Fables of Representation: Essays

The New Modernism

The New Modernism The editors of Green Mountains Review have assigned the difAcult task of prophecy, to determine “both the state of poetry now and what current trends predict for the writing of the future.” I suggested in my introduction to the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) that postmodernism, as an extension of romanticism and modernism, does not represent a clean break with the past, as Fredric Jameson claims in his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984). There can be no doubt of the triumph of capital and the cultural impact of consumerism. But the characteristics which Jameson assigns to postmodernism—“aesthetic populism ,” “the deconstruction of expression,” “the waning of affect ,” “the end of the bourgeois ego,” and “the imitation of dead styles” through the use of pastiche—are true only in part and then mainly of the popular culture rather than poetry. Affect has not waned; indeed, it is still a late-romantic affect that fuels much poetic practice. Nor has the “bourgeois ego” disappeared. Being largely confessional, American poetry is the ritualizing of middle-class desire. “Aesthetic populism” was central to American culture long before the postmodern period. Modernist poets like W. C. Williams , Hart Crane, and T. S. Eliot were also inBuenced by mass culture, as seen in Eliot’s lines, in The Waste Land: “O O O O that Shakespeherian rag / It’s so elegant / So intelligent.” Populism is fueled by liberal democracy. It also takes its legitimacy from television, rock and roll, and cultural pluralism, all of which seek larger markets through an apparent lowering of the stan136 From Green Mountains Review, fall–winter 1996–97 and spring–summer, 1997, 30–37. dard. A curious fact of American culture is that a new “low” always contains the seeds of a new elitism. Nothing could be more standard than “revolution” in the United States, but these revolutions are so readily consumed by a product-hungry public that they rarely do any ideological damage. Many new artistic practices like rap music and performance poetry originate in marginalized culture, but they become “the new” only at the point they are fashionable among the (white) middle class. There has been much complaint about the appropriation of the blues by white musicians like Elvis Presley. Such cultural compromises lie at the heart of liberal democracy as well as Bakhtin’s concept of the “dialogic,” a process by which disparate cultures and idioms are conjoined through contact. Cultural compromise is the genius of American culture; it also contributes to its reputation for soullessness. Section XVIII of “Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams, beginning with the lines, “The pure products of America / go crazy,” is a critique of American culture. The lines of interest are: and young slatterns, bathed in Alth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but Butter and Baunt sheer rags. In America, what constitutes a “peasant tradition,” especially one that is an imaginative and uniting cultural force? The girl Elsie is from a poor family, an American peasant lacking the cultural advantages that tradition provides. She is therefore voiceless , “succumbing without / emotion / save numbed terror.” If the American voice is not provided by ritual mediums like poetry and religion (as still occurs in Vietnamese culture), but 137 rather by marketing mediums like popular music, television, and Alm, what is likely to constitute the American soul? In “To Elsie,” William Carlos Williams is a Matthew Arnold of the American suburbs, casting a fearful eye on cultural anarchy— this from a poet who contributed to “aesthetic populism.” Populism , of course, is far from “numbed terror” and “No one / to witness / no one to drive the car,” the poem’s ending lines. Williams’s point is that democracy is successful only when the people maintain imaginative cultural traditions. The last Afty years—roughly the lifetime of the baby boomer generation—has seen the rise of a new romanticism counterbalanced by an occasional stab at formalism. New formalism, as a movement, is too dedicated to past practices and too conservative politically. It also lacks a major poet. The most meaningful alternatives to free-verse epiphany are to the found in the innovative formalism of the New York School and language poetry. Both are attracted to systematic Oulipo procedures, and both employ modernist devices like substitution (fetishized...