Shock seekers.(Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond)(Book review)

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond, by Peter Gay (Norton, 640 pp., $35)

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WHAT is modernism? It is a testimony to the complexity, or possibly to the recalcitrance, of the idea that you come away from the 640 pages of Peter Gay's ambitious inquiry into the subject and are still not sure of the answer. The uncertainty is not, or at least not entirely, Gay's fault. The word covers a multitude of activities, attitudes, accomplishments, and aberrations--and that's just to begin with the A's. Whatever it is, modernism is something more than a merely chronological marker, more than a fancy synonym for "modern." As Gay notes early on, modernism, like pornography, is a phenomenon that is "far easier to exemplify than define." He tells us he toyed with the idea of embracing the "prudential plural"--modernisms--but rejected that pusillanimous alternative. What he is after in this book is not a definition, then, or even a history, but a sort of characterological profile: a dossier of intellectual birth marks that would allow us to identify the "mindset," the climate of aesthetic endeavor, that was recognizably "modernist."

Let me say at the outset that I am not sure that Gay succeeds in providing even this more circumscribed taxonomy. Let me say, too, that this failure scarcely diminishes the pleasure one may take from his book. Now in his mid-80s, the German-born Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale has been providing elegant examples of intellectual history for decades. Admirers of his prolific work on the European Enlightenment will find evidence of that ironically disabused and cosmopolitan spirit here: a scholar who writes well, who has a nose for balderdash, and whose wide appetite for culture makes him an entertaining and informative cicerone no matter what the itinerary. Admirers of Gay's equally prolific work on Freud--who is a presiding deity in this book--will find evidence of that long discipleship here as well. My point is that Modernism: The Lure of Heresy is one of those Big Books whose value is rightly measured less by its success in tackling its announced subject than by the sensibility and intellectual vitality of its author. Gay has supped long and thoughtfully at the table of European culture. Readers may find what he says more or less pertinent to the subject at hand; rarely will they find it dull or uninspiring.

I'll come in a moment to the ways in which I think Gay's characterization of modernism falls short. But let me start with two of his most pregnant insights into the nature of modernism. The first is his counterintuitive emphasis on the fact that modernism, despite its sometimes anti-bourgeois rhetoric, is in fact a deeply bourgeois, which also means a deeply urban, phenomenon, dependent for its values as well as its institutions on the surrounding bourgeois culture that nurtures it through the expediency of irritation and antagonism. That insight will strike many as counterintuitive precisely because of the oppositional posture adopted by many (though hardly all) modernists. Indeed, Gay might profitably have referred to "Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s," a brilliant essay by my colleague Hilton Kramer. Noting the curious "institutionalization of the avant-garde"--curious because the avant-garde had made it a point of pride to rebel against the stricture of institutions--Kramer limned the cultural metabolism that underlay the dialectic of modernism and its aftermath:

 
   Much--if not quite everything--that we continue to esteem in the 
   creative achievements of the last two centuries owes its existence 
   to this curious compact between the bourgeoisie and its licensed 
   opposition. But the dynamism of the avant-garde, with its 
   unremitting appetite for innovation and its steady erosion of 
   established values--including the values established by its own 
   efforts--came in time to exert a powerful control over the very 
   culture it still ostensibly "opposed." So completely did the 
   bourgeois society cede its cultural initiatives to this licensed 
   opposition that the terms of their compact came to be fatefully 
   altered. It was now the avant-garde that dominated cultural 
   life--thus, in effect, ceasing to function as an authentic 
   avant-garde--and the surviving remnants of bourgeois "reaction" 
   that went through the motions of a principled resistance. 

Gay's discussion usefully presupposes the tensions that Kramer describes. If he slights the capitulations that Kramer enumerates, that is largely because he has a broader, less demanding view of what modernism encompasses. A second key insight Gay offers his readers concerns the link between religion--more specifically, the attenuation of religion--and the advent of modernism. Even before 1900, Gay notes, Western culture was entering a "post-Christian era." This situation was discerned by thinkers as different as Friedrich Nietzsche, with his melancholy ...