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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Other pieces dazzle with their mad showmanship. "The Trumpet of the Martians," by the Russian futurist Victor Khlebnikov and others, resembles something Heidegger might have written if he had dropped acid while watching "The War of the Worlds" after reading Ayn Rand:
"People of Earth, hear this! The human brain has been hopping around on three legs (the three axes of location!) We intend to refurrow the human brain and to give this puppy dog a fourth leg -- namely, the axis of TIME.
Poor lame puppy! Your obscene barking will no longer grate on our ears! [...]
Are we not gods? And are we not unprecedented in this: our steadfast betrayal of our own past, just as it barely reaches the age of victory, and our steadfast rage, raised above the planet like a hammer whose time has come? Planet Earth begins to shake already at the heavy tread of our feet!
Boom, you black sails of time!
And then there are statements that are simply, utterly weird. Here is the futurist Carlo Carra (before he met de Chirico and went metaphysical) waxing synaesthetic with psychotic precision on the colors that belong to various sounds and smells: "In railway stations and garages, and throughout the mechanical or sporting world, noises and smells are predominantly red; in restaurants and cafes they are silver, yellow and violet. While the sounds of animals are yellow and blue, those of a woman are green, blue and violet." Paging Oliver Sacks!
As Caws notes, the categories and labels attached to modernism are notoriously imprecise, and there's inevitably a fair amount of overlap and blurriness: "Expressionism" and "futurism," for example, include so many national variations as to be virtually meaningless terms. But Caws also introduces some confusion by including some "isms," like Primitivism and Individualism, that are not movements at all, but simply artistic tendencies or intellectual themes. She even makes up a category she calls "Thingism."
This editorial approach muddies the waters, but it does allow her to include essays that otherwise wouldn't have made the cut. A dubious, overly broad category titled "Nativism" gives Caws the opportunity to include superb essays by Marsden Hartley and Eudora Welty (although Caws also exhumes D.H. Lawrence's over-anthologized "The Spirit of Place.") The made-up "Thingism" makes room for a piece wonderfully titled "The Philosophy of Furniture" by that noted avant-garde theorist, Edgar Allan Poe. (Alas, the title is more interesting than Poe's essay.) In another place, Caws shoehorns Yeats into her chapter on symbolism. This is a stretch at best -- Yeats was beyond category -- but since it allows Caws to include a stunning excerpt from "Anima Hominis," who cares?
The fact that Caws essentially opens the field to all comers by including loose and baggy categories like "Individualism" and "Nativism," and essays that have little to do with art or aesthetics, invites the reader to second-guess her choices. Caws says that on principle she ruled out secondary, merely critical selections: the manifestos and statements included had to be "written by a practitioner of the particular art movement." But this artists-only rule is not absolutely enforced. And since the French feminists Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement are allowed in, why not a critic of much greater stature, Walter Benjamin, whose "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was a far more influential 20th century text than their "Sorties"? Or T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"? Or Roland Barthes' "Writing Degree Zero"? Or Alain Robbe-Grillet's "For a New Novel"? Or even Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp"? (Presumably, Cixous and Clement got in because the moralistic, feminist strain in their essay makes it more "manifesto-like" than the alternatives cited, which are mere lit-crit.) Other possible candidates include Evgeni Zamyatin's 1924 manifesto "On literature, revolution and entropy," Tom Wolfe's recent call for realism, one of Henry Miller's wild solos on literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's post-structuralist rantings, the cut-up theories of William S. Burroughs, a doctored Situationist comic strip, and one of the Fluxus or Happenings manifestos.
One could also question the high-cultural bias of Caws' selections. If, as Robert Hughes and many others have argued, mass media has replaced the fine arts as our culture's dominant force, one could make a case, as Greil Marcus implicitly did in "Lipstick Traces," that the true manifestos of our time are not documents by highbrow poets with academic sinecures but three-minute songs by angry, drug-addled punks. The Sex Pistols undoubtably changed the world more than the Language poets -- why isn't "God Save the Queen" in here?
A deeper problem -- though one that is to a large degree beyond Caws' control -- is the fact that, like modernism itself, "Manifestos" gets less interesting as it goes along. The last quarter or so of the book, after the chapter on surrealism, is far weaker than the earlier part. With a few minor exceptions like lettrism, after surrealism modernism simply didn't offer any more significant formal innovations (or, more to the point, chest-pounding bombast), and so the book simply runs slowly out of steam. The categories become ever more watery and eclectic: Does Whitman's "Song of Myself" really need to be in here? Does a category called "Individualism" mean anything? One chapter, "Thresholds," seems a perfunctory sop to bien-pensant academic trends.
The last cohesive modernist movement featured in the book is language poetry, a heavily theorized, frequently unreadable postmodern school celebrated in academia. In her introduction, Caws notes that "If the Postmodernist manifesto shrugs off [Modernist] nostalgia, it has often a kind of dryness that undoes its energy": her words certainly apply, not just to the language poets but to many of book's more contemporary manifestos.
Why is this? What's at issue is not just the status of postmodernism, but that of modernism itself. Is postmodernism a vital part of the great modernist tradition of rebellion and formal innovation, and thus worthy of inclusion in a book that confers upon it, by association, the heroic mantle of its predecessors? Is it merely a cul-de-sac, the playing-out of a dead end within modernism? Or was modernism a glorious but one-time-only explosion that has now exhausted itself, rendering futile all attempts to continue working in the same radically exploratory vein?
