Uneasy Modernism

Abstract

Chapter 1 outlines the distinctive features of European modernism. The first feature of common culture in modernism is its drive toward simplicity. The conventional idea that modernist art is characteristically “difficult” does not stand scrutiny. Second, the idea that modernism valorizes subjectivity also falls. The larger modernist impulse is to overcome subjectivity. Third, the view that modernism snubs the average person by skewing toward the esoteric high culture is a problem that looks much different now, a century distant from modernism’s beginnings. Fourth is a related point: modernist art is predicated not on cultural and intellectual sophistication but on a recovery of the frank directness—naïvité—that both elite culture and mass culture have suppressed. Fifth is the question of mimesis. Mimesis and representation overlap but are not the same. Modernist art aimed overall not at “the representation of reality,” no matter whether that reality is thought objective or subjective, but instead at expressing a new experience of the world. Consequently, modernism is not to be understood in the conventional sense of a turn away from mimesis. It is rather a deepening of our mimetic relationship with the world. This relation entails empathy, a feeling of one’s way into things and experiences of the present, that sparks expression. This expression does not represent reality in the received sense. Instead, it creates it by shining a light on what is there. Art does not represent. It creates our reality by empathetically shaping how we see what’s really there. This chapter also introduces Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus as a key work. But the interpretation of this novel is distributed piecemeal throughout the entire book. This is because it bears directly on all aspects of modernism and helps to illuminate not only fiction but also painting, poetry, and especially music.