Modernist Literature and Politics
Tyrus Miller
Preliminary Considerations
The relation of modernist literature to politics has been the subject of heated debate since modernism’s emergence in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Claims for modernism’s anticipation of new utopian human traits and social orders have been met with counterclaims of its portending of degeneration, social decline and collapse into sheer nihilism and anarchy. It has been seen as a rhetorical toolbox for individual and collective liberation, and, antithetically, as an oppressive instrument for aestheticizing power. For some it is an efficacious unshackling of mind and word from the chains of sterile tradition, for others a wanton destruction of the past and its values, without any affirmative compensation for them. Modernism has been aligned with such varying political tendencies as anarchism, socialism, fascism, revolutionary nationalism, the liberal defence of Western freedom against Eastern totalitarianism, pacifist internationalism, and even, in the recent ‘culture wars’ in journals like The New Criterion, with the politically conservative defence of quality, virtue and cultural tradition itself against liberal multiculturalism, post-modernism and political correctness. Strongly different ideological emphases, rhythms of development and national features are observable even within historical modernism’s European ‘core’, and these differences become all the more pronounced when modernisms from colonial-imperial ‘peripheries’ and postcolonial independence cultures where complex appropriations of and resistances to metropolitan cultures come into play. Modernism has been viewed as a corollary of political internationalism, as an outgrowth of modern nationalism, as a product of complex transnational networks and exchanges, and as a reflection of distributed or utopian cultural geographies that do not neatly map onto the borders and categories of political geography but seem to place them, sometimes explicitly, in question. Depending on which language bases, which media and genres, which geographical units, which periods and time spans and which subcultural specifications (women writers, queer writers, exile writers, postcolonial writers and so on) one begins with, very different judgement about modernism’s political valences will result. Consequentially, any attempt to formulate an inclusive theoretical and historiographic view of modernist literature’s or modernist aesthetics’ relation to politics seems quickly to verge towards the ambiguity, complexity and contradictoriness of a modernist artwork itself.
A further complication of the question of modernist literary politics is the relatively uncertain, even confused, relation between the several senses in which the two complex terms ‘modernism’ and ‘politics’ might be conjoined. What, for example, is the relation between the political commitments of the biographical modernist author and the ‘politics’ of his or her literary work? If an author professes support for Mussolini, for example, does the work that he writes automatically become, by virtue of that adherence or advocacy, ‘fascist’? If an individual modernist writer’s work (e.g. John Dos Passos) is associated with left-wing politics, or another with right-wing politics (e.g. T. S. Eliot), does either individual case tell us anything generalizable about ‘modernism’ as a broader literary tendency? What is the relation between the work’s ‘politics’ understood as its internally represented ideological commitments and its ‘politics’ as its external, practical social commitments and effects (if any)? Must a modernist author or work have a manifest relationship to a state, a party or a political movement to be considered ‘political’? If an author changes political affiliations – explicitly renouncing fascism as did, for example, Wyndham Lewis in the later 1930s or shifting from conservatism to democratic liberalism as did Thomas Mann after the First World War – does this affect only the ‘politics’ of the work subsequent to the ideological turn or the ‘politics’ of the whole corpus? Or, vice versa, does a previous political orientation continue to shadow the ‘modernism’ of the whole body of work? How can the futurist modernism of F. T. Marinetti be fascist, while the futurist modernism of Aldo Palezzeschi was anti-fascist? Were these both ‘modernist’ in the same way, or did their varying political directions also shape their aesthetics divergently? Insofar as Marinetti’s and Pound’s modernisms were ostensibly ‘fascist’ were they ‘fascist’ in the same way? And did the modernisms of Pound and Gottfried Benn relate to, respectively, Italian and German fascism in analogous or divergent ways? None of these questions, and many more we might pose, are trivial ones. They may offer directions for substantial, consequential historical and theoretical investigation by critics, theoreticians and historians. But our ability to proliferate such questions at will points to the great difficulty in making general statements about the relations of objects of such internal complexity as modernist literature and politics. It is easy to end up in a kind of exasperated scepticism, exclaiming of the whole issue of modernism’s politics, as of Samuel Beckett’s character Watt in the eponymous novel, ‘I tell you nothing is known!’ (Beckett, 1959, 21).
At the same time, however, mere scepticism towards generalizing precepts will not suffice either. Political meanings and ideological engagements manifestly accompany and in many cases drive modernist literature’s linguistic, rhetorical and moral provocations, while this literature consistently and self-reflexively engages with the question of its own relation to politics, however variable the answers that it embraces may be. In fact, I wish to suggest, it may be precisely its singular combinations of political intention or interest and ideological indefiniteness that reveals an essential feature of modernism’s literary politics: its ‘representational’ underdetermination, its speculative and inventive nature, its open adaptability to a variety of social-historical and ideological contexts. As Ferenc Fehér notes of modernist art and literature, it is ‘thoroughly free of ideology (tolerating no interpretations, refuting all “ideal content” imposed on it), and at the same time it is thoroughly ideological (in so far as the “form”, the formed world, is, so to speak, a sensualized theorem)’ (Fehér, 1976, 185–6).
Modernist form may distance the work from any thesis-like formulation of a political position or argument, but it may at the same time open up a set of alternative possibilities for the modernist work to evoke political meanings and ideas. The paradoxically non-ideological/ideological ‘sensualized theorem’ of the singular modernist work stands in a charged hermeneutic tension with the actually existing world of the present. The modernist work resists decoding and interpretation; it is undetermined in its meaning, even nonsensical and incoherent in relation to the codes of ‘normal’, present reality. Yet it also, implicitly, urges towards a reorganization of that reality in a future in which its apparent difficulty or nonsensicality will be, at last, revealed to have been, all along, a higher form of clarity and sense. A piece of Russian futurist zaum poetry or a Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons does not expect immediate understanding from the present. Rather, it speculates on a future – occupied by, for instance, Malevich’s transfigured ‘Strong Men of the Future’ – in which it might be normal to speak like the poetry of Khlebnikov or Kruchenykh, or in the cubist textures of Stein, and it ponders the conditions under which this future might come to exist. Insofar as the idioms and forms of the work project both a destruction of the present and a transfigured future, in which current indetermination is the typological anticipation of fulfilled meaning in a future historical order, there is a utopian ‘politics’ that inheres in much modernist writing, and certainly in its most radical, experimental instances.
In what remains, I will pursue this hypothesis further, exploring three distinct cases of modernist politics in which modernist writers deploy their works’ utopian-critical tension with the present to point towards and imagine future, still-to-be-realized ideological meanings, a ‘possible politics’ that is evoked and indexed, if not fully represented or depicted by the work. The forms of possibility that different modernisms project, and the experimental literary means of producing them, are radically different across authors, contexts and periods. Yet, I will argue, together they share this common feature: they address and remotivate the gap between their own literary representations and actually existing politics, in order not simply to innovate in the form and content of the literary but also to imagine new shapes and expressions that politics might, in the present and future, take on. The three cases I will discuss relate in indicative ways to strong political background contexts; we may use them, however, to guide us in the interpretation of works for which the political background may be less intense, explicit or well defined. My cases are the politics of revolutionary messianism, of radical transfiguration latent in the present, in the poetics of the Dadaist Hugo Ball and the Hungarian avant-garde poet Lajos Kassák; a dystopian, demonic variant of this same, which represents a dystopian variant of this same modernist theo-political impulse in Wyndham Lewis’s 1927 satirical novel The Childermass; and the ‘Popular Front’ modernism of John Dos Passos, who conceives of the modernist montage novel as the means to project the aesthetic image of ‘the People’, a popular political force with multiple cultural, racial-ethnic and geographical characteristics.
Revolutionary Messianism: Hugo Ball and Lajos Kassák
For those familiar with the name Hugo Ball, the first association is almost invariably with the costumed figure of ‘the magic bishop’ performing Dadaist sound poetry in the Cabaret Voltaire in wartime Zurich. The image of Ball reciting, in a priest-like liturgical voice, poems such as ‘Gadji beri bimba’ and ‘Karawane’, hoping to use words magically to heal the wounds inflicted by war and technical modernity, has become canonical. It is less observed that the Dadaist episode represents only a few months of Ball’s career and that the dramatic theatricality of his Dada persona has obscured the erudite, restlessly intellectual and politically engaged character of his writings. The Dadaist phase was followed by important activity as a political journalist, cultural critic and religious writer, up to his premature death from cancer in 1927. Along with the messianic philosopher Ernst Bloch, he was one of the regular contributors to the progressive newspaper Freie Zeitung in Bern, where he also made the acquaintance of his neighbour Walter Benjamin, who was in Switzerland to flee the draft. After a conversion experience in which he embraced a monastic Catholicism, he wrote a book on Byzantine Christianity, which focused on three saints’ lives, an important review of Carl Schmitt’s Catholic juridical and political thought, the first literary critical treatment of his friend and benefactor Hermann Hesse and many other diverse works animated by his spiritual and political vision. What unites these various artistic, political and spiritual threads in Ball’s work is the orientation of a fallen present towards an age of salvation, in which the apparent chaos of today, expressed in the extremities of Dadaist and expressionist verse, will be prophetically redeemed as portents of a higher sense to come.
Ball’s relation with Ernst Bloch was warm and mutually influential, though eventually strained by intellectual and personal differences. In his diary entry of 18 November 1917, Ball wrote that ‘I am often seen with a utopian friend, E. B., and he induces me to read More and Campanella, while he studies Münzer and the Eisenmenger’ (Ball, 1996, 145). Already as early as 1914, Hugo Ball became interested in Thomas Münzer, one of the revolutionary religious inspirations and leaders of the peasant uprising in Germany in 1525, and worked with his picture hung above his work desk. The conclusion to the first chapter of Ball’s 1919 book Critique of the German Intelligentsia pitted Thomas Münzer’s connection of social freedom and religious belief against Martin Luther’s attempt to appease the feudal princes. After publishing Spirit of Utopia in its first version in 1918, Bloch went on to publish a subsequent book Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution in 1921; Ball encouraged Bloch to research the figure of Münzer. In turn, Walter Benjamin met Ernst Bloch through Hugo Ball. Gershom Scholem describes Benjamin’s association with Ball as being both personal and intellectual (1981, 78–9).
Entries from Ball’s diary, published late in his life as Flight Out of Time, exemplify the messianic dimension of his artistic thinking. A central dimension of his artistic, spiritual and political vision and the main axis linking them is the idea of incarnation. Already in an entry on 4 October 1915, Ball wrote:
I tend to compare my own private experiences with the nation’s. I see it almost as a matter of conscience to perceive a certain parallel there. It may be a whim, but I could not live without the conviction that my own personal fate is an abbreviated version of the fate of the whole nation. If I had to admit that I was surrounded by highwaymen, nothing in the world could convince me that they were not my fellow countrymen whom I live among. I bear the signature of my homeland, and I feel surrounded by it everywhere I go. (1996, 30)
This representative status would take on an explicitly ‘passional’ dimension in a note of 5 July 1919: ‘I cannot make a fresh start in private and just for myself alone. All my ideas must go with me, the whole fabric that I grew up in and that my mind can grasp. That pulls and tears and bleeds from a hundred wounds. I want to fit in with the whole nation, or not to live’ (176). And in a more general, philosophical way, in an entry dated 31 July 1920, Ball presents incarnation as the foundation of an alternative vision of history, which in turn motivates his salvational conception of the artist, occupying a position near the saint in a spiritual hierarchy of the capacity for suffering:
The great, universal blow against rationalism and dialectics, against the cult of knowledge and abstractions, is: the incarnation. Ideas and symbols have become flesh in the divine-human person; they have suffered and bled in and with the person, they have been crucified. It is no longer just the intellect but the whole person that is the representative of the spiritual heaven. (192)
This incarnational poetics and politics also characterize the early messianic stance of the important Hungarian avant-garde poet, novelist, editor, artist group organizer and visual artist Lajos Kassák. Kassák, who came from a provincial city in the area of Greater Hungary now in Slovakia, went from a lower-middle-class family into work in workshops and factories, where he participated in the socialist labour struggles and demonstrations of pre–First World War Budapest. A dropout from school, he educated himself as a writer and founded a succession of journals – A Tett (The Act), Ma (Today), Dokumentum (Document), Munka (Work) – that established him as the incontestable centrepoint of the Hungarian avant-garde, which was characterized by both aesthetic and political radicalism. The journal A Tett was one of the central expressions of anti-war sentiment among the artistic intelligentsia and was banned by the authorities; its successor Ma spanned the end of the war and the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, and Kassák managed to revive it in exile in Vienna and maintain it for another five years, while getting contributions from the most important avant-garde writers and artists from all over Europe. Dokumentum and Munka were path-breaking journals representing the political modernism that we associate with figures like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, and, in fact, Benjamin published two articles in Hungarian translation in Dokumentum in 1926–27.
Kassák was a man of singular will and intelligence and his biography is an extraordinary one. Yet the cultural and political context of Hungary made it particularly ripe for the incarnation of the messianic idea in the figure of its artists and poets. Already in the 1848 independence struggle, the poet Sándor Petőfi set the tone for seeing the poet as the representative of the suffering and potential of the nation. In the first years of the war, the passionate apocalypticism of the influential modernist poet Endre Ady, whom Georg Lukács described at the time as a religious poet without God, was an important impetus towards the development of a revolutionary messianism (Lukács, 1998, 47–54). This climate of ideas was given what seemed practical confirmation with the declaration of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in March 1919, in which nearly all major modern intellectuals, from non-Communist modernists such as Béla Bartók to Communist converts like Lukács and Béla Balázs to utopian anarcho-communists such as Kassák, participated. During the first month of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Tanácsköztársaság), on 10 April 1919, the avant-garde critic Iván Hevesy published an article in Kassák’s journal Ma entitled ‘Mass Culture, Mass Art’, in which he took up Lukács’s messianic impulse and situated the task of avant-garde art in fostering revolutionary, salvational impulses. Hevesy saw in the new mass culture an overcoming of individualism in a new epic representativeness, which provides the foundation for the unified belief of which great mass art requires. Typical of the cultural revolutionary viewpoint, Hevesy emphasized the spiritual dimension of the masses over their practical aims. ‘It must be strongly emphasized’, he writes, ‘that the first and foremost precondition for the emergence of a social art is the emergence of a religion of the masses. The economic situation of the masses, their degree of liberation or exploitation can only play a secondary role’ (Hevesy, 2002, 229). Seeing the essence of religion as ‘belief in a perfected human life’, Hevesy went on to argue that the ‘new order’, the Soviet Republic, ‘brings a new religion […] that demonstrates the perfect life right here on earth and does not defer to the goal of perfected life. […] The new religion and the new society will form a new aesthetic culture and folk art of an inconceivably high order, next to which all that has gone before will shrink and vanish’ (229).
Kassák added one further ingredient to Hevesy’s millenarian conception of mass art, the ‘incarnational’ role of the avant-garde artist as the collectively representational figure. In his essay ‘Activism’, a lecture given on the eve of the declaration of the Soviet Republic and published in Ma in the same issue as Hevesy’s article, Kassák argued that he and his avant-garde colleagues were fighting for the political goals of Communism, but also against the constraint of human liberation by politics, in favour of a permanent ‘existential’ revolution of life. They were fighting, in Kassák’s coinage, for the ‘collective individuum’, which can be understood as a new epic monumentality and representativeness of the singular, individual artist as mass activist. Kassák saw ‘activism’ as an artistic and social movement ‘toward individual revolution that will outlast all forms of government and party dictatorships’. Kassák formulated his goals – the task of the collective individuum and the avant-garde artist – as a revolution beyond Communism:
The revolution of the political parties does not yet constitute the great all-consuming revolution of life […]
For us the meaning of life lies therefore beyond the speculative revolution of political parties, in the endlessness of existential revolution.
…
With this conceptual definition we declare the rebirth of the human soul as the barely definable ultimate goal of the revolution – beyond Communism which is held by many to be the ultimate goal. (Kassák, 2002, 223)
The Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed in July 1919, after a few, intense bloody months, and the response was a violent, repressive White Terror, with anti-semitic pogroms and a mobilization of Catholic conservative rhetoric to legitimate the militarist counter-revolutionary dictatorship of Admiral Horthy. After a period of imprisonment, Kassák managed to get across the border to Vienna, where he revived his journal Ma and provided a centre of avant-garde activity among the exiles from the terror. The avant-garde group around Kassák, however, began to polarize into those who remained aligned with him and those who more closely aligned themselves with the ultra-left of the Communist Party in the proletarian culture movement. Kassák’s own writing in the three years after the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic took on tragic shadings, but in no way lost their messianic tone, which, if anything, was heightened into a veritable passion of exilic suffering. Thus in his preface to his lyrical prose-poetic narrative of the revolution and reaction of 1919, Máglyák Énekelnek (The Bonfires Sing), Kassák explicitly takes on the role as the incarnated, crucified, Luciferian-Christ poet of that crushed revolution:
When I place this, my book, before the reader, I feel that with my 34 years of life, I have passed the first station of my being a writer. […] The sole indicator of value is the artist’s power and humanity, which as one is the measure of the world’s level. Yet the world’s totality is movement, eternal revolution in itself. Every artistic creation, however, as the world’s expression, is a revolutionary demonstration in the face of limitation (the state, the conservative representative of society). Before viewers and listeners I want to make ‘artistic traditions’ collapse. And from this comes the book’s apparent irreality and formal strangeness. (Kassák, 1920, n.p.)
Wavering between prose and poetry, between grimly realistic portrayals of pogroms and expressionistically abstracted representations of collective impulses, Kassák ends his 120-page text on a rhapsodic note of utopian hope:
From our pure eyes the river-banks fall away.
Beliefs bonfire.
Bonfires sing.
The goal! The goal!
Above the city the organs incessantly rain red stars.
By then, already no one believed in the saintliness of the regime.
From somewhere the just man set out.
And in the arms of the poor the pitiless power awakened anew.
O my young, chance-found brothers! (Kassák, 1920, n.p.)
Satiric-Political Modernism in Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass
Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass constitutes my second case of how modernist politics is implicit in the tension between modernism’s present context and its potential collective normalization in a future yet to be realized. Lewis’s novel offers an allegorical vehicle for him to explore an open-ended set of historical, social, political and philosophical-theological ideas that together, in his view, constitute the larger, current modernist zeitgeist. The Childermass presents a limbo-like world of the dead spirits of young men, many of whom have been killed in the recent trench warfare of the First World War, though according to the fluidity of time in its heterocosmic setting, there are also incongruous mixes of historical period, cultures and races that are part of its world. This setting is a mixture of a military encampment, a concentration camp (a term that Lewis actually uses, though of course not with advance knowledge of what it would come to mean in the 1940s), a political rally and Roman bread-and-circuses festival – all forms of social space strongly marked by political connotations. The camp is a holding area at one of the gates of the ‘Magnetic City’, where the souls will pass in and be moulded into a new collective mass. The Magnetic City, it is suggested, is a sort of neo-London, in which all the manifestations of modernity that Lewis also identified in cultural critical books such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927), from collective politics to the contemporary dedifferentiation of gender, will be manifest as a coherent, realized whole.
The Childermass camp is, as it were, the Magnetic City’s temporal suburb – from which we are on the threshold of passing into the Magnetic City any day. The camp is thus largely a manifestation of time, a spatialized, allegorical dystopic exaggeration of tendencies in the extended present, pointing forward from recent history (First World War) to an imminent future (the coming age of political collectivism). This implication is reinforced by the opening 125 pages of the book – more than a third of its total length – in which the two dead ex-soldiers and schoolboy pals Pullman and Satters wander around in the ‘time-flats’ surrounding the camp, experiencing its strange phenomenology and manifestations. In these wanderings, Pullman has the tendency to take on traits and the idiom of James Joyce in the mode of Work in Progress (to become Finnegans Wake), which Lewis pilfered and parodied, while the corpulent, fleshy Satters can lapse into Gertrude Stein-like repetition.
The two young men return to camp from their wanderings in time for the daily proceedings of the camp’s chief authority, the Bailiff, a Mephistopheles-like, Machiavellian ‘Old Nick’ stage devil and comic villain, who also bears traits of the hysterical Roman anarcho-tyrant like Heliogabalus or a brutal ‘oriental despot’. In this latter two-thirds of the book, Pullman and Satters become essentially individualized members of a chorus that reacts in stereotyped fashion to a political and philosophical farce being staged by the Bailiff and his enemies in the camp, the hilariously ultra-Hellenic followers of the philosopher Hyperides. The Bailiff is a classic crowd-master, while Hyperides is a hyperbolic personification of resistance to everything the Bailiff represents – a parodic, polemical grotesque by which Lewis dramatizes his ideas, not unlike his persona of ‘the Enemy’, while also reflecting on the danger of satirical engagement: that the satirist becomes contaminated by the object of satire or appears disfigured by the negative imprint of that which he opposes.
In representing the fluctuating phenomenological fields of the time-flats around the camp, Lewis engages a relatively simple estrangement device, to which he nevertheless steadily accretes ideological, philosophical and aesthetic connotations: the substitution of time for space in the structuring of the object world, bodily motion, visual appearance and measures of proximity and distance. Thus, for example, at a certain point in their wandering, the two young men encounter an eighteenth-century English village full of miniature houses, cows the size of terriers, bush-like trees and diminutive villagers. Besides being a nod to his precursor in philosophical and political satire, Jonathan Swift, Lewis has taken painterly perspective as a metaphor for historical distance: in this world of the dead, being two centuries past from Pullman and Satters translates into being a third of their physical height and weight. More chaotic and deranging is a passage early in the book, in which Pullman and Satters pass through a time-vortex:
The scene is redistributed, vamped from position to position intermittently at its boundaries. It revolves upon itself in a slow material maelstrom. Satters sickly clings to his strapping little champion: sounds rise on all hands like the sharp screech of ripping calico, the piercing alto of the slate-pencil, or the bassooning of imposing masses, frictioning each other as they slowly turn in concerted circles.
Never before have there been so many objects of uncertain credentials or origin: as it grows more intricate Pullman whisks them forwards, peering into the sky for lost stars twirling about as he has to face two ways at once on the qui vive for the new setting, fearing above all reflections, on the look-out for optical traps, lynx-eyed for threatening ambushes of anomalous times behind the orderly furniture of Space or hidden in objects to confute the solid at the last moment, every inch a pilot. (Lewis, 1965, 42–3)
Lewis’s implication is not just that his protagonists suffer from this disorganized time-scape. It is also that, in order to move and dwell in it, they need to adapt and adjust to it. Just as we in the modern present are adapting to new everyday experiences and phenomena, so too his characters Pullman and Satters, to an even more extreme degree, are becoming fluctuating time-beings, whose identity depends not on their physical, embodied, locational continuity, but rather on an asyntactical, futuristic chain of experiences and intensities ‘in libertà’, whose modernist literary expressions might be found in Marinetti’s futurist ejaculations, Stein’s continuous present, Joyce’s multilingual punning, Proust’s slowly thickening memories and Pound’s transhistorical citational and stylistic montage.
Ultimately, it is the Bailiff who is the demonic figure who turns mastery of time into mastery of a new political principle, wielding his power over the mass of souls and guiding them on their pathway into the Magnetic City, where they will be the elements of the collectivist polis and a new post-liberal politics. While his alternatingly sinister and ridiculous camp spectacle nods towards modernist references such as Joseph Conrad’s colonial outposts and D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, it is not accidental that the Bailiff deploys Stein and Joyce as touchpoints of his political rhetoric. The Bailiff is a kind of personified mask of modernist time as the continual metamorphoses, mimetism and the exchange of simulacra.
We need not imagine that Lewis’s point is to morally castigate his modernist compatriots as the willing accomplices of the real devils who were looming up in the political landscape of the late 1920s. However, he was suggesting that modernist writing had an effective domain that was different from and separate from the direct space of political polemics and electoral campaigns. In the heterocosmic spaces of these texts, in their very distance from everyday life and their experimentation with new linguistic and narrative idioms, Lewis discerned a liquidation of social stabilities, boundaries and edges that could once have been taken for granted. Lewis believed that it was necessary to enter these liquid spaces and stage a polarizing set of confrontations that would harden the friend–enemy relations to a situation of political decision: either a final, irreversible capitulation to the forces of liquidation or a sovereign stand to reinstitute solidities and boundaries that had been effaced.
Acknowledging ‘the People’: Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy
In his introductory prose to his U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos evokes the meaning of ‘USA’ in a rhapsodic passage:
USA is the slice of a continent. USA is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. USA is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills, USA is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. USA is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetary. USA is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly USA is the speech of the people. (1996, 2–3)
Dos Passos asserts this at the outset of his more than 1000-page trilogy of novels The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money. But we should not take this so much as a confident assertion that this ‘speech of the people’ has been achieved by his work, and rather as a designator of a struggle of this speech to be articulated and heard among the other elements Dos Passos names and gives space to in the interlocking narratives, biographical prose poems and ‘Camera Eye’ stream-of-consciousness elements montaged together in the whole of U.S.A. We can, in a sense, see the novel as a dramatization of a struggle for recognition and, to a great extent, that struggle’s ultimate failure.
In his provocative On Populist Reason, the post-Marxist theoretician Ernesto Laclau formulates his notion of populism in a set of theses, which in turn can help us to explicate the political valences of Dos Passos’s writing in U.S.A. First, he argues, ‘the emergence of “the people” requires the passage – via equivalences – from isolated, heterogeneous demands to a “global” demand which involves the formation of political frontiers and the discursive construction of power as an antagonistic force’ (Laclau, 2005, 110). Put in a somewhat more vernacular form, he means that ‘the people’ appears as a political agent when single particular demands begin to be linked up by their common opposition to some power and the unfulfillment of those demands is experienced as a common injury to a single community; latent in the chain of equivalent, unfulfilled demands is ‘the people’, ready to emerge onto the political scene. Second, however, there is a crucial step of ‘nominating’ this political agency as ‘the people’ and investing it with the feeling that a community may come to feel about its own bond of identity: ‘Since, however, this passage [from isolated demands to single, “global” demand] does not follow from a mere analysis of the heterogeneous demands themselves […] something qualitatively new has to intervene. This is why “naming” can have [a] retrospective effect. This qualitatively differentiated and irreducible moment is what I have called “radical investment.” […] If an entity becomes the object of an investment – as in being in love, or in hatred – the investment belongs necessarily to the order of affect’ (110). Finally, because the chain of equivalences between demands entering into the political constitution of ‘the people’ remains, to some substantial degree, particular and irreducibly heterogeneous – composed of individuals and not a fused, uniform ‘community’ – the content of the name ‘the people’ and its political orientation is shifting, contestable and potentially unstable. Together, these three features – the movement towards linking particular demands as equivalents, the nomination of these linked equivalents by a collective name and the ambiguity of this name’s meaning and reference – constitute the conceptual nodal points of Laclau’s theory of populism.
Ironically, it is a strongly anti-modernist Popular Front thinker, Georg Lukács, who provides us with a critical link to understanding how Laclau’s post-Marxist populism might illuminate the ambiguous, populist project of Dos Passos’s trilogy. Novels, Lukács consistently suggests, can be understood as a sort of rhetorical laboratory for constituting and nominating ‘the people’, exhibiting the conditions under which this succeeds or fails and with what social, political and existential results (see Lukács 1979, 1983). Lukács could see this clearly in relation to the realist novel, which, however, he took to be the exclusive and normative type of novel for which this was the case, in part because his theory of reification and ideological distortion was entwined with his particular version of ‘populist reason’. Lukács required not only that the novel model the rhetorical articulation of equivalences between particulars and their summation into a collective narrative of an emerging ‘people’, but also that this model meet the demand for ‘objective’ social knowledge, as opposed to ‘false consciousness’ under the sway of reification.
Here, however, we must go beyond both Lukács’s judgements of taste and his epistemology of reification, in order to embrace Laclau’s idea that the heterogeneity and indefiniteness of the people is irreducible, which makes its identity unstable and the conflicts around its definition inventive. Not only, then, for the realist novel but also for a much vaster span of novels this logic of populism, this problem of constituting ‘the people’, would be at stake. Lukács’s focus on the novel, including the realist novel, remains timely, insofar as the logic of populism increasingly defines the political and cultural horizon of our day. What is no longer timely, however, is his exclusive valorization of realism in the articulation of populist reason. ‘Constituting the people’, I would argue, is not only the underlying object of the great realist novels of Balzac, Tolstoy, Mann and Gorky, as Lukács believed; ‘the people’ – fulfilled in different ways – is also the object of the works of political modernist writers, such as John Dos Passos, whom Lukács spurned.
Lukács emphasized the question of ‘perspective’ in his criticism of modernism and defence of realism (1979, 33, 54–5). Ultimately, he implies that a kind of one-point perspective, taking in a temporally and spatially proportionate field of action in context, is the only proper norm that could correspond, mimetically, to the objective historical character of a ‘people’. His notion of mimesis is not merely a crude reflection theory, a mirroring of a static, already existing entity. On the contrary, his theory of realism includes in it a pedagogical moment, in which the realist novel constitutes a kind of training ground for becoming, in a full sense, a people – and reflexively stages this emergence as part of its form-content unity. But if I may extend the analogy to painting, Lukács’s realist theory rejects out of hand the various dimensions of agency, action, context and interrelationship that other perspectival systems might offer a people to learn from and to clarify its rhetorical articulations: the reversal of field and ground that reverse perspective might allow (Brechtian theatre and certain works of modernist film deliberately deployed this perspectival system); the highlighting of features against a flattened field that might come from a reduced perspectival system; the multiplication of aspects and ambiguities through multiple perspectival systems deployed at once; and so on. Pace Lukács, once we see ‘the people’ as a problematic entity – both epistemologically and as a performatively made and unmade unity – we cannot in advance prescribe what forms it should take. Constituting a people becomes a series of provisional ventures in form-giving, within which the novel may function as a kind of extended and multiple ‘essayism’, at once tentative in its construction and engaged with the range of social discourses and ‘dispositions of the sensible’ necessary to any potential popular sovereignty, from science and technology to religion, political ideology, experience of work and aesthetics.
Modernism and populism are thus structurally isomorphic within Popular Front culture, rather than being (as often thought) antinomies or at best mere chronological fellow-travellers, as ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ but successive cultural formations. At the same time, however, 1930s modernist works such as Dos Passos’s trilogy project a decisively different hermeneutic task for its readers, in which the accent falls not, first and foremost, on discovering and decoding a representational meaning rendered difficult by modernist form, but rather on fulfilling, through exemplary acts of reading, the emergence of a still-latent collectivity demanding recognition – a task of acknowledgement from which representational understanding will derive. Conventionally, critics see 1934 (possibly 1936) as the moment in which Dos Passos distanced himself from Communist politics, very quickly moving to hostility and eventually, after the Second World War, towards a far-right McCarthyist and Goldwater-supporting Republican Party affiliation. Not accidentally, 1934–36 was also the point at which the Communist Party itself made its turn towards the Popular Front. Dos Passos’s U.S.A., I would suggest, had already adumbrated the Popular Front’s need, in the absence, still, of any reflection of it in the policy and actions of the Communist Party, which in the early 1930s was still characterizing Social Democrats and Socialists as social fascists and disrupting their rallies and demonstrations. U.S.A., then, is a plea for recognition of the people and a testimony that such recognition was already compromised by the time it came. Dos Passos’s trilogy is, in this regard, a monument of America’s political failure to hear and respond to the ‘speech of the people’, a modernist work mourning a Popular Front that was too little, and too late.
Modernism encompasses a wide variety of ways in which the modernist text may relate to ideological ‘content’, from the text’s apparently radical exclusion to its explicit treatment of ideologically motivated characters and events to its ‘essayistic’ disquisition on political ideas. Clearly, such different treatments of ideological and political materials have important implications for how we understand the ‘politics’ of modernist literature. In this chapter, however, I have stressed another vector of the politics of modernist writing: its ‘politics of time’, to use Peter Osborne’s phrase (1995), its setting the present in which the work is received into a politically charged tension with a changed future that is implicitly or explicitly indexed by the work. Considering three different cases, with highly distinct ideological valences – the revolutionary messianism of Hugo Ball’s and Lajos Kassák’s avant-garde writing, the pessimistic dystopianism of Wyndham Lewis’s futuristic satire and John Dos Passos’s mournful montage-epic of a populist politics recognized too late – I have sought to suggest a mode of reading the politics of modernism different from that of interpreting it in light of the political commitments of its authors or the manifest ideological contents of the works. Such a mode of reading may extend to many other works of modernism beyond those of the specific cases discussed here. Although authorial political commitments and explicit ideological content are material to the question of modernism’s politics, both of these dimensions are strongly inflected by this modernist ‘politics of time’. It is thus in the multidimensional tensions generated between these dimensions, rather than in any single aspect of ideology or explicit engagement, in which the politics of modernism should be sought.
Bibliography
Ball, H. (1996), Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, John Elderfield (ed.), A. Raimes (transl.). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Beckett, S. (1959), Watt. New York: Grove Press.
Dos Passos, J. (1996), U.S.A. (The 42 Parallel, 1919, The Big Money). New York: Library of America.
Fehér, F. (1976), ‘Ideology as Demiurge in Modern Art’. Praxis, 3, 184–95.
Hevesy, I. (2002 [1919]), ‘Mass Culture, Mass Art’, in T. O. Benson and E. Forgács (eds), Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 227–9.
Kassák, L. (1920), Máglyák Énekelnek. Vienna: Bécsi Magyar Kiadó.
Kassák, L. (2002 [1919]), ‘Activism’, in T. O. Benson and E. Forgács (eds), Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 219–24.
Laclau, E. (2005), On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Lewis, W. (1965 [1928]), The Childermass. London: Jupiter Books.
Lukács, G. (1979), The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, J. and N. Mander (transl.). London: Merlin Press.
Lukács, G. (1983), The Historical Novel, H. and S. Mitchell (transl.). Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Lukács, G. (1998 [1913]), ‘Ady Endre’, in Esztétikai kultúra. Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, pp. 47–54.
Osborne, P. (1995), The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London: Verso.
Scholem, G. (1981), Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, H. Zohn (transl.). Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.