360
FRANK KERMODE
the cult of the orgasm, or on Allen Ginsberg. The philosopher of the
eye would have found hard words for the philosophers of other organs.
No doubt I have exaggerated the differences between the two
modernisms. There is a continuity between them, a continuity of
crisis; what distinguishes them broadly is that the older, in an
ancient tradition, remade or rewrote its past, but the latter has a
nihilistic, schismatic quality.
It
is not unlike the difference between
such a church as the Anglican, professing to sort out traditions, and
the extremist sects, such as Anabaptists. But there were schismatics
contemporary with early modernism; Lewis already found them ex–
cessive.
As
I have said, he would surely have associated some modems
with the time-and-flux men represented by the Bailiff in
The ChildeT–
mass.
He attacked the White Negro in advance, and in the figure of
Kreisler in
T aTT
struck a proleptic blow at the "melodramatic nihil–
ism" of the later modernists. But there is, I think, between the two
modernisms the broad distinction I have drawn. Each reacts to a
"painful transitional situation," but one in terms of continuity and
the other in terms of schism. The common topics are transition and
eschatological anxiety; but one reconstructs, the other abolishes, one
decreates and the other destroys the indispensable and relevant past.
To speak clearly on these issues is to attract the charge that
one is simply no longer young enough or bright enough to grasp the
exciting things that are going on.
If
what is happening is not a con–
tinuation but a mutation then everything I say is wholly wrong. All
I've written may be so much wastepaper devoted to the obsolete
notion that there is a humanly needed order which we call form;
the notion has been attacked at length by the philosophical anti–
formalist Morse Peckham, for whom art is simply what occurs in a
setting and a situation appropriate to a certain kind of attention. But
why do we attend? Not because by doing so we can project our own
order on to anything, but because some things are designed, in col–
laboration more or less close between producer and consumer, to
accommodate, confirm and extend that order. There is all the differ–
ence here between Schoenberg and random music, between the
translogical order of
The Waste Land,
and the random collocations
of Emmett Williams, between Ford's cubist novel and the cut-up---fold–
in experiments. However radical the alterations to traditional proce–
dures implied in the first, they are extensions, in a recognizable sense,
