The Difculties of Modernism

Leonard Diepeveen

Randall Jarrell outlines could be sketched with precision:
That the poetry of the rst half of this century was too difcult just as the poetry of the eighteenth
century was full of antitheses, that of the metaphysicals full of conceits, that of the Elizabethan
dramatists full of rant and quibbles is a truism that it would be absurd to deny. How our poetry
got this way how romanticism was puried and exaggerated and corrected into modernism;
how poets carried all possible tendencies to their limits, with more than scientic zeal; how the
dramatic monologue, which one had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm
of poetry, now became in one form or another the norm; how poet and public stared at each other
with righteous indignation, till the poet said: Since you won"t read me, I"ll make sure you can"t
is one of the most complicated and interesting of stories.
The Difculties of Modernism, from its denitons on up, stays close to this sense of
difculty as an experience. It denes difculty in terms of how modern readers understood
and used it: as a barrier to what one normally expected to receive from a text, such as its
logical meaning, its emotional expression, or its pleasure. For moderns readers, difculty
was the experience of having one"s desires for comprehension blocked, an experience
provoked by a wide variety of works of art (comprehension is here dened broadly).
Without dealing with this barrier in some way and such dealings were not restricted to
understanding or decoding the syntax of the difcult moment it was impossible to
interact signicantly with the text. Difculty thus drove its readers forward, for they realized
that their bafement was an inadequate response. Further, until they removed or
contained their bafement, readers overwhelmingly reacted with anxiety. Modernism"s
difculty solely as the property of texts is to impoverish it and miss how difculty became
an integral part of haigh culture. Difculty must be understood in terms of reading process,
and it manifests itself socially; modernism begins with a typical interaction between art and
its audience. Difculty, this book argues, is that recurring relationship that came into being
between modernist works and their audiences.
Two central claims about difculty shaped its social articulation. First, literary
modernism"s rst readers often asserted that difculty"s prevalence was unique to
modernism, frequently commenting that difculty currently was, as one reader grumbled,
running rampant in literature. Difculty, in fact, was the most noted characteristic of what
became the canonical texts of high modernism; it dramatically shaped the reception of
Faulkner, Joyce, Stein, Moore, Eliot, Pound, and Woolf, just to name those who early were
considered to be central modernist writers. Now, it"s not that people thought difculty had
never before surfaced in literature. However, there was a general sense that this was the
rst time in history that difculty was so widespread, and that modernism was unique in
that its difculty was seen as being the central to art"s direction. Second, modern difculty
made big claims for itself. T.S. Eliot, for example, would claim that it appears likely that
poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difcult. Our civilization
comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a
rened sensibility, must produce various and complex results.
Difculty thus was central to people"s sense that modernism was a sea change
not just in the properties of art works, but in the default and most useful ways of talking
about and interacting with art. Modernism"s difculty set up the terms and protocols by
which readers read and gained access to modernist texts, and it became a litmus test: one
could predict both a given reader"s response to modernism by his or her reaction to
difculty, and a writers place in the canon by the difculty of his or her work. Modern
difculty was a powerful aesthetic, then. It also continues to be one, for aesthetic difculty
retains its legitimizing force today. Modern difculty has profoundly shaped the entire
twentieth century; one"s ability to move in high culture continues to depend, in large part,
on how one reacts to difculty.
Focusing primarily on literature, this book examines what followed from the mometn
when modernism"s readers began to comment that difculty was everywhere. Why did
difcult writing produce such anxiety? In what ways did difcult works contest traditional
understandings of pleasure? How did the argument over difculty shape what became the
high modern canon? How much do modern understandings of difculty shape
contemporary culture? Answering these questions is crucial to understanding not only
difcult literature, but the relationship between all forms of high art and culture in the past
century, for the major arguments about literary difculty travel unchanged to other arts,
using the same rethorical tropes, describing the same kind of experiences.
The argument about difculty can more protably be undestood as a kind of game,
a game with alimited number of rhetorical counters but a geat variety of combinations. This
book reveals what those counters were, the standard ways in which they were moved, and
their conseguences. The Difculties of Modernism thus is, in a sense, a social rhetoric of
difculty: rhetoric, because it is concerned with recurrent linguistic strategies, and social
because these strategies occurred within a social domain and were profoundly implicated
in it.
The sketchiness yet preponderance of arguments about difculty, the stylized
reactions to it, along with the breadth of my research have led me to analyze the work
performed by typical descriptions of difculty. Since what is typical in modernism drives my
argument, modernism"s understandings of difculty set the agenda for how I discuss
accounts of difculty from before the twentieth century (not that I believe that modernism"s
understandins were always right). As a consequence, though there are many moments in
the book where I point to earlier understandings of difculty, The Difculties of Modernism
does not give a time line. It does not begin with Aristotle, move through Dante, Kant, and
Hegel, and then onward toward early modernism. It is not that these earlier moments are
irrelevant to modernism"s difculty, but a writer like Aristotle shows up where he impinges
most clearly on modernism"s peculiar difculties; this book addresses how difcult
modernism put Aristotle to use.
This book limits its attention to Anglo-American culture during the years 1910 to
1950, setting the parameters of analysis at the beginning of the twentieth century and at
midcentury. The chronological range is pragmatic: beginning in the second decade of the
twentieth century one starts to hear the complaint that difculty is everywhere. Earlier, and
in the previous century (except, possibly, in painting), comments about difculty are
directed as individuals, such as George Meredith or Joseph Conrad. Around 1915 difculty
starts to be discussed as a movement, and a large movement indeed, for readers begin to
comment on how difculty had overtaken all the arts. By 1950, a fairly impermeable canon
of high modernism had been established in the university curriculum. And that general
sese of modernism is the one that functions as my denition. It is the idea of modernism
that typically was promoted in English departments from the mid-1940s to the mid 1970s,
modernism with a capital M: portentous, asserting a unity for itself, and claiming privileged
status to speak about early twentieth-century culture.
High modernism!s skeptics thought it was destroying literature, even
civilization; while modernism!s apologists made big claims for difculty, arguing
that difculty had important things to say about modern culture or human
psychology.
Some arguments for difculty!s apology: is inevitable domain of the
professional; accurately portrays the human mind or modern culture; is an agent for
social change; new works are difcult and difculty will disappear as difcult work
becomes a classic; apparently difcult is actually simple; is essential to all great art.
(These arguments did not march along in a triumph of efcient logic. Instead, they
were driven by an inner conict, a conict that on the one hand grounded difculty
in a professionalist/classic ethos, and on the other hand kept nervously reaching
back to romanticis ideals of aesthetic expression, including the sublime.)
What modernism!s defenders did not clearly acknowledge, but which is
central to understanding how difculty worked in modern culture, is that difculty
had an important social function as a cultural gatekeeper. Knowing how to respond
properly to difcult art became a way of indicating one!s membership in high
culture. High culture eventually accepted this social function so completely that it
was possible for it to do its work in the background. This acceptance has everything
to do with how we go where we are today, and where that where we are actually is.
Modernism was formed on an aesthetics of difculty; since that time high culture
has been living off of a modernist inheritance. Unless we reexamine that allegiance
and the ways in which it continues to control contemporary culture, we are doomed
to accept its benets and its costs.
The story"s satire, of course, exaggerates reality, but in order for his gags to work, Squire
depended on people recognizing the ways in which difculty accompanied by its social
nuances permeated modern culture. Modern difculty, in fact, was a parodist"s dream.
One did not have to agree with Squire"s take on difculty to recognize that his satire was
pointing to the real world. While not everyone agreed, for example, that modernism was
decadent or that it reveled in scandalizing the general public, everyone recognized that
questions about scandal, decadence, marketing, and elitism shaped the public debate
about modernism"s difculty. Many of Squire"s readers would further agree with Squire that
these questions shaped modernism so profoundly, in fact, that they had destabilized
literary production, creating the social conditions that made a successful hoax (chiste)
plausible.
Squire"s story has more ambition than its light tone suggests. In using difculty as
its springborad, The Man Who Wrote Free Verse not only pillories aspects of modernism
that the London Mercury"s readers recognized, in doing so it addresses the social and
textual conditions that in fact were central to modernism"s formation. Squire"s story shows
that one can recognize difculty not just by looking at a text"s properties, but also by
looking at what accompanies those properties, how those properties enter social
discourse. Difculty is a social situation: it is produced by certain kinds of people and
received favorably by other identiable groups. Turning to the advanced circles that
produce and celebrate difculty, Squire repeatedly jabs at the kinds of people
professionalism attracts, as well as central presuppositions of aesthetic professionalism:
its belief that a work"s aesthetic value depends upon its importance or its status as a
development of some aesthetic concern as well as the idea that art should reect the
radical newness of modern life. And, while Squire ridicules difculty as the latest literary
fashion, the equivalent of wide (or, perhaps, narrow) neckties, he also implies that it is
more insidious than a change in clothes, for, as Eliot"s epigraph to this chapter shows,
difculty makes big claims for itself. Squire notes these big claims by repeatedly referring
to those who write and value difculty as being advanced and through quoting their
jargon. Squire also attacks the professionalized elitism of modern literature (an elitism
different from Reggie and Adrian"s class-based elitism, which is a social snobbery the story
also lampoons, though with a lighter touch). He satirizes how this coterie of professionals
is self-serving and self-congratulatory, and how it ignores, or worse, abuses, the common
reader. The story repeatedly claims an entangled relationship between modern writing and
politics, not only through its potshots at Marxism (which near the story"s end are
accompanied by a startling whiff of anti-Semitism), but also with the American bookseller"s
capitalist venture. Through his portrayal of the radical elite and its mania for the latest
literary fashion, Squire lampoons what he sees as modernism"s decadence, a decadence
brought to life by modernism"s acrid mixture of pseudo-intellectualism, effete
unnaturalness, and overbearing women.
Thus, the great crime of modernism, according to Squire, is that it is self-serving
and driven by social forces such as fashion, publicity and marketing. But Squire"s story
goes further; it suggests that understanding how difculty works, and knowing what
attitude to adopt when confronted with difcult work is a ticket of entry into high culture. If
you don"t know what to do with Mammon Fox-Trot, you don"t get invited to the luncheon. In
asserting this, Squire also recognizes that a primary effect of difculty is anxiety for the
uninitiated. All this, according to Squire, shapes the context and texts of modernism, and
all of this is what"s wrong with it. Squire"s story, then, contains almost all the major issues
that accompanied or even drove the construction of modernism. But what is striking about
this list is that Squire chooses difculty as the vehicle to foreground these issues. Difculty
does a lot of work in The Man Who Wrote Free Vers, as it did in modernism itself.
Directly opposing these kinds of sentiments was John Middleton Murry, husband of
Katherine Manseld and editor of the journal Athenaeum, in whose pages he regularly
attacked Georgian writing. After attending a lecture by Eliot, Murry, undoubtedly agreeing
with Pound"s description of Waugh"s writing as senile slobber (Pound [1917] 1922, 77),
wxultingly described the two encamped armies that had gathered at the talk: The anti-
Athenaeums Munro [sic], Jack Squire etc present in force. There"s no doubt it"s a ght
to nish between us & Them them is the #Georgians" en masse. It"s a queer feeling I
begin to have now: that we"re making literary history. But I believe we are going to. More
than that, in spite of the London Mercury and all its money and rclame, I believe we"ve
got them on the run. They"re afraid (Murry [29 October 1919] 1983, 199).
Murry"s dramatization may be overdone, but it is typical. For many involved in
forming the modern canon, the issues were sharply dened, and there clearly was a public
battle going on. It was a battle between those who saw themselves as serious artists, who
realized that the unique conditions of modern life demanded cultural artifacts uniquely
shaped by those conditions represented by the proponents of difcult modernism on
one side. On the other side were those who considered themselves as the defenders of
traditon, who thought that modern art had abandoned the universal qualities of great art
represented by Squire and others. It was a battle with high stakes, a battle in which
difculty, wielded more like a broad-ax than a scalpel, was the main weapon.
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