Late Modernism. Robert Genter

pro-Romantic, any attempt to set the revolution in a wider context will have to concern itself with Romanticism.”¹⁶ In part, these artists were frustrated with their lack of critical reception, arguing, as Jack Kerouac and Jackson Pollock both did throughout the 1950s, that they were producing modernist masterpieces unrecognized by their formalist counterparts. This frustration eventually translated into entirely new forms of modernist practice that operated through shock and immediacy and that incorporated spontaneous methods of production. Soon, the success of these romantic modernists produced in their high modernist counterparts endless stories about the contamination of modernism by arrogant bohemians and delinquent college dropouts.

      In the end, however, neither mode of modernist practice was triumphant; as the traditional story goes, both high modernism and its precocious avant-garde challenger had their loftier claims punctured by the sudden rise of postmodernism in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, for instance, the playfulness of the soup can paintings of Andy Warhol had replaced Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings as the emblem of American art. Critic Andrew Ross has observed in perhaps overstated language that “modernism ends when there are no places left to run to—the autonomy of art, the Romantic ‘psyche,’ poetic license, the bardic, magic, psychosis, suicide, and even silence.”¹⁷ Modernism in all its forms had seemingly relinquished its privileged status, a shocking transformation given its ubiquity only a few years prior. Indeed, modernism had appeared in the 1950s in endless forms—the action paintings of Willem de Kooning, the cultural reportage of Partisan Review, the Jamesian-inspired criticism of Dwight Macdonald, the aesthetic writings of Theodor Adorno, the spontaneous prose of Jack Kerouac, the color-field paintings of Mark Rothko, the projective verse of Charles Olson, and the Dadaist-inflected compositions of William Burroughs. The early Cold War was a moment of seemingly endless experimentation, craftsmanship, and innovation in American art. But the apparent displacement of both by the end of the 1960s—due to charges of elitism, to the reactionary politics of its practitioners such as Kerouac or Trilling who lambasted the student movement, and to the suicidal gestures of Pollock and Rothko—signaled a fundamental transition in American culture.

      But we cannot act as if there was something linear or logical to the rise and fall of modernism, as if the complications inherent in the belief in the transformative potential of art inevitably meant that modernism in all its forms was destined to be eclipsed. Irving Howe himself, in a more honest moment, made a similar claim: “Modernism will not come to an end; its war chants will be repeated through the decades.”¹⁸ We must recognize instead the more complicated historical roots of modernism, thereby treating the transition to postmodernism less as a radical shift to a fundamentally new paradigm of literary and epistemological understanding and more as a complex, historically engaged challenge to the dominant strands of modernist practice.¹⁹ Similarly, we need to move beyond the arbitrary divisions between high modernism and the avant-garde and between modernism and postmodernism, no longer treating these camps as the only possibilities of aesthetic and epistemological practice. In this spirit, I argue that this opposition between high and romantic modernism in the early Cold War was triangulated by another tradition, late modernism, which critiqued the theoretical assumptions of these other traditions and prefigured the movement toward postmodernism. Kenneth Burke’s outburst at the round table in San Francisco in 1949 was an obvious example of this emerging trend. Indeed, there were a number of artists, writers, and critics from the 1950s who did not fit comfortably within any of the traditional modernist categories, artists such as Jasper Johns who challenged both the formalist aesthetics of Clement Greenberg and the overt expressionism of Jackson Pollock while also pointing the way toward the overt commercialism of Andy Warhol but without making the journey himself.

      The title of my book therefore signifies both the chronological lateness of modernism in the 1960s, when such practices had supposedly run their course, and a demarcation of a viable modernist tradition in its own right, one that complicates the story that Howe and others have told over the years. Alongside the battle between high modernism and romantic modernism and between the intellectual elite and these bohemian upstarts was a third tradition that charted an entirely different course, one that leads to a fuller, more compelling explanation for the transition to postmodern aesthetics in the late twentieth century. In this, I am following the lead of critic Fredric Jameson, who argued years ago that cultural historians needed to introduce an intermediary concept between the demarcations of modernism and postmodernism, a space for those artists and writers who do not fit comfortably within any of the other established categories.²⁰ But unlike Jameson, who merely echoes Howe in linking late modernism to the last gasp of writers such as Samuel Beckett or Vladimir Nabokov, I want to posit a more complex version of late modernism, one that was able to offer a new and more flexible understanding of art and the aesthetic experience. If anything, the tradition of late modernism represented a maturing of modernism, an overcoming of the elitism that hampered high modernism and a rejection of the more mystical claims of romantic modernism. This tradition was best represented by Kenneth Burke, whose essays, reviews, and, more important, three major works from this period—A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and The Rhetoric of Religion—rethought the nature of modernism. Unlike high modernists who stressed the autonomy of the aesthetic object and unlike romantic modernists who treated art as a direct expression of a unique individual subject, Burke argued instead that the work was a rhetorical form, that is, an object that confronted and challenged the embedded assumptions within particular languages, discursive formations, and established motives. As I explore throughout this book, Burke and those who directly borrowed from his work such as C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, and Ralph Ellison or those who independently echoed his claims such as Norman Brown, David Riesman, James Baldwin, and Jasper Johns all treated art (as well as all discursive forms) as persuasive elements that intervened in and critiqued embedded assumptions of everyday life. These late modernists tried to open modernism by blending it with realism and rhetoric, treating art at its essence as a form of communication.

      Of course late modernism did not represent any self-acknowledged group of compatriots any more than the earliest modernists considered themselves part of a unified movement. One can hardly imagine a cocktail conversation between Norman Brown, Jasper Johns, and Erving Goffman or, for that matter, one between T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Obviously, any interpretive category is artificial at best, and I do not want to give the impression that these late modernists represented any sort of “school” in the traditional sense. But missing from the literature on art and culture after 1945 is any sense that there was a range of writers and artists who tried to find a language that did not partake of either the formalist visions of high modernism or the mystical visions of romantic modernism. For instance, the novelist Ralph Ellison spent years fighting against both alternatives. He repeatedly admitted that he had little patience for high modernist critics such as Lionel Trilling who limited the possibilities inherent within the aesthetic form by trying to divest art of any social or political attachments. “Fuck Trilling and his gang,” Ellison wrote to his friend Albert Murray in 1957; “I know that a novel is simply hard to write, especially during this time when you can’t take anything for granted anymore.”²¹ Similarly, Ellison had little respect for the bohemian denizens of New York, who included Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others, a modernist avant-garde pushing madness, despair, and sex. “Man, where did Norman Mailer and them—them—teenagers get that shit from,” an exacerbated Ellison once asked; “that goddamned Mailer sounds like a degenerate” (211).

      In contrast to these two dominant strands of modernist practice, Ellison centered his own project on what he referred to as “the enigma of aesthetic communication.”²² Unlike high modernists who focused on the artwork as a form disconnected from outside entanglements and romantic modernists who saw the artwork as a reflection of their own personalities, Ellison argued instead that the artwork was designed to address the complicated relationship between artist and audience, serving as a means to bridge social differences and to forge new connections between disparate individuals. The artwork in this sense did not skirt social communication, as many modernists would have it, but existed solely as a form of communication between the artist who offered his personal vision of redemption and an audience who “counters the artist’s manipulation of forms with an attitude of antagonistic cooperation.” In this way, the importance of any artwork