152
PARTISAN REVIEW
A literary period had taken shape-beginning around 1885 and
apparently ending after World War II-which came, by one of those
historical miracles of common agreement, to be called
modernist,
anachronistic as it seemed
to
call a period of the past
modern.
One sign
that the period had come to an end was that so many critics were now
trying to define it. "What Was Modernism?" asked Harry Levin and
many others. "The most important recent event," says Matei Calinescu
in
Faces of Modernity,
the latest attempt at definition, is "the desynon–
ymization of 'modern' and 'contemporary'" -the recognition, in other
words, that all contemporary art is not necessarily modernist. Already
in the fifties the "Beats," led by Allen Ginsberg, were pointing toward
the new generation of writers who in the sixties called themselves
postmodernists,
thus declaring that a distinction had to be drawn
between two literary periods.
The best book on modernism is Renato Poggioli's
Theory of the
Avant-Garde
(1962; translated from the Italian, 1968), which is conti–
nental in its theoretical approach, drawing examples mainly from the
French, Italian, and Russian avant-gardes. Calinescu's
Faces of Mo–
dernity,
which is also continental in its examples, takes off from
Poggioli's book but adds little to it; for Calinescu lacks Poggioli's
theoretical power. Calinescu's way of introducing a literary movement
is
to
define its name in the original Latin and move on through
changing definitions. He circles around a subject but never seems able
to get
to
the center of it. The book's best remarks are in the quotations.
The book is mainly valuable for its quotations, which are drawn from
an impressively wide range of reading, and for certain amplifications
and modifications of Poggioli.
Calinescu, for example, thinks it important to distinguish between
avant-garde
and
modernism,
and takes issue with Poggioli and others
for equating them. Poggioli argues that the avant-garde or modernism,
despite its often antiromantic stance, derives from romanticism; for it
was romanticism which first conceived that a work of art must be an
expression of its time and that therefore made innovation a supreme
good in art. Calinescu agrees, citing Stendhal's definition of romanti–
cism as the art of the present and Baudelaire's definition of it as "the
most contemporary form of the beautiful." Because romantic art
should be different from
everything
done in the past, Baudelaire saw
"an obvious contradiction between romanticism and the works of its
principal adherents." Baudelaire's " romanticism," as Calinescu sug–
gests, is "antiromantic" or "modern." We are now in a position to
understand that modernism and (as the other two books under review
