Paradoxy of Modernism (review)

Professor Robert Scholes reads with relish the inner significance of texts and images. He likes thick descriptions, witty lounge lizards, and a durably fluffed art. Most of all he likes skilled modern stories which give to his palate a fine tang of the iridescently enduring. His latest book, Paradoxy of Modernism, is his fourteenth (not counting his six coauthored and fourteen edited volumes). It is ripe with the pleasures of reading. Indeed, pleasure is at the heart of the book: it discusses pleasure, it manifestly gave pleasure in the writing, and it is a deeply pleasurable read.

Any teacher of modernism, whether experienced or newly minted, will benefit from Paradoxy of Modernism. One need not know Scholes's vita to recognize it as the work of a seasoned scholar who has always grasped teaching and scholarship as part of a unified project. As befitting a winner of the Modern Language Association's Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize (for Textual Power in 1986), Scholes has a lot to teach about teaching even when he is not directly addressing the subject, and I frequently found myself making mental notes about things to try in my next class. Much of the usefulness of Paradoxy of Modernism derives from the clarity and ambition of its central argument.

By "paradoxy" Scholes means "a kind of confusion" generated by binary oppositions that seem "to make clear distinctions where clear distinctions cannot—and should not—be made" (xi). His goal is to clear away the distorting simplifications produced over the years by these oppositions, the most important for Scholes being high and low, old and new, poetry and rhetoric, hard and soft. The problem with these structuring terms is that they effectively obscure the complexity of the middle space in which, after all, most cultural productions are situated. Part I devotes a chapter to each of the oppositions in order to recover excluded middles. Part II then focuses on examples of works marginalized or excluded by the binaries examined in Part I in order to propose paradoxical categories designed to counter the polarizing effects of paradoxies: paradox, in others words, is invoked to purge paradoxy. Chapter 5's "Durable Fluff" looks at The Importance of Being Earnest in order to think about why some light comedies continue to find an audience over time even as they eschew what Matthew Arnold called "high seriousness." (The next time the Academy Awards shuns a comic performance, you will be reminded of this chapter.) The "Iridescent Mediocrity" of Chapter 6 refers to the conservative middlebrow popularity of the novelist Dornford Yates, beloved by Cyril Connolly and his ilk, despised by Bloomsbury. Chapter 7 examines Georges Simenon in order to defend "Formulaic Creativity" against the "High Modernist" abjection of genre fiction as low and therefore inferior. Certain kinds of fluff, mediocrity, and formulaic writing have endured over the years, and in Scholes's view they not only merit their longevity, they also deserve to be considered, and therefore taught, as examples of modernism. (Here arises a problem, to which I will return.) Part III, "Doxies," comprises two chapters, "Model Artists in Paris: Hastings, Hamnett, and Kiki," and "The Aesthete in the Brothel: Proust and Others." A "doxy," Scholes observes, is defined as "a floozy or prostitute," and this section examines figures who inhabited or explored the "bohemian borders" of modern culture (219). Most compellingly, Chapter 8 conducts a recovery of women "who do not fit into the High Modernist paradigm" (223) by writing about female models who "posed for painters, but crossed over to the other side of the easel, either as painters or writers, and also painters or writers who moved in the other direction and posed for artists, allowing themselves to become objects for the gaze of others" (222).¹ For anyone who has not already closely studied the various writings of Kiki (Alice Prin), who modeled for Man Ray and Brancusi, of Beatrice Hastings, who wrote for the New Age and posed for Modigliani, and of Nina Hamnett, who modeled...