BOOKS
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These categories are serviceable enough, and what I would regard
as a central
motif
in modernist writing -
its
confrontation with an inner
impulse toward nihilist surrender - Poggioli subsumes under his last two
categories, though not with a sufficiently strong recognition of how des–
perately the modern masters, those who truly were masters, struggled
against that impulse. Reading Poggioli's exposition on these matters, I
have been struck by how ragged they have become: we must now learn
to see the idea of the problematic as itself problematic, that is, paradox–
ically, as having become a mode of complacence. And the more a critic
elaborates a synthetic description of modernism as if it were indeed a
coherent and self-contained cultural style, the more he must move away
from the great texts
which
can alone give it enduring value. What
happens is that in time the abstracted categories are taken to have some
independent or suprahistorical value: so that a new fetichism is thrown
up and a great literature left behind.
There is more to be noticed in Poggioli's book, but let me confine
myself to two problems, the origin of and prognosis for modernism.
As is proper for a critic with a strong historical sense, Poggioli
stresses the continuities between romanticism and modernism, so much so
that those literary historians who deny a severe rupture between the two
will find solace in his pages. Poggioli, like others before him, has no
difficulty in showing that
most
of the central traits or properties of
modernism have their sources in the literature of romanticism. (Or at
the least, that there are many similarities with romanticism.) How
then could one provide a usable support for the claim that there did
occur at some point in the second half of the nineteenth century a break
sufficiently sharp to warrant speaking of modernism as a major new
cultural style or outlook? Poggioli does not confront this question directly
enough, and it is not at all easy to answer. My own disposition would
be
to say that enumerating formal divergences and innovations is not
enough; one would have to invoke, as well, the risky notion of a fun–
damental shift in values and philosophic temper. The modernist writers
abandon, once and for all, the wish or effort to see the universe as consti–
tuting an order which can be apprehended through transcendent revela–
tions or intuitive flashes; they accept, to an extent the romantics did not,
the "deadness" and distance, the beyondness of the world; they have lost,
or care little about, what Frye calls "the sense of identity with larger
power of creative energy [which] meets us everywhere in Romantic cul–
ture." And even as they share with the romantics a worship of the
imagination as the central agency of creation, they do not seek a sanc–
tion for it in the external world. As a pure type - fortunately no such
