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41 Chapter 3 Sandra Greenberg,“Fiction, Society, and the Literary Critic,”Book Forum: An International Transdisciplinary Quarterly, 1981, 534-40. Introduction The interviews in this volume showcase Irving Howe as a “triple thinker” devoted to the three “loves” of his intellectual life—Socialism, literary criticism, and Yiddish culture—a triad captured in the title of Edward Alexander’s biography , Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (1998).1 Unlike the political bent of the first two interviews in this book, this interview with Sandra Greenberg, at the time a writer living in Creve Coeur, Missouri, showcases the middle of these three terms: Howe as literary critic. This is unsurprising, given that it appeared between the publication years of Howe’s best seller and his autobiography, when he was much in demand as a speaker about literary life and Jewish issues. This contrasted with the 1960s and 1970s, when he primarily visited American campuses to discuss political questions. In the literary realm, Howe’s central and ongoing interest was the modernist movement that began in the early decades of the twentieth century and largely ended in the years following World War II. Beginning in the 1970s, his interest in Yiddish literature and secular Judaism as a cultural phenomenon also became apparent. This conversation witnesses Howe engaging in a serious, even grim, discussion of modernist literature that bears on issues of tradition and society. Crucial here are the horrors of World War I, which led to a bitter cynicism about the ultimate advance of civilization and provided a historical backdrop to modernist and avant-garde literature. Howe mentions this cavernous subtext only indirectly : “The whole modernist idea is associated with historical crisis, with the 42 Chapter 3 sense of living through a time which is qualitatively different and more difficult, a time when all the premises of human existence . . . are called into question.” Accompanying the disillusionment with European society was a questioning of the European colonial project, a digging up of its arrogant and often brutal side, exemplified by much of the work of Joseph Conrad and George Orwell. It is this critical spirit that Howe finds integral to modernism, and to art in general, creating an implicit link between political upheaval and distinguished literature: “the best writing comes from calling into question one’s own beliefs, one’s own views, one’s own premises.” Howe himself practiced this kind of Keatsian “negative capability .” Or to cite F. Scott Fitzgerald: “the mark of a first-rate mind is to hold two opposing ideas together and not crack up.” Howe was a master at holding together and even synthesizing opposing ideas, or in showing why they might not be as opposite as was conventionally assumed. That was how he could be politically radical and culturally conservative. The literary tradition that Howe upheld was one that valued independent thinking and critical intelligence. These values have animated the trajectory of the history of the novel. Although the modernism that Howe favored is often seen as a break from that tradition, it may be insofar as it expresses a political despair and social rootlessness, but not in its exploration of consciousness and sympathy with all facets of human life. So in “The Idea of the Modern,” Howe’s seminal 1967 essay, he praises Joyce for avoiding easy political solutions, unlike the case of Ezra Pound regarding Fascism. Rather, Joyce remains in the quotidian, in the humane, aesthetic world of “the streets of the city and its ongoing commonplace life.”2 In this strange way Joyce, argues Howe, stays true to the modernist avantgarde impulse to remain outside the boundaries of political ideology. Howe contrasts the brilliance of the modernist era with a contemporary American literature that adopts some aspects of the sensibility and style of modernism , a mode that in 1981 was only starting to be called “postmodernism.” For Howe, this development was part of the flashy shallowness of a consumer society that appropriated art that had once been culturally oppositional. If upheaval and questioning had spurred great art in early twentieth-century Europe, a more affluent , complacent postwar era had generated a tamer art. Unlike many commentators, who applauded the postmodern spirit of play, Howe was severe in his judgment of the postmodern sensibility: “The United States, with its endless capacity for absorption, found that it could not take the essential spirit of modernism, but only many of its decorative elements, and defang them, make them unthreatening, domesticate them.” This critique seems also to spring from Howe...

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