**1. Introduction**

At the time of the first World War and after—in a Europe unsure of itself, overflowing with unsettled ideologies and ways of life, and pregnan<sup>t</sup> with disaster— certain writers distinguished by instinct and insight find a method which dissolves reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness. That this method should have been developed at this time is not hard to understand.

These opening words come from Erich Auerbach's classic study, *Mimesis,* or, to be precise, from Willard Trask's translation of Auerbach's German original which was published in 1946. We are in the final chapter, which deals with radical modern forms of the mimetic representation of reality in Western literature. In fact, though, this final chapter concerns itself with the dissolution of realistic representation, and it could be called the chapter on modernism. Auerbach charts what are for him dismal signs of how a continuous sense and representation of reality elude the reader in one challenging modern novel after another. "There is in all these works", he adds, "a certain atmosphere of universal doom: especially in *Ulysses*, with its mocking *odi-et-amo* hodgepodge of the European tradition [ ... ]" (Auerbach 1968, p. 551). He goes so far as to sugges<sup>t</sup> that these works manifest hostility towards culture "brought out by means of the subtlest stylistic devices which culture and civilization have developed, and often a radical and fanatical urge to destroy." He notes that these features, including "haziness, vague indefinability of meaning", are "also to be encountered in other forms of art of the same period."<sup>1</sup>

**Citation:** Eysteinsson, Ástráður. 2021. Modernism—Borders and Crises. *Humanities* 10: 76. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020076

Received: 4 February 2021 Accepted: 6 May 2021 Published: 17 May 2021

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<sup>1</sup> The word Auerbach uses, "Kulturfeindschaft" (Auerbach 1946, p. 492), is rephrased here as hostility towards culture, since I find Trask's strong rendering, "hatred of culture and civilization", somewhat questionable.

This is how the new "method" in the art of fiction is presented in this book which Auerbach wrote during the Second World War. As for the "other forms of art", and music specifically, Thomas Mann could be said to echo salient parts of this portrayal in his novel *Doktor Faustus*, which appeared a year later. Both Auerbach and Mann had been forced into exile by the Nazi reign of terror, and their works are shaped by this experience. In the case of *Mimesis*, this is especially pertinent as the final chapter is concerned: Auerbach's analysis of aesthetic writing that bears on tradition with a destructive force—a force that he links (albeit not in any simple manner) with horrors that he has seen swelling in Europe in his lifetime: in other words, with contemporary history. This perspective is relevant for any discussion of the time of modernism, its history, and its places, along with its challenges in the domain of literary forms and styles of presentation.

It is equally significant that Auerbach does not conclude his inquiry by suggesting that the novel as art form should turn away from this twisted realism. Exploring the seemingly random levels of consciousness unfolding in Virginia Woolf's *To the Lighthouse*—his key example of this new realism or anti-realism—Auerbach finds a gleam of hope. Something in the method illuminates the way the world of modernity has shrunk, how we may perhaps all be connected. "The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. [ . . . ] Beneath the conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people" (Auerbach 1968, p. 552).

It is from within the sphere of these modernist works of fractured space, of "realistic depth" and ye<sup>t</sup> "dissolved reality" that Auerbach looks ahead. Thus, he connects this sphere with his contemporary scene of crisis, shaped by war and devastation and ye<sup>t</sup> also hope for a different future. By concluding this major work, which focuses on the long tradition and legacy of Western mimetic representation of reality, with a chapter on the "destructive" ye<sup>t</sup> probing edge of modernism, Auerbach poses a challenge that is still with us. How has this new literary force fared, and how has it impacted the ongoing mimetic tradition of Western literature?

However, when his book appeared, in 1946, many were undoubtedly certain that this wave of radical and "exploratory type of representation" (Auerbach 1968, p. 552) already belonged to history. That view was to be confirmed, if sometimes hesitantly, by leading scholars in modernist studies as the century wore on, for instance by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in the symposium *Modernism: 1890–1930* which appeared in 1976 (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976a). Even so, that symposium was born of the strong presence of modernism as a current or movement which had been avidly studied by Western critics, scholars, and students in the decades after World War II. Looking back, one may see a curious double effort at work, where the emphasis to close the period of modernism runs concomitantly with any ever-growing critical and scholarly attention paid to modernism. In the first half of this paper, the Bradbury and McFarlane symposium and the final chapter of Auerbach's *Mimesis* serve as important nodal points from the history of modernist studies. These two critical manifestations of modernism could in fact be said to embrace a 30 year period during which the study of modernism became a major preoccupation of critics and scholars, even though there was (and still is) considerable uncertainty about both the aesthetic borders and the historical and geographic range of this "movement" (as it was sometimes called), and about the crisis this movement or current was often felt to be born of. As I pursue this inquiry, examining the conceptual and historical shape of modernism from several angles, other critical perspectives are gradually brought into this discussion of borders and crises.

As I attempt to trace the challenges involved in both situating and periodising modernism, some of the key questions materialize in a dialogue between Nordic and European/Western modernisms, in which the former is both a part of the latter and ye<sup>t</sup> also

a separate domain with its own disparate units of nations and languages. The Nordic scene saw an early rupture in the notion of what "modern" meant as a term in mapping literature, such that Strindberg can be found to usher in Nordic modernism around 1890. In other Nordic instances, modernism made headway in the 1950s or 1960s. Such "late" breakthroughs are not necessarily belated, and they may still be in possession of the exploratory force and structural challenges of modernism, while also activating the border that both connects it with and separates it from realism and other literary traditions.

The term "border" is used not only in both the temporal sense of *periods* (with their beginnings and ends) and in spatial references to the different *locations* of modernism, but also in referring to the salient aesthetic and historical *borders of modernism and realism*. While they may be to some degree mapped as different entities in the following sections of this essay, these borders significantly intersect with one another while they also feed into a double-narrative crisis—a historical crisis of narratable experiences and narrative paradigms—a crisis that emerges not only in modernist writing but also in critical attempts to embrace the history of modernism.
