Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

 
George Szirtes writes of the connections between artistic form and political content:

"The normally unquestioned assumption is that Modernism is a left wing movement. One assumes that, rightly, of the Constructivists and to some extent of the Bauhaus. We know that the Viennese architect Adolf Loos wanted to do away with all ornament, primarily because ornament was bourgeois. We know that pitched roofs were regarded as emblems of crowns and therefore as ideologically unsound. The bourgeois were the enemy. They were conservative and stodgy and repressive. Any opposition to them might be thought to be left wing. To manufacture mass-produced objects for the masses was forward-thinking, egalitarian and honest.

In the previous century, William Morris, a socialist, was certainly not against ornament, nor was he bourgeois. Unlike the Modernists-to-come he was in revolt against mass production, chiefly because it tried to replicate craftsmanship. He thought the work of human hands working with natural forms was the right expression of the socialist ideal. Natural form, however, was anathema to most Modernist architects. For them geometry and logic were better. What they desired was clarity, light and a certain moral astringency... The proper question I want to raise - or rather begin to raise - is whether specific forms embody specific ideologies. Was the architecture of Italian Fascism, or the movement-through-planes of Futurism formally so different from works by left wing contemporaries?

The problem with formal pattern was that it was associated with the wrong things. The Imagists talked of not composing according to the metronome. It was the metronome and all it entailed - the forms of rhetoric it conjured - that was, briefly, the enemy. It is interesting that while some poets, some of the time, seemed to be freeing themselves of mathematical patterns, the modernist architects were developing new, ever stricter formal equations. Nor is there any lack of strictness in twelve-tone serial music. It is only fairly recently that people have suggested that formal verse was an expression of repressive, authoritarian, right-wing, imperialist, proto-fascist politics.

There is no serious poet in the world who has not learned from Modernism. I have learned almost everything I know from it. But what he or she has learned is less to do with rhyme or metre or stanza than with narrative. That, in turn, has been informed as much by cinema as by literature. Cinematic narrative is now often more complex than literary fiction. Its language of hint, enigma, fracture, return, inconclusiveness, doubt and complex register are part of the mainstream audience's field of expectation. They are so in poetry too. Nevertheless movies are not formless, not without rhythm, stanza and rhyme, or rather, their cinematic equivalents."


There's something about this that rather reminds me of Thomas Mann's decision to base the Nietzchean protagonist of Doctor Faustus on Schoenberg, Mann’s friend and fellow artist in exile instead of a Nazi fellow traveller like Richard Strauss. The cult of the kulturnation Nazi aestheticisation of politics seemed to demand a figure like Schoenberg, whose declaration that his system would "ensure the hegemony of German music for the next hundred years" seems an inevitable corollary of the thousand year Reich and Speer's theory of ruin value. In practice though, such distinctions are nearly impossible to draw; Mann's choice of favourite composer was the same as that made by Hitler: Richard Wagner. In terms of literature, similar problems apply. The Marxist critic Georg Lukacs argued that the novel was a form of bourgeois epic wherein a form of 'problematic individual' must emerge as self and society were forced apart by capitalism. It's a description that works well for much of the history of the novel from Defoe to Eliot. With that said, I found it a little too easy to read this as a valedictory narrative and to decenter the endorsement of Scott and Balzac's aristocratic critiques of the bourgeoisie. At that point, Lukacs becomes much more congenial to an alternative account of the novel, that of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin sees the novel as inherently contesting totalitarian ideologies, such as communism. Bakhtin characterises the novelistic form, exemplified for him by Dostoevksy, as polyphonic, its language as heteroglossic and dialogic, incapable of rendering a single meaning. The most interesting aspect of Bakhtin's work is that it essentially rests on aspects of the history of the novel rather than on imputed metaphysical or formal characteristics (occasionally in contradiction to some of Bakthin's rather Derridean statements); novels are not inevitably polyphonic but it does represent a significant strand of the novel's lineage. I think this is why I always found it one of the most convincing analyses of the political aspects of genre.

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posted by Richard 8:15 pm