296
PARTISAN REVIEW
The sentiment clearly implies continuity between past and present. But it
seems to me that there is a slight discrepancy in one respect between what
Steven and Karen were saying about post-modernism. The most famous
description of it-Lyotard's in
La
conditioll
post-modern~is
that post-mod–
ernism means incredulity towards all meta-narratives. If that's true, it
implies that there is no sense of bereavement, indeed that one of the ways
of dealing with the present situation is to denounce the redemptive falla–
cy. Leo Bersani's book,
The Culture
if
Redemption,
makes a sustained assault
on the first generation of the major modernists, culminating in an attack
on Joyce's
Ulysses.
Eliot and Yeats are consistently attacked because they
looked for a narrative redemption of time. If I understand the post-mod–
ern motif, the corresponding urge would be to forget about the
redemption of time, and regard all such attempts as narratively jejeune. The
promiscuousness of post-modernism would regard everything as equally
interes ting.
Karen Wilkin:
I was struck by your linking of culture and anarchy, which
unfortunately corresponds far more to my understanding of post-mod–
ernist views in the visual arts. I entirely agree with Denis's analysis. The
great difference between post-modernist visual artists and the classical
generation of modernists, who are now held in much disrepute, is that
modernism was not a refutation of the past but rather deeply involved with
bereavement in the sense you have posited.
It
was disenchantment with the
debased version of tradi tional art, not rejection of tradi tional art per se, that
fueled what turned out to be very radical and often inadvertent inventions
by the first modernist generation of painters and sculptors. Greenberg has
in fact defined modernist painting as a holding action for quality, if one is
allowed to use that word in public.
Steven Marcus:
Both of these contradictory notions or gestures coexist.
Their coexistence is something we have yet to make adequate sense of.
The post-modern dancing in the graveyard, which is the repudiation of
bereavement, seems to me to have little beyond bereavement in its back–
ground. The dancing in the graveyard can best be understood as a response
to and away from the previous bereavement,just as the rejection of meta–
narrative is a response to the sense of loss that preceded it and was its
precondi tion. I do not believe that these responses obli terate or, as it were,
constitute a Hegelian
Aujhebung
of the past, but are rather simple reversals
of it in a number of senses. I do not see transcendence and a new forma–
tion but a reversal of the previous formation, which is why I think it's still
appropriate to speak of loss and bereavement. I do not think that post–
modernism stands in relation to modernism as modernism stood in
relation to its past, which was not merely a standing of continuity but a
