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IRVING HOWE
those with a special interest in the subject and forbidding to everyone
else.
If
one digs, there are nuggets: a useful distinction between the
intelligentsia and the intellectual elite (the first a social-cultural forma–
tion likely to be antagonistic toward modernism as a diversion from
political tasks, and the second a literary-intellectual group forming the
characteristic audience and fierce spokesman for modernism); the deep
affinity displayed by modernism for sentiments of anarchism "which is,
if only in non-ideological forms, the single political ideal that the avant–
garde artist sincerely feels, despite any totalitarian sympathies, left or
right"; the close
if
uneasy kinship between modernism and "the cult of
violence"; the mixture of dependence and hostility in the relationship
between the avant-garde and the fashions of popular culture; the thrust
of modernism to race through the century, as if the present had no
intrinsic value but were merely a tract of obsolescence to be left behind;
the drive of modernism toward self-consumption, an end to speech and
art, the silence of anti-art - which is why its greatest practitioners kept
shy of the limits they kept approaching.
Poggioli chooses, rightly I think, to locate the distinctiveness of
modernism in a complex of values and responses to life, rather than
through formal traits and properties, although he is of course sufficiently
sophisticated to underscore the fact that the distinction is primarily an
analytic convenience. Like Zamyatin in his great essay on modern litera–
ture, Poggioli sees experimentalism as a secondary feature in the develop–
ment of modernism (the matter would no doubt be different if he were
discussing art and music). Among the controlling values Poggioli cites
are these:
activism
- the characteristic modernist group is a movement not a
school;
antagonism
- what the Russian futurists called "a whack at public
taste" and Poggioli shrewdly notes as leading to "an exaltation of
youth," with the consequent dangers of regressing to cultural in–
fantilism;
agonism
- "an anguish alien to any metaphysical or mystical red–
emption . . . a sacrifice to the Moloch of historicism," sometimes
reduced to an alienation "almost gratuitous ... a morbid taste for
present suffering";
futurism
- the wish, says the Italian critic Massimo Bontempelli,
to create "the primitive or, better, primordial condition out of which
is
then born the creator found at the beginning of a new series."
