Modernism

 I do not know if I am a modernist, or not. This goes beyond my education. I read William Collins Donahue's Truths That Cannot Be Offered Outside of Art: On Stephen D. Dowden’s “Modernism and Mimesis” hoping to learn more. Frankly, I found the essay a bit of a slog through abstruseness. That is until I came to the following:

Though I have remarked upon his use of Heidegger and Gadamer, Dowden’s understanding of modernism depends to a much greater extent on modernist artists themselves — specifically Thomas Mann. Indeed, one of the things I most admire about this study is the way he deploys Doctor Faustus (1947) throughout to make his point. Once again, we are invited to look with fresh eyes at an alleged specimen of canonical modernism. For many years, the consensus was that Adrian Leverkühn, the musician protagonist, devolves as a consequence of his deal with the devil into a kind of fascist, his modernist music serving to illustrate his “inhuman” turn. Not so, argues Dowden. What we see instead is an artist who learns to eschew irony and parody (at which Leverkühn, like Mann, quite excels) in favor of a naïve form of composition that expresses profound grief at the loss of his beloved nephew, Nepomuk. Though this reading of the novel has since gained some traction (most recently in an essay in The New Yorker), Dowden was the first to make it. More importantly, it transforms a simple — and, frankly, simplistic — allegory about Nazism into a much more compelling narrative of modernism as a form of art whose directness and, yes, naïveté bring people together, rather than dividing them by class and educational attainment. Entirely at odds with the notion of modernism as grist for elite academic specialists, this reading of Doctor Faustus communicates an alternative, far more egalitarian and positive, image of the movement.

For Dowden, modernism is essentially a game or party, with no prerequisite of expertise. It can only come alive because of us — indeed, it remains a dead thing without us — and we can only participate by shedding our self-consciousness, at least provisionally. The argument involves a massive shift from puzzling over abstruse literary allusions in T. S. Eliot to an emphasis on unselfconscious play, from feelings of frustrated inadequacy and alienation to inclusion and “naïve” delight. But if this reading is correct, it is true of art itself, not modernism only. Here, too, Dowden is ahead of us, conceding the point but arguing that modernism just happens to be the best there is.

The abstruseness comes from my being long from reading current philosophy, and never reading much on the subject of aesthetics. From the above sections, I will prefer to be a mere modernist. 

sch 1/8/23