**2. Crossing Borders**

Auerbach wrote *Mimesis* in a city loaded with history, a place which has often constituted crossroads of cultural worlds in dialogue or conflict—and still does. From his desk in Istanbul, he cast a glance over the history of Western narrative art, drawing on a selection of works that, from our contemporary point of view, might strike some as "Eurocentric", to use a blame word which often is wielded with scant qualification of its reach. Perhaps I, from my desk in Reykjavík—which like Istanbul can be seen as one of the edges of Europe—should bemoan that Auerbach's "Western" selection does not include one of the Icelandic sagas, brandishing the argumen<sup>t</sup> that they are as Western as Homer. However, I could then in fact also argue that Iceland, like many other parts of the geographically "Western" domain, has historically been a part of the "rest" rather than the "West", and that like much of the non-Western world, it stood for centuries in colonial relation to reigning Western powers. The "rest" of the world has certainly been pulled into the maelstrom of the West and the process of modernization it engineered, a process often designated as progress, while it has also been marked by brutality on a global scale and has thrown the world into various situations of crisis. In his closing chapter, Auerbach responds to such a crisis—of history, narrative, form, and consciousness—as it appears in works illustrating that the centre does not hold—to recall Yeats' words from "The Second Coming", a poem written shortly after WWI—and it is relevant that Auerbach's key example is a novel by an author born and raised in the heart of the British Empire—a woman who came to question many of its values and narratives.

The makings of Western modernity were shaped at once by the global activity of ruthless colonialism and the scientific and gradually secularized process of technology, mechanization, and mercantile systems on a grand scale, and also, albeit in the midst of the increased need for administration and control, by the struggle for human rights, democracy, and enlightenment (although generally only for some, not all). While it is tempting to discern in the aesthetics of modernism an acute and potentially critical awareness of both the triumphs and the fragility and failures of Western modernity, including its cultural traditions, it is also obvious what a daunting task it is to find one's heuristic way through such a maze. Among the important elements of aesthetic modernism is arguably its critical stance vis-à-vis instrumental modernization, but this is not an inherently privileged position of modernism. Other strands of modern literature, including realist writing, also grapple critically with the upheaval and disruption entailed in various aspects of social and technological modernity, as do the songs and poems of ethnic groups that ge<sup>t</sup> pushed around by modernization, for instance the *jojk* poetry of the Sámi, in which these indigenous "first nations" of another edge of Europe—northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and into Russia—speak out against the severe encroachments on their lands and the disruption of their reindeer herding and other rhythms of their nomadic life style.

The Icelandic poet Einar Bragi (1921–2005) was among those who made a modernist breakthrough in Icelandic poetry in the 1950s, although he was also a master of the traditional forms of poetry against which the modernists clashed. His border-crossing activity is also reflected in his inter-Nordic translations of poetry and drama. He translated some of the poetry of Edith Södergran and especially Gunnar Björling, pioneer modernists of Nordic poetry, but also collections of the major plays of both Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. In the early 1980s, he came to feel a strong affinity with the Sámi, travelled often and widely through their territories, which they call Sápmi, and devoted much of his creative energy during the last part of his career to translating their poetry. He brought out a total of seven books of Sámi poetry in Icelandic, the last one in 2003.

The closeness to nature in some of this poetry is breathtaking, and now, less than two decades on, it no longer seems surprising that an Icelandic poet-translator should shift his attention from a "central" scene in Nordic literature to the life and pursuits of an "islanded" and threatened people, whose existence becomes a mirror for a wider world that has drastically usurped its natural environment. Einar Bragi finds a place for this poetry in his modernism, extending it to bridge not only the gap between different cultures but also between complexities of feeling and an elemental touch with the environment, although he is also aware how this move harbours sentiments handed down to us from romanticist encounters with nature. Nevertheless, in this regard, Einar Bragi was always—as a friend and colleague in fact once remarked to me about Virginia Woolf—on the "precious side of modernism." Perhaps there is a connection here with the scene Woolf creates in *To the Lighthouse*, where a precarious outside world in reflected in a garden and a house on the Isle of Skye. The title of the final chapter in *Mimesis*, "The Brown Stocking" and the opening scene it alludes to in Woolf's novel, seem, in spite of the "haziness" and the "vague indefinability of meaning", to imply a return to core questions of humanity and preparation for more modest but nonetheless meaningful journeys ahead. This is perhaps what Auerbach means when he talks about a "simple solution" (Auerbach 1968, p. 553): going back to basics, back to the everyday moment, every day being special. It is in Auerbach's final chapter, which is elegiac in its portrayal of a deeply fractured sphere, that the book's epigraph, from Andrew Marvell, finds its deepest resonance: "Had we but world enough and time".

#### **3. Times and Places of the Modern**

For Auerbach, the fragmented kind of realism he seeks to come to terms with is not a thing of the past. He involves it in addressing his contemporary world, a world torn and twisted as he writes, having lived through times when Europe as a place of democracy seemed for a while all but lost, and he is, in spite of everything, looking openly to the future. Now, 75 years later, his discussion still raises questions about the times and places of the literary–historical phenomenon he is engaging with. The Nordic countries may often have appeared marginal in relation to the more populous and powerful nations of Europe. Moreover, if geography may be found to reflect this state of affairs, Iceland is a Nordic island which may seem doubly removed from the European centre(s). Does the history of modernism in these outlying regions of Europe contain any useful lessons when it comes to negotiating the function and relevance of this concept? At the turn of the twentieth century, or, say, "in or about December, 1910", to stick with Virginia Woolf,<sup>2</sup> Iceland was one of the poorest countries in Europe. It was slowly wriggling its way out of the colonial grasp of Denmark, but it was still a Nordic backwater, except, arguably, in literary matters. In fact, it could make a rather solid claim about being the place where the medieval Norse culture was most avidly put down in writing. What was it like to observe the rise of modernism from a place seemingly entrenched in a longstanding literary tradition which formed no small part of its claim to independence? As a matter of fact, there were some

<sup>2</sup> The oft-cited phrase, "in or about December, 1910, human character changed" (Woolf 1966, p. 320), one of the better known attempts at temporally marking the onset or breakthrough of modernism, comes from Woolf's 1924 essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown".

interesting modernist experiments in Icelandic literature as early as the 1920s, but for a number of historical reasons, that had for instance to do with an ongoing struggle for full national sovereignty and the reliance of that struggle on an unbroken literary tradition, the scene was not ripe for modernism. In a country teeming with narrative legacies, the novel, as a genre in Icelandic, was still in a fledgling state, although it picked up stream quickly in the second quarter of the century, through both translation and original writing. Thus, with modern realism gradually moving centre stage, the emergence of modernism became a protracted affair, shaped by struggles and interaction between different literary practices. This interaction, involving a variety of expressive forms, is something that I find a fascinating aspect of the history of both modernism and realism, and this essay dwells in part on the salient relationship between these key concepts of modern literature.

Most of the works Auerbach discusses in the final chapter of *Mimesis* appeared in the 1920s. In addition to Woolf's *To the Lighthouse* (1927), he touches on Joyce's *Ulysses* (1922), Proust's *In Search of Lost Time* (A la recherché du temps perdu, 1913–1927), and Gide's *The Counterfeiters* (*Les Faux-monnayeurs*, 1925). It has often been assumed that the aesthetic tremors in works like these and from this period are shaped by the cataclysm of World War I, seen by many as the breakdown of a civilization which supposedly had reached its highest peak in a Europe shaped by the Enlightenment, growing civic liberty, and prosperity. Some aspects of this radicalized aesthetics of modernism, though, have often been traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, to works such as Flaubert's *Madame Bovary* and Baudelaire's *The Flowers of Evil* (*Les Fleurs du mal*). In the unusual structural relations between form, representation, content, and implication in these works, scholars have detected forebodings of what was to unfold later, although a historical shift towards modernism is generally not supposed to occur until 1890, or even as late as 1910, and many of the signature works of modernism are frequently not seen to emerge until the 1920s—prominent works being, for instance, *Ulysses* and Eliot's *The Waste Land* from the often termed "annus mirabilis", 1922.

However, scholars are not likely to be unanimous in drawing such historical boundaries or fault lines or in pinpointing individual watershed works. The relevance of *Ulysses* and *The Waste Land* may ride in part on the ever-growing international prominence of the English language since the early twentieth century, and when one starts looking in other quarters, the groundbreaking works of modernism manifest a variety of different turns and tunes—in different languages and emerging at different times—although many of them certainly did appear in the wake of the First World War.

When Auerbach was deliberating the dissolution of outer reality in the works of Virginia Woolf and other authors, the critical debate about this trend had been under way for some time, often under the rubric of the *avant-garde* or its various individual groups. In addition, such unrest and attempts at new departures in the works and world of literature were frequently signalled with a special emphasis on the words *new* or *modern*, for instance in English-, French-, or German-language discourse (also as nouns, e.g., *die Moderne* in German)—it was *modern* with an implied stress, indicating a departure from literary traditions. These variations in the meaning of "modern" are as relevant as they can be slippery. They had been employed differently by the Danish scholar and critic Georg Brandes as early as 1871 in the phrase "The modern breakthrough" ("Det moderne gennembrud") which came to stand for a crucible of ideas and discourses, literature as well as non-fiction, over the next two decades, marking a break with conservative, authoritarian views, and opening Scandinavian culture and public debate to the liberal politics, scientific theories, and social criticism which had been on the move in Europe for some time. Significantly, a part of this breakthrough consisted in translations: the writer J.P. Jacobsen translated Darwin into Danish, while Brandes himself translated John Stuart Mill's *The Subjection of Women*.

However, Brandes felt that literature itself should also be a platform for public debate, tackling the problems of modern society.<sup>3</sup> It should not be surprising that this Scandinavian modern breakthrough was strongly represented by realist and naturalist writing. Nevertheless, in the long run, and as it spread to the other Nordic countries, especially Norway and Sweden, it did not turn out to be a streamlined movement at all and could even be described as a cauldron of ideas, approaches, and expressions in motion—and this can also be said of the ideas and opinions of Brandes himself. While this modern breakthrough helped feed the main trajectory of literary realism into the twentieth century, it also fostered elements of neo-romanticism and symbolism, and literary ventures that seemed to be driven by psychological energies more than obvious social concerns—or perhaps they met head-to-head, as in Knut Hamsun's novel *Sult* (Hunger 1890). The two writers most important for and illustrative of the dimensions of this breakthrough, also broke into the international limelight in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen and the Swede August Strindberg. It is in no small measure because of their modern "unrest" that it has seemed propitious to search in this Nordic cauldron for early signs of the shift towards modernism.

The meaning of the word "modern" was thus in considerable flux in the latter half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth (and perhaps still is). The term "modernism" as such, however, was not regularly or widely used in Europe until well into the twentieth century, for instance in English and in the Nordic languages. Important elements in the early debate about avant-garde art and literature took place in what are often called "little magazines" which frequently brought together experimental literary works, aesthetic manifestoes, and critical commentaries. Concomitantly, scholarly exploration gradually increased, and in retrospect, it seems obvious that the discussion surrounding modernism, especially in the post-WWII era, is in various ways closely tied to the expansion of literary scholarship within the academy, in particular as it pertains to the enhanced presence of modern literature as part of the university curriculum.

However, if modernism is at once an object and a concept of the history of literature and the other arts, how do we make use of the concept in getting a *historical grasp* on relevant phenomena, their qualities, and contexts, in space and time? Can it be called a "movement" and allotted both a place and a period within which it can be observed and studied at a certain historical distance? The concept of modernism has long been employed for such demarcation. The widely read symposium *Modernism* from 1976, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, was probably the most influential book in modernist studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century (and at the same time, it helped firmly anchor "modernism" as a concept within English, which was rapidly securing its place as the new academic lingua franca). The book's subtitle was simply *1890– 1930*. It was published by Penguin Books as part of the series *Pelican Guides to European Literature* and one could therefore assume that this period in European literary history was in some crucial sense under the aegis of modernism. This was strongly underscored in 1991 when the book was reprinted with a new preface and a cover where the words " *A Guide to European Literature*" had been inserted between the two parts of the (previous) title: "*Modernism*" and "*1890–1930*". The additional "European" emphasis sits a little awkwardly with the fact that North America is part of the territory covered by the book. The actual title page of the book, though, remained unchanged (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991a).<sup>4</sup>

It is worth taking a close look at this volume as a precursor to subsequent activity in modernist studies, up to the present. Bradbury and McFarlane's symposium can be seen as confirming Fredric Jameson's oft-quoted phrase: "We cannot not periodize" (Jameson 2002, p. 29), but it also illustrates how the defining traits of what we refer to as "periods" are sometimes units in motion, aesthetic and cultural paradigms whose shapes and times are determined by cultural geography. The scope of the volume is not limited

<sup>3</sup> For an extensive portrayal of Brandes in English, see Oskar Seidlin (1942).

<sup>4</sup> The new front cover, with what thus has the look of an expanded subtitle, is adorned with the portraits of nine writers, four of whom are American: Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, and Marianne Moore.

to Anglo-American literature, as was often the case in books about modernism written in English.<sup>5</sup> An ambitious attempt is made to pull together threads from a wide spectrum of European and to some extent American literature. This volume, like Auerbach's book, is clearly "Eurocentric", a designation that is in fact often made to include North America. Nonetheless, this is how the book is deliberately mapped out, and in the 1991 preface, Bradbury and McFarlane emphasize that "in the opening phases of the Modern movement the centre was unmistakably in Europe. European ideas and ideals, European dissents and crises, European developments and disorders, fed it" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991b, p. 14).

Apart from introductory essays, this almost 700 page book is divided into three parts. A special section on the "Geography of Modernism" focuses on cities portrayed as prominent in the experiential world of modernism, i.e., Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Chicago, New York, and London. This is followed by a section of seven articles on individual literary movements of modernism, from symbolism through imagism, vorticism, futurism, and expressionism, to dada and surrealism. The second half of the book comprises 17 articles on modernism in poetry, the novel, and drama, frequently with an emphasis on works by key authors (mostly men), such as Rilke, Valéry, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Thomas Mann, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Strindberg, Brecht, and Pirandello. Elements of certain works are examined, but the process involves a portrayal of central authors, a modernist canon, or what some might want to see as a fleshing out of "high modernism". Although the use of that elevated category is often loose and unclear, it frequently seems to be two-pronged— referring to a *group* of eminent and firmly canonized writers during a certain *period*.
