**4. Distant Reading**

The revision of modernism carried out in the early years of the twenty-first century involves a critique of both the geography and canon of modernism as it is staged for instance in Bradbury and McFarlane's book. In various studies of modernism, for instance recent attempts to map its manifestations in the Nordic countries, scholars have pointed out modernist innovations and interventions outside the beaten track of the Western cities that have been in the limelight, while also directing attention to authors other that those most discussed under this category. Such revision frequently involves untying the latter end of the period, illustrating how modernism constituted a breakthrough force *after* 1930.

From a present-day perspective, the book *Modernism: 1890–1930* might seem open to the objection that it "appropriates" this period, these four decades of literary history, by overemphasizing certain literary currents at the cost of others that also played a significant role within this time frame. There is, however, no indication that Bradbury and McFarlane were seeking a broad-based historical survey of the period; their primary aim was to map the main traits of modernism or "the Modern movement", as they also call it, which "transformed consciousness and artistic form" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991b, p. 11). It could still be argued that the volume makes a claim to the period on behalf of the innovatory aesthetic achievements of modernism, and it is obvious that the publisher later made such a move with the new front-cover presentation of the book in 1991, tuning in with several other scholarly publications that actually go as far as to state that modernism was a *dominant* force in this period. This exemplifies a skewing motion that sometimes characterises the documentation of past literary history. In fact, the editors themselves open their new preface to the 1991 reprint by saying that their book has become "a key textbook on international literary Modernism" in the course of the past decade and a half, and that during this time the "Modern movement" has drawn "vastly more interest" and is "now generally seen as the dominant spirit in early-twentieth century art and literature" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991b, p. 11).

<sup>5</sup> This has changed dramatically since then, with the universal push to publish academic works in English, a push that could be called doubleedged, at least in the humanities, where individual local languages are often strongly intertwined with the topics at hand and have shaped their discursive environments.

This is a highly interesting case of how an act of distant reading embraces forces entering and challenging the field and shifts them *retrospectively* to centre stage. Such an approach may make the period in question more manageable and more teachable, but this mapping risks ignoring actual mainstream activity in the period under discussion as well as missing the dialogue between different currents and methods. Significantly, it also risks presenting an unduly sedate view of the challengers, including the "high modernists" that appear to tower over the literary neighbourhood which they were in fact often struggling against during the time in question.

While an emphasis on innovation within any designated period casts a significant light on literary history, a different kind of distant reading may show that doing so stringently can obstruct broader insight into that particular historical stretch, not only in terms of the book market and other scenes of literary culture but also concerning the recapturing of the "literary institution" and its various levers of recognition and value.<sup>6</sup> I will attempt a simple exercise in viewing the period 1890–1930 without modernist eyeglasses. In British fiction, for instance, this is noticeably the time of H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and Somerset Maugham. In addition, across the Atlantic, we come across writers such as Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and Pearl S. Buck. All these British and American writers were prominent and highly regarded during this time; in fact, four of them were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, given Bradbury and McFarlane's outlined premises, it may stand to reason that these writers do in fact *not* figure prominently in their book. We might think they had been dealt with in another volume in the same series, i.e., *The Age of Realism* (edited by F.W.J. Hemmings) which came out 1974. However, that book focuses on nineteenth-century realists, and the end of that century seems to coincide with the end of the age of realism.

However, realism did flourish in the early twentieth century, and after 1930, a new generation had emerged on the scene, in Britain for instance Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and George Orwell. Thus, we can go on—also with examples from other languages—in underpinning the argumen<sup>t</sup> that mainstream fiction in the Western world in the first half of the twentieth century is of a realist rather than a modernist bent. Writing in 1959, Raymond Williams mentions the view or idea that realism "went out with the hansom cab", wondering what this means in practice. "For clearly, in the overwhelming majority of modern novels, including those novels we continue to regard as literature, the ordinary criteria of realism still hold" (Williams 1959, p. 202). These criteria are resilient; I think it is safe to say that they have stayed strong throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day and that this also pertains to most branches of literature that are sometimes designated as popular culture—and it is ultimately hopeless and useless to try to find a clear line separating such literature from works that receive more critical or academic recognition.

Perhaps this situation is something that critics and scholars take for granted, unless they silently assume that "traditional realism"—I realize that the term may seem scandalously vague—is actually obsolete. In any case, it almost comes as a surprise, in this day and age, to see its relevance acknowledged, as is the case in Robert Eaglestone's useful introductory book *Contemporary Fiction* from 2013: "Realism is the dominant form of the novel", he states bluntly and clearly finds that it has been so for a long time. In fact, it seems that the strength and resilience of realism is so conspicuous, its place so secure, that it can be referred to as the obvious standard against which other motions can be measured. In addressing contemporary fiction specifically, Eaglestone writes, "Of course, the majority of novels published are realist, but there seem to be, as I've suggested, three sorts of areas of challenge to this realism special to the last ten years or so." One of these is a "demolition of the barriers between the realms of fiction and non-fiction writing," an interesting transgression which may disturb, if only slightly, the strong status of traditional mimesis in the various domains of non-fictional narrative of which we are indirectly but usefully

<sup>6</sup> The term "distant reading" is borrowed from Franco Moretti's article "Conjectures on World Literature" (Moretti 2002) and his book *Distant Reading* from 2013, although I may bend the term a little to suit my argumentative context.

reminded here, since they play a significant background role in our various encounters with literary texts. Another challenge, interestingly, involves a step back, as it were—"a retreat from the wilder edges of postmodernism towards a stronger sense of narrative. This retreat, however, has not forgotten the lesson of postmodern fiction: these texts are still playful, still complex over issues like textuality and closure." This understanding of postmodernism owes more than a little to the legacy of modernism, and a third area of challenge does in fact manifest "a renewed interest in techniques of high modernism, associated with Woolf and Joyce" (Eaglestone 2013, pp. 8, 23)."<sup>7</sup> All these challenges, in the early years of the twenty-first century are by implication seen as confronting a realist mainstream, which breeds and feeds our narrative consciousness along with other sign systems in the symbolic order embracing us (see also David James 2012).

Has modernism perhaps retained, up to the present, its challenging status vis-à-vis long-lived realist paradigms, even though—or indeed because—realism has obviously found various ways of renewing itself? One of the defining features of modernist literature is in my view the complication, if not breakdown, of narratives—not necessarily of sequentiality as such, but of prevalent narrative referentiality, including the various codes and contracts involving both receivers and makers of literature. Many avant-garde literary practices can be fairly described in terms of narrative crisis. This is a crisis of the process or proceedings ("Prozess", to cite the title of a Kafka novel, which also means "trial") of the literary text in relation to individual identities and historical contexts—including the reader's reconstruction of the links between text, identity, and history. Nevertheless, this very crisis foregrounds the urgency of capturing the relationship of modernist texts to historical circumstances and periods, as borne out in countless studies of modernism. Historical mappings of modernism as an aesthetic paradigm or "movement" partly spring from and in turn influence the reception of various individual modernist works and practices. These different levels of reception tend to situate their findings within historical-narrative frameworks, even when the modernist works in question—in the possibly radical dispersal of their non-organic units—may seem to defy such narrative groundings.

These are, of course, roughly drawn and un-nuanced dimensions of a struggle, and it not hard to understand the tendency to contain such a crisis; to wrap modernism up as something that happened between 1890 and 1930, even while admitting that it is "still, in some fashion, a shaping art behind the art of our own times" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991b, p. 12), or perhaps also to stave realism off as mainly a nineteenth century affair. Unless realism is taken to be "dominant but dead", to use words with which modernism was once laid to rest in the 1980s (see Foster 1983, p. ix). However, both these spectres are still very much with us.

#### **5. The Border of Realism and Modernism**

The above discussion may at times seem to imply that there is a clear and obvious border between modernism and realism. This is not the case. In all their significance, this border is often quite blurred. The density of discourse, structure, and reference in the last novels of Henry James, and in some of the works of E.M. Forster and Joseph Conrad, along with a seemingly realist narrative framework, may appear to open these texts up in both directions. Some of Ernest Hemingway's narrative works reside in a similar but different border area. Hamsun's novel *Hunger*, as already mentioned, is an early and very important case in point. Thomas Mann is an author who has been found vital to both modernism and realism. *The Magic Mountain* (*Der Zauberberg* 1924) is frequently seen as one of the key novels of modernism. In an article by J.P. Stern in Bradbury and McFarlane's *Modernism* (Stern 1976), Mann's career is interpreted as a trajectory towards modernism, with early signs already in the novel *Buddenbrooks* (1901)—which might seem to open up the gates of modernism quite drastically. Others have viewed Mann as a renewer of realism. The Marxist scholar Georg Lukács saw Mann's career as an exemplary route of modern realism

<sup>7</sup> Eaglestone lists these three challenges in a different order, but their sequence is not significant in this context.

and placed it in historical opposition to what he saw as the modernist aberrations of Franz Kafka—although he is also aware of Kafka's masterful realist strokes (Lukács 1958).

The border and the interplay of realism and modernism are important for our understanding of the history of modern Western literature and concomitantly for the ways in which we weigh the role of modernism in the short and long term. Of course, the interpretive approach of the respective reader also weighs in heavily. Some may read Proust's *In Search of Lost Time* as an example of the transformative capacities of realism, others as the extended birth of a one of the outstanding mind-worlds of modernist literature.

Such an approach, however dialectic, may seem to risk further entrenching an already oversimplifying dichotomy, especially in the realm of fiction. What about science fiction and the multifarious works sometimes grouped under the terms *fantasy, the fantastic*, or *speculative fiction* which have for some time been a major presence in Western literature and film? Certainly, literature and literary history need to be approached from a number of angles, and it is obvious that a grea<sup>t</sup> host of literary works are not "realist" in the sense that the world they portray matches the prevalent reality models of Western rationalism. However, if we accept the verisimilitude of such works, we tend to agree to a whole narrative scenario which in turn, however, often proves to be under the control of traditional motions and patterns.

Perhaps it even needs to be stressed that those who are drawn to literary modernism and its various ruptures are not automatically antagonistic to the fluidity or sequentiality of narrative. It may sound like a contradiction, but this narrative drive may be among the factors constituting the narrative crisis of modernist literature, in which classical narrative shifts may veer into real "interruptions". The *time* inherent in the text turns into *place*, as it were—a place of contemplation, uncertainty, figuration, and the emergence of other narrative threads, which also impacts the self-awareness of the reader. It is this interruption which Italo Calvino explores and throws so brilliantly into action (and counteraction) in the novel *Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore* (If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, 1979). Such metafictional self-consciousness was sometimes designated as "postmodernist" when it became prevalent in the late twentieth century, but it has been a feature of modernism throughout. As for constant narrative interruption, there are interesting similarities between this work by Calvino and Veijo Meri's *Manillaköysi* (1957; The Manilla Rope), an important novel in the history of Finnish modernism and one that has been translated into several languages (Riikonen 2007, p. 853).

A fascinating but more recent work with strong modernist traits that are structurally and thematically interwoven with techniques and aesthetics of communication is the English writer Tom McCarthy's novel *C* from 2010. McCarthy is very much in touch with the history of modernism and has been quoted as saying that to "ignore the avant garde is akin to ignoring Darwin" (Purdon 2010). Although *C* was well received by some, the response of the critic Christopher Tayler in *The Guardian* is an indication that modernism has not become as ingrained in the literary system as one might think. According to Tayler, this is an unusual novel, one that has taken aboard both high modernism and continental philosophy. He finds it refreshing that McCarthy has gone against the grain of contemporary literary culture which is "stubbornly non-modernistic". Tayler appears to speak from within that culture when he notes that given the company the author keeps, one may expect the novel to be a "bit pretentious, in the style of Deleuze-loving architecture theorists or Lacan-quoting gallery notes. This suspicion isn't totally off the mark, ye<sup>t</sup> McCarthy is a talented and intelligent novelist; however pretension-prone the scene he's interested in might be, his writing is tight and lucid, and he has a functioning sense of humour" (Tayler 2010).

The same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, the novel *Freedom* appeared, written by Jonathan Franzen, who had enjoyed rapid success, as reflected in his picture on the cover of *Time*, along with a familiar and time-word phrase: "Great American Novelist" (*Time*, Vol. 176, No. 8, 23 August 2010). Franzen has been unabashedly frank in his critique of modernism and experimental writing, and his accomplished novels are sometimes

compared to the works of Dickens and Tolstoy, as if nothing is less pretentious in our time than the company of these high chiefs of the nineteenth-century novel. Can the making of narrative fiction in our time be directly linked to the realist tradition of the nineteenth century, as if there had been no modernist "interruption" along the way? Franzen's realist prose is of course shaped by the contemporary American reality he writes about and a matrix of modern textuality, and yet, it rests on traditional underpinnings that have come down to us through turbulent times in (literary) history and still carry significant weight.

Nonetheless, it is interesting, in this context, to look at another recent American novel whose author also has a firm grasp of realist discourse ye<sup>t</sup> brings it into a charged dialogue with modernism—I am referring to *The Road* (2006) by Cormac McCarthy. When the modernist narrative crisis proves fertile, it is in no small part due to the creative activity of readers moving in a certain empty space between the "troubled" text and the mimetic reality they need to reconstruct as a kind of subtext in the work—perhaps most modernist works are double-coded in this sense. It is a challenge to travel through Joyce's *Ulysses*, but at the end of the journey, readers have contributed significantly to the city and the community they have encountered. In Cormac McCarthy's novel, this is turned around in a crucial sense, although it is a travel story as indicated by the title. Here, the background of the narrative, along with its various modern premises, has either vanished or lies in ruins: even memories cannot recall it. In *The Road*, the impact on the reader stems from a text which is realist in its surface details but moves eerily in a world which is at once new and lost, stimulating a surging ye<sup>t</sup> troubling sensitivity in those grasping for the firmness that such texts tend to deliver.

The border of realism and modernism—however unclear it may be at times, but also because of that lack of clarity—is in my view crucial for those seeking to come to terms with the shape of modernism as a current in literary history. This shape—or in other words, the history of modernism—is itself presently going through a narrative crisis, almost as if scholarship were re-enacting the troubled terms of modernist fiction. What gets called realism in narrative fiction certainly has major touchstones in the nineteenth century but is also broadly understood as drawing in a continuous manner on the mimetic functions of language and other sign systems. The use of language in realist literary works is thus related to the verisimilitude of general socio-practical discourses, while modernism tends towards skirting or undermining various rationalized links that constitute the "representation of reality", to use Auerbach's phrase.

This is most definitely not to say that realists base their works on simple notions of the relationship between reality and language. Great realist writers have always been able to create multi-levelled narrative worlds and multifaceted views of reality. Moreover, as mentioned already, this is a matter of interpretive approach—for reading strategies can also be analysed in the respective terms. Jonathan Culler once wrote that we can read Flaubert as a realist or a modernist—and he chose to approach him as a modernist (Culler 1982).<sup>8</sup> Much could be said here about modernism and the act of reading against the grain. However, I do not think that the employment of modernism as a general strategy of reading and interpreting various kinds of texts needs in itself challenge the argumen<sup>t</sup> that the border of realism and modernism, while an easy prey of deconstruction, is important in making sense of the modern literary landscape, especially as narrative is concerned (including the various narrative implications and subtexts of poetry). Even if someone were to carry out a brilliant reading of Dickens as a modernist (probably someone already has), I do not think this would change Dickens' position as a major realist author. I think the same holds true for Henrik Ibsen. Toril Moi has argued in a recent book that Ibsen deserves to be seen as an important modernist writer, and her arguments are in no small measure

<sup>8</sup>See (Eysteinsson 1990, pp. 190–91) and the broader discussion in that chapter about the connections between realism and modernism.

based on dismantling or bypassing the differences between realism and modernism as modern textualities (Moi 2006).<sup>9</sup>

## **6. The Edge**

While the border of realism and modernism can arguably in itself be seen as a significant if constantly shifting tradition, modernism as a force in literary history is also shaped by its crisis-prone and searching edge. From this angle, as even Bradbury and McFarlane acknowledge, there is much in modernism that "remains contentious, perplexing or simply obscure, so that the larger map still stays vague" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991b, p. 12), although it may seem tempting to clarify the map by drawing a firm line between the experimental and performative group activities of the *avant-gardes* and the individual achievements of certain *modernists*, those "certain writers distinguished by instinct and insight", as Auerbach puts it.

Fredric Jameson has in fact argued that it is possible to identify four historical "moments or tendencies" of modernism, a kind of evolution from symbolism and other stirrings at the end of the nineteenth century, to early twentieth-century avant-gardes, but to these "should be added the modernism of the isolated "genius," organized [ ... ] around the grea<sup>t</sup> Work, the Book of the World" (Jameson 1991, p. 305), a description that would seem to fit modernists such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound.<sup>10</sup> However, Pound's career is a good example of how questionable such categorization can be: not only did he participate in avant-garde group activities, but his story as author is marked by the importance of social and aesthetic connections or networks for modernists that swam against the tide. Pound's historical importance lies not only in his poetry, but also in his contribution as editor and intermediary. His editing of Eliot's poem *The Waste Land*—an avant-garde intervention in its own right and enormously important in and for the history of modernist poetry—has sometimes been described in terms of midwifery. Work of this kind was in fact often carried out by women, who as supporters, assistants, editors, co-workers, or even publishers of modernists who met little or no response from leading publishers of the time; women who themselves were important writers, for instance Gertrude Stein, or had other roles in the literary world, such as bookseller Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Joyce's *Ulysses*.<sup>11</sup>

In pulling modernism into perspective within the broad context of literary culture and focusing on its experimental, critical, and often controversial dynamic, one must not forget that it had from the start important supporters, both among writers and others within the field of literary culture, and this support grew steadily among critics and literary scholars. While modernism has not been a dominant current in the Western literary marketplace in the past hundred years, it gradually moved into a crucial position within the scholarly community, especially when the academy started shoring up cultural fragments in the wake of the Second World War, to echo T.S. Eliot's words about poetic creativity at the end of *The Waste Land*. Certain modernists, authors such as Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Kafka, Proust, and Beckett, have now for decades received a grea<sup>t</sup> deal of close attention which manifests that scholars and critics find in their works—in the formal expression and provocative connections between consciousness and reality—responses to modernity that demand thorough examination and interpretation. I cannot myself deny perceiving this attraction of modernist works, although I am also aware that these critical ventures take readers down various and different roads; the "messages" are often murky.

Hence, I also read signs of the times in Auerbach's responses and in his very decision to focus especially on such writings in the final chapter of *Mimesis*. Rather than directing his attention to recent works that draw on the trajectory of the realist-mimetic tradition, he

<sup>9</sup> I should stress that although I think Ibsen is a key realist author in the history of modern drama, this does not detract from his important role in a transition period which played a significant role in the emergence of modernism. I find it interesting, in this regard, to see how Inga-Stina Ewbank places Ibsen in the company of Henry James (Ewbank 2002).

<sup>10</sup> Jameson's fourth stage or moment is "late modernism"—more on that later in this article.

<sup>11</sup> In recent years a good number of books have appeared that highlight the roles of women in the history of modernism and its whole cultural environment. Shari Benstock's *Women of the Left Bank* (Benstock 1986), remains among the most important studies of this kind.

looks to more structurally elusive and seemingly open-ended forms of expression. In this realism at the edge, or in its fracturing of traditional mimesis, Auerbach notes a radical response to modernity but also new attempts to convey perception, and thus, he broaches the melting pot of various modernist endeavours. Some avant-gardists declared their animosity towards traditions, and those who sought their material in the cultural heritage strove to reshape it or "make it new", as Pound famously put it, whereby he had in mind some quite radical modes of cultural translation.

In 1942, the poet Steinn Steinarr wrote an article about the painter Þorvaldur Skúlason— both were modernist trailblazers in their respective fields in Iceland. Steinarr claims that modern art must aim "to broaden the sphere which is defined by artistic knowledge and the artistic capacity of its creators" (Steinarr 1942). In his view, artists must, by exploring and experimenting, push their own borders and those of their art, as if seeking to touch the unknown. This may risk breaking prevalent aesthetic contracts and conventions, and there is a potentially destructive force built into such endeavours, as Auerbach points out. In some sense, this is creativity driven by crisis. Steinarr's own creative crisis, in his best-known work, the poem-cycle *Tíminn og vatnið* (Time and Water 1948), did not involve taking radical leave of the classical elements of Icelandic poetry, as is often the case in modernist poetry. Instead, he played these time-hallowed instruments—metric schemes, rhyme, alliteration, and rhythm—but without making them ge<sup>t</sup> a hold of his language and meaning, which might seem to flutter every which way. In this manner, he explored and reignited the sphere of both the music and the imagery of Icelandic poetry, opening formal expression to new knowledge.

This emphasis on the expansion of artistic expression may be seen as a one of the primary forces of modernism, especially when it appears in radical rupture or fragmentation of traditional expressive forms. However, in this regard as well, modernist literature spans a wide spectrum, from an apparent overabundance to minimalist asceticism. Such challenges can be a driving force in innovative, avant-garde work, but they entail no inherent guarantee for aesthetic achievement, howsoever that may be measured. The aesthetic appraisal of modernism has been under some scrutiny in recent years, and there are those who feel that the emphasis on form, innovation, and the rupturing of traditions has enjoyed privileges which need to be rescinded. This view is sometimes tied to attempts to broaden the concept of modernism, aligning it with modernity in broad cultural terms, rather than aesthetic ones, but some recent critics also tend to hang on to a more narrowly defined notion of modernist aesthetics when dovetailing it with "formalism". Thus, the editors of *The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms* write in their introduction: "The formalist approach to literature and the visual arts was perfectly suited to linguistically complex writing and to abstract painting and was thus to a grea<sup>t</sup> extent responsible for the critical valorization of modernism, out of which the New Criticism had itself emerged" (Brooker et al. 2010, p. 7).

It is certainly fair to say that formal analysis has played a significant role in the valorisation of various works and authors associated with modernism, but formal analysis is by no means the exclusive domain of the New Critics. Moreover, missing here is the awareness that we saw in Steinn Steinarr's previously quoted statement, of how the epistemological aspects of art may be thrown into sharp relief when prevalent borders of expression are challenged. Literature and the other arts are domains of knowledge as much as form, and it may not always be easy to separate the two. Meticulous attention to form plays a salient part in the approach of some who have grappled with the cultural discordance and the social contexts of modernist art, for instance Theodor Adorno, whose book *Aesthetic Theory* (Adorno 1970) focuses substantially on modern art and is a highly relevant contribution to modernist studies. Adorno finds formal radicalism vis-à-vis traditions and prevalent patterns of communication to be vital to modernism, and he goes as far as saying that there is within modernism an inherent negative attitude to, and even rejection of, tradition (Adorno 1970, p. 38). This may, ironically, appear to echo Auerbach's view of modernism, although in Adorno's case this stems from his highly critical view of conventions and modes of expression which have thrived under the double-edged

legacy of the Enlightenment and instrumentalised social patterns rooted in the Western world. I concur with Adorno that the critical dynamic of modernism constitutes an edge, a negativity which inclines against all tradition. In this edge reside in my view both the merits and the severity of modernism. That edge may be directed against mandates and directives, against stagnant conventions in behaviour, expression, and mindset, against various forms of orthodoxy. That said, there is no reason to assume a negative attitude to all traditions. Rigorous negativity can result in turning a blind eye to the values and resources of traditions, and their modes of adaptability to new times and conditions.

In some of her essays from the 1920s, Virginia Woolf was highly critical of the prominent British novelists Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells. These challenging views do not come from someone who was among the "dominant" writers of that time (to refer to my previous discussion). Woolf directs an edge towards centrally reigning traditions and realist methods that she associated with "ruin" and "death" (Woolf 1966, 1972). The sharp wording is reminiscent of some of the avant-garde manifestoes, proclaiming and seeking to enact an artistic revolt. Perhaps we cannot expect those struggling for new creative space to dwell on the tenacity and adaptability of traditions. "In the arts there is no way back", to quote one of the most memorable declarations from the struggle for modernist space in Icelandic literature. It dates from 1955 and is the title of a preface that the poet Einar Bragi, who has already been discussed above, wrote for the first issue of *Birtingur*, a journal that sought to promote an awareness of aesthetic modernity across the artistic fields (Einar Bragi 1955, p. 25). It may seem obvious that a spiritless repetition of older forms of expression is not a promising way forward, but one could also argue that there are several ways to re-explore certain travelled routes, even while heading forward. Along with his co-editors—including the writer Thor Vilhjálmsson, who helped spearhead the "late" breakthrough of the Icelandic modernist novel in the late 1960's and into the 70's—Einar Bragi managed to run *Birtingur* continuously until 1968 as a platform for various kinds of modernist activity, inquiry, translation, critical discussion, and new Icelandic writing. Avoiding the local contests created by the (political and cultural) cold war, the journal managed to push the frontiers of both critical and aesthetic space in Iceland.

Modernism's urge to keep pushing its creative frontier is sometimes discussed with reference to the career of James Joyce: how he moved from his early narrative works to just about toppling the form of the novel as a genre in *Ulysses* and then went beyond that point in *Finnegans Wake* (1939), raising questions about the limits of the genre and about how one can go on experimenting with language. These questions have been prevalent ever since. While many find *Finnegans Wake* to be a master stroke of modern literature, one is hard put denying that it radically foregrounds the narrative crisis which is rife in modernism, although the crisis rarely reaches this extent. The Czech author Ivan Klíma says in his essay "Our Tradition and the Limits of Growth", that literature and the arts have already reached the outermost edge of innovation; that Joyce and Beckett took originality to the borders of incomprehensibility, which is as far as literary expeditions can take us (Klíma 1994, pp. 149–50).

It is not hard to understand this sentiment, but the borders of incomprehensibility are hardly to be drawn with any such clarity, and the history of modernism is not a single or straight road leading to such borders. I am tempted to react in similar terms to the question whether modernism has not itself inevitably become a tradition, given that some of the key experimental works of modernism have been around for a hundred years. This can be answered in the affirmative: works of Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, and other modernists have been continuously and intensely explored and discussed by scholars for decades now, and may, in these circles, be among the best-known items in their repertoire. At the same time, however, it seems highly unlikely that modernism has, in the wider realm of reading and writing, become a tradition in a traditional sense.

Whether it is due to an inherent conservatism of language or the strong mainstream of narrative traditions up to the present (and the two may be intertwined), radical modernism has maintained its estrangement in the public sphere. It has not become an openly accepted paradigm in the "representation of reality in Western literature" and this may help explain the elasticity of the concept of modernism up to the present time. This does not mean that new authors can repeat previous works of modernism, but the uncanny "tradition of modernism" may strikingly elucidate the diversity and the maze of "rewriting" and the innovative potential within the field of literature. This is relevant when accounting for the situation of authors that go against the mainstream at different times, whether it be Guðbergur Bergsson in the novel *Tómas Jónsson. Metsölubók* (*Tómas Jónsson: Bestseller*) in 1966 or Tom McCarthy in *C* in 2010. Both have recourse to the storehouse of previous modernist exploits and make their own use of them in challenging works, although *C* is clearly not as much of a "game changer" in British fiction as *Tómas Jónsson* was in Iceland in the sixties. Modernism enters a complex dialogue within each linguistic community, depending on time and place. This is a major issue in the history of modernism if we want to come to terms with it as an international phenomenon—and it does so in no small part by rubbing up against the heritage and development of narrative realism, which has itself of course often learnt from the twists and turns of modernism, while both have also kept their eyes on other streams of social discourse.

## **7. Finding a Beginning** ...

My above description of the parallel existence of modernist and realist practices may seem to clash with approaches that emphasize the successions of movements, with each one being an active and sometimes dominant force within a certain period. Looking back to the period of 1890–1930, it is worthwhile taking a closer look at how Bradbury and McFarlane, in the *Modernism* volume, describe the scene of the "Modern Movement" in their lead article, "The Name and Nature of Modernism". This is a rich essay, teeming with observations that often jostle uncomfortably against one another, which in itself evinces the challenge of the task at hand. It opens with a discussion of "cultural seismology", the third and most radical degree of which involves "overwhelming dislocations" and "cataclysmic upheavals of culture" that "question an entire civilization or culture"—and "we have [... ] increasingly come to believe that this new art comes from, or is, an upheaval of the third and cataclysmic order" (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976b, pp. 19–20). The authors then touch on "attempts to locate the Great Divide", such as Roland Barthes' statement, in his book *Writing Degree Zero* from 1953, that around 1850 classical writing disintegrated "'and the whole of literature, from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of language'" (pp. 20–21).

This is how the essay opens, with modernism and its style seen as characterized by "the shock, the violation of expected continuities, the element of de-creation and crisis" (p. 24), along with other arguments "as to why Modernism is our art; it is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos" (p. 27). Then, some argumentative backtracking kicks in, for it "is clear" that "not all artists have believed this to be so—that indeed, ours has been a century not only of derealization but of realism, not only of ironic but of expansive modes" (p. 27). Followed by: "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" (p. 28).

This sounds like a most elusive truth, to say the least, one that furthermore lies in the past, for instead of "Modernism is our art" we are now told that "Modernism *was* indeed an international movement [ ... ]" (p. 30; emphasis added). As we move into the argumentation, the more it strives, at times admirably, to contain this beast of a "movement", to put it in its proper place. In fact, *place* is a key issue in this discussion, and the authors acknowledge that modernism "viewed from a New York-London-Paris axis" may not rhyme with its signatures in "Berlin, or Vienna, or Copenhagen, or Prague, or St Petersburg", and the attention subsequently shifts to "Germanic Modernism", including the Scandinavian "modern breakthrough" mentioned above and its connection with Germany, and especially Berlin as a cultural centre. One of the two authors, James McFarlane, is here in familiar territory, being a specialist in Scandinavian Studies and an Ibsen expert.

As the authors try "to pin Modernism down ", Georg Brandes is mentioned as a key player in making "the epithet 'modern' [ ... ] a rallying slogan of quite irresistible drawing power" (p. 37), but when this German–Scandinavian scene is scrutinized, there emerges at some point a significant shift in the meaning and reference of "modern". This is a kind of "reorientation", a "Wendepunkt", occurring "about the year 1890" (p. 40). "To ge<sup>t</sup> at a quality of this change", the authors take a "roll call": "When, in the early 1880s, Georg Brandes wrote of the 'modern minds' [ ... ] of whom did he speak? Of Ibsen and Bjørnson, of Jacobsen and Drachmann, of Flaubert, Renan, John Stuart Mill. But particularly of Ibsen." Moreover, Ibsen was also at the centre of attention in Germany through the 1880s.

When, however, the 1890s generation of critics—often the same men as before— looked for specifically 'modern' qualities, to whom did they turn? To Strindberg and Nietzsche, Büchner and Kierkegaard, Bourget and Hamsun and Maeterlinck. But especially to Strindberg. This is a sharp change, and nowhere is it more dramatically revealed than in two successive articles by the Viennese critic, Hermann Bahr—one of 1890 [ . . . ] and the other of 1891 [ . . . ]. (pp. 42–43)

In the 1890 article, Bahr highlights the "synthesis of naturalism and romanticism, and urged the example of Ibsen as the supreme exponent", but less than a year later, "he speaks of 'the wild frenzy of the galloping development'" (p. 43), and all of a sudden, Strindberg is the central figure.

What occurs here seems somehow to be both *development* (albeit "galloping") and *rupture*; there is a "crossover point" when "something happens to the fortunes of realism and naturalism, themselves modern but not quite Modernist movements [ ... ]" (p. 43). It is both striking and illuminating—given the complexity of the issues at hand—to notice how a crisis caused by a "Great Divide" here re-emerges as what may sound like a subtle difference between what is *modernist* on the one hand and *modern but not quite modernist* on the other. As if this were a crack or a crevice, but one that may turn into a canyon. In fact—as if anticipating how the plural "modernisms" came to be used later on, the authors could be said to make a conceptual slip as they go on to note that "looking at the two Germanic Modernisms, early (before 1890) and late (after 1890), one can see clearly in this context—something that the more confused events elsewhere perhaps disguise—the one growing out of the other." However, after that, it appears that they both keep growing, perhaps in contention as well as dialogue with one another, "not simply an extension but a *bifurcation* of the impulse to be modern" (p. 44). My discussion above should make it clear that I cannot but concur, and the analysis, earlier in this essay, of the selection of writers emphasized in *Modernism: 1890–1930*, should make it clear that one of the premises of the book is a pertinent difference between the concept of *modernism* and the word *modern* as used for instance in the more general concept of "modern literature".

#### **8.** ... **and an End to Modernism**

The role of modern Scandinavian literature in the birth pangs of modernism, as outlined by Bradbury and McFarlane—especially of course the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg and Brandes' critical initiative—is interesting, a kind a "dislocation" in itself, considering the generally assumed centres of modern Western literature. However, the Nordic countries seem to step aside when we move closer to the temporal "epicentre of the change" (p. 32) and the "peak of intensity" of modernism in the early 1920s (p. 33). The material the authors draw on in that respect is mainly the Paris–London–New York axis and the German-language literary scene. They admit that while some critics would in fact see "the Modernist impulse" reaching "a point of exhaustion" already in the 1920s, others argue "that Modernism, far from being exhausted, has continued as our essential art right up to the present" (p. 34).

Bradbury and McFarlane, towards the end of the article, seek to defend their decision to draw the line at 1930: "After that is seems that certain elements of Modernism seem to be reallocated, as history increasingly came back in for intellectuals, as, with the loss of purpose and social cohesion, and the accelerating pace of technological change, modernity was a visible scene open to simple report, and as the world depression tends increasingly to bring back political and economic determinism into the intellectual ideologies" (pp. 51–52). The two "seems" early on underline the hesitation in the sentence, even as it seeks to plough quickly through the 1930s and the pathway towards another world war. Earlier in the essay, looking back from their vantage point in the mid-1970s, the authors note of the post-World War II-period that it had "first appeared to be moving away from Modernism in the direction of realism and linearity" (a move frequently seen to occur already during the 1930s), but that there is now a "new entity" on the scene, "called Post-Modernism. The term is acquiring high currency now to talk about a compound of that art of chance and minimalization, that 'literature of silence', in which, as in Beckett and Borges, the idea of absurd creation, random method, parody or self-exhausting fictionality is paramount [... ]" (p. 34).

Therefore, here we are in the mid-1970s, close to half a century after the surge of modernist energy had reportedly exhausted itself in the late twenties, still grappling with it in the form of "post-modernism". Bradbury and McFarlane cite Frank Kermode's article "Modernisms" from the late 1960s, in which he argues for a plurality of modernisms and their continuity up to present-day forms of "Neo-Modernism" but notes that "there has been only one Modernist Revolution" and "it happened a long time ago" (Kermode 1968, p. 24). Others had less faith in such continuities, and this was only the beginning of lively debates under the heading of postmodernism in the last few decades of the twentieth century, a multifarious stretch of an often cross-disciplinary inquiry into art but also culture in the broadest terms, frequently intertwining with a grea<sup>t</sup> deal of theoretical activity which has sometimes been summed up under the general term "theory", although salient parts of it have also been gone by another post-name: "poststructuralism". This was a time when the boundaries between scholarly and literary explorations would tend to open up; therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that "postmodernism" also came to be used in summing up tendencies in theoretical and critical work, at times even making the two *posts* seem all but synonymous. However, insofar as "postmodernism" was used for literary developments, these were often (but not always) seen as taking place *after* modernism, although the various "ends" of modernism kept cropping up (see Eysteinsson 1990, pp. 103–42, and Eysteinsson 2000).

This is not the place to map the complex critical post-activity from the late 1960s onwards, but it evinces various links to the legacy of literary modernism, which had radicalized textuality and helped bring about linguistic and cultural turns that went far beyond the connection with New Criticism which is so often brought up. The American historian Hayden White has emphasized how relevant "modern literary theory [is] to our understanding of the issues being debated among theorists of historical thought, research and writing", in part "because modern literary theory is in many respects fashioned out of the necessity of making sense of literary modernism, determining its historical specificity and significance as a cultural movement, and devising a critical practice adequate to its object of study" (White 1999, p. 26). Stephen Ross goes even further in his introduction to the volume *Modernism and Theory*:

Modernism's critique of modernity animated theory's invention of postmodernity, while theory's anti-foundational stance extended modernism's indeterminacy, linguistic complexity, and reflexivity. The relationship between them is unique; though certain specific theories no doubt have particular relevance for other literary movements or eras (e.g., the New Historicism and the renaissance), theory *per se*—that massive influx of challenges to conventions of form, aesthetics, ideology, race, class, sex, gender, institutions, and subjectivity dating from the mid-1960s to the 1990s—is integrally bound to modernism. (Ross 2009, p. 2)

Perhaps this influx of challenges, aesthetic as well as theoretical, can in both cases be traced to the rupture Henri Lefebvre discusses in an important book from this theory-rich period, where he claims that "around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge (*savoir*), of social practice, of political power, a space

thitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and channel for communication; the space, too, of classical perspective and geometry, developed from the Renaissance onwards on the basis of the Greek tradition (Euclid, logic) and bodied forth in Western art and philosophy, as in the form of the city and town" (Lefebvre 1991, p. 25). Alternatively, is this ye<sup>t</sup> another attempt to pinpoint a moment— relatively, dramatically, or playfully—this one being in consensus with Woolf's "in or about December, 1910", but one also thinks of Kermode's insistence on the single modernist "revolution" which happened "a long time ago", an attempt, that is to say, to pinpoint in time a change which in fact is protracted, although writers, artists, and theoreticians may all seek to express the sense and perception of that change in a compact form?

Furthermore, there is a similar urge to fix with some precision the moment of modernism's demise. When the study of literary modernism gained new momentum towards the end of the twentieth century, the discussion was still marked by the urge to find an end to modernism, that is to say modernism "proper", although this may usher in another post- or after- term. Along came "late modernism", which was perhaps meant to cope with certain uncomfortable inconsistencies or to account for an interim or transition period. Peter Nicholls' fine book *Modernisms: A Literary Guide* largely covers the same territory and time as Bradbury and McFarlane. Nicholls is willing to let modernism advance a little beyond the 1930 mark, but by 1936, we seemed to have moved beyond modernism; this is the year of Faulkner's *Absalom, Absalom!*, which is found to be a "late modernist" work and of Djuna Barnes' *Nightwood*, which stands "outside modernism" (Nicholls 1995, pp. 222, 254). My perspective is different from that of Nicholls, and I find *Nightwood* to be an important modernist novel, one that is significant for the history of modernism, in no small part due to its strength as a mid-1930s expression.

Tyrus Miller, in his book *Late Modernism* from 1999, begins to see the "funereal signs" of modernism already by about 1926, and for him Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and Samuel Beckett serve as "exemplary late modernist figures". He does allow, however, for the corpus of "high modernism" to develop for a while alongside late modernism, in the case of modernists who were already under way, allowing Joyce's *Finnegans Wake* (which others have claimed for postmodernism), Woolf's *The Waves*, and Pound's *Cantos* to retain modernist status (Miller 1999, pp. 5, 10).

However, there is too much leakage in this system. The categories are too narrow, the arguments too forced. With Pound's late *Cantos*, we are already well into the second half of the century. What about Beckett's *Waiting for Godot* and *Endgame* in the fifties or even later works of his—how far does *late* modernism stretch? This is a crisis, and the boundaries do not hold (not to mention the centre). Modernism may have been contained in some sense, but instead, we have an open-ended late modernism that once let loose is hard to stop. In 2002, David Holloway's book on *The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy* appeared, and 2005 saw the publication of Varun Begley's *Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism*, with a chapter called "A Last Modernist". The indefinite article may be significant, here; I wonder if we can find a last one yet. Furthermore, the twilight has been there all along.
