Continuing the theme of modernism from yesterday

… For six hundred years, English has been tinkered with until it has

become a fine instrument for describing what’s literally going on and

what people are thinking. The vocabulary is famously huge, the syntax

is supple, and there are narrative techniques for all occasions. As an

example of perceptive modern prose, consider James Joyce‘s spare

description of Leopold Bloom in a hearse:

Mr. Bloom entered and sat in a vacant place. He pulled the door to

after him and slammed it shut tight. He passed an arm through the armstrap

and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds

of the avenue. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars

she was passed over. Glad to see us go we give them so much trouble

coming.

We don’t really know how the old woman talks or what she’s thinking.

Maybe she’s a police informant spying on the house opposite; maybe she’s

a he. But Joyce has focused his lens so that only Bloom’s mind

shows clearly. Thus we learn about the objects that Bloom handles—the

door and the armstrap—but only about their functions, because he

is too preoccupied to note accidental features like material and color.

His very name reflects his state of mind, for he experiences himself as

"Mr. Bloom" when he rides in a hearse. We might like

to learn more (for instance, what kind of buildings line the avenue?),

but such information would ruin the realism. Thinking is perspectival,

selective; and we know just what Bloom notices.

Modern literary English allows an author to choose almost any vantage

point, any focus, and any depth of field. Why then does Joyce use so many

other idioms? For instance, in the "Oxen of the Sun" episode,

he mimics every major prose style in the history of English. At one point,

Bloom has just entered a house where a woman is suffering her third day

of labor. He means to express his sympathy to the family, but he finds

himself among callous drunks who are loudly discussing whether it would

be better in the eyes of the Church for the woman or the baby to die.

Bloom mutters vague abstractions to avoid expressing a view, perhaps because

any opinion could be heard upstairs. Then …

Joyce’s prose resembles a thick but uneven hedge screening the literal

truth. Here, we can just about cut through the fifteenth-century language

to to see what’s going on. In other places, it is impossible to make out

even the basic narrative facts. For instance, we are almost never permitted

to overhear Bloom’s thoughts about what to do or where to go next. Much

like Odysseus, he just shows up in episode after episode.

Frustrated by this and other omissions, we might say: If only Joyce would

just tell the story! Why does he have to use a pastiche of past and present

styles, so many of which are opaque?

The question assumes, of course, that there is a truth to grasp. But

perhaps my "literal interpretation" above is simply one idiom,

a product of its time, just as Everyman reflects the culture of

England in 1500. In that case, Joyce has carried realism to its final

stage. He doesn’t describe the world or consciousness (either objectively

or subjectively), because to do so would be to forget the fact that all

seeing is from the point of view of a style. Instead, he describes some

past and contemporary ways in which life has been described. As in one

of Nietzsche’s magic tricks, the real world—disappears! Literature,

not life, is the subject of Ulysses; yet the book itself counts as literature

(in Stephen’s words, as an "eternal affirmation of the spirit of

man"), because it is perceptive, tender, and humane.

This rare combination—a declaration of the End of Art that is also

art—is characteristic of the greatest works of modernism. Note, however,

that Joyce must deny that there has been progress in the history of English

narrative style. The succession of idioms that he mimics does not evolve

toward clarity. If modern English prose has somehow surpassed its predecessors,

then Joyce would have no excuse to abandon it.

I know less about ballet than about any other art form, which

is to say, nothing. Thus I was fascinated to read Jennifer Homans’ article

"Geniuses Together,"

in the New York Review of Books some time ago. I have long believed

that "modernism" means a recognition that all the past

ways of representing the world have been arbitrary and culturally relative

styles. Once modernism arrives, we have three main choices: (1)

historicism, the effort to reproduce past styles accurately and

comprehensively; (2) abstraction, the effort to move beyond style

and representation altogether by taking inspiration from something universal,

such as mathematics or the unconscious; or (3) irony, the joking

recognition that there is no way out of style. I’ve argued that these

are the choices faced by the visual arts and also by philosophy. My friend

David Luban argues

that even law faces this dilemma. From Homans’ article, it appears

that the ballets of Stravinsky perfectly illustrate the same situation.

First came a historicist phase, around 1909, when Michel Fokine was Stravinsky’s

choreographer:

Ballet, [Fokine] said, was hopelessly "confused." It was

historically nonsensical for pink-tutued ballerinas to run around with

Egyptian-clad peasants and Russian top-booted dancers; ballet dancers

were ridiculously "straight-backed." … Ballet, Fokine insisted,

must be reformed, and it was here that his ideas dovetailed with Diaghilev’s:

a ballet, he said, must "have complete unity of expression."

It must be historically consistent and stylistically accurate. Petipa’s

French classical vocabulary was appropriate only for French classical

or romantic subjects. If a ballet was about ancient Greece, then the

choreographer must invent movement based on the art and sculptures of

that place and time. …. In Fokine and Diaghilev’s historicist aesthetic,

classical ballet was not a universal form, but a particular style. ….

And then came abstraction, with Balanchine:

Choreographically, Apollon Musagète created a stylistically

unified, Fokinesque "whole" world. But Balanchine broke with

Fokine in one crucial respect. …. For Balanchine, what mattered was

that the external shape, color, and tone of the movement capture an

important idea. He was not interested in historical accuracy or what

he called "petty, everyday" emotions: he was trying to show

something more elevated: "supplication."[7]

In 1957, Balanchine further simplified Apollo (as it was then

renamed) by dispensing with the ballet’s seventeenth-century sets and

costumes in favor of simple black-and-white practice cloths against

a plain backdrop. As such, he brought Apollo into aesthetic orbit

with his most recent Stravinsky collaboration: Agon. …. Agon

was the culmination of an aesthetic Balanchine first introduced in 1946

with The Four Temperaments, and it changed everything we know

about how to watch a dance. Agon has no clear narrative, no melodic

or lyrical line: rather, it piles blocks of movement and music one on

top of another. ….

Of course, dancing in plain lyotards in front of plain drapes is also

a style. In the other arts, sooner or later, minimalism and abstraction

are seen as arbitrary styles, at which point irony becomes the only option.

I wonder whether this has happened in dance.