The Limits of Literary Historicism

Why Modernist Claims for Autonomy Matter

Why Modernist Claims for Autonomy Matter Charles M. Altieri I I think there are four aspects necessary to address fully if one is going to give a historical account of Modernism honoring the intentions of the artists and writers. One need not end with this account—all sorts of criticisms and contextualizing are possible. But if one does begin by finding out how to take the artists’ assertions seriously and sympathetically, it is hard to see whether one is accounting for any historical situation at all. (1) Modernism despised two aspects of what they saw as dependencies on rhetoric blinding their society to real social conditions and to possible sources of energy and value possible for addressing those social conditions. At one pole this critique focused on outmoded habits and conventions like those of studio painting or assumptions that literature should be morally edifying. At the other pole the focus was on how individuals deployed an internalized rhetorical impulse that led them to the kinds of social identities allowing them to think well of themselves because they could envision others being seduced by their performances . Such performances substituted for mustering the will and the labor to attempt struggling with the real historical situations in which the agents found themselves. (2) There was a continual alienation from the ways their society developed representational ideals that placed truth concerns within the authority of Enlightenment empiricist philosophy. One model of opposition here was Joyce’s claim that he was not representing appearances within nature but was imitating the productive energies of nature itself. Other writers and painters sought models by which they could claim that their art was not mediated by representational pictures but rendered the immediate interplay of subject and object or objective force that constituted a vital encounter with their historical situations. (3) Impersonality was one basic means of challenging rhetorical stances because the artist would renounce the pleasures of Charles M. Altieri 146 imaginary identification in favor of rebuilding personal energies in consort with how the object or objective force might yield possibilities of feeling. (4) The only way to stabilize impersonality was to rely as little as possible on empirical or conventional interests and as much as possible on the internal logic developed by the art work. That is, the artists and writers had to take very seriously the rhetoric of the autonomous art work and had to develop means of turning that rhetoric into formal possibilities for a new art and a new way of imagining how subjects and objects might be inseparable from one another. Now I have two choices. I can go through a list of recent books and criticize them for not fully honoring these principles, turning instead to what I consider primarily exercises in a critical rhetoric telling the academic world what it wants to hear and expecting in return the immeasurable benefit of allowing one to feel good about one’s work. Or I could try to clarify the most maligned of my four principles—modernist thinking about autonomy—in such a way that I at least can imagine historicist critics having to confront. I chose the second because it seems more interesting. Then I need only one antagonist. So I have chosen Jay Bernstein’s Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting even though he has not made much of an impact on literary studies. Bernstein’s immensely articulate account also has the advantage of focusing a common thread in modernist criticism—the dilemmas confronting artists and writers once they renounce “orientations” that attune us to the principles of nature. (We might call this a deep realism amenable to Marxist visions and quite distinct from the “representational” realism that critics disdain as a product of instrumental reason.) And because Bernstein approaches modernism philosophically, he provides an abstract account with sufficient scope to serve as an umbrella argument covering a variety of discrete and often competing claims. If we take figures like Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson as examples, we will see that Bernstein offers a clear formulation of their frustrated realism as well as their attacks on modernist abstraction and offers a clear formulation of the logic of their positions . New historicist parallels are not as obvious. But while new historicists rarely lament modernism’s refusal of orientations derived from realism, they do complain about high modernism’s lack of the kind of psychological realism that enables honesty about self-interest and political filiation.Thus modernist impersonality becomes self...