Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
How Bad Can It Be?
(on Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., Bad Modernisms [Durham: Duke UP, 2006])
by Matthew Hooley | ns 71-72
In 2001 Susan Stanford Friedman imagined "what modernism was" for her "Po-Mo" students: "Modernism was elitism. Modernism was the Establishment. 'High Culture' lifting its skirts against the taint of the 'low,' the masses, the popular" (493). A few years earlier, Friedman, along with Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz attended the first two Modernist Studies Association conferences, entitled "New Modernisms." The "new" name signaled "a broadened definition, one that goes beyond the handful of writers—Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Woolf—who have come to stand in for various literary movements that remain far less studied and more difficult to grasp," as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it at the time.
Today, "the new modernist studies" is still growing and is still being defined against the preconceptions of Friedman's hypothetical students. Mao and Walkowitz have been at the forefront of this redefinition, writing in May 2008: "Were one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modernist literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one could do worse than expansion." Their article coordinates this expansion along "temporal, spatial, and vertical" axes, and directly challenges the notion that modernist studies is defined by an "exclusive focus on the literatures of Europe and North America" (737).
This is work that Mao and Walkowitz prominently initiated with Bad Modernisms, a volume that organizes modernism's expansion conceptually, around the idea of "badness." In eleven essays contributed by a bold group of young modernist scholars, the collection resists charges of modernism's (bad) elitism, and reconsiders the complexity and subtlety of its "virtuous," often political, transgressions. By holding these two versions of "bad" in tension, Bad Modernisms points out the irony in the way evaluation has captivated both modernist artists and scholars, showing that attempts to achieve goodness or badness are always weighted toward reversal: good aesthetic innovation gravitates toward the bad exclusivity of canonization, and "bad behavior" toward political or aesthetic authorities is tempered by critical approval.
The contributors to Bad Modernisms are persistently uninterested in stabilizing these political, historical, or aesthetic conditions of badness. What they are after is a broader sense of how an engagement with badness helps expand the scope of what counts as modernist art. For Heather Love and Walkowitz, this means reconsidering the modernism of artists (Walter Pater and Virginia Woolf) deemed politically quietist or disengaged. Love, for example, reads Pater's politically conservative Studies in the History of the Renaissance not as a failure to resist his own marginalization but as an "investment in failure and victimization" that produces "a politics of refusal" (26-7). Similarly, Walkowitz responds to "critics [for whom] Woolf's fiction is quietist" and even "dangerous" because of its evasiveness: "she mentions a newspaper but does not tell us what the headlines say; she describes someone thinking of war but does not describe a battle" (121-2). Rather than reading Woolf as a modernist whose politics are bad or unpatriotic, Walkowitz argues that Woolf's modernism utilizes "bad" "models of attention" to generate an "anti-heroic" and "critical" political dissent.
Other essays revisit works or writers that fail to fit approved models of modernist aesthetic transgression. These chapters work against the critical mainstream to show that modernist transgression is far from straightforward and is often characterized by self-defeat, negation, or contradiction. For instance, Martin Puchner and Michael LeMahieu reconsider models of literary resistance often misunderstood as "nonsense" (Wittgenstein) or "reactionary" (Lewis), by showing that, unlike other modernist writing, their work was not meant as a transgression of modernity or the modern condition. Rather, Wittgenstein and Lewis worked against what they recognized as growing norms of modernism, adopting "the tools of modernism in order to criticize modernism" (11). For Lewis, this took form as a "reactive" and "defensive" version of the manifesto (Blast), a form that had grown to prominence among the continental avant garde. Naming Lewis' reactivity a "rear-guard modernism," Puchner shows that Lewis' version of "bad" or transgressive modernism is misunderstood, precisely because it subverts a dominant model of aesthetic badness: "our bad had not been quite their bad" (Lewis qtd. in Puchner 62). Similarly, LeMahieu shows that, in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, transgression entails a direct confrontation of modernist norms, "refus[ing]" resolution between a logical positivism (qua Bertrand Russell) and a kind of mystical anti-positivism ("closer in spirit to Nietzsche or Heidegger" [68]).
As these essays reassert overlooked models of "good badness" (that is, productive modernist transgression and resistance), they assert an attention to the ways that modernist art is, in its badness, sharply political, and at the same time they embrace a more inclusive concept of modernist politics. This politicized approach is also key—in the collection's most straightforward examples of expansion—to Laura Frost, Joshua Miller, and Lisa Fluet, whose articles extend modernist studies both generically and "vertically" between "low" and "high" art forms. Exposing the political subversiveness in E. M. Hull's romance novels, Carlos Bulosan's "modernist treatment of collective [Filipino] folklore," The Laughter of My Father, and the hit-man character in "pulp modernist" film, these critics show that the use of minor literary forms allowed writers to recondition aesthetic norms established in the supposed "height" of modernism, for instance by "the men 1914." In a superior demonstration of this, Miller argues that seeing the political badness of Bulosan's "folkloric" short stories relies on a "historiciz[ation of] his writings" against the sanctioned historical narratives of "interwar U.S. expansionism." This approach not only revalues Bulosan's work, but it "challenge[s] the enduring dichotomy between Western...and non-Western" (240), understanding "local" literary responses in relation to global political histories.
Toward disciplinary expansion, tactics like Miller's geo-politically dynamic historicization and Frost's and Fluet's politicized revaluations of minor genres suggest subtle and valuable methodologies to modernist scholars. Furthermore, these approaches address a fundamental problem in modernist studies—how is it possible to make accurate and nonexclusive generalizations about transnational and transhistorical modernisms? Bad Modernisms demonstrates convincingly that attention to recurring concepts and phenomena (e.g. "goodness" or "badness") can open the field to works excluded by chronological, stylistic, or cultural generalizations. Accomplishing this, while delicately preserving the instability of those concepts, Bad Modernisms is one of the most broadly suggestive works in new modernist studies to date, and one that links to scholarship in postcolonial and cultural studies that centralizes politically conscious work.
In terms of modernist studies, the collection also provocatively considers that there is a stylistic density to the distinctively modernist ways of acting and writing bad. This is an interest related to book-length studies by contributors Puchner (Poetry of the Revolution) and Walkowitz (Cosmopolitan Style), which show that for the manifesto and for the British novel discourse can be transgressive, resistant, and experimental as much in the manner or act of its projection as in its reception or effect. Focusing on the "theatricality" of the manifesto and the "naturalness," "evasion," "mix-up," etc., of writers like Conrad, Woolf, and Rushdie, these examples of new modernist scholarship expand both the politics and aesthetics of modernism, traditionally expressed through juxtaposition, collage, allusion, and de-naturalness. And in different way, Bad Modernisms is also related to criticism on minority modernist traditions, from Houston Baker's foundational work Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance to the recent work by Edward Pavlic (Crossroads Modernism) and Brent Hayes-Edwards (The Practice of Diaspora) that theorize African-American and transatlantic modernist traditions.
However, there is also the sense that Bad Modernisms' expansion of modernist studies remains a disciplinarily conservative project: leveling its modifications and evaluations primarily from within, and toward the advancement of, modernist studies itself. This aspect of the work is related to a systematic refusal to argue, even provisionally, for stable definitions of either "bad" or "modernism." For instance, the volume's introduction approaches such definitional questions by prizing the "synergy or friction" produced by an unstable "pluralism or fusion of theoretical commitments" (2). Similarly, it argues that expanded definitions of modernism have "disclosed in more and more striking ways how badness is relative and contextual" (8). For modernist studies, this kind of irresolution is unproblematic, even necessary to the task of working against claims like "Modernism was elitism." However, this approach does not help address questions about how and why to project the critical concept of "bad modernisms" outside modernist studies.
Another way to pose this is: this collection proves that thinking about badness helps us understand something about modernism. But what does thinking about modernism help us understand about being bad? What does modernist style and modernist philosophy accomplish for writers interested in real political or institutional resistance? Puchner's discussion of a manifesto tradition that begins with Marx and Engels suggests that modernist literary tactics can serve political resistance movements: "bringing the will of a collective into the open, making it known, public, manifest" (47). In his Poetry of the Revolution, Puchner argues that the manifesto is able to function this way because it is a "theatrical" pronouncement, posturing the authority required of an Austinian "speech act." In this case, a modernist literary tactic takes a position against institutional power with conceivably greater ease or efficacy than non-literary models of resistance could. Puchner also points out the way the manifesto was able to travel, using the example of the Communist Manifesto, which was translated over twenty times in ten different cities in its first quarter century (64-5). The way that this mobility serves the political function of literature is evidenced by the almost incomparably wide geographic and historical significance of the document. But perhaps most importantly, Puchner's approach to the manifesto's efficacy as an tool of political opposition suggests that while it is a characteristically modernist genre, it is also a genre whose badness does not necessarily need to be evaluated in terms of modernism at all.
This is a model of critical expansion, expanding beyond disciplinary boundaries, both possible and promising for new modernist studies. However, it requires not only a degree of definitional stabilization, particularly in terms of the relationship between politics and aesthetics, but a disinterest in the self-reinforcement of modernist studies itself. This is an approach that could also open up new questions for scholars—not just "How is it bad?" or "What's bad about it?"—but what can modernist badness (transgression, resistance) achieve? What good can it do? How bad can it be?
Works Cited
Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism." Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (2001): 493-513.
Heller, Scott. "New Life for Modernism." Chronicle of Higher Education 46.11 (5 Nov. 1999): A21-A22.
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. "The New Modernist Studies." PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 737-748.
Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.
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