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The Difficulties of Modernism

Leonard Diepeveen

Randall Jarrell outlines could be sketched with precision:

That the poetry of the first half of this century wastoo difficult just as the poetry of the eighteenthcentury was full of antitheses, that of the metaphysicals full of conceits, that of the Elizabethandramatists full of rant and quibbles is a truism that it would be absurd to deny. How our poetrygot this way how romanticism was purified and exaggerated and corrected into modernism;how poets carried all possible tendencies to their limits, with more than scientific zeal; how thedramatic monologue, which one had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the normof poetry, now became in one form or another the norm; how poet and public stared at each otherwith righteous indignation, till the poet said: Since you won "t read me, I"ll make sure you can"tis one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.

The Difficulties of Modernism, from its definitons on up, stays close to this sense ofdifficulty as an experience. It defines difficulty in terms of how modern readers understood

and used it: as a barrier to what one normally expected to receive from a text, such as itslogical meaning, its emotional expression, or its pleasure. For moderns readers, difficultywas the experience of having one"s desires for comprehension blocked, an experienceprovoked by a wide variety of works of art (comprehension is here defined broadly).Without dealing with this barrier in some way and such dealings were not restricted tounderstanding or decoding the syntax of the difficult moment it was impossible tointeract significantly with the text. Difficulty thus drove its readers forward, for they realizedthat their bafflement was an inadequate response. Further, until they removed orcontained their bafflement, readers overwhelmingly reacted with anxiety. Modernism"s

difficulty solely as the property of texts is to impoverish it and miss how difficulty becamean integral part of haigh culture. Difficulty must be understood in terms of reading process,and it manifests itself socially; modernism begins with a typical interaction between art andits audience. Difficulty, this book argues, is that recurring relationshipthat came into beingbetween modernist works and their audiences. Two central claims about difficulty shaped its social articulation. First, literarymodernism"s first readers often asserted that difficulty"s prevalence was unique tomodernism, frequently commenting that difficulty currently was, as one reader grumbled,running rampant in literature. Difficulty, in fact, was the most noted characteristic of whatbecame the canonical texts of high modernism; it dramatically shaped the reception ofFaulkner, Joyce, Stein, Moore, Eliot, Pound, and Woolf, just to name those who early wereconsidered to be central modernist writers. Now, it"s not that people thought difficulty hadnever before surfaced in literature. However, there was a general sense that this was thefirst time in history that difficulty was so widespread, and that modernism was unique inthat its difficulty was seen as being the central to art"s direction. Second, modern difficultymade big claims for itself. T.S. Eliot, for example, would claim that it appears likely thatpoets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilizationcomprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon arefined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. Difficulty thus was central to people"s sense that modernism was a sea change not just in the properties of art works, but in the default and most useful ways of talking

about and interacting with art. Modernism"s difficulty set up the terms and protocols by

which readers read and gained access to modernist texts, and it became a litmus test: onecould predict both a given reader"s response to modernism by his or her reaction to

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difficulty, and a writers place in the canon by the difficulty of his or her work. Moderndifficulty was a powerful aesthetic, then. It also continues to be one, for aesthetic difficultyretains its legitimizing force today. Modern difficulty has profoundly shaped the entiretwentieth century; one"s ability to move in high culture continues to depend, in large part,on how one reacts to difficulty. Focusing primarily on literature, this book examines what followed from the mometn

when modernism"s readers began to comment that difficulty was everywhere. Why diddifficult writing produce such anxiety? In what ways did difficult works contest traditionalunderstandings of pleasure? How did the argument over difficulty shape what became thehigh modern canon? How much do modern understandings of difficulty shapecontemporary culture? Answering these questions is crucial to understanding not onlydifficult literature, but the relationship between all forms of high art and culture in the pastcentury, for the major arguments about literary difficulty travel unchanged to other arts,using the same rethorical tropes, describing the same kind of experiences.

The argument about difficulty can more profitably be undestood as a kind of game,a game with alimited number of rhetorical counters but a geat variety of combinations. Thisbook reveals what those counters were, the standard ways in which they were moved, andtheir conseguences. The Difficulties of Modernism thus is, in a sense, a social rhetoric ofdifficulty: rhetoric, because it is concerned with recurrent linguistic strategies, and socialbecause these strategies occurred within a social domain and were profoundly implicatedin it. The sketchiness yet preponderance of arguments about difficulty, the stylizedreactions to it, along with the breadth of my research have led me to analyze the workperformed by typical descriptions of difficulty. Since what is typical in modernism drives myargument, modernism"s understandings of difficulty set the agenda for how I discussaccounts of difficulty from before the twentieth century (not that I believe that modernism"s

understandins were always right). As a consequence, though there are many moments inthe book where I point to earlier understandings of difficulty, The Difficulties of Modernismdoes not give a time line. It does not begin with Aristotle, move through Dante, Kant, andHegel, and then onward toward early modernism. It is not that these earlier moments areirrelevant to modernism"s difficulty, but a writer like Aristotle shows up where he impingesmost clearly on modernism"s peculiar difficulties; this book addresses how difficultmodernism put Aristotle to use. This book limits its attention to Anglo-American culture during the years 1910 to1950, setting the parameters of analysis at the beginning of the twentieth century and atmidcentury. The chronological range is pragmatic: beginning in the second decade of thetwentieth century one starts to hear the complaint that difficulty is everywhere. Earlier, and

in the previous century (except, possibly, in painting), comments about difficulty aredirected as individuals, such as George Meredith or Joseph Conrad. Around 1915 difficultystarts to be discussed as a movement, and a large movement indeed, for readers begin tocomment on how difficulty had overtaken allthe arts. By 1950, a fairly impermeable canonof high modernism had been established in the university curriculum. And that generalsese of modernism is the one that functions as my definition. It is the idea of modernismthat typically was promoted in English departments from the mid-1940s to the mid 1970s,modernism with a capital M: portentous, asserting a unity for itself, and claiming privilegedstatus to speak about early twentieth-century culture. High modernism!s skeptics thought it was destroying literature, evencivilization; while modernism!s apologists made big claims for difficulty, arguingthat difficulty had important things to say about modern culture or humanpsychology.

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Some arguments for difficulty!s apology: is inevitable domain of theprofessional; accurately portrays the human mind or modern culture; is an agent forsocial change; new works are difficult and difficulty will disappear as difficult workbecomes a classic; apparently difficult is actually simple; is essential to all great art.(These arguments did not march along in a triumph of efficient logic. Instead, theywere driven by an inner conflict, a conflict that on the one hand grounded difficulty

in a professionalist/classic ethos, and on the other hand kept nervously reachingback to romanticis ideals of aesthetic expression, including the sublime.) What modernism!s defenders did not clearly acknowledge, but which iscentral to understanding how difficulty worked in modern culture, is that difficultyhad an important social function as a cultural gatekeeper. Knowing how to respondproperly to difficult art became a way of indicating one!s membership in highculture. High culture eventually accepted this social function so completely that itwas possible for it to do its work in the background. This acceptance has everythingto do with how we go where we are today, and wherethat where we are actually is.Modernism was formed on an aesthetics of difficulty; since that time high culturehas been living off of a modernist inheritance. Unless we reexamine that allegianceand the ways in which it continues to control contemporary culture, we are doomedto accept its benefits and its costs.

The story"s satire, of course, exaggerates reality, but in order for his gags to work, Squiredepended on people recognizing the ways in which difficulty accompanied by its socialnuances permeated modern culture. Modern difficulty, in fact, was a parodist "s dream.One did not have to agree with Squire"s take on difficulty to recognize that his satire waspointing to the real world. While not everyone agreed, for example, that modernism wasdecadent or that it reveled in scandalizing the general public, everyone recognized thatquestions about scandal, decadence, marketing, and elitism shaped the public debate

about modernism"s difficulty. Many of Squire

"s readers would further agree with Squire thatthese questions shaped modernism so profoundly, in fact, that they had destabilized

literary production, creating the social conditions that made a successful hoax (chiste)plausible. Squire"s story has more ambition than its light tone suggests. In using difficulty asits springborad, The Man Who Wrote Free Verse not only pillories aspects of modernismthat the London Mercury"s readers recognized, in doing so it addresses the social andtextual conditions that in fact were central to modernism"s formation. Squire"s story showsthat one can recognize difficulty not just by looking at a text"s properties, but also bylooking at what accompanies those properties, how those properties enter socialdiscourse. Difficulty is a social situation: it is produced by certain kinds of people and

received favorably by other identifiable groups. Turning to the advanced circles thatproduce and celebrate difficulty, Squire repeatedly jabs at the kinds of peopleprofessionalism attracts, as well as central presuppositions of aesthetic professionalism:its belief that a work"s aesthetic value depends upon its importance or its status as adevelopment of some aesthetic concern as well as the idea that art should reflect theradical newness of modern life. And, while Squire ridicules difficulty as the latest literaryfashion, the equivalent of wide (or, perhaps, narrow) neckties, he also implies that it ismore insidious than a change in clothes, for, as Eliot "s epigraph to this chapter shows,difficulty makes big claims for itself. Squire notes these big claims by repeatedly referringto those who write and value difficulty as being advanced and through quoting theirjargon. Squire also attacks the professionalized elitism of modern literature (an elitismdifferent from Reggie and Adrian"s class-based elitism, which is a social snobbery the storyalso lampoons, though with a lighter touch). He satirizes how this coterie of professionalsis self-serving and self-congratulatory, and how it ignores, or worse, abuses, the common

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reader. The story repeatedly claims an entangled relationship between modern writing andpolitics, not only through its potshots at Marxism (which near the story"s end areaccompanied by a startling whiff of anti-Semitism), but also with the American bookseller"scapitalist venture. Through his portrayal of the radical elite and its mania for the latestliterary fashion, Squire lampoons what he sees as modernism "s decadence, a decadencebrought to life by modernism"s acrid mixture of pseudo-intellectualism, effete

unnaturalness, and overbearing women. Thus, the great crime of modernism, according to Squire, is that it is self-servingand driven by social forces such as fashion, publicity and marketing. But Squire"s storygoes further; it suggests that understanding how difficulty works, and knowing whatattitude to adopt when confronted with difficult work is a ticket of entry into high culture. Ifyou don"t know what to do with Mammon Fox-Trot, you don"t get invited to the luncheon. Inasserting this, Squire also recognizes that a primary effect of difficulty is anxiety for theuninitiated. All this, according to Squire, shapes the context and texts of modernism, andall of this is what"s wrong with it. Squire"s story, then, contains almost all the major issuesthat accompanied or even drove the construction of modernism. But what is striking aboutthis list is that Squire chooses difficultyas the vehicle to foreground these issues. Difficultydoes a lot of work in The Man Who Wrote Free Vers, as it did in modernism itself.

Directly opposing these kinds of sentiments was John Middleton Murry, husband ofKatherine Mansfield and editor of the journal Athenaeum, in whose pages he regularlyattacked Georgian writing. After attending a lecture by Eliot, Murry, undoubtedly agreeingwith Pound"s description of Waugh"s writing as senile slobber (Pound [1917] 1922, 77),wxultingly described the two encamped armies that had gathered at the talk: The anti-AthenaeumsMunro [sic], Jack Squire etc present in force. There"s no doubt it"s a fightto finish between us & Them them is the #Georgians"en masse. It"s a queer feeling Ibegin to have now: that we"re making literary history. But I believe we are going to. More

than that, in spite of the London Mercuryand all its money and rclame, I believe we"vegot them on the run. They"re afraid (Murry [29 October 1919] 1983, 199).

Murry"s dramatization may be overdone, but it is typical. For many involved informing the modern canon, the issues were sharply defined, and there clearly was a publicbattle going on. It was a battle between those who saw themselves as serious artists, whorealized that the unique conditions of modern life demanded cultural artifacts uniquelyshaped by those conditions represented by the proponents of difficult modernism onone side. On the other side were those who considered themselves as the defenders oftraditon, who thought that modern art had abandoned the universal qualities of great art represented by Squire and others. It was a battle with high stakes, a battle in whichdifficulty, wielded more like a broad-ax than a scalpel, was the main weapon.

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