But these essences are not the objective essence of reality, of the total process. They are purely subjective. I will refrain from quoting the old and now discredited theoreticians of Expressionism. But Ernst Bloch himself, when he comes to distinguish the true Expressionism from the false, puts the emphasis on subjectivity: ‘In its original form Expressionism meant the shattering of images, it meant breaking up the surface from an original, i.e. subjective, perspective, one which wrenched things apart and dislocated them.’
This very definition made it inevitable that essences had to be torn from their context in a conscious, stylized and abstract way, and each essence taken in isolation. When followed through logically, Expressionism repudiated any connection with reality and declared a subjectivist war on reality and all its works. I would not wish to intervene here in the debate about whether, and to what extent, Gottfried Benn can be thought of as a typical Expressionist. But I find that the sense of life which Bloch describes so picturesquely and fascinatingly in his account of Expressionism and Surrealism, finds its most direct, candid and vivid expression in Benn’s book Kunst and Macht: ‘Between 1910 and 1925 the anti-naturalist style reigned supreme in Europe to the exclusion of almost everything else. For the fact is that there was no such thing as reality, at best there were only travesties of reality. Reality – that was a capitalist concept.… Mind [Geist] had no reality.’ Wangenheim, too in his highly eclectic apologia for Expressionism, arrives at similar conclusions, although by a less analytical, more descriptive route: ‘Successful works could not be expected in any quantity, since there was no reality corresponding to it [i.e. to Expressionism. – G.L.]… Many an Expressionist longed to discover a new world by abandoning terra firma, leaping into the air and clinging to the clouds.’
We can find a perfectly clear and unambiguous formulation of this situation and its implications in Heinrich Vogeler. His accurate assessment of abstraction in Expressionism leads him to the correct conclusion: ‘It [i.e. Expressionism – G.L.] was the Dance of Death of bourgeois art … The Expressionists thought they were conveying the “essence of things” [Wesen], whereas in fact they revealed their decomposition [Verwesung].’
One inescapable consequence of an attitude alien or hostile to reality makes itself increasingly evident in the art of the ‘avant-garde’: a growing paucity of content, extended to a point where absence of content or hostility towards it is upheld on principle. Once again Gottfried Benn has put the situation in a nutshell: ‘The very concept of content, too, has become problematic. Content – what’s the point of it nowadays, it’s all washed up, worn out, mere sham – self-indulgence of emotions, rigidity of feelings, clusters of discredited elements, lies, amorphous shapes.…’
As the reader can see for himself, this account closely parallels Bloch’s own description of the world of Expressionism and Surrealism. Needless to say, their respective analyses lead Bloch and Benn to entirely opposite conclusions. At a number of points in his book, Bloch clearly sees the problematic nature of modern art as something arising from the attitude he himself describes: ‘Hence major writers no longer make their home in their own subject-matter, for all substances crumble at their touch. The dominant world no longer presents them with a coherent image to depict, or to take as the starting-point for their imagination. All that remains is emptiness, shards for them to piece together.’ Bloch goes on to explore the revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie down to Goethe. He then continues: ‘Goethe was succeeded not by a further development of the novel of education, but by the French novel of disillusionment, so that today in the perfected non-world, anti-world or ruined world of the grand bourgeois vacuum, “reconciliation” is neither a danger nor an option for the writer. Only a dialectical approach [?! – G.L.] is possible here: either as material for a dialectical montage or as an experiment in it. In the hands of Joyce even the world of Odysseus became a kaleidoscopic gallery of the disintegrating and disintegrated world of today in microscopic cross-section – no more than a cross-section, because people today lack something, namely the most important thing of all…’
We have no desire to quibble with Bloch over trifles, such as his purely idiosyncratic use of the word ‘dialectics’, or the mistaken logic which allows him to suggest that the novel of disillusionment follows directly upon Goethe. (My early work, The Theory of the Novel, is partly to blame for Bloch’s non-sequitur here.) We are concerned with more vital issues. In particular, with the fact that Bloch – although his evaluation is the reverse of ours – expresses the notion that the subject-matter and the composition of works of literature depend on man’s relationship to objective reality. So far so good. But when Bloch comes to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of Expressionism and Surrealism, he ceases to concern himself with the objective relations between society and the active men of our time, relations which, as we can see from Jean Christophe,6 even permit a novel of education to be written. Instead, taking the isolated state of mind of a specific class of intellectuals as his starting-point, he constructs a sort of home-made model of the contemporary world, which logically enough appears to him as a ‘non-world’ – a conception which, regrettably enough, turns out to be very similar to that of Benn. For writers who adopt this kind of stance towards reality there obviously cannot be any action, structure, content or composition in the ‘traditional sense’. For people who experience the world like this it is in fact perfectly true that Expressionism and Surrealism are the only modes of self-expression still available. This philosophical justification of Expressionism and Surrealism suffers ‘merely’ from the fact that Bloch fails to make reality his touchstone and instead uncritically takes over the Expressionist and Surrealist attitude towards reality, and translates it into his own richly imaginative language.
Despite my sharp disagreement with all of Bloch’s judgements, I find his formulation of certain facts both correct and valuable. In particular, he is the most consistent of all defenders of modernism in his demonstration that Expressionism necessarily leads to Surrealism. In this context he also deserves praise for having recognized that montage is the inevitable mode of expression in this phase of development. Moreover, his achievement here is all the greater because he shows that montage is important not only in modernist art, but also in the bourgeois philosophy of our time.
However, one consequence of this is that he brings out the anti-realistic one-dimensionality of the entire trend much more starkly than other theoreticians who think along these lines. This one-dimensionality – about which, incidentally, Bloch has nothing to say – was already a feature of Naturalism. In contrast to the Naturalist, the artistic ‘refinement’ introduced by Impressionism ‘purifies’ art even more completely of the complex mediations, the tortuous paths of objective reality, and the objective dialectics of Being and Consciousness. The symbolist movement is clearly and consciously one-dimensional from the outset, for the gulf between the sensuous incarnation of a symbol and its symbolic meaning arises from the narrow, single-tracked process of subjective association which yokes them together.
Montage represents the pinnacle of this movement and for this reason we are grateful to Bloch for his decision to set it so firmly in the centre of modernist literature and thought. In its original form, as photomontage, it is capable of striking effects, and on occasion it can even become a powerful political weapon. Such effects arise from its technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context. A good photomontage has the same sort of effect as a good joke. However, as soon as this one-dimensional technique – however legitimate and successful it may be in a joke – claims to give shape to reality (even when this reality is viewed as unreal),