Modernism and Style by Ben Hutchinson (review)

Prefaces do not always warrant mention in a review, but the one introducing Ben Hutchinson’s Modernism and Style provides an unusually illuminating context for what follows. Hutchinson’s book is the latest in a series entitled Modernism and. … Edited by a historian, Roger Griffin (the author of a tome on Modernism and Fascism¹), it includes such volumes as Modernism and Eugenics, Modernism and Japanese Culture, and Modernism and Zionism (x).² Authors in the Modernism and … series, states Griffin in the preface, have “been encouraged to tailor the term modernism to fit their own epistemological cloth, as long as they broadly agree in seeing it as the expression of a reaction against modernity” (xvi, my italics).

Griffin’s theory of modernism is related to his understanding of fascism. The modern period as he sees it is characterized by “the impotence of Christianity and the insidious spread of a literally soul-destroying cynicism” (xiii). In the face of “a protracted spiritual crisis,” modernist writers, he avers, “set themselves the task … of re-enchanting and re-sacralizing the world” in “the bid to find a new home, a new community and a new source of transcendence” (xiv, xi, xv). Unsurprisingly, this conception of modernism poses problems for Hutchinson. While much research has been and continues to be devoted to the analysis of modernism’s complex relationship to modernity (with one leading journal—Modernism/modernity—foregrounding the question in its title), few scholars regard literary modernism as a unified movement committed to the articulation of a sole (or even primary) response to the modern world.

The difficulty of tailoring a study of literary modernism to fit Griffin’s tenet is augmented for Hutchinson by the fact that his own interest is in style and not in history or in the conditions of modernity (which go virtually unmentioned throughout his study). As a result, he finds himself trapped into trying to argue that the gamut of modernist styles springs from a uniform and unchanging position of authorial disapproval concerning historical events and social, political, and technological realities with which his work does not actually engage.

Hutchinson’s study offers a survey of modernist theories of style expounded and enacted from the late-eighteenth century to the 1940s, ranging from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.³ His discussions span a broad range of time periods (the early modernisms of Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, the decadent styles of Thomas Mann and Édouard Dujardin, the late modernisms of Joyce and Broch), various linguistic traditions (Rainer Rilke, F. T. Marinetti, Marcel Proust, and others are considered alongside Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound), several genres (novel, lyric, manifesto), and two disciplines (philosophy and literature).

Hutchinson’s central argument is this:

modernist views of style are united by an underlying double movement: on the one hand, style is increasingly foregrounded as its own subject matter, rather than as a transparent window onto a supposedly “real” world; on the other hand, there is a concomitant suspicion of mere style, a fear that secular modernity may have been voided of any meaningful content.

(1-2)

His study aims to observe this “double movement”: to delineate “the development of modernism from ‘pure’ style to what one could call ‘purely’ style” (2). To do this, he begins by tracing the arc of a rhetoric of purity discerned in the writings of Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer and later in those of Walter Pater, Stéphane Mallarmé, Eliot, Paul Valéry, and Rilke (2-4). He then turns to Flaubert, focusing on the author’s ambition, expressed in a letter of 1852, to write “a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style” (6).⁴

Flaubert’s dream of a “non-representational, intransitive style” and his understanding, formulated later in the same letter, of style as “an absolute manner of seeing things” are identified as...