‘The Most Difficult Abstract Piece of Writing’: ‘Time Passes’ as Container

Abstract

Although modernist critical studies from the mid-twentieth century onward has gradually conquered the notion of insularity of the modernist canon by revealing the diversity and with it the various historical, political and cultural aims of the works coming out of modernism, the latter is still generally classified as what Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane call an ‘era of high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life’ (1976: 25). With Bradbury and McFarlane, moreover, I perceive the ‘formal crisis’ of high modernism, its experimentalism, as ‘a crisis of culture’ which ‘often involves an unhappy view of history’ (1976: 26).¹ The modernist author is not merely experimenting with narrative for the sake of aesthetics, but is ‘under specific, apparently historical strain’:

Experimentalism does not simply suggest the presence of sophistication, difficulty and novelty in art; it also suggests bleakness, darkness, alienation, disintegration. Indeed Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea of the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic ideal that had been growing forward from Romanticism, reaches formal crisis — in which myth, structure and organization in a traditional sense collapse, and not only for formal reasons. (Ibid.)