ and as ‘a kind of self-portrait’.89 In
writing of Berlin’s ‘loggias’ – internal balconies – Benjamin refers to ‘the images
and allegories which preside over my thinking’ and to the rhythms of the city – of
the railways and of carpet-beating – which ‘rocked me to sleep. It was the mold
in which my dreams took shape’. Describing the highly decorated Tiergarten
villas of his childhood, Benjamin writes: ‘Among the caryatids and atlantes,
the putti and pomonas, which in those days looked on me, I stood closest to
those dust-shrouded specimens of the race of threshold dwellers – those who
guard the entrance to life, or to a house. For they are versed in waiting’.90 There
is a strongly implied connection between the condition of exile and the appeal,
even the security, of liminal spaces – courtyards, thresholds, passageways. The
loggias, he writes, have stayed with him ‘on account of their uninhabitability for
one who himself no longer has a proper abode’.91
The condition of exile, both from place and from the past (whether the
latter is mourned or seen as a world well lost), runs throughout many of the
autobiographies of the early twentieth century. Closely connected to this theme
is the perception of a fracturing of history. There are here two forms of time-
consciousness and historicity. One relates to events which are so extreme that
they fracture history’s flow and create an absolute divide between then and now;
the other to a philosophy of history focussed on the different rhythms, speed
and intensity of historical processes. This bears closely on a resistance to what
are viewed as the false certainties of narrative sequence and causality, bringing
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 49

modernist autobiography and twentieth-century historiography into a closer

relationship than has yet been explored.

Notes

1 Seamus O’Malley, Making History New. Modernism and Historical Narrative

(New York: OUP, 2014). See also Michael Sayeau, Against the Event. The
Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (Oxford: OUP, 2013), and
Laura Marcus, ‘Experiments in Form: Modernism and Autobiography in Woolf,
Eliot, Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, and Richardson’, in A History of English
Autobiography, ed. Adam Smyth (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2016), 298–312.
2 For an in-depth comparative discussion of Woolf ’s and Benjamin’s
representations of the past and practices of historiography, see Angeliki
Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter
Benjamin (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See also Sanja
Bahun, ‘The Burden of the Past, The Dialectics of the Present: Notes on Virginia
Woolf ’s and Walter Benjamin’s Philosophies of History’, Modernist Cultures 3, no.
2 (2008): 100–15.
3 Karl Mannheim,‘Historismus’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 52,
no. 1 (1924): 1–60. Translated in Karl Mannheim, Essays in the Sociology of
Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), 84–133.
4 Christian J. Emden, Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft
um 1930 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 85–6.
5 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 4 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and
Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap University of the Harvard Press,
2003), 391.
6 Ibid., 395.
7 See David Turner, ‘History as Popular Story: On the Rhetoric of Stefan Zweig’s
‘Sternstunden der Menschheit’, The Modern Language Review 84, no. 2 (April 1989):
393–405.
8 This lecture was intended for delivery in Stockholm at a PEN conference, cancelled
because of the outbreak of war. Zweig, ‘Die Geschichte als Dichterin’, Reed
Library – Stefan Zweig Collection, SZ-AP2/W–H234.1. In: stefanzweig.digital, Ed.
Literaturarchiv Salzburg, Last Update 17.12.2019, URL: stefanzweig.digital/o:szd.
werke#SZDMSK.211.
9 Woolf was greatly involved with the ‘new biography’ of Lytton Strachey, André
Maurois, Harold Nicolson and others, which was defined against the terms of
Victorian biography and had as its central tenets the levelling of the relationship
50 Historical Modernisms

between biographer and subject, the use of fictional techniques and a focus
on a ‘key’ to personality. See her essays ‘The New Biography’ and ‘The Art of
Biography’.
10 Virginia Woolf, ‘De Quincey’s Autobiography’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf
Vol. 5, 1929 to 1932, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2009), 457–8.
11 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London: Cassell, 1987), 30.
12 Ibid., 45.
13 Virginia Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind
(London: Pimlico, 2002), 87.
14 ‘inwiefern es unter allen Umständen dasselbe geblieben’. Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit. Aus meinem Leben (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1960),
Preface, 6. My italics.
15 Paul Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, 244–9, points to the limits of narrative
identity and the need to ‘link up with the “non-narrative” components in the
formation of an acting subject’ (249).
16 Woolf, ‘Sketch’, 80.
17 Ibid., 81.
18 Ibid., 116.
19 Ibid., 149.
20 Ibid., 123.
21 Ibid., 116. The term ‘ambivalence’ had been introduced into psychology in 1910 by
the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler.
22 Zweig, World of Yesterday, 15.
23 Ibid., 318.
24 Ibid., 6.
25 Letter of 20 June 1939, cited in Ulrich Wienzierl, ‘Autobiografie als
Epochendarstellung’, in Stefan-Zweig-Handbuch, ed. Arturo Larcati, Klemens
Renoldner and Martina Wörgötter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 340.
26 Cited in Freud, Sigmund, Stefan Zweig. Correspondance (Paris: Rivages, 1995).
27 Zweig, World of Yesterday, 5.
28 This concept was explored in the lecture he wrote immediately after working on his
autobiography, as mentioned in note 8.
29 D. A. Prater, European of Yesterday. A Biography of Stefan Zweig (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1972), 307.
30 Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (London: Readers Union, William Collins and
Hamish Hamilton, 1954), 17.
31 Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Journey. Autobiography 1931–53 (London: Collins
with Hamish Hamilton, 1954), 430.
32 Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time and Other Prose Pieces, trans. Clarence Brown
(London: Quartet, 1988), 109–10.
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 51

33 For critiques of Zweig’s nostalgic picture of imperial Vienna, see for example
Hannah Arendt, ‘Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday’, in The Jewish
Writings, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Schocken, 2007), 317–28; also Robert S.
Wistrich, ‘Stefan Zweig and the ‘World of Yesterday’, in Stefan Zweig Reconsidered.
New Perspectives on His Literary and Biographical Writings, ed. Mark H. Gelber
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2007), 59–77. On the background to Arendt’s
critique, see Michael Steinberg, ‘Hannah Arendt and the Cultural Style of the
German Jews’, Social Research 74, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 879–902.
34 Zweig, World of Yesterday, 310.
35 George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile. Stefan Zweig at the End of the World
(London: Granta, 2014), 11.
36 On this, see Nikolaus Unger, ‘Remembering Identity in Die Welt von Gestern:
Stefan Zweig, Austrian German Identity Construction and the First World War’,
Focus on German Studies, 12 (2005), 95–116. As Unger notes, even later in the war
he rejected Zionism as an alternative version of the nationalism which had been
discredited in its German/Austrian form.
37 Koestler, Arrow, 38.
38 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the
Harvard University Press, 2002), 143–4.
39 Thomas Harrison takes Benn’s remark as his epigraph in his 1910: The
Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Jane Goldman opens her account of modernism in 1910 in her book Modernism,
1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
40 Focusing on the flowering of cultural life in 1913 in his book 1913: The Cradle
of Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), Jean-Michel Rabaté chooses that
year as his reference point. This is also Harrison’s emphasis, though he stresses the
strongly pessimistic current in intellectual life of ‘the seven years to either side of ’
1910.
41 Harrison, 1910, 8.
42 Bryher, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoir (London: Collins, 1963), 7.
43 Bryher had purchased the journal in 1935; it was edited by Robert Herring, who
also wrote film criticism for her earlier journal Close Up, and Dorothy Petrie
Townshend.
44 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA:
The Riverside Press, 1918), 382.
45 Ibid.
46 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings Vol. 4, 397.
47 Bryher, ‘Paris, 1900’, Life and Letters To-day 16, no. 8 (Summer 1937), 33.
48 Ibid.
52 Historical Modernisms

49 Ibid., 34.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 36.
52 Ibid., 35.
53 See my ‘European Witness: Analysands Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Laura
Marcus, Dreams of Modernity (Oxford: OUP, 2014), chapter 8, 151–77.
54 Ibid., 42.
55 The French version, presumably based on a revised text by Bryher, is more
focussed on her Paris experiences, with less material on her English childhood. The
references to contemporary politics are also somewhat different.
56 Bryher, Heart to Artemis, 211.
57 Reprinted in Adrienne Monnier, Les Gazettes d’Monnier 1925–1945 (Paris: René
Julliard, 1953), 245.
58 Bryher, Heart to Artemis, 278.
59 In his foreword to the 1938 version, not published until 1950, Benjamin gives
a fuller account of this immunization strategy. He had earlier published some
extracts in his own name or pseudonymously.
60 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1999), Vol. 5, 628–9.
61 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 556.
62 Ibid., 7.
63 Ibid., 17–18.
64 Ibid., 26.
65 Ibid., 73.
66 Ibid., 80.
67 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, in Selected Writings Vol. 2, ed. Michael W.
Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 612.
68 Ibid., 612–13.
69 See Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space. Re-reading Walter Benjamin (London:
Routledge, 1996), 112.
70 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Nachwort’, in Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um
neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 111.
71 Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle, 597.
72 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin,
revised by D. J. Enright (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), book VI, 224. See also
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’, in Selected Writings Vol. 2, ed. Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
University of the Harvard Press, 1999).
 Autobiography and History in the 1930s 53

73 Ibid., 227.
74 Peter Szondi, ‘Nachwort’, in Walter Benjamin, Städtebilde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1963), 82.
75 Benjamin, ‘Berlin Chronicle’, 596.
76 Ibid., 614.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 See Weigel, Body- and Image-Space, 138.
81 Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle, 611. Despite the image of the spade, Gerhard Richter
suggests that Benjamin’s argument is that memory is not an instrument ‘but rather
a scene, space or site, a spectacle or stage (Schauplatz).’ See Walter Benjamin and the
Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 42–3.
82 Ibid.
83 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. by Howard Eiland and
Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap University of the Harvard Press,
2002), 344.
84 Ibid., 345.
85 Ibid., 392.
86 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press,
1994), 107.
87 Benjamin, ‘Berlin Childhood’, 391.
88 Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’, 240.
89 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom
Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 424, 427.
90 Benjamin, ‘Berlin Childhood’, 354.
91 Ibid., 346.
54
 2

Spatial histories of magazines and modernisms

Andrew Thacker

Introduction

What happens to our histories of modernism when the route commences not
with individual authors, artists or texts, but by taking the plethora of magazines,
whether ‘little’, ‘big’ or something in-between, as our point of origin? If we agree
with Scholes and Wulfman’s assertion that ‘modernism began in the magazines’,1
then how is our historical understanding of modernism altered by engaging
more closely with a different kind of material? Modernism as canonized in the
Western academy since the 1930s with the development of New Criticism, the
critical criteria of T. S. Eliot or the claims of Ezra Pound for the ‘men of 1914’
has for several decades now been the focus of critique from various sources: in
particular, we might note the questioning around ‘gender and modernism’ in the
1980s and 1990s, the emergence of the New Modernist Studies at the end of the
last century and, mostly recently, the work being done on queer modernism.2
The selection of what constitutes the object of study has thus been criticized,
revised and reorientated in multiple ways and, as Mao and Walkowitz note in
their overview of the ‘new modernist studies’, the keyword of this process has
been that of ‘expansion’: we now know, study and teach a much different canon
of modernism, with diverse senses of its history.3 However, the material form of
much of the literature studied has remained, to an extent, the same: novels, short
stories, poems, plays – mostly to be analysed in individual books, anthologies
and textbooks, or course readers. How many undergraduate courses in
modernism, we might wonder, survey the history of the subject predominantly
via its magazines? Since 1995, with the founding of the digitization work of the
Modernist Journals Project (MJP), teachers and critics have had access to the
material culture of Anglo-American modernism as it emerged in a wide range
56 Historical Modernisms

of magazines; other digitization projects such as the Blue Mountain Project or

Monoskop have widened the focus to include the European avant-garde, while
other work on middlebrow culture and pulp magazines has similarly expanded
our access to other forms of modern periodicals.4 The study of magazine culture
is thus more established now as part of the materialist and historicist turn within
modernist studies (and within English as a discipline more widely), but have we
really started to imagine what the history of modernisms would look like if we
approached it primarily via magazines rather than by means of its books?
The Modernist Magazines Project that I have been co-directing since 2006
has aimed to trace the contribution that the little magazine, and many of its
variants, has made to the construction of modernism, a project that has so far
produced three volumes of essays on the modernist magazine in Britain and
Ireland, in North America and in Europe. The second stage of the project, which
aims to produce another set of volumes exploring the modernist magazine in
the rest of the world, has recently begun.5 Building upon this work this chapter
explores some of the significant challenges for historicizing modernism when
we take seriously the idea that magazines should be considered as our primary
texts. These challenges revolve around the issues of method, periodization and
spatial history. The chapter starts by exploring these three issues in turn, before
turning to consider some examples from the future project on Global Modernist
Magazines that poses a fresh set of questions for how we historicize modernism.

Method

If we are to really understand the role of magazines in the history of modernism

it has become increasingly clear that we require radical new methods for the
literary analysis of a textual object, the magazine, which differs greatly from
a poem, a novel or a play. Many of the basic interpretive strategies of literary
history and criticism are problematic when faced with the run of a magazine:
‘what constitutes the work?’ or ‘who is the author?’ are not easy questions to
answer in relation to periodicals. It is difficult to imagine a modernist magazine
as a ‘well-wrought urn’, to evoke Cleanth Brooks’s famous New Critical image for
the individual work of art. Is an individual issue the essential unit, the ‘work’, or
is the entire run of the magazine the single ‘work’?6 And how should we balance
‘the multivocal authorship’ of a periodical with the ‘more or less coherent vision
of its editors’?7 Such theoretical questions around form have been explored and
debated within Victorian Periodicals research for a number of years,8 but it
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 57

seems that the issues facing attempts to historicize magazines within modernism
are somewhat different. The categories of modernism and the avant-garde
themselves create complex problems for the analysis of twentieth-century
periodicals as textual objects; this is not the case for Victorian periodicals,
where work upon theorizing serials is able to explore their variety without
having to engage constantly with definitions of the ‘Victorian’ as a category of
analysis. As Laurel Brake asserts, in nineteenth-century periodical studies, ‘the
focus of research is seldom on their Victorian identity.’9 This is in contrast to
scholars in modernism, who spend an awful lot of time debating the nature
of the modernism they locate in magazines, as well as the parameters of what
constitutes a modernist, rather than merely modern, magazine.10 Here, of course,
scholars of Victorian periodicals are aided by the fact that ‘Victorian’ offers a
ready-made category for literary history, in contrast to the more historically
nebulous concept of ‘modernism’. The notion of the modernist magazine is –
as is modernism itself – perhaps too heterogeneous to be readily reduced to
the familiar generic categories of the nineteenth-century serial (the review, the
weekly, the quarterly, the newspaper).
So we need new methods of analysis. I’ve suggested a couple of these in the
introductions to the already published volumes, referring to the idea of periodical
codes and the periodical field.11 Do we also need to think about employing
some version of Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ methodology for magazines?
Probably.12 However, the irregular nature of many modernist magazines hampers
their ability to be analysed by means of a ‘distant reading’ approach, as has been
carried out upon the large corpora of Victorian periodicals by critics such as
Dallas Liddle and Jim Mussell.13 For example, though the Vorticist magazine
Blast (1914–15) was advertised as a quarterly – a well-established genre of the
nineteenth-century serial – it only ever produced two issues, a year apart, rather
than separated by three months. Similarly, Robert Graves’s The Owl purported
to be another quarterly, but managed only two issues in 1919, with a final issue
in 1923. Alfred Kreymborg’s important magazine of poetry, Others, ran for four
years from 1915, but was only a monthly for the first year; thereafter, as Jay
Bochner notes, it appeared ‘quite irregularly, in spurts of three to four months at
a time’.14 Thus the generically unstable label of the ‘miscellany’, or the temporally
disjunctive term ‘irregular’, is a familiar descriptor of many modernist magazines.
In order, then, to apply some form of Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ to individual
modern periodicals we need a more substantial and stable corpus than is often
available in a number of modernist magazines: many lack the quality of being
what Mussell terms ‘repetitive serial forms’.15 Which perhaps suggests that ‘close
58 Historical Modernisms

reading’ still has a significant role to play when facing textual objects defined as
‘irregular’ or ‘occasional’.16
Certain critics working in modern periodical studies have argued for shifting
attention from the ‘much studied modernist little magazine’ to a wider ‘print
media ecology’ in the early twentieth century, exploring pulp or glossy magazines,
newspapers or newsletters.17 Collier, for example, argues that ‘there is a more
urgent need for mapping the much larger, nonmodernist locales of the vast
landscape of twentieth century print culture than for filling in the blank spots on
the already well-sketched map of modernism’.18 Such arguments are stimulating
and productive in opening up periodical studies and print culture, helping
to understanding the little magazine within the wider field of contemporary
periodicals. This was certainly the aim in the first two volumes of the Oxford
Critical and Cultural Histories, which included essays on many magazines that
cannot be easily defined as modernist ‘little’ magazines, such as the London
Mercury, New Yorker or The Smart Set. However, I would argue that there still
remains very much that is not studied in the modernist little magazine: even if we
just took the corpus of the MJP, with its digitized versions of some twenty-five
magazines, there still exist thousands of pages to be analysed further; unknown
authors and artists to ponder; editorials, adverts and images to digest.19 In many
ways this is not really a ‘well-sketched map of modernism’ at all. For instance, if
we do persevere with some form of close reading of periodicals, then many little
magazines of modernism are only scantily treated, if at all, in comparison to the
work carried out texts that are normally encountered within books. Consider,
for example, how much ‘close reading’ has been conducted on the 500 lines or
so of Eliot’s The Waste Land, whether in a Faber edition or a Norton Anthology,
in comparison to the 5,000 pages or so (85 issues of c. 68 pages) of The Little
Review from 1914 to 1922 that have been digitized by the MJP.20 And even if we
reach for a ‘distant reading’ methodology to help with the labour of analysing
this vast corpus, what are we to do about the seven years of The Little Review
that are not currently digitized and online due to copyright restrictions, and
thus not readily accessible to the probing tools of digital humanities?21 A focus
only upon those magazines available in digital form up to 1923, due to US
copyright laws, inevitably skews our historical conception of what happened to
modernism in the many periodicals published after this date. For example, the
two magazines in which Eliot first published The Waste Land in 1922 prior to
book publication – The Criterion in Britain and The Dial in the United States –
are currently not digitized, and hence a reading of the poem in the context of
the rest of the contents of these magazines is much harder to access. Analysis of
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 59

the contents of these two major magazines, The Criterion as edited by Eliot from
1922 to 1939, and The Dial in the version revived by Scofield Thayer and James
Sibley Watson (1920–9), and edited by Marianne Moore from 1925 onwards, is,
arguably, only starting to be sketched out by scholarship.22 Some of the famous
Anglophone transnational magazines edited in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s
are also not digitized, such as Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review (1924) or
Eugène Jolas’s transition (1927–38). A more deeply historicized modernism thus
needs to take account of the great unread pages of existing magazines and of the
many magazines not readily available for ‘distant reading’ in the digital archive.

Periodization

The burgeoning field of modern periodical studies has significantly revised

both the literary history and the geographical understanding of modernism.
This work has shown that the periodization of modernism and its magazines
needs to be greatly expanded beyond that of traditional accounts that suggest
that modernism (as often conceived in the Anglophone world) starts in the
1910s and concludes in the late 1930s. All of the volumes in the first Modernist
Magazines series pushed the starting point back into the nineteenth century,
in order to trace a fuller genealogy of the ‘little magazine’. In Britain the most
often cited precursor ‘little magazine’ of modernism was that of The Yellow Book
(1894–7), but our research indicated the importance of other magazines such
as the ‘Arts and Crafts’ periodical The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884–94),
the English symbolist publication The Dial (1889–97) or the magazine
of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, The Germ (1850). Such magazines pioneered
the independent ethos and anti-commercial qualities that form the core of
definitions of the modernist ‘little magazine’.23 In North America the 1890s saw
the flourishing of large numbers of ‘ephemeral bibelots’, as F. W. Faxon labelled
them in a bibliography of some 200 such publications in 1903.24 Short-lived
magazines with low circulations and bizarre names (The Freak, The Lark, The Fly
Leaf, The Ghorki) constitute what Kirsten MacLeod has described as a ‘fin-de-
siècle modernism’.25 Turning to Europe we find the 1880s as the point of origin
for the ideas and attitudes of the modernist magazine shown in France with the
appearance of symbolist magazines such as La Plume (1889–1905) or La Revue
Blanche (1889–1903), as well as other ‘petites revues’ such as Le Scapin (1885–6),
and Le Chat Noir (1881–95). The first work of historiography on the ‘little
magazine’ also appeared in France, with Remy de Gourmont’s Les Petites Revues
60 Historical Modernisms

(1900).26 Operating with an earlier genealogy for Spain brought into view the
Catalan magazines of ‘modernisme’ and ‘noucentrisme’, as well as the influence
of Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario’s ‘modernismo’, and the work of the Generation
of ‘98’.27 Including such material demonstrates a theorization of modernity and
the modern that predated many Anglophone versions, thus producing another
challenge to our historical understanding of modernism.28
Extending the genealogy of the modernist magazine back into the late
nineteenth century therefore enables us to understand the emergence of the
‘petites revues’ formula as a response to changes in mainstream publishing, the
development of new (and cheaper) forms of print technology and the emergence
of an aesthetic ideology of cultural production which emphasized formal
experimentation and a rejection of mainstream norms: all features that were
crucial to the explosion of the little magazine in the twentieth century.29
Of equal significance for the historicizing of modernism has been the
extension of the chronology of the modernist magazines beyond the 1930s.30
This enabled us to explore, for example, in a magazine such as The Kenyon
Review (1939–70) the emergence of New Criticism as it codified a certain
version of ‘high modernism’ associated with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. We
could also, therefore, consider how formations such as the Beats, the New York
Poets and the Black Mountain group attempted to revive the revolutionary spirit
of early-twentieth-century modernist experimentation in a different place and
time, in magazines such as Origin (1951–2007) or Yugen (1959–62).31 There
is also a persuasive argument to be made that the modernist little magazine
is very much alive today – in the shape of online poetry publications such as
Jacket, Shearsman, m58, along with myriad others.32 This temporal expansion of
modernism in magazines later into the twentieth century is, as discussed below,
important when venturing beyond an Anglo-European framework. Studying
the history of modernism through the lens of its magazines thus suggests that
periodization must, in particular, be flexible and attentive to specific national
histories of modernism and their evaluations of what it means to be modern.

New spatial histories

A new spatial history of modernism begins to emerge strongly when we expand

the geography of the modernist magazine beyond Europe and Anglo-America.
From the earliest stages of bibliographic research, however, I was aware that there
were forms of modernist magazine published beyond the chosen geography of
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 61

these three volumes. Even in the foundational study of Frederick Hoffman et al.,
The Little Magazine (1946), there are entries for Angry Penguins (Melbourne,
Australia, 1946), Australian New Writing (Sydney, 1943) and Voorslag (Durban,
South Africa, 1926).33 The flourishing study of modern periodicals over the last
two decades is thus part of an expansion in modernist studies itself, particularly
in the considerable new work on transnationalism and globalization.34 Such
innovations have made more visible the fact that the continents of South
America, Africa and Asia all have publications we can understand as modernist
little magazines, and analysing these in more detail will be the principal aim
of the next volumes on Global Modernist Magazines. As Eric Bulson argues
persuasively in Little Magazine, World Form, the little magazine was something
like a ‘world form’ that was crucial in transporting modernism as a movement
around the world, but which was also involved in complex negotiations with
existing forms of national print culture.35
The transnational dimension of the modernist magazine, for instance,
emerged strongly in the first series of volumes, with stories of networks of
international contributors as well as the peregrinations of particular magazines
across continents, such as the ‘American’ magazine Broom (1921–4) in Rome,
Berlin and New York (in which the editors utilized the strength of the dollar
in post–First World War Europe by moving the magazine to places where
publication costs were cheaper). The avant-garde’s complex interactions
between and across continents can also be traced, for example, in the history
of Dada as it zig-zagged between various cities in magazines such as Cabaret
Voltaire (Zurich, 1916), The Blind Man (New York, 1917), Dada (Paris, 1920–
1), Der Dada (Berlin, 1919–20) and back to New York Dada (New York, 1921).
The affiliations between 291 (1915–16) magazine, begun in New York by Alfred
Stieglitz, and Francis Picabia’s 391 (1917), with three issues published in New
York, followed by four issues in Barcelona, and a final issue published in Zurich
in 1919, demonstrate the complex transnational geography of the avant-garde at
this point: tellingly, Tristan Tzara described 391 as a ‘revue en voyage’.36
The issue of magazines ‘en voyage’ created certain problems for the structure
of the original Modernist Magazines Project, and also for its next stage. For,
in locating magazines by their places of publication, we sometimes miss the
other geographical affiliations they have, and their travelling tendencies. This
was always an issue the original series editors were aware of: there was, for
instance, an early discussion about where to place the English-language film
journal Close-Up: published in Switzerland, it was also very engaged with the
German film industry in Berlin, but institutionally linked to the London Film
62 Historical Modernisms

Society. On the advice of Laura Marcus (who contributed the chapter on the
magazine) it was placed in the first volume on Britain and Ireland. But the closer
you look, the more you realize that Close-Up is not alone. Dyn, for example,
was a surrealist magazine published in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944 but
which seems mainly to address debates in London, Paris and New York.37 In the
North American volume I wrote upon the poetry magazine Palms – edited by
a US national, Ida Purnell, and published in Guadalajara 1923–30, but hard to
describe as a Mexican magazine because of its Anglophone contents, minimal
reference to its location, along with an address to networks and audience in the
United States and, to a certain extent, Europe.38
Such magazines might thus be considered to possess multiple spatialities.
Though they were physically located in one or more places of publication, to
a weaker or stronger degree, they also spoke to or for a readership that was
sometimes located in a quite different place. Though closely tied to avant-
garde circles in London, for example, Close-Up frequently engaged with
German expressionist cinema witnessed by the editors in Berlin. Magazines
thus contributed significantly to the historical spread of modernism across
Europe and beyond, demonstrating how modernist ideas travelled around the
globe, interacting with national cultural traditions to produce new forms of
modernist expression. In exploring the transnational travels of modernist little
magazines we are, therefore, studying what Andreas Huyssens, drawing upon
the work of Arjun Appadurai, describes as ‘modernisms at large’, that is, ‘the
cross-national cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of the modern
with the indigenous, the colonial and the postcolonial in the “non-Western”
world’.39
A particularly interesting example of Huyssens’ ‘modernism at large’ is
that of the single-issue magazine Légitime Défense. This was part of a group
of magazines edited by students from French colonial territories who came
together while studying in Paris, and which clearly demonstrates how some
magazines display the concept of multiple spatialities. Strongly linked with the
late colonial theorists of negritude, Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, this
group of magazines included Revue du monde noir (Paris, 1931–32), Légitime
Défense (Paris, 1932), L’Etudiant Noir (Paris, 1934–5) and Tropiques (Martinique,
1941–5). These ‘revue en voyage’ oscillate between the geographies of Europe and
the Caribbean, powerfully addressing various aesthetic and political discourses
within Paris and Martinique simultaneously, in a kind of Bakhtinian double-
voiced discourse, while also reaching out to address emerging anti-colonial
voices in African literature and black writers and artists in the United States.40
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 63

Légitime Défense was produced by a collective of eight middle-class

Martinique students in Paris (Etienne Léro, René Ménil, Jule-Marcel Monnerot,
Michel Pilotin, Maurice-Sabas Quitman, Auguste Thésée and Pierre Yoyotte)
and emerged out of the collapse of Revue du monde noir after six issues. Léro,
Ménil and Monnerot had all contributed to the earlier magazine and wanted to
position Légitime Défense as a more radical critique of political conditions in the
Caribbean. Légitime Défense thus contained a heady mixture of Marxist critique,
anti-colonial discourse and an engagement with one of the most dominant
avant-garde movements in Paris in the early 1930s, surrealism. It also reached
out to Black American writers and other transnational modernist formations by
publishing a section of Claude McKay’s novel Banjo and a polemic by Etienne
Léro on the Scottsboro case in Alabama.41 As Lori Cole notes, in drawing upon
both Marx and André Breton (the title of the magazine was adapted from a 1926
essay by Breton) the magazine ‘appropriated Communist and Surrealist rhetoric
for the purposes of initiating a Caribbean literary and political consciousness’.42
In particular the Légitime Défense collective embraced the way in which both
the surrealists and the French Communist party denounced the 1931 Colonial
Exposition held in Paris.43 What the magazine provides, then, is a complex example
of the ‘negotiation’ between a European modernism and a colonial modernity
forged in the Francophone Caribbean, with its own particular history and
politics.44 Until its absorption into France as a département in 1946, Martinique
was one of France’s vieilles colonies, which had bestowed a limited and subaltern
form of French citizenship upon its inhabitants without the enabling structures
of local democratic government.45 The students from the country that studied
in Paris brought together their complex geopolitical identities in the pages of
the magazine and attempted, in Cole’s words, to ‘insert themselves within a
discourse from which they were previously excluded by their status as other, a
gesture that inaugurates black consciousness into both Western and Caribbean
discourse’.46 This strategy was particularly evident, as Cole demonstrates, in the
magazine’s adoption of a key discursive feature of much avant-gardist discourse,
that of the manifesto form.47 By negotiating both with the manifesto tradition of
Marxism and that of surrealism, the group articulated a unique voice of dissent
for their own anti-colonial voices, as witnessed in this early proclamation in
the magazine: ‘We are speaking to those who are not already branded as killed
established fucked-up academic successful decorated decayed provided for
decorative prudish opportunists.’48
If Marxism and surrealism form the immediate intellectual influences behind
Légitime Défense a more intriguing concept of ‘negotiation’ between European
64 Historical Modernisms

and Caribbean modernisms can be explored if we place the front cover of

Légitime Défense (Figure 2.2) alongside a paradigmatic instance of the Anglo-
American little magazine tradition, Wyndham Lewis’s Blast (Figure 2.1), in its
first issue of 1914.
What is interesting here is the obvious resemblance of format, or what I
would call the shared periodical codes of these two modernist magazines:49 there
are striking similarities between the use of colour (black print on a puce/pink

Figure 2.1 Cover of the Journal Blast, no.1, 1914. Image courtesy of The Modernist
Journals Project. Brown and Tulsa Universities, www.modjourn.org.
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 65

Figure 2.2 Cover of the Journal Légitime Défense, 1932.

66 Historical Modernisms

background) and a sans-serif typeface, laid out in an affront to the horizontality

of normal typography. There is no obvious evidence to indicate that the Légitime
Défense group were consciously copying the stylings of Blast: rather, the point is
that the two magazines seem to illustrate Huyssens’ notion of ‘the cross-national
cultural forms’ that we can detect once we widen the spatial history of modernism
to study the ‘negotiations’ between Western and non-Western instances of
magazine publication. Blast and Légitime Défense not only share a sustained
use of the manifesto format within their pages but also exhibit a similarity in
tone: the famed ‘blasts’ of Lewis’s magazine against English Victorian culture
or Italian Futurism are echoed in the opening manifesto statement in Légitime
Défense, which attacks the Black bourgeoisie in the Caribbean as ‘one of the most
depressing things on earth’ and then continues,
we declare (and we shall not retract this declaration) that, faced with all the
administrative, governmental, parliamentary, industrial, commercial corpses
and so on, we intend – as traitors to this class – to take the path of treason so
far as possible. We spit on everything they love and venerate, on everything that
gives them sustenance and joy.50

Clearly the attack in Légitime Défense has a more political cast than is found
in Blast, which was aimed primarily at what Lewis perceived as the backward
aesthetic and cultural formations that prevailed in Britain, and which Vorticism
might readily replace. The critique in Légitime Défense is more self-directed
(Edwards memorably terms it a ‘kind of class suicide’), aimed at a Martinique
bourgeoisie (from which the editors all came) that celebrated French culture
above all as a model for Caribbean writing.51 However, both magazines share
a certain attitude, that of the voice of the confrontational modernist magazine
aiming to épater les bourgeois, willing to ‘spit on everything they love and
venerate’ in a manifesto. It is this shared tone that is marked by the striking
similarity of the covers of the two magazines.
Légitime Défense is not then ‘influenced’ by Blast, consciously or
unconsciously, but can be seen as exemplifying certain of the features of the
‘cross-national cultural form’ (Huyssens) of the modernist magazine that
previous histories of modernism have tended to view as an exclusively ‘Western’
form. In particular Légitime Défense finds its voice by a negotiation between
the multiple spatialities encountered in its pages: living in Paris as colonial
outsiders these young students review both their native Caribbean home and
its Black bourgeoisie, while drawing inspiration for this reassessment from the
Western intellectual formations of Marxism and surrealism; simultaneously
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 67

they look to Black America for inspiration, a strategy which opens onto another
geography, that of Africa. Etienne Léro’s account of the ‘poverty’ of Caribbean
poetry thus ends by bringing these diverse spatial locations together when he
writes, ‘Let’s hope the wind rising from black America will quickly cleanse our
Caribbean of the aborted fruits of a decrepit culture’.52 He then looks to two
‘black revolutionary poets, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay’ to bring to the
Caribbean their ‘African love of life, the African joy of love, the African dream of
death’. The outcome, imagines Léro, will be that ‘the black proletariat – sucked
dry in the Caribbean by a parasitic hybrid caste in the pocket of degenerate
whites – will manage, by breaking this double yoke, to establish that one has
a right both to eat and have a life of the mind, from that day forth alone will a
Caribbean poetry exist’.53
Légitime Défense is, then, a fascinating example of what Bulson describes as the
‘strange amalgam of print media’ that characterizes modernist little magazines
emerging out of conditions of colonial modernity.54 Placing it alongside a
magazine such as Blast, which has a paradigmatic position in the history of
the avant-garde in the Anglophone world, continues a conversation about the
transnational and international formations of modernism that is ongoing in
our discipline. It would be far too easy to view a magazine such as Légitime
Défense as simply a ‘belated’ version of the modernism of Blast, drawing upon
similar periodical codes in its use of the manifesto or experimental typographic
formatting. Rather the best way to understand Légitime Défense is as a magazine
viewed through the lens of its multiple spatialities and its particular historical
moment, where its coding and content are produced by the dynamic interaction
of its diverse geopolitical and aesthetic affiliations.
Modernism thus starts to look different when we view it primarily through
the history of its magazines; it begins to look even more different – diverse,
strange, provocative– when we juxtapose magazines from one familiar iteration
of modernism (the Western avant-garde), with that of periodical forms from
elsewhere: Blast next to Légitime Défense; the Tokyo avant-garde production, Mavo
(1924) alongside Bauhaus magazines; the Transition from Uganda (founded in
1961 by Rajat Neogy and then edited by Wole Soyinka in 1973) alongside Eugène
Jolas’ Paris-based transition.55 And in the case of transition/Transition it is worth
pondering further the differing historical nuances embodied in the title of the
respective magazines: from a slogan in Paris searching for the next iteration of
the avant-garde (such as the promotion in its pages of Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’)
to a (post)colonial notion of a shift to national independence (Uganda gained
formal independence from Britain a year after the first issue of Transition). For
68 Historical Modernisms

this reason the next volumes of the Modernist magazine project will aim to
consider carefully the material print culture of specific nations when tracing
the diffusion of the little magazine across the globe, along with the complex
travels and multiple spatialities of these ‘revues en voyage’. In this way we hope to
productively trouble the story we tell ourselves about how modernism emerged
in the magazines, and the historical understanding we have of modernism itself.

Notes

1 See Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An

Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 73.
2 For an indication of this work see, inter alia, Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender
of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman
Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988,
1989, 1994); Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’,
PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48. There have been three Queer Modernisms
conference held in Britain since 2017 (see https://queermodernismconference.
wordpress.com) and see also Benjamin Kahane, ‘Queer Modernism’, in A Handbook
of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Oxford: Wiley, 2013), 347–61.
3 Mao and Walkowitz, ‘New Modernist Studies’, 737.
4 For the MJP, see http://modjourn.org//; Blue Mountain Project http://bluemountain.
princeton.edu/bluemtn/cgi-bin/bluemtn; Monoskop magazines https://monoskoorg/
Avant-garde_and_modernist_magazines; Pulp magazines https://www.pulpmags.
org; Middlebrow network https://www.middlebrow–network.com.
5 The first series consisted of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist
Magazines Vol. I: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009); Vol. II: North America, 1894–1960 (2012), eds. Peter Brooker and Andrew
Thacker; Vol. III, Europe 1880–1940 (2013), eds. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew
Thacker, and Christian Weiko. All subsequent references to these volumes will be
by short title and volume number. The second series of volumes will be called The
Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines, and the series
editors are Eric Bulson and Andrew Thacker. The first volume, on magazines in
South America and the Caribbean, will be edited by Andrew Thacker and María del
Pilar Blanco.
6 See Matthew Philpotts, ‘Defining the Thick Journal: Periodical Codes and Common
Habitus’, paper from the MLA 2013 Special Session, ‘What Is a Journal? Towards a
Theory of Periodical Studies,’ available at http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/jvc/files/2012/12/
mla2013_philpotts.pdf.
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 69

7 Jeff Drouin, ‘Close and Distant Reading Modernism’, Journal of Modern Periodical
Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 115. For a discussion of periodical editors using Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus, see Matthew Philpotts, ‘The Role of the Periodical Editor’,
Modern Language Review 107, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 39–64.
8 See, for example, the special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review, Fall 2015, on ‘The
Return to Theory’, itself a reprise of an issue of the same journal from 1989.
9 Laurel Brake, ‘The Case of W. T. Stead’, in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940:
Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 152.
10 For a provocative argument that the category of ‘modernism’ is something of a
hindrance to the development of a theory of ‘modern periodical studies’, see Patrick
Collier, ‘What Is Modern Periodical Studies?’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies
6, no. 2 (2015): 92–111.
11 See Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction: Magazines, Magazines, Magazines!’,
Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Vol. II, 1–30.
12 For one such attempt, see the special issue on ‘Visualizing Periodical Networks’,
Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 5, no. 1 (2014).
13 See, for example, Dallas Liddle, ‘Genre: “Distant Reading” and the Goals of
Periodicals Research’, Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 383–402.
14 Jay Bochner, ‘Others’, in American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century, ed.
Edward E. Chielens (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1992), 232.
15 James Mussell, ‘Repetition: Or, “In Our Last’”, Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3
(Fall 2015): 345; Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).
16 See Drouin, ‘Close and Distant Reading Modernism’, for an argument in favour of
combining distant and close reading methodologies. Collier suggests an approach
that draws upon the notion of ‘surface reading’ initially proposed by Stephen Best
and Sharon Marcus and related to periodicals by Margaret Cohen; see Collier,
‘What Is Modern Periodical Studies?’ 107–8.
17 See Ardis and Collier, ‘Introduction’ to Transatlantic Print Culture, 5; 8. See also
Faye Hammill, Paul Hjartarson, and Hannah McGregor, ‘Introduction’ and Patrick
Collier, ‘What Is Modern Periodical Studies?’ in the special issue, ‘Magazines and/
as Media: Periodical Studies and the Question of Disciplinarity’, Journal of Modern
Periodical Studies 6, no. 2 (Nov. 2015): iii–xiii and 92–111.
18 Collier, ‘What Is Modern Periodical Studies?’ 99.
19 See Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, 20–1.
20 For the MJP digital editions of The Little Review, see http://www.modjourn.org/
render.php?view=mjp_object&id=LittleReviewCollection.
21 Roxanne Shirazi argues that one way past the impasse of copyright is for
digital humanities to access the underlying data rather than the page images of
copyrighted periodicals. See Roxanne Shirazi, ‘A Digital Wasteland: Modernist
Periodical Studies, Digital Remediation, and Copyright’ in Creating Sustainable
70 Historical Modernisms

Community: The Proceedings of the ACRL 2015 Conference, March 25–28, Portland,
Oregon, edited by Dawn M. Mueller (Chicago: Association of College and Research
Libraries, 2015), 192–9. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/
conferences/confsandpreconfs/2015/ACRL2015_A.pdf.
22 For work on these two magazines, see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural
Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002); and Victoria Bazin, Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial
Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
23 See, for example, the definition given by Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and
Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1947), 2, and a more recent one by Suzanne Churchill
and Adam McKible, ‘Little Magazines and Modernism: An Introduction’, American
Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography 15, no.1 (2005): 3.
24 See Frederick Winthrop Faxon, Ephemeral Bibelots: A Bibliography of the Modern
Chap Books and Their Imitators (Boston: Boston Book Company, 1903).
25 Kirsten MacLeod, ‘The Fine Art of Cheap Print: Turn of the Century American Little
Magazines’, in Transatlantic Print Culture, 184. MacLeod’s recent book demonstrates
a larger corpus of material in the category of American ‘ephemeral bibelots’ and also
poses some excellent questions about how we should understand these magazines
within the wider history of modernism; see MacLeod, American Magazines of the
Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2018).
26 Remy De Gourmont, Les Petites Revues, essai de bibliographie (Paris: Librairie du
Mercure de France, 1900).
27 See Lori Cole, ‘Madrid: Questioning the Avant-Garde’ and Geoffrey West,
‘“Noucentrisme” and the Avant-Garde in Barcelona’, in Modernist Mazagines Vol.
III, 369–91 and 392–412.
28 For a succinct discussion of this issue, see Gerard Aching, ‘The Temporalities
of Modernity in Spanish American Modernismo: Darío’s Bourgeois King’ in The
Oxford Handbook of Global Modernism, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
29 For a discussion of these features, see the ‘General Introduction’ to both Modernist
Magazines Vol. I: Britain and Ireland and Vol. II: North America.
30 For Europe the complications attendant upon the effect of the Second World War,
such as the redrawing of national borders, meant that we decided to stop at 1940.
31 For a discussion of these magazines, see chapters 40–44 of Modernist Magazines
Vol. II: North America.
32 For Jacket see http://jacket2.org; for Shearsman see https://www.shearsman.com/
shearsman-magazine; for m58 see https://www.m58.co.uk.
33 Hoffman, The Little Magazine, 351, 364, 388.
 Spatial Histories of Magazines and Modernisms 71

34 See, inter alia, Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and
Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Susan
Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and The Oxford Handbook of Global
Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
35 See Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2017).
36 Tristan Tzara in Dada 4–5, quoted in Debbie Lewer ‘The Avant-Garde in Swiss
Exile 1914–20’, in Modernist Magazines Vol. III, 1047.
37 See Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell, eds, Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle
in Mexico (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2012).
38 See Andrew Thacker, ‘Poetry in Perspective: The Melange of the 1920s’, in
Modernist Magazines Vol. II, 320–46.
39 Andreas Huyssens, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, in
Geographies of Modernism, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London:
Routledge, 2005), 9. See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1996).
40 For a discussion of these magazines, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice
of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
41 Etienne Léro, ‘Civilisation’, Légitime Défense, no. 1 (1932): 9. On the significance of
McKay for black intellectuals in Paris, see Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 187–240.
42 Lori Cole, ‘Légitime Défense: From Communism and Surrealism to Caribbean Self-
Definition’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 4, no. 1 (2010): 15. The question
of whether, or if at all, Légitime Défense predates the theory of negritude is the
subject of much critical debate; for an overview of this issue, see Edwards, Practice
of Diaspora, 194.
43 Cole, ‘Légitime Défense’, 21–2.
44 There is considerable discussion upon the nature of the ‘modernity’ found in the
various territories of the Caribbean, many of which have diverse, rather than
shared, histories of colonial and political rule. To refer to the ‘colonial modernity’
of the Caribbean is to signal a complex set of questions surrounding how these
various islands engaged with the impact of colonization and the forms of social
and economic modernity attendant upon these, including centrally the fact of
slavery and the development of the plantation, and the types of modernism that
emerged out of these multiple interactions. As Mary Lou Emery notes, in an
essay that reads Caribbean literature as a kind of ‘contramodernism’, we can ‘read
Caribbean modernism as constitutive of a previously defined modernism and also
72 Historical Modernisms

counter to it: simultaneously interconnected with alternative modernisms’, such

as ‘Latin American surrealism … the Harlem Renaissance, and the Francophone
cultural and political movement of Négritude’. See Mary Lou Emery, ‘Caribbean
Modernism: Plantation to Planetary’, in Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms,
51.
45 For more context, see Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude
and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2005).
46 Cole, ‘Légitime Défense’, 26.
47 See ibid., 17–19.
48 Légitime Défense, 2; I am using the translation given in Refusal of the Shadow:
Surrealism and the Caribbean, eds. Krzysztof Fijałkowski and Michael Richardson
(London: Verso, 1996), 42.
49 For the concept of periodical codes, see ‘General Introduction’, Modernist
Magazines, Vol. 1, 6–8.
50 ‘Declaration’, Légitime Défense, 2 (translation from Refusal of the Shadow, 43).
51 Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 191.
52 Etienne Léro, ‘Misère d’une Poésie’, Légitime Défense, 12 (translation from Refusal of
the Shadow, 58).
53 Ibid., 58. Edwards is critical of Légitime Défense for its use of terms such as ‘black
proletariat’, arguing that the magazine could neither grasp conceptually what this
term entailed nor help organize it; Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 198.
54 Eric Bulson, ‘Little Magazine, World Form’, in The Oxford Handbook of Global
Modernisms, 268.
55 For a brief discussion of Mavo, see Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form, 62–4;
for Transition, see Peter Benson, Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural
Awakening in Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
 3

Rethinking the modernist moment: Crisis,

(im)potentiality and E. M. Forster’s failed Kairos
Vassiliki Kolocotroni

Bookended by two world wars, and as many twists in imperialist fortunes,

inspired by a number of revolutionary movements and fuelling many militancies
to more or less successful emancipatory ends and ongoing practices of dissent,
modernism can be said (pace Eliot’s Prufrock) to have had ‘the strength to
force the moment to its crisis’. A close relative of the Paterian prescription of
passionate intensity for ‘the given time’1 (itself an early figuration of Alain
Badiou’s diagnosis of the modernist century’s ‘passion for the real’),2 and
similarly concerned with relegating the possibility of climax to aesthetic
sublimation, the moment in modernism is the generic bearer of crisis, in both
its quantitative and qualitative aspects – in the temporal sense with its qualities
of suddenness,3 evanescence, fleetingness, spontaneity, presentness and their
attendant affective, epistemological and ethical associations: shock, wonder,
quickening of the senses, estrangement, defamiliarization, jouissance, sense
of liberation, connectedness/disconnectedness, transience. In formal terms,
modernist writing often relies on the moment for its signature effects: Helen
Carr and Richard Parker,4 for instance, have read the Poundian doctrine of the
‘Image’ (‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of time’),5 as well as Zukofsky’s early Objectivist writing as enacting the Paterian
aesthetic moment, and one could argue that even the caesurae that introduce
The Waste Land’s abject metamorphoses (‘Twit twit twit/Jug jug jug jug jug jug/
So rudely forc’d/Tereu’) rely as much on the sudden appearance of the aesthetic
moment as on an apocalyptic synchronicity. In the case of T. E. Hulme’s imagistic
flourishes, in poems such as ‘The Sunset’ (1909), the ‘intellectual and emotional
complex’ flashing (the reader) ‘in an instant of time’, may also be viewed as an
74 Historical Modernisms

effect of crisis, both of lyrical and cultural convention, and potentially more
violently perhaps, of masculinity too:

A coryphée, covetous of applause,

Loth to leave the stage,
With final diablerie, poises high her toe,
Displays scarlet lingerie of carmin’d clouds,
Amid the hostile murmurs of the stalls.6

Along the same trajectory one encounters other modernist staple devices, such
as Woolf ’s ‘moments of being’ and Joyce’s epiphanies, recorded experiences
of ‘“luminous” correspondence between an internal predisposition and a
powerfully felt external perception’, as Ashton Nichols puts it,7 which critics
have classified variously within spiritual or vitalist or psychoanalytical or other
scientific frameworks,8 and whose provenance has also been traced to Victorian
motifs, such as Robert Browning’s ‘good minute’ or ‘infinite moment’.9 In turn,
the visual and spatial signature of these sudden and transformative recognitions
connects them to devices integral to other modernist techniques such as
collage, Eisensteinian montage and surrealist trouvailles (‘lucky finds’), the
latter appearing under the auspices of another variant of the critical moment,
‘objective chance’ [le hasard objectif].10 This panoply of related formal events
may be associated in a sweeping gesture with modernism’s critical construction
of a personal history within, or as Alan Wilde put it, ‘vis-à-vis large, imposing
structures’ and its ‘intense need to shape a disordered world – not, in the first
instance, either to reform or escape it but, instead, to establish, if only negatively,
a relationship with it.’11
The paradoxical effect of this kind of concatenation, however, that is of the
classification of these cognate effects under a common rubric, is the normalization
of crisis and its moment into what can appear at times as a phenomenological
impressionism, a phantasmagoria of perceptions and responses in a somewhat
forced, seemingly necessary disunity or random order. The quotidianizing of the
crisis moment, a guiding principle in many accounts of the modernist everyday,
posits a problem, both methodological and strategic. It is perhaps with good
reason that Leon Trotsky balked when André Breton outlined his theory of
‘objective chance’ at their meeting in Mexico in 1938:
At other times he took up this or that concept which he considered worthy
of putting before me, submitting it to a sharp critique. He thus said one day:
‘Comrade Breton, your interest in phenomena of objective chance does not
appear clear to me. Yes, I know well that Engels referred to this notion, but I ask
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 75

myself if, in your case, it isn’t something else. I am not sure you aren’t interested
in keeping open (his hands described a little space in the air) a little window on
the beyond.’12

For someone like Trotsky, concerned with the ‘revolutionary expansion of the
concept of the everyday’ and ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’13
anything vaguely smacking of ‘the beyond’ would be anathema.14 Marxist post-
revolutionary thought concerned itself exhaustively with matters of the everyday,
of course, through relating them to radical concepts of reality, the present, class
consciousness, alienation and the philosophy of praxis more broadly, all paths
that lead us firmly away from crisis and towards critique. In a temporal and
formal sense, these concerns may also lead us away from the modernist moment
as symptom of crisis, and the motif of the sudden, fleeting awareness of it.
What still remains, however, is the need to think about those irruptions
of critical content in the continuum of represented experience as they are
re-collected in modernist tranquillity. I would like to suggest two ways in which
one might rethink modernist crisis, without making of it a generalized, normal
condition, with the moment as its symptom or saving grace, working its magic
on the individual. Both involve retrospection, a sense of (at least possible)
collectivity and connectivity and a sense of urgency. The first by way of a concept
that has gained much currency recently, mainly through the work of Alain
Badiou, namely the event. The event in a Badiouan sense creates subjects, and
fidelity to the event ‘binds the subject to a truth’. As Badiou puts it:
Every process of truth begins with an event. An event is unpredictable and
incalculable – it is a supplement of the situation. Every truth, and therefore every
subject, depends upon an evental emergence. A truth and a subject of truth do
not derive from what there is, but from what happens, in the strong sense of the
term ‘happens.’15

An event in that sense will puncture time and inaugurate a new subject, who in
turn will commit to that evental transformation. In other words, it is the aspect
of active, subject-forming intervention and innovation, that strong sense of
‘happens’ rather than ‘appears’, that distinguishes the concept of ‘event’ from the
‘moment’. Though there is no reason why a moment can’t be isolated as partly
inaugurating an event, the event is only thinkable (and formative of subjects and
truth processes) with the immediate hindsight afforded by the new experience
of time after the event – put crudely, it is about action, not perception, about
the new militancy and praxis arising from it rather than about the moment of
its coming to pass. Eventality thus outlasts the moment and sets in motion a
76 Historical Modernisms

transformative durée which confirms the subject through its fidelity to the
originary act. Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, for instance, may be considered in this
light as recording evental subject formations and deformations, as seen in the
retrospections of Septimus, Clarissa or Miss Killman, though the truth processes
inaugurated in their lives may ultimately lead to an impossible existence in the
now. That’s one example – Yeats’s 1916, Eliot’s conversion may be read eventally
through their writing too.
I want to move swiftly and speculatively to another cognate concept,
however, which I would propose as equally relevant for an attempt to finesse
our understanding of modernism’s moment and as alternative to its association
with epiphanic and evanescent shock effects. The concept which offers us these
alternative inflections is that of ‘kairos’,16 with its multiple associations with crisis,
exception, emergency, urgency, temporal disjunction, inaugural potentiality,
freedom and pleasure. In the Foreword to a collection of essays on Rhetoric
and Kairos, Carolyn R. Miller cites Erwin Panofsky’s description of the iconic
representation of Kairos in classical art:
‘Kairos’; that is, the brief, decisive moment which marks a turning-point in the
life of human beings or in the development of the universe. This concept was
illustrated by the figure vulgarly known as Opportunity […], a man (originally
nude) in fleeting movement, usually young […] equipped with wings both at the
shoulder and at the heels. His attributes were a pair of scales, originally balanced
on the edge of a shaving knife, and, in a somewhat later period, one or two
wheels. Moreover his head often showed the proverbial forelock by which bald-
headed Opportunity can be seized.17

Originally denoting the strategically aimed mortal blow (as in the Iliad), later
adopted by rhetoricians to define the appropriate, exact delivery of the clincher
line in an argument or oration, and by early Christian writers as ‘the time of
the now’ as urgent, messianic time, kairos is antithetical to the psychoanalytical
logic of trauma, that is to the repressed or latent aspect of experience, or indeed
to the very logic of forgetting itself. It is instead the assumption of a heightened
reality in the present that signals the dissolution of temporal boundaries: even
in its eccentric, chemically induced configuration as the union with the cosmos
afforded by the psychedelic experience as preached by Ken Kesey and the Merry
Pranksters of the 1960s, kairos takes on the form of a release from the limits of
time and space – as Tom Wolfe recalled:
Gradually the Prankster attitude began to involve the main things religious
mystics have always felt, things common to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians,
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 77

and for that matter Theosophists and even flying-saucer cultists. Namely the
experiencing of an Other World, a higher level of reality. And a perception of the
cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that
what we know as time is only the result of a naïve faith in causality – the notion
that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when
actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by
opening the doors of perception and experiencing it … in this moment … this
supreme moment … this Kairos.18

Though partaking of qualities of liminality (especially if configured in a spatial

as well as temporal sense, that is, when referring to the exact place in which a
strike is made, which presupposes an inexact – ákairos – spot),19 kairos is of
the order of the strong potentiality, of now-time as seized time, or as Giorgio
Agamben puts it, ‘the only real time, the only time we have’:20
What do we have when we have kairos? The most beautiful definition of kairos
I know of occurs in the Corpus Hippocraticum which characterizes it in relation
to chronos. It reads: chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en ho ou pollos chronos,
chronos is that in which there is kairos, and kairos is that in which there is little
chronos.21

In other words, for Agamben, ‘[w]hereas our representation of chronological

time, as the time in which we are, separates us from ourselves and transforms
us into impotent spectators of ourselves […], messianic time, as operational
time in which we take hold of and achieve our representations of time, is the
time that we ourselves are.’22 Here, Agamben glosses kairos via the concept of the
messianic event in the writing of Saint Paul:
Paul’s technical term for the messianic event is ho nyn kairos, ‘the time of the
now’; this is why Paul is an apostle and not a prophet. […] [T]he messianic event
is not the end of time, but the time of the end … What interests the apostle is not
the last day, it is not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts
itself and begins to end …, or if you prefer, the time that remains between time
and its end.23

Agamben embraces the eschatological associations of the term, though he

reads them through a Benjaminian lens which accords our consciousness
of the time that remains a ‘weak messianic power’.24 Agamben relates this
reflection to Paul’s statement in the second letter to Corinthians: ‘power
fulfils itself in weakness.’25 The implications of this line of thinking for a
critique of power are of broader interest for Agamben, especially in his
reading of Aristotle’s discussion of ‘impotentiality’,26 and Heidegger’s
78 Historical Modernisms

interpretation of it in his 1931 lecture course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics.27

In a stronger, materialist reading, closer to Badiou’s eventalism, however,
Antonio Negri has read kairos as the precipitation, or as he puts it, ‘decision
of a new being’:28
If consciousness perceives kairòs ambiguously, as ‘being on the brink’, as ‘being
on a razor’s edge’, i.e. as the instant in which the ‘archer looses the arrow’, then
kairòs becomes the restlessness of temporality – the name we wanted for that
experience. But if it is so, we will then be able to ask ourselves if kairòs is not
equally real insistence in that point of time defined by the point of that arrow;
that is to say, being’s act of leaning out over the void of the time to-come, i.e
the adventure beyond the edge of time. In third place, we will be able to ask
ourselves if kairòs is not – simpliciter – power to experience temporality.29

Concerned (like Badiou) with the transformation of ‘the ontology of temporality

into a production of truth’, and more specifically with praxis, Negri posits a ‘decisive
function’ for kairos as ‘an event of generation’, ‘the arrow that has been released’.30
The extension of kairos into the to-come opens up utopian potentialities, but also
acts of creation in the now, imagination as a ‘linguistic gesture, hence a common
gesture’, as Negri puts it; ‘the gesture which throws a web over the to-come so as to
know it, construct it, organize it with power’.31 In what follows, I consider briefly
how the concept of kairos, in both its strong and weak expressions, might add a
resonance to modernist formulations of the supreme instant.
One could read much modernist poetry kairologically, along the lines
of this restless temporality: Eliot’s later reflections, for instance, where kairos
is subsumed, pacified in chronos, as in these lines from ‘East Coker’: ‘Not the
intense moment/Isolated, with no before and after,/But a lifetime burning in
every moment’; Yeats’s questions (as in the last lines of ‘Leda and the Swan’)
could be read as kairotic moments as formulated this time by Heidegger, that
is as moments ‘that impos[e] [their] own time by apprehending us through
a genuine asking of questions’,32 moments, as Heidegger puts it, ‘when we
are pushed out into the open’.33 Or, to return to modernism, the caesura of
Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ may be read as the kairotic moment of a
seized potentiality of transformation, not merely an interruption in perception.
For Gregory Mason, this moment would be a variant of the kairoticism (and
one might add, eventalism) of the haiku, the effect of which he approaches in
Paterian terms:
Each haiku poem could be said to build upon its own particular kairos, its
‘haiku moment.’ This ‘haiku moment’ denotes a kind of kairos when a seemingly
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 79

commonplace event becomes the inspiration for a poem. The event presents
an intersection of the transient with the enduring, and the concrete image
embodying it resonates with associations and connotations. The haiku form is
radically kairotic, urging a sensitivity to experience that enhances the quality of
each passing moment.34

For Theodor Adorno, it is the ‘snatched instant’, or the captivating detail that
in its intensity kairotically confirms the totality of the artwork – as he puts it in
Aesthetic Theory:
That in many of its elements the artwork becomes more intense, thickens,
and explodes, gives the impression of being an end in itself; the great unities
of composition and construction seem to exist only for the purpose of such
intensity. Accordingly, contrary to current aesthetic views, the whole in truth
exists only for the sake of its parts – that is, its καιρός, the instant – and not the
reverse.35

Equally resonant, but more complex in their associations with potentiality

and praxis, as well as a ‘weak messianic power’, are the kairoticisms of those
modernist events which arise from a moment whose truth was not fully lived,
yet whose momentousness has cast a shadow of protracted potentiality over life,
a kind of radical waiting, as identified by Adorno in his reading of Beckett:
[H]is consciousness was correct that the need for progress is inextricable from
its impossibility. The gesture of walking in place at the end of Godot, which is
the fundamental motif of the whole of his work, reacts precisely to this situation.
Without exception his response is violent. His work is the extrapolation of a
negative καιρός.36

There are many such moments in Woolf ’s writing (who can also be kairotic in
a positive sense, as in Orlando or To the Lighthouse), but also and perhaps most
strikingly in E. M. Forster’s many staged encounters between the ‘tame and the
savage’, between classes and ‘races’. In his various ‘panics’, rare ‘happy endings’,
where two men ‘fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction
allows’,37 but mainly in the recurrent ‘No’s, “not yet … not there” of his characters’
prospects,38 Forster seems to be constructing a form of queer kairos, which
encompasses the desire to ‘only connect the prose and the passion’, as in the
famous, ambiguous final maxim of Howards End,39 its power and its impossibility.
As Frank Kermode has shown in his classic exploration of fictions of ‘the End’,
narrative endings are the very stuff of kairotic temporality: ‘The fictive end
purges the interval of simple chronicity. It achieves a “temporal integration” –
it converts a blank into a kairos, charges it with meaning.’40 For Kermode,
80 Historical Modernisms

‘[t]his is the time of the novelist, a transformation of mere successiveness which

has been likened, by writers as different as Forster and Musil, to the experience
of love, the erotic consciousness which makes divinely satisfactory sense out of
the commonplace person.’41 Kermode’s discussion of the formal kairoticism of
narrative time per se may provide a broad and still useful entry point, but in the
final part of this essay, I would like to explore further the specificity and, pace
Kermode, the ‘divinely’ unsatisfactory sense of Forsterian kairos.
In terms of our discussion so far, Forster’s queer kairos is both evental and
negative in the sense that while it may be experienced as ‘the time of the instant,
the moment of rupture and opening of temporality’, a ‘restless temporality’, as
Negri glosses it in his reading of kairos (except for Maurice’s wilful, all-that-
heaven-will-allow ending), usually inaugurates a betrayal rather than a fidelity
to the event. The ‘plain, simple man, with no pretensions to literary style’ who
narrates ‘The Story of a Panic’, fails to understand the salutary ‘laughter of the
escaping [English] boy’, or the sudden death of the Italian ‘fisher-lad’, after their
kairotic, Pan-presided encounter in the Ravello wood;42 in ‘The Road from
Colonus’, the ageing, babbling Mr. Lucas betrays the experience of the ‘supreme
event’ awaiting him ‘in that place and with those people’ in Greece, which for a
‘tremendous moment’ he was certain ‘would transfigure the face of the world’,43
as does the ‘authoress’ Miss Raby, in ‘The Eternal Moment’, whose inability
genuinely to ‘connect the prose and the passion’ in her romanticized rendition
of the place of her ‘missed moment’ with the Italian porter has only the effect
of turning the idyllic small town into a hot spot for the wrong kind of tourist.44
It is in the suppressed, openly homoerotic stories, however, that Forster writes
out the full ramifications of a queer kairos, most notably in ‘The Life to Come’
(1922), which casts a moment of Christian conversion in the light of queer love.
In its failed (and in that sense strong) messianism and the fatal inversions on
which it relies, its insistence on the ‘no more’ as a ‘not yet’, Forster’s linguistic
gesture here seems suspended over the precipice of time conceived as crisis and
kairos. The story is based on a typically Forsterian encounter between the young
English missionary, Paul Pinmay, stationed in an unspecified foreign country,
and the young native chief Vithobai-cum-Barnabas, as he is named after his
conversion to Christianity. The choice of names for both missionary and convert
is significant, and points to a set of foundational but troubled couplings: in the
New Testament, Barnabas, meaning ‘the son of consolation’, is the mediator of
the converted Saul to the suspicious disciples at Jerusalem (Acts 9.27), the one
who brings Saul-cum-Paul back from Tarsus to join the church at Antioch and
goes out with him on the first missionary journey (Acts 11.25f), and between
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 81

whom and Paul there is a decisive later rupture (Acts 15.26-40).45 For Badiou,
who ‘ha[s] never really connected Paul with religion’, Paul is ‘a poet-thinker of
the event’, a ‘militant figure’.46 Though his approach could not be further from
Forster’s adaption of the figure of Paul, as we will see, Badiou’s gloss on the
critical moment of the future apostle’s life resonates with our discussion and the
kairotic terms of Forster’s story: ‘Is the term “conversion” appropriate to what
happened on the road to Damascus? It was a thunderbolt, a caesura, and not
a dialectical reversal.’47 The opening of ‘The Life to Come’ introduces Paul and
Vithobai, unnamed, in a post-caesura scene, in a spatial and temporal setting
of potentiality, immediately reverting through another caesura of shameful
recognition to regret and resignation:
Love had been born somewhere in the forest, of what quality only the future
could decide. Trivial or immortal, it had been born to two human bodies as a
midnight cry. Impossible to tell whence the cry had come, so dark was the forest.
Or into what worlds it would echo, so vast was the forest. Love had been born for
good or evil, for a long life or a short. […] A remote, a romantic spot … lovely …
lovable. And then he caught sight of a book on the floor, and he dropped beside
it with a dramatic moan as if it was a corpse and he the murderer. For the book
in question was his Holy Bible. […] ‘Oh, what have I done?’ […] ‘Only one end
to this, he thought.’48

Written in reverse order in four sections, ‘Night’, ‘Evening’, ‘Day’, ‘Morning’, the
story is the violent extrapolation (to paraphrase Adorno) of a fatal betrayal of a
kairotic event. Having converted through and for love, rejected but faithful (in a
double, queer sense, that is, faithful in Christ, but also faithful to his first night
with Paul, as well as to his language), Vithobai/Barnabas pleads with Paul to
fulfil his promise of a love and life to come:
Tepid, impersonal, as if he still discussed public affairs, the young man said: ‘Let
us both be entirely reasonable, sir. God continues to order me to love you. It is
my life, whatever else I seem to do. My body and the breath in it are still yours,
though you wither them up with this waiting. Come into the last forest, before
it is cut down, and I will be kind, and all may end well. But it is now five years
since you first said Not yet.’
‘It is, and now I say Never.’
‘This time you say Never?’
‘I do.’49

In a kairotic context, the clergyman’s ‘I do’ is a lying word, a denial proffered

as an affirmation; conversely, when urged to confess to his love as a sin, the
convert’s ‘No’ is a truth and a conviction:
82 Historical Modernisms

Do you repent of your words?

No.
Then you must be punished. As the head of the community you are bound to
set an example. You are fined one hundred pounds for backsliding.
‘No.’ Then as if to himself he said: ‘First the grapes of my body are pressed.
Then I am silenced. Now I am punished. Night, evening and a day. What
remains?’50

What remains is a betrayal of ‘the time when it was still time’ (as Beckett might
have put it),51 and a waiting for Vithobai/Barnabas, whose conversion translates
his desire into a messianic idiom and the invocation of ‘the life to come’, which
ironically he elicits from the clergyman in the final scene. The story closes with
the end of the two lovers (as now old, consumptive Vithobai/Barnabas stabs an
urgently repenting Paul – false or weak apostle that he has proved to be) at the
moment of his own death:
The jerk the knife gave brought his own fate hurrying upon him. He had scarcely
the strength to push the body onto the asphalt or to spread the skein of blue
flowers. […] He dragged himself up, he looked over the parapet. Below him were
a horse and cart, beyond, the valley which he had once ruled, the site of the hut,
the ruins of his old stockade, the schools, the hospital, the cemetery, the stacks
of timber, the polluted stream, all that he had been used to regard as signs of his
disgrace. But they signified nothing this morning, they were flying like mist, and
beneath them, solid and eternal, stretched the kingdom of the dead. He rejoiced
as in boyhood, he was expected there now. Mounting on the corpse, he climbed
higher, raised his arms over his head, sunlit, naked, victorious, leaving all disease
and humiliation behind him, and he swooped like a falcon from the parapet in
pursuit of the terrified shade.52

Here, Forster engages obliquely with Plato’s Phaedrus, another foundational tale
of homoerotic love: ‘Phaedrus. My tale, Socrates, is one of your sort, for love was
the theme which occupied us – love after a fashion.’53 The famous dialogue, set
in a pleasant wooded spot in the hot midday and ending with a very Forsterian
prayer to god Pan, features Socrates’s defence of philosophy as the true art of
speaking, his appreciation of the knowledge of kairos, or the ‘times and seasons’
for speaking truth and justice, and of course the elaborate figure of the soul as
‘a pair of winged horses and a charioteer’; of the many variants of this figure in
Socrates’s telling, there are those that pertain to the lover:
Now the lover who is taken to be the attendant of Zeus is better able to bear
the winged god, and can endure a heavier burden; but the attendants and
companions of Ares, when under the influence of love, if they fancy that they
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 83

have been at all wronged, are ready to kill and put an end to themselves and their
beloved.

Forster had already turned to Plato as an authority on the ‘malady’ of homosexual

love: in Maurice (written in 1913–14), he presents the Phaedrus as a corrective
gloss on the Bible, though in terms which neither Clive himself nor the characters
of the later story can actually live out:
The boy [Clive] had always been a scholar, awake to the printed word, and the
horrors the Bible had evoked for him were to be laid by Plato. Never could
he forget his emotion at first reading the Phaedrus. He saw there his malady
described exquisitely, calmly, as a passion which we can direct, like any other,
towards good or bad. Here was no invitation to license. He could not believe
his good fortune at first – thought there must be some misunderstanding
and that he and Plato were thinking of different things. Then he saw that the
temperate pagan really did comprehend him, and, slipping past the Bible rather
than opposing it, was offering a new guide to life. ‘To make the most of what I
have.’ Not to crush it down, not vainly to wish that it was something else, but to
cultivate it in such ways as will not vex either God or Man.54

As he put it in ‘What I Believe’ (1938), his ‘law-givers [were] Erasmus and

Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul’,55 and in ‘The Life to Come’, Forster places
the latter pair, or at least one of their namesakes, in the terrible situation of an
impossible ‘what if ’. Like Nietzsche’s Socrates, failing to heed fully Dionysus’s
command to ‘make music!’ and fearing that ‘like some barbarian king, he did
not understand the noble image of some god’,56 Forster’s Paul is a cautionary
example, a missed opportunity to affirm life in the now. His end bears out the
catastrophic consequences of ‘crushing [love] down’, while through a queering
of the Biblical promise, it is Vithobai/Barnabas who assumes the mantle of the
messiah: ‘But he survived for a moment longer, and it was the most exquisite
he had ever known. For love was conquered at last and he was again a king, he
had sent a messenger before him to announce his arrival in the life to come, as
a great chief should.’57 The reversal of the circumstances of redemption is deeply
ambivalent: the references to ‘a king’ and ‘a great chief ’ are both paratactic and
paradoxical, suggesting a slippage from the symbolic language of Christianity
to that which it failed to dominate or extinguish. The reborn Vithobai (‘sunlit,
naked, victorious’) is a radicalized, rebel angel: ‘“I served you for ten years,” he
thought, “and your yoke was hard, but mine will be harder and you shall serve
me now for ever and ever.”’58 In Christopher Lane’s reading, though ‘gratuitous
and bathetic’ to almost farcical effect, Vithobai’s act ‘seems consistent with
Forster’s anxiety and the problem of managing colonial and sexual fantasy.’59 For
84 Historical Modernisms

Lane, the story’s final image ‘not only forges a comparison between sexual desire
and colonial insubordination, but also assumes, as its corollary, an analogy
between the unconscious and a state of savagery’.60 In fact, Lane quotes Forster’s
‘confession’ to Siegfried Sassoon (in a letter dated 21 July 1923) that he ‘wish[ed]
the story could have [had] another ending’.61 The brief sketch in the letter of
an abandoned final chapter, in which ‘Pinmay enters Eternity as a slave while
Vithobai reigns with his peers’, is read by Lane as ‘Forster’s insistence that sexual
inequality persists in Heaven’. For Lane,
In his determination to retain Pinmay’s and Vithobai’s intimacy – a
determination that went hopelessly awry in the narrative’s execution – Forster
could not conceive of homosexual desire without accompanying elements of
violence, slavery and distress. Thus we might argue that Forster’s expectation
of redemption precipitates an astonishing burden on his texts, forcing them to
buckle under the strain of reconciling impossibly conflicted sexual and racial
desires.62

Yet, as I would argue, it is in the very impossibility of resolving the conflict while
retaining the intimacy that the kairotic power of Forster’s writing lies.63 Read
through this lens, the master–slave dialectic and its double reversal in Forster’s
tale (as Vithobai’s conversion through the promise of love, a ‘not yet’, turns
into a waiting for what will never be, and forces a reversion to the moment of
union, the original ‘Night’ when all was still possible) intercepts the message of
redemption and interprets or converts it into that temporal modality ‘through
which being opens itself, attracted by the void at the limit of time’, as Negri puts
it.64 The final image of Vithobai’s demonic flight invokes the trajectory of a rebel
angel, or in different terms, to bring Benjamin back into the frame, of the angel
of history – I am cross-reading Forster with Agamben here:
There must be a critical demolition of the ideas of process, development, and
progress whereby historicism seeks to reinsert the pseudo-meanings of the
Christian ‘history of salvation’ into a history which it has itself reduced to a pure
chronology. Against the empty, continuous, quantified, infinite time of vulgar
historicism must be set the full, broken, indivisible and perfect time of concrete
human experience; instead of the chronological time of pseudo-history, the
cairological time of authentic history; in place of the total social process of a
dialectic lost in time, the interruption and immediacy of dialectic at a standstill.65

The fact that the story was thought ‘wholly unpublishable’ by Forster at the time
of its composition adds a further nuance to this discussion of critical temporality:
‘Have this moment burnt my indecent writings or as many as the fire will take
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 85

[…] I am not ashamed of them,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 April 1922, ‘[i]t is
just that they were a wrong channel for my pen.’66 Luckily, he changed his mind
and salvaged that writing, even as he remained ambivalent about its prospects
and literary suitability. There is a poignancy, or a kairotic urgency, about the
perceived danger of that creative moment, a recognized ‘action on the edge of
being’, in Negri’s phrase.67 For us now, in our time still, as for Forster, the story
in its queer kairoticism, its unresolved conflict, and weak, though rebellious,
messianism poses an open question about the ‘not yet, not there’ of such
‘indecent’ moments.

Notes

1 See Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed.
Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For discussions of
the resonance of the Paterian moment in modernism, see Perry Meisel, The Absent
Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1980) and The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after
1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
2 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007),
21, passim.
3 See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans.
Ruth Crowley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
4 See Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2009) and Richard Parker, ‘Walter Pater – Imagism–
Objectivist Verse’, Victorian Network 3, no. 1 (Special Bulletin [2011]): 22–40.
5 Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry 1, no. 6 (March 1913): 200–6, 200.
6 T. E. Hulme, Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (New York: Routledge,
2003), 9.
7 Ashton Nichols, ‘Browning’s Modernism: The Infinite Moment as Epiphany’,
Browning Institute Studies 11 (1983): 81–99, 96.
8 For a detailed account, see Sharon Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950:
Constellations of the Soul (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
9 See Nichols, ‘Browning’s Modernism’.
10 On the finer points of ‘objective chance’ and Breton’s attempts to convince Trotsky
of its revolutionary relevance, see E. San Juan Jr., ‘Aimé Césaire’s Insurrectionary
Poetics’, in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, ed. Raymond Spiteri and Donald
LaCoss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 226–45.
11 Alan Wilde, ‘Modernism and the Aesthetics of Crisis’, Contemporary Literature 20,
no. 1 (Winter 1979): 13–50, 47.
86 Historical Modernisms

12 Quoted in André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin

Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), 239.
13 See John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of
Cultural Theory (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006), 27, 28.
14 As it happens, Breton later claimed to have landed his point after clarifying that
those ‘phenomena’ of objective chance were only seemingly magical and disturbing
‘in the present state of knowledge’ (Breton, What Is Surrealism? 239).
15 Alain Badiou, ‘A Poetic Dialectic’, in Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto
Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 55.
16 The term/name (Gr. καιρός/Καιρός respectively) variously appears in English
renditions as ‘kairós’, ‘kairos’ (that is, with or without an accent or italics) or ‘cairos’.
Unless quoting another author’s spelling, I will be using the non-accented, non-
capitalized, italicized version.
17 Carolyn R. Miller, ‘Foreword’, in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and
Praxis, ed. Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2002), xii.
18 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool–Aid Acid Test (London: Black Swan, 1989), 129–30.
See also pp. 117–18, 131. I am grateful to Adam Piette for bringing this use
of kairos to my attention. The term also appears in the related, contemporary
context of therapy culture; see, for instance, Pauline B. Bart, ‘The Myth of Value-
Free Psychotherapy’, in The Sociology of the Future: Theory, Cases, and Annotated
Bibliography, ed. Wendell Bell and James A. Mau (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1971), 113–59, 130: ‘A striking example of therapy both as recreation
and as social movement can be found in the [1967] booklet describing Kairos,
the mental health spa in San Diego, where self-actualizing encounter therapy
takes place. Not only can individuals join the Kairos Club, but they can give gift
certificates of from $25 to $100 “for that person whom you know is open and really
right for such an experience”’.
19 See Phillip Sipiora, ‘Introduction: The Ancient Concept of Kairos’, in Rhetoric
and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. Philip Sipiora and James
S. Baumlin (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 2.
20 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005),
68.
21 Agamben, The Time That Remains, 68–9.
22 Ibid., 68–9.
23 Ibid., 61, 62.
24 ‘The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. […]
[L]ike every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak
messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim’ (Walter Benjamin, ‘On
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 87

the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings: Vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings; trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 390.
25 See Paul 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, quoted in Agamben, The Time That Remains, 140.
26 Giorgio Agamben, ‘On Potentiality’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy,
ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999), 182.
27 Agamben, ‘The Passion of Facticity’, in Potentialities, 201. See also Heidegger’s related
concept of Augenblick, or ‘glance of the eye’, also sourced from Aristotle, which
connotes for Heidegger a decisive instant, a moment of vision and transformation.
For a discussion, see Suvi Alt, ‘Darkness in a Blink of an Eye’, Angelaki 21, no. 2 (June
2016): 17–31 and William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the
Ends of Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
28 Antonio Negri, ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, in Time for Revolution, trans.
Matteo Mandarini (London: Continuum, 2003), 154. Emphasis added. For a
discussion of Negri’s deployment of the concept in Biblical and revolutionary
contexts, see Roland Boer, ‘The Immeasurably Creative Politics of Job: Antonio
Negri and the Bible’, SubStance 41, no. 3 (2012): 93–108 and ‘Revolution in the
Event: The Problem of Kairós’, Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 2 (2013): 116–34.
29 Negri, ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, 152.
30 Ibid., 152, 154.
31 Ibid., 156.
32 Melissa Shew, ‘The Kairos of Philosophy’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 27, no. 1
(2013): 55.
33 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics’, quoted by Shew,
‘The Kairos of Philosophy’, 64.
34 Gregory Mason, ‘In Praise of Kairos in the Arts: Critical Time, East and West’,
in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, 207. The effect of
associative enhancement is noted too by Sergei Eisenstein, whose 1929 essay ‘The
Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’ considers the haiku (alongside other
examples of Japanese poetic and pictorial art) as analogous to cinematic form. See
Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), 32.
35 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and
New York: Continuum, 2002), 187.
36 Ibid., 30.
37 Forster, ‘terminal note’ to Maurice (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 220.
38 See, for instance, the final words of A Passage to India: ‘ “No, not yet,” and the sky
said “No, not there” ’ (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 306.
39 E. M. Forster, Howards End (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 183–4.
88 Historical Modernisms

40 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 192.
41 Ibid., 46.
42 ‘The Story of a Panic’, in Selected Stories, ed. Davis Leavitt and Mark Mitchell (New
York and London: Penguin Books, 2001), 1, 23.
43 ‘The Road from Colonus,’ Selected Stories, 86.
44 ‘The Eternal Moment,’ Selected Stories, 161–92.
45 I owe this gloss to my erudite colleague Donald Mackenzie. For a detailed reading
of the blend of ‘sex and exegesis’ in the story, see Gregory W. Bredbeck, ‘Missionary
Positions: Reading the Bible in E. M. Forster’s “The Life to Come”’, in Reclaiming
the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture, Second edn., ed. Raymond-Jean
Frontain (New York: Harington Park Press, 2003), 137–60, 138.
46 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–2.
47 Ibid., 17.
48 E. M. Forster, ‘The Life to Come’, in The Life to Come and Other Stories, ed. Oliver
Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 65–82, 65–6.
49 Ibid., 75.
50 Ibid., 76.
51 Samuel Beckett, ‘Gloaming’, quoted by James Knowlson in Damned to Fame: The
Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 432.
52 Forster, ‘The Life to Come’, 81–2.
53 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.
html.
54 Forster, Maurice, 59–60.
55 E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 65.
56 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music’, in The Birth of
Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers; trans. Ronald
Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 71.
57 Forster, ‘The Life to Come’, 81.
58 Ibid., 81.
59 Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of
Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 169.
60 Ibid., 169.
61 Ibid., 170.
62 Ibid.
63 In this sense, I am in broad agreement with Bredbeck, who reads the story’s ending
as ‘ironically suggest[ing] that which it will not say. […] Forster’s truth is different:
that some things remain – and should remain – uncapturable’ (‘Missionary
Positions,’ 156).
 Rethinking the Modernist Moment 89

64 Negri, ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, 152.

65 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Project for a Review’, in Infancy and History: The Destruction of
Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 148.
66 Quoted by Oliver Stallybrass in the Introduction to The Life to Come and Other
Stories, xii.
67 Negri, ‘Kairòs’, Alma Venus, Multitudo, 159.
90
 4

‘Well now that’s done: And I’m glad it’s over’:

Modernism, history and the future
Max Saunders

When does Tiresias see the encounter between the typist and her lover, the
‘young man carbuncular’, in The Waste Land? His present tense may suggest he
is reporting it as it happens. But then he tells us he has ‘foresuffered all/Enacted
on this same divan or bed’. He foresaw it in the past, that is; as a seer would be
expected to do. So is he witnessing the scene he foresuffered now happening in
the present in front of his (blind) eyes; saying, ‘I foretold you so’? If so, that would
be the opposite sequence to the one he gives us, saying he ‘Perceived the scene,
and foretold the rest’. That way round may get at the depressing predictability
of modern degradation (we all know where this is heading …). But it also tells
us that modernism’s relation to history, to time, to the future, has been radically
disconcerted. The event is in the past, the present and the future. A figure from
the classical past speaks to us – from when? – about an event in the reader’s era,
which he has predicted, or is predicting …
Modernism is generally cast as backward looking: classicising; allusive;
declinist. Yes, it talks of innovation – of ‘the new (the really new) work of art’
(Eliot); of the need to ‘Make it New!’ (Pound).1 But the It to be made new,
the context for the really new work, is the past; the tradition; history. While
a writer like H. G. Wells was portraying Edwardian drapers and Suffragettes,
and imagining time machines and alien invasions, Eliot, Joyce and Pound were
reanimating Tiresias, Ulysses, Propertius and Dante.
Modernism’s relation to the past seems familiar. Its relation to the future is
less often told, even though modernists themselves foretold it. This chapter
will argue that what Eliot called ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history’, while it may express nostalgia about past history,
primarily expresses anxiety about the future.2 It will show how, in order to
92 Historical Modernisms

understand modernism’s relation to history, both terms need to be triangulated

with the future; and it will recover some key texts from the modernist period
in which thinking about history and about the future co-exist. Joyce’s ‘mythical
method’, like Eliot’s own, may have offered a reassuring sense of how post-war
disorder might be reordered. What is disturbing about such moments of new
world disorder, though, as we are reminded now, is what they presage. We call
events historic not because they are over, settled and written down, but because
they disturb such order.
Eliot’s phrase ‘contemporary history’ might give us pause. Wait a minute:
isn’t all history past history? What does it mean to speak of ‘contemporary
history’? It could indicate the recent events which have led up to the present
moment. One might think that ‘recent history’ would be a more colloquial way
of expressing that. The term ‘contemporary history’ had some currency, since
the early nineteenth century, as simply a description of the most recent period
under investigation.3 That may have been what Eliot meant. Yet the phrase is also
susceptible of a different reading: one which expresses a specifically modernist
attitude to temporality.
Ford Madox Ford, for example, recalling his effort to reconstruct himself as
a writer after his experiences on the Western Front, said: ‘I wanted the Novelist
in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time. Proust
being dead I could see no one who was doing that.’4 Again, being the historian
of your own time could mean writing the history of your own lifetime; looking
back, but only as far as the span of your life, to your childhood (Ford was sixty
when wrote these words). That is the sense he appears to invoke when, at the same
time that he was composing the preceding volume of reminiscences, Return to
Yesterday (1931), he drafted A History of Our Own Times; a work which sketched
out world history from the time of his youth to the present.5
But the phrase ‘historian of his own time’, as with ‘contemporary history’, will
bear a more radical reading: as pushing the time frame right into the present,
and writing the history, not of the past at all, but a paradoxical history of now.6
That sense comes to the fore when Eliot wrote ‘Little Gidding’ during the Second
World War:

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.7
 Modernism, History and the Future 93

But the pattern, as Eliot had written in ‘East Coker’ in 1940, ‘is new in every
moment/And every moment is a new and shocking/Valuation of all we have
been’.8 The modernist sense of history, according to this view, is of a dynamic
process. History does not remain fixed, because the meaning of events in the
past is changed by events in the future. This was an understanding of a situation
which both thrilled and terrified Thomas De Quincey, in a superb passage of
the Confessions of an English Opium Eater which Eliot appears to have been
recalling. De Quincey elaborates a metaphor for experience as an exploration
of the unknown:
In fact, every intricate and untried path in life, where it was from the first a matter
of arbitrary choice to enter upon it or avoid it, is effectually a path through a vast
Hercynian forest, unexplored and unmapped, where each several turn in your
advance leaves you open to new anticipations of what is next to be expected, and
consequently open to altered valuations of all that has been already traversed.9

The extraordinary temporal gyration in that sentence enacts the vertiginous

sense of a life’s pattern, as each ‘turn’ produces first ‘anticipations’ of future
choices and then ‘altered valuations’ of your past course. As he teases out
the implications, he develops the classic statement of the indeterminacy of
autobiographical meaning:
Even the character of your own absolute experience, past and gone, which (if
anything in this world) you might surely answer for as sealed and settled for
ever – even this you must submit to hold in suspense, as a thing conditional and
contingent upon what is yet to come – liable to have its provisional character
affirmed or reversed, according to the new combinations into which it may enter
with elements only yet perhaps in the earliest stages of development.

What is true for individual experience is true for collective experience. What is
true of auto/biography is true of history.
Where Romantic writers like De Quincey or Wordsworth work construct
a labyrinthine syntax threading between different moments of time to bring
out their shifting interrelationships, modernists tend to operate through
fragmentation and collage. That is one way of making moments ‘timeless’ –
by breaking them out of their temporal location and sequence, and throwing
them into a melee of moments from other times. A sexual encounter of the jazz
age signifies differently when seen by Tiresias, and the typist juxtaposed with
Cleopatra or Philomel.
Timelessness is itself an equivocal quality, or lack of quality. Is a timeless
moment for all time, or of no time? What possibilities of meaning are available
94 Historical Modernisms

to a moment once broken out of its historical context? Eliot saw the ‘mythical
method’ in Ulysses (and doubtless The Waste Land too) as ‘manipulating a
continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’. It makes patterns
across time, rather than sequences through time. It is opposed to narrative – the
primary mode of historical understanding: ‘Instead of narrative method,’ says
Eliot, ‘we may now use the mythical method.’ The results are transhistorical.
Neither the Trojan wars, nor Dublin in 1904, but a pattern of wandering and
return; neither the classical past of Greece, Rome and Egypt, nor post-war
Europe, but patterns of death and rebirth, waste and fertility.
The mythical method has become the most familiar version of modernism’s
engagement with history, by disintegrating it. The prestige of Eliot and Joyce, and
of other modernists using it – Ezra Pound, H. D., David Jones, Yeats – together
with the influence of Eliot’s criticism through the mid-twentieth century, has
effectively displaced alternative modernist reconceptualizations of history.
These reconceptualizations take three forms, which are the subject of the rest
of this chapter. Unlike Eliot’s ‘mythical method’, they remain based in narrative,
though they all transform that narrative in different ways.
The first is what Ford, describing his decade-long collaboration with Joseph
Conrad, referred to as the ‘time shift’.10 This is an elaboration of the flashback or
prolepsis, used not for the racking up of tension or the filling in of the back-story
(as in the classic example, analysed by Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, of ‘Odysseus’
Scar’), but to produce a sense of fracture in both the time-sequence and the
narrative. Conrad uses it in The Secret Agent, the botched explosion of the bomb
at Greenwich not being represented directly in the text, but causing the narrative
to flash forward in time to its aftermath, then back to its causes.11
The questions of what trauma does to narrative, and what narrative does
to trauma, were at the heart of the most substantial of the Conrad–Ford
collaborations, Romance: a novel based on the story of the last Englishman tried
for piracy, in which the protagonist John Kemp goes on a Bovaryesque quest for
adventure, is drawn into the world of Cuban pirates, escapes death there and
then faces it again before the law. Like Madame Bovary, the novel wants to make
the reader feel the glamour of romance as something real, but also to ironize
the way retrospect casts a romantic glow over the past, and even its traumatic
episodes. Ford wrote a poem for the book’s epigraph, which includes the lines:
If we could have remembrance now
And see, as in the days to come
We shall, what’s venturous in these hours.12
 Modernism, History and the Future 95

Thomas Moser describes this wish as symptomatic of Ford’s ‘characteristic

longing to leap out of the present so that he can look back at it’.13 To achieve
‘remembrance now’ is to become the historian of your own time; to experience
the contemporary as if it were already history. (The elegiac connotations of
the term ‘remembrance’ also suggest that what’s at stake here is wanting to be
remembered as if respectfully after one’s own death.) There are two points to make
about this move. First, as the parallels with Eliot, Joyce and Conrad suggest, the
quest for forms which move beyond the narrative present is ‘characteristic’ not
just of Ford but of modernism more generally; and we shall see more evidence
of it in other writers. Second, the desire to look back may sound like a form of
escapist nostalgia. But it is enabled by something much more surprising: a leap
into the future.
Modernism’s mythical method, its allusiveness, like its classicizing,
characterize it as preoccupied with the past; with tradition; with history (Pound’s
Cantos are what he called – defining epic – ‘a poem including history’).14 But
again, this emphasis has obscured its engagements with the future. So much so
that the main collection of writings in the modernist period about the future has
remained largely unknown for nearly a century.
This is the extraordinary book series called ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’,
published by Kegan Paul in the United Kingdom from 1923 to 1931, and issued
in the United States by E. P. Dutton. There were 110 volumes: small, pamphlet-
length books on a wide range of topics, as can be seen from the Classified Index
(Figure 4.1) that began to be included after about sixty had appeared, and seemed
to require organizing into categories:
This is our second type of modernist reconceptualization of history. The series
was edited by the polymath and maverick intellectual C. K. Ogden, and included
many of the leading thinkers, scientists and writers of the period, combining
established talents like Bertrand Russell and James Jeans with brilliant young
writers yet to make their names, such as J. B. S. Haldane, Robert Graves, Vera
Brittain, J. D. Bernal and Hugh MacDiarmid.
Why such a project is interesting with respect to history is its lack of concern
with the past. Unlike a comparable series, Essays of To-day and Yesterday,
published by Harrap from 1926, and including conservative and reactionary
writers like Hilaire Belloc, A. C. Benson and G. K. Chesterton, To-Day and
To-Morrow largely ignores ‘yesterday’. The inverse of Walter Benjamin’s
‘Angel of History’, whose ‘face is turned toward the past’, and who is propelled
by the storm of progress into ‘the future to which his back is turned’, Odgen’s
contributors resolutely face the future and turn their back on the past.15 They
96 Historical Modernisms

Figure 4.1 To-Day and To-Morrow: Classified Index from Ralph de Pomerai,
Aphrodite; or, The Future of Sexual Relationships (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and
Trubner, 1931), end-matter.

were predominantly progressive, atheist or at least agnostic, and utopian,

committed to an Enlightenment belief that science, reason, communication
and education would enable humanity to leave behind the storms of the past –
a history of war, religious intolerance, ignorance and cruelty. To that extent,
the conception of the series bears out Anthony Giddens’ characterization of
modernity as ‘a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which,
unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past’.16
Yet To-Day and To-Morrow does engage with history in two illuminating
ways. First, a number of its key contributors who would become leading public
intellectuals were committed to a Marxist view of history, which claimed to have
established a scientific basis for historical processes (in the material and economic
bases of society, and its class relations). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the triumph of rampant neoliberalism, that view is discredited everywhere
but – paradoxically – in economics. But at its core is the belief that if history can
be conducted as science, then its results should be as predictable as those in the
physical or biological sciences. Philosophers like Karl Popper and scientists like
Stephen Jay Gould have contested this position, arguing that even in the history
 Modernism, History and the Future 97

of science, too much depends on unforeseeable chance and inspiration to be

susceptible of rigorous prediction.17 But right at the turn of the century, H. G.
Wells had given a compelling example of how the recasting of futurology from
prophecy to scientific prediction could nevertheless provide useful hypotheses,
approximations which could in turn direct future thinking. He argued that just
as biologists and palaeontologists had been able to construct a sophisticated
theory of evolution from a very patchy fossil record, so too thinkers about
the future could construct patterns from the recent discoveries and emerging
trends around them, and extrapolate hypotheses from them.18 He doesn’t claim
that it would ever be possible to specify the future in all its detail. But it should
be possible to glimpse what he would call in his 1933 projection The Shape of
Things to Come. The method, that is, is the same whether you’re engaged in
history or futurology. It just points in opposite directions. Thus for example in
his breathtakingly visionary The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929), the X-ray
crystallographer J. D. Bernal imagines humans bionically enhancing their bodies
to increase their strength and sensory range, and to extend their longevity. But
in elaborating the effects of such technological developments, he anticipates
social tensions between those who have augmented themselves through bio-
engineering, and those who have chosen not to, or cannot afford to do so. It is
thus a vision of a future form the class struggle might take, using the familiar
Marxist analysis, but simply applying it to a state of affairs that doesn’t exist yet,
but might in a possible future society. The working title for Bernal’s book had
been ‘Possibilities’.19 These scientific futurologists were not laying claim to a vatic
vision of the truth of the future. They were conducting thought experiments,
exploring possible futures to see which directions should be encouraged, and
which might prove harmful. One of the classic defences of the value of history is
that we understand the present better if we know where we have come from. Part
of To-Day and To-Morrow’s justification is that we understand ourselves better
if we know where we might be heading.
The other way in which the series engages with history is by writing it. That
is, several of the best volumes experiment with a technique J. B. S. Haldane
uses in the first volume, Daedalus; or, Science and the Future: a complex time-
shift in which the writer jumps forward to the distant future in order to look
back at a period between then and now; a period still in the future for us, but
described historically from the further future. In my study of To-Day and
To-Morrow, Imagined Futures, I call this technique ‘future history’.20 It’s like
Ford’s ‘remembrance now’; but instead of letting present experience feel like
future memories of that experience, ‘future history’ imagines our future already
98 Historical Modernisms

feeling as if it were our past. In the middle of Daedalus Haldane switches into
‘some extracts from an essay on the influence of biology on history during the
20th century which will (it is hoped) be read by a rather stupid undergraduate
member of this university to his supervisor during his first term 150 years
hence’.21 The book originated in a paper read to Ogden’s ‘Heretics’ debating
society, so the denigration of the typical undergraduate is a knowing Cambridge
in-joke. But it also has more interesting effects. First, it is a realist device. Casting
speculation into the register of history makes it sounds like the hypothetical
scenario has already happened. Futurology is presented as fact. This can make
radical transformation feel less threatening. Vera Brittain’s Halcyon invents
excerpts from a book by a feminist Oxford professor (itself a future history
idea in 1929) called the History of English Moral Institutions in the Nineteenth,
Twentieth, and Twenty-first Centuries. It charts the progressive achievements of
women’s freedom through a sequence of legislation which had not happened
yet at the time of writing; such as the ‘Sexual Instruction (Schools and Welfare
Centres) Act of 1948’ (38), the 1949 ‘Married Women’s Independence Act’ (38)
and the ‘Matrimonial Causes Act of 1959’ (40), which broadened the possible
grounds for divorce, and made consensual divorce legal. These seem obviously
necessary to us now that equivalents have become law (or nearly have, in the case
of ‘no fault’ divorces in the UK). They still seemed controversial to many when
proposed in the 1920s. But presenting them as part of the Whig interpretation
of future history makes them seem unobjectionable; part of the deal of civilized
modernity; not mere possibility, but actuality.
Daedalus uses the future history device for comparable effects. The book’s
most audacious prediction – what Haldane calls ‘ectogenesis’: the rearing of
human embryos in artificial wombs outside the mother’s body – is presented
as so widespread and familiar to the stupid undergraduate that he is rather
bored by the idea. Yet the aim of presenting the really new as if it were already
entirely familiar can have a double edge. Yes, it might accustom people to ideas
they would otherwise chafe at. But equally, the vision of a world in which
people accept the outlandish as if it were the most normal thing can produce
a powerfully satiric effect. That’s how Haldane’s friend Aldous Huxley works it
in his novel about ectogenesis, Brave New World (1932), in which not just the
human ‘Hatcheries’, but the paraphernalia of the ‘feelies’, ‘hypnopaedia’, Malthus
Belts – any of which may have been suggested by To-Day and To-Morrow22 – are
all taken for granted by everyone in the World State, and are shocking only to
John Savage, the representative of the twentieth century.
 Modernism, History and the Future 99

Future history, that is, can conduce paradoxically to satire as well as realism.
But that satire can itself be triple-edged. It can satirize the historian, as Daedalus
pokes fun at the undergraduate’s essay. Or it can ironize the content of the history.
There are elements of this in Daedalus too, when, for example, overenthusiastic
genetic modification has created algae which have turned the seas purple. (The
undergraduate doesn’t notice, but classically trained Haldane would have, that
this ironically realizes the Homeric epithet for the sea as ‘wine dark.) Haldane
doesn’t satirize ectogenesis though; he is seriously committed to the idea that
science will transform human existence in liberating ways. One of the writers
who does use future history so as to satirize the historical actors as well as
speculative science is André Maurois. His witty volume, The Next Chapter:
The War against the Moon (1927), shows the press barons having a video–
conference (itself a shrewd bit of futurology in the very early days of television).
They decide that in order to maintain world peace, a fictitious common enemy
must be manufactured. So they work up popular opinion against the moon and
persuade governments to attack it with a Wellsean death ray. Unpredictably,
the Moon starts firing back (54–8). Maurois’ science fiction is tongue-in-cheek,
but his critique of media power is serious, and his predictions about human
developments are stunningly accurate: a world war of 1947 (close, if too late
and too short); and the resulting development of knowledge of ‘energy within
the atom’ between then and 1951 (only two years out about the start of the
atomic age).
The third possible target of satire in future history, in addition to the
historian or the historical events, is the idea of history itself. The Next Chapter
is presented as a ‘Fragment of a Universal History’ published in 1992 (little did
Maurois foreknow that Francis Fukuyama would have announced the end of
history three years before then).23 Its focus on historiography was more evident
in the title by which it was first advertised in other volumes: Clio, or the Future
of History; though perhaps Maurois, or Ogden, felt that, when it was finished,
its futuristic fantasy had predominated. The main point here, though, is that the
games these writers were playing with the idea of history show how history itself
had come into question.
In part that was an effect of the First World War. Even as it was declared,
Henry James felt that the received account of contemporary history was no
longer adequate:
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton
feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long
100 Historical Modernisms

age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement,
gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years
were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.24

How much more tragic after four and a half years of slaughter? At the beginning
of the third volume of Ford’s Parade’s End, A Man Could Stand Up – (1926),
the pacifist suffragette Valentine Wannop is teaching in a girl’s school when the
Armistice is announced. The other teachers are worried that in this euphoria
they will lose control of their pupils:
If, at this parting of the ways, at this crack across the table of History, the
School – the World, the future mothers of Europe – got out of hand, would
they ever come back? The Authorities – Authority all over the world – was
afraid of that; more afraid of that than of any other thing.25

History is now and England. In the moment of the Armistice they feel that it can
be described as a celebration of victory and relief, but also as revolution. That
feeling of the redescribability of history is produced by the sense of a ‘crack across
the table of History’; a sense of a radical fissure between past and future; between
the old and the new, old and young. History is the story of these transformations –
in the world of work, the relations between the sexes and so on. But it is also
cracked. The devastations of war, its trauma, its disturbances to the social and
psychological order mean that it no longer seems possible to capture the past in
narrative; or at least in a single narrative.
That a similar turn was occurring in biography after the war is well known,
with Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1919) as prime exhibit. But Strachey’s
notorious ‘debunking’ of the individual biographies of Florence Nightingale or
General Gordon is not just ad hominem (or ad feminam). His figures are eminent
not only for their personal qualities, but as representatives of their respective
institutions: the medical profession and the military for these two; the church
and the educational system with Cardinal Manning and Thomas Arnold. In
ironizing them, Strachey is simultaneously ironizing Victorian historiography.
What Virginia Woolf said about biography also applies to history:
There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation, not that we
have anything new to add to them, but because of some queer quality in them
which makes them not only Shelley’s story but our own. Eminent and durable
they stand on the skyline, a mark past which we sail, which moves as we move
and yet remains the same.26

This was written at the time she was formulating her views on what she called
‘The New Biography’. And in Orlando, published the following year, she would,
 Modernism, History and the Future 101

precisely, retell much of English history from the Renaissance to the present,
mocking biography and the biographer in the process.27
What is at stake here is a new sense, in the era of modernism, of the relativity
of history; its multiplicity, provisionality, disputability. This is our third and final
modernist reconceptualization of history. It is manifest not only in the modernists
discussed already, but in the historiographical developments of the same period.
Doubtless modernist self-consciousness about narrative experiment affected the
way some readers read history, seeing it less as sheer presentation of facts, and
more as narratives producing effects. The subject is an enormous one, beyond the
scope of this chapter. But it will be indicated here via discussion of three examples,
very disparate in kind, but again connected by the prodigious C. K. Ogden.
From 1920 Ogden edited the journal Psyche, devoted to psychology
in the broadest sense (including anthropology, medicine, symbolization,
communication, etc.). In 1926 he launched an associated series of small pocket-
books called Psyche Miniatures. This also ran to 110 volumes. Some recycled
work from the journal. About half were on the same subjects as the journal;
the latter half consisted mostly of works written in or translated into BASIC
English, Ogden’s simplified version of the language, reduced to 850 words, as an
international auxiliary language. The seventh of the Pysche Miniatures was On
History: a Study of Present Tendencies (1927); the first book by A. L. Rowse, who
would go on to become one of the best known British popular historians of the
twentieth century.28 It was characteristic of Ogden’s knack as a talent-spotter. This
series is no better known now than To-Day and To-Morrow, but it too deserves to
be rediscovered. The first volume was I. A. Richards’s Science and Poetry (1926).
Later contributors included Rudolf Carnap, Bronislaw Malinowski, Joseph
Needham, J. B. Watson, John Wisdom, Otto Neurath, J. B. S. Haldane and Ogden
himself. Just as To-Day and To-Morrow was followed by major modernists such as
Joyce, Eliot, Waugh, Lewis, Huxley and Leonard Woolf, so the Psyche Miniatures,
like all Ogden’s editorial ventures, made their mark on the intelligentsia.29 For
example, my copy of On History bears Lytton Strachey’s bookplate.
Rowse bemoans the prevalence of specialisation in history writing. ‘The lay
mind’, he says, ‘finds most modern work strangely inconclusive.’ (19–20)
And that not all is well is to some extent shown by the amount of argument and
discussion that goes on, not only as to the writing of history, but also as to the
reading and interpretation of history. (19)

Specialization has produced ‘a widening gap between the researcher and the
interpreter’ (20). He disagrees with Chesterton’s position, which he characterizes
as drawing the moral ‘of the futility of attempting to get at the truth of the matter
102 Historical Modernisms

by reading the historians, ultimately arriving at a kind of scepticism with regard

to history’ (22). But that he voices this view shows his awareness of its currency.
Rowse’s own prescription is the one to which he would devote his life’s work: to
seek to combine specialist expertise with popular presentation. He quotes G. M.
Trevelyan on the need for ‘the synthesis of the scientific and the literary views of
history’ (27). The ‘scientific’ view of history here appears to denote scrupulous
evidencing from the archives; the adducing of Quellen (‘sources’) seen as the
bedrock of the German academic industry devoted to the Leopold von Rankean
mission of establishing ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen ist’ (how it truly was). Harold
Nicolson (the husband of Virginia Woolf ’s lover, Vita Sackville-West) made a
comparable distinction in his book of the same year, The Development of English
Biography, between, on the one hand, a ‘pure’ biography in pursuit of ‘historical
truth’ and ‘complete and accurate portraiture’; and on the other, an ‘impure’
or applied biography, adulterated by hagiography, didacticism and excessive
subjectivity.30
Rowse’s On History, however, makes a case for a different form of scientific
history.31 He argues that the historiography of the previous century was
outmoded. Its view of an essentially static society, explicable in terms of the
machinations of a privileged elite (36–7), had been challenged by the impact
of Darwinian theory on the social sciences, leading to a view of society as in
a constant state of evolution as a result of struggle (35–6); and challenged in
parallel (50) by Marx’s account of the decisive influence of the material basis of
society and its relations of production, and the class struggle (46–7; 93). Rowse
is careful to present himself as not doctrinaire in his Marxism. He sees it not
as the be-all and end-all, but as a ‘framework’ which ‘does not seek to include,
though it underlies, other studies’, and which he is thus able slyly to characterize
as ‘libertarian’ (68). Nevertheless, ‘the historical province is first and foremost
that of men in the mass’ (65).
The crucial point is that what Rowse thinks history needs to re-energize itself
is a theory. At a time of such excitement over the theories of genetics, Relativity,
psychoanalysis, behaviourism and the atom, he argues that history too seems in
need of one – especially in England, where ‘there has been a notorious dislike
of the abstract discussion of theories or of the ideas which are often implied
in historical work’ (92). And that is what his book offers. At least, the chapter
headings for the third and longest chapter read ‘A Theory of History’; the title
itself offers, more tentatively, a ‘Sketch of a Theory of History’. The theory will
allow the ‘return to synoptic writing’ which he feels is needed; and the ‘greater
breadth of conception’ (31) that makes the synthesis between ‘the analytic and
 Modernism, History and the Future 103

the generalizing methods’ possible (30). These ‘generalizing principles will

involve a different conception of historical processes’ (32), he says. They will
provide the ‘integrating force’ of the future (32, 56), building on the insights from
anthropology, psychology and ‘social studies’ (40; 95). Historical materialism
is not unprecedented; but what is needed is ‘to systematize the results of such
speculations’ (32). What is also apparent is that what Rowse is writing is not so
much an analysis of present history, but a manifesto for what he wants it to be in
future. In fact, it could just as well have appeared in the To-Day and To-Morrow
series.32
The writing is oddly convoluted, to the point that the advocacy of Marxism
can easily be missed. Perhaps that was the point. Rowse had been made a Fellow
of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1925, and it’s as if he didn’t want to risk his
colleagues there being able to realize what a socialist Trojan Horse they had
elected. It would be nice to believe that he saw himself as gently preparing his
fellow academics for the methodological onslaught; though his dismissal of ‘the
reactionary stupidity of the professional intelligentsia’ (90) makes it implausible
that the offensive would operate through charm.
On History is far from parochial. Rowse quotes Marx and Trotsky, cites
German philosophers and French historians. Indeed, his theory challenges ‘the
all-sufficiency of the nation as a historical unit’ (93), seeking to replace it with
an internationalism based on class. But he appears bizarrely out of touch with
what was happening in his own discipline, at least outside of Oxford.33 He seems
unaware that the historical development he was advocating for the future had
in fact already begun to manifest itself; and in Britain, and, again, thanks to
C. K. Ogden, in yet another series he edited, launched three years earlier in 1924.
This was entitled the History of Civilization, and in its conception was
arguably the most audacious of his book series. Like Ogden’s other major
textbook series, the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and
Scientific Method, the History of Civilization involved an internationalist
mission to translate leading European scholarship. The core of the series
consisted of translations of the French collection L’Evolution de l’Humanité, to
which newly commissioned works written in English were added. The book
history of the series remains to be written, and could fill a book, not fit a
chapter conclusion. But the series list included in a 1929 volume gives an idea
of its scope and organization.
The volume that was probably published first, and was included as the first
in the listings, Social Organization by W. H. R. Rivers (1924), included a brief
prospectus as end-matter with this short description:
104 Historical Modernisms

This series, which will eventually comprise upwards of 200 volumes, is designed
to form a complete Library of Social Evolution. The field has been carefully
mapped out, both as regards subjects and periods; and, though the first
instalments will be published as they are ready, the necessary degree of
chronological sequence will be secured by the fact that the volumes of ‘L’Evolution
de l’Humanité’ will be used as a nucleus and translated as they appear.34

This was followed by a list of only eighty-four volumes, suggesting that the
careful mapping out was sketchier than claimed.
The projections flickered as the series developed. The undated prospectus
at the end of Eugène Pittard’s 1926 volume, Race and History, expands the
description to over two pages, claiming that:
The series marks one of the most ambitious adventures in the annals of book
publishing. Its aim is to present in accessible form the results of modern research
and modern scholarship through the whole range of the Social Sciences – to
summarize in one comprehensive synthesis the most recent findings and theories
of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and all conscientious
students of civilization.35

It appends a ‘plan, comprising of upwards of eighty titles, though not definitive’.

Not definitive at all, as it turns out, since the following list includes ninety-
one. The jacket of Prophets and the Rise of Judaism (1937) is comically unable
to put a number on the eventual run, saying only that the series will provide
‘A Complete History of Mankind from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day
in Numerous Volumes […]’; but that ‘More than fifty’ had already appeared
by then. A 1939 catalogue bound in as end-matter to what looks like the first
impression of Jacques de Morgan’s Prehistoric Man (1924) lists ‘just under one
hundred’ projected titles, saying that more than sixty were then available.36 The
1944 catalogue bound into G. Renard’s Life and Work in Prehistoric Time (1929),
when combined with the list given on the verso of the half-title amounts to just
sixty titles, indicating that the war years had shut the series down. The British
Library catalogue doesn’t record any further volumes published after 1939, and
only records sixty-six under the series title.
The jacket of Prophets and the Rise of Judaism (1937) also includes two telling
quotations about the series from the reviews. The Manchester Guardian called
it ‘an heroic attempt to bring some light into the vast mass of ill-organized
knowledge which we owe to modern research’. For Nature it was ‘the most
important contribution so far undertaken towards the task of organization and
systematization of the social studies’.37
 Modernism, History and the Future 105

That idea that ‘modern research’ in history was too specialized and
disconnected to be intelligible and accessible was Rowse’s diagnosis too. The
fact that Ogden and/or Kegan Paul included these quotations as promotional
material indicates that that was the view of the series they wanted to present.
History is seen not as about producing yet more knowledge of the past – because
the table of History is cracked. Historical sources alone have come to seem
problematic. The thing is to organize and systematize that knowledge; or, as we
would now say, to theorize it. The organizing principle of the French series was
both evolutionary and humanist; that of the British counterpart, to recast history
as social science. Social Organization, that is, was the volume that sounded the
note of the series, because its title was also the project’s rationale.
Both the History of Civilization and the Evolution of Humanity must have
seemed doomed titles during and after the Second World War; so it’s unsurprising
that the series ground to a halt in 1939. It is also possible that the ambitious scale
was self-defeating. Besides the money and shelf-space required for even fifty or
a hundred volumes, let alone two hundred, the aim to bring order and system to
piecemeal research may have seemed defeated by the quest for completeness of
period, region and topic.
Ogden carried on building two of his series: the International Library and the
Psyche Miniatures. His driving interests until his death in 1957 were psychology
and BASIC English. But he took on a very different historical project in 1938,
which seems the place to conclude this survey, since it brings together most of the
themes discussed here. It was a collaboration with E. H. Carter (‘Formerly H. M.
Inspector of Schools and Training Colleges’), and miniature in scale compared
to the book series: a single volume, providing a General History: in Outline and
Story. World History, that is, from the pre-Historic to the contemporary; all in
fewer than 300 pages. It was written in BASIC and aimed at a young as well as
international audience. Again, the terms in which they introduce it echo the idea
we have seen in Rowse and in the reviews of the History of Civilization:
The purpose of this book is to give a bird’s eye view of history from the earliest
times to the present day. It is hoped that it may be of value in two ways: first,
by offering a framework with the help of which details of history outside the
range of the book itself may be seen with a certain order and relation; second,
by putting in a clear light the connection between the histories of different
countries, so that the story of any one of them is seen as but one thread in the
complex design which is the story of them all.38

Just as Ogden edited the vast International Library, then published his own ABC of
Psychology (1929) as a sketch-map of the terrain it covered, so here he and Carter
106 Historical Modernisms

are providing a form of ‘ABC’ of History – the History of Civilization which that
series had mapped out.39 Here, too, the task is seen as one of organization and
systematization: providing a sense of ‘order and relation’ that enables us to make
sense of the details of history. This organizing motive operates at two levels.
The ‘framework’ gives a context to the details of a single national history. The
opening section on the Stone Ages doesn’t mention Stonehenge, for example.
But its ‘General History’ of the Ice Age, the discovery of copper, then tin, then
their combination as bronze, enabling the development of better tools to work
stone, gives us a narrative ordering which allows us to place particular stone
edifices into relation with it. That narrative is already international, moving
between Australia, Europe, Egypt and America. The point is that its range gives
the details – which are necessarily of one place and time – their significance.
At the second level, the relation is worked the other way. The weaving together
of the different national narratives shows that their ultimate meaning lies in
being part of an international order.
Ogden’s and Carter’s title was a nod to H. G. Wells’s 1920 bestseller, the
Outline of History. And though they describe their history as extending up to
‘the present day’, in fact the last chapter asks, ‘What of the Future?’, as Wells had
too, concluding his Outline with a consideration of ‘The Next Stage in History’.
That was what contemporary history meant above all for modernism between
the wars, as for science, as for politics, as for the arts: not only the culmination of
the past, but the beginning of the future.

Notes

1 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays, third enlarged
edition (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1951), 13–22; Ezra Pound first used the
phrase ‘Make It New’ in his translation entitled Ta Hio: The Great Learning, Newly
Rendered into the American Language (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore,
1928). As Michael North explains, it was in fact ‘a dense palimpsest of historical
ideas about the new’: ‘The Making of “Make It New”: Ezra Pound’s slogan was
itself the product of historical recycling’, Guernica (15 August 2013): https://www.
guernicamag.com/the-making-of-making-it-new/, accessed 24 July 2019.
2 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed.
Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 177.
3 See, for example, the Edinburgh Review 12 (1808): 480. ‘There is this general
distinction between contemporary history and all other history,—that the
 Modernism, History and the Future 107

former is a witness, the latter a judge.’ The Institute of Contemporary History

was established in the early 1930s in the Netherlands. See Michael D. Kandiah,
‘Contemporary History’, https://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/
articles/contemporary_history.html.
4 Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale (London: Heinemann, 1934), 180.
5 Ford Madox Ford’s A History of Our Own Times was published posthumously, ed.
Sondra Stang and Solon Beinfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988;
Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989).
6 See David Garland, ‘What Is a “history of the present”? On Foucault’s Genealogies
and Their Critical Preconditions’, Punishment & Society 16, no. 4 (2014): 365–84.
DOI:10.1177/1462474514541711.
7 T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, V, from Four Quartets in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1,
ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber, 2015), 208.
8 T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, II; ibid., 187.
9 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1986), 181–2.
10 Ford, It Was the Nightingale, 143.
11 See R. W. Stallman, ‘Time and The Secret Agent’, in Texas Studies in Literature and
Language 1, no. 1 (Spring 1959): 101–22; Michael Mageean, ‘The Secret Agent’s
(T)extimacies: A Traumatic Reading beyond Rhetoric’, in Seeing Double:
Revisioning Edwardian and Modern Literature, ed. Carola M. Kaplan and Anne
B. Simpson (London: Macmillan, 1996), 235–58; and Adam Parkes, A Sense of
Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 241.
12 Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, Romance (London: Smith, Elder & Co.,
1903), [v]; see Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), Vol. 1, 69–70.
13 Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980), 49.
14 Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (London: Faber, 1951), 46.
15 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 249.
16 Anthony Giddens, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 94.
17 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002), xi–xii. Stephen
Jay Gould, ‘Unpredictable Patterns’, in Predictions, ed. Sian Griffiths (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 145–6. For further discussion, see Max Saunders,
Imagined Futures, Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow
Book Series, 1923–31 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Introductions.
18 H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902).
108 Historical Modernisms

19 Bernal’s volume was advertised as Possibilities in the end-matter of Vera Brittain’s

Halcyon (1929), 4.
20 See Saunders, Imagined Futures, Chapter 2.
21 J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench
and Trübner, 1923), 56–7. Place of publication and publisher should be taken to be
the same for all subsequent references to Ogden’s series unless stated otherwise.
22 Bonamy Dobrée’s Timotheus; the Future of the Theatre (1925) imagine emotions
being controlled by psychotropic gases; Daedalus discusses potential future
applications of hypnosis; several volumes discuss contraception, particularly
C. P. Blacker’s Birth Control and the State (1926).
23 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest no. 16 (1989): 3–18.
24 Henry James to Howard Sturgis, 4–5 August 1914: Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy
Lubbock, 2 volumes (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1920), Vol. 2, 384.
25 Ford Madox Ford, A Man Could Stand Up, ed. Sara Haslam (Manchester: Carcanet,
2011), 17–18.
26 Virginia Woolf, ‘Not One of Us’, A review of Shelley; His Life and Work, by Walter
Edwin Peck, October 1927, in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (London:
The Hogarth Press, 1942), 78.
27 For an extended discussion of these texts and issues, see Max Saunders, Self
Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
28 A. L. Rowse, On History: A Study of Present Tendencies, (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trübner & Co., 1927). Henceforth page references to Rowse’s book will be
noted inside brackets in the text.
29 See Imagined Futures, Ch. 6, on modern writers engaging with To-Day and
To-Morrow.
30 Harold Nicolson, The Development of English Biography (London: The Hogarth
Press, 1927), 9–11. ‘But in general literary biography will, I suppose, wander off
into the imaginative, leaving the strident streets of science for the open fields of
fiction’, he opined (155–6) – rather self-congratulatorily, since that is exactly what
he did in his autobiografictional sketches published the same year as Some People.
See Saunders, Self Impression, Chapter 11.
31 On History was published in the United States as Science and History: A New View
of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1928) in the American version of the Psyche
Miniatures series, called the New Science Series.
32 There was some cross-over between the two series, volumes being the same length
for both. See Imagined Futures, 386.
33 Rowse quotes the Master of Balliol A. D. Lindsay’s Karl Marx’s Capital on the
economic antecedents of Puritanism, (On History), 71.
34 W. H. R. Rivers, Social Organization, ed. W. J. Perry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench
and Trübner, 1924), end-matter.
 Modernism, History and the Future 109

35 Eugène Pittard, Race and History, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner,
1926), 3.
36 This was common practice with Kegan Paul – see Imagined Futures, Appendix A.
37 Fuller texts of these reviews are reprinted in the end matter to some of the volumes,
such as Jacques de Morgan’s Prehistoric Man (1924) or Eugene Pittard’s Race and
History (1926).
38 General History: In Outline and Story by E H Carter and C K Ogden (London:
Thomas Nelson, 1938), ix. The book was reprinted at least four times, in 1943, 1944,
1946 and 1950.
39 Ogden, ABC of Psychology (London: Kegan Paul, 1929).
110
 5

Historical and rhetorical emplotments of

modernism: An interview with Hayden White
by Angeliki Spiropoulou

Few historians delved into the porosity between literature and history, or indeed
the arbitrariness of their distinction, as systematically and convincingly as the
American history and cultural theorist Hayden White. In his path-breaking
study, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(1973),1 White questioned the objectivist claims of historical science by stressing
the linguistic and narrative foundation of historiography. White’s radical
recognition of the narrative nature of history and, inversely, of the epistemic
quality of literature is encapsulated in his statement that ‘history is no less a form
of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation’.2 The influence of
his work, marking the so-called linguistic turn in historian science, has been
formative for twentieth-century historical theory and contemporary literary
criticism. It is significant that after serving as a Professor in the History of
Consciousness programme at the University of California-Santa Cruz, when he
formally retired in 1994, he became Bonsall Professor of Comparative Literature
at Stanford University.
One of White’s most fundamental arguments is that historical events are
made into familiar stories using ‘all of the techniques that we would normally
expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play’.3 In seeking to lay bare
a ‘poetics of history’, he presented a typology of nineteenth-century historical
writing arranged according to patterns of literary ‘emplotment’ it tacitly employs
and he then matched the emerging narrative tropes to particular modes of
consciousness. Significantly, for White, traditional historiography actually
competes with the long realist novel in the way it ‘emplots’ facts and events
112 Historical Modernisms

to render a ‘truthful’ sense of historical reality. Even more radically, White

stressed the paradox of how historiography in effect defines what is considered
a historical ‘fact’, even though facts are axiomatically taken as history’s raw
material in standard historical thinking and writing.
Suspicious of the facticity and putative objectivity of realist verisimilitude
and by focusing on form as content, White sides with a modernist poetics of
subjectivism and technical self-reflection, also refuting the realist/historicist
division between fact and fiction. Relevantly for this volume, drawing on his
study of major modernist authors and thinkers, White not only challenged
modernism’s putative ahistoricism but also, and significantly, he modelled
the demand for a new historiographical imagination on the features and
effects of modernist art. In his 1996 essay, ‘The Modernist Event’,4 for
example, White notes that the plotless, characterless narratives associated
with modernism put into serious doubt the standard forms and premises of
traditional narrative and call for a reconfiguring of historiography itself. But
further than this, in what he calls a ‘modernist event’, such as the Holocaust,
White recognizes a constitutional resistance to representation presented by
the events of modernized life and discusses modernism’s pioneering ‘anti-
narrative non-stories’ as responses to this resistance, marked by the collapse of
the distinction between form and semantic content and by the ‘de-realization’
of the event.
As explained in more detail in the Introduction to the present volume, which
is dedicated to the memory of this pioneering thinker, the 2015 interview that
follows is offered in lieu of the chapter White had generously promised to
contribute, just some months before his sudden death in 2018, on the subject
of deconstruction and history. However, the interview lucidly highlights some
of White’s original thinking on the relation of history and literature, the nature
of the fact and the historical past, rhetorical tropes of narration and modernist
and contemporary art’s contribution to new historiographies. Apart from
his brilliance, erudition and originality, his replies also reveal his immense
kindness and intellectual generosity.
A.S.

Interview
Angeliki Spiropoulou: Your work evokes Walter Benjamin’s notion that
every present invents its own past or Benedetto Croce’s idea that all history is
contemporary history. What would the role of the subject and the context be in
historical narratives?
 Rhetorical Emplotments of Modernism 113

Hayden White: I would have to know which ‘subject’ you are talking about: the
subject of history (i.e., the actors and agencies of historical changes) or history’s
subjects (i.e., the specific kinds of people who are deemed worthy of appearing
in a history because they are the kind of people who ‘make’ history). Or by the
subject of history, do you mean the historian or whomever it is that assumes
the authority to speak for history? As you know, I distinguish between the past
of history, which places history within a larger time-portion of ‘the past’, and
history’s past (which subordinates the past to the historians who produce it). In
the former, history is treated as a part of the past in general, while in the latter,
the past is treated as historical only insofar as it yields to history’s criteria of
significance.
A.S.: You have insightfully pointed out that historical discourse is not defined
by a specific method of approaching the past and neither is its subject matter
(e.g., past events, facts, experiences) exclusive to it. On the contrary, historical
study, in common with literary writing/theory, principally involves a narrative
reconstruction or interpretation of its subject matter. In view of this thesis, what
would the role of the artwork in historical studies be and, additionally, what is
special in the relationship between history and literature?
H.W.: If we are looking for similarities between history and literature, we
have to do so by examining the linguistic protocols by which some part of the
past is constructed as ‘history’ or as ‘historical.’ One way to do this is to treat
historiography and literature as kinds of artistic writing, which is to say that
both differ from ‘ordinary speech/language’ by virtue of the use of certain
devices, tropes, thematizations, and so on that are either not found in ordinary
(communicative) speech or are only implicitly present in them (as in, for
example, the use of metaphor or metonymy). Both kinds of literary writing,
a history such as that of Herodotus and a novel such as DeLillo’s Underworld,
are products of the(Kantian) imagination or, following Jacques Lacan and
Cornelius Castoriadis, dwell in ‘the imaginary’. The older historiography,
which sought to purge itself of both ‘literary’ and ‘philosophical’ language
and thought, presupposed a condition of literalness or, in oral discourse,
‘propriety’, as a basis for a discourse purged of both rhetoricity and poiesis.
But as Ernesto Laclau argued in the last book before his death, The Rhetorical
Foundations of Society, there is no degree-zero of rhetoricity. Speech and language
are inherently rhetorical in the sense of being unable to avoid figures of speech
and thought, use of tropes, and such devices as ablation and irony. Historians wish
to speak literally, which is to say, properly – but the proper is a moral category,
not an epistemic one, and what is meant by the literal meaning of a word or sign
is nothing more than what a given group of speakers of a given language have
decided by use and convention is the literal meaning. One thing that ‘literature’
always does, in contrast to non-artistic speech, is systematically experiment with
114 Historical Modernisms

the distinction between literal and figurative (or proper and improper) speech
in order to render the language used to present a given reality more precisely,
more concretely’, or more ‘dramatically’. This is why, when I am asked for an
example of a modern literary treatment of historical reality, I cite one or another
novel such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, De Lillo’s Underworld or Roth’s American
Pastoral: following Barthes, I call these examples of ‘novelesque history’. I might
also have cited Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf – as interpreted by Angeliki
Spiropoulou.
A.S.: In your discussion of modernism, you write that there are certain events,
distinctive to modernity, which cannot be represented in the realist mode
privileged by traditional historiography. They need to be represented in some new
mode, proposed by plotless, multivocal modernist writing which is reflexive of
the narrativization process. However, wouldn’t this imply that you take historical
experience, the historical referent, to be prior to the means of its representation
since it appears to generate the demand for new forms? And if this is so, how is it
related to your argument that ‘the content is the form’?
H.W.: This is a good question, but like many such questions it ignores the
distinction between events of the past and historical events. Events in the past
(already written about in many cases) are what is ‘given’ in the sense of preceding
the historian’s interest in them. But not all events of the past are historical
events; they must be ‘worked up’ as possible objects of a specifically ‘historical’
or ‘novelistic’ treatment before they can serve as ‘referents.’ The demand for
new forms or modes or even genres of presentation arises with the appearance
of events unclassifiable immediately by traditional modes of classification. In
modernity, a case in point would be the kinds of microscopic events that are in
principle not observable but must be inferred as having happened by virtue of
the traces of their occurrence in, for example, bubble chambers for measuring
the path of an electron or the beginning of the universe itself. The demand for
new forms of presentation arises when someone or some group ‘experiences’ an
event that, for that group, is unthinkable or unutterable. To grasp the ‘meaning’
of an event as ‘historical’ is to apprehend it as a pattern, a form of being in
the world. Within what we think we already know as ‘historical reality,’ what
Marx called the modes and means of production produce events unthought
of in anyone’s philosophy, such as destruction of the ozone layer around the
earth. Indeed, the whole idea of ecohistory would have been unthinkable before
modern technology.
A.S.: In many of your writings, you connect the experience and the structure
of trauma with both modernist art and modernity as a historical period, evoking
the Holocaust as an exemplar. It is particularly interesting that, inversely, you
seem to be suggesting that a modernist mode of representing traumatic events,
 Rhetorical Emplotments of Modernism 115

peculiar to modernity, resists the symbolic closure and mastery of anxiety or

‘narrative fetishization’ sought by realist narration. Perhaps you could elaborate
on these connections around what you call ‘the modernist event’. Could you also
explain why you think the experience of trauma may not appropriately describe
the experience of the nineteenth century, for example, and whether trauma can
be considered a paradigmatic topos and trope of postmodern or contemporary,
alongside modernist, writing?
H.W.: Well, of course, ‘trauma’ is a concept produced by psychoanalysis
and can be applied to any event experienced by a group as disabling and
omnipresent long after the event that caused it has passed, and demanding
attention in whatever situation the traumatized person finds itself. The utility
and relevance of the concept of trauma in the twentieth century has to do
not only with the novelty of modernist techno-events, their scope, their reach,
their shock value, but also with the speed of news of their occurrence by way of
the electronic media. The transmission of news by vivid (colored) images, the
number of images of any given event, and the violation of the privacy of those
affected by events of an extreme nature, all of this has the effect of rendering
extreme events palpable in a way that transmission by writing or print does
not.
A postmodernist artistic movement such as Surrealism seems ‘super-’ or
‘hyper-’ real only in contrast to what we might call – from our perspective today –
the ‘coziness’ of nineteenth-century events like ‘the revolutions’ of that century.
Napoleon’s campaign in Russia, the Paris Commune, and the Boer War appear
in retrospect to be containable in well-wrought stories. But who can tell the story
of Hiroshima or the Holocaust in a way that does justice to the ‘quality’ of the
suffering endured by thousands of people on a single day of their ‘surprising’
occurrence.
A.S.: Interestingly, history is both an ostentatious concern and a method within
contemporary literature, thus contrasting with modernism, whose emphasis on
form resulted in a more controversial referential relationship to history than
that evident in the classical historical novel. You have convincingly vindicated a
historical concern for modernism. However, would you identify any qualitative
differences between modernist and postmodernist art in treating history and
history writing?
H.W.: Postmodernism is used in the Anglophone world as a term of derision,
except for a few intellectuals such as Richard Rorty and on occasion me. Fredric
Jameson is of course the writer who has studied postmodernism as the cultural
equivalent of ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism.’ In his view, postmodernism
manifests the total triumph of capitalism understood as the commodification of
culture and the social relations of production. Postmodernism as thus understood
116 Historical Modernisms

is what comes after modernism, itself a mode of epochal self-consciousness

produced by the conflict between the realities of agrarian and industrialized
societies. This is quite different from Lyotard’s conception of postmodernism as
a repudiation of all ‘grand narratives’ and especially that of the ‘hidden hand’
and ‘progress’. As a historian of culture, I see modernism (in the arts, fashion,
architecture, literature, the social and human sciences, and the like) as a response
(and not only a reaction) to the modernization of societies, which is to say, a
response to capitalism, commodification, consumerism, value as exchange-
value, etc. I do not see modernism as nostalgic for ‘a world we have lost’ but as a
Nietzsche-like acceptance of the nihilism implicit in capitalism, its institutions and
practices, and a commitment to go forth within this nihilism to the revivification
of what remains valuable in spite of the commodification of culture.

According to this view, postmodernism is produced by the carrying out

of this nihilistic impulse. It presupposes the ruination of traditional cultural
institutions and asks what can be done with the ‘waste’ now produced. I agree
with the late Arthur Danto that Marcel Duchamp was the herald of a genuinely
postmodernist artistic practice: the art of the ready-made, the objet-trouvé,
the copy and especially the mechanically re-produced copy, the simulacra
which ironizes ‘art’ itself. Whereas the modernists were frightened by the loss
of ‘substance’ effected by modernist science, postmodernists take this loss for
granted, confront a world of pseudo-substantialized objects, a wasteland of things
drained of all inherent value (which is what I mean by ‘de-substantialization’).
Marx tried to return thought to value (and substantiality) by the hypostatization
of ‘labor.’ Modernist technology, now digitalized, substitutes the robot for the
worker and pre-packaged work for ‘service’. Postmodernism faces a world in
which labor itself has been desubstantialized.
We can see the effects of this postmodernist forma mentis in the modern
novel, in architecture (Frank Gehry), in theatre, music and in such human
sciences as sociology, anthropology and political economy. As for history and
history-writing, postmodernism manifests itself in various ‘eccentric’ or non-
normative activities such as ‘queer history,’ post-colonial and subaltern studies,
and eco-, big data- and deep-historiography. But such movements gain little
traction among professional historians insofar as both the content and the form
of canonical historiography are constituted precisely to resist such deviancies. A
postmodern historiography must begin not by treating its referent (the past, ‘the
seventeenth century’, feudalism, the Renaissance, and so on) as given a priori but
as constructions, the social functions of which, at the time of their invention as
historiological objects, was to provide genealogical confirmation of ‘the present’
as ‘the way things ought to be’.
 Rhetorical Emplotments of Modernism 117

A.S.: Your formalist perspective on historical thinking and your (post-)

structuralist theoretical sympathies are uniquely combined with humanism. How
does ethics come into your work? And where do you stand in relation to recent
controversies about the nature of humanity itself?
H.W.: Humanism. The older I become, the more I think about this term. I
am more inclined towards what Donna Haraway and others call ‘inter-species’
relations, between, say, humans and animals such as dogs, horses, and chickens.
All forms of humanism end up being a kind of species-narcissism justifying the
commodification of the whole of nature and its consumption.
A.S.: There are resonances of the Vichan philosophy of universal history in your
‘poetics of history’, the typology of rhetorical tropes corresponding to stages of
historical consciousness and periods. However, how do you conceptualize the
movement of history?
H.W.: ‘History’ cannot be conceptualized in the sense of finding or discovering
the ‘substance’ of human evolution on the planet earth. Of course, one can
stipulate what one means by ‘History’ but this runs counter to the empiricist
ideology that serves as orthodoxy for modern professional historians. Stipulation
of meaning for basic terms in a historiography is what engenders ‘grand narratives’
of the kind that postmodernists, according to Jean-François Lyotard, must eschew.
‘The movement of history’ is a metaphorical expression requiring the naming
of the substance of this thing called ‘history’ that is supposed to be capable of
‘movement’. Once you hypostatize ‘history’ you can present it as capable of all kinds
of movements, including actions or intention-motivated movement. You can then
proceed to chart a ‘pathway’ for this movement, posit an end, aim, or purpose of
its ‘journey’, and so on. Benjamin speaks of history coming to a ‘standstill’, does
he not? Of course, we don’t have to be literalists in all this. We can stay within
the metaphorical, which Spengler did in The Decline of the West. Rather than a
conception of history as movement, we might speak of ‘figures of history’ (the title
of a recent book by Jacques Rancière) and schemata of movement. Then you have
allegory. Allegories of history – is that not what postmodernist novelists are all
about? Try reading Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, this way.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. This interview first appeared in the special issue on

‘Contemporary Literature and History’, edited by Christine Harrison and Angeliki
Spiropoulou for the journal Synthesis, no 8 (Fall 2015): 118–24.
118 Historical Modernisms

1 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century

Europe. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
2 Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Tropics of Discourse:
Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 122.
3 Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact’ (1974), in ibid., 84.
4 Hayden White, ‘The Modernist Event’, in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis
Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 66–86.
 Part II

Stories and histories of

the avant-gardes
120
 6

Medium-New
Tyrus Miller

Modernist theorizing about media might justifiably be seen as taking its point
of departure from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 treatise Laocoön: An
Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, a meditation on the capacities and
limitations of these sister arts in response to the classical injunction ut pictura
poesis, rearticulated in the Renaissance and elaborated in a range of artistic
debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 Lessing’s fundamental
contribution to aesthetics, his distinction of time- and space-based artforms
and his prescriptive strictures against blending them, was an implicit (and often
enough, explicit) touchstone of modernist media aesthetics. This is true whether
Lessing’s analytic was taken up affirmatively, as in Wyndham Lewis’s militant
advocacy of static, spatial art (contra time-art and its flux) in Time and Western
Man,2 in Clement Greenberg’s evocation of an updated Laocoön to address
the conditions of mid-twentieth-century modernism3 and in Michael Fried’s
conjuring of minimalism’s bad ‘theatricality’ to defend late modernist painting
against a trend towards, in his view, literalist ‘objecthood’;4 or negatively, in the
transgressive blending of space and time in the mobilized aesthetics of Moholy-
Nagy,5 in the media-crossing experimentalism of Cage,6 in the ‘other criteria’
applied by Leo Steinberg to the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Dubuffet, Noland,
Johns and Rauschenberg (‘other’, namely, than those criteria represented by the
Lessing-esque pseudo-couple of Harold Rosenberg’s ‘action painting’ theory
and Clement Greenberg’s assertion of painting’s essential tendency towards
flatness and ‘all-over-ness’);7 and in Rosalind Krauss’s correction of Lessing
in her insistence on the time-dimension, the ‘passages’, of modern sculpture.8
W. J. T. Mitchell sums up the stakes of a number of critical arguments for
modernist abstract painting from Clement Greenberg to Rosalind Krauss, by
122 Historical Modernisms

noting how the terms of Lessing’s antinomy of painting and literature were
reiterated in a transmuted form. Painterly abstraction, Mitchell suggests, is the
very means of enforcing a prescriptive separation of the one from the other:
The project of abstract painting (as understood by some of its principal
advocates) is only secondarily an overcoming of representation or illusion; the
primary aim is the erection of a wall between the arts of vision and those of
language. Sometimes this project expresses itself more generally as an attack on
the ‘confusion of the arts’, the blurring of the boundaries between painting and
other media.9

Basing his argument on the spatial (side-by-side) and temporal (one-after-

another) essences of the media of pictures and speech, and on the corresponding
objects of depiction (bodies) and narration (action), Lessing offered a critique, in
the proto-Kantian sense of establishing the limits of validity, of artistic theories
that in his view were tending to transgress the proper domain of the sister arts
and leading to defects in composition and artistic rendering. Notably, Lessing
employs the term ‘medium’ (Mittel) to designate not the raw material support
of the artform, but rather the material characteristics of the work as a means (a
more vernacular sense of Mittel) to accomplishing an intended artistic goal:
Once more, then; I do not deny to speech in general the power of portraying
a bodily whole by its parts … but I do deny it to speech as the medium of
poetry, because such verbal delineations of bodies fail of the illusion on which
poetry particularly depends, and this illusion, I contend, must fail them for
the reason that the coexistence of the physical object comes into collision with
the consecutiveness of speech, and the former being resolved into the latter, the
dismemberment of the whole into its parts is certainly made easier, but the
final reunion of those parts into a whole is made uncommonly difficult and not
seldom impossible.10

This usage similarly inflects an important monument in the history of modernist

theories of the poetic medium, Ezra Pound’s edition of Ernest Fenellosa’s The
Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, composed by Fenellosa
around 1903 and published by Pound in 1919. The ‘medium’ is the Chinese
written character, not ‘poetry’; but poetry is the intentional framework that
mobilizes and motivates aspects of the ‘ideogram’ as specifically poetic. Notably,
Fenellosa makes explicit reference to Lessing’s argument and categories,
including a comparison of the Laocoön statue with lines from Robert Browning.
The specific virtue of the ideogram as a medium of poetry, for Fenellosa, is that
it overcomes the split between pictoriality and action in which Lessing grounded
 Medium-New 123

his aesthetics, and which Fenellosa/Pound now present as a linguistically

contingent feature of Western alphabetic scripts and grammars.11 Language has
putatively become, in the crucible of the Chinese ideogram, a dramatic or even
cinematographic enactment in which depiction and description are fused:
One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the
fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of
combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and
with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more
dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but
to be watching things work out their fate.12

Fenellosa, having brought into unity Lessing’s parallel antitheses of poetry and
painting, speech and image, provides Pound with future theoretical justification
for subsequently exploring a variety of poetic innovations in The Cantos,
including the juxtaposition of heterogeneous materials without transitions,
the relativizing of alphabetic orthography with Chinese characters and other
graphic symbols, and the typographical treatment of the page as a hybrid of
linguistic and pictorial meaning.
What we might view as a certain circularity in Lessing’s reasoning – the
constraints of poetry being defined by the nature of speech, but only speech’s
nature as delimited by the constraints of poetry – nevertheless highlights a
salient ambiguity in the very definition of a medium. Medium signifies neither
the pure materiality of artistic creation and communication nor a naturally given
essence of the material; rather, a medium depends on an intentional structure
of the act of artistic creation and on the sedimentation of precedent intentions
in the historical traditions to which the current production of the work makes
reference. ‘Media’, in this sense, can be viewed not as unchanging essences, but
rather as relative constants or stabilities in the artistic appropriation of materials,
and to this extent, media may exhibit a certain transhistorical validity despite the
flux of historical variations and novelties in their use. Medium is an outcome, not
an origin. It derives from iterative processes of artistic Vermittlung, mediation
between the current act of creation and the tradition and between the artist and
his audience. As Rosalind Krauss has recently underscored in her contemporary
plaidoyer for medium-specificity, and in this regard with complete fidelity to
Lessing: ‘the medium [is] a form of remembering, since the various artistic
supports, each represented by its individual muse, serve as the scaffolding for
a “who you are” in the collective memory of the practitioners of that particular
genre—painting, sculpture, photography, film’.13 Raymond Williams, in his
124 Historical Modernisms

discussion of the concept of medium in Marxism and Literature, goes still further,
reminding us of the work processes lying behind the artist’s engagement with
material and their embeddedness in the broad social relations of production and
division of labour. He argues that the notion of medium, as used to characterize
artistic labour in contrast to other forms of labour in capitalist society, bears
the traits of what Lukács called reification; ‘medium’, in short, becomes, in
aesthetic discourses, an ideologically charged cypher that conceals and deflects
from more direct consideration the underlying social processes and practices
of artistic production.14 Despite this ideological distortion, however, Williams
finds in the notion of medium an important diagnostic value, specifically for the
social relations that undergird the development of artistic modernism:
[S]ince the late nineteenth century, crises of technique—which can be isolated as
problems of the ‘medium’ or of the ‘form’—have been directly linked with a sense
of crisis in the relationship of art to society which had previously been agreed
or even taken for granted. A new technique has often been seen, realistically, as
a new relationship, or as depending on a new relationship. Thus what had been
isolated as a medium, in many ways rightly as a way of emphasizing the material
production which any art must be, came to be seen, inevitably, as social practice;
or, in the crisis of modern cultural production, as a crisis of social practice. This is
the crucial common factor, in otherwise diverse tendencies, which links the radical
aesthetics of modernism and the revolutionary theory and practice of Marxism.15

In light of the socio-historical dimensions that are encoded into and potentially
legible in the notion of medium, the apparent circularity of Lessing’s definition
may, then, be less a logical flaw than a prescient formulation of the hermeneutic
‘fusion of horizons’ necessary to instance ‘the medium’ in individual works
of art, to body forth the medium’s ‘effective history’ in works, mediating the
creative relations between present production and inherited tradition.16
Notably, T. S. Eliot, who exhibits in his criticism great sensitivity to the specific
technical characteristics of the poetic uses of language, also carefully grounded
his observations on the specific medium characteristics of poetry not in a
material theory of the medium but in a hermeneutical argument about tradition.
This is most evident in his renowned essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
(1919), which establishes the relationship between a self-sufficient, singular
realization in the medium of poetry and an artistic process that extinguishes the
contingencies of the self in order to submit to the selective necessity of tradition.
What becomes evident from Eliot’s own poetic practice in works such as ‘The
Waste Land’, ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Hollow Men’, however, is that the ideal poetic
relation to tradition defined in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ can only
 Medium-New 125

function as a diagnostic of the negative condition of modernity, as an index of

what at present could be achieved only with the greatest ascetic efforts, through
the most desperate contortions of crisis-consciousness, or perhaps ultimately
not at all. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ itself leaves this parlous state
of affairs largely tacit (though perhaps legible between its elusive lines). Of
Eliot’s early essays, then, it is thus not ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that
offers the most salient analysis of medium in modernist writing, since it largely
evades the question of what happen to media when the intentional structures
embedded in tradition begin to erode, but rather his 1917 ‘Reflections on Vers
Libre’. In this earlier essay, in contrast, Eliot diagnoses the emergence of technical
formalism – a poetry whose heightened artifice derives from the isolation and
intensive development of latent aspects of the material medium – as a symptom
of a disturbance in tradition itself. Eliot notes that ‘the decay of intricate formal
patterns has nothing to do with the advent of vers libre. It had set in long before.
Only in a closely-knit and homogeneous society, where many men are at work
on the same problem … will the development of such forms ever be carried to
perfection’.17 In the contemporary context of a heterogeneous, loosely structured
modern society, immersion in technical problems of verse – Eliot’s example is
Swinburne’s metrical complexities, but he could well be referring to Pound’s
early poetry – represents a problematic gambit. Given the general ‘withdrawal
of consensual language’, as Christopher Butler has formulated modernity’s
progressive delegitimation of inherited artistic conventions,18 any such elaborate
techniques, even if inspired by the Troubadours or the Elizabethans, can only be
speculative bids for a future recognition that is far from guaranteed. Swinburne,
for Eliot, is exemplary for the failure of his metrical gambit: ‘If anything
promising for English poetry is hidden in the metres of Swinburne, it probably
lies far beyond the point to which Swinburne has developed them.’19
In his essay ‘How to Read’, from the late 1920s, Pound famously formulated a
typology of poetry that distinguished three distinct kinds of poetry, each based
on alternative constitutions of the medium of language in poetry, according to
how language is ‘charged or energized in various manners’.20 These include:
MELOPŒIA, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain
meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that
meaning.

PHANOPŒIA, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination.

LOGOPŒIA, ‘the dance of the intellect among words’, that is to say, it employs
words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way
126 Historical Modernisms

of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the world, its usual
concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the
aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and
cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music. It is the latest come, and
perhaps the most tricky and undependable mode.21

While Pound treats each type of poetry as legitimate in the light of tradition, he
clearly conceives of logopœia as both the most contemporary (‘the latest come’)
and the most consummately autonomous manifestation of language as a medium
of poetry (‘peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation’). It is, for Pound,
the mode in which language comes into its own as a modern poetic medium,
emancipated from its heteronomous bonds to other media. Moreover, of the
three kinds of poetry, as Pound formulates them, only logopœia contains an
explicit index of contemporaneity in its relation to the social context of language
usage, performance and pragmatics. Regardless of the ultimate validity of
Pound’s categories, they illustrate a key nuance in his understanding of medium
as it pertains to poetry: far from simply focusing on language as a material
support, much less on some isolated aspect of its sound or representational
character, language as poetic medium, at its most distinct, is a particular relation
to a social, cultural and, implicitly, historical context that is taken up into the
artwork and that facilitates its capacity to communicate aesthetically.

II

The notion of the artistic medium, in sum, cannot be reduced either to the
material support of the work of art or to a back-formation of the artist’s
techniques for mobilizing and intensifying properties that may be projected
into or derived out of the artistic material. The commonly accepted artistic
media took on their consistency and quasi-essential stability only against
a background of long-evolving traditions of practice, chains of artistic
exemplars, and conventions of composition and interpretation. However, one
of the most salient conditions of modernist art and literature is the disruption
of tradition, the delegitimation of inherited representational conventions, a
process that the modernist avant-gardes, moreover, intentionally sought to
intensify and accelerate into wholesale destruction. Whether this negative
horizon of delegitimation was viewed by the modernist artist with anguish
or with a sense of exhilaration, the artistic imperative it pronounced was to
invent new forms, new idioms and paradoxically singular ‘genres’ of art. But
 Medium-New 127

this imperative to invent extended beyond the specific forms and styles to
the domain of art itself, where the distribution and hierarchy of media was
a defining feature. If traditional forms, idioms and genres were mutually
implicated in stable artistic media and vice versa, then the general dialectic
of modernism could not have left media unaffected. Accordingly, modernism
expresses a paradoxical demand – given the mutually constitutive nature of
media, conventions and traditions – to purify or reinvent old media, and,
ultimately, to invent new media, freed from the burden of conventions and
ungrounded in any precedent tradition, as if the media and the work they
supported were to be co-equal objects of composition.
Modernism, and especially its activist wing in the avant-garde, proliferated
nominalistic, performative attempts to call into being new medium-categories
bearing new labels, exemplified, initially, by only one or a small number of works,
or by a theoretical projection of future works, or by incomplete sketches, studies
and notes towards their eventual realization.22 We can multiply at will key such
instances as Mallarmé’s ‘Book’, the ‘manifesto’ developed by much of the historic
avant-garde, the Cubists’ ‘collage’, Marinetti’s ‘parole in libertà’, Malevich’s ‘non-
objectivity’, Khlebnikov’s and Kruchenykh’s ‘zaum’, Apollinaire’s ‘calligram’,
Pound’s ‘ideogram’, Stein’s ‘geography’, Lewis’ ‘vortex’, Duchamp’s ‘readymade’,
Kandinsky’s ‘Geistige’, Klee’s ‘picture poems’, Van Doesburg’s ‘Stijl’, Breton’s ‘poème-
objet’, El Lissitzky’s ‘Proun’, Micić’s ‘Zenit’, Eisenstein’s ‘intellectual montage’, the
Productivists’ ‘factography’, Hausmann’s ‘optophonetics’, Schwitters’ ‘Merz’, the
Surrealists’ ‘psychic automatism’, the Bataille circle’s l’informe, Moholy-Nagy’s
and Man Ray’s ‘photogram’, and the Expressionists’ ‘neuer Mensch’23 (even before
adding in a further iteration of neo-avant-garde bids for medium status such as
‘concrete poetry’, ‘chance’, ‘graphic score’, ‘indeterminacy’, ‘instruction poem’, ‘shape’,
‘mesostic’, ‘mirror displacement’, ‘site/non-site’, ‘action’, ‘situation’ and ‘dérive’).
As Stanley Cavell has noted, ‘One might say that the task is no longer to
produce another instance of an art but a new medium within it … It follows that
in such a predicament, media are not given a priori. The failure to establish a
medium is a new depth, an absoluteness, of artistic failure.’24 Cavell, who speaks
of media as ‘automatisms’, in the sense of providing artists embedded, tacit ways
of ‘doing things’ with words, images, sounds, etc., contrasts the traditional and
modernist artist through their divergent relation to the medium as an ensemble
of automatisms:
In a tradition, the great figure knows best how to activate its automatisms, and
how best to entice the muse to do most of the work. In a modernist situation,
there is no such help … The automatisms of a tradition are given to the
128 Historical Modernisms

traditional artist, prior to any instance he adds to it; the master explores and
extends them. The modernist artist has to explore the fact of automatism itself,
as if investigating what it is at any time that has provided a given work of art with
the power of its art as such.25

As Rosalind Krauss notes (though referring to the re-invention of medium in

the ‘post-medium condition’ of contemporary art):
The invention of a medium will strike us as strange – since mediums develop
over many centuries during which an entire guild uses their rules as a means of
communication. An ‘invented’ medium would seem to be merely idiomatic.26

But it is, however, precisely upon the transmutation of this (potentially

incommunicable) idiomaticity into communicable aesthetic validity that
modernism stakes its artistic claim. As Cavell suggests, modernism turns
‘tradition’ into a reiterated series of foundational moments, a ‘tradition of the
new’ (in Harold Rosenberg’s words). Which might be restated, with a note
of Benjaminian pathos: modernism generates the history of its media as a
continuum of catastrophes: ‘This is the meaning of the new fact of series, or
the fact that a new medium establishes and is established by a series. Each
instance of the medium is an absolute realization of it; each totally eclipses the
other.’27
Modernism thus speculates on turning the authority of tradition over into a
bid for posterior understanding and acceptance, with current incomprehension
and even outrage as the necessary interest paid on that credit. This contract
rests, that is, on the fallible potential for the artist to establish, through the
reflexive action of the singular artwork itself, a code to accompany the work,
to render its newly instituted language translatable into communicable
experience and meaning. ‘A medium’, Krauss writes, ‘is the articulation of such
a code.’28 But so too, we should add, may a supplementary theoretical statement
or an externally furnished critical discourse serve this function, which,
as Mitchell reminds us, often regularly accompanies the tacit statements of
modernist media and addresses their typical lack of discursive explicitness.
The sort of self-reflexively generated and work-immanent code from which
Krauss conjures her prescriptive evaluations of artists and works is not, in
historical perspective, the only way in which new, singular media have stated
their case and bid for recognition. But by various means, one way or the other,
the modernist work projects its own posterity forward from a foundational
moment validating the artwork’s forms and its medium in a singular act of
present-tense co-creation.
 Medium-New 129

III

We can see this media-renewing impulse at work already in Stéphane Mallarmé,

in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, in his response to what he
diagnosed as ‘the crisis in poetry’. In a key passage, he writes:
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his
initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their difference; they
light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual stream of fireworks over jewels,
restoring perceptible breath to the former lyric impulse, or the enthusiastic
personal directing of the sentence.29

Though apparently anticipating Eliot’s ‘continual extinction of personality’,

Mallarmé’s evocation of ‘the disappearance of the poet as speaker’ more directly
and more radically expresses an ideal of the purified medium, its liberation
of a defining difference from ‘speech’, understood as language in its everyday,
pragmatic acceptations, which constitutes in Paul Valéry’s words, ‘an extremely
odd mixture of incoherent stimuli’.30 Notably, unlike Eliot and Pound, Mallarmé
makes no mention of ‘tradition’ or any other index of historicity or background
climate of usage; indeed, the metaphors of jewels and fireworks suggest extremes
of geological time and absolute presentness that preclude any middle-term
duration in which history or tradition would be possible. Analogously, in his
posthumously published notes towards Le Livre, Mallarmé also evokes the
differential and distributed dimension of silence in speech, itself imagined as a
sparkling crystalline form organized and composed through the constellations
of white space on the page:

poem, held in space which isolates the stanzas and

conceals itself and takes place
amid the white of the paper; significative silence that it is
beautiful
no less difficult to compose, than the
meritorious
glorious
verses.31

It would, however, be misleading to consider Mallarmé’s purification of the

medium of writing as simply oblivious to background of history and tradition; far
more, it represents an intentional and methodical withdrawal, in which everyday
language remains as a negative horizon or even a resource to be transfigured by
130 Historical Modernisms

poetry. The white sheet of the virginal page is, prior to any writing deposited on
it, the negation of the dark background, the night, of ordinary speech:
To write – The inkstand, crystal as a conscience, within its depths its drop of
shadow relative to having something be: then take away the lamp. You notice,
one does not write luminously on a dark field; the alphabet of the stars alone, is
thus indicated, sketched out or interrupted; man pursues black on white.32

The new literature as Mallarmé imagines it thus makes aesthetic use of the
medium of typography derived from, but also defined by, an internal swerve
from the newspaper, which despite the vulgar ‘pressed’ quality of its letters, also
points the way to a new disposition of letters and spaces on visually arresting
large format pages. In ‘The Book: A Spiritual Instrument’, in which ‘instrument’
may also be read as ‘means’ or ‘medium’, Mallarmé writes:
The newspaper with its full sheet on display makes improper use of printing
– that is, it makes good packing paper. Of course, the obvious and vulgar
advantage of it, as everybody knows, lies in its mass production and circulation.
But that advantage is secondary to a miracle, in the highest sense of the word:
words led back to their origin, which is the twenty-six letters of the alphabet,
so gifted with infinity that they will finally consecrate Language. Everything is
caught up in their endless variations and then rises out of them in the form
of the Principle. Thus typography becomes a rite. The book, which is a total
expansion of the letter, must find its mobility in the letter; and in its spaciousness
must establish some nameless system of relationships which will embrace and
strengthen fiction.33

Mallarmé came closest to exemplifying this transformed medium practice in the

constellative typography and ‘significative’ white space in his poem ‘Un coup de
dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’, published in journal form in 1897 and in book
form, posthumously, in 1914.
Taking up the lineage that Mallarmé helped establish in his essay ‘Epstein,
Belgion, and Meaning’, published in The Criterion in 1930, Pound suggested that
writing must evolve in the direction of a graphic diagrammatics, which would
help establish art at the high level of non-linear, multidimensional thought
already achieved by the sciences. Facilitated by Mallarmé’s and Apollinaire’s
innovations in establishing a graphic-verbal medium, the French cousin to
Pound’s own Chinese-inspired ideograms, the poet can be ‘as capable, or
almost as capable as thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub
and that fuse in hypergeometric amalgams’.34 In his 1926 book of ‘thought-
images’, the German critic Walter Benjamin expressed an analogous vision of
 Medium-New 131

the contemporary transfiguration of writing first adumbrated by the hermetic

meditations of Mallarmé:
Mallarmé, who in the crystalline structure of his manifestly traditionalist
writing saw the true image of what was to come, was in the Coup de dés the first
to incorporate the graphic tensions of the advertisement in the printed page. The
typographic experiments later undertaken by the Dadaists stemmed, it is true,
not from constructive principles but from the precise nervous reactions of these
literati, and were therefore far less enduring than Mallarmé’s … Script – having
found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence –
is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the
brutal hetronomies of economic chaos … If centuries ago it began gradually to lie
down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping
desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as
slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical
than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word
entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. And before a contemporary finds his
way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of
changing, colorful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the
archaic stillness of the book are slight … [Q]uantity is approaching the moment
of a qualitative leap when writing, advancing ever more deeply into the graphic
regions of its new eccentric figurativeness, will suddenly take possession of an
adequate material content. In this picture-writing, poets, who will now as in
earliest times be first and foremost experts in writing, will be able to participate
only by mastering the fields in which … it is being constructed: statistical and
technical diagrams.35

Both Benjamin and Pound, then, nearly contemporaneously predicted

transformations of script as a poetic medium that develop from Mallarmé’s
typographic speculations to the explosion of literate thought beyond the linear,
alphabetic and spatial boundaries of the book.36
Such speculations, at once, exploded the inherited conception of poetic
language into new domains of immersive tactility related to modern technology
and urban life and assimilated a vast new range of sonorous, luminous, graphic,
chromatic, typographical, configurational and mobile stimuli to the expanded
poetic medium/means of language. They exemplify a generalized modernist
hypertrophy of ‘language’, which Geoffrey Galt Harpham has aptly called
‘the critical fetish of modernity’. ‘The modernist moment,’ Harpham writes,
‘is achieved when immediacy … is renounced as an illusion [and] the limits
of language are seen as the limits of the world, and linguistic mediation itself
becomes the object of observation.’37 He goes on to note that
132 Historical Modernisms

[D]uring this time and even beyond, artistic and cultural media were conceived
as languages, with pigment, stone, tones, or human motion being credited
with a ‘syntax’, a ‘grammar’, a ‘rhetoric’, even a ‘phonology’ … The most
programmatically modernist art did not affiliate itself with particular national
traditions of expression, but cultivated an abstract ‘language of art’ that could
address a broadly European, even a universal audience.38

Whatever its validity, the artistic productiveness of the modernist obsession

with language-as-medium – language alone, but also language writ large –
cannot be doubted. Mallarmé’s path-breaking speculations on typography and
the expanded book helped inspire further typographical, artistic and musical
experiments throughout the twentieth century, from Apollinaire, Picasso and
Pound to Cage, Boulez39 and Broodthaers.

IV

In conclusion, I want to consider briefly one further modulation of the modernist

impulse to invent new media, often ‘nominalistically’ – that is, as exemplified by
a singular example, and provided a label that represents a bid for future validity.
One of the ways that this occurred was the assemblage of individual works – in
such modes as the avant-garde periodical, the performance venue, the collection
and the exhibition – and their composition as, themselves, quasi-works of art.
Often, this was accompanied by unconventional usage and labelling of the mode
of presentation, implying, as well, that in editing or otherwise presenting a variety
of modernist works, a ‘metamedia’ was also being invented and projected into
the world. We might point, for instance, to key exhibitions as Kasimir Malevich’s
0,10 exhibition, ‘the Last Futurist Exhibition’, the Cabaret Voltaire soirées, or
to periodicals such as Theo Van Doesburg’s De Stijl and Lajos Kássak’s MA as
instances in which the ensemble of works collected together and composed
might themselves be seen as self-reflexive, aesthetically innovative instances of
avant-garde form.
An illuminating example – because we can weigh an editor’s own statement of
his artistic and even political intentions – is Kurt Pinthus’s celebrated collection
of expressionist poetry Menschheitsdämmerung (Twilight/Dawn of Mankind).
Pinthus’s book assembles works by twenty-three of the younger generation of
expressionist poets, collocating the poems into four ‘chapters’: ‘Collapse and
Cry’,40 ‘The Heart’s Awakening’, ‘Call and Outrage’ and ‘Love of Man’. It brings
together such renowned poets as Gottfried Benn, Jakob Hoddis, Georg Heym,
 Medium-New 133

Ivan Goll, Franz Werfel, August Stramm, Georg Trakl and Else Lasker-Schüler,
as well as a number of now lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Klemm,
Rudolf Leonhard, Paul Zech, Walter Hasenclever and Karl Otten. Each section
included poems from the twenty-three writers, arranged in an order determined
by Pinthus’s intuitive sense of interconnections between the works, rather than
by external criteria such as alphabetical order, chronology, direct affiliations
between the writers or independent presentation of a given poet’s work.
Pinthus begins his preface by distinguishing Menschheitsdämmerung from
an ‘anthology’; the editor of this book, he claims, is an ‘enemy of anthologies’.41
‘Anthology’ implies, he explains, a gathering of texts by poets who happen to
live in the same time, and who are represented by alphabetical or chronological
presentation of a few poems each. They may be connected by a common theme,
or be presented as models of good poetry in the tradition of the forefathers.
Instead, Pinthus insists for his own book on the term ‘Sammlung’, which would
typically be translated ‘collection’ or ‘compilation’. However, he underscores that
he means the term not only in this more obvious sense, but also in the sense of
‘concentration’ and ‘composure’ and further extending to the active, politically
connotative sense of ‘Versammlung’, ‘assembly’, a gathering of people together
in action, a ‘calling to order’. ‘This book is not only called “a compiliation” (eine
Sammlung)’, he writes. ‘It is assembly! (Sammlung): assembly of concussions
and passions, assembly of desire, joy, and torment of an epoch—our epoch. It
is the collected (gesammelte) projection of human movement out of and into
time.’42
Pinthus goes on to contrast the organizational principle of his assemblage
from the handling of cultural material by the twentieth-century humanities
(Geisteswissenschaften). These latter, he suggests, took as their model the natural
sciences and subordinated their materials to a conceptual, successive, and
causal order. ‘One saw things causally, vertically.’43 His book, Pinthus argues, is
assembled – called to order – in a different manner:
One listens into the poetry of our time …, one listen across and through, looking
all around, … not vertical, not successively, rather horizontal; one does not
divide that which follows one from the other, rather one listens together, in an
instant, simultaneously. One listens to the chiming together of poetic voices: one
listens symphonically. The music of our time is intoned, the throbbing unison
of heart and brain.44

If the book is symphonically organized – assembled, that is, through a network

of immanent properties flowing out of the artworks into the new medium of the
134 Historical Modernisms

Sammlung, rather than by the ordinary external principles by which anthologies

are selected and arranged – what then is the underlying principle of composition?
Their commonality is the intensity and radicalism of feeling, sensibility,
expression, form; and this intensity, this radicalism, compels the poets in turn
to struggle against the humanity of an epoch coming to its end and to longing
preparation and demand for a new, better humanity.45

Pinthus suggests that it is the intensity of poetic subjectivity, of affective response

to the historical condition of the age, that brings the poems together and
represents, in the course of their meta-artistic composition and orchestration,
the true object of their poetic striving: Menschheit, ‘humanity’ itself, in its twilight
and new dawning. Subjectivity is, in this expressionist poetics, the expressive
medium in which ‘humanity’ ebbs and emerges in historical time; the Sammlung
of lyric poetry in a book is, in turn, the medium in which the temporalizing
movements of this subjectivity can be made present and communicable to
readers.
In moving from individual lyric expression in the medium of poetic language
to the orchestrated collective subjectivity of a poetic generation in the medium
of the ‘compilation/assembly’ to the universal voice of a historical horizon
in the medium of a declining and dawning humanity, Pinthus reveals a logic
of escalation in which the validity of unconventional artistic choices at one
medium-level – the individual poems – is staked on the degree to which they
can be assumed by the meta-artistic labour of the editor and eventually the meta-
historical movements of toiling, suffering mankind as a whole. Indeed, if we take
an admittedly extreme example, even for this collection of artistic extremities –
August Stramm’s often one-word-per-line ejaculations of pure feeling – it is hard
to see how the work could be aesthetically justified on purely work-immanent
grounds, without its being taken up by a meta-mediumistic and/or theoretical
context that would legitimate its non-conventional poetic model and offer
relevant interpretative framing for making sense of it as an instance of poetic art:

Lips, lips
Thirsty, curly, warm lips!
Blooms! Blooms!
Kisses! Wine!
Red
Gold
Rapturous
Wine!
 Medium-New 135

You and I!
I and you!
You!46

Pinthus’s example, in conclusion, is also notable for its obvious overstraining of

the aesthetic gambit of modernism, which is nevertheless far from exceptional
in the history of modernist manifestoes and theories, and in its works of art and
literature. Already upon the republication of Menschheitsdämmerung in 1922,
after its blockbuster success of selling more than 20,000 copies, Pinthus’s new
foreword, entitled ‘Reverberation’ (Nachklang), sounded a note of profound
disappointment and failure. Discussing his decision to republish the book
unchanged from its original edition, Pinthus admits that ‘[t]he poetry of this
generation died early’; ‘faster than any other generation, this one entered literary
history, became historical; their poetry became paradigm, schema for those
who followed’.47 Ultimately, however, the failure of the individual poetry – its
petrification into a mere historical artefact – and the deadening of the book’s
living ‘assembly’ into a static, monumental tableau, indexes failure at the
highest medium-level, ‘mankind’, which refused to be artistically composed and
transfigured. ‘The glow of this generation,’ Pinthus laments, ‘ignited itself in
opposition to the past, to the decaying, and for a few moments was able to throw
its illumination into the future, but it could not enflame humanity to the great
deed or to great feeling.’

Notes

1 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry
(1766), in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25–129.
2 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black
Sparrow Press, 1993).
3 Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a New Laocoon’, in The Collected Essays and
Criticism Vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),
23–41.
4 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–72.
5 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist (New York:
Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947).
6 John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
136 Historical Modernisms

7 Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1972).
8 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1981).
9 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language’, in Picture
Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 216.
10 Lessing, Laocoön, 90.
11 For the connection of Lessing and Fenellosa, see Haun Saussy, Great Walls of
Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 40.
12 Ernest Fenellosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for
Poetry: A Critical Edition, eds. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 45.
13 Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 2. She
is referring directly to Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay ‘Why Are There Several Arts and Not
Just One?’ in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994).
14 Compare, on this point, the Soviet Productivist theorist Boris Arvatov’s framing
of ‘medium’ as an alienation and mystification of bourgeois art’s relations of
production: ‘[N]ow artistic production was governed not by socio-technical tasks,
but by socio-ideological tasks, the artist-productionist turned from an organizer
of object into an organizer of ideas, turning the object into a “bare” medium, i.e.
he introduced goals into his material process of production that were completely
alien to this process’ – Boris Arvatov, Art and Production, trans. Shushan Avagyan
(London: Pluto Press, 2017), 26–7.
15 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 163–4.
16 I refer to the hermeneutic framework set out by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth
and Method, 2nd edn. (1st English edn, 1975, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, ed. by John
Cumming and Garret Barden), revised translation by J. Weinsheimer and
D. G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989).
17 T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank
Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 36.
18 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe
1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 4–14.
19 T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on Vers Libre ’, 33.
20 Ezra Pound, ‘How to Read’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London:
Faber and Faber, 1954), 25.
21 Ibid., 25.
22 I owe my discussion of label and example to Nelson Goodman’s discussion of
exemplification in Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). For
 Medium-New 137

further application of this concept of exemplification to artistic works of the neo-

avant-garde, see my Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2009).
23 For discussion of the notion of ‘the new man’ in the avant-garde, see Gottfried
Küenzlen, Der Neue Mensch (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994). For the even
broader suggestion that in modernity there is an evolving reciprocity of the
definition of ‘man’ and ‘medium’ in the human sciences, arts, and communication,
such that modern ‘man’ could be defined as the ‘medium of media’, see Stefan
Rieger, Die Individualität der Medien: Eine Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom
Menschen (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000). See also my essay of post-
surrealist constructions of the ‘new man’ in the 1930s, ‘Mimesis of the New Man:
the 1930s from Ideology to Anthropolitics’, Encounters with the 30s (Madrid: Reina
Sofia, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, 2012).
24 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged
edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 103.
25 Ibid., 107.
26 Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 3.
27 Cavell, The World Viewed, 115. A more starkly catastrophic view, emphasizing the
tendency of the serial ‘new’ to exhaust itself entropically, was expressed by Octavio
Paz in Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde,
new and enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). The
notion of the new as a ‘continuum of catastrophe’ was most thoroughly explored
by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project and his writings ‘On the Philosophy of
History’, in which the angel of history views the entire past as an ever-escalating
pile of rubble. Benjamin’s figure is a sobering counter-image to the seriality of the
new that Cavell celebrates as the achievement of modernity in art.
28 Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 3. Though he draws drastically different aesthetic
conclusions than Krauss, Craig Dworkin offers an analogous view of media when
he writes: ‘Media … consist of analyses of networked objects in specific social
settings. As much acts of interpretation as material things, as much processes
as objects, media are not merely storage mechanisms somehow independent of
the acts of reading or recognizing the signs they record’ – Dworkin, No Medium
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 22.
29 Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New
Directions, 1982), 75.
30 Paul Valéry, ‘Pure Poetry: Notes for a Lecture’, in The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise
Folliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 191.
31 Stéphane Mallarmé, The Book, trans. Sylvia Gorelick (Cambridge, MA: Exact
Change, 2018), 5.
32 Mallarmé, ‘Action Restricted’, in Selected Poetry and Prose, 77.
138 Historical Modernisms

33 Mallarmé, ‘The Book: A Spiritual Instrument’, in ibid., 82.

34 Ezra Pound, ‘Epstein, Belgion and Meaning’, The Criterion 9, no. 36 (April 1930): 475.
35 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings
Vol. 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1996), 456–7.
36 Notably, this was also the guiding thesis of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory:
that the homogeneous, visual space of thought constructed by literacy was, under
the pressure of new technological and electronic media, as well with the impetus
of as new scientific and technical paradigms, giving rise to a multidimensional,
dynamically fluctuating space of experience and thought. It is out of the scope
of this essay, but it is worth noting the central role of modernist literature and
criticism – most importantly the writings of Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and I. A. Richards – in McLuhan’s intellectual formation and
as a touchstone throughout his career. For further on this connection, see Marshall
McLuhan, The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan,
1943/1962, ed. Eugene McNamara (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Counterblast:
1954 Edition (Berkeley: Ginko Press, 2011); Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994); Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws
of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); and Glenn
Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1996). One could note an analogous modernist provenance of situationist
thought, which has been highly influential in contemporary media theory. Lettrist
and Situationist analyses of culture and their techniques of cultural intervention
took inspiration from a heterogeneous range of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde
practices from Mallarmé, Lautréamont and surrealism to the post-war COBRA
group and continental informelle painting.
37 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 4.
38 Ibid., 5–6.
39 Boulez’s composition Pli Selon Pli (completed 1962), incorporating five Mallarmé
poems, was, for example, a vehicle for Boulez to explore a problem of interartistic
media relations. It represents, he writes, ‘a number of solutions to the problems
posed by the alliance of poetry and music, and these solutions range from a simple
heading to total amalgamation. They give each piece a meaning and indicate
the significance of its position in the complete cycle’ – Boulez, ‘Pli Selon Pli’, in
Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 174. For a more extended
treatment of the same issue, see also ‘Sound, Word, Synthesis’ (1958), in Ibid.,
177–98.
40 Kurt Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung: Ein Document des Expressionismus
(Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955).
 Medium-New 139

41 ‘Zuvor’ (1919), in Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung, 22.

42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 23.
46 August Stramm, ‘Blüte’ (Blooms), in Pinthus, 142.
47 ‘Nachklang’ (1922) in Pinthus, 34.
140
 7

Time assemblage: History in the European

avant-gardes
Sascha Bru

Given the rhetorical verve with which they claimed to break with the past,
their pronounced desire to be of, or to transform, the present, and their strong
futural thrust, the so-called classic or historical avant-gardes – Expressionism,
Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism and many other isms –
are generally considered to have been anti-passéist. Critics indeed most often
side either with Renato Poggioli’s claim that what ultimately tied all classic
avant-gardes together was a generic futurism, an orientation towards the
future,1 or with the view put forth, among others, by François Hartog, that the
dominant ‘regime of historicity’ of the avant-gardes was presentism, that is,
their hermeneutical horizon of expectation was primarily geared towards the
present.2 Hardly anyone associates the classic avant-gardes with the past. To
interpret the avant-gardes’ alleged disregard of the past as emblematic of a joint
a- or anti-historical stance, or to pit the avant-gardes, in a sort of Manichean
conflict, on the side of a purely Kantian, historically disinterested, aesthetic that
takes on the Hegelian, historical front of Realism, is jumping to conclusions too
quickly, though. For it is, of course, not because we downplay the role of the past,
and favour the present or the future, that we would be against history as such.
Rather, this suggests that we operate with a different understanding of history,
one that perhaps also recalibrates the relations between the past, the present
and the future. What the avant-gardes’ other understanding of history, and its
‘medium’, time, might have amounted to forms the topic of this essay.

I am profoundly grateful to Tyrus Miller, whose input has been vital to this essay. A first draft of this
essay was read as a keynote at the conference Realism(s) of the Avant-Garde, organized by the European
Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) at the University of Münster in September
2018. I am also much indebted to the organizer, Moritz Baßler, for inviting me to present it there.
142 Historical Modernisms

Allegories of patience

One of the most undervalued aspects of the classic avant-gardes is their patience,
for were we to take the words of many avant-gardists literally, then we can only
conclude that they mainly awaited their own death, if not the end of times. In
an oft-quoted patch from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Fondazione e Manifesto
del Futurismo’ (1909), for instance, we read that by the time the harbingers of
Futurism will have turned forty, a younger generation will come to throw them
out in the dustbin like ‘manoscritti inutili’, useless manuscripts.3 Traditionally
framed as a sign of Marinetti’s insistence on youthfulness and generational
conflict, this passage can also be interpreted as already prefiguring the end,
that is, the moment upon which Futurism will have become a thing of the past,
thereafter surviving only as a stack of archival manuscripts and artefacts in some
new era. Right before Futurism is to meet its end here, the Futurists will encounter
a phase of ferocious violence, Marinetti insisted. For as the manifesto goes on to
state, he and his cohorts will not just be thrown in the dustbin. Younger artists,
perhaps no longer Futurists, let alone humans – the manifesto says they will have
‘hooked, predatory claws, sniffling like dogs’4 – will come to the elders’ houses
and virulently slaughter them. Hence, to imagine the end of the present, or at
least to appreciate the epoch of Futurism, Marinetti prefigured, we first have to
envisage ourselves being killed and obliterated. Only at or from this projected
point, only by imagining a future anterior that coincides with the end of life or
human temporality, the meaningful nature of Futurism can become manifest.
The idea that the apocalyptic end to the epoch of the present was the
condition of addressing oneself to the future constantly resurfaces in the classic
avant-gardes. Quite a few Expressionists, for instance, saw the present as a mere
intermediary phase pregnant with possibility, a phase that could only gain
meaning in a cataclysmic temporality. In his famous ‘Rede für die Zunkunft’
(1919), for example, Kurt Pinthus described the present as ‘a furtively receding
nothing’,5 and even the ever-mild Kandinsky argued in Über das Geistige in der
Kunst (1912) that an art which ‘has no power for the future, which is only the
child of the age, cannot become a mother of the future, is a barren art’.6 The
present to many avant-gardists was, in short, a nullity, a phase that awaited a
calamitous overthrow. Only then would their art attain its proper functionality
and value. In the meantime one of their principal tasks was to wait, to exert
patience.
A most radical version of this view can be encountered in Russian Futurism.
In 1913, in the Luna Park theatre in St Petersburg, the Union of Youth staged their
 History in the European avant-gardes 143

Pobeda nad Solntsem (Victory over the Sun). The story of this famous Futurist
opera is well known – although we continue to argue over its exact tenor. A
young aviator punctures the sun. The aviator, often read as a symbol of the new,
the acme of the present, destroys the sun, emblem of the old forces that keep the
universe from changing. By placing the destruction of the sun at the centre of the
opera, Mikhail Matyushin, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Kasimir Malevich and Velimir
Khlebnikov implied that to appreciate Russian Futurism as meaningful requires
that we imagine the end of the present to coincide not just with our own death,
but with a point beyond entropy, after the thermodynamic expiration of the
universe as such. The future begins with extinction, in total darkness. The sun
no longer exists. And only at this point does the new art become meaningful. All
radical art begins after visibility, beyond legibility as currently coded. Indeed,
it is an early version of the Black Suprematist Square (1915) icon that actually
punctures the sun in this opera. Malevich in his later writings would go on to
invite us to imagine the art of the future as being experienced on a desolated and
arid land: ‘[Art] reaches a “desert” in which nothing can be perceived’, adding,
except ‘feeling’, a pure feeling of the materiality of art.7
Such reflections, when we take them at face value, tone down the naïve
utopian zeal and buoyancy we usually associate with the Futurists, and the
blind meliorism we attach to certain Expressionists. Instead, they accentuate the
patience of the avant-gardes, an aspect we do not usually associate with them.
When taken literally, many avant-gardists apparently awaited the end of times.
Read allegorically, however, their projections of what on occasion resembles a
post-human epoch, a world and time beyond human legibility from which their
work becomes meaningful, can also be interpreted as prefiguring a different way
of experiencing time and history, a temporality and historicity beyond any given
understanding of history. It is worth seeing this allegorical reading through.

Historicism and realism

The intuition that the classic avant-gardes operated with a new or different notion
of history is almost as old as the avant-gardes themselves. There is indeed a well-
established tradition of research that in part finds its roots in the so-called Realism
or Expressionism Debate as it was waged in the German-language exile journal
Das Wort in the late 1930s,8 but also in the work of Walter Benjamin and Frankfurt
School representatives to, more recently, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Georges
144 Historical Modernisms

Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, W. T. J. Mitchell and Andreas Huyssen – all of

whom have seized upon the work of the historical avant-gardes and their cognates
to think differently about history. Lately, several scholars have also attempted to
rethink the meaning of the term ‘avant-garde’ in our own seemingly post-avant-
garde times. Whether we turn to Hal Foster, to Krzysztof Ziarek’s conception of
the avant-garde ‘event-work’,9 Andrew Benjamin’s reading of the ‘avant-garde
experience’ as an ‘anoriginal difference’,10 David Cunningham’s understanding
of the avant-garde as a concept of historical temporalization,11 the work of Peter
Osborne12 and Susan Buck-Morss13 – all these critics have revisited the (classic,
neo- and more recent) avant-gardes’ reflection on their own internal history within
the last two centuries or so, in order to determine whether today, too, we could not
think about the (or an) avant-garde differently, and from our contemporary point
of view redraw or temporalize its history differently, or not at all.
However, all this critical energy has not led to a consensus on what the view or
views of history in the avant-gardes amounted to, except perhaps in the negative.
For at the risk of oversimplifying matters, all these scholars can be said to share
one presupposition, namely that the avant-gardes’ view of history differed from,
or, better, was against, the default notion of history in historicism, and against its
perceived art and literary historical extension: Realism. Admittedly, much is to
be argued for this. As Hayden White reminds us, around 1900 ‘the term “history”
had come […] to be synonymous with “reality,” so much so that the phrase
“historical reality” had become a pleonasm’.14 Nowhere was this assumption as
clear as in professional history. Here a variety of at times conflicting views which
ranged from hypertrophic positivism to unbridled relativism, and which today
we commonly lump together under the label of ‘historicism’, upheld that all social
and cultural phenomena were determined by history, that is, by the context in
which they figure. As is well known, this rather general assumption around 1900
was not characteristic of historians alone. It pervaded European culture, which
in a panoply of ways prided itself on its advanced understanding and mastery
of the past as it supposedly had once existed. This wider cultural interest in the
past, as a real thing that had to be cherished and studied, was of course also
mirrored in the emanations of Realism in the arts – the realist novel, for instance,
perfectly mirrored the cultural significance attributed to the past, as its default
tense was the past tense; the novel, and the Bildungsroman especially, thus made
its readers witness to past events moving towards the future; whence also the
success of the historical novel. Because reality was perceived as historical, and
all that can be known for certain was the past, so, eventually, the present came
to be viewed as the history of tomorrow in an ever-faster-changing world. The
 History in the European avant-gardes 145

future, in turn, as Reinhart Koselleck has shown, came to be looked upon as a

vergange Zukunft, a former future or future past on the way forward.15
To read the avant-gardes as a reaction against this dominant view of history is
entirely justified. For, in part following Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of history
as it was understood in the nineteenth century, the avant-gardes unmistakably
assailed historicism and left the conventions of Realism behind. Yet it is perhaps
less justifiable to reduce the avant-gardes’ entire understanding of history
to a mere after-effect of the historical emanations of Realism in the arts, and
historicism in professional history. Indeed, while critics in other cases often
compare the avant-gardes to a large variety of other than nineteenth-century
European periods and styles, when it comes to ‘history’, with a few exceptions
(such as Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on the Baroque), we most often tend to
pull the card of nineteenth-century Realism and its historiographical cognates.
By so doing, we not only remain caught in a fixed set of presuppositions, if not
ourselves entrenched in exclusively contextualizing and historicizing analyses
of the avant-gardes. At the risk of stating the obvious, we thereby also operate
with a rather narrow understanding of history, reducing it to a single, albeit
supposedly ‘long’, century.

Polytemporality and anachronicity

That avant-garde works frequently move beyond and outside the parameters
of nineteenth-century European culture is no secret. Synthetic Cubist collages
or papiers-collés such as Picasso’s visually punning and anti-illusionist Guitare,
partition, verre (Guitar, Sheet Music, Glass, 1912, Figure 7.1), for instance, leave
no doubt about the avant-gardes’ departure from nineteenth-century Realist
conventions. This still-life can also be read as anti-historicist, in that in defiance
of Realist painting it further incorporates a newspaper snippet referencing a
historical battle in part to claim a place for the everyday as constitutive of, or
at least conterminous to, historicity. The moment or the present, Picasso here
suggests, is always more than itself; it has the potentiality of the implex, as Paul
Valéry called it in L’idée fixe (1932), it can go in various, albeit conditioned
directions, and it belongs to all not the few. As such, this same work can also
be interpreted as a response to its immediate historical context, that is, a short
phase before the First World War, during which the arrival of global war still
seemed a possibility, not a necessity. In addition, critics often couple this
work to the brief phase in Picasso’s oeuvre during the early 1910s in which he
146 Historical Modernisms

Figure 7.1 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, Glass (1912). Cut-and-pasted
wallpaper, newspaper (Le Journal, 18 November 1912), sheet music, coloured paper,
paper and hand-painted faux bois paper, charcoal and gouache on paperboard,
47.9 × 36.5 cm. McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. Bequest of Marion Koogler
McNay © McNay Art Museum/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence © 2021 Succession
Picasso/SABAM Belgium.
 History in the European avant-gardes 147

produced a whole series of works portraying stringed instruments,16 a phase that

coincidentally ended with the arrival of the Great War, thereby suggesting that
the redemptive song of the guitar collage came to a close when the war began.
Picasso, in sum, elevated the sign of the guitar to malleable material, turning
it into a site of possibility and openness, to abandon it in the end. Yet, sitting
somewhat uneasily with our historicizing and contextualizing gaze, this same
sign of course also invites us to consider the enormously rich history of visual
art works portraying chordophones, a history whose materiality Picasso pulls
on the plank of this work as well. This history is almost boundless and reaches
well beyond the Middle Ages; it also comes with a wide variety of views of the
relations between past, present and future that differ at times radically from
those in the nineteenth century.
The creation of ‘shapes of time’, as George Kubler called them,17 the
development of temporal cross-referencing complexes we encounter in Picasso’s
collage, is not typical of the avant-gardes alone, but of all art. Exploiting the
potential of polytemporality, as Bruno Latour defines it,18 that is, bringing
together material or materialities with different historical origins, is indeed not
only characteristic of avant-garde collages, textual experiments, assemblages
or performances. Such polytemporality can also be located in, say, the plays of
Shakespeare with their well-studied bricolage of building blocks and sources
stemming from various periods. We can read any twenty-first-century novel as a
polytemporal object – the basic narrative make-up or ‘exoskeleton’ of the novel19
after all is a late eighteenth-century generic convention – and even the Realism of
a Courbet, whose scandalous Un Enterrement à Ornans (1849–50), for instance,
derived from its adoption of a genre previously reserved for the depiction of
nobility, is polytemporal in this sense. Such diachronic intertextuality, as it is
known in literary studies, this ability to reverse even the pro- and retentional
consciousness of time, abounds in all art.
As Werner Hofmann, Alexander Nagel and others have argued, this
ultimately points to the anachronic nature of all art, which as a rule relativizes
temporal and historical distance and which follows a temporality of its own,
one that can fold, bend, crack, wrinkle, split or loop the linear arrow or arrows
of time, the multidimensional strip of time we commonly evoke to conceive of
history.20 This makes clear that art in whatever medium travels through time
and history in ways that mostly do not mesh with the dominant view of history
in the nineteenth century. Pointing at the anachronic nature of all art is not to
deny that concrete art works are at the same time also situated and dated events,
however. Historicization or contextualization should therefore not simply be
148 Historical Modernisms

thrown overboard. (Far from it – I will conclude on a contextualizing note

myself.) Yet, if we take this anachronic aspect or material-force of art seriously, if
we recognize that art is a mode of transmission that continues to produce effects
into the future while also altering and changing the past, then we might also
want to enquire whether the classic avant-gardes in some way stand out here as
an artistic formation.
Indeed, what, if anything, did the avant-gardes make of the anachronic
nature of art? And what does ‘history’ in these avant-gardes look like if we
for a brief stint bracket our inclination to look at them as post-Realist or
post-historicist, and also drop our habit of historicizing and contextualizing
them? How, for instance, is history presented in a text or score such as Kurt
Schwitters’ Ursonate (1922–32)? What perspective on history is yielded by, say,
László Moholy-Nagy’s Licht-Raum-Modulator (1922–1930)? Where is history
here? And where is history in Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand verre (1915–23)?
How do these and all other so-called classic or historical avant-garde works
relate or present history?

Metahistory and interchronicity

To answer the above questions, even if it were just partially, it is worth considering
the view of history in the avant-gardes from a metahistorical perspective –
and the prefix meta- is of course key here, in that it implies that we do not anchor
the discourses, works and practices of the avant-gardes in any context that
surrounded them. Instead, we jump straight away from an initial close reading
of a work to a meta-perspective and ask how that work imagines, projects
or calibrates the relationships between past, present and future, and how it
considers something like a context. As Roland Barthes famously stated in his
essay ‘Le mythe, aujourd’hui’: ‘un peu de formalisme éloigne de l’Histoire, mais
[…] beaucoup y ramène.’21 This holds true in our case, too, because an attentive
analysis of avant-garde works, discourses and practices does allow for some
general conclusions about the nature of ‘history’ in the classic avant-gardes,
for a different hermeneutics of history, we will see. In fact, when we approach
the archive of works and artefacts the avant-gardes left us today as carriers of
‘tertiary memory’, as Bernard Stiegler defines it,22 that is, as temporal objects or
prostheses which allow us to experience history and time, it further becomes
clear that we may want to revise our common view that the avant-gardes simply
favoured the present or the future over the past.
 History in the European avant-gardes 149

Let us turn to an example: Max Ernst’s Katharina Ondulata (1920, Figure 7.2).
One of Ernst’s so-called Übermalereien or ‘overpaintings’, it consists of a piece
of paper on which Ernst first printed certain elements and then subsequently
painted over. Its structure, in other words, is laminar or layered, and as such it can
be read not just as an index, but also as a manifestation of its own construction in

Figure 7.2 Max Ernst, Katharina Ondulata d.i. frau wirtin a.d. lahn (1920).
Gouache, pencil and ink on printed paper, 31.2 × 27 cm. Inscribed: ‘Katharina
ondulata d.i. frau wirtin a.d. lahn erscheint als der deutschen engelin u. perlmütter
auf korksohlen im tierbild des krebses’. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
Edinburgh. Purchased with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art
Fund 1995. © Scala, Florence © 2021 SABAM Belgium.
150 Historical Modernisms

time. Evoking a landscape of sorts, its motives are dazzling. Centre right we see a
mountain, which is actually named: it is an almost verist drawing of Mount Fuji
on the Japanese island of Honsu, the tallest mountain of the country, an iconic
piece of japonisme, and, notably, a volcano. This motif is further elaborated at
the bottom, where we appear to be confronted with a cross-cut of geological
or techtonic layers, the top crust of which consists of the volcano. These layers
or strata are interesting as one of them contains a signature and a date: ‘Max
Ernst, 20’. As other layers find themselves on top of this one, it is difficult to
resist reading this work as a projection of some future. This is, at some point
in the future, how the world will look. An accretion of strata, the landmass
at the bottom is anything but uniform. It evokes processes of metallization,
crystallization, dissolution and saturation. The blue layers of water, and above all
the red dotted section bottom left, further hint at a process of liquefaction that
is still evolving. Yet there is little happening, it seems. This work invites us to be
patient, and, while being patient, to consider how things came about, how they
can be un-happened, scraped off, again and again, layer after layer – as Ernst
himself would come to do elsewhere through the technique of grattage.
Of course, taking the differently coloured zones at the bottom for geological
strata implies that we also undo Euclidean perspective, and simply look at
this work as evoking a flat surface foregrounding its own materiality. When,
alternatively, we look at this landscape as having depth, then these are not
strata, but a river, a lake or even a sea, surrounded by differently coloured
patches of land that remove themselves further from us one after the other. In
this case, however, we no longer find ourselves in the future, but in the now,
the present.
It is at this critical junction or folding of temporalities, at a point upon which
the past becomes visible from the future and the present from the past, that at
the centre we find two entities, left and right, both of which suggest a sense of
dynamism.23 To the right, on a pedestal, a zigzagging arrow-construction. Just
like the faux-bois layer or zone at the bottom, this in part mechanomorphic
shape consists of man-made remnants: tubes, wall-papered matter, a set of flags.
The figure suggests dynamism in two ways. First, through a process of excretion.
Out of the blue tube far right pulverized material is ejected, the dust-like matter
landing on Mount Fuji and thus the whole contraption apparently transforming
the landscape over time. Second, the faux-bois pedestal finds itself on water;
perhaps what we are seeing is not something static, but a figure in the process
of moving and floating by. This tension between movement and stasis, time
evolving and standing still, is further emphasized by the zigzagging shape of the
 History in the European avant-gardes 151

arrow-like member. If what we are witnessing is a cross-cut of geological strata,

however, then all this figure does, it seems, is to displace land (as the picture as a
whole seems to be doing as well), while being stuck in the ground.
To the left we find an organic shape or figure, perhaps set in motion by the
feathery insect or caterpillar-like creature tied to the blue cog. A vulva dentata – if
we extend the title’s assonance and take the Katharina of this title as a reference to
Catherine the Great – or the opposite, an emblem of chastity – when we interpret
the same Katharina as a reference to the saintly Catherine of Alexandria –
this ‘female’ figure as well is engaged in an act of excretion. Unlike the ‘male’
figure on the right, whose labour seems to yield something informe, an ash-like
un-form, the ‘female’ figure produces form. For the cinders ‘she’ produces form
a stone or bone-like statue, a work in progress that clearly introduces something
new into this landscape and does not just displace it. Whether this new life
or entity is rooted in the past, buried under layers of ground, or whether it is
completely visible in the now, in its turn excreting a substance that yet again
takes on a red un-form, is not to be determined. Yet together these three figures
(the ‘male’ land displacer, the ‘female’ creator of form and the statue-like ‘child’
excreting a substance) do suggest a cyclical process. This further upsets any
attempt to place or locate this tableau in time.
This work holds much more secrets. Constellations of stars in the sky, for
instance, introduce an astrological temporality, a cosmological sense of time,
if not an eternity that renders the difference between past, present, future
irrelevant. The ‘male’ shape, with the ladder leading to its top, also intimates
the Cross, suggesting we are long past the morning of deposition, perhaps even
long past Apocalypse. The mention of waves in the work’s title alludes to Greek
mythology and to Hercules more specifically. If we take the organic life-form in
the ‘female’ figure to resemble a crab, this figure might actually be a portion of
Hercules, as he got pinched in the toe by a crab sent by Hera.24 It is an estranging
state, to say the least, that this late Dada work allows us a glimpse of, and we
could easily interpret it in a variety of ways. In fact, the work explicitly invites us
to do so. The text at the bottom reads: ‘Undulating Katharina, i.e., mistress of the
inn on the Lahn appears as guardian angel and mother-of-pearl of the Germans
on cork soles in the zodiac sign of cancer.’ The expression ‘mistress of the inn
on the Lahn’ is the first line of a popular schoolboy song, which is of a type that
can be extended indefinitely with the addition of new verses. As such it is also a
reference to the openness of interpretation of this image.
Crucial to observe, however, is that this openness rests on the temporal
indeterminacy of the work. Like any piece of art or writing, this is an anachronic
152 Historical Modernisms

work that moves through time freely by the connections and references it makes
through art and cultural history. It is also manifestly polytemporal, in that it
is clearly a work composed of remnants of human labour: wallpaper, cogs,
etc. Yet its most important building block is time, that is, it collates culturally
coded objects and themes associated with time in an assemblage or agencement
that resists decoding and territorialization in a Deleuzian sense. For Katharina
Ondulata allows us to simultaneously see the past, the present and the future, and
forces upon us a hermeneutical point of entry to all three without determining
their relations. Thus, it conditions us as interpreters to recalibrate these relations
ourselves. It does not, significantly, push us outside of its temporal universe; it
cannot in a way, as this is a work made of time. Rather, it places us in-between
past, present and future, and as such it is also interchronic, making us see a phase
of pre- and posthistory at once, a point upon which even the future and the
past can be regarded as imbricated, the future taking place before the past. The
metahistorical view or conception of history to emerge from Katharina Ondulata
is thus anything but a stable one, as the interchronic nature of the work demands
from us that we contemplate and try to experience a variety of temporalities and
forms of historicity at once.

Interchronicity in context

Katharina Ondulata’s interchronicity does not stand alone in the archive of the
classic avant-gardes. Different yet cognate instances of interchronicity proliferate
in the works and practices of these avant-gardes. We encounter such instances
in the various points of entry or perspectives analytic Cubist works enforce
upon us at the same time, in the space between the three- and four-dimensional
worlds evoked by Duchamp’s Grand verre, in the Metaphysical painting of
De Chirico or the massive turn to objects in surrealism, and in the colour
theory, in part inspired by Chevreul, of the Simultanéiste Robert Delaunay,
with its implied suspension between the states of seeing and non-seeing, as in
the act of awakening and opening one’s eyes. In fact, all instances we usually
describe as emanations of simultaneity appear to have been developed to effect
interchronicity. When, for example, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard
Huelsenbeck devised their so-called simultaneous poem ‘L’Amiral cherche une
maison à louer’ (1916), what was at stake was perhaps not so much the depiction
of several things unravelling at the same time. At stake, rather, was the opening
of a hermeneutical point of entry in time and history, a moment-in-between
 History in the European avant-gardes 153

all of these different temporalities and trajectories that conditions the reader,
viewer or listener to experience this simultaneity.
Interchronicity also surfaces in many other practices, protocols and
procedures developed by the avant-gardes. The exploration of unmotivated

Figure 7.3 Sophie Täuber & Hans Arp, Untitled (Duo-Collage, 1918). Paper, board
and silver leaf on board, 82 × 62 cm. © bpk, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin, Jörg P. Anders © 2021 SABAM Belgium.
154 Historical Modernisms

action and chance operations, for instance, provided avant-gardists themselves

with a vantage point from which to experience an aperture in time, a moment
that opened, and permitted them to tinker with, what comes before and after,
what causes what and what changes what – chance operations after all suspend
the present and anticipate a renewed future understanding of the past. Also in
the exercise of geometric abstraction by the avant-gardes the interchronic stands
out, in that it is most frequently the equality of geometric elements in time that
is thematized in such grid-like works. Indeed, however we approach Hans Arp’s
and Sophie Täuber’s duo-collage (Figure 7.3), for instance, it refuses to establish
or fix a before, now and after, past, present or future. Its visual rhythm is created,
foregrounded even, by glitches and intervals, by the interchangeability of non-
identical matter in time. (Paul Klee, in his Bauhaus Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch
(1925), would bring these insights to full bloom a few years later.)
Manifested by all of these cases – and given world and time many more
could be added – is, first of all, that the classic avant-gardes actively seized upon
the potential of the anachronic nature of art in general to forge or impose a
multitude of experiences of time and views of history on an audience. Second,
these cases thereby also illustrate that it is perhaps oversimplifying to claim that
the avant-gardes adhered to a generic futurism or a shared presentism. Isolating
one or several dominant regimes of historicity hides that at bottom the avant-
gardes were perhaps indifferent to any hierarchy or stratification among past,
present and future. To them, there was no ontological primacy of the present or
future over the past. Yet neither was the past to be endowed with authority over
today or tomorrow. This indifference might be interpreted as proof of an a- or
antihistorical stance after all, but the actual knowledge of history produced by
such aesthetic experiments becomes rather clear when we return to the context
in which it was produced.
Let us go back to where we began: the avant-gardes’ patience in the wake of
historicism and Realism. If historicism means that context is key, then not just
Leopold von Ranke’s work, but also Oswald Spengler’s speculative ruminations
on the nature of two millennia of civilization were historicist – Spengler just
worked with a different ontology of context. So did Giambattista Vico, whose
work regained new prominence in the early 1910s, or the Earl of Birkenhead,
whose The World in 2030 A.D. (1930), illustrated by former Vorticist Edward
McKnight Kauffer, simply invented a context for wild conjectures about future
global history. While the avant-gardes were developing their interchronic
time assemblages, there was, in short, no dearth of philosophical, scientific,
historiographical, cosmological and ideological context-models. Laws, rhythms,
 History in the European avant-gardes 155

patterns, they were seen everywhere. Theories and philosophies of history and
time of the widest possible variety became weapons also in political debates over
the legitimation of power. On its own terms, Carl Einstein observed in his study
Georges Braque (1934), historicism thus incited a ‘vacation from causality’.25
Anti-historicism, as David Myers has argued,26 thereby began a history of its
own, not least in the sphere of religion, where the sprawling of contexts was felt
to lead to a complete overhaul of eternal truths and values. The avant-gardes, in
all of this, were a minor voice. Yet not within the history of the arts. Aware of the
fact that reality could only be seen as a context by their contemporaries, and that
those defining the right context most convincingly could also lay claim to power,
they exploited art’s given anachronic nature to the full in time assemblages that
derailed the basic presuppositions of contextual logic. For when neither the
past nor the present nor the future can be shown to have ontological primacy,
if even determining which of these age-old temporal units comes first proves
impossible, then little remains of ‘context’, and a truly different understanding
of history takes off. Indeed, avant-gardists of all isms portrayed themselves as
the ‘primitives’ of a new era to come, but this new era was not located in some
distant future or in a new social or political context to come. It would begin with
history beyond history. Until then patience was key.
Today, in our own, so-called post-avant-garde times, claims abound about
the ‘historical turn’, ‘the temporal turn’, the fascination, both conceptual and
artistic, with ‘the contemporary’: these are all said to be typical of our current
predicament in the arts. Perhaps the classic avant-gardes’ patience is soon to
be awarded, and a chronoaesthetics that further explores their experiments with
temporality and historicity across the arts will finally be developed.

Notes

1 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald

(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1968), 68–74.
Compare Marjorie Perloff ’s The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and
the Language of Rupture (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
2 François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris:
Seuil, 2003). Compare, among others, Maria Stavrinaki’s study Dada Presentism.
An Essay on Art and History, trans. Daniela Ginsburg (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Presss, 2016).
3 F. T. Marinetti, ‘Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo’, in Teoria e invenzione
futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 13.
156 Historical Modernisms

4 F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism’, in F.T. Marinetti,

Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thomson (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006), 16.
5 Kurt Pinthus, ‘Rede für die Zukunft’, in Die Erhebung: Jahrbuch für neue Dichtung
und Wertung, ed. Alfred Wolfenstein (Berlin 1919), 1, 411; cited in translation from
Stavrinaki, Dada Presentism, 8.
6 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, rev. ed., trans. M. T. H. Sadler
(London: Dover, 2012), 19.
7 Kasimir Malevich, ‘Suprematism’ (1927), in Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L.
Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 94.
8 For a collection of these materials, see Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (ed.), Die
Expressionismusdebatte; Materialen zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973). This debate has been revisited time and again,
becoming one of the most vexed yet perhaps also most inconclusive international
controversies of twentieth-century intellectual life.
9 Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the
Event (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 3–21. See also Ziarek’s The
Force of Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
10 Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-garde: Aspects of a Philosophy of
Difference (London: Routledge, 1991), especially 1–5.
11 See inter Alia, David Cunningham, ‘Architecture, Utopia and the Futures of the
Avant-Garde’, The Journal of Architecture 6, no. 2 (2001): 169–82; ‘A Time for
Dissonance and Noise: On Adorno, Music, and the Concept of Modernism’,
Angelaki 8, no. 1 (2003): 61–74; ‘The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism,
Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde’, SubStance 34, no. 2 (2005): 47–65.
12 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso,
1995; 2nd ed. 2011), ix–x, 1–5, 13–16, 23.
13 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Revolutionary Time: The Vanguard and the Avant-Garde’,
in Benjamin Studien/Studies: Perception and Experience in Modernity, ed. Helga
Geyer-Ryan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 209–25; Dreamworld and Catastrophe:
The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
14 Hayden White, ‘Modernism and the Sense of History’, Journal of Art Historiography
15 (2016): 1–15.
15 Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten
(Frankfurt a/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979).
16 See, among others, David Cottington’s still excellent analysis in ‘What the Papers
Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso’s Collages of 1912’, Art Journal 47, no. 4 (1988),
350–9.
17 George Kubler, The Shape of Time. Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1962).
 History in the European avant-gardes 157

18 Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique
(Paris: La Découverte, 1991). Compare also Michel Serres, Eclaircissements. Cinq
entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris: François Bourin, 1992), where Serres launches
the term ‘polychronicity’ to refer to the same phenomenon.
19 I borrow this metaphor from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Narrative
as a Socially Symbolical Act (London: Methuen, 1981).
20 Werner Hofmann, Die Moderne im Rückblick. Hauptwege der Kunstgeschichte
(München: Beck, 1998); Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2012).
21 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), 184.
22 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans.
R. Beardsworth and G. Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
23 For a reading of this work that also compares it to similar experiments by Francis
Picabia and Man Ray, see: Diana Walden, ‘Max Ernst’, in the Catalogue Max Ernst.
A Retrospective (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975),
15–61, especially 25–6.
24 For a more elaborate discussion of this work’s astrological references and allusions
to Greek mythology, see John J. Hatch, ‘Desire, Heavenly Bodies, and a Surrealist’s
Fascination with the Celestial Theatre’, Culture and Cosmos 8, nos. 1–2 (2004),
87–106.
25 Carl Einstein, Werke—Berliner Ausgabe, Band 3: 1929–1940, ed. Hermann
Haarmann et al. (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996), 299, my translation.
26 David N. Myers, Resisting History. Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish
Thought (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003).
158
 8

Clement Greenberg’s modernism:

Historicizable or ahistorical?
Rahma Khazam

‘We have never been modern,’1 claimed Bruno Latour, on the grounds that
modernity’s distinction between nature and culture was never as watertight
as it was made out to be. The same may be said, I will argue, about the
conventional perception of modernism as ahistorical: like the nature/culture
distinction, modernism’s claim to ahistoricity was not truly watertight either.
If modernism has indeed never been truly or solely timeless or ahistorical, just
as we have never been truly modern, then it may be historicized and connected
to the broader context of the political, social and scientific developments of its
time. In my essay, I will explore this claim in relation to Clement Greenberg’s
modernism, which can and has been contextualized historically, despite the
latter’s emphasis on its autonomy and timelessness. I will also consider the
historicism/ahistoricity dichotomy in relation to movements or worldviews
that preceded or followed Greenberg’s modernism. My intention is to
show not only that some of these movements have more in common with
Greenberg’s modernism than it might initially appear, but also that the issue
of ahistoricity vs. historicism is a fundamental distinction that crops up in
different guises throughout the history of artistic modernism and beyond –
leading to inconsistencies and contradictions that question the divisions it
implies. First, I highlight its recurrence in Greenberg’s modernism, then its
re-emergence in analyses of the contemporary, and finally, I show how a similar
dichotomy pervaded earlier modern movements. Just as the purifying practice
of modernity exists alongside nature/culture hybrids in Latour’s scheme, so do
Greenbergian modernism’s purifying and ahistoricizing practices likewise go
hand in hand with its historicization and proximity to certain non-modern
approaches to time.
160 Historical Modernisms

Greenberg’s modernism

The issue of timelessness vs. historicity loomed large in Greenberg’s modernism,

linking up with related binaries such as purity and autonomy vs. context and
continuity: indeed, ahistoricity, purity and autonomy all presuppose distance
and aloofness with respect to historical and contextual concerns. Yet Greenberg
was unable to keep the two sides of these dichotomies apart: he co-opted all
these notions into his articles on modernist painting in an ongoing dialectic
that was never fully resolved. For example, he argued in favour of the continuity,
and therefore historicization, of modernist art in his article ‘Modernist Painting’
(1960–5): ‘Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It
may mean a devolution, an unraveling of anterior tradition, but it also means
its continuation.’2 Indeed, Greenberg needed this continuity to legitimate his
approach to modernist painting, as he himself admitted, noting that modernist
painting would not be worthy of its name if it did not take into account art’s past
and the standards of quality on which it was based.3
Yet at the same time, Greenberg’s position was ahistoricist: he argued that
each art had to ascertain the effect that was uniquely and durably associated with
it through a process of narrowing and reduction.4 Michael Fried acknowledged
this ahistoricity: ‘Dispensable conventions were progressively discarded until
[…] one arrived at a kind of timeless, irreducible core (in painting, flatness and
the delimitation of flatness). The implication of this account was that such a core
had been the essence of painting all along, a view that seemed to me ahistorical.’5
Yet, as James Meyer emphasizes, in ‘Art and Objecthood’ ([1967] 2003), Fried
not only rejected minimalism but also asserted his independence from that
ahistoricity:6 in that essay, Fried wrote that flatness and its delimitation should
be regarded not as ‘the “irreducible essence of pictorial art” but […] the minimal
conditions for something’s being seen as a painting; and that the crucial question
is not what these minimal and, so to speak, timeless conditions are, but rather
what, at a given moment, is capable […] of succeeding as painting’.7 As Fried
showed, Greenberg’s ahistoricism was hard to defend.
A similar dialectic pervaded Greenberg’s reflections on the subject of
medium-specificity: he ascribed purity and autonomy to modernist painting,
while nonetheless allowing it to incorporate historical or methodological
references that were foreign to it. For instance, in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939),
Greenberg foregrounded the need to exclude everything extraneous to painting:
‘Picasso, Braque […] derive their chief inspiration from the medium they
work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie […] in its pure preoccupation
 Clement Greenberg’s Modernism 161

with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc.,
to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.’8 In
‘Modernist Painting’, he likewise emphasized the importance of eliminating any
quality that might belong to another art: ‘The task of self-criticism became to
eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably
be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be
rendered “pure”, and in its “purity” find the guarantee […] of its independence.’9
For Greenberg, it was especially important to eliminate the effects of sculpture,
and particularly its three-dimensionality, of which painting needed to be entirely
free if it was to ensure its autonomy.10
Yet despite his repeated insistence on purity and autonomy, Greenberg
nonetheless engaged with historical and methodological references pertaining
to other disciplines. In ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940), he recommended
borrowing the method of music, insofar as it was an art that could only be
conceived in terms of the sense of hearing: ‘Only by […] defining each of the
other arts solely in the terms of the sense or faculty which perceived its effect
and by excluding […] whatever is intelligible in the terms of any other sense
[…] would the non-musical arts attain the “purity” and self-sufficiency which
they desired.’11 Greenberg claimed to be merely borrowing the method of music
rather than its effects, yet even this contravenes his requirement that each art
should exclude whatever was intelligible to any other sense.
Another way in which Greenbergian modernism allowed itself to be
shaped by external influences – thereby once again contradicting its claims to
timelessness – was through its deliberate non-engagement with political events,
non-engagement being a political position in itself. Benjamin Buchloh accounts
for Greenberg’s disidentification with the trauma of the Second World War in the
following terms: ‘Either you confront that history or you don’t. And if you don’t,
it’s easier to claim access to a new identity-formation in relation to American
liberal-democratic culture: that lies at the foundation of the new painting in New
York as well.’12 The horror of the Second World War was clearly out of place in
the context of the affirmative post-war modernist narrative that Greenberg was
putting together – a narrative of renewal that, as Hal Foster suggests, institutions
in this period of reconstruction wanted to hear.13 The potential links between
the traumatic history of the Second World War and Greenberg’s modernism
considerably weaken the latter’s claim to ahistoricity.
Above and beyond its connections to politics or music however, it was
Greenberg’s repeated involvement with science that most undermined his
claim to autonomy and ahistoricity. For example, he evoked a parallel between
162 Historical Modernisms

painting and scientific methodology, as he had done with music: ‘That visual
art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience […]
is a notion whose only justification lies, notionally, in scientific consistency.
Scientific method alone asks that a situation be resolved in exactly the same
kind of terms as that in which it is presented.’14 Yet in the case of science he
went a step further, noting that its convergence with art was based on historical
and cultural affinities: ‘From the point of view of art itself its convergence of
spirit with science happens to be a mere accident […] What their convergence
does show, however, is the degree to which Modernist art belongs to the same
historical and cultural tendency as modern science.’15
There were even closer affinities between Greenberg’s modernism and the
history and culture of science. In her book Eyesight Alone (2005), Caroline A.
Jones makes significant connections between Greenberg’s theories and the
scientific culture that was permeating everyday life in the United States at the
time, noting that in Greenberg’s writing, abstract art was to occupy spaces
already opened up by scientific discourse.16 The testable, normative criteria he
sought to apply to painting were an example of this: ‘Was a particular painting
its own kind of pictorial “fact,” or did it seem to rely on some other art form
for its effects? Did it exhibit illusionism (bad) or rigorously exclude it (good)?
Was it “illustrative” or self-reflexive? Did it appropriately acknowledge the means
of its own production?’17 Even more telling are the parallels Jones draws between
Greenberg’s focus on vision and ‘opticality’, and technological developments such
as hi-fi. Hi-fi was one instance of the segmenting of the senses resulting from
the processes of rationalization spreading across mid-century United States, and
just as hi-fi targeted the ear, so did Greenberg’s modernism target the eye. As
Jones writes: ‘The “culture” being authenticated was pre-eminently the acoustic
culture of the “dead” room (and the white cube) […] Hi-fidelity listeners created
their own fiercely separate world, as intensely regulated as Greenberg’s optical
one, for the purposes of entering a similarly purified and artificial acoustical
regime.’18
Convergences between modernist painting, technology and science also
took place on the level of the works themselves. As Jones observes, scientists
were taking human movements apart, using photographic technologies to
transform them into measurable fragments, and a number of artists followed
these developments.19 She points in particular to the formal connection, first
made by Jeremy Lewison, between the left–right walk of the figure in Thomas
Eakins’s Marey-inspired photographs of human movement from 1884 and the
left–right movement of the figures in Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943).20 For
 Clement Greenberg’s Modernism 163

Jones, Pollock’s Mural ‘fueled Greenberg’s desire to ordinate the senses through
a programme of rationalized body disciplines that could integrate industrial
labour into modernist décor. Cubist geometries and segmented movement were
both aspects of the march of industrial progress’.21 Mural thereby testified to the
links between Greenberg’s modernism and the socio-historical developments of
its time.
Greenberg even went so far as to use the term positivism, although he did
not appear to have engaged seriously with it.22 Nineteenth-century positivism
as developed by the philosopher Auguste Comte was based on the premise
that observation, experiment and the scientific method constituted the means
of attaining truth, yet as Jones observes, ‘Greenberg’s repetitive, vernacular
invocation […] somehow summoned these tenets without concern for their
philosophical rigor. Positivism, in this context, is signified by a set of reading
protocols in which the “disinterested” objective observer measures sense-data
against testable criteria.’23 Greenberg’s use of positivism nonetheless reinforced
modernism’s links with science.
To the extent that his brand of modernism was positivist, investigative and
quasi-scientific, it was also a break with the art of his predecessors. According
to Jones, Kandinsky and Rothko emphasized the spiritual dimension of their
art, whereas Greenberg did the opposite: ‘Nonobjective painting and sculpture,
in his writing, became comprehensible – not in terms of “the spirit,” that
nineteenth-century ideal, but as deeply related to rationalization, efficiency, and
the rapidly industrializing public sphere.’24 In other words, Greenberg replaced
the quest for the spiritual by verifiable criteria, jeopardizing art’s purity as well as
its ahistoricity, by allowing it to reflect the scientific and economic developments
of its time.
Greenberg’s continual vacillations make the question as to whether
modernist painting was truly ahistorical, pure or autonomous hard to answer.
It would appear that the new painting was a quest for a timeless purity, for
works that obeyed their own laws and logic but nonetheless borrowed from
other disciplines or were legitimated by the art of the past, and so not entirely
autonomous or ahistorical after all. Indeed, as he himself admitted in his essay
‘Detached Observations’ (1976): ‘“Purity” of and in art […] is an illusory notion,
of course. It may be remotely conceivable or imaginable, but it can’t be realized
[…] All the same, for Western art in its Modernist phase “purity” has been a
useful idea and ideal.’25 Greenberg thus juxtaposed the ahistorical, purity and
autonomy with consideration of historical, social or political developments: in
other words, modernist painting was both timeless and of its time, and these
164 Historical Modernisms

two characteristics coexisted alongside one another in an undecidable ongoing

interplay.
In view of the above, we may conclude that it is impossible to enforce a
strict separation between historicization and the ahistorical in modernist art,
just as, in Latour’s scheme, nature and culture cannot be kept apart. Indeed, for
Latour the term ‘modern’ refers to two different types of practices that need to
be considered in isolation from one another if they are to retain their validity:
the first operates by means of ‘translation’, producing nature/culture hybrids
that link together such factors as the composition of the atmosphere and
scientific strategies, whereas the second operates by purification, distinguishing
sharply between human and nonhuman, society and nature.26 The first is
essential to the second, for if there were no hybrids, there would be no need
for separation. As Latour notes: ‘So long as we consider these two practices of
translation and purification separately, we are truly modern […] As soon as we
direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of
hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins
to change.’27
We might make a similar point about Greenberg’s modernism. Greenberg
may be said to have been truly modern when he concerned himself with such
issues as autonomy and ahistoricization, but as soon as he began to associate the
historical and the ahistorical, he ceased to be entirely modern, paving the way
for a different future in which these oppositions could disappear. As the next
section will show, however, they have not entirely disappeared but continue to
exert an impact on critical thinking about art up until today.

Post-Greenberg

Commonly defined as an art of the present,28 the contemporary is likewise

marked by the ahistoricity/historicization dichotomy. Not only do certain
theorists of the contemporary shed new light on the distinction, but they also
warrant consideration insofar as they refute or support Greenberg’s thinking. At
one extreme, Lionel Ruffel (2015) eschews modernism’s ethos of separation and
division, emphasizing that the contemporary exposes the modern for what it is,
an ideology premised on sequentiality that views time as a unidirectional linear
sequence.29 Rejecting the assumption that the contemporary is just the newest
stage or sequence in this time-line and so merely follows on from the modern,
he proposes that the contemporary suspends the notion that time is an arrow: ‘It
 Clement Greenberg’s Modernism 165

reconnects with what time is: heterogeneous, a mixture, whether on a subjective

or a collective level. In this sense the contemporary really is […] not modern
or a-modern […] It is another mode of being in time, in history, in the world.’30
For Ruffel, who defines the flow of modern time in terms of a coherent whole,
that whole no longer exists, for the non-modern human multitudes have torn it
apart.31
Ruffel claims that the contemporary includes all other representational
systems and is thus transhistorical, proceeding not by sequentiality but by
superimposition and thus including the modern within it.32 The contemporary is
thus premised on the layering of highly diverse temporalities and experiences.33
Referencing Benjamin, Ruffel goes so far as to posit the co-temporality in the
present of all historical eras, offering an ‘archaeological’ approach that allows
the remains of the past to be read in the present, while eschewing detachment in
favour of an engagement with everyday life.34
Whereas Ruffel’s definition of the contemporary contradicts Greenberg’s
position on nearly every count, Giorgio Agamben reinstates disengagement and
separation in his essay ‘What Is the Contemporary?’ [2008]. Agamben writes:
‘Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those
who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands […]
But precisely […] through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are
more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.’35 As Ruffel
himself notes, Agamben’s formulation of the contemporary is a counter-model
to his: premised on distance and disconnection, it eschews direct engagement
with daily life, adopting a detachment akin to the modern.36
Yet in the final analysis the difference between Ruffel and Agamben may not
be as great as Ruffel thinks. Agamben’s contemporary constitutes ‘an ahistorical
concept; not a label of periodization, but an existential marker’,37 and as such, it
elicits comparison with Ruffel. For as mentioned earlier, Ruffel’s contemporary
also rejects a purely historical perspective: it is premised instead on the
superimposition or co-temporality of all historical eras, thereby questioning
the centrality of sequentiality, chronology and periodization in the writing of
history and, as a result, the very possibility of history itself.
Likewise contesting the modern approach, Terry Smith’s The Contemporary
Condition: The Contemporary Composition (2016) contrasts the work of Gertrude
Stein with contemporary composition: ‘Stein composes by writing a composition
about explaining artistic composition that not only articulates a modernist
argument about what it is to compose, but which also becomes, in itself, a model
of a modernist literary composition.’38 Contemporary composition, on the
166 Historical Modernisms

other hand, is concerned with place making, world picturing and connectivity,
thereby transcending notions of style or ideology.39 It may be divided into three
contemporaneous currents, the remodernist tendency that reverts to modernist,
postmodern and late modernist art, a second current based on critical nationalist
and identitarian perspectives and a third consisting of small-scale, do-it-yourself
initiatives concerned with precarity or futurity.40 Yet here too, the simultaneity
of these currents and the juxtaposition of different temporalities transcends the
sequentiality of periodization, chronology and history in general, and may thus
be described as ahistorical. In other words, despite the differences between them,
the definitions of the contemporary formulated by Ruffel, Smith and Agamben
function ahistorically: by avoiding sequentiality or periodization, they attain
Greenberg’s stated, but unrealized aim.
The post-contemporary, on the other hand, retains a sequential conception of
time. Contesting the modernist perception according to which the past, present
and future follow on from one another, it proposes that it is the future, and not
the past, that shapes the present. The future thus becomes the main principle
for structuring time and provides the impetus for the new. Armen Avanessian
writes: ‘Concrete examples […] are phenomena that usually start with the prefix
“pre,” like preemptive strikes, preemptive policing, the preemptive personality
[…] What happens in the present is based on a preemption of the future.’41
Yet despite the challenges the post-contemporary presents to modernism,
there are nonetheless commonalities between them. For a start, the prefix ‘post’
in post-contemporary recalls the sequentiality of the modern, even though in the
post-contemporary it is the future that has priority. In the second place, both the
post-contemporary and modernism are future-oriented. The post-contemporary
emphasizes the hegemony of the future over the present, thereby invalidating the
contemporary, as Avanessian observes: ‘The logic of the contemporary with its
fixation on the present – […] this presentism has difficulties or even completely
fails in dealing with the logic of being constituted by the future.’42
Greenberg’s modernism also had to do with the future: insofar it was
teleologically determined, it was constituted and pre-defined by the goal of
flatness, such that its future could be said to have pre-empted its present as well
as its past. The successive generations of modernist painters who tested and
experimented with painting’s norms43 may thus be retrospectively regarded as
having contributed to its ongoing goal. In his article ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’,
Greenberg noted the shifts within art history from imitation to abstraction and
from tonality to primary colours, shifts that were historically explicable but also
goal-oriented, pointing inexorably forward: ‘The history of avant-garde painting
 Clement Greenberg’s Modernism 167

is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium […] The picture
plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together
the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the […] surface of the
canvas.’44 Somewhat like the post-contemporary, Greenberg’s modernism was
determined by developments that were yet to come, by a future that was brought
to bear on events that had already taken place in the past.
We may conclude from this brief and necessarily incomplete survey of the
relation between contemporary and modern that because of its sequentiality,
Greenberg’s modernism could not be truly ahistorical – and that it has more
affinities with the post-contemporary than the contemporary. As such, it is not
so much turned towards the present as obsessed with the future. This fixation on
progress and developments to come likewise confirms that it was never entirely
timeless or ahistorical.

Pre-Greenberg

The ahistorical/historicist dichotomy also plays itself out in the modern

movements prior to Greenberg, highlighting the context and background in
relation to which the latter’s views developed and generating, as in the case of
the contemporary, overlaps, contradictions and inconsistencies between the
different theorists of the modern. At one extreme, the art historian Catherine
Grenier argues in favour of modern art’s ahistoricity and autonomy. Pointing
out that all modern artists take an interest in the distant or ancient past, she
notes that the German expressionists were continually referencing the Middle
Ages and children’s drawings, while the Russians were fascinated by vernacular
styles, and that recalling the origins of art was a trait all these artists shared with
other modern art movements from Cobra to abstract expressionism.45 Indeed,
for Grenier, this same openness to the past characterizes the work of artists
from Matisse and Duchamp to Picabia and Beckmann, and defines it more
satisfactorily than the idea of the rejection of the past, a goal that is all too often
attributed to modern art.46 Her views thus echo those of Greenberg, to the extent
that she emphasizes continuity and the past of art.
As much as Greenberg, albeit on different grounds, Grenier defends modern
art’s lack of political engagement, arguing that art historians have mistakenly
linked the desire for political and social change that marked the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries with the concurrent revolution in art – to the point
where it has become just about impossible to extricate art from the humanist
168 Historical Modernisms

project of remedying political inadequacies.47 For those who mistakenly link art
and politics, the modern revolution was a failure, a historical event like so many
others, and in the same way, modern art has become just another style that has
had its day. However Grenier herself resists this interpretation, emphasizing that
the advent of modern art has to be viewed in isolation from politics and thus
as ahistorical.48 After all, neither Duchamp nor Apollinaire held progressive
political views: they engaged with modern art on an artistic level,49 as was also
the case of the artists Greenberg championed.
Indeed, for Grenier, modern art is inherently apolitical, for it was not so
much a revolution as a kind of revelation. Drawing on the writings of the
literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss, she posits that the old and the new are
not two different time frames, nor does the old give rise to the new. Instead,
the old contains the premise of the new, which itself encompasses the old.50
Accordingly, modern artists such as Matisse or Picasso described their
experience as a revelation or realization, but not in terms of a political or social
upheaval.51 On this reading, the modern art movements prior to Greenberg,
like Greenberg’s modernism itself, appear to be disconnected from political
and historical time.
Yet Grenier fails to take into account those modern artists who were
politically engaged. In this, she resembles Greenberg. At the other extreme from
Grenier and Greenberg, Colin Trodd points out: ‘It should come as no surprise
that Greenberg’s model of modernism found no place for Dada, surrealism
and constructivism, all of which sought […] to generate visions of social and
cultural emancipation. In all three cases modernism involved disputing and
contesting the shape and nature of modern society.’52 Dada, surrealism
and constructivism did, however, find a place in Peter Bürger’s historical
avant-garde, which rejected the notion of the autonomy of art in favour of the
integration of art and life.
Alexei Penzin likewise rejects the ahistoricism of Greenberg’s model in
favour of the historicized, politically oriented model of modernism defended by
the avant-garde. In ‘The Biopolitics of the Soviet Avant-Garde’, he highlights the
anti-autonomous stance of certain modern art movements, explicitly referencing
Peter Bürger’s distinction between modernism and the avant-garde – according
to which modernism is viewed in the context of the institutionalization of art’s
autonomy, and the avant-garde as contesting the notion of autonomy.53 As Penzin
states, analogous dualisms have been formulated by other thinkers, for example,
Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit – a time of revolutionary possibility opposed to
the homogeneity of chronological time – or the notion of the two modernities
 Clement Greenberg’s Modernism 169

put forward by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.54 As Penzin notes, one of their
two modernities has to do with the nation-state and its system of domination and
the other with struggle and contestation, thereby substantiating ‘the difference
between avant-garde and modernism, placing them in the global perspective of
two rival modernities’.55 Even more important for the purposes of the present
study, this difference may also be expressed in terms of the ahistorical/historicist
dichotomy, such that the first modernity seeks to preserve its autonomy, while
the second is more attuned to change and historical reality, as in the case of the
avant-garde.
As I argue throughout this essay, an analogous split may be identified
in the work of Greenberg himself. In 1939, Greenberg referred to the avant-
garde culture he was defending in explicitly historical terms: ‘A part of Western
bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: – avant-garde
culture. A superior consciousness of history – more precisely, the appearance of
a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism – made this possible.’56
Likewise, in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, he wrote: ‘I find that I have offered no
other justification for the present superiority of abstract art than its historical
justification.’57 Indeed, for T. J. Clark, both ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and
‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, those two early essays on art written in 1939 and
1940, respectively, were ‘historical explanations of the course of avant-garde
art since the mid-nineteenth century. They are seized with the strangeness of
the avant-garde moment […] a peculiar, indeed unique, reaction to a far from
unprecedented cultural situation – to put it bluntly, the decadence of a society’.58
Yet Clark was not convinced by Greenberg’s arguments, noting that his account
of flatness was not as rich, vivid and meaningful as that espoused by the avant-
garde.59 As it turned out, Greenberg’s subsequent writings increasingly addressed
formal concerns, to the point where if we were to try to link Greenberg’s later
modernism to one of the two modernities described by Penzin, we would
associate it with the modernity that institutionalizes art’s autonomy, and not
with the modernity of struggle and contestation associated with the historical
avant-garde. Greenberg’s modernism thus shifted from political awareness to
ahistoricism.
That said, the roots of the dichotomy between historicism and ahistoricism
may be traced even further back than the avant-garde – to the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, according to the philosopher Peter Osborne. Osborne
likewise differentiates between Greenberg’s modernism and other types of art on
the basis of their autonomy or ahistoricity on the one hand, and their capacity for
critique, contestation and political engagement on the other. Indeed the first of
170 Historical Modernisms

the two traditions that he proposes designates Kant and Lessing as predecessors
of Greenberg – opposing them to the second more recent tradition connecting
Dada, Duchamp and the Russian avant-gardes to conceptual art and after.60 For
Osborne, the main tradition today is the second, insofar as the Greenbergian
approach of limiting the qualities of medium-specificity and aesthetic judgement
to a fixed grouping of historically recognized arts has proved problematic.61 As
Osborne notes: ‘While critically dominant in the United States in the decade-
and-a-half immediately following the Second World War and currently resurgent
in a marginal and modified form, the medium-specific modernism of a plurality
of arts is essentially a nineteenth-century tradition.’62
Finally, the modernist historicist/ahistoricist dichotomy spills over into
broader developments, as Rosalind Krauss stresses in her discussion of the
historicist foundations of American critical thought, to which Greenberg, on her
reading, subscribed: for Krauss, these foundations were called into question by
structuralism, which was later to be itself denounced for its ahistoricism.63 The
shift from autonomy to politicization, from the ahistorical to the historicized
and back again, thus recurs over and over again in the modernist period, in a
seemingly endless cycle. That – as I have been arguing – this same historicist/
ahistoricist duality also traverses the work of Greenberg himself is corroborated
by Krauss (1985), when she writes: ‘Profoundly historicist, Greenberg’s method
conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux […] Certain
things, like art itself […] are universal, transhistorical forms. But in the same
breath it is to assert that the life of these forms is dependent upon constant
renewal.’64
Such a perspective allows us to conclude that like the nature/culture binary,
the notions of ahistoricity and historicism, autonomy and politicization or
contextualization, are not so much diametrically opposed as shifting, overlapping
in certain respects, and even, on occasion, intertwined – thereby supporting
the claim that Greenberg’s modernism was never truly or solely ahistorical. As
Latour writes: ‘If we have never been modern […] the tortuous relations that
we have maintained with the other nature-cultures would also be transformed.
Relativism, domination, imperialism, false consciousness, syncretism – all the
problems that anthropologists summarize under the loose expression of “Great
Divide” – would be explained differently.’65 In the same way, if modernism
has never been completely ahistorical, we would need to provide, as this essay
has begun to do, a new and different account of modernist painting and of its
relation to the movements that followed and preceded it – that is to say, of the
last hundred and fifty odd years of the history of art.
 Clement Greenberg’s Modernism 171

Notes

1 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [1991], trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
2 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ [1960–65], in Art in Theory 1900–2000,
ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell, 2003),
778.
3 Ibid., 779.
4 Ibid., 774.
5 Michael Fried, ‘Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop’ (1987), in Discussions in
Contemporary Culture no. 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 56–7.
6 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 231.
7 Michael Fried, footnote 3, ‘Art and Objecthood’ [1967], in Art in Theory 1900–2000,
845.
8 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ [1939], in Art in Theory 1900–2000, 541.
9 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 775.
10 Ibid., 776.
11 Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ [1940], in Art in Theory 1900–2000, 565.
12 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Roundtable ‘Art at mid-century’, in Art since 1900, ed.
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2004), 321.
13 Hal Foster, Roundtable ‘Art at mid-century’, in ibid., 320.
14 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 777.
15 Ibid., 778.
16 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press,
2005), 139.
17 Ibid., 137.
18 Ibid., 409.
19 Ibid., 243.
20 Ibid. See also footnote 88, 475.
21 Ibid., 248.
22 Ibid., 105.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., xxi.
25 Clement Greenberg, ‘Detached Observations’, Arts Magazine, (Dec. 1976). Available
online: http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/detached.html (accessed 18 October
2018).
26 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10.
172 Historical Modernisms

27 Ibid., 11.
28 Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on
Contemporaneity & Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 9.
29 Lionel Ruffel, ‘Displaying the Contemporary/the Contemporary On Display’, trans.
R. MacKenzie, The Drouth, Issue no. 52, Summer 2015: 6. Available online: https://
issuu.com/drouth/docs/lionel_ruffel_displaying_the_contem (accessed
18 October 2018).
30 Ibid., 7.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 15.
34 Lionel Ruffel, Brouhaha: Worlds of the Contemporary [2016], trans. R. MacKenzie
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
35 Giorgio Agamben [2008], ‘What Is the Contemporary?’ in ‘What Is an Apparatus?’
and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 40.
36 See Ruffel, Brouhaha.
37 James Riley, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’, University of Cambridge Contemporary
Research Group (15 March 2013). Available online: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/
research/contemporary/?p=257 (accessed 24 August 2020).
38 Terry Smith, The Contemporary Condition: The Contemporary Composition (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2016), 17.
39 Ibid., 21.
40 Ibid., 24–5.
41 Armen Avanessian in Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, ‘The Speculative Time
Complex’, in The Time Complex. Post-Contemporary, ed. Armen Avanessian and
Suhail Malik (Miami: NAME Publications, 2016), 10–11.
42 Ibid., 15.
43 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, 776–7.
44 Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, 566.
45 Catherine Grenier, ‘Modernité: révolution ou révélation ?’, in La Parenthèse du
moderne, edited by Marianne Alphant, (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2005), 77.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 71.
48 Ibid., 72.
49 Ibid., 76.
50 Ibid., 72.
51 Ibid., 74.
52 Colin Trodd, ‘Postmodernism and Art’, in The Icon Critical Dictionary of
Postmodern Thought, ed. Stuart Sim (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998), 91.
 Clement Greenberg’s Modernism 173

53 Alexei Penzin, ‘The Biopolitics of the Soviet Avant-Garde’, in Pedagogical Poem: The
Archive of the Future Museum of History, ed. Ilya Budraitskis and Arseniy Zhilyaev
(Moscow/Venice: V-A-C Foundation/ Marsilio, 2014), 91.
54 Ibid., 92.
55 Ibid.
56 Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, 540.
57 Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, 567.
58 T.J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (September
1982): 143.
59 Ibid., 152.
60 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London/
Brooklyn: Verso, 2013), 46.
61 Ibid., 81.
62 Ibid.
63 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), 2.
64 Ibid., 1.
65 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11–12.
174
 9

Beer in Bohemian Paris: A symbol

of the Third Republic
Alexandra Bickley Trott

Symbols of the republic

On 30 June 1878, Claude Monet began a series of paintings of Haussmann’s Paris,

which on this summer’s day was shrouded in hundreds of tricolours, alive in the
breeze and flying above the crowds filling the Parisian boulevards (Figure 9.1).
Édouard Manet depicts the same day on a street further to the north of the city
(Figure 9.2). With the same palette we again see the tricolour and the sandy
colour of the street and buildings. But in this harsh realism, the flurry of flags –
some tangled in their pole – are hung oblivious to the scene’s destitution. The
grand buildings of Monet’s boulevard are replaced by a mound of rubble, and
instead of a bustling crowd we see the back of a single one-legged pensioner,
hobbling down the cobbled street. Seen side by side they show differing views
of modern Paris. One affirming the official version: the vibrant gathering of
people, celebrating a moment of republican liberty. The other highlighting the
ruin of Paris: of buildings destroyed, and men crippled by war.
Just a few years earlier, in 1870, France had lost its war against Prussia, and
through it the country lost its elected leader, Louis Napoléon, the nephew of
the great Napoléon Bonaparte who for many had symbolized stability, and the
nationalist spirit of France’s re-emerging imperial might. In his place sprung
a conservative provisional government led by President Adolphe Thiers, a
royalist driven by the right-wing agenda to reinstate the Bourbon Monarchy.1
A republic only by name, his was a government willing to slaughter thousands
of its own people to defend its aims, as evidenced during the annihilation of
the Commune when Theirs’s army ‘gunned down’ ordinary men, women and
children of Paris.2
176 Historical Modernisms

Figure 9.1 Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, 1878, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay,
Paris. Reproduction permission granted by Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Figure 9.2 Édouard Manet, Rue Mosnier, 1878, oil on canvas, J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content programme.
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 177

Following this dark chapter in France’s history, the fête of the 30 June 1878
celebrated peace and productivity, and promoted the country’s recovery from
war. Taking place alongside the Exposition Universelle, this was part of the state’s
wider agenda to project a rejuvenated image of French society: one that was
innovative and culturally progressive, which embraced modernity and was not
held back by archaic traditions. Yet, this was a country still divided by an intensely
partisan political environment. While France remained under conservative
leadership, by this time under the presidency of Patrice de MacMahon and his
policy of ‘Moral Order’, the elections sparked by the Crisis of May 1877 had
handed a substantial majority to the republicans in the Chamber of Deputies.
The left was starting to gather pace.
In the aftermath of the Paris Commune, socialist activity had been curtailed by
the loss of left-wing revolutionaries, either through fatalities suffered during the
massacre of 1871, or by the subsequent imprisonment and exile of communards.
While amnesty was not granted until 1880, socialist and working-class political
activism began to re-emerge in France as early as the mid-1870s, and by 1879
(the year the Presidency was won by the republican Jules Grévy) Jules Guesde
and Paul Lafargue founded the Parti Ouvrir Français. This was a Marxist political
party with a ‘radical republican programme’ that campaigned to subvert royalist
conservativism, and embed republican ideology in the French legislature, and in
society more broadly.3 The tricolour, whose three stripes came to represent the
three tenets of the democratic nation – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – had been a
symbol of the republic since the years of the First Revolution. And following the
Bourbon Monarchy’s reinstatement of the white flag during its brief restoration
in 1815, the subsequent re-adoption of the tricolour as the national flag had
symbolized republican victory during the July Revolution of 1830. Seen in 1878
in the works of Monet and Manet, the tricolour is once again raised to symbolize
growing republican strength, starting to emerge victorious over their royalist
adversaries in this long-fought battle for the republic.
In this chapter I turn away from the more prestigious Fine Arts, to instead
examine how the bohemian clubs of the time responded to this struggle between
republicans and royalists: a battle for the soul of France. This analysis focuses
specifically on two associated clubs, the Hydropathes and the Bon Bocks. If
republicans promoted their ideology through symbols such as the tricolour, for
the bohemian clubs, it was beer that became an unlikely symbol of their beliefs
in sovereignty, laïcité, and the rights of the common man.
This is an atypical look at Paris’s bohemian clubs, and a view at odds with
the notion of the forward-thinking, absinthe-drinking, bohemians usually
178 Historical Modernisms

associated with artists of Montmartre around the turn of the century. Seemingly
motivated by aesthetic progression and social freedoms, such clubs are more
widely understood in sharp contrast to previous generations of communards,
anarchists and Realist painters, who confronted fraught socio-political tensions.
Indeed, the clubs themselves reinforced the idea that they had no political
agenda: at the Hydropathe club all talk of politics was expressly forbidden. I will
show how beer was employed as a symbol to promote a more radical opposition
to the royalist, catholic factions that still threatened to return the country to a
conservative monarchist state, as well as how it became a symbol of sovereignty:
a weapon in the battle against the ascendency of foreign authority and culture.

The Hydropathes: a secular Eucharist

Founded in 1878, the Hydropathe club was active at the turning point between
conservatism and liberal republicanism in France’s early Third Republic. Taking
place just before the social liberalization of the 1880s, the club was still subjected
to the laws and censorships of MacMahon’s Moral Order. Yet, despite the state’s
suspicion of its people and anxiety of further uprisings, new social liberties
were instigated, and the Hydropathe club was one of the first artistic societies to
successfully take advantage of the ability to gather in large numbers.4
For almost two years the club hosted soirées twice a week for artists, poets,
musicians and the youth of the Latin Quarter. In contrast with the radical
political action of artists in previous decades, the young men who attended
the Hydropathe club were forbidden from discussing politics, and its president
Émile Goudeau consistently claimed that they were interested only in matters of
the arts: ‘The Latin Quarter, numb from inflexible politics, and from religious
questions that are of little interest today, wakes to listen to verse and song. It
devises its philosophical-poetic works, allowing fantasy to hover with its wings
deployed.’5 Its members produced and performed poetry, music and song, and
while artistic talent was appreciated, it was by no means required, and was
secondary to the need to participate socially within the club’s fraternal spirit. The
club was highly successful, attracting a crowd of several hundred young Parisians
each week. It was also hugely influential, not least for being the birthplace of
the Fumiste movement, a humorous, satirical form of proto-performance art.
In 1880 the Fumiste was described to be at odds with the typical man of letters:
To abandon one’s senses and to make him give the quintessence of his imbecility,
is characteristic of Fumisme. The spirit of bourgeois culture demands to be
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 179

rewarded with cheering and discreet smiles; Fumisme on the other hand carries
its own reward within itself: it is art for art’s sake. In order to be considered a
man of bourgeois spirit it will often suffice to be an ass in a lion’s skin; to be a
good Fumiste it is often essential to be a lion in the skin of an ass.6

At the heart of Fumiste philosophy was a cutting, yet obscure, satire, which
sought to subvert the political order through seemingly nonsensical actions and
absurdity in daily life. This was a proto-anti-art, and a basis for conceptual art
as we would understand it today. After the Hydropathe club, Fumisme was soon
developed by the Arts Incohérents, the Chat Noir (co-founded by Goudeau), and
the notorious Alfred Jarry. These in turn inspired the twentieth-century anti-
art of Paris Dada, therein sparking an historical lineage that spanned numerous
subsequent generations.
At the Hydropathe club, alcohol helped to create a carefree environment of
unrestrained artistic creativity; and in a room of several hundred young men,
drinking songs helped to both unite and provoke the often boisterous crowd.
Despite later claims that the Hydropathes indulged in a vast array of drinks,
in the club’s earliest months, beer was the only drink that was consumed.7
As Francisque Sarcey wrote in 1878: ‘There, we speak verse, we make music,
we sing and we talk. No drink other than beer is permitted.’8 In the following
decades associated bars followed the same trend. In the early twentieth century
the Cabaret Zut opened in Montmartre as a homage to the Zutistes – the 1870s
collective including Verlaine, Rimbaud and Hydropathe Charles Cros – and
likewise prided itself on only selling beer.9 Furthermore, Aristide Bruant’s Le
Mirliton, which took over the lease of the Chat Noir’s original venue on the rue
Rochechouart, also only stocked beer.10
Given the ubiquity of wine in French society, its economic importance and
symbolic value to the nation’s cultural identity, it is conspicuous by its absence at
these events. Much is known of the ‘cultural landscape of viticulture’ in French
history, and according to statistics gathered in 1899, wine accounted for over
72 per cent of the country’s alcohol intake.11 A further 22 per cent was made up
by spirits, and only 5.5 per cent by beer. This is in contrast with Britain, whose
tastes are shown to have been almost exactly opposite, with beer accounting for
72 per cent of the total alcohol consumed, and only 2.2 per cent by wine. Given
this, the choice made by these clubs to sell only beer is notable.
The widespread contamination of phylloxera (otherwise known as the
Great Wine Blight) may have been a potential cause of this phenomenon.
From the 1850s through to the mid-1870s, aphids devastated French vines,
180 Historical Modernisms

causing unprecedented damage to the country’s wine industry. The quality and
availability of wine were both severely affected. Poor-quality synthetic substitutes
and expensive foreign imports became a common, though unwelcome sight. As
stocks ran dry the prices escalated, and although the worst of the disease was
vanquished by 1875, its repercussion on the industry lasted until the end of the
century. The Hydropathe club was active as the cost of a bottle of wine was near
its peak, and as prices more than doubled its consumption decreased to less than
half.12 Although this might suggest that beer provided a necessary alternative
during a difficult time for the French wine industry, for the beer-drinking cultures
such as the Hydropathes, the consumption of beer also helped to distance the
club from dominant cultural practices in French society, not least dissociating
it from symbolic reference to the Eucharist. During the Holy Sacrament of the
Catholic church, Christians gather to ‘celebrate’ the Eucharist, breaking bread,
drinking a sip of wine, singing and praying as a mass to reinforce and confirm
their collective beliefs. The Hydropathes similarly gathered en masse, drinking
and singing together to confirm their belief in a modern, secular way of life. In
the years leading up to laïcité – the official separation of church and state – this
celebration of a secular Eucharist, in which the blood of Christ was replaced
with a symbol of the working man – was a loaded political gesture denoting
this generation’s separation from the liturgical rites of the church, and the ‘anti-
republican’ conservatives who continued to follow it.
Outside of the Hydropathe meetings, particularly after the club’s close, many
of its leading figures were associated with anticlerical discourse. Such views,
for instance, surfaced overtly at Goudeau’s Chat Noir, and the increasingly
controversial matter of the church’s authority was confronted in the first edition
of the cabaret’s journal: ‘It is high time to correct an error which has weighed
down on more than sixty entire generations … The writing which we call holy –
I don’t really know why – has done nothing more, to put it politely, than make
a mockery of the people.’13 As Julian Brigstocke has argued, in opposition to
the Catholic church’s tactical construction of the Basilica de Sacré Cœur,
such articles attempted to re-imagine Montmartre as a place characterized
by ‘anti-clericalism and anti-traditionalism’.14 While anticlerical views are not
so vehemently confronted in the Hydropathes’ own journal, l’Hydropathe,
potentially due to persistent surveillance at this earlier moment, such beliefs
nonetheless occasionally surfaced. In the final few issues of the journal (by this
point publishing under the title Tout-Paris), there are a number of advertisements
for anticlerical publications. Unlike the advertisements for local bars and
bookshops that appear in a designated advertising space on the back page, the
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 181

promotion of anticlerical literature occurs on the inside cover. They sit alongside
the artists’ poetry and prose, and the texts are given full endorsement by the
Hydropathe club. Publicity for the anticlerical publication, Le Jésuite Rouge by
Alfred Sirven and Henri Le Verdier appeared in the journal’s final issue; and the
following promotion of Pompeu Gener’s La Mort et le Diable was published in
four consecutive issues:15
In these times of conflict between the church and the state, between superstition
and reason, it is good fortune to find work of a profound analysis of dogmas and
religious myths of diverse races and ages, in which the beliefs of theologians are
reduced to their meagre value compared to the omnipotent truth of positivist
science. It is to this text that we are happy to signal an important work published
by Reinwald, with a preface by Littré, and entitled: La Mort et le Diable: Histoire
et philosophie de deux négations suprêmes. This study, which exposes all the
obstacles that man must overcome to extend civilization on Earth, is due to a
young Spaniard, Mr. Pompejo [sic] Gener, member of the Société d’anthropologie
de Paris, and correspondent member of the Cercle des Hydropathes.16

Gener was a Catalan writer who was influential in late nineteenth-century

Spanish modernism, not least for introducing Nietzschean ideas to the
country before the appearance of authorized translations of Nietzsche’s texts.17
The journal’s declaration of Gener as a ‘correspondent member of the Cercle
des Hydropathes’ indicates the club’s attempts to link with a wider network of
anticlerical European intellectuals.18 As well as being a proponent of Nietzschean
ideals, Gener is closely aligned with Positivist theories. The preface for his text
was written by Émile Littré himself, the student of the founder of Positivist
thought, Auguste Comte.
As many historians agree, it was from Comtean Positivism that the seed of
laïcité grew. The term was coined in the early 1870s to define ‘the principle of
separation of civil society and religious society.’19 It formulated a scenario by
which the state held no power over religion; and in return the church held no
influence over politics.20 In practical terms, within the context of the 1870s,
laïcité represented the idea of tolerance of religious faiths, but only under the
precept that they were practised in the private domain, without interference in
the public realm, and renounced all influence upon state institutions:21
Meanwhile, it must ensure that religions remain in the private domain. Private
does not mean individual; there is a possibility of private organizations. The
public domain, that which the Republic is responsible for, which begins with the
school, should be influenced as little as possible by religions.22
182 Historical Modernisms

It was with the introduction of laïcité that the republican politician Jules Ferry
made his name in the late 1870s.23 The republicans still held only a minority
in the French legislature for most of the decade, yet due to the lack of a formal
party system, it was possible for political figures to hold senior positions under
a de facto opposition government. Ferry was one such figure, and in February
1875 he was appointed as Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. Ferry
understood the importance of culture and education in society, and saw how it
could be mobilized to influence public opinion. This is clearly demonstrated by
his choice to continue in this role as head of arts and culture after he was elected
as prime minister in 1880, and again in 1883. Convention dictated that the head
of government take the role of Minister of Foreign Affairs, taking charge of war
and defence, and Ferry was the first and only prime minister to do otherwise,
giving greater emphasis to the cultural pursuits within the nation. As part of his
responsibilities for the country’s cultural institutions, Ferry was involved in the
official state Salon. Diverging from the standard, mundane speeches made at the
awards ceremony, in 1879 Ferry spoke against the Institute for its suppression of
modern painters in favour of academic traditions:
The Institute conceived the plan to force all of French art to submit to its
discipline and obey its rules. To this end, the learned society set itself up as the
vigilant guardian of the doors of the Salon […] Contemporary art is at the same
time very strong and absolutely individual […] It would be difficult to find it in
any traditional schools or influences like those of years past. We might say that
right now individualism overflows its banks.24

In essence, Ferry exploited the arts as a weapon in the battle between

conservatives and republicans. While conservatives continued their long-
established relationship with Academicism, the republicans aligned themselves
alongside modernist art practice. Where the Academic traditionalists
attempted to impose restrictions on artists, demanding they follow rigid
standards of quality and value, the republicans, Ferry claimed, saw that what
made their country great was the ‘individualism’ of its citizens. In making
this claim he distanced the debate from partisan political divides. Instead, the
argument focused on defending the natural character of all French citizens
against oppressive state institutions such as the Academy. This oppression, it
was proposed, would hold back the nation, and everything that made it great.
Republican individualism, on the other hand, would support the citizens of
France in freedom of thought and expressions of liberty. As Patricia Mainardi
has stated, Ferry asserted the republican position in favour of art’s liberty,
championing the French pursuit of individualism.25 This accords with Tamar
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 183

Garb’s claims that although the diversification of style, genre and the place
of exhibition was not new to the Third Republic, it expanded within the
liberal democratic system, which promoted the free market economy under
the republican ‘political credo of individualism’.26 And as Nicholas Green
concisely asserts, the ‘independence of artists […] was actively produced by
state sponsorship’.27
In aligning the republic with the avant-garde, which he deemed representative
of the nation’s greatness, Ferry poses them as allies against the common enemy:
the traditionalist gatekeepers that suppressed the arts with ‘rules’ and ‘discipline’.
While at times seeming to be subversive, the Hydropathes were therefore part
of a cultural realignment that worked in favour of republican ideology, by
providing a space to perform individuality through a novel anti-art aesthetic
that rejected conservative judgements of value; and by promoting, within this
space, associated beliefs in anticlericalism.28
While the consumption of beer may seem innocuous, within this context
it was a small gesture that connected the young group of artists to this heated
debate. In rejecting the loaded symbol of the Eucharist, the group disconnected
itself from conservatism and the Catholic church, and replaced it with a symbol
of a rural, working-class ideal, unpretentious and befitting of a culture for a
brave new world that was yet to be won.
Although this republican debate stimulated support for ‘individuality’, it
was not intended to reject patriotic sentiment. On the contrary, it was part of
an attempt to reinforce French identity in the image of the republican citizen,
and partook of Gambetta’s controversial declaration that one could not be
both catholic and a patriot. To support the Catholic church, he claimed, was
to support an authority based outside of the nation, and whose allegiance
was not to the people of France, but to Catholics worldwide. This, Gambetta
asserted with the approval of his republican compatriots, undermined their
nation’s sovereignty, which must be reclaimed as a matter of priority.29 Intricate
gestures that undermined the traditional cultures and values of the church
and autocratic regimes were a crucial way in which this was achieved on the
streets.

The Bon Bocks: anti-modern modernists

The implication that beer represented a symbol of French patriotism may well
be countered by the drink’s simultaneous reference to Britain or Germany, since
beer was a prominent element of these national cultures. However, as I shall now
184 Historical Modernisms

argue, for parts of the avant-garde its consumption symbolized artists’ rejection
of a standardized, stereotypical national identity, and the pursuit to construct
a French persona that was not influenced by official doctrine.30 This can be
seen most acutely at the Bon Bock club: a society of artists that met for lively
monthly dinners during the early Third Republic. These meetings continued,
rather extraordinarily, for over fifty years, with the only recess forced by the First
World War.31 The lunches combined arts and music in an exclusive social space.
Among this privileged crowd were figures such as Charles and Antoine Cros,
André Gill, Georges Lorin and Coquelin Cadet, who were all central members of
the Hydropathe club, and regular contributors at the Chat Noir, therefore closely
linking the Bon Bock club with the avant-garde circles of bohemian Paris.
The term ‘Le Bon Bock’ translates into English as ‘The Good Pint’, and the
club was so-named in honour of Manet’s well-known painting of the same title
which received critical acclaim at the Salon of 1873 (Figure 9.3).32 The portrait
depicted Émile Bellot, an engraver and future founder of the Bon Bock lunches,
who Manet portrayed sat calmly with a pipe and a glass of beer, in a style
reminiscent of the Dutch Golden Age. Instead of rejecting such classical cultural
connotations, the Bon Bocks embraced them. They drew on these cultural
roots at their monthly lunches, as they recited classical music, and poetry – the
forms of high culture that might seem at odds with the avant-garde spirit of
bohemian Montmartre. Yet they revelled in this kind of high-brow education,
and awareness of the country’s cultural history that also included the coarse
humour, exaggerated characters, and carnivalesque spirit of Rabelais, who Bellot
referenced in his Album du Bon Bock: ‘beloved brothers, I pray our immortal
master, Rabelais, to maintain you in good bodily health and joyous frame of
mind.’33 The Bon Bocks were searching for a contemporary French identity, and
here they found an affinity with historical cultures that seemed to offer a more
genuine Gallic persona than could be found in their own changeable society.34
This is paralleled in Manet’s image of Bellot as a rural champion; the rustic brass
table, characteristic agrarian clothing, the pipe and beer, all create a timeless
image that rejects the temporality of Parisian urbanism and modernity.
The name ‘Bon Bock’ also alluded to the cultural heritage of the society’s
leaders, many of whom were from the region of Alsace. One of the reasons
Manet received such acclaim for Bellot’s portrait was due to its apparently
conservative subject matter and style. This united left- and right-wing press,
appearing as respite from the previous controversies of ‘Olympia’ and ‘Le
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’. Yet this view does not account for the painting’s political
undercurrent, such as those alluded to by Jules Claretie when he asserted that
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 185

this calm, dignified figure was likely ‘a good Alsatian philosopher and patriot,
quietly enjoying his tobacco and hops’.35 Alsace had long been the main producer
of French beer, and for the Bon Bocks, the pint of beer referenced in its name
was a symbolic allusion to the region, which had recently been lost to Germany
following the Franco-Prussian War.36 The Bon Bock meetings had strong links
with Alsace, held as they were at the Alsatian restaurant ‘Krauteimer’ on the rue
Rochechouart in Montmartre. Before the war this was a local haunt of artists and
actors of German and Alsatian origin.37 This Alsatian connection was evident
from the first Bon Bock meeting, which was co-organized by the Alsatian
satirist Eugène Cottin, during which the caricaturist Étienne Carjat ‘recited
his “Toast to Alsace-Lorraine”’, which was said to ‘stir the emotions of all those
in attendance’.38 The Bon Bocks’ reference to beer, as well as the Hydropathes’
consumption of beer at their séances in 1878, was a symbol of solidarity with the
Alsatian people, and the communities alienated by political agenda.

Figure 9.3 Édouard Manet, Le Bon Bock, 1873, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum
of Art: The Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson, Jr., Collection, 1963, 1963–116-9.
186 Historical Modernisms

Figure 9.4 Eugène Cottin, ‘La Lutte à Entreprendre’, Le Bon Bock, no. 1, 21 February
1885, p.3. Courtesy of BnF.

Figure 9.5 Eugène Cottin, ‘Les Effets de la Bière en Allemagne’, Le Bon Bock, no. 10,
2 May 1885, p. 1. Courtesy of BnF.
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 187

Figure 9.6 Eugène Cottin, ‘Les Effets de la Bière Française’, Le Bon Bock, no. 11,
9 May 1885, p.1. Courtesy of BnF.

Ten years after the inaugural Bon Bock dinner, this was confirmed in the
Journal du Bon Bock, which was published weekly by the group’s leading members
for at least six months.39 This is no doubt a peculiar magazine to be published
by so-called bohemian artists. Beer was its sole subject. It included poetry and
cartoons, as typical of artistic magazines of the period. But it also included
historical articles on the history of French beer, reported the fluctuating costs of
hops and barley in the capital, and published studies by pre-eminent scientists
supposedly proving unequivocally that French beer was superior to its foreign
rivals. In all it was an odd mix of satirical literary magazine, trade journal and
nationalistic propaganda. Throughout this range of articles, it championed the
superiority of French beer, in particular above the German counterpart. In the
opening article of the first issue Bellot stated explicitly that this was a ‘battle –
albeit a passive one – against the Germans’.40 In this same issue the leading
caricature expressed that the battle was underway. Here we see a handsome
young Frenchman, clean-shaven showing his chiselled jaw, and wearing clothing
reminiscent of the sans-culottes – clearly of the peasantry, but nonetheless clean
and respectable (Figure 9.4). He is the personification of French beer battling his
German counterpart, imagined as a Prussian soldier, somewhat bestial with his
188 Historical Modernisms

thick beard, and despite being armed with a long dagger, unable to fight off the
stoic might of the French revolutionary. Such rivalry continues throughout the
journal. In issue ten, we see the supposed ‘effects of German beer’ (Figure 9.5).
Once again pictured as soldiers, the Germans are, under the influence of their
own country’s beer, turning on each other as they brawl in the streets. On the
other hand, when shown the ‘effects of French beer’, we see patrons as civilized
clientele, engaged in conversation over a game of cards or billiards (Figure 9.6).
In the presence of women (who they are subtly leering over) they represent the
kind of macho masculinity that, we can assume, its readers could have identified
with.
The Bon Bock caricatures argued against the consumption of German beer
not only for the sake of patriotism, but for health reasons too. German beer, they
argued, was mass-manufactured. It used scientific brewing methods, and large
quantities of the controversial Salicylic Acid as a preservative. This we can see
satirized in issue thirteen, where we are shown a crowd of scientists learning
German brewing methods in a scientific laboratory (Figure 9.7). If the message
here wasn’t transparent enough, the text below clears up any misunderstanding:
‘the use of salicylic acid prevents beer from spoiling. The beers do not spoil, it is
true, but the health of the drinkers is spoiled. Do not drink beers from Germany:
they are all salicylic.’ The message had already been made a few months earlier in
the image entitled ‘A Dream’, in which Cottin invokes the death of German beer,
killed by her own deadly poison (Figure 9.8). As inscribed on the headstone:
‘Here lies Lady German Beer of Munich […] Deceased victim of her own germs.
Eternal regrets for all who they poisoned.’ And there in the funeral march are
the embodied figures of apoplexy and paralysis: the supposed side-effects of
this controversial substance. French beer, on the other hand, was supposedly
brewed with traditional, rural techniques, and was the healthy choice against
the poisonous German alternative. Thus, for the Bon Bocks, the consumption
of beer was not about youthful liberation and bohemian ideals. Its message was
to oppose scientific methods of modernity, and to instead stimulate support
for a rejuvenation of rural values, rallying against the modern urban ways that
were influenced by the invasion of foreign (in this case, German) cultures.
By expressing this message through the long-established language of visual
satire they appear to maintain a voice of the young free-thinkers, mocking the
authority of science, and all the while promoting the reinstatement of a more
ancient way of life.
The symbolism adopted by the Bon Bocks had been used in recent
times, notably by the revolutionary Realist painter, Gustave Courbet, who
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 189

Figure 9.7 Eugène Cottin, ‘Expertise sur les Bières d’Allemagne’, Le Bon Bock, no.
13, 23 May 1885, p.1. Courtesy of BnF.

Figure 9.8 Eugène Cottin, ‘Un Rêve’, Le Bon Bock, no. 5, 28 March 1885, p.3.
Courtesy of BnF.
190 Historical Modernisms

often frequented the Alsatian bar, the Brasserie Andler in Paris, and in the
extensive collection of caricatures during his later life, he was rarely pictured
without his customary pipe and stein of beer (Figure 9.9). For Courbet, who
frequently manipulated his public persona through self-portraiture, the beer
stein completed his real-life image of masculine, anti-bourgeois ‘naïvety’. Just
as much as the substance indicated Courbet’s cultural roots, its consumption
dictated his behaviour, ideas, the company that he kept and the physical
state of the writing he produced often on beer-stained paper, as T. J. Clark
describes:
[Courbet] thrived on [the Brasserie Andler’s] mixture of the gross and the
intellectual; the others sat and laughed at his hour-long tirades against the Ideal
and in favour of Alsatian beer: they laughed but they listened, night after night.
Courbet was, in fact as in legend, a naïf, almost an illiterate, with wild spelling
and disintegrating syntax spilling over page after page. Yet he was also, in his
own cantankerous way, a theorist, a doctrinaire. Proudhon himself groaned
under the onslaught of the twelve-page letters, beer-stained and crumpled,
which greeted his drafts of Du principe de l’art.41

Courbet exemplified beer drinking as a rejection of refined culture and

etiquette; and offered a glimpse of a world in which intellectualism, vulgarity
and naivety were complimentary, rather than conflicting traits. Fearing further
imprisonment for his role in the Commune, Courbet was exiled to Switzerland
in 1873, the same year Manet’s portrait of Bellot was exhibited. And it is perhaps
no coincidence that the Bon Bock subject – with his pipe and glass of beer – uses
a palette and tone remarkably similar to that of Courbet’s own After Dinner at
Ornans (1848). While the Bon Bock club equally drew on this idealized image
of the rural man, it was, however, far from matching Courbet’s more radical
anarchism. While the journal empathizes with the common Frenchman, and
a rural character in particular, by 1885 – at the height of the Tonkin military
campaign that sought to establish a French protectorate in Vietnam – this
empathy lay specifically with the French infantryman. In two separate issues of
1885, the reader is invited to identify with the French foot soldier fighting for the
colonial empire (Figures 9.10 and 9.11). In sharp contrast to the representations
of the Prussian military as drunken aggressors, the courageous French soldiers
gather to drink beer in the spirit of community. Rather than attempting to
subvert the authority of the state, the group encouraged the reader to support
the state’s military agenda, inviting them to toast to the health of their valiant
soldiers with a glass of French beer.
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 191

Figure 9.9 Léonce Petit, ‘G. Courbet’, Le Hanneton, 13 June 1867, p.1. Léonce Justin
Alexandre Petit (1839–1884), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 9.10 Eugène Cottin, ‘Un Toast à l’armée française au Tonkin, Le Bon Bock,
no. 7, 11 April 1885, p. 3. Courtesy of BnF.
192 Historical Modernisms

Figure 9.11 Eugène Cottin, ‘Notre Armée dans l’est’, Le Bon Bock, no. 16, 13 June
1885, p.1. Courtesy of BnF.

Conclusion

National celebrations, such as the fête of 30 June 1878 as depicted by Monet and
Manet, were a means by which the emerging liberal Republic entrenched its
ideology within French society. They provided a means to collectively engage
with common ideals, under the flurry of tricolours that symbolized the victory
of the left over the conservative royalists and the Catholic church. The bohemian
cultures of the Hydropathes and the Bon Bocks performed an equivalent role
on a smaller scale. As we have seen, this was wholeheartedly in support of the
republic; but the agency permitted through their own cultural expressions
allowed these artists to define what they understood to be the essential
characteristics of the new republican citizen. The Bon Bocks championed
masculinity, a carnivalesque spirit of Rabelais, the quiet dignity of the rural
Frenchman and the regaining of sovereignty from the German invasion (both
military and cultural). The Hydropathes were similarly focused on regaining
sovereignty, partaking of Ferry’s and Gambetta’s left-wing agendas that sought
to supplant the power of the Catholic church. For both, beer symbolized their
defiance and acted as an agent to create and maintain unity in support of their
republican cause.
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 193

As roots of twentieth-century anti-arts and avant-garde practice, the two

clubs under question thus appear to be suitably subversive in respect of their
rejection of authority and pursuit of independence. Yet, as I hope to have
shown, this nonetheless acted in favour of the emerging liberal republican
state, and aided the promotion of its ideology to the Parisian youth. Given the
widespread violence against catholic communities, which were expelled from
France due to suspicion of the church’s authority, and distain for a religious
way of life, to understand this to occur within the context and name of liberty,
only highlights a certain hypocrisy at the source of avant-garde practice.
Similarly, their engagement with a hypermasculine aesthetic, and distrust of
the apparent influx of foreign cultural influence, may be less palatable to today’s
liberal western values. The Bon Bocks, furthermore, did not practice what they
preached. Despite what they so doggedly express in their journal, at the Bon
Bock lunches they didn’t drink beer: in practice, within their exclusive circle
they were comfortable with more bourgeois pursuits, toasting their ideas over a
glass of fine French wine.

Notes

1 Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 18.
2 Monarchists held a majority in the National Assembly with up to 400 seats,
compared to 250 republicans, making restoration of the monarchy a distinct
possibility. See William Fortescue, The Third Republic in France 1970–1940:
Conflicts and Continuities (London: Routledge, 2000), 24. John M. Merriman,
Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2014), 2.
3 Fortescue, The Third Republic, 28.
4 Alan R.H. Baker, Fraternity among the Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary
Associations in the Loire Valley, 1815–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 37.
5 Émile Goudeau, Dix ans de bohème ([1888]; Paris: Éditions Champs Vallon, 2000), 324.
6 Georges Fragerolle, ‘Le Fumisme’, L’Hydropathe 2, no. 8 (12 May 1880): 2–3. (All
translations are my own, unless otherwise stated.)
7 Charles Cros, ‘Udadushkhînam – Çruti’, Le Chat Noir, no. 77 (30 June 1883): 4.
8 Francisque Sarcey, ‘Les Hydropathes’, XIX Siècle (28 November 1878): 1.
9 Dan Franck, Bohemian Paris: Picasso Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern
Art, trans. Cynthia Liebow (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
194 Historical Modernisms

10 Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999), 46.
11 Kolleen M. Guy, ‘Wine, Champagne and the Making of French Identity in the
Belle Epoque’, in Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking Eating and Drinking in Europe
since the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Scholliers (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 165. David Grigg,
‘Convergence in European Diets: The Case of Alcoholic Beverages,’ GeoJournal 44,
no. 1 (January 1998): 11.
12 James Simpson, ‘Cooperation and Conflicts: Institutional Innovation in France’s
Wine Markets, 1870–1911’, The Business History Review 79, no. 3 (autumn 2005): 534.
13 Jacques Lehardy (Clément Privé), ‘Montmartre,’ Le Chat Noir, no. 1 (14 January
1882).
14 Julian Brigstocke, ‘Defiant Laughter: Humour and the Aesthetics of Place in Late
Nineteenth-Century Montmartre’, Cultural Geographies 19, no. 2 (2012): 220–1.
Construction of the Sacré-Cœur began in Montmartre in 1875.
15 Alfred Sirven and Henri Le Verdier, Le Jésuite Rouge (Paris: Dentu, 1879). Pompeu
Gener, La Mort et le Diable: Histoire et Philosophie des deux Négations Suprêmes
(Paris: Reinwald, 1880).
16 Tout-Paris, nos. 9–12 (1880): 2.
17 Paul Ilie, ‘Nietzsche in Spain: 1890–1910’, PMLA 79, no. 1 (March 1964): 8. My
thanks to Jordi Larios for discussion regarding this obscure figure connected to
Catalan Modernisme (not to be confused with Anglo-Saxon Modernism).
18 Tout-Paris, nos. 9–12 (1880): 2.
19 Caroline C. Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Guy Bedouelle and Jean-Paul Costa, Les
laïcités à la française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 11.
20 Ibid.
21 John F. V. Keiger, Raymond Poincaré (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 61.
22 Claude Nicolet, Histoire, Nation, République (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000), 248.
23 Pierre Chevallier, La séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Ecole (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 228.
24 Jules Ferry speech at the 1879 Salon, reproduced in the 1880 Salon catalogue, v–xiv,
cited in Patricia Mainardi, End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third
Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61.
25 Mainardi, End of the Salon, 61.
26 Tamar Garb, ‘Revising the Revisionists: The Formation of the Union des Femmes
Peintres et Sculpteurs’, Art Journal 48, no. 1, ‘Nineteenth-Century French Art
Institutions’ (spring 1989): 64–6.
27 Nicholas Green, ‘“All the Flowers of the Field”: The State, Liberalism and Art in
France under the Early Third Republic’, Oxford Art Journal 10, no. 1, ‘Art and the
French State’ (1987): 71.
 Beer in Bohemian Paris 195

28 Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn
of the Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).
29 Fortescue, The Third Republic, 33.
30 Grigg, ‘Convergence in European Diets,’ 11. According to statistics from Rowntree
and Sherwell, in the German Empire, beer made up nearly 50 per cent of all alcohol
consumed.
31 Philip Dennis Cate, and Mary Shaw, The Spirit of Montmartre (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers, 1996), 3.
32 Ibid., 2.
33 Émile Bellot, ‘Preface’, Album du Bon Bock (Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 1878).
Translation from Cate and Shaw, The Spirit of Montmartre, 4.
34 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Golan looks in detail at
representations of the rural landscape, regional cultures and rustic symbols in art
during the modernist period.
35 Jules Claretie, Le Soir, cited in Eric Darragon, Manet (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 217.
36 Katharina Vajta, ‘Linguistic Religious and National Loyalties in Alsace’,
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 220 (March 2013): 110. As is
well known, the region changed between French and German rule since the Early
Middle Ages, but it had been a region of France since the rule of Louis XVI in 1648.
37 Cate and Shaw, ‘Spirit of Montmartre’, 3.
38 Ibid. Carjat was a journalist, and co-founded the journal Le Diogène. He is perhaps
best remembered for having produced a number of well-known photographic
portraits, including of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Cottin produced
illustrations for a number of journals, including front-page designs for Le Grelot, Le
Sifflet and Le Chat Noir.
39 It was published for at least six months, between January and June 1885.
40 Émile Bellot, ‘Notre Programme,’ Le Bon Bock, no. 1 (21 February 1885): 1.
41 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1982), 30.
196
 10

From the marvellous to the managerial: Life at

the Surrealist Research Bureau
Rachel Silveri

On Friday, 20 June 1924, the newspaper Paris-Soir dutifully reprinted the

announcement by André Breton that he had decided to end the publication of
his journal Littérature. The magazine, it reported, ‘has published its last issue, not
due to the lack of material resources but for sufficient reasons of existence. The
usual collaborators of this journal have the intention of dedicating themselves
to Surrealism in poetry and above all else in life’.1 And so it was declared that
Surrealism would enter life, indeed that it was already residing within life and
required further action, further dedication, further pursuit.
As to what Surrealism in life might look like, by September it was already
becoming clearer. Discussions were in the works for a new journal to be called
La Révolution surréaliste, aimed at liberating ‘the unconscious activity of the
mind’ and ‘penetrating the unexplored field of Dreams’.2 But equally important
it was decided that this journal would have a dedicated office, an office, in fact,
that was to be open to the public. In a group meeting, the Surrealists decided on
the name – the Bureau de recherches surréalistes – and envisioned the types of
people they would attract, divided into three categories: first, those who wanted
information on Surrealism; second, those who wanted to ‘abandon themselves’
to dreams and automatic writing; and third, those who wanted to bring new
ideas for the movement.3
For the office’s location, Pierre Naville, a younger addition to the group,
offered one of his family’s properties, a bi-level apartment at 15 rue de Grenelle,
in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. Artworks and posters were brought in
to decorate the space; manuscripts and publications were collected to form a
library; basic furniture and equipment were procured – a table, chairs and at
least one portable typewriter. A large, black cahier was purchased as a logbook.
198 Historical Modernisms

The Surrealists decided on their hours of operation – Monday through Saturday,

from 4:30 pm to 6:30 pm. They ordered official business stamps; they printed
various letterheads. They made advertisements and sent announcements to
various newspapers to publicize the space. And so on Friday, 10 October 1924,
just five days prior to the publication of Breton’s first Manifeste du surréalisme,
the doors of the Surrealist Research Bureau opened to the public.
In the histories of Surrealism, with a few notable exceptions, the Bureau is
frequently overlooked.4 When mentioned, its account is usually in passing or
delivered in a somewhat embellished language. Consider Maurice Nadeau’s
seminal Histoire du Surréalisme, in which the Bureau was ‘the generator of new
energies’, a place for ‘inventors’, ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘dreamers’, a site for ‘all
those who had something to say, to confess, to create’.5
In contrast to this type of romanticized description, this essay proposes a
study of the concrete power dynamics at place within the Bureau – of what work
was accomplished, how such work was distributed and especially how it became
supervised. In so doing, I argue for a different type of history for Surrealism, one
that foregrounds a different historical context. Scholars of Surrealism have long
privileged psychoanalytic theory, as both context and method, in their analyses
of this movement.6 Yet given the aims of Historical Modernisms – of rethinking
the historicization of early-twentieth-century art afresh and better placing the
avant-gardes ‘in the historical contexts of their production and reception’ – one
might argue that the Surrealist workplace warrants a perspective outside the
psychoanalytic and instead rooted in the socio-historical.7 Towards this end, I
situate the Bureau in relation to a broader set of historical discourses, including
the rationalization of office work, the gendered division of labour and the rise
of management practices in interwar France, treating its production as less a
product of psychic drives and rather something closer to what T. J. Clark has
described as ‘a series of actions in but also on history’.8
In 1924, the office was neither a new nor a neutral space: debates about labour
and organization were thriving. The fact that the Surrealists chose to create an
official, organized and public Bureau at a time when Breton had otherwise called
upon its members to ‘lâchez tout’, to ‘leave everything’, merits some explanation.9
What the Bureau reveals is not only that a handful of writers suddenly became
employees of Surrealism, but also that a few members began fashioning
themselves as managers, in a manner complicit with contemporary theories of
administration. Neither marginal nor insignificant, the Bureau was the ground
through which André Breton refined his leadership skills. His abilities to shape
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 199

and consolidate Surrealism, I contend, rest on this period in which, on the office
floor, he worked at governing and managing others.
In the beginning, the Bureau was staffed by ten different Surrealists, each
assigned to work on different days. Breton and Louis Aragon worked on Mondays.
Paul Éluard and Benjamin Péret staffed the office on Tuesdays. Simone Breton
and Jacques-André Boiffard came in on Wednesdays, while Pierre Naville and
Francis Gérard handled Thursdays. On Fridays, Max Morise and Roger Vitrac
were present at the office. And on Saturdays, Simone and Boiffard assumed an
additional shift. From its very inception, the Bureau was thus predicated on an
unequal distribution of labour.
Those on duty accomplished specific tasks, at times tedious or mundane. If
any visitors came by the office, the members on staff were responsible for them.
Despite the Surrealists’ initial planning, archival records clearly show that only
about four guests per week visited the office, the vast majority of them other
Surrealists and writers.10 When not engaging the public, indeed most of the time,
the Bureau’s staff had other duties. They signed a daily logbook and recorded
their work accomplished, a gesture akin to the attendance sheet and record-
keeping notecards described in office literature.11 They kept inventory and
organized the library, documented press clippings, maintained correspondence,
coordinated with printers and publishers, mailed pamphlets and other materials.
They worked on the production of the journal and managed subscriptions. The
day the office opened, Morise and Vitrac sent letters to newspapers and handled
the ‘Material organization of the Bureau’.12 The next day, Simone completed an
extensive inventory, which was updated a week later by Boiffard.
If one starts to wonder whether the Surrealists were somehow being ironic
in all of this mundane office work, consider the nature of some of their
correspondence. It was penned on the most banal of stationery – no icons, no
graphics, no typographical experimentation. Contrast it with Tristan Tzara’s
infamous Dada Movement letterhead from 1921 and the differences are
clear enough: against the latter’s playful, vertiginous alternation of scale in its
lettering, a clear mockery of corporate authority, the Surrealist stationery, with
its lack of illustrations and bolded serif font, appears sober and serious. They
used it to send letters of rectification to the press. For in the fall of 1924, there
were a number of other artists, notably Yvan Goll and Paul Dermée, who were
attempting to use the label of ‘Surrealism’.13 Whenever those figures received
any mention in the press, the Bureau sent a letter to the newspaper, correcting
usage of the term.14 Rather than mocking authority, the Bureau, with its official
200 Historical Modernisms

stationery and stamps, with its public office and monthly journal, wanted to
appear legitimate, powerful, the definitive organization of Surrealism.
Beyond the collective commitment to staffing, a few leadership roles within
the office were nominally determined. Gérard was declared the general secretary,
while Naville and Péret were made the directors of the new journal. Yet the
precise roles of such titles were nonetheless kept open and the result was that a
few members – mainly Breton and Naville – began vying for power, a struggle
that has been left recorded in the office’s daily notebook.
Consider one of the earliest entries in the Bureau’s Cahier, written on
13 October. Breton declares: ‘Put forward these vows: 1. Suppression of all
communication for a period of 15 days. 2. Complete suppression of every
personal letter that has no experimental interest. 3. Multiplication by every
means possible of individual Surrealist initiatives … Communicate to this
Bureau the results of such experiences.’15 Articulated as vœux, as vows or wishes,
the enumerated statements are blunt, declarative, non-questionable; they are
aimed at directing the behaviour of the collective group. Reading the list, Naville
decided to endorse the first item, adding, ‘I approve’ with his initials. As will
soon be apparent, this was but one of many such statements. And so already
within the first pages of the Bureau’s Cahier, it becomes clear that there are
certain Surrealists who openly direct the actions of others, certain Surrealists
who approve or disapprove such actions, and still others who either silently obey
or disobey while they continue their work at the office. It is here, within these
distinctions, that we begin to see the Bureau staff mimic contemporary theories
of labour management.
Such theories were so widespread at the time that France has been described
as living within an ‘age of organization’.16 The writings of Frederick Wilson Taylor
advocated the breakdown of labour into highly efficient movements; they were
translated as early as 1906 and spread widely – by 1916, readers of the popular
La Nature (including the Surrealists) could find long profiles written on Taylor
within the pages of their journal.17 While Taylor’s work was primarily associated
with factory labour, French businessmen found his system of rationalized tasks
readily applicable to various industries. Thus as early as 1909, with the founding
of Mon Bureau by the Ravisse brothers, office trade journals began avidly
embracing Taylor’s methods and theorizing the multitude of ways in which they
could be applied to the white-collar space of the office floor. Throughout the
1910s and 1920s subsequent journals such as Organisation et outillage du Bureau
and La Revue du Bureau made clear that theories of rationalization could be
successfully applied to clerical work, office administration and the classification
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 201

of information. Filing and typing soon became Taylorized activities.18 Within

the layout of the office, desks were to be rearranged so as to provide minimal
interruption yet constant supervision. A proper series of movements were
established for a broad range of clerical tasks, from opening letters to filing
papers, each with their own system of accounting and supervision.
Taylor’s system of focusing on the individualized and fragmented motions
of workers found its complement in the theories of Henri Fayol, a French
engineer, whose writings appeared contemporaneously with that of the
American theorist. While Taylor focused on measuring the tasks of labourers,
Fayol directed his attention to that of the administration, outlining an entire
system of proper management in his widely popular Administration industrielle
et générale (General and Industrial Administration, 1916). Aimed at outlining
the basic functions of executive leadership, Fayol regarded his work as not only
applicable to industry but to ‘the government of affairs, of every affair, large
or small, industrial, commercial, political, religious, or any other’.19 For Fayol,
leadership was part of the ‘natural order’; it was applicable to any and every
‘human organization’ and undertaking.20 It was a system that ranged from the
supervision of one to that of many. His envisioning of administration at once
naturalized leadership and deified it.21
Fayol identified five elements as central to the activity of management:
‘Administration,’ he wrote, ‘is to plan, organize, command, coordinate, and
control.’22 To plan was to evaluate the business, develop concrete goals and
formulate a plan of action to achieve those goals. To organize was to ensure that
the business had all it needed to function and implement the plan of action.
Command was to maintain and supervise all staff. The goal was to discipline
them, sanction them if necessary and ‘acquire the optimum return from all
employees’.23 Central to Fayol’s administrative system was that command was
unified and singular: ‘for any action, an employee must receive orders from
only one leader.’24 This leader was to combine both ‘personal qualities’ (such as
‘integrity’, ‘perseverance’ and ‘high moral character’) and a ‘general knowledge
of administration’, establishing his authority as much by setting a good example
as by eliminating unnecessary employees, conducting audits and overviews, and
utilizing sanctions.25 To coordinate was to harmonize all the activities of the
business. And finally to control was to ensure that the leader’s command was
properly respected, to maintain order and rule.
Fayol’s tenets on administration spread rapidly. Administration industrielle et
générale was republished in 1917 and then reprinted in 1918, 1920 and 1925.
Beyond his publications, Fayol formed the Centre d’études administratives in
202 Historical Modernisms

1919, a school that offered management classes, lectures, programming and

publishing opportunities. This organization was to merge with the Taylorist
Comité Michelin in 1926 to form the Comité national d’organisation française
(CNOF). Directed by several of Fayol’s students, the CNOF promoted the
scientific organization of labour and management alike throughout French
industries. Inspired by Fayol’s administrative theory, the market was flooded by
a variety of texts emphasizing the importance of managerial abilities.26 In short,
during the exact moment when the Surrealists decided to open and operate an
office space, the social environment of France was profoundly marked by a series
of discourses that at once sought to rationalize such spaces and to stress that
above all else such spaces required a clear, commanding and singular leadership.
Under this ‘age of organization’, as the historian Jackie Clarke has described,
leadership was a type of ‘ethos’, a technique of managing people that was to be
embodied and exemplified by a certain cast of administrators.27 And while Fayol’s
work was widespread, it should also be noted that strong management was not
the only option. Against such theories of administration, there existed a variety
of individual writers (such as Hyacinthe Dubreuil) and institutions (such as the
Confédération générale du travail unitaire) within France that publicly hewed to
a tradition of communitarian socialism and called for worker’s autonomy and
collective effort.28 This, however, was not the model embraced by the Surrealists.
Consider some further examples in the Cahier. Around 20 October, Breton
writes: ‘The activity of the office leaves much to be desired and this is due to the
seven or eight of us who should not be here. It is absolutely important that the
two Surrealists on duty have the ability to work in peace. The others should only
stay on the second floor.’29 Immediately beneath this command, Naville added,
‘I approve.’ What could have been a collective decision – to separate the bi-level
space of the office according to function – was one demanded by Breton and
approved by Naville.
When the policy had difficulty taking into effect, Naville proclaimed on
30 October,
Starting today, it is ESTABLISHED that: a) Only those on duty have the right
to be in the principle room on the ground floor. b) The staff on duty must
accomplish an effective action during their two-hour shift … They will record in
this cahier, very succinctly and without poetic development, the result of their
work. c) Those who are uncooperative will be punished.30

Not quite the liberation of dreams, this was Surrealism as a disciplinary

endeavour: segregated into an enclosed space, employees were given a precise
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 203

two-hour frame to be filled with precise duties, ‘effective action’ and proper
notation. Those who refused to follow orders would now be subject to sanctions.
And sanctions were indeed put into effect. On 2 December, Éluard wrote
in the Cahier: ‘Given what I said earlier about the presence of Vitrac at the
Office, the latter being here, I am leaving and from now on will not return to any
meeting concerning la Révolution surréaliste [sic].’31 Then it is written, in Éluard’s
script: ‘Naville expels Vitrac.’32 While the precise reasons are unclear, Vitrac was
thus abruptly subject to sanctions.33 Dismissed from the Bureau, he was not to
return. Recall that for Fayol sanctions were key to good command. In order
to get that ‘optimum return from all employees’, one needed to ‘eliminate the
incompetent’, eliminate any employee who had ‘become incapable of carrying
out his function’.34 A benefit, Fayol theorized, was that eliminations could
create ‘unity’ throughout the personnel.35 In expelling Vitrac, Naville at once
appeased Éluard, a senior member of the group, increasing his ‘optimum return’,
and bolstered his own authority over the office. Surrealism, in short, was now
something that one could be fired from.
While Naville was asserting more and more power over the Bureau’s daily
existence, Breton was also performing his own type of command and control.
Around 20 October, he wrote, ‘The press clippings album has not been kept up-
to-date. Very annoying.’36 Rather than updating the album himself, Breton chose
to supervise the activity, shaming the staff who should have felt obliged. Then he
added another list of directives:
1. I ask that this evening we examine very closely the texts for the journal that we
have gathered. Ensure that the collaboration is not monotonous, I insist on this …
2. A visit to the flea market should be imposed. 3. I ask instantly that each of
us contributes … to the rigorous establishment of the documentary part of
Surrealism.37

Throughout this passage, Breton uses what Mary Ann Caws has described as a
‘style of demand’, in which Breton ‘calls for our attention, and secures it: “I ask …,”
“I demand,” “I claim.”’38 Deeming this a language of ‘noncompromise’, Caws
describes Breton’s voice as ‘categorical, stubborn’.39 While her discussion was in
reference to Breton’s manifestos, it is clear that it was also the language used
at the Bureau. Whenever Breton articulated his views it was done in manner
to render discussion obsolete, aimed at disguising what was mere opinion into
undisputed rule, aimed at bolstering what Fayol described as a unified and
singular command.
In another instance, Breton critiqued the workings of the office, claiming that
there was ‘too much useless spirit’.40 ‘The scope of Surrealist activity still has yet
204 Historical Modernisms

to be defined. No serious plan of action has been proposed,’ he wrote, calling for
a programme of action in precisely Fayol’s terms.41 Breton urged members to
undertake a ‘broader offensive’ and he began an active supervision of the staff.42
On Friday, 31 October, he visited the Bureau and recorded what he saw:
‘It follows from my benevolent inspection today that Morise passed the time
typing, and that Vitrac did absolutely nothing (at 5:15pm he declared that
there was nothing to do but wait).’43 While Vitrac immediately denounced such
surveillance, no other Surrealist openly protested Breton’s decision to act as
manager of the office floor, conducting what Fayol would describe as a ‘periodic
inspection of the organization’, a necessary activity of good command.44
As Breton adapted his engagement with the Bureau from that of participant
to supervisor, he notably abandoned his original duties as a staff member. His
extensive critique and so-called ‘benevolent inspection’ occurred between two
Monday shifts in which Breton effectively abandoned his Bureau post. Failing
to sign into the logbook on both days, Aragon wrote, ‘Breton excuses himself.’45
Such behaviour continued with the production of La Révolution surréaliste.
When several staff members travelled to the printer to oversee the publication
of the first issue, they were met with what Naville described as ‘un travail ingrat’,
‘a thankless work’, of making mock-ups and proofing pages.46 ‘I was extremely
tired,’ Naville wrote in a series of letters; ‘We worked a day and half at the printer,’
while Breton was ‘of course at a café’.47 And when the journal was printed, it
was Naville, Boiffard and Morise who attended to the mailing of copies and
subscription cards, to their delivery at various bookstores.48 Breton’s avoidance
of such work was again in line with Fayol’s directives: ‘A great leader must always
seek to retain for himself the liberty of thought and action necessary for the
examination, direction, and control of the main business issues. He must offload
on to his subordinates and staff all of the difficult labour which he himself is not
strictly bound to carry out.’49
Out of all the ‘thankless work’ present at the Bureau, perhaps the most
prominent was that of typing. Consider that when the office received responses
to their first questionnaire, ‘Is Suicide a Solution?’ someone had to type the
handwritten answers for publication in the journal. That someone was Simone
Breton, who transcribed the texts over two weeks of work, coming into the
Bureau on days beyond her assigned shifts, typing up handwritten answers even
from other members of the Bureau (such as Aragon) who had access to the office
typewriter.50
We have, in fact, a photograph of the Surrealists with their writing machine
(Figure 10.1). Taken by Man Ray in November 1924 it features nearly a dozen
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 205

Figure 10.1 Man Ray, Surrealist Group ‘Waking dream séance’, 1924. Photograph
of the Bureau de recherches surréalistes (Surrealist Research Bureau) in November
1924. Standing (left to right): Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Jacques-André Boiffard,
André Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault.
Seated (left to right): Simone Breton, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron. © Man Ray 2015
Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris [2020], image: Telimage, Paris.

Figure 10.2 Man Ray, Centrale surréaliste (Surrealist group), 1924. Photograph
of the Bureau de recherches surréalistes (Surrealist Research Bureau) in November
1924. Standing (left to right): Jacques Baron, Raymond Queneau, André Breton,
Jacques-André Boiffard, Giorgio de Chirico, Roger Vitrac, Paul Éluard, Philippe
Soupault, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon. Seated (left to right): Pierre Naville, Simone
Breton, Max Morise, Louise (Mick) Soupault. © Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris [2020], image: Telimage, Paris.
206 Historical Modernisms

Surrealists crowded into a corner of the Bureau. Robert Desnos sits above the
bottom-right frame; with his left hand, he tilts a box inwards towards the rest
of the group, while his right hand is open, gesturing. The gaze of almost every
Surrealist is directed towards this space: the emptiness that lies between the palm
of Desnos’ hand and the container, whose contents, if any, are hidden from the
viewer’s sight. One after another, Morise and Vitrac, Boiffard, Breton and Naville
incline their heads, bend their backs, tilt forward and gaze towards the Surrealist
below. In the very centre of this circular grouping sits Simone at a small desk
with a small portable typewriter. Like the others, her gaze travels downwards
towards Desnos’ gesture. Her hands touch the base of the keyboard, though her
fingers are no longer extended. The typewriter is set midway through the page
and the dark ink of a few words appears across the paper. The transcription
has occurred or, perhaps, was still mid-process. The transcriber was Simone.
If Desnos was considered the ‘prophet’ of Surrealism in the words of André
Breton, then Simone was its typist.51
This group portrait of the Surrealists has been described in the literature as a
type of ‘waking dream séance’, a ‘waking dream session’.52 Yet Desnos’ body – his
gaze downcast yet pointed, his hands active, articulating – has little resemblance
to the passive states that have been recorded in other images depicting his trances
(such as the photograph of Desnos that appears in Breton’s Nadja), where his
body was limp, reclining, in a liminal state between awakening and slumber.
Other scholars have described this activity as a ‘collective automatic writing
process’.53 To be clear, however, the Surrealists who practised automatic writing
did so by hand, and never in a group so numerous. Breton’s own instructions
for automatic writing in his first Manifeste du surréalisme state that the goal was
to ‘write quickly without a preconceived subject’, and mentioned nothing of
typing.54
Indeed this photograph is neither a ‘waking dream séance’ nor a collective
automatic writing session, but rather a publicity image. Note the eyes of Éluard
and Giorgio de Chirico, who, rather than gazing downwards towards Desnos,
look up and stare directly into Man Ray’s camera, revealing that this is less an
absorbed activity than a staged spectacle. The Surrealists were on display and
they knew it, from Breton’s performed concentration with a monocled eye to de
Chirico’s confrontational mug. The photograph is part of a series of images that
Man Ray took to document the Bureau’s opening.55 In another portrait taken on
the same day, we glimpse fourteen Surrealists lined up against the Bureau’s walls,
a table with papers and books in disarray nestled in the foreground (Figure 10.2).
That disarray was itself performed, as archival notes indicate that Aragon pressed
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 207

the Bureau members to ‘take care’ of the library and to ‘not leave the papers on
the table in disorder’.56 As for the artists themselves, the same group that was
huddled around Simone reappears here in the exact same dress. In each image,
the number of represented Surrealists exceeded those who routinely staffed the
office. Viewers could see Desnos, de Chirico, Philippe Soupault and his wife
Louise – figures who had very little to do with the running of the Bureau and
the journal. But the idea was to have images that could be used to represent
and promote the movement, photographs that recorded the Surrealists in action,
investigative, serious, a formidable (and numerous) group. Along with a third
photograph (now lost), the publicity photographs appeared on the front cover of
the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste. These were the very first images one
encountered from the self-declared revolutionary movement, a variety of artists,
dressed in suits, posing in their office space.
Indeed, what the photograph of the Surrealists grouped around Simone
ultimately publicizes is the latter’s role as a transcriber, as a labourer who
copies or reproduces one form of writing (l’écriture automatique) into another
(document, record, testament). The image shows Simone as the dactylo-copiste,
the typist-copier, attached to her machine, nearly an extension of it. With her
head bowed in dutiful attention, her hands at the base of the typewriter, the
transcription underway, she appears as a replica of the various typists seen across
contemporaneous office trade journals (Figures 10.3 and 10.4). Such a gendered
division of labour, between (feminine) typists and (masculine) administrators,
reflects a deep complicity with interwar office culture.
Delegating the tasks of typing to others, abandoning his Bureau post,
foregoing the material production of the journal, Breton, simply put, was no
longer working. He was supervising. The staff at the Bureau felt the effects of
such management. Vitrac was fired. Morise and others became accustomed to
having their work monitored and critiqued. Aragon eventually complained that
staffing the Bureau was a ‘corvée’, a chore.57 Not work, not duty, but chore, what
the dictionary tells us is an ‘annoying obligation’, one ‘unavoidable and without
interest’.58 This was what Surrealism ‘in life’ had become. It was the same word
that Simone used when she finally decided to quit the Bureau. Several weeks
after the typing frenzy of the suicide questionnaire, on 7 January 1925, Simone
wrote and signed in the office notebook: ‘I protest the procedures [les procédés]
used towards certain female staff members [permanentes] who have come to take
care of certain chores and are treated as instruments. I understand that we do not
keep them up to date with the detailed functioning of the journal and the Bureau
at all.’59 Note how encompassing Simone’s critique is: she protests ‘les procédés’,
208 Historical Modernisms

Figure 10.3 Detail of advertisement for La Machine Comptable Ellis, Mon Bureau
164 (October 1927): page 603. Source gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 10.4 Advertisement for Société des Machines à Écrire MAP, Mon Bureau 139
(September 1925): page 664. Source gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France.
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 209

‘the procedures’, of certain staff members (a word that describes methods, a way
of doing something, a general attitude). She objects to a specifically gendered
condition, writing ‘permanentes’, ‘staff members’, in the feminine plural. She
protests being treated like an instrument, a tool, an extension of a machine. She
disputes the lack of information provided to certain members, and their exclusion
from the overall decision-making processes concerning the journal, the office
and the movement at large. After realizing that the revolutionary concerns of
Surrealism were blinded to her position, that the Bureau itself was founded on
an unequal division of labour, Simone left and never returned. Breton made no
commentary on her departure. Carrying little for the protest that was occurring
within the very walls of 15 rue de Grenelle, he was busy drafting ‘The Last Strike’,
a text in which he called for intellectuals to stop work and show solidarity with
‘our friends, the true workers’.60
The Bureau ended in April 1925, once Breton had grown tired of his
squabbling employees, once he had grown tired of dealing with Naville, claiming
outright that he was ‘annoyed’ by his behaviour.61 Utilizing the authority he had
been refining, Breton moved the journal’s headquarters to his own apartment
and opened the fourth issue of the magazine with the editorial ‘Why I Have
Taken Direction of La Révolution surréaliste’. When he later learned that Naville
was protesting to other members of the group, Breton’s choice of words could
not have been more revealing: ‘Je vais le sacquer à la première occasion,’ ‘I’m
going to fire him at the first opportunity.’62
In the literature on Surrealism, Breton’s ascent has been described in
various terms. He was ‘naturally the head’, due to his ‘charisma’, his ‘particular
magnetism’.63 Breton was said to have a personality that provoked ‘fascination’,
a ‘physical seduction’, a ‘sphere of attraction’.64 He was a sorcerer, a ‘spiritual
compass’, the ‘arbiter of Surrealism’, the ‘arbiter of the entire avant-garde’.65 He
was a ‘pope’, ‘priest’, ‘guru’, ‘teacher’, the recipient of ‘a certain form of faith’.66 In
the more sobering accounts, he was simply the one ‘who had done the most to
shape the movement’.67
Metaphors abound in these narratives, from electromagnetic fields to magic.
The terms I wish to add to this description – planning, organization, command,
coordination, control – are not nearly as poetic, yet not nearly as vague. If Breton
became the leader of Surrealism, it was not because of charisma or faith, but
because he actively espoused management qualities, the very qualities that were
being theorized contemporaneously with his movement.
And if Surrealism was to enter life, as it did, it would not just be found in
the socializing in cafes, the wanderings through the street, the cinema, the flea
210 Historical Modernisms

market, the arcades. Neither elusive pursuit nor romantic ideal, Surrealism
‘in life’ was found in the mire of power relationships surrounding Breton.
Here, depending on one’s place within the group, Surrealism ‘in life’ became
an opportunity for exerting command or it became a type of ‘thankless work’.
Neither marvellous, nor liberating, nor revolutionary, what the Bureau gives us
is an image of artists performing and re-performing the dominant norms that
structured the ‘age of organization’ in France.
The history of Surrealism after the closure of the Bureau is well known.
The group that Breton was now strictly administering would become affiliated
with the Communist Party. Debates would ensue. Novels would be written. Art
would be made. By 1930, Breton made sure to publicly denounce Naville, Vitrac
and Gérard along with the others who should be ‘abandoned silently to their
sad fate’: André Masson, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos, Antonin Artaud,
Jean Carrive, Joseph Delteil.68 Breton declared that Naville had an ‘insatiable
thirst for fame’; he was blinded by a ‘revolutionary allure’.69 Vitrac was ‘a veritable
swine of ideas’.70 Gérard suffered from ‘congenital imbecility’.71 Such lengthy,
acerbic and public denunciations within the Second Manifeste du surréalisme
were merely sanctions of a different sort. With office or without, Surrealism was
now a defined group, a group that one was either permitted to join or was not,
an organization commanded and controlled by Breton. Such a view of Breton as
manager, as supervisor, as bureaucratic leader is not necessarily to discredit his
subsequent political writings, his firm commitment to a pro-Trotskyite, anti-
Stalin, anti-Fascist, anti-nationalist politics that he articulated throughout the
1930s. But it is to remind us that Breton rose to that position – spokesperson of
Surrealism – through the governance debates that marked the life at the Bureau
and the acts of sanctions and firings that ensued.72
The Surrealist Research Bureau – its structure, supervision and organization,
the thematics of work – would continue to haunt some of its members. Naville,
too, joined the Communist Party and became a sociologist of labour, writing
over thirty books on the politics of work.73 Gérard became the secretary of Leon
Trotsky.74 Simone continued her independent spirit and avoided the fate of a
typist. And Breton? Well, Breton continued to manage.

Notes

1 ‘À Tous Échos’, Paris-Soir, 20 June 1924, 2, original emphasis. Unless otherwise

noted, all translations from the French are my own.
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 211

2 La Révolution surréaliste Bulletin de souscription, reproduced in Histoire du

Surréalisme: Documents surréalistes, ed. Maurice Nadeau (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1948), 16.
3 See ‘2009. [Artaud, Antonin]. Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes: Manuscrits
autographes et textes ronéotypés, réunion du 2 avril 1925,’ in André Breton: 42 rue
Fontaine: Tome III: Manuscrits (Paris: CalmelsCohen, 2003), 94.
4 Notable exceptions include Julia Kelly, ‘The Bureau of Surrealist Research’, in
Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris, ed. Therese Lichtenstein (Nashville: Frist
Center for the Visual Arts, with University of California Press, 2009), 79–101; Sven
Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008),
85–104; and Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2021).
5 Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme (first published 1944; Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1964), 61–2.
6 For an engagement of Surrealism and psychoanalytic theory, see, among others,
Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Hal Foster,
Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 225–54; David Lomas, The
Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000); and Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2007).
7 Angeliki Spiropoulou, Proposal for Historical Modernisms Symposium, Institute of
English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 12–13 December
2016.
8 See T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 15, emphasis added.
9 André Breton, ‘Lâchez tout’, in Œuvres complètes: Tome I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet
(Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 262–3.
10 See Paule Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes: Cahier de la permanence:
Octobre 1924—avril 1925 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).
11 See, for example, Gabriel Chavet, Ce que doit savoir l’employé de bureau (Paris:
Gauthier-Villars & Cie., 1921), 149.
12 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 17.
13 For a detailed overview of this debate, see Jeremy Stubbs, ‘Goll versus Breton:
The Battle for Surrealism’, in Yvan Goll—Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts, ed. Eric
Robertson and Robert Vilain (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1997), 69–82.
14 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 17–19.
15 Ibid., 19–21.
16 Jackie Clarke, France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home and Nation from the
1920s to Vichy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 6–8 and passim.
17 Ibid., 14. See also Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the
Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 271–88.
212 Historical Modernisms

The Surrealists modelled La Révolution surréaliste on the design of La Nature. For

coverage of Taylor in the latter publication, see A. Breton, ‘L’Organisation du travail
et le système Taylor’, La Nature, quarante-quatrième année, deuxième semestre,
no. 2246 (14 October 1916): 246–51.
18 See Delphine Gardey, ‘The Standardization of a Technical Practice: Typing
(1883–1930),’ History and Technology 15, no. 4 (1999): 313–43.
19 Henri Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale (Paris: Dunod et Pinat, 1917), 5,
original emphasis.
20 Ibid., 26, 33.
21 Clarke, France in the Age of Organization, 28–34. See also Marjorie A. Beale,
The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 97.
22 Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale, 11.
23 Ibid., 138.
24 Ibid., 31.
25 Ibid., 138, 103, 29.
26 See, among others, Joseph Carlioz, Le Gouvernement des entreprises commerciales
et industrielles (Paris: Dunod, 1921); Joseph Wilbois, Le Chef d’entreprise: sa
fonction et sa personne (Paris: Alcan, 1926); and Jules Billard, Un essai de doctrine, le
fayolisme (Paris: Jouve, 1924).
27 Clarke, France in the Age of Organization, 49.
28 For an overview, see ibid., 51–6.
29 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 26.
30 Ibid., 39.
31 Ibid., 65.
32 Ibid.
33 A series of private letters reveal that Naville and other Surrealists were upset with
Vitrac’s ‘moral attitude’ and the fact that he ‘made these rather terrible scenes’.
Pierre Naville, Letters to Denise Lévy (November 1924), Archives Pierre Naville,
CEDIAS Musée social bibliothèque.
34 Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale, 138, 140.
35 Ibid., 145.
36 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 26.
37 Ibid., 26.
38 Mary Ann Caws, André Breton (New York: Twayne, 1996), 100.
39 Ibid., 25–6.
40 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 36.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 40.
 From the Marvellous to the Managerial 213

44 Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale, 138.

45 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 35, 45.
46 Pierre Naville, Letter to Denise Lévy (7 December 1924), Archives Pierre Naville,
CEDIAS Musée social bibliothèque.
47 Pierre Naville, Letters to Denise Lévy (6 and 7 December 1924), Archives Pierre
Naville, CEDIAS Musée social bibliothèque.
48 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 70–84.
49 Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale, 145.
50 See accounts in Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 67–9.
51 André Breton, ‘Robert Desnos’, in Œuvres complètes: Tome I, 473.
52 Rosalind E. Krauss and Jane Livingston, eds., L’Amour fou: Photography and
Surrealism (Washington DC: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, with Abbeville Press,
1985), 12. See also Kelly, ‘The Bureau of Surrealist Research’, 83; and Rudolf
Kuenzli, ‘Surrealism and Misogyny’, in Surrealism and Women, ed. Mary Ann Caws,
Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 18–19.
Waking Dream Séance is also the official title given by the Man Ray Archives and
Estate.
53 Martine Antle, ‘Breton, Portrait and Anti-Portrait: From the Figural to the Spectral’,
in André Breton Today, ed. Anna Balakian and Rudolf Kuenzli (New York: Willis
Locker & Owens, 1989), 49–50. See also Spieker, The Big Archive, 89.
54 André Breton, ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’, in Œuvres complètes: Tome I, 332.
55 Pierre Naville, Letter to Denise Lévy (November 1924), Archives Pierre Naville,
CEDIAS Musée social bibliothèque.
56 See reproduction of archival notes by Louis Aragon in Gérard Durozoi, History of
the Surrealist Movement, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 64.
57 Ibid.
58 ‘corvée, n. 3’, Le Grand Robert de la langue française, version 4.1 (Paris:
Dictionnaires Le Robert, November 2017), https://grandrobert.lerobert.com/
robert.asp (accessed 12 September 2020).
59 Thévenin, ed., Bureau de recherches surréalistes, 75, emphasis added.
60 André Breton, ‘La Dernière grève’, La Révolution surréaliste 2 (15 January 1925):
1–3.
61 Pierre Naville, Letter to Denise Lévy (30 April 1925), in Archives Pierre Naville,
CEDIAS Musée social bibliothèque.
62 André Breton, Letter to Simone Kahn (20 September 1925), reprinted in André
Breton, Lettres à Simone, ed. Jean-Michel Goutier (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 264.
63 Henri Béhar, André Breton: Le grand indésirable (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1990),
166–7. Nadeau, Histoire du Surréalisme, 55–6.
214 Historical Modernisms

64 Julien Gracq, André Breton: Quelques aspects de l’écrivain (first published 1948,
Paris: José Corti, 1977), 56, 52, 54. Sarane Alexandrian, André Breton par lui-même
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 25.
65 Marguerite Bonnet, ‘Avant-propos’, in Les Critiques de notre temps et Breton, ed.
Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1974), 17. Clifford Browder, André
Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism (Geneva: Librairie Drosz, 1967). Alexandrian, André
Breton par lui-même, 27.
66 Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (Boston: Black
Widow Press, 2005), 191–2. Gracq, André Breton, 51, original emphasis.
67 Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 191.
68 André Breton, ‘Second manifeste du surréalisme’, in Œuvres complètes: Tome I, 786.
69 Ibid., 798–9.
70 Ibid., 789.
71 Ibid., 788–9.
72 I am grateful to Jean-Michel Rabaté for the prompt to think further about Breton’s
politics in the 1930s.
73 For more on Naville’s political life, see Françoise Blum, with Sylvie Le Dantec, eds.,
Les vies de Pierre Naville (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion,
2007).
74 See Gérard’s account of this in his memoirs, Gérard Rosenthal, L’Avocat de Trotsky
(Paris: Robert Laffront, 1975).
 11

History and active thought: The Belgrade

surrealist circle’s transforming praxis
Sanja Bahun

Activating thought

‘Thought is a product of matter … Yet, thought, albeit consequential to matter,

is never a passive product, a mere reflection of matter; rather, it possesses an
active role … it is working, operative, capable of transforming the material
world, which, in turn, may transform thought itself … and on ad libitum.’1 So
begins an ambitious philosophical treatise entitled Outline for a Phenomenology
of the Irrational (Nacrt za jednu fenomenologiju iracionalnog), written by
Koča Popović and Marko Ristić, two key members of the Belgrade Surrealist
Circle (and recent philosophy graduates), published by Surrealist Publishing in
Belgrade in 1931. A unique text in the history of global surrealisms, Outline
for a Phenomenology of the Irrational tiptoes the discursive fields of Aristotle,
Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Freud and Einstein over more than hundred pages to
posit an approach to matter, history and art-making through the category of
the irrational. The idea of a perpetually transformative, mutually corrective
interaction of thought and matter is key to Popović and Ristić’s argumentation in
this book. One such interaction dynamizes both thought and the material world
from within, Popović and Ristić argue, so that they can only appear to us as
one joint dialectical process; in turn, its processual and dynamic nature endows
thought-assumed-as-matter with the capacity to be subversive, revolutionary
and to transform history. Yet, to release this potential one must challenge
another natural propensity of thought, namely, its tendency to reify itself into
abstractions, categories like spirit, freedom, history, unconscious – a step which,
Ristić and Popović argue, even the likes of Freud and Hegel have failed to take. In
order to avoid the petrification of thought into a passive object (an abstraction),
216 Historical Modernisms

then, we should exploit the inherent potential of thought for its own negation
and self-critique, resident in the vast repositories of the unconscious. It is in
eliciting and activating this negational background of thought and overriding the
static positivism of the rational mode of thinking that the crucial achievement of
surrealism as an enunciative mode lies. Surrealist dialectic negation, the authors
argue, naturally engenders aesthetic modes and strategies of representation
that are most suitable for continual rebellion and self-critique: identifying and
opposing the dictates of petrified thought in each expressive act, privileging
communal and participatory modes of thinking and performing over Western
individualism, and using transposition, irony, simulation. The category of the
irrational, always in dialectic tension with the rational, stands at the centre of
this aesthetic operation in history: it is a hermeneutic and psychological point
in which the world of material phenomena and the unconscious coalesce, each
serving as an incessant corrective to the other.
Nibbling on the morsels of material history of the locale which engendered
and conditioned these thoughts on the irrational, and engaging surrealist
activities of different types, this essay zooms in on the Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s
efforts to dynamize the interaction between historical matter, thought and its
representation and to use it for strategic political purposes. Taking as my case
study one of the most influential art-practices in the liminal (and, history will
prove, transient) zone of Yugoslavia will enable me to pose questions that are
more capacious: How does material history turn itself into continuously active
forms/represented objects? What implications may the Belgrade surrealists’
mandate for active thought have for our understanding of modernism and
history? And what mode of interpretation befits this vision of historically-
politically engaged art?

Activating history

There have been few better vantage points for appreciating that history is not
static than the region of Yugoslavia in the early twentieth century. Politically
and cognitively located at the intersection of two demising empires (Austro-
Hungarian and Ottoman), and between the demands of an imported notion of
nation-state and the indigenous styles of political action, the region was a charged
locus of political contests, cultural interpellations and dissenting practices. The
legacy of interacting empires and human motions between and against those
empires created intense awareness of the region’s inter-positionality and the
 History and Active Thought 217

latter shaped the regional conceptualizations of history and the manoeuvres and
investments of artists that aspired to convey them. Founded in 1918, Yugoslavia
constituted the first union of the South Slavs, peoples living in the territories that
gained independence from colonial rule in a series of processes following the
mid-nineteenth-century liberation wars. The very foundation of the country was
contingent upon a historical incident that in itself came to epitomize global inter-
imperial fissures.2 On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, an impressionable youth
whose farmer-father had participated in the Herzegovina Uprising against the
Ottomans in 1875–7 and later supplemented his meagre income by transporting
illegal migrants across the border between the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian
Empires, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Latin
Bridge in Sarajevo. The event sparked the First World War, the outcome of which
(among many other things) was the political possibility for a sovereign state of
the South Slavs. The new state, initially named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes, operated as constitutional monarchy from 1918 to 1929, then, renamed
the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (the land of South Slavs), as absolute monarchy/
dictatorship from 1929 to 1934 (the period of the most intense activity of the
Belgrade Surrealist Circle), and as shaky constitutional monarchy, increasingly
economically and politically dependent on the Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945.
Caught between the desire for independence and the legacy of imperial claims,
and between the modernizing aspirations and an anti-modernizing political
set-up, it was a highly repressive state, with a notorious impressment law and
swiftly developing penitentiary system for the dissenting. In the cultural sphere,
the Turks, French, Germans, Italians and Russians had battled for hegemony in
the region for nearly a century; in one significant case of strategic aid, France
provided shelter and schooling to more than 3,500 Serbian children in France
during the First World War, including almost all future members of the Belgrade
Surrealist Circle. These cultural interpellations only intensified as the new,
strategically positioned, country came into being, but they were now stratified,
their complex operation reflecting global political reconstellations. For one, the
Soviet influence, while officially denounced, grew steadily among the members
of undercover resistance organizations; and these counted in their ranks many
members and associates of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle.
In 1922, the same year when the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes
was officially ratified and internationally recognized at the Conference of
Ambassadors in Paris (coincidentally, also known as the year of modernist
miracles), young Marko Ristić published his first poetry, started international
correspondence, and took up the editorship of Ways, a Belgrade-based little
218 Historical Modernisms

magazine dedicated to contemporary literature. Over the course of following

year, Ristić transformed the journal into a voice of international proto-
surrealism and started conversations and text and gift exchanges with André
Breton. In the years to follow, Ristić coordinated Yugoslav surrealists through
a period of individual and collective art practices and publications (1922–9)
and the operation of the Circle as a self-declared public organization (1929–33),
and he served as a coalescing point for surrealist practices after the dissipation/
banning of the Circle (post-1934). Hundreds of preserved visual artefacts, more
than twenty books of poetry, prose and theory, several manifestoes, fanzines,
magazines and bilingual journals, and one group exhibition/conceptual
presentation came out of these endeavours. But the Circle’s long-term legacy
is the unique endurance, even exultation, of modernist art and development of
neo-avant-gardes in post–Second World War, socialist Yugoslavia. I have traced
this history in more detail elsewhere.3 Here it is important to highlight only that,
while the Belgrade collective invested their energy in recognizable surrealist
concerns such as the nature of poetic creation, madness, and the functioning
of dreams, they also placed particular emphasis on the issues of artistic and
social responsibility and the role of artist in a participation-oriented society.
Not only anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment but also actively committed
to a proletarian revolution, the Belgrade surrealists understood their artistic
enterprise as a subversive act, ‘boundless, unselfish, and moral’,4 in the face of
which the contemporaneous French surrealist activities – even at their most
radical – were somewhat naïve and/or purely rhetorical. The Belgrade surrealists
viewed the bourgeois society in monarchical Yugoslavia as incompetent, myopic
and repressive in its racing capitalism and displaced nationalism. In turn, the
Yugoslav monarchical state authorities perceived the Circle as rather a dangerous
political party, at times even a terrorist organization, than an artistic grouping.
The group itself dissipated upon the arrest and detention without trial of several
key members in December 1932 – an incident reported in an emotionally
charged article by René Crevel in Le surréalisme au service de la révolution in May
1933; Crevel astutely likens the terror of the Yugoslav pro-fascistic government
to the contemporaneous rise of Nazism in Europe.5
This history suggests that site-specific convergences between material history
and intellectual history and the local meanings that art production acquires in
each setting matter greatly when approaching global movements like surrealism.
The artwork that the Belgrade Surrealist Circle produced must be understood
as ‘emplaced’ in the historic-political context of a newly independent, oppressive
state; inter-imperial position of the region; violent history of colonial rule;
 History and Active Thought 219

both appropriation and wariness of foreign cultural influence; and cohort-

specificities such as their commitment to the surrealist blend of Marxism and
psychoanalysis, engagement with revolutionary organizations, multilingualism
and higher-level education in disciplines of philosophy and law.6 It is out of this
geo-cognitively hybrid terrain that the Belgrade surrealists’ art emerged as a
site-specific aesthetic ethnography that insists on an understanding of thought,
representation and history itself as dynamic, unfinished and continuously
embroiled in dialectical self-critique.

Interactive artwork, interactive history

The members of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle were mostly the merchant class
youth, many of them of Jewish or Tsintsar descent, educated in France or
Switzerland, and most of them living in the Belgrade neighbourhood of Dorćol
and surrounding zones. Spreading around the crossroads of four major trade
routes (‘dört yol’ means ‘four roads’ or ‘crossroads’ in Turkish), leading to,
respectively, Vienna, Widdin, Istanbul and Dubrovnik, Dorćol fronts the Danube
river which was for centuries the border between the Ottoman and Austro-
Hungarian empires. Sited on this marker of division, the neighbourhood also
positioned itself as defying the border, and, through all the legitimate and illicit
commerce of goods and people that took place there, blurring the physical and
cultural boundaries between the imperial zones; a hub for the placeless, homeless
and transient. By the early twentieth century, the area had become an eclectic
architectural composite befitting the fractured histories of peoples inhabiting it –
Serbs, Turks, Jews, Armenians, Aromanians, Roma, Greeks, Germans; within a
square mile one could find a synagogue, a mosque, an Orthodox Christian and
a Catholic church. The early-twentieth-century architectural revamping of this
terrain and, in particular, intense building of monuments in service of nation-
building and bourgeois civil culture promotion provoked irritation among
the Belgrade surrealists. While French surrealists found evocative potential in
monuments in Paris, whose scriptural function seems to be to deaden the past
and thus, paradoxically, liberate the present, the members of the Belgrade Circle
found such potential in dilapidated walls, almost deprived of any outward signs
of historical specificity – except that it is precisely their dilapidated, forcefully
erased condition that testifies to the workings of history.
One such wall fronts a piece of conceptual engagement art called Facing a
Wall: A Simulation of the Paranoiac Delirium of Interpretation. Survey, authored/
220 Historical Modernisms

signed by Belgrade surrealists M(arko) R(istić), V(ane) B(or), Ž(ivanović) N(oe),

M(ilan) D(edinac), D(ušan) M(atić) and R(astko) P(etrović). The collective took
a frontal-view close-up photo of a dilapidated Dorćol wall and then asked its
members to ‘simulate delirium’ (or simply freely associate) and develop their
own artistic responses to the photograph – autobiographical, intertextual,
abstract, affective – in the form of six interventions. The interventions were
subsequently arranged around the incentive-photo, reproduced on two pages
in the third issue of the Belgrade surrealist journal Nadrealizam danas i ovde
(Surrealism Today and Here, 1932), and accompanied by Ristić’s article ‘Facing
a Wall – An Explanation of the Eponymous Illustration Page’ (‘Pred jednim
zidom – objašnjenje istoimene strane ilustracija’). Ristić explains that the four
phases/facets of the artwork – photographing of the wall, free-associating on
the photograph, materialization of the idea (interventions), and reflection about
the work (that is, the article itself) – aim to elicit the traces of the unconscious
and to insert and activate these in the public sphere.7 One may remember here
both Salvador Dalí’s 1930 essay ‘The Stinking Ass’ [‘L’âne pourri’, 1930] and
Breton and Paul Éluard’s The Immaculate Conception [L’Immaculée conception,
1930], but the immediate context for this installation is Ristić and Popović’s 1931
Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational. As Outline defines it, ‘simulation’
is a volitional, historically engaged, phenomenological activity which purports
to awaken the latent content through an external, conscious impetus like a
material phenomenon or an image thereof. Its result is a simulacrum which
dynamizes the image/received matter and activates thought. Far from being a
product of a solitary simulation of paranoid state, simulation emerges through
the collaborative ‘paranoiac’ activity of the producer of the work of art and its
interpreter. Being phenomenological and collaborative, such simulacra are also
markedly historical, Ristić and Popović insist: they articulate the dialectical
struggle between activated thought/matter and the unthought/not-yet-matter, a
struggle that governs and shapes the historical subject-in-becoming.8
A good example of such operation in history is Vane Bor’s 1935 pair of
photographs of a semi-deserted Dorćol underpass, Milica S. Lazović as a
Shadow, or Two Minutes before Crime (Milica S. Lazović kao senka ili dva minuta
pre zločina) and One Minute before Murder (Jedan minut pre ubistva). Capturing
the perspective of someone looking down at a female (Figure 11.1) and a
female and a male (Figure 11.2) figures in the white roadway below, this series
of photographs was probably taken during a random walk but was carefully
staged as a pair of film-frames showing a cobble-stone road on one side and the
other side of a bridge. The road is demarcated by tall cement walls, creating two
 History and Active Thought 221

Figure 11.1 Vane Bor (Stevan Figure 11.2 Vane Bor (Stevan
Živadinović), Milica S. Lazović as a Živadinović), One Minute Before
Shadow, or Two Minutes Before Crime, Murder, 1935, vintage photograph,
1935, vintage photograph, 90 × 60 mm, 87 × 62 mm, Inv. No. M111. Courtesy
Inv. No. M112. Courtesy of the Museum of the Museum of Contemporary Art,
of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Belgrade.

main compositional lines that converge towards the horizon of each image. The
two horizons in Bor’s photographs embody the contrasts that characterized 1930s
Belgrade: in the Dubrovačka street-facing photograph (Milica S. Lazović … ),
the horizon is a dense mixture of heterogeneous abodes – ground-level Turkish-
style houses, two-floor baroque edifices, and, towards Upper Dorćol, modern
buildings, all bearing witness to architectural and historical transformations of
the city; in the photograph facing the Danube river-bank (One Minute before
Murder), the horizon is ominously consumed by the unpopulated river bank and
a recently constructed canal that would allow cargo ships to bring coal for the
new power plant ‘Power and Light’ in the Lower Dorćol quay. The titular crime
is oddly absent in Bor’s photographs, but it looms in the surprising emptiness
of urban space and the interplay of geometrical lines and shapes, darkness and
light. An in situ Hellenistic necropolis with an architrave ‘gate’ to Hades, a temple
dedicated to Greek goddess Hecate was dug up close to the location in 1935, and
Bor must have been aware of this discovery. Furthermore, these photographs
222 Historical Modernisms

remind one of Eugène Atget’s snapshots of deserted Parisian streets, which

Camille Recht and Walter Benjamin, respectively, linked to the scenes of crime.
Unlike Atget’s photographs, however, Bor’s series foregrounds the human and
the (possible) violation of the human, and it is oriented towards interaction. In
Milica S. Lazović …, the slanted-vertical occlusion that tantalizingly diminishes
the view draws the viewer into an uncomfortable hermeneutic effort: the
blurred bordure signals the mythic operation of bridge as passage to death but
the uncanny close-up also suggests that the viewer is somehow implicated in
this passage. On her way to the river (of death?) in One Minute before Murder,
then, the girl has suddenly turned back; she looks away with a half-smile, as
if interacting with someone under or on the other side of the bridge, while a
passer-by is approaching her, hands in his pockets, unnoticed yet. Will someone
warn her? And against what? Where is the threat situated, exactly? The careful
spatial arrangement of the actants in Bor’s artwork positions the viewer as not
only a witness of a crime, but also, hypothetically, its perpetrator; or a rescuer.
While mythic in tenor, Bor’s series also indexes some events in the region’s
recent history. In April 1934, less than a year before these photographs were
taken, the workers constructing a twin-underpass in the immediate vicinity
unearthed the skeletons of the soldiers who had unsuccessfully defended Belgrade
against the Central Powers in a decisive First World War battle; on 1 May 1934
Yugoslavia signed a major trade treaty with Nazi Germany, whereupon German
Foreign Minister Hermann Göring became a frequent guest in Belgrade;9 and,
on 9 October 1934 King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated, along with
the French Foreign Minister, Louis Bartou, in Marseilles, France. Taken at a cusp
historical moment, Bor’s photographs foreground the claustrophobic enclosure
of horizon-paths between two tall, bare walls, and the human’s entanglement in
crime. There is more than an inkling that we, too, are responsible for this unfolding
of history, or, at least, the narrative of Bor’s photographs. The cinematicity of
the series forces the viewer to become a co-creator of this film, to supplant an
edit between the two film-frames, and, importantly, imagine the dénouement
of the action. Like installation Facing a Wall, then, Bor’s photographs rely for
their operation on an extraordinarily active relationship between the text, its
producer(s) and its recipient(s), and they materialize the interaction between the
matter, thought/affect, and articulation that Popović and Ristić keenly examined
in Outline. This is a lesson for the interpreters of these artworks, then: as much
as the exterior impetus does not deprive the artefacts in question of the quality
of being a ‘representation’ of the unconscious flow (and thus also participants
in an international surrealist conversation), so the intention to elicit the interior
 History and Active Thought 223

affective content that binds objects and observing subjects does not take away
from the artefact the quality of being a representation of a particular physical
infrastructure of Belgrade, metonymically linked to the deep and contemporary
history of the area.

Dialectic self-critique and unfinalizable work of art

The active relationship between the text, its producer and its recipient, and
the idea of a perpetually transformative interaction of thought and matter put
forward in Outline and articulated in Facing a Wall and Bor’s photographs had
already been conceptualized and specifically linked to the mode of self-critique
in an earlier text, Marko Ristić’s 1928 novel entitled Without Measure. The novel,
written from 1926 to 1928 in Paris and Belgrade, is a fragmentary piece of prose
that runs like a novel but simultaneously undermines its own generic status.
The quasi-autobiographical narrator/detective follows the wanderings of a man
named Roman (‘roman’ means the ‘novel’ in both Serbo-Croatian and French),
strolling in and out of the supposed reality, into a hyper-reality, the collective
unconscious, and from history into the mythic supra-history, and back into
the current political and cultural debates. The fragmentary storyline follows
the negotiation of the protagonist’s passage through alternating experiences
of fascination, political resentment and radicalization, all punctuated by the
oblique references to specific sites in Belgrade, Paris, Vrnjačka banja and
several seashore locations. While the narrative tension rises and murders,
dream-murders and executions accrue, the entities of the narrator and the
protagonist become progressively indistinguishable from each other until they
finally transform into a writer penning a polemic response to Ivan Nevistić, a
Yugoslav scholar who had previously published a critical article on the Belgrade
surrealists.
Insofar as the temporal and spatial coordinates of the protagonist’s actions
and utterances and his bodily boundaries are blurred, or hard to ‘measure’,
focalization is shifting (or incalculable), and the subject (narrator)-object
(protagonist) relation is indeterminate (impossible to measure), Ristić’s Without
Measure might seem comparable to Breton’s Nadja, written at the same time
and during the period of intense interaction between the two writers. Yet, Ristić
presents the reader with a markedly different text. He opts for a male protagonist
in interaction with an assumedly male narrator, a choice that helps him avoid
the objectivization of the female and the narrative distraction of love affair and
224 Historical Modernisms

foreground, instead, the textual line of maladjustment, resentment and social

revolt. The narrator-writer, involved in the story yet strategically distanced and
psychologically undecided, continuously probes the quality and integrity of their
own writing and is more comparable to the later developments of the role in
Nouveau Roman (e.g. Alain Robbe-Grillet) than to the emphatically subjective
narrator of a surrealist novel. The protagonist operates as, simultaneously, the
subject of the work of art, the activity of its production, the artwork itself and
its formal, generic and contextual interpretation, and is, in this respect, just
like the narrator, rather a metatextual trace than an iconographically embodied
being. Meanwhile, the metapoetic and intertextual games proliferate. Genres
(a detective chronicle, a Gothic novel, a symbolist play a manifesto, a film
script, a fairy tale, a scholarly article), narrative modes, tonalities of address
and focalization all constantly shift in the text. To make the matters even more
complicated, the novel consists of not only the loose plot outlined above, but
also its own paratext and visuals, accrued across the three editions of the text
(1928, 1962, 1986): the 1928 acknowledgements, motto and footnotes; the 1962
author’s prologue and endnotes; the 1928 kabalistic pictographs and illustration
from the first edition of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
(Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, 1870), the 1962
reproduction of Max Ernst’s ‘Owl (A Bird in a Cage)’ (owned by Ristić since
1927), the 1986 reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s 1914 Piazza d’Italia and
others. As contextualized by the chatty narrator in one of his copious discursive
footnotes, this interaction of textual modes and formats and the exultation of the
book’s unfinizability is both the condition for rejuvenating the genre of the novel
and a performance of a specific historical mandate: the novel should serve as ‘a
silent witness’ to history.10
While the surrealist revolt tends to be oriented by a notion of freedom that
is overarching but also abstract, the target and historical tenor of Ristić’s novel
are specific. It was with dismay that, in 1927, Ristić wrote from Paris to his
Belgrade friends about the sudden lapse in communication between the two
surrealist circles, a lack of understanding in both political and aesthetic matters.
Yugoslav surrealist Milan Dedinac wrote back to Ristić: ‘I cannot advize you to
pass over certain differences … Our position is immeasurably more absurd and
more brutal than theirs in France … For, just think what freedom means in our
country … and what in theirs (not to mention our impressment law!).’11 In the
novel written in this context, then, the search for unconditional freedom segues
seamlessly in a dialectical challenge to the very notion of freedom as enshrined
in, and appropriated by the philosophical discourse and moves into the pursuit
 History and Active Thought 225

of a specific freedom (revolution). The last is addressed through the metonymic

extension of leitmotifs such as revolver and ‘atentat’ (‘assassination’), wherein
the ‘atentat’ of ‘a certain artistic convention’ becomes, across three editions,
inextricably linked to the past, present and future history of the region and
beyond: to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914; that of five Croatian
MPs in the Parliament in 1928; that of King Alexander in 1934; and subsequent
history of global political assassinations, especially those related to liberation
struggles, for example, that of Patrice Lumumba. This expansion is not accidental.
Already in the first edition of the novel Ristić suggests that the South Slavs’
yearning for freedom is intensified by another kind of captivity, an incarceration
in regional and global imperial inscriptions, which, parenthetically, the French
group might have also unwittingly deployed. These are meticulously related in
Without Measure: ‘East, West, Catholicism, Mediterranean Culture, Europe in
Danger, Balkan Man, Racial Expression, the Slavic Mission, Reslavicization –
what are all those games and toys to me?’ queries Ristić’s narrator, ‘and what is
love for homeland, nurturing beauty, belief in good, and other abstractions?’12 As
an impassionate and lengthy footnote to the text at this point further explicates,
it is the concept and discourse of ‘racial art’, whose rise and global spread we can
date to 1925–30, that bother Ristić most: he deems it a doubly limited, superficial
way to refer to identity through entity, entrapping us, sometimes unawares, in
an imperial construction. And ‘imperialism itself, including imperialism of the
spirit’, the footnote-voice argues, is ‘the most facile form of dogmatism’ (233). In
the face of an abstract, or mediated notion of freedom, the narrator of Ristić’s
text muses, the only ‘position which remains fruitful for the spirit’, is ‘a MORAL
and REAL attitude […]: a working, active rejection of a certain order which has
proven itself as dead and artificially maintained’, that is, ‘a bloody dialectic’. For,
‘passive resistance is insufficient’ (233–34).
How, in this context, one pursues freedom relevant to one’s integrity – one
that would be beyond all abstraction and yet ‘immanent to … our existence’ –
and makes art revolutionary and resistant to the imposition of an identity in
the name of (sometimes myopic) idealism, Ristić’s narrator ponders.13 Rejecting
imposed measures and demarcations, Without Measure itself is the answer to this
question. The novel as a whole may be understood as a performative of Hegelian
philosophy, compulsively explored by Ristić, a PhD student of Philosophy at
Sorbonne, in the period 1922–7.14 This ambition is synopsized in one strategic
peripheral character, who describes his name, Jan, as being derived from ‘Ja-
Ne’, meaning ‘I-Not I’ in Serbo-Croatian, and his existence as being shaped by
dialectical tension. The same kind of dialectic, we infer, determines the very
226 Historical Modernisms

status as an anti-novel: ‘it is from the interiority of the book that its very negation
erupts’, the narrator reiterates (204). In line with this dialectical procedure, the
first-person narration also stages a pamphlet against its own writer, framed
as ‘I against itself ’ (‘This [text] is a pamphlet against myself, perpetuated for
years, and in vain’, 234) and enacts one of the governing principles of the
Belgrade surrealist project: permanent self-critique. And the text rallies ‘against
the reader’, that is, against the passive reader habituated into the ‘logical’ or
‘consequential’ progression of narrative and history. It is not only the bourgeois
literature of the yesteryear and the obsolete political system that are targeted
here. This proclamation should be understood, I suggest, as a challenge to, or a
call for, a more active readerly entity, at once a co-creator and an interpreter of
the novel, thus an entity which would assist in consistently activating thought.
Chapter entitled ‘Against the reader’ opens with the assertion that the book that
we are reading does not end or stop with its last page. The narrator entreats
the reader to abandon ‘belting’ and ‘belt measure-taking’ (both implied in
‘kaišarenje’) and to continue reading even after the last word in the novel, to
turn back the pages and start from the beginning or to branch out down any side
routes that the book suggests (64). The textual monster’s existence and shape,
indeed its very coming into being, are thus conditional upon our commitment
to read against the grain. The two postulates articulated by Facing a Wall and
Bor’s photographs thus shape Ristić’s novel, too. The figurative space we traverse
embodies the space and time of a specific historical subject-in-becoming, but
this embodiment is itself subject to a condition: Roman – the protagonist and
the novel itself – is figuratively constituted only through the collaboration of the
producer and recipient/interpreter of the work of art.
Unsurprisingly, then, Without Measure also renounces its prerogatives
as a text: rather, it describes itself as an ‘activity’, or ‘being active’ [‘aktivitet’]’
(47), thus a processual entity, a dynamism at the heart of the object. The
term ‘aktivitet’ has limited currency in colloquial Serbo-Croatian; what Ristić
doubtlessly has in mind here is the specific way in which the term was used
by Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die
Geschichte der Philosophie). Responding to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
Hegel describes the circumstances governing the abrogation of passivity in
the face of thought’s propensity for reification. Because thought reifies its
own content as being (a certain subject-matter, an object, Gegenstand), Hegel
reasons, it must be receptive. Dialectically understood, then, thought-assumed-
as-matter must be simultaneously an instance of active thinking, wherein ‘the
object [subject-matter] reverses into activity’ (‘der Gegenstand schlägt um in
 History and Active Thought 227

Aktivität’; 162).15 In Ristić’s reworking of this insight, an endless, committed

readerly pursuit would continuously galvanize the inner capacity of thought to
dynamize itself into activity and thus, in turn, co-create the activity that is the
text; this dialectic activity, Ristić believes, is deeply political. Here the producer
and the user of art become one, enjoined in the ‘aktivitet’ of endlessly co-creating
and co-witnessing history, what, in a 1969 interview, Ristić (after Marx) called
‘reversing, or transforming praxis’ (‘umwälzende Praxis’). In 1984, at the end of
his life and after two published editions of the novel, Marko Ristić still treated
Without Measure as a work in progress.

The (political) futures of Surrealism

Ristić’s Without Measure proposes a bold vision of artwork as reliant on the

(hope of) continuous writing-reading-reworking of artwork and history, thence
appreciated and cognizable only in the context of an expansive temporality that
multilaterally connects the past, the present and the future. While attentive
to unequally paces and divergences in international modernisms, our pursuit
of a more global, more multi-levelled, and more multi-sectoral account of
modernism still lacks flexible temporal thinking, one that would be more
profoundly attuned to the diverse handling of time – and thus also modernity –
in each locale and under each circumstances. The never-ending nature of
creating art and history that Ristić identifies points us in the direction of just
such flexible historical thinking. It is with Ristić’s mandate to capture the past
but also the futurity of modernist artefacts in mind that I sketch here the future
of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s historically charged practices. These ‘future
perfect’ snapshots of the figures and spaces we have engaged so far host further
lessons for scholars of global modernisms.
Image 1: In 1937 Koča Popović joined a contingent of Yugoslav volunteers
(brigadistas yugoslavos) in Spain, fighting besides the Republican Army in the
Spanish Civil War until 1939. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he
became a leading figure in the partisan movement, and the Commander of
the First Proletarian Division of the Yugoslav Partisans. After the war, Popović
became the Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav People’s Army, then the
Minister of Foreign Affairs – a position which he held for more than ten years –
and then the Vice-President of Yugoslavia. As the Yugoslav Minister of Foreign
Affairs (1953–65), Popović was instrumental in establishing the first alliance of
a European country with the postcolonial South. Among Popović’s diplomatic
228 Historical Modernisms

accomplishments, one can single out the organization of the legendary 1954–5
long boat trip for the Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, during which Tito visited
one by one newly independent states in Asia and Africa, forging not only political
and cultural links but also affective rapports between global communities (Tito,
for one, was the first European head of state to visit independent India, and the
Yugoslav Declaration was the first to bring the demands of the Algerian National
Liberation Front to the United Nations); orchestration of the 1956 meeting of
Yugoslav president, Indian Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser
at the islands of Brijuni (Yugoslavia), widely seen as the inaugural step in the
creation of the non-aligned movement; and the organization of the First Summit
of Non-aligned Movement itself.
Image 2: In 1938 Marko Ristić published his long surrealist poem
‘Turpituda/e: A Paranoiac-Didactic Rhapsody’ (‘Turpituda: paranojačko-
didaktička rapsodija’), together with surrealist-expressionist artwork by Krsto
Hegedušić, as an intermedial work entitled Turpituda/e [Turpituda]. The
poem ends with the image of ‘wolves sharpening their teeth’ at the prospect of
‘a manic fete’ where the concrete and iron of financial watchtowers will spin,
the earth will slide down a tangent, seas will fume, and lava will pour out of
history. This prophetic imagery of war and revolution, and the visual–verbal
blend of daydreaming and eroticism, did not please the authorities: the book
was identified as incendiary and almost the entirety of the edition of 500 copies
was confiscated and destroyed, under the Kingdom of Yugoslavia Law on the
Protection of State Public Security and Order. Fewer than ten copies of the
original book have survived, including the author’s own copy. After the Second
World War, Ristić became socialist Yugoslavia’s first ambassador to France,
then served as the Head of the influential Special Committee for International
Cultural Exchange, and the President of the Yugoslav Permanent Delegation to
UNESCO since 1952, where he worked enthusiastically on the promotion and
implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He was a member
of SEC (Société Européenne de Culture), a prominent cultural pan-organization
set up in response to the partitioning of Europe, whose first East-West Dialogue
conference in Venice in 1956 he attended alongside some key figures of mid-
century international modernism – philosophers like Marice Merleau-Ponty
and Jean-Paul Sartre; writers like Stephen Spender, Giuseppe Ungaretti and
Jarosław Iwasziewicz; and art historians like Mikhail Alpatov. He wrote inspiring
articles in French and Serbo-Croatian on the necessity of cultural exchanges and
dignity and service of translator,16 and was one of the key figures credited for the
persistence of modernism in Yugoslav literatures and arts.
 History and Active Thought 229

Image 3: It was under the same bridge that Vane Bor memorialized in his
photographs that a large group of Jews and Roma from Dorćol passed in 1941,
on their way to the train station or Banjica concentration camp, herded into their
tragic future by German and Belgrade police. One of those few who escaped
this fate was a Sephardic Jew named Oskar Davičo, an acclaimed surrealist poet
and one of the foremost members of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle. Davičo was
arrested in Italian-occupied Split, and then interned in the region of Parma
(Italy), wherefrom he escaped just before German occupation in 1943 and
joined the partisan movement. In 1945 he was the Yugoslav court reporter
at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. A few years later he re-performed some
of the key principles of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle in his series of poems/
book-length poem Human’s Human (Čovekov čovek, 1953): permanent self-
critique (including the critique of ideology for which one oneself has fought),
revolutionary humanism and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of freedom –
a freedom whose content always transforms in interaction between thought and
matter. ‘I believe in the inventiveness of the human,/who can think freedom to
death,’ he writes in ‘Facts’, the central poem in the book. Davičo visited African
countries one by one as they gained independence in the late 1950s and early
1960s and subsequently published a travelogue entitled Black on White (1962),
in which he self-consciously rejects the Orientalizing gaze and highlights his
own inadequate knowledge, whilst suggesting a transhemispheric solidarity
of the formerly ‘downtrodden’ and a commonality that, he believes, effectively
circumvents Western prejudices and racialized inscriptions. With its sustained
critique of racism and its poignant reflections on the author’s own ‘whiteness’
which he now wishes to denounce, Davičo’s book also targets the tone of cultural
superiority that tainted some of the earlier Yugoslav travelogues of the post-war
period.17
Image 4: The First Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of
Non-Aligned Countries (later known as the Non-aligned Movement [NAM])
was held in Belgrade from 1 to 6 September 1961.18 As a socialist country which
had won independence through a liberation war and, since 1948, had been
precariously but inventively navigating the Cold War international relations,
Yugoslavia found natural allies in recently independent Asian, African and
Central and South American states. Already in Outline, Popović and Ristić were
arguing for the inevitable demise of Western individualism and the rise of an
ethics and aesthetics of participation modelled on ‘the communitarian practices
of peoples and native communities from the Global South’ and building of
multilateral and multi-plane bridges between communities that challenge the
230 Historical Modernisms

state-and-border-based thinking about human habitats.19 Twenty years later, in

their positions as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Head of Foreign Cultural
Exchange, respectively, Popović and Ristić were able to put these thoughts in
practice. A hidden punctum of modernism and history emerges here: while the
non-aligned movement was a result of increasing cooperation and brainstorming
of Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno of Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, it
was philosophically and politically prepared and organized by the once-surrealist
Popović and vitally aided by diplomatic and cultural exchange efforts of other
members of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle, including Ristić, Davičo, Dedinac
and Matić. From the movement’s foundational documents onwards, the NAM
named and condemned cultural imperialism, critiqued the developmentalist
and linear understanding of history, and promoted what Tito called a ‘resolute
struggle for decolonization in the field of culture’.20
The movement sparked vibrant cultural exchanges. According to some
records, more than 40,000 students from the non-aligned countries studied in
Yugoslavia between 1961 and 1991, often supported by Yugoslav scholarships;
cultural councils were established at quick pace; architecture and urban projects
exchanges proliferated; non-Western and minor languages were included
in Yugoslav higher education curriculum; multilateral literary translations
abounded and unique postcolonial museums like the Museum of African
Art (Belgrade, 1977) and the Josip Broz Tito Art Gallery of the Non-aligned
Countries in Titograd (Titograd, 1981), which acquired art solely through
donations and gifts, were established, serving as models of a new type of cross-
cultural cooperation and insight.21 Post-war international surrealist art and
literature thrived and developed along South–South axis in these exchanges.
Geo-historically located in Europe and involved in surrealism from the very
beginning, Yugoslavia was nevertheless devoid of any imperial historical
baggage and without statehood precedence. It was an openly anti-colonial
cultural space with committed resources for cultural aid and exchange, and with
repeatedly professed aspiration to enable rather than occlude the indigenous
types and means of expression and local redefinitions of ‘West-originating’
artistic movements like surrealism. Positioned as such, for global surrealists,
Yugoslavia served as a safe conduit, preferred partner, and an exemplary fringe
redefiner/displacer of the cultural material from a ‘centre’.22 For Yugoslav artists
and writers, encounters with their non-aligned peers were often an opportunity
to engage in self-critique and negotiate their own racial positionality as the
white or the white subaltern. Scattered across different countries with histories
of disruption (Yugoslavia itself being a prime example here), the archival traces
 History and Active Thought 231

of these encounters are unfortunately scant, random, disorganized. We do have

testimonies, however, that Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Agostinho Neto and
many other global South writers with surrealist strand in their poetic portfolio
spent time in Yugoslavia;23 that artists, both heirs and developers of indigenous
surrealist practices, interacted and even jointly presented at international art
biennales like the International Biennale in Alexandria, the São Paulo Biennial,
International Graphic Art Biennial in Ljubljana, Triennale India in New Delhi
and festivals of culture like those in Kinshasa, Dakar, Algiers and Lagos; and
that one ‘non-aligned gift’, a Yoruba Gelede mask, features prominently in
Marko Ristić’s ‘The Wall of Surrealism’ – an installation-wall in his household,
methodically assembled from 1930 to 1970, now regarded as the first installation
in Yugoslav art, and on permanent display at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Belgrade.
What lessons about historical modernisms does this temporally expanded look
at an avant-garde collective provide in closure? One above all: there is no history
that is not a human history and thus the ultimate purpose of any creative activity
can only be, as Ristić claims, the ‘affirmation of the human’ (BM 20) – that is, a
man’s or a woman’s realization as a human, always on its own (cultural, historical,
individual) terms, and others’ acknowledgement of this condition. Believing in
infinite creative capacities of the thinking human to transform material world,
the Belgrade surrealists not only bequeathed to us some inspiring artwork but
also effected a change in real history in a long span and across multiple sites – a
change whose contours we have only begun to delineate. Inherent to humans
as the anchoring points in the ever-lasting, mutually corrective interaction of
thought and matter, the potential for transformation will be released whenever
a human self-critically battles thought’s proclivity to reify itself by engaging in
practices of activation, ‘aktivitets’. That such practices, as well as our tools to
assess them, must remain unfinalizable and subject to permanent self-critique is
an insight with which I would like to close this essay.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. The bulk of my discussion in the middle part of this

essay appeared, with a different purpose, as an article: Sanja Bahun, ‘Gaps, or
the Dialectics of Inter-imperial Art: The Case of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle’,
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 64, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 458–87. I am grateful to
Modern Fiction Studies and the Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing
232 Historical Modernisms

me to reproduce select material from that publication. I would also like to

thank the following institutions which made this work possible: Historical
Archives of Belgrade; the Archive and Documentation section of the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Belgrade; The Legacy of Marko Ristić in the Archive of the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA), Belgrade; the Library Legacy of
Marko Ristić in SASA, Belgrade.

1 Koča Popović and Marko Ristić, Nacrt za jednu fenomenologiju iracionalnog

[Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational], ed. Gojko Tešić (Belgrade:
Prosveta, 1985 [1931]), 7–8. For a French translation, see Esquisse d’une
phénoménologie de l’irrationnel (Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis, 2016).
2 On inter-imperiality and modernism, see Laura Doyle, ‘Modernist Studies and Inter-
Imperiality in the Longue Durée’, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed.
Mark Wollaeger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 669–96. On inter-imperial
contexts of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s production, see Bahun, ‘Gaps.’
3 Sanja Bahun-Radunović, ‘The Value of the Oblique (Notes on Relational
Funhouses, Historical Occlusions, and Serbian Surrealism),’ in The Avant-garde
and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism, ed. Sanja Bahun-Radunović and
Marinos Pourgouris (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), 26–52.
4 Marko Ristić, Oko nadrealizma I [Around Surrealism] (Belgrade: Clio, 2003), 166.
5 René Crevel, ‘Des surrealists yougoslaves sont au bagne’, Le surréalisme au service de
la revolution 6 (May 1933): 36–9.
6 On ‘placedness’, see Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, ‘Introduction’, in Geomodernisms:
Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Doyle and Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2005), 1–4. The level of education and foreign language
knowledge was an occasionally uncomfortable point of distinction between the
Paris Centrale and the Belgrade Circle. In a 1931 letter to Ristić from Paris, Popović
relates how he translated large chunks of Hegel’s text from German into French to
André Thirion at a meeting on previous day, apparently in an effort to introduce
their Outline to the French group and solicit their help in publishing their own text
in French. Koča Popović, letter of 6 November 1931. The Legacy of Marko Ristić,
SANU Archives, Belgrade, unit of archival preservation 14882, box 2.
7 M(arko) R(istić), ‘Pred jednim zidom – objasnjenje istoimene strane ilustracija’
(‘In Front of a Wall – An Explanation of the Eponymous Illustration Page’),
Nadrealizam danas i ovde 3 (1932): 51.
8 Ristić and Popović, Outline, 49–52.
9 The ratification coincided with the establishment of a one-party Austrofascist state
in Austria, Hitler’s May Day speech at Tempelhof Air Field and the establishment
of the notorious People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), empowered to mete out death
sentences for high treason in Berlin, Germany.
 History and Active Thought 233

10 Marko Ristić, Bez mere [Without Measure] (Belgrade: Nolit, 1986, henceforth BM),
91.
11 Milan Dedinac, letter of 15 February 1927, The Legacy of Marko Ristić.
12 BM, 232–3.
13 Ibid., 233.
14 Ristić started his PhD study in Philosophy in 1927, but never finished it.
The surviving drafts of his doctoral thesis, ‘La Métaphysique des faits divers’
(‘Metaphysics of News’), focus on the flaws of traditional metaphysics, circulation
of news and the category of the dialectic moment (Ristić 1985: 243–54).
15 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Metaphysik’ [‘Metaphysics’], in Vorlesungen über die Geschichte
der Philosophie II [Lectures on the History of Philosophy II]. Vol. 19, ed. Eva
Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1986), 162.
16 Marko Ristić, ‘Dignité et Servitude du Traducteur’, Babel 9, no. 3 (1963): 123–4.
17 Oskar Davičo, Crno na belo [Black on White] (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1962), 9, 20, et
passim.
18 The first Summit was attended by Afghanistan, Algeria, Yemen, Myanmar,
Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Congo, Cuba, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea,
India, Indonesia, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Somalia,
Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yugoslavia. Some historians erroneously suggest the
Bandung Asian-African Conference (18–24 April 1955, Bandung, Indonesia)
was an antecedent for the establishment of the non-aligned movement, but this
is erroneous since nonalignment as a concept and political strategy emerged
distinctly only in the period 1956–61 and some key figures in the movement like
Tito and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana were not present at Bandung. For survey, see
The Non Aligned Movement and the Cold War, ed. Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer
Tine and Nada Boškovska (London: Routledge, 2014).
19 Ristić and Popović, Outline, 116–17.
20 Josip Broz Tito, ‘Address to the Sixth Conference of Heads of State or Government
of Non-aligned Countries’, Havana, September 4, 1979 (Red Hill, A.C.T.: Embassy
of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1979), 24.
21 See Bojana Piškur, ‘Yugoslavia: Other Modernities, Other Histories’, Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2019): 131–9; Ana Sladojević, Slike o Africi/ Images of
Africa, Non-aligned Modernisms, Vol. 1 (Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art,
2015).
22 On such operation, see Homi Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’, in Identity, Community,
Culture, Difference, ed., Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1990),
210.
23 Aimé Césaire first travelled to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1935, when his visit to
Martinska island, off the Adriatic coast, prompted him to start writing Notebook of
a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939).
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 Index

Absolute, the xxiii, 11 autonomy 13, 15, 24, 159–61, 163–4,

Academicism 182 167–70
Aching, Gerard 70n. 28 Avanessian, Armen 166
Adams, Henry 40–1, 51n. 44 avant-garde xxii, xv, 8, 10, 12, 17, 20–1, 23,
Adorno, T. W. 14, 45, 52n. 70, 53n. 89, 79, 25–6, 56–7, 61, 63, 67, 119, 126–7,
81, 87n. 35 132, 137n. 23, 137, 138n. 36, 141–5,
aesthetics xix, 14, 15, 18, 121–4, 129, 229 147–8, 152–5, 160–1, 166, 168–70,
chronoaesthetics 155 (see also 183, 184, 193, 198, 209, 218, 231 See
temporality) also Bohemian Clubs; the New York
Agamben, Giorgio 77, 84, 165–6 Poets; Noucentrisme
ahistoricism/ahistoricity/ahistorization 13, Black Mountain Poets 60
20, 112, 159–70 Constructivism 141, 168
Allen, Charles 70n.23 Cobra 138n. 36, 167
alphabetic script 123 Cubism 10, 13–14, 141, 168, 170, 179,
anachronism/anachronicity 7, 23, 25, 199
145–8, 151, 154–5, 165 Dada/Dadaism xix, xxiii, 6, 10, 14, 61,
Angelus Novus 16 See also Klee, Paul 131, 141, 151
Angel of History 84, 95, 137n. 27 (see Expressionism 141, 143
also Benjamin, Walter) Abstract Expressionism 13, 167
Annales School, the 1, 21 Futurism xxiv, 25, 40, 66, 141–3, 154
anti-art 179, 183, 193 Imagism 73
anti-Historicism 155 Passéisme 40
apolitical 39, 168 See also ahistoricism Simultaneisme 152
Apollinaire, Guillaume 1, 127, 130, 132, Suprematism143
168 Surrealism 6, 10, 13, 26, 63, 115, 138n.
Appadurai, Arjun 62, 71n. 39 36, 141, 152, 168, 197–210, 215–32
Arab Spring 1 automatic writing (l’écriture
Aragon, Louis xi 199, 204–6, 207, 213n. 56 automatique) 197, 206, 207
Ardis, Ann 69n.17 Belgrade Surrealist Circle, the 26,
Arendt, Hannah 51n. 33 215–19, 227, 229–30, 131
Aristotle 16, 18, 77–8, 87n. 27, 215, 226 Bureau de recherches surréaliste
Arp, Hans x, 153–4 (Surrealist Research Bureau)
Art Nouveau 42, 44 197–207
Artaud, Antonin 12, 210 Manifeste du surréalisme 198, 206,
Arts and Crafts 59 210 (see also Manifesto)
Arts Incohérents 179 La Révolution surréaliste (see
Arvatov, Boris 136n. 14 Periodicals)
assemblage 23, 25, 132–3, 141, 147, 152–5 Vorticism 67
Atget, Eugène 222 avant-gardism 22
automatism 127–8 neo-avant-garde 127, 137n. 22,
automatic writing (see Surrealism) 138n. 36, 218
254 Index

Bachelard, Gaston 47 autobiography 21, 22, 33–5, 37–40, 45,

The Poetics of Space 47 49, 93
Badiou, Alain 23, 66, 75, 81 Bishop, Tom 9
Bahun, Sanja 26, 49n. 2 Blake, William 25
Baker, Alan R. H. 193n. 4 Blue Mountain Project 56
Barthes, Roland 19, 114, 148 Bochner, Jay 57
Baudelaire, Charles 5, 16, 21, 44, 195n. 38 Boer War, the 41, 115
Bauhaus 67, 154 Bohemian Clubs/Βohemianism 25, 175,
Bazin, Victoria 70n. 22 177, 184, 187–8, 192 See also Avant-
Beats, the 60 garde
Beckett, Samuel 3, 4, 11, 14, 79, 82 Bon Bock, les 25, 183–92
Bedouelle, Guy 194n. 19 Fumisme 178–9
Belgrade Surrealist Circle, the See Avant- Hydropathes, les 25, 177–81, 183–4,
garde: Surrealism 185, 192
Belloc, Hilaire 95 Zutistes, les 179
Bellot, Émile 184, 187, 190 Boiffard, Jacques-André 199, 204, 205, 206
Benjamin, Andrew 144 Bor, Vane (Stevan Živadinović) 220,
Benjamin, Walter xxiii, xxvi, 1, 14–17, 25, 221–2, 223, 226, 229
33–4, 39, 40–8, 77, 84, 96, 112, 117, Boulez, Pierre 132, 138n. 39
128, 130–1, 137n. 27, 143, 145, 165, Bourbon Monarchy 175, 177, 198
168, 222 Bourdieu, Pierre 14, 69n. 7
The Arcades Project 44, 45 Brake, Laurel 57
A Berlin Chronicle 45–7 Braudel, Fernand 1
‘Berlin Childhood Around 1900’ 44 Breton, André 9–10, 13, 14, 63, 75, 127,
‘On the Concept of History’ xxvi, 34 197–210, 218, 220, 223
‘On the Image of Proust’ 52n.72 Breton, Simone (née Simone Kahn, also
‘Literary History and the Study of Simone Collinet) 199, 204–10
Literature’ 25 Brexit 3
One-Way Street 138n. 35 Brigstocke, Julian 180
‘The Storyteller’ 39 Brittain, Vera 95, 98
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Halcyon 108n. 19
Mechanical Reproducibility’, 44 Brooker, Peter 68 n5
Benson, C. A. 95 Brooks, Cleanth 56
Benson, Peter 72n. 55 Bru, Sacha 25, 68 n5
Bergson, Henri xxiv, 23 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) 33, 40–7
durée réelle 23, 30n. 52 Heart to Artemis 40, 43
élan vital 23 ‘Paris, 1900’ 41, 43
Creative Evolution 30n. 52 Buck-Morss, Susan 144
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Bulson, Eric 61, 67
Immediate Data of Consciousness Bureau de recherches surréaliste
30n. 52 (Surrealist Research Bureau) See
Berman, Jessica 71n. 34 Avant-garde: Surrealism
Bernal, J. D. 95, 97 Bürger, Peter 168
The World, the Flesh and the Devil 97 Byzantine (art) 9, 12
Berr, Henri
L’Evolution de l’Humanité 103–4 Cadet, Coquelin 184
Bickley Trott, Alexandra 25 Cage, John 121, 132
Bildungsroman 22, 33, 144 See also Camus, Albert 2
Künstlerroman Capitalism 18, 115, 116, 218
biography 34, 49–50n. 9, 93, 100–2, 108n. 30 Carjat, Étienne 185, 195n. 38
 Index 255

Carnivalesque 184, 192 Cros, Charles 179

Carrive, Jean 210 Crow, Thomas 5
Carter, E. H. 105 Cubism See Avant-garde
General History: in Outline and Story
105 (see also Ogden, C. K.) Dada See Avant-garde
Castoriadis, Cornelius 113 Dante, Alighieri xxvi, 91
Cate, Philip Dennis 195n. 31 Danto, Arthur 116
Catholicism 12, 225 Davičo, Oskar 229
Cavell, Stanley 127–8 de Chirico, Giorgio 152, 205–6, 207, 224
Césaire, Aimé 62, 231, 233n. 23 de Gourmont, Remy 59
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 27n. 15 de MacMahon, Patrice 177
Chanel, Coco (Gabrielle Bonheur) 6–8 de Man, Paul 26
Chaney, Lisa 8 de Nerval, Gérard 5
Chesterton, G. K. 95, 101 De Quincey, Thomas 34, 93
Chevallier, Pierre 194n. 23 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Chronoaesthetics See aesthetics; 34, 93
temporality Delaunay, Robert 152
Churchill, Suzanne 70n. 23 Deleuze, Gilles 152, 143
Claretie, Jules 184 DeLillo, Don 113, 114
Clark, Timothy James 190, 198, 202 Underworld 113, 114
Classics, the 5 Delteil, Joseph 10, 210
Claudel, Camille 3 Dermée, Paul 199
Cole, Lori 63 Derrida, Jacques xxii, 143
Collier, Patrick 58, 69n. 16 Desnos, Robert 205, 206–7, 209
colonial xxiii, 62, 63, 66, 67, 83, 84, 116, dialectical image xxiii, 16, 17 See also
190, 217, 218 Angel of History
anti-colonial 62, 63 Didi-Huberman, Georges 144
post-colonial xx, 62, 67, 227, 230 digital humanities 58, 69n. 7; 21
colonialism xix, 9 Dilthey, Wilhelm 20
Communism 63, 210 Drouin, Jeff 69 n.16
The Communist Manifesto 22 (see also Duchamp, Marcel 14, 116, 127, 148, 152,
manifesto) 167, 170
Comte, Auguste 163, 181 Durée 76 See also Annales; Braudel,
Conrad, Joseph 20, 33, 94, 95 Fernard
Nostromo 23 Longue durée 1, 4
Romance 94 (see also Ford, Ford Duthuit, Georges 8, 12
Madox)
Secret Agent, The 94 Eagleton, Terry 22
Constructivism See Avant-garde Eatough, Matt 71n. 34
Contemporary, the xxi, xxiv, 13, 15, 92, 95, Edwards, Brent Hayes 66, 71n. 41, 42
99, 105, 125, 114–15, 128, 155, 159, Einstein, Albert xxiii, 215
164–7, 182 Einstein, Carl 155
Conwell, Donna 71n. 37 Eliot, George
Cosmopolitanism 9, 10 Middlemarch 20
Cottin, Eugène 185–7, 188–92 Eliot, Thomas Stearns xix, xxii, 4, 5, 10, 11,
Courbet, Gustave 147, 188–91 23, 55, 58, 60, 73, 76, 78, 91–4, 95,
Covid-19 2 101, 124–5, 129, 138n. 36 See also
crisis 13, 22, 23, 73–6, 80, 124–5, 129 mythical method, the
Cros, Antoine 184 Four Quartets 25
256 Index

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Goudeau, Émile 178, 179

124–5 grand narrative xix, 20, 116, 117 See also
The Waste Land 58, 73, 91, 94 Lyotard, Jean-François
Ellmann, Richard 27n. 5 Great Exposition, the See World
Éluard, Paul 203, 205 Exhibition
Emden, Christian J. 34 Great War, the See World War I
Emery, Mary Lou 71n. 44 Green, Nicholas 183
Emplotment 111 See also White, Hayden Greenberg, Clement 13–14, 24, 121, 159–70
Epiphany 74, 76 See also Kairos, Greenhalgh, Chris 7–8
Illumination, moment, the Grenier, Catherine 167–8
Ernst, Max 149–50, 224 Guesde, Jules 177
Exposition Universelle See World
Exhibition H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 94
Expressionism See Avant-garde Haldane, J. B. S. 95, 97–9, 101
Daedalus; or, Science and the Future 97–8
Faxon, F. W. 59 Haraway, Donna 117
Fayol, Henri 201–4 Hardt, Michael 167
Fenellosa, Ernest 122, 123 Harrison, Thomas 40
Chinese Written Character as a Hartog, François 25, 141
Medium for Poetry 122 (see also Hauptmann, Gerhart 5
Pound, Ezra) Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 175
Ferry, Jules 182–3, 192 Hegedušić, Krsto 228
fin-de-siècle 25, 59 See also avant-garde; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich xxi, 141,
Bohemian clubs 215, 225–6
Ford, Ford Madox 33, 59, 92, 94–5, 97, 100 Heidegger, Martin 9, 11, 78
A History of Our Own Times 92 Herodotus 18, 113
Parade’s End 100 historical materialism 103
Romance 94 (see also Conrad, Joseph) historical sense, the 23 See T.S. Eliot
Forster, E. M. 79–85 historicism 17, 18, 25, 41, 84, 112, 143–5,
‘The Life to Come’ 80–4 154, 155, 159, 169, 170
Maurice 80, 83 historicity 20, 21, 23–4, 25, 48, 129, 141,
Fortuny, Mario 7, 8 143, 145, 152, 160
Foster, Hal 144, 161 historiography xxvi, 18, 19–21, 24, 33, 49,
Foucault, Michel 143 59, 99, 100, 102, 111–17
Fragerolle, Georges 193n. 6 history
Frankfurt School, the 143 art history 25, 166
Freud, Sigmund xxii, 1, 6, 10, 22, 36–7, 46, contemporary history 91–2, 99, 106,
47, 215 106n. 3, 112, 223
Fried, Michael 121, 160 ‘future history’ 97
Friedman, Susan Stanford 4 literary history xx, 25, 56–7, 59, 135
Fumisme See Bohemian clubs material history 216
Futurism See Avant-garde novelesque history 114
postmodern history
Galsworthy, John 4 queer history 116
Garb, Tamar 183 universal history 18, 22, 99, 117
Gehry, Frank 116 world history 92, 105
Gener, Pompeu 181 history of civilization 103, 105–6
Giddens, Anthony 96 (see also Ogden, C. K.)
Golan, Romy 195n. 34 historiography xxvi, 18, 19–21, 24, 26, 33,
Goll, Claire and Ivan 10, 133, 199 49, 49n. 2, 59, 99–100, 102, 111–17
 Index 257

big-data 116 Kolocotroni, Vassiliki 23

deep historiography 116 Koselleck, Reinhart 145
eco-historiography 116 Kouen, Jan 6
Hitler, Adolf 37, 232n. 9 Krauss, Rosalind 121, 123, 128, 170
Hofmann, Werner 147 Kreymborg, Alfred 57
Hoffman, Frederick 61 Kruchenykh, Aleksei 127, 143
Huelsenbeck, Richard 152 Kubler, George 147
Hughes, Langston 67 Künstlerroman 22, 33 See also
Hugo, Victor 5 Bilgunsroman
humanism 117, 129
Huxley, Aldous 98, 101 labour 124, 134, 152, 163, 198–204, 207,
Brave New World 98 209–10
Huyssen, Andreas 62, 66, 144 Lacan, Jacques 113
Hydropathes, les See Bohemian clubs Laclau, Ernesto 113
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 11
Ibsen, Henrik xxii, xxv, 2, 4 Lafargue, Paul 177
The Enemy of the People 2 Laïcité 177, 180–2
ideogram 122, 123, 127, 130 Larkin, Philip xxvi
illumination 46 See also Kairos, moment, Latour, Bruno 25, 143, 147, 159, 164, 170
the Le Verdier, Henri 181
interchronicity 25, 148, 152–3 See also Leddy, Annette 71n. 37
temporality; polytemporality Lehardy, Jacques (Clément Privé) 180
irrational, the 26, 215–16 See also Léro, Etienne 63, 67
Surrealism Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 121–4
Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of
Janco, Marcel 152 Painting and Poetry 121–2
Jarry, Alfred 3, 4, 179 Lewis, Wyndham 64, 66, 101, 121, 127,
Jolas, Eugène 8–12, 59, 67 See also 138n. 36
Periodicals: transition Time and Western Man 121
Jones, Caroline A. 162–3 Liddle, Dallas 57
Joyce, James xix, xxvi, 2–4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 67, little magazines See periodicals
74, 91, 92, 94, 95, 101 Littré, Émile 181
A Brilliant Career 2–3 Longue durée See also the Annales School
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1, 4
3 Lorin, Georges 184
Exile 2–4 Lukács, Georg 17–8, 124
Ulysses xix, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 91, 94 Lyotard, Jean-François 20, 116, 117, 143
Jünger, Ernst 9
MacLeod, Kirsten 59, 70n. 25
Kairos See also Moment, the 23, 73, 76–82 McKay, Claude 63, 67
Kandinsky, Wassily 127, 142, 163 McKnight Kauffer, Edward 154
Kant, Immanuel 13, 113, 122, 141, 170, McNamara, Andrew 15–6
215 Maeterlinck, Maurice 3
Kermode, Frank 79–80 Mainardi, Patricia 182
Kern, Stephen 30n. 51 Malevitch, Kazimir 3
Khazam, Rahma 13 Mallarmé, Stéphane 40, 128–32
Khlebnikov, Velimir 127, 143 Le Livre 129
Klee, Paul See also Angelus Novus 16, 127, Mandelstam, Osip 39
154 Manet, Édouard 175, 176–7, 184–5, 190,
Koestler, Arthur 37, 38–9 192
258 Index

Manifesto xxiii, 10, 63, 66, 67, 103, 127, Monet, Claude 175–6, 177, 192
135, 142, 203, 218, 224, 230 See also Monnerot, Jule-Marcel 63
avant-garde, Bohemian clubs) Monnier, Adrienne 43, 44
Mann, Thomas xxiv Monoskop 56
Mannheim, Karl 34 Moore, Marianne 59
Mao, Douglas 55 Moretti, Franco 57
Marcus, Laura 22, 62 Morise, Max 199, 204–7
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 127, 142 See Morrison, Toni
also Futurism Beloved 114, 177
Márkus, György 15 Mussell, James 57–8
Marsden, Dora 9 ‘mythical method’, the 92, 94–5 See also
Marx, Karl xix, xx, 63, 102, 103, 114, 116, Eliot, T. S.
227
Marxism xx, xxiv, 12, 17, 63, 66, 75, 96, 97, Nadeau, Maurice 12, 198
102, 103, 124, 177, 219, 227 Nagel, Alexander 147
Masson, André 12, 13, 210 Nancy, Jean-Luc 11, 85
Matisse, Henri 12, 167, 168 Napoléon, Bonaparte 115, 175
Matyushin, Mikhail 143 Napoléon, Louis 175
Maurois, André 99 narrative See grand narrative
The Next Chapter: The War against the anti-narrative 112
Moon 99 naturalism 5, 17
medium 122–35 Naville, Pierre 197, 199, 200, 202–6, 209,
memory 34, 36, 39, 41, 45–7, 123, 148 See 210
also temporality; time Nazism 218
Ménil, René 63 Negri, Antonio 78, 85
metahistory 111, 148 See also history; negritude 62
Hayden White Neogy, Rajat 67
metamedia 132 See also medium new, the xxi, 14–17, 91, 100, 106n. 1, 115,
Meyer, James 160 128, 130, 137n. 27, 143, 166, 168
Miller, Tyrus 23, 141 See also tradition
mimesis 18, 48 new man, the (Der Neue Mensch)
Mitchell, W. T. J. 121–2, 128, 144 137n. 23
modernisme 60 new painting 161, 163
modernismo 60 new criticism 55, 60
Modernist Journals Project (MJP) 55, 64 New York Poets, the 60 See also Avant-garde
Modernist Magazines Project 8, 56, 61 Nicolson, Harold 102
modernist painting 13, 121, 160–1, 162–3, Nietzsche, Friedrich xix, xx, 12, 33, 83,
170 116, 145, 181
modernist studies 25, 55–6, 61 nominalism 127, 132
new modernist studies 55 Non-aligned Movement (NAM) 228–30,
modernity xix, xxi, xxv, xxvi, 2, 4–5, 7, 9, 233n.18
15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 34, 42, 44, 60, 96, Noucentrisme 60 See also avant-garde
98, 114–15, 125, 131, 159, 169, 177, novelty See new, the
184, 188, 227 Nouveau Roman, the 224
‘Colonial Modernity’ 42, 63, 67, 71n. Now-time (Jetztzeit) 34, 77 See also time
44 (see also colonial)
Moholy-Nagy, László 121, 127, 148 O’Malley, Seamus 34
moment, the 25, 46, 73, 75, 80, 82, 84 See Objet-trouvé 116 See also the readymade
also Epiphany, Kairos, illumination Ogden, C. K. 95, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105
 Index 259

General History: in Outline and Story Nouvelle Revue Française 10

105 (see also E. H. Carter) Origin 60
Osborne, Peter 144, 169–70 Others 57, 60
The Owl 57
Panofsky, Erwin 23, 76 Revue du monde noir 62–3
Paris Commune, the 115, 177 Shearsman 60
Penzin, Alexei 168–9 The Smart Set 58
Péret, Benjamin 199–200 Transition 8, 10–12, 59, 67
periodicals (‘little magazines’) 8–9, 21, 58, transatlantic review 59
56, 59–68, 132 Tropiques 62
291 61 Voorslag 61
391 61 The Yellow Book 59
Angry Penguins 61 Yugen 60
Australian New Writing 61 periodization 8, 56, 59, 60, 165–6 See also
Blast 57 time; history
The Blind Man 61 Picabia, Francis 61, 67
Broom 61 Picasso, Pablo 132, 145–7, 168
Cabaret Voltaire 61, 132 Pilotin, Michel 63
The Century Guild Hobby Pinter, Harold 3
Horse 59 Pinthus, Kurt 132–5, 142, 160
Close-Up 61, 62, 220 Menschheitsdämmerung 132, 133, 135
Commerce 10 Pirandello, Luigi 4
The Criterion 58, 59, 130 Plato 82–3
Dada 61 Phaedrus 82, 83
Der Dada 61 Poggioli, Renato 25, 141
The Dia 58, 59 Poiret, Paul 7–8
Dyn 62 polychronicity 157n. 18 See also Serres,
The Egoist 9 Michel; temporality
The Fly Leaf 59 polytemporality See also Latour, Bruno;
The Freak 59 temporality
The Germ 59 Popović, Koča 215, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230
The Ghorki 59 positivism 144, 163, 181, 216
Jacket 60 post-contemporary, the 166–7
The Kenyon Review 60 post-medium condition 128 See also
La Plume 59 Krauss, Rosalind
La Révolution surréaliste (see also post-colonial See colonial
Surrealism) postmodernism xx, xxiv, xxvii, 115–16
La Revue Blanche 59 potentiality 25, 76–81, 145
The Lark 59 Pound, Ezra 4–5, 10–11, 16, 55, 60, 73, 78,
Le Chat Noir 59, 195n. 38 91, 94, 95, 122–3, 125–6, 127, 129,
Le Diogène 195n. 38 130, 131, 132
L’Etudiant Noir 62 Praxis 26, 75, 78–9
Le Scapin 59 transforming, or reversing
Légitime Défense 62–4, 65–7 (umwälzende Praxis) 227
London Mercury 58 Pre-Raphaelites 59
Les Petites Revues 59 Presentism 16, 23, 25, 34, 141, 154, 166
The Little Review 10, 58, 69n. 20 Prochnik, George 39
m58 60 Productivism 136n. 14
Mavo 67 progress xix, xx, xxiv–xxvi, 3, 14, 16–17,
New York Dada 61 20, 22, 34, 41, 79, 84, 95, 116, 151,
New Yorker 58 163, 167, 178
260 Index

Proust, Marce, xxiv, 45–6, 48, 92 Soupault, Louise 205, 207

À la recherche du temps perdu xxiii Soupault, Philippe 205, 207, 210
Psyche Miniatures 101 See also Ogden, C.K. Soyinka, Wole 67
Purnell, Ida 62 Spanish flu 1
Spengler, Oswald 19, 154
Quitman, Maurice-Sabas 63 The Decline of the West 117
Spiropoulou, Angeliki 29n.49, 49n. 2, 114,
Rabaté, Jean-Michel 51n. 40, 214n. 72 211
Rabelais, François 184, 192 Steele, Valerie 6
Rancière, Jacques 20, 24, 117, 144 Steinberg, Leo 121
Ranke, Leopold von 18, 102, 154 Sternstunden 34
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 21 Stevenson, Randall 29n. 34
Ray, Man (Emmanuel Radnitzky) 127, Stiegler, Bernard 148
204–6 Stieglitz, Alfred 61
readymade, the 57, 116, 127 See also Strachey, Lytton 49n.9 100, 101
Objet-trouvé Eminent Victorians 100
Realism xx, xxv, xxvii, 5, 19, 22, 99, 141, Stravinsky, Igor 6–8, 14
143–5, 147, 154, 175 subaltern 63, 116, 230
Recht, Camille 222 Suprematism See avant-garde
Réjane, Gabrielle 7 Surrealism See avant-garde
Renaissance, the 101, 116, 121 Szondi, Peter 46
Richardson, Dorothy 40
Ricoeur, Paul 18, 19 Täuber, Sophie x, 153–4
Rimbaud, Arthur xxii, 179 Taylor, Frederick Wilson 200–2
Ristić, Marko 215, 217, 218–31 technology 11, 16, 60, 114, 116, 131, 162,
Romanticism 8, 10–11, 14 227
Rorty, Richard 115 temporality xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, 16, 21,
Rosenberg, Harold 121, 128 23, 78–80, 84, 92, 142–3, 151, 155,
Rosenthal, Gérard (Francis Gérard) 210 165, 184
Roth, Phillip polytemporality 25, 147, 152 (see also
American Pastoral 114 interchronicity; Latour, Bruno)
Rowse, A. L. 101–3, 105 Thacker, Andrew 8, 68n. 5
On History: A Study of Present Thayer, Scofield 59
Tendencies 101–3 theatricality 121
Ruffel, Lionel 164–6 Thésée, Auguste 63
Thiers, Adolphe 175
Sarcey, Francisque 179 Third Republic, the 178, 183, 184
Saunders, Max 24, 25 time See also chronoaesthetics;
Scholes, Robert 55 temporality
Schwitters, Kurt 127, 148 clock time xxiii, 23, 28n. 34
Senghor, Leopold 62, 231 cyclical time xxv–xxvi, 22
sequentiality 13, 164–7 linear time xxiii, xxv, 3, 16, 22, 23, 33,
Serres, Michel 143 46, 147, 164, 230
Shakespeare, William 2, 43, 147 To-Day and To-Morrow 24, 95–8, 101, 103
Silveri, Rachel 26 See also Ogden, C.K.
Simulacrum 220 tradition xix, xx, xxii, 5, 22–4, 62, 91, 95,
simultaneity 34, 133, 152 124–32, 160, 170, 182–3 See also
Sirven, Alfred 181 Eliot, T.S.; new, the
Smith, Terry 165, 166 transnationalism 61
 Index 261

trauma 6, 76, 94, 100, 114, 115, 161 Wollaeger, Mark 71n. 34
Trotsky, Leon 74, 75, 103, 210 Woolf, Leonard 36, 101
typography 66, 130, 132 Woolf, Virginia 6, 21, 22, 24, 33–6, 40, 48,
Tzara, Tristan 10, 14, 61, 152, 199 74, 76, 79, 100, 102, 114
Between the Acts 114
Valery Larbaud 10 ‘De Quincey’s Autobiography’ 34–5
Valéry, Paul 129, 145 Jacob’s Room 6
Verlaine, Paul 179 To the Lighthouse 79
Verticalism/ Vertigralism 10 Mrs Dalloway 76
Vico, Giambattista 154 ‘The New Biography’ 100
Victorian age, the 36, 66, 74, 100 Orlando 79, 100
Victorian periodicals 56–7 ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ 21
Vionnet, Madeleine 7 ‘A Sketch of the Past’ 36, 74
Vitrac, Roger 199, 203–7, 210 Three Guineas 36
Vorticism See avant-garde World Exhibition (also Exposition
Universelle; the Great Exposition)
Walkowitz, Rebbeca 55 41–4, 63, 177
Watson, J. B. 101 World War I (also The Great War) 6, 7, 34,
Watson, James Sibley 59 61, 222
Weiko, Christian 68n 5 World War II 161, 170
Wells, H. G. 91, 97, 99, 106 Wulfman, Clifford 55
Outline of History 106
West, Geoffrey 70n. 27 Yeats, W. Butler xxvi, 3, 4, 38, 76,
West, Rebecca 33 78, 94
Wharton, Edith 4 Yoyotte, Pierre 63
White, Hayden 9, 19, 111–17, 144
Whiting, Steven Moore 194n. 10 Zola, Émile 5
Wilder, Gary 72n. 45 Zutistes See Bohemian Clubs
Williams, Raymond 123, 124 Zweig, Stefan 33, 34–9
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 25 The World of Yesterday 34–9
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