Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923-2003): Hugh Kenner And The Invention of Modernism

"Art," quips Hugh Kenner in A Homemade World (1975) "lifts the saying out of the zone of things said" (HW, 60). The reference is to William Carlos Williams's poems, such as "The Red Wheelbarrow," that do not seem to "say" anything profound and yet are brilliantly articulated. It is a notion close to Wittgenstein's adage "that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information."¹ Kenner's emphasis on the how rather than the what has sometimes led critics to confuse him with the New Critics. But Kenner, who studied at Yale under Cleanth Brooks, had little truck with New Critical doctrine, which was, for his taste, excessively thematic and figural. The New Critic tracked a given poem's unifying metaphor or paradox—for example, the comparison of lovers to saints in Donne's "Canonization." Kenner, by contrast, never focused on what Reuben Brower called the "key design" or "the aura around a bright clear centre";² he looked, not for centeredness but for difference. What makes Beckett's syntax unique and different from Joyce's? How did Pound's annotation of Eliot's Waste Land transform that particular poem? How did the language of the turn of the century popular magazine Tit-Bits differ from the representation of Gerty McDowell's seemingly similar maudlin kitsch language in Ulysses?

The ethos that animates such questions is hard to characterize. You will not find Kenner's name in the endless handbooks of literary theory and criticism that have sections on formalism, post-structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, and so on. To be included, a given critic must be representative and must provide a model that students can follow. But one cannot, I think, perform a Kennerian reading of anything, for Kenner is himself a kind of poet-critic, whose books and essays place him among writers rather than among academic commentators. Indeed, his eclectic methodology and firm emphasis on values places him closer to Samuel Johnson or Coleridge or T. S. Eliot than to such systematic theorists as Adorno or Foucault. Hence the unusual status of The Pound Era, which, despite its immense learning and esoteric subject matter, has remained popular with general readers for over thirty years.

The Pound Era, along with Kenner's studies of Joyce and Eliot, Williams and Beckett, represents what has often been called "the invention of modernism." Not everyone's modernism: highly selective in his enthusiasms, Kenner slighted women poets (especially Gertrude Stein) and minority writers. Eclectic as is his methodology—a mix of philology, etymology, and close attention to syntax, coupled with literary history, cultural study, and biographical information—his value system is as firm as Pound's or Johnson's, and often just as irritating. But it is a good question for our time whether criticism can be as tolerant and value-free as we now want it to be. In the age of cultural studies, when the literary text is regarded as primarily a symptom of its culture rather than as an individual success or failure, critics are reluctant to pronounce one work or group of works "better" than another. Kenner's, on the other hand, is advocacy criticism: as the author of "firsts"—the first important book on Pound, on Wyndham Lewis, on Joyce, on Beckett, and for that matter on Buckminster Fuller—his aim was to bring the reader round to his understanding of and appreciation for the author in question.

What, then, are the values that govern Kenner's choices? His detractors stress what they take to be his conservative politics and accuse him of possibly sharing the fascist values of Pound and Lewis. But Joyce was hardly a fascist, and Beckett, as an implacable enemy of the Nazis, actually risked his life in the Resistance. And what about Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, poets both Jewish and on the far Left, whom Kenner promoted, almost single-handedly, when they were barely known, just as he was a great supporter of their mentor William Carlos Williams...