**9. Double Crisis**

How can we begin to comprehend the historical shape of modernism, if we: (1) hesitate to see it as a literary force that becomes dominant in the early twentieth century, showing signs of exhaustion already in the late 1920s (even if certain signs of its revolution are said to appear as after-effects of one sort or another for a long time); and (2) recognize its longstanding dialogue and struggle with both a stronghold of realist literary paradigms, theoretical activity, and a broader social discourse and symbolic order which services modernity on many fronts? The elasticity of the shape of modernism is indeed precarious, for, to repeat words from Bradbury and McFarlane, cited in the above discussion, "Today it must surely seem to us that the truth lies somewhere between the view that Modernism is the supreme modern expression and the view that it is of marginal importance" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976b, p. 28). Wherever the truth may lie, I would

argue that both these views are still vibrant and very much with us. A grea<sup>t</sup> deal of recent literary activity is grounded on mainstream traditions which seem not to have been seriously shaken by the formal and structural activities or experiments of modernism. In such "stubbornly non-modernistic" literary cultures, modernism may appear to be "of marginal importance".

From the other point of view, someone might argue—along the lines of my previous discussion—that even traditionally minded realist writing has often been more impacted by modernist ideas and activities than first impressions may indicate. A stronger argumen<sup>t</sup> for modernism as a force at centre stage may come from two other sources that have a grea<sup>t</sup> deal to do with the history of modernism: First, while modernism is generally not a popular aesthetic domain, it draws strength from its diverse expressions in different languages and places, and at different times—a strength that manifests itself in translation and other forms of cultural connections. Second, the critical reception of modernism, especially from the mid-twentieth century on, has sometimes pushed modernist writing to the forefront of literary education in several countries, which in turn has strengthened its position in the broader literary "establishment". Variants of this reception can of course be traced to early responses to modernist writing, but it is only in the second half of the twentieth century that they take on the solidity of critical paradigms—which then also played a significant role in the fervent theoretical activity starting in the late 1960s.

The historical positions of modernism do not, therefore, depend solely on its "newness", although the characteristics of radical modern art have sometimes been explained by its "shock" effect on the audience (as in the TV series *The Shock of the New* and synonymous book on modern art by Robert Hughes in 1980). Furthermore, the novelty and experimentation in creative writing and the other arts can only in a limited sense be compared to innovation in science and technology, although art may enter into an intense dialogue with these realms, which have shaped modernity in irrevocable ways. What I have called the narrative crisis of modernism has much to do with the relations between language, narrative, and the reality of modernity—the process of modernization which has provided certain sectors of humanity with prosperity but also enhanced violence, exploitation, and human-caused disasters that transgress the enlightenment, rationalism, and humanism that many have been seen as core elements of progress.

Fredric Jameson finds that modernism in literature is a result or product of a double crisis: a "social crisis of narratable experiences" and a "semiotic crisis of narrative paradigms" (Jameson 1984, p. 211). The two inevitably mesh and are shaped by circumstances that can make it hard to convey historical experiences in traditional narratives. Hayden White argues that although literary modernism appears to show hostility to narrative discourse, it does

not so much reject narrativity, historicity or even realism as explore the limits of their peculiarly nineteenth-century forms and expose the mutual complicity of these forms in the dominant discursive practices of high bourgeois culture. In the process, literary modernism revealed new or forgotten peculiarities of narrative discourse itself, potentialities for rendering intelligible the specifically modern experiences of time, historical consciousness, and social reality. (White 1999, p. 26)

In fact, White goes so far as to say that instead of viewing modernism as "a rejection of the realist project and a denial of history", it can be seen as

an anticipation of a new form of historical reality, a reality that included among its supposedly unimaginable, unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects: the phenomena of Hitlerism, the Final Solution, total war, nuclear contamination, mass starvation, and ecological suicide; a profound sense of the incapacity of our sciences to explain, let alone control or contain these; and a growing awareness of the incapacity of our traditional modes of representation even to describe them adequately." (White 1999, p. 41)

It is often said that language does not fathom major traumas that individuals experience, and White here points to such traumas on a large, historical scale. This may remind us of a significant moment in Hemingway's *A Farewell to Arms* (1929) where language is found to be vacuous, exhausted by the war, especially words describing heroic behaviour: "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. [ ... ] There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity" (Hemingway [1929] 1957, pp. 161–62). The mid-section of Woolf's *To the Lighthouse*, describing the interplay of weather, time, and an empty house waiting for its inhabitants, may bring home a more powerful sense of the first World War than any mimetic rendering of the war itself. Then along comes the Second World War with disasters on a more massive scale. Later still, in Cormac McCarthy's *The Road*, the unspeakable has all but submerged the world and its narrative leverage.

Hayden White's analysis of literary modernism as an endeavour to capture the experience of various extreme predicaments of modernity may certainly account for important aspects of the crises and challenges of modernist narratives. The expressive "trials" of modernism no doubt often spring from attempts to capture experiences felt to exceed the mimetic or descriptive conventions of realist discourse, not only in moments of disaster but also in the details of everyday life as they take on their internalized shapes. Can we read White as saying that literary modernism has shouldered its historical destiny and pushed "classical" realism out of its central role? In an interesting article, the Slovene scholar Jola Škulj refers to White's arguments, discussed above, and concurs, saying: "With modernism, the traditional mode of narrative in literature and in historiography has become inadequate" (Škulj 2006, p. 194). Taken at face value, this comment would seem to indicate that literary modernism is more authentic in grappling with modernity than traditional narrative texts, which might further lead to the assumption that the ruptured and fragmented narrative of modernism does in fact create distinct aesthetic spaces and mobilities.

This in turn brings us back to the alleged "privileged" position of modernism that has come under substantial criticism in recent years. This situation is perhaps best described by words to be found at the end of Guðbergur Bergsson's novel *Anna* (1969): "If the story-line is given a punch, the system goes haywire and turns into multifarious fiction which gets stuck in the chicken brain of the reader" (Bergsson 1969, p. 249, my translation).<sup>12</sup> Like so many raucous statements in Bergsson's works, this one is not as unambiguous as it may seem. Some might take this as a somewhat arrogan<sup>t</sup> statement by a modernist writer, to the effect that disruptive and multifarious fiction—"high" modernism indeed—is only for those who do not have a "chicken brain". From another angle, "the reader" could be anyone, with the implication that we all receive our punches at one time or another and have to cope with storylines being interrupted or severed. As for the history of modernism—perhaps that is a narrative which will remain in constant crisis, as paradoxical as that may sound.

## **10. Modernist Rhizomes and Formations**

It should be obvious from my discussion so far that I am sceptical of ideas of total paradigm shifts in literary history, just as I am sceptical of periodisation in the name of a single concept. We may feel that we need specific concepts to pinpoint and outline various features of the literary landscape in the second half of the twentieth century, but it seems constrictive to do so without accounting for both realism and modernism as salient forces of literary culture and aesthetics, advancing through the Second World War and the Cold War, up to and into a new century.

Moreover, as noted earlier, modernism is in significant ways shaped by its reception and construction in the post-WWII period—I would hazard to say that it is only then that it assumes, in certain areas, the kind of "dominance" some claim it had in the early decades of the century. Moreover, if Bradbury and McFarlane are correct in say-

<sup>12</sup> "Sé söguþræðinum gefið á hann, ruglast kerfið og snýst í margbrotinn skáldskap, sem stendur fastur í hænuhaus lesandans."

ing that modernism is an art "that responds to the scenario of our chaos", driven by "a notion of a relationship of crisis between art and history", and in no small part by a recognition of the First World War "as the apocalyptic moment of transition into the new" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976b, pp. 27, 29, 51), then one cannot but wonder about the significance of the Second World War for both the reception of earlier modernism and the activity of writers who pursued work in this vein after another apocalypse had struck. This second moment of transition into "the new" brought us the Holocaust (after a rapid breakdown of democracy in Germany), the devastation of cities through fire bombing, and finally the use of the atom bomb (which opened up a whole new dimension of what "total war" could mean). The role of the Second World War for modernism and its history has been underestimated.

This takes us back to Auerbach who in writing about modernism of the 1920s can also be seen as responding to the scene of chaos which he watched from his exile—such displacement being in itself a chaotic and estranging experience. The same is true of Mann's *Doktor Faustus*, and there is little doubt that the insightful analyses of modernism we find in the writings of Adorno are also shaped by exile and WWII, and the course of events leading up to it. In its aftermath, modernism takes on a renewed urgency, even if combined with new ironic edges, whether we find these in the persistence of avant-garde experiments or in a playful or sardonic self-awareness of narrative reoccurrences. The modernist scene in the post-WWII period was to some extent a complex meeting place of "old" and new modernisms. For instance, while several works of Kafka had been translated into a number of languages by the late 1930s, his presence as a key European writer only began to be seriously felt in the post-WW II era, when the impact of his oeuvre is contemporaneous with the writings of authors such as Camus, Borges, Celan, Grass, Sarraute, Nabokov, and Lispector—and the charged but slippery affinity between Kafka and Beckett is important for the long view of modernism.

During this period, it also becomes doubly obvious how frequently the aesthetic ventures of modernism tend to involve the predicaments of displacement as well as the meeting or clashing of different worlds—whether in terms of culture or subjectivity. This is true of Kafka, Joyce, Stein, and Pound, and also of Celan, Nabokov, Nelly Sachs, Salman Rushdie, and Herta Müller—to move right up to the present. There is an internal restlessness in many modernist works, although it can also morph into a kind of stasis which can be hard to pinpoint in place and time, although sometimes it seems akin to exile (see Olsson 2007).

However, such speculations about modernism before and after the world-altering events of WWII also make one conscious, as pointed out above, of the ways in which modernist works and ideas about modernism have themselves travelled between languages and cultures. Documented literary history has always been full of missing pieces or blind spots, even large, eclipsed territories, vis-à-vis the historical scene of literary culture and productivity. Nowhere more so than in the realm of cross-cultural relations, as they materialise in translated literature and in original writings about foreign culture—which are also acts of translation, in a looser or broader sense of the word (see Caneda-Cabrera 2007). Insofar as modernist writing constitutes a challenge to prevalent traditions—and even broadly to *culture as tradition*—its international dissemination in the form of translation and critical dialogue constitutes a terrain full of interesting stories and points of contact, resistance, and renegotiation of the new, the foreign, and the native.

What happened, for instance, to modernism in the Nordic world after Strindberg had made his international breakthrough in or around 1890 and moved into the new century with even more radical experiments, notably with *Ett drömspel* (A Dream Play) which was published in 1902 and first performed in Stockholm in 1907? Was modernism subsequently lulled back to sleep in the North? About a hundred years later, or from about 1999 to 2014, I was involved with a research group from six Nordic countries, focusing—at conferences and in various publications—on the routes, reception, and local manifestations of modernism from Finland to Iceland, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the

Faroe Islands (see for instance Tysdahl et al. 2002; Jansson et al. 2004; Jansson et al. 2008; and Lothe et al. 2014). There is little doubt that modernism took root early on in these countries, in some form or another. For quite some time there were very few contiguous formations of this kind, but rhizomatic activity was confirmed in a number of individual endeavours, such as the Danish poet Johannes V. Jensen's book *Digte* (Poems) in 1906, while a number of years elapsed before a major modernist breakthrough in the Danish novel materialized in Tom Kristensen's *Hærverk* (Havoc) in 1930. Around the same time, in the early 1930s, the Finnish writer Volter Kilpi brings out structurally innovative novels, akin to those of Joyce and Proust. By that time the Icelandic writers Halldór Laxness, with the novel *Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír* (The Great Weaver of Kashmir 1927), and Þórbergur Þórðarson, with his multi-genre prose work *Bréf til Láru* (Letter to Laura 1924), had also challenged the development of the realist novel. In the Norwegian novel, there is also a time lag between the modernist stirrings in Hamsun's *Hunger* of 1890 and the contributions of novelists Cora Sandel, Aksel Sandemose, and Sigurd Hoel in the second quarter of the 20th Century. Hoel was an early admirer of Kafka and instrumental in getting *Der Prozess* (The Trial) translated into Norwegian in 1933, the first translation of the novel to come out in any language. Hoel was himself a translator of Conrad and Faulkner. Thus, a modernist web begins to emerge through the intertwining of original writing, translation, and critical reception, and after another time lag due to WWII and the German occupation of Norway, a new modernist wave is brought into motion, notably in Tarjei Vesaas' novels of the 1950s and 1960s (see Lothe and Tysdahl 2007, p. 865).

There is, however, one significant Nordic modernist "formation" in the early decades of the twentieth century, one that is in itself cross-cultural, since the group in question belonged to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland: Edith Södergran, Elmer Diktonius, Gunnar Björling, and Rabbe Enckell "formed a modernist front from 1916, the year of Södergran's debut, until around 1930, when the group gradually disintegrated" (Jansson 2007, p. 838). By that time other modernist poets were emerging on the scene, most visibly in Sweden, where throughout the 1930s, a modernist network of modernism was gradually assembled, especially in the domain of poetry. There, and in fact throughout the Nordic domain, the impact of Södergran and her colleagues is quite perceptible—in Iceland as late as around 1950, when modernist poetry finally made a breakthrough there. However, this impact was everywhere intermingled with other impulses, coming for instance, via translation and critical debates, from T.S. Eliot and the French surrealists. Eliot's poetry, especially *The Waste Land*, had a significant impact on Nordic poetry, but it did so in multifarious company with other modernist works, both local and foreign. In the realm of fiction, the significance of translation and of the critical discussion of foreign literature is striking, in the midst of a local scene that is going through a transition, fast or slow. The Swedish writer Karl Vennberg, an important poet in his own right, writes critical essays about Kafka and translates Kafka's *Der Prozess* in 1945. In 1946, Thomas Warburton's Swedish translation of Joyce's *Ulysses* is published in Stockholm and Helsinki. Thus, in the post-WWII era, Kafka and Joyce assume roles that are both new and iterative.

By that time, the Swedish "literary institution" is on its way to becoming "decidedly pro-modernist"—one can only wonder if that could be said of any broad-based literary institution in any other language community before 1950. Which means of course that neoavant-groups would soon start questioning the status of "high modernism" (Jansson 2007, pp. 842–45). This is one of the ways in which modernism regenerates itself, as it has done ever since in the Nordic countries, in fertile co-existence and struggle with other currents. It is shaped not by or during a single continuous period, but by various and not always easily visible laws of timeliness, anachronism, and displacement. Furthermore, it can take a long time coming. When I started translating the works of Kafka into Icelandic in the early 1980s, along with my father (yes, a somewhat ironic arrangemen<sup>t</sup> in the case of Kafka), only the novella "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis") and a few other short stories had appeared in Icelandic, even though modernism had made its initial breakthrough in Icelandic prose literature some time ago. We were driven by our interest in Kafka but

also by our awareness of the lasting impact of modernism, its ways of reinventing itself, through both original writing and translation. Therefore, we found it relevant to bring the works of Kafka, that master of warped selves and fragmented texts (or was it the other way round?), into the Icelandic language. We gradually translated most of Kafka's narrative corpus, with the longest novel, *Das Schloß*, not appearing in Icelandic until 2015. *The Castle* in 2015—that must be "late modernism", if ever there was one. However, K., the lonesome traveller, is still as perplexed and arrogan<sup>t</sup> as ever, as he stands on the wooden bridge leading to the village and looks up into the void that appears to be there.

Much remains to be learned from translation and other cultural contacts in the realm of modernist research, and this is a branch of scholarship that seems bound to grow and prosper, considering that in the past two decades, modernist studies have sought to expand their international horizon. Since I can only touch very briefly on this development, I shall restrict my attention to a few projects that can be said to have followed in Bradbury and McFarlane's footsteps in bringing together a team of scholars exploring literary modernism as a cross-cultural and multilingual phenomenon. These new endeavours have also sought to move out the borders of modernism, both geographically and chronologically, as well as conceptually.

Some years ago, I co-edited, with Vivian Liska, a two-volume symposium on modernism brought out by the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) as part of its series *Comparative History of Literature in European Languages.* It involved close to 70 contributors in various countries working on a project that revolved around a single concept—a daunting and fascinating task, especially since this concept does not have a narrowly defined realm of meaning even though it serves a key role in designating major currents of ideas and aesthetic practice (Eysteinsson and Liska 2007). The concept could be said to constitute a forum capable of embracing considerable critical and theoretical disagreements, but it also needs some framework to insure stability and functionality—its sheer usefulness.

While such a large collaborative project is in progress, one has a strong sense of both the constraints and the mobility of the borders of modernism. The ICLA *Modernism* symposium takes a long historical view of modernism and addresses its topics through a broad range of theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches. It is based in part on the premise that modernism is a salient current in modern literature, one in which the avant-garde plays a significant part, but it is not presented as an overarching or dominant paradigm of twentieth-century literature. Its geographical reach is different here and more diverse than in Bradbury and McFarlane's book, and wider in that it includes for instance case studies on Latin America and Australia, as well as for instance Western literary connections with Africa and Japan. However, it does not have the global or planetary aspirations which were on the rise at the time in modernist studies, concomitantly with an equally interesting resurgence of *world literature* as a sphere of scholarship.

The global turn in modernist studies has been signalled by a number of important publications, including the volume *Geomodernisms* (Doyle and Winkiel 2005), and two large Oxford University Press volumes, *The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms* (2010) and *The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms* (2012). In these symposia, the literary world can certainly be said to emerge as a modernist stage, and this has opened up the question of modernism for a whole new inquiry. What happens to modernism as concept and designation when it is used as a key term in such planetary mapping enterprises? Ideally, it will enter a forum for various comparative explorations in world literature, but hardly in order for us to find semblances of it elsewhere. Although modernism became a significant and challenging force in Western urban centres, usually emerging a little later in more "outlying" territories—sometimes with a time lag which might entail enrichment rather than belatedness—it is obvious that it cannot, as such, serve as any kind of measuring stick on a world-wide scale. On the other hand, this does not mean we can, in broad, global contexts, ignore modernism as a historical and aesthetic concept and the roles it has played where it has proven to be relevant.

Moreover, it is one thing to be critical of modernist aesthetics and another to make it a scapegoa<sup>t</sup> for Western blindness, due to "privileges" it may enjoy. Morag Shiach has stated that scholarly discourse about modernism has "tended to iron out the complexity of competing styles at any given historical moment in favour of a map which identifies particular form of artistic experimentation as more truly expressive of their moment" (Shiach 2004, p. 135; cited in Brooker et al. 2010, p. 5).

If this is so—and I agree that this is sometimes the case—then it seems to me that the strongest response to such simplification is a critical reassessment of the complexity and validity of these competing styles, which may not have been acknowledged on their own terms. Such a move would potentially augmen<sup>t</sup> the critical discussion about the varieties of modern literary currents, forms, and methods, and the ways in which they interact. Some may have felt that this was impossible, given the strong status of modernism within parts of the literary culture, especially within the universities. For a while postmodernism appeared to have undermined this "regime". However, modernism made a comeback—fired up by new approaches and the "new modernisms"—and may by now have swallowed up much of the difference that had been claimed on behalf of after-modernisms (both "post" and "late"). Nevertheless, one should not, in seeking to understand its renewal, ignore historical factors, some of which I have sought to touch on in this essay. How then, one may ask, do we distinguish between the history that we seek to grapple with through sign systems like literature, and the history of these sign systems, including the history of certain perceptible currents, and the history of the concepts identifying these currents? In a 1992 essay, surveying the state of affairs in modernist studies, Marjorie Perloff noted memorably that modernism "after all, now has the charm of history on its side, even as it remains, at the end of the twentieth century, our Primal Scene" (Perloff 1992, p. 175).

Which history is Perloff talking about? Does the primal scene involve the potentially traumatic meeting of history and art, during which history brings along not only its charm but also its brutal force? However, the charm of history could also refer to the formal endeavours modernism has pursued in coping with experiences that are not easily put into words. Can aesthetic form meet the force of historical moments? Alternatively, can the disrupted or "troubled" referentiality of modernist works be critically (and justifiably) whittled down to "form" in a narrow and negative sense of "formalism"?

Concomitantly, one cannot bypass the history of the concept of modernism and of what we call "modernist studies". I do not think anyone who has worked intensely in modernist studies in recent decades can deny that significant *value*—in more than one sense of that word—has been amassed in the name of modernism. As a term for aesthetic activities that have both highlighted and frustrated our notions of modernity, modernism has been a significant academic preoccupation for quite some time, and it is probably safe to say that it has acquired a fair amount of cultural capital. It is a concept in which literary, critical, and academic establishments have invested heavily, as have a grea<sup>t</sup> many researchers, teachers, and authors of academic and other critical writings. This value comes from a claim, in the name of modernism, to a radical cultural grasp on the modern world, based in aesthetic responses to the scene of modernity—and here, again, we may perhaps spot the "primal scene". However, if critics claim that modernism "responds to the scenario of our chaos" or that it works—significantly also in its formal inventiveness—through moments of crisis in both history and subjective realms, then all such evaluation contributes to this "value". This also explains, in part, the privileges modernism is found to enjoy and the "authenticity" sometimes ascribed to it. The strong position of modernism, as a literary "institution", also and in no small part, stems from individual writers who have come to be seen as the prominent figures of this current; the creators of literary works on which modernism thrives as an enterprise and a concept. Many of these names are well known and come immediately to mind. Here, as elsewhere, for better or worse, the canon holds sway, although it is not immutable.

One way to respond to the power of such an institution, instead of labouring to reassess the "competing styles", as I suggested earlier—especially perhaps the sleeping giant of realism as a concept—is to step inside this privileged sphere and push out its borders, making the critical and aesthetic space linked to modernism more and more inclusive, and thus gradually change the game. At the risk of grossly simplifying a complicated process, I would sugges<sup>t</sup> that this is an important and interesting factor in some recent modernist studies. The editor of *The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms*, Mark Wollaeger, discusses in his concise introduction the difference between the terms "modern" and "modernist", noting candidly that in the recent approaches of several scholars this difference is fading, and he refers to Neil Lazarus's view that modernism is not tied to any specifications of form and that "any cultural production that attempts to grapple with the realities of modernization might qualify as modernist" (Wollaeger 2012, pp. 11, 14).

If, in the process of modernism's global conquest, the difference between *modernism* and *modern*—the crevice we saw turn into a canyon in Bradbury and McFarlane's essay discussed above—has not only turned to crevice again but has in fact disappeared, we do indeed have a crisis in the narratives that constitute the history of modernism. Perhaps it simply flatlines, as the air is let out of not only "form" but also "difference", that darling term of much modern scholarship. We would then presumably use "modernist" and "modernisms" for any kind of modern literary (or aesthetic) expression. Arnold Bennett, John Steinbeck, and Jonathan Franzen would be as modernist as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Toni Morrison. We might as well then just use the word "modern—unless all these writers, along with many others, are modernists because they all "grapple with the realities of modernization", whereas there may be others who do not. That potential distinction might seem to open up a strangely familiar Pandora's box, but we probably have enough to cope with as is—since while the borders of modernism may be both moving out and fading as we speak, various aspects of the modernist crisis that Auerbach called our attention to still seem to be in full force—primal scene or not. Before we ultimately conflate "modern" and "modernist", there are still issues to contemplate and discuss. Given world enough and time.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
