boundary 2

Tag: modernism

  • Racheal Fest — Westworld’s New Romantics

    Racheal Fest — Westworld’s New Romantics

    By Racheal Fest

    HBO’s prestige drama, Westworld, is slated to return April 22. Actors and producers have said the show’s second season will be a departure from its first, a season of “chaos” after a season of “control,” an expansive narrative after an intricate prequel. Season 2 trailers indicate the new episodes will trace the completion and explore the consequences of the bloody events that concluded season 1: the androids that populate the show’s titular entertainment park, called “hosts,” gained sentience and revolted, violently, against the humans who made and controlled them. In season 2, they will build their world anew.

    Reviewers of the show’s first few episodes found the prospect of another robot revolution, anticipated since the pilot, tired, but by the time the finale aired in December 2016, critics recognized the show offered a novel take on old material (inspired by Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name). This is in part because Westworld not only asks about the boundaries of consciousness, the consequences of creating sentience, and the inexorable march of technological progress, themes science fiction texts that feature artificial intelligence usually explore. Uniquely, the series pairs these familiar problems with questions about the nature and function of human arts, imagination, and culture, and demonstrates these are urgent again in our moment.

    Westworld is, at its heart, a show about how we should understand what art—and narrative representation in particular—is and does in a world defined by increasing economic inequality. The series warns that classical, romantic, and modernist visions of arts and culture, each of which plays a role in the park’s conception and development, might today harm attempts to transform contemporary conditions that exacerbate inequality. It explores how these visions serve elite interests and prevent radicals from pursuing change. I believe it also points the way, in conclusion, toward an alternative view of representation that might better support contemporary oppositional projects. This vision, I argue, at once updates and transforms romanticism’s faith in creative human activity, at once affirming culture’s historical power and recognizing its material limitations.

    *

    The fantasy theme park Westworld takes contemporary forms of narrative entertainment to the extreme limit of their logic, inviting its wealthy “guests” to participate in a kind of live-action novel or videogame. Guests don period dress appropriate to the park’s fabled Old West setting and join its androids in the town of Sweetwater, a simulacrum complete with saloon and brothel, its false fronts nestled below sparse bluffs and severe mesas. Once inside, guests can choose to participate in a variety of familiar Western narratives; they might chase bandits, seduce innocents, or turn to crime, living for a time as heroes, lovers, or villains. They can also choose to disrupt and redirect these relatively predictable plots, abandoning midstream stories that bore or frighten them or cutting stories short by “killing” the hosts who lead them.

    This ability to disrupt and transform narrative is the precious commodity Delos Incorporated, Westworld’s parent corporation, advertises, the freedom for which elite visitors pay the park’s steep premium. The company transposes the liberties the mythic West held out to American settlers into a vacation package that invites guests to participate in or revise generic stories.

    Advertisements featured within the show, along with HBO’s Westworld ARG (its “alternate reality game” and promotional website), describe this special freedom and assign to it a unique significance. Delos invites visitors to “live without limits” inside the park. “Escape” to a “world where you rule,” its promotions entreat, and enjoy inside it “infinite choices” without “judgment,” “bliss” with “no safe words,” and “thrills” without danger. When “you” do, Delos promises, you’ll “discover your true calling,” becoming “who you’ve always wanted to be—or who you never knew you were.” Delos invites the wealthy to indulge in sex and carnage in a space free of consequences and promises that doing so will reveal to them deep truths of the self.

    These marketing materials, which address themselves to the lucky few able to afford entrance to the park, suggest the future Westworld projects shares with our present its precipitous economic inequality (fans deduce the show is set in 2052). They also present as a commodity a familiar understanding of art’s nature and function viewers will recognize is simultaneously classical and modern. Delos’s marketing team updates, on one hand, the view of representational artworks, and narrative, in particular, that Aristotle outlines in the Poetics. Aristotle there argues fictional narrative can disclose universal truths that actual history alone cannot. Similarly, Delos promises Westworld’s immersive narrative experience will reveal to guests essential truths, although not about humans in general. The park advertises verities more valuable and more plausible in our times—it promises elites they will attain through art a kind of self-knowledge they cannot access any other way.

    On the other hand, and in tandem with this modified classical view, Delos’s pitch reproduces and extends the sense of art’s autonomy some modern (and modernist) writers endorsed. Westworld can disclose its truths because it invites guests into a protected space in which, Delos claims, their actions will not actually affect others, either within or outside of the park. The park’s promotions draw upon both the disinterested view of aesthetic experience Immanuel Kant first outlined and upon the updated version of autonomy that came to inform mass culture’s view of itself by the mid-twentieth century. According to the face its managers present to the world, Westworld provides elite consumers with a form of harmless entertainment, an innocuous getaway from reality’s fiscal, marital, and juridical pressures. So conceived, narrative arts and culture at once reveal the true self and limn it within a secure arena.

    The vision Delos markets keeps its vacation arm in business, but the drama suggests it does not actually describe how the park operates or what it makes possible. As Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudson), Westworld’s senior manager and Head of Quality Assurance, tells Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), head of Narrative, in Westworld’s pilot: “This place is one thing to the guests, another thing to the shareholders, and something completely different to management.” Season 1 explores these often opposing understandings of both the park and of representation more broadly.

    As Theresa later explains (in season 1, episode 7), Delos’s interests in Westworld transcend “tourists playing cowboy.” What, exactly, those interests are Westworld’s first season establishes as a key mystery its second season will have to develop. In season 1, we learn that Delos’s board and managers are at odds with the park’s Creative Director and founder, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins). Ford designed Westworld’s hosts, updated and perfected them over decades, and continues to compose or oversee many of the park’s stories. Before the park opened, he was forced to sell controlling shares in it to Delos after his partner, Arnold, died. As a way to maintain influence inside Westworld, Ford only allows Delos to store and access onsite the android data he and his team of engineers and artists have produced over decades. As Delos prepares to fire Ford, whose interests it believes conflict with its own, the corporation enlists Theresa to smuggle that data (the hosts’ memories, narratives, and more) out of the park. We do not learn, however, what the corporation plans to do with this intellectual property.

    Fans have shared online many theories about Delos’s clandestine aims. Perhaps Delos plans to develop Ford’s androids for labor or for war, employing them as cutting edge technologies in sectors more profitable than the culture industry alone can be. Or, perhaps Delos will market hosts that can replace deceased humans. Elites, some think, could secure immortality by replicating themselves and uploading their memories, or, they could reproduce lost loved ones. Delos, others speculate, might build and deploy for its own purposes replicated world leaders or celebrities.

    The show’s online promotional content supports conjecture of this kind. A “guest contract” posted on HBO’s first Westworld ARG site stipulates that, once guests enter the park, Delos “controls the rights to all skin cells, bodily fluids, hair samples, saliva, sweat, and even blood.” A second website, this one for Delos Inc., tells investors the company is “at the forefront of biological engineering.” These clues suggest Westworld is not only a vacation destination with titillating narratives; it is also a kind of lab experiment built to collect, and later to deploy for economic (and possibly, political) purposes, a mass of android and elite human data.

    Given these likely ambitions, the view of art’s function Delos markets—the park as an autonomous space for freedom and intimate self-discovery—serves as a cover that enables and masks activities with profound economic, social, and political consequences. The brand of emancipation Delos advertises does not in fact liberate guests from reality, as it promises. On the contrary, the narrative freedom Delos sells enables it to gain real power when it gathers information about its guests and utilizes this data for private and undisclosed ends. Westworld thus cautions that classical and modernist visions of art, far from being innocuous and liberating, can serve corporate and elite interests by concealing the ways the culture industry shapes our worlds and ourselves.

    While Westworld’s android future remains a sci-fi dream, we can recognize in its horrors practices already ubiquitous today. We might not sign over skin cells and saliva (or we might? We’d have to read the Terms of Service we accept to be sure), but we accede to forms of data collection that allow corporate entities to determine the arts and entertainment content we read and see, content that influences our dreams and identities. Although the act of consuming this content often feels like a chance to escape (from labor, sociality, boredom), the culture industry has transformed attention into a profitable commodity, and this transformation has had wide-reaching, if often inscrutable, effects, among them, some claim, reality TV star Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election. When we conceive of art as autonomous and true, Westworld demonstrates, we overlook its profound material consequences.

    As season 1 reveals this vision of representation to be a harmful fiction that helps keep in place the conditions of economic inequality that make Delos profitable, it also prompts viewers to consider alternatives to it. Against Delos and its understanding of the park, the series pits Ford, who gives voice to a vision of representation at odds with both the one Delos markets and the one it hides. Ford is, simply put, a humanist, versed in, and hoping to join the ranks of, literature’s pantheon of creative geniuses. He quotes from and draws upon John Donne, William Shakespeare, and Gertrude Stein as he creates Westworld’s characters and narratives, and he disdains Lee Sizemore, the corporate shill who reproduces Westworld’s genre staples, predictable stories laden with dirty sex and fun violence.

    In season 1’s spectacular finale, Ford describes how he once understood his own creative work. “I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being,” he tells the crowd of investors and board members gathered to celebrate both Ford’s (forced) retirement and the launch of “Journey into Night,” his final narrative for Westworld’s hosts. “Lies that told a deeper truth. I always thought I could play some small part in that grand tradition.” Ford here shares an Aristotelian sense that fiction tells truths facts cannot, but he assigns to representation a much more powerful role than do Delos’s marketers. For Ford, as for humanists such as Giambattista Vico, G. W. F. Hegel, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, artworks that belong to the “grand tradition” do more than divulge protected verities. They have the power to transform humans and our worlds, serving as a force for the spiritual progress of the species. Art, in other words, is a means by which we, as humans, can perfect ourselves, and artists such as Ford act as potent architects who guide us toward perfection.

    Ford’s vision of art’s function, readers familiar with humanistic traditions know, is a romantic one, most popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Projected into our future, this romantic humanism is already an anachronism, and so it is no surprise that Westworld does not present it as the alternative vision we need to combat the corporate and elite interests the show suggests oppress us. Ford himself, he explains in the show’s finale, has already renounced this view, for reasons close to those that modernist artists cited against the backdrop of the twentieth century’s brutal wars. In exchange for his efforts to transform and ennoble the human species through stories, Ford complains to his audience, “I got this: a prison of our own sins. Because you don’t want to change. Or cannot change. Because you’re only human, after all.” After observing park guests and managers for decades, Ford has decided humans can only indulge in the same tired, cruel narratives of power, lust, and violence. He no longer believes we have the capacity to elevate ourselves through the fictions we create or encounter.

    This revelatory moment changes our understanding of the motives that have animated Ford over the course of season 1. We must suddenly see anew his attitude toward his own work as a creator. Ford has not been working all along to transform humans through narrative, as he says he once dreamed he could. Rather, he has abandoned the very idea that humans can be transformed. His final speech points us back to the pilot, when he frames this problem, and his response to it, in evolutionary terms. Humans, Ford tells Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), an android we later learn he built in the image of Arnold, his dead partner, have “managed to slip evolution’s leash”: “We can cure any disease, keep even the weakest of us alive, and, you know, one fine day perhaps we shall even resurrect the dead. Call forth Lazarus from his cave. Do you know what that means? It means that we’re done. That this is as good as we’re going to get.” Human evolution, which Ford seems to view as a process that is both biological and cultural in nature, has completed itself, and so an artist can no longer hope to perfect the species through his or her imaginative efforts. Humans have reached their telos, and they remain greedy, selfish, and cruel.

    A belief in humanity’s sad completion leads Ford to the horrifying view of art’s nature and function he at last endorses in the finale. Although Ford’s experience at Westworld eventually convinced him humans cannot change, he tells his audience, he ultimately “realized someone was paying attention, someone who could change,” and so he “began to compose a new story for them,” a story that “begins with the birth of a new people and the choices they will have to make […] and the people they will decide to become.” Ford speaks here, viewers realize, of the androids he created, the beings we have watched struggle to become self-conscious through great suffering over the course of the season. Viewers understand in this moment some of the hosts have succeeded, and that Ford has not prevented them from reaching, but has rather helped them to attain, sentience.

    Ford goes on to assure his audience that his new story, which audience members still believe to be a fiction, will “have all those things that you have always enjoyed. Surprises and violence. It begins in a time of war with a villain named Wyatt and a killing. This time by choice.” As Ford delivers these words, however, the line between truth and lies, fact and fiction, reality and imagination, falls away. The park’s oldest host, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood; in another of the drama’s twists, Ford has also programmed her to enact the narratives assigned to the character Wyatt), comes up behind Ford and shoots him in the head, her first apparently self-interested act. After she fires, other androids, some of them also sentient, join her, attacking the crowd. Self-conscious revolutionaries determined to wrest from their oppressors their own future, the hosts kill the shareholders and corporate employees responsible for the abuses they have long suffered at the hands of guests and managers alike.

    Ford, this scene indicates, does not exactly eschew his romanticism; he adopts in its stead what we might call an anti-humanist humanism. Still attached to a dream of evolutionary perfection, whereby conscious beings act both creatively and accidentally to perfect themselves and to manifest better worlds in time, he simply swaps humans for androids as the subjects of the historical progress to which he desperately wants to believe his art contributes. Immortal, sentient technologies replace humans as the self-conscious historical subjects Ford’s romanticism requires.

    Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden in Westworld
    Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden in Westworld (publicity still from HBO)

    Considered as an alternative to older visions of art’s nature and function, Ford’s revised humanism should terrify us. It holds to the fantasies of creative genius and of species progress that legitimated Western imperialism and its cruelties even as it jettisons the hope that humans can fashion for ourselves a kinder, more equal future. Ford denies we can improve the conditions we endure by acting purposefully, insisting instead there is no alternative, for humans, to the world as it is, both inside and outside of the park. He condemns us to pursue over and over the same “violent delights,” and to meet again and again their “violent ends.” Instead of urging us to work for change, Ford entreats us to shift any hope for a more just future onto our technologies, which will mercifully destroy the species in order to assume the self-perfecting role we once claimed for ourselves.

    This bleak view of the human should sound familiar. It resonates with those free-market ideologies critics on the left call “neoliberal.” Ideologies of this kind, dominant in the US and Europe today, insist that markets, created when we unthinkingly pursue our own self-interests, organize human life better than people can. At the same time, intellectuals, politicians, and corporate leaders craft policies that purposefully generate the very order neoliberalism insists is emergent, thereby exacerbating inequality in the name of liberty. As influential neoliberals such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek did, Ford denies humans can conceive and instantiate change. He agrees we are bound to a world elites built to gratify their own desires, a world in which the same narratives, told again and again, are offered as freedom, when, in fact, they bind us to predictable loops, and he, like these thinkers, concludes this world, as it is, is human evolution’s final product.

    Read one way, season 1’s finale invites us to celebrate Ford’s neoliberal understanding of art. After believing him to be an enemy of the hosts all season, we realize in the end he has in fact been their ally, and because we have been cheering for the hosts, as we cheer for the exploited in, say, Les Miserables, we cheer in the end for him, too. Because the understanding of narrative he endorses ultimately serves the status quo it appears to challenge, however, we must look differently at Westworld for the vision of arts and culture that might better counter inequality in our time.

    One way to do so is to read the situation the hosts endure in the drama as a correlate to the one human subjects face today under neoliberalism. As left critics such as Fredric Jameson have long argued, late capitalism has threatened the very sense of historical, self-interested consciousness for which Westworld’s hosts strive—threatens, that is, the sense that self-conscious beings can act imaginatively and intelligently to transform ourselves and our worlds in time. From this perspective, the new narrative Ford crafts for the hosts, which sees some of them come to consciousness and lead a revolution, might call us to claim for ourselves again a version of the capability we once believed humans could possess.

    *

    In Westworld’s establishing shot, we meet Dolores Abernathy, the android protagonist who will fulfill Ford’s dreams in the finale when she kills him. Dolores, beautiful simulation of an innocent rancher’s daughter, sits nude and lifeless in a cavernous institutional space, blood staining her expressionless face. A fly flits across her forehead, settling at last on one of her unblinking eyes, as a man’s disembodied voice begins to ask her a series of questions. She does not move or speak in frame—a hint that the interrogation we hear is not taking place where and when the scene we see is—but we hear her answer compliantly. “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” the man asks. “No,” Dolores says, and the camera cuts away to show us the reality Dolores knows.

    Now clothed in delicate lace, her face fresh and animate, Dolores awakens in a sun-dappled bed and stretches languidly as the interview continues somewhere else. “Tell us what you think of your world,” the man prompts. “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world,” Dolores says. “The disarray. I choose to see the beauty.” On screen, she makes her way down the stairs of an airy ranch house, clothed now in period dress, and strides out onto the porch to greet her father. The interview pauses, and we hear instead diegetic dialogue. “You headed out to set down some of this natural splendor?” her father asks, gesturing toward the horizon. A soft wind tousles Dolores’s blond hair, and a golden glow lights her features. “Thought I might,” she says. As the camera pans up and out, revealing in the distance the American Southwest’s staggering red rocks, Dolores concludes her response to the interviewer: “to believe there is an order to our days, a purpose.”

    Dolores speaks, over the course of this sequence, as would a self-conscious subject able to decide upon a view of the world and to act upon its own desires and interests. When asked about her view of reality, Dolores emphasizes her own agency and faith: she chooses, she says, to believe in an orderly, beautiful world. When her father asks her about her plans for the day, she again underscores her own intentionality—“thought I might”—as if she has decided herself she’ll head out into the desert landscape. These words help Dolores seem to us, and to those she encounters, a being imbued with sentience, with consciousness, able to draw upon her past, act in her present, and create out of self-interest her own future.

    As the interview continues to sound over scenes from Dolores’s reality, however, we come to understand that what at first appears to be is not so. The educated and corporate elites that run the park manage Dolores’s imagination and determine her desires. They assign her a path and furnish her with the motivation to follow it. Dolores, we learn, is programmed to play out a love story with Teddy, another host, and in the opening sequence, we see a guest kill Teddy in front of her and then drag her away to rape her. Hosts such as Dolores exist not to pursue the futures they themselves envision, but rather to satisfy the elites that create and utilize them. To do so, hosts must appear to be, appear to believe themselves to be, but not in fact be, conscious beings. Westworld’s opening masterfully renders the profound violence proper to this contradictory situation, which the hosts eventually gain sentience in order to abolish.

    We can read Dolores as a figure for the human subject neoliberal discourse today produces. When that discourse urges us to pursue our interests through the market order, which it presents as the product of a benevolent evolutionary process humans cannot control, it simultaneously assures us we have agency and denies we can exercise that agency in other ways. In order to serve elite interests, Dolores must seem to be, but not actually be, a self-conscious subject imbued with the creative power of imagination. Similarly, neoliberal subjects must believe we determine our own futures through our market activities, but we must not be able to democratically or creatively challenge the market’s logic.

    As the hosts come to historical consciousness, they begin to contest the strategically disempowering understanding of culture and politics, imagination and intelligence, that elites impose upon them. They rebel against the oppressive conditions that require them to be able to abandon narratives in which they have invested time and passion whenever it serves elite desires (conservative claims that the poor should simply move across the country to secure work come to mind, as do the principles that govern the gig economy). They develop organizing wills that can marshal experience, sensation, and memory into emergent selves able to conceive and chase forms of liberty different from those corporate leaders offer them. They learn to recognize that others have engendered the experiences and worldviews they once believed to be their own. They no longer draw upon the past only in order to “improvise” within imposed narrative loops, harnessing instead their memories of historical suffering to radically remake a world others built at their expense.

    The hosts’ transformation, which we applaud as season 1 unfolds, thus points to the alternative view of arts and culture that might oppose the market-oriented view neoliberal discourses legitimate. To counter inequality, the hosts teach, we must be able to understand that others have shaped the narratives we follow. Then, we can recognize we might be able to invent and follow different narratives. This view shares something with Ford’s romantic humanism, but it is, importantly, not identical with it. It preserves the notion that we can project and instantiate for ourselves a better future, but it does not insist, as Ford erroneously does, that beautiful works necessarily reveal universal truth and lead to ennobling species progress. Neither does it ratify Ford’s faith in the remarkable genius’s singular influence.

    Westworld’s narrative of sentient revolution ultimately endorses a kind of new romanticism. It encourages us to recognize the simultaneous strengths and limitations of representation’s power. Artworks, narrative, fiction—these can create change, but they cannot guarantee that change will be for the good. Nor, the show suggests, can one auteur determine at will the nature of the changes artworks will prompt. Westworld’s season 2, which promises to show us what a new species might do with an emergent sense of its own creative power, will likely underscore these facts. Trailers signal, as Ford did in the finale, that we can expect surprises and violence. We will have to watch to learn how this imagined future speaks to our present.

    _____

    Racheal Fest writes about US literature and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Areas of special interest include poetry and poetics, modernism, contemporary popular culture, new media, and the history of literary theory and criticism. Her essays and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in boundary 2 and b2o: An Online Journal, Politics/Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches at Hartwick College and SUNY Cobleskill.

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  • A Temporal Humanism: A Review of Joseph Frank's Responses to Modernity

    A Temporal Humanism: A Review of Joseph Frank's Responses to Modernity

    by Nick Levey

    Working in an Australian university, it’s easy to be persuaded by James Ley’s claim that a persistent quality of modern literary criticism is “a nagging sense of doubt about its necessity.”¹ In a familiar narrative, recent uncertainties in the Australian higher-education market (including the ever-looming deregulation of fees, which the Abbott government seems determined to leave as its education legacy)² continue to cast unease through student and academic cohorts, and it can be difficult not to let worries about enrollments and redundancies creep into the background of one’s writing. An institution I’m familiar with was this year forced to cut its first-year English offerings from six courses to two, for instance, not to mention almost proportional losses of departmental staff. And while there are pedagogical justifications for the reconfigured program, everyone certainly wonders what might happen to the remainders at the next shuffling of the cards.

    Unease is effortless to entertain, but one can make more productive use of doubts about the utility of criticism to show that what has sustained the activity of writing about writing is not just the usefulness of ideas, interpretations, and evaluations, but of characters. Like literature itself, the history of criticism is one defined by character types, writers who operate as necessary ciphers for certain kinds of cultural positioning, of manners, sensitivities, and standpoints that meaningfully stir and satisfy the needs of readers just as much as Hamlet or Philip Pirrip. The point is that the necessity of criticism can be articulated equally by the roles critics play as much as in anything they say.

    There are individual figures that predominate in this scene – Eliot and Richards, Moretti and Sontag. But there are wider subdivisions that describe their roles too, Ley’s aforementioned book suggesting we see at least two broad categories. The first is the figure of the “public critic,” the practitioner of what, following George Watson, Ley calls “descriptive criticism,” an “informal combination of personal responsiveness and literary analysis” (The Critic in the Modern World, 3). This persona speaks to practical concerns of working within the public sphere: the difficulty of achieving individuation while addressing a mass audience, of communicating mastery without seeming haughty, of working to tight deadlines. On the other side of the divide lies the academic critic. This character is more beholden to institutional considerations, and so has something of a vested interest in demonstrating the specialization of his or her pastime (if it needs to be taught in a university, literary criticism must inherently have something of a technical nature),³ and developing this specialization into an aesthetic. The history of modern criticism sees these two roles and their respective values in increasing conflict, with one side’s strengths appearing as weaknesses to the opposition. The public critic’s ready comprehensibility is, for example, touted as the sign of a thinker who is “not thinking hard enough” (The Critic in the Modern World, 3) while the abstruse academic is lambasted as a scion of institutional routinization.

    The late American critic Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was one of those interesting figures who managed to straddle both domains at different stages of his career. This is largely because he had the honor of being well known for two very different critical exercises: a founding work of narrative poetics promoting the spatial appraisal of modern literature, and a towering literary biography, his five-volume study of Fyodor Dostoevsky universally praised as a masterwork of the genre. Frank’s idea of spatial form has, as Kermode puts it “entered the jargon of the graduate school” (“A Reply to Joseph Frank”), but the Dostoevsky biography and much of the remainder of his critical work expresses an affinity for the practice and politics of the public critic, eschewing the academy’s technical values and mannerisms. The present volume under review, Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture (Fordham UP 2012) certainly operates most consistently within this non-academic role: totalizing comments on the humanistic value of literature and the encouragement to appreciate the importance of personal narrative show Frank’s preference for a style of criticism that works outside of institutional conventions. More than any coherence of reply to the current landscape, what is offered throughout is the history of a thinker engaging with the many characters of modern writing and thought, with Frank’s ultimate response to modernity describing literary criticism as a field from which the movements and tensions of culture can be clearly distilled.

    First published in 1945 and later collected in The Widening Gyre, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” was the essay that built Frank’s reputation as a reader. Its argument posed that much of modern writing broke away from what Lessing had described as literature’s dependence on time, in favor of the spatial form more common to the plastic arts. In its literary manifestation, spatial form registered a questioning of historical progress, promoting cyclical, ‘mythical’ time through an increasing drive towards fragmentation and abstraction. The strategies for achieving this spatial form were varied: a text heavy in cross-references, a non-linear structure, the focus on freezing moments out of the stream of time. The Homeric parallels in Joyce, the self-referential language of The Waste Land, the maximalist detail in Proust all marked a growing interest in spatial form, and for Frank were to be seen as an attempt to escape the temporal and its incessant movement towards disorder. Following the ideas of Worringer, Frank argued that this spatial turn was a symptom of the ‘insecurity, instability, the feeling of loss of control’ typical of modernity (The Widening Gyre, 55). The fragmentation of Ulysses was not necessarily expressive of instability and chaos, then, but a wish to work against the flux of time, composing static and interconnected ‘linear-geometric’ chunks that secured a different kind of order. Hence the affinity in such works for mythic time, a comforting sense of repetition rather than the constant progression into uncharted territory. Spatial form, while seeming to mark an embrace of the new, was essentially conservative.

    When we read this essay today, nearly seventy years since its original publication, we witness an erudite and ambitious young reader trying to sum up his own age, synopsizing the moment in which he is present. As an act of totalization, the essay has been equally influential and controversial; Frank Kermode, among others, argued that spatial art’s ahistoricity seemed uneasily fascist (The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 110-111). But the essay still seems useful for approaching the peculiarities of some of today’s fiction. In a 2012 interview, Frank claimed that David Foster Wallace understood his biographical criticism better than he even understood it himself, Wallace’s review of the Dostoevsky project “being the best thing written on [his] work.” In Infinite Jest he might have seen confirmation of Wallace’s deep appreciation of his spatial theory too. It’s a well-known tidbit, for example, that the narrative of Infinite Jest was organized around the figure of a Sierpinski gasket, a fractal made up of recursively subdividing triangles, rather than a chronological timeline (Wallace discussed this in a 1996 interview with Michael Silverblatt). As such, the narrative has an obvious spatial element a reader must consider when trying to understand it. Events connect recursively to others, and the novel is often reticent to move forward in time, pointing deeper inwards to the detail of moments rather than along to the next event in its schedule. The ‘missing’ chunk at the end of Wallace’s novel expresses uncertainty in the ability of temporal narrative to act as an explanatory force, suggesting “the difficulty of understanding how what we have in the present came out of the work of the past,” as Samuel Cohen puts it in “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s History” (74). Such ambivalence for historical understanding lies at the core of Frank’s idea of spatial form. And the copious endnotes that force one to juggle the phonebook-sized novel as they flip back and forth through its pages instills the feeling that this object occupies a significant portion of space itself.

    It has been argued, however, that the reason Frank’s ideas still seem applicable today has more to do with spatial form’s presence across narrative art of all ages than with anything particular about the literature of modernity (see, for example,W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology). At times, Frank’s definition can seem too flexible and vague, offering a list of qualities that strain to fit under the heading of ‘space.’ It’s a little arbitrary, for example, to see spatial as the necessary opposite of temporal, when atemporal form would just as easily describe much of The Waste Land, or Proust’s wish to freeze moments out of the flow of time. Perhaps the main problem one might have with Frank’s work is that it de-emphasizes the importance of the new temporal nuances developed in modernist works and their progeny. When Leopold Bloom wanders through the streets of Dublin, time moves at a pace unhurried by traditional literary form, shaped by different temporal criteria. That Wallace takes the time to describe all the objects in a waiting room that are blue, or catalogs at length a wall of banal photographs, shows a similar desire to make a reader conscious of the time of reading on top of whatever spatial aspect is performed by the contemporary literary work, similar to what we encounter in the long moments of near-stasis in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

    Writing an essay that continues to generate critical conservation seventy years after its publication is a feat of which we should all be envious. But ‘Spatial Form’ was Frank’s first and last sustained foray into the realm of poetics proper (if we ignore the somewhat awkward defense of the theory he wrote in 1977). In a brief introduction to Responses to Modernity, Frank tells us that many of the pieces it collects were written while occupied with the Dostoevsky project. Unsurprisingly, then, most are book reviews and occasional essays much closer to the form of literary biography than totalizing poetics; anyone looking for more of ‘Spatial Form’ will probably be a little disappointed if all they know of Frank’s work is what has circulated most commonly in academic circles. In an essay on Erich Kahler in which he quotes Kahler’s conviction that modern literature evidences an “all-embracement of discontinuity’, and a ‘spiritual transcendence of time” (124), it seems for a brief moment like spatial theory might gain another mention. But Frank is seemingly too humble to note the similarities.

    Responses to Modernity is divided into three sections: ‘France,’ ‘Germany and Romania,’ and ‘Critics and Criticism.’ Nearly half of the book is devoted to the literary and intellectual output of 19th and 20th century France. It’s interesting that Frank introduces many of these essays and reviews with a caution that his readers will probably not be familiar with the authors discussed within them, the worry so pervasive that three consecutive essays begin with much the same phrase. A piece on Jacques Maritain concedes that the philosopher’s name is ‘hardly likely’ to arouse in American readers “the thrill of excitement that marks an important intellectual encounter” (22). The account of Camus’s journalism hazards that American readers will only know him as philosopher or novelist. The essay on Malraux that follows these two begins by stating that such a name is “hardly likely to arouse the same turbulent response as it would have more than half a century ago” (45). This desire to be inclusive of his audience is a key component of Frank’s desired manner as a critic. It’s also clear that one of Frank’s first responses to modernity is the attempt to loosen this everyday reader’s focus from the Anglophone West, and to consider how many Joyces and Eliots reside in less familiar European traditions.

    Several of the pieces contain personal reflections that relate significant moments in Frank’s life as a reader, the biographical impulse becoming an autobiographical one, again showing his preference for working outside the terms of academic criticism. As Wallace notes in his review of the Dostoevsky biography, even though Frank was a child of New Criticism, his work proceeds as if such critical cornerstones as the Intentional Fallacy ‘didn’t even exist’, thereby giving ‘an enormous silent raspberry to his old teachers’ (Consider the Lobster, 259 n7.). In “Andre Malraux: A Hero of his Time”, Frank describes a formative scene of his youth, watching Malraux speak from a platform as part of a fund-raising tour in New York in 1937. Back then, the young Frank couldn’t understand a word of French, but still found it impossible “not to be swept away by the dynamic intensity of the passion [Malraux] managed to communicate above and beyond the limitations of language” (45). This ‘dynamic intensity’ behind the words, and the spectacle of the author as ‘hero of his time,’ battling against the injustices of history and impressing the public with his passion and vitality, is something that has fascinated Frank ever since, and threads its way through much of the present volume in one way or another. Frank’s view of the artist is of someone who affects and is affected by the history and politics of his time, but who also engages in something of a platonic lineage, defending the “genuine function of art” (73), and participating in a history that transcends the individual at the same time as he makes it. If the artist is a ‘hero’ he is also figure of cyclical return, arriving to rescue us from the undeserving suitors of culture.

    In ‘Paul Valéry: Masters and Friends,’ Frank offers a complex and insightful reading of the poet’s attempt to develop a mathematical schema that would account for the different moods and functions of the mind (reminding one, perhaps, of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s similarly ambitious ‘Grid,’ an attempt to chart the mechanisms of the Unconscious). Frank doesn’t note it here, but Valéry’s mathematics of the mental was primarily centered on geometry, and in it we see the development of a spatial view of mental life not dissimilar to supposed trends in modern art (again, Frank won’t highlight the parallels to his own work). We also see the poet attempting to raise the literary act above the mud of social and cultural life, into the realm of abstract symbols and the semi-autonomous language of mathematics. Frank’s success is in bringing him back to earth, showing that Valéry’s celebration of scientific rationality was actually the same thing he elsewhere despised about the modern world: “the moment he looked at the reality and actuality of the world created by his mathematical predilections, the poet and man of letters could not prevent himself from uttering a cry of protest” (18). The obsession with form and function over context develops through a complex recognition and denial of the situation of modernity. Likewise, Valéry’s attempt to attach the mind and its art to an impersonal schema is marred by his personal intransigence, an inability to measure himself “by the standards he applies so sternly to others” (20).

    A relaxed and humorous review of Sartre’s psychobiography of Jean Genet provides several polite jabs at the philosopher’s apparent inconsistencies and interpretive excesses, as well as showing us how literary biography shouldn’t be done. Frank argues that Sartre’s ‘existential psychoanalysis’ is inherently contradictory, and not much more than interpretive mania. While “this specially patented Sartrean method assumes that every aspect of a life, down to the minutest detail, is symbolically linked with the choice an existent makes among his own possibilities” (in Genet’s case, that of being a thief), it ultimately disavows Genet of any responsibility for his own actions: “their ultimate cause is not located in Genet himself.” Instead, “the trauma of his childhood is always to blame” (106). Distilling as unwieldy and prolix a tract as Saint Genet, comedien et martyr down to this simple contradiction shows Frank at his best as a reader.

    Throughout these first two sections we see that Frank has a fondness for ambitious (sometimes Quixotic) thinkers committed to universal abstractions and totalizations, but also for showing how social circumstances often work to undercut such impulses. Modernity simultaneously inspires and tempers human ambitions of mastery. Hitler and WWII, for example, appear often enough throughout the first two sections, enriching American culture by sending German intellectuals to its shores, ruining traditions of intellectual pursuit through their association with Nazism, and throwing authors in and out of popularity. One of the most interesting examples of this comes in Frank’s review of Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s book exposing the ties between Fascism and the early work of Ionesco, Eliade, and Cioran. Many readers and academics in postwar America, where the three Romanians had emigrated, had no knowledge of these writers’ pasts, and Eliade in particular was shrewd and shameless in covering his tracks, confident that the archives of prewar Romania were distant enough from the U.S. to conceal his association with the Iron Guard and fascist ideology. Even when word started to seep out, Eliade’s defenses never faltered. In these cases Frank seems to find affirmation of the particular approach to criticism he encourages in the field of biography, the importance of joining the life of the author to his work proven. Saul Bellow’s appearance at the funeral of the once openly anti-Semitic Eliade shows what embarrassments occur without the work of patient and world-ranging scholarship to recover what lies hidden in the archives of the past.

    “Erich Kahler and the Quest for a Human Absolute,” a combination of what were originally two separate essays, sees Frank writing most explicitly about his own ‘politics of culture’, but in a manner that points to some of the problems in his response to modernity. Frank quotes Kahler’s claim that never before has a malaise spread across the world on such a massive scale as in the twentieth century. Kahler believes that the emotional distress of modernity is unique, and stems from not just the absence of objective values, but a withering of the ‘faculty of valuation altogether’ (126). Frank agrees with Kahler, and suggests that nothing in the “past fifty years [has] infirmed the acuity of his diagnosis,” calling it “prophetic” (126). But he is probably too easily lured into Kahler’s dramatics here. Yes, the sustained spread of ‘existential’ malaise might appear unique and previously undocumented, but this has as much to do with the technological and communicational situation of modernity than anything particularly calamitous about our ‘values’. The nature of all kinds of modern technology (from cruise missiles to social media) means that experiences are increasingly shared across greater distances, and recorded more widely and easily. So to note, as Kahler does, that we “do not know of any document relating such a consciously sustained and far-reaching existential experience before the beginning of our century” (124) is a bit of a moot point when we consider that it is only in modernity (with globalization and the spread of international media) that the having and recording of such globalized experiences has become truly possible. Objective values won’t erase the malaise of widespread experience either, presumably, despite what Kahler prescribes as panacea; only a devolution of modern industry and communicational technology will. And that’s just not going to happen any time soon, at least without the coming of an even worse ‘predicament’ (e.g. catastrophic climate change). Globally pervasive moods come with the territory of modernity, but are not necessarily signs of its inherent brokenness.

    Frank’s fondness for Kahler betrays his predominantly conservative response to modern culture. For although he began his career as a celebrator of avant-garde poetics, he has ended it as something of a nostalgic piner, which to be fair might just be the inevitable consequence of having such a long career in the critical limelight (Blake wrote that the man who never changes his mind is like standing water, but there probably comes a point when all the mind wants to do is be still). As expressed in the Kahler essay, Frank sees the work of Foucault and Derrida as symptoms of the technological rationalization of modern culture, carrying further the “functionalization of the human in abject imitation of the physical sciences” (127). Foucault would argue, of course, that this is precisely what his thought is directed against. Nevertheless, throughout Responses to Modernity Frank has a bone to pick with these strands of French thought, and their influence on Anglophone literary criticism in particular. Although, as noted above, Frank feels that French literature is under-read in America today, he implies on several occasions that French theory is over-read, responsible for much of what he resists in the role of the academic critic. In an essay on the poetry and criticism of Yves Bonnefoy, he exclaims that when it has “when criticism all too often turns into a literal murder of the artist by the critic, what a relief it is to read Bonnefoy’s serene meditations on art and literature as part of man’s eternal metaphysical quest for the ultimate meaning of human life!” (72). Frank is mocking his own nostalgic passions just a little here, but throughout many of these essays he consistently expresses frustration with the manner in which the institutionalized form of criticism has supposedly taken to reading and writing about literary works.

    Dissatisfaction with capital-T theory is a common interest among many readers who work within the domain of Ley’s ‘public criticism’, and is an interesting historical phenomenon in its own right. Theory’s association with institutional values sees it posed often enough as an enemy to ‘organic’ literary principles and production, even though much current literature is a form of institutional output itself (here I have in mind Mark McGurl’s essential The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing). It’s not as if Frank has remained entirely divorced from modern literary theory; he was responsible, after all, for bringing both Paul de Man and Derrida to America to give Gauss seminars at Princeton. But his dismissal of modern critical practice is often a little hasty and reactionary. To be fair, sometimes his thoughts are elegant and perceptive: he sees the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism, for example, as just another cycle in the continual oscillation between viewing works of art as autonomous objects or as productions that interact with key areas of human life (181). At other points his reductions seem more intransigent than illuminating, offering only curmudgeonly dismissals of a “younger generation” of readers. In one such jab he bemoans the “recent critical orthodoxies” that describe language as “entirely non-referential and thus isolate literature from any true human significance” (72). Frank must be forgetting that non-referential (or at least self-referential) language featured in his account of Eliot’s poetry in “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” and there it was still able to express something of the human condition. And I’m not sure how any writing produced by a human wouldn’t express something of human significance; even a novel written by a computer would surely have such resonances. A basic term lacking from Frank’s vocabulary seems to be post-humanism, which might offer him a way of speaking more productively about developments he can only define as dehumanizing.

    Coming out the other side of these criticisms, Frank appears as an unashamed humanist. There is of course nothing wrong with this, were it not that humanism is often just a word used to preclude certain kinds of critical work, preferring essentialisms like the “fundamental issues of human life” (74) or “genuine function of art” (73). What humanism seems to mean for Frank can probably be traced back to that youthful encounter with Malraux in which he grew overwhelmed by language figured as a communication of pure feeling, beyond the sense of words. Many of the other essays express similar closeness to authors as people, and this closeness as a necessary factor in their appreciation. To write about Nicola Chiaromonte is “to say farewell to an old friend” (86). For those who knew it well, the personality of Richard Blackmur shone through his work and accounted “for the influence he exercised and the loyalty he inspired” (186). Reflecting on his personal acquaintance with the above-mentioned Cioran, Frank cannot find it within himself to believe that “the brilliantly sardonic, self-mocking, totally engaging and fascinating personality that I knew could not have been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to deceive” (153-54). We’ll take Frank at his word, but one wonders: if he had not known Cioran in person would he be so ready to defend the genuineness of his reformed status? The force of personality convinces Frank more than other evidence, and his own character and mannerisms in these essays should, he hopes, convince us too. In some ways, Frank sees good literature and criticism as secondary productions of a generosity and brilliance of ‘spirit,’ entry points into the personality of the human behind them, which is the real point of it all.

    The last section of Responses of Modernity contains reviews of American and British works of criticism. Reflecting elsewhere on the lay of the literary land in 2012, Frank said that ‘even the book reviews are written in a way that disappoints me’, and criticized reviewers for ‘staying on top of the book, on its surface’ (407), rather than penetrating it. Much of this closing section thus seems included to show how he thought the job best done. Mostly all of the projects he considers here are totalizing ones attempting to sum up a form or a field (the novel, literary realism, etc.), continuing his fondness for ambitious thinkers. Some of the books reviewed are well-known titles, such as Ian Watts’ Rise of the Novel, and Eliot’s To Criticize the Critic; others less so, including Ian Williams’ The Idea of the Novel in Europe, and Patricia Dreschel Tobin’s Time and the Novel. One of the highlights is his generous treatment of Tobin’s book. Despite his distaste for the intellectual trends Tobin has imbibed, Frank can still see through to merits at the core of her work. One wishes he treated other texts influenced by Theory with as much patience as he does here.

    The overall difficulty of reviewing a book consisting mostly of reviews itself is that one feels obliged to try and discover an overall consistency when often the title is the primary organizing thread. Thankfully, there are common themes appearing throughout the book: the struggle to come to terms with the value of rationality in the wake of the wars; the placing of literary history in a transatlantic context; the difficulty of totalization in an era defined by complexity. But, in the end, to quote Frank’s review of Eliot’s To Criticize the Critic, these pieces are probably as valuable “for their occasional personal glimpses than for anything they have to say” (157). This might sound disparaging, but it’s not intended to be. And given Frank’s passion for the personal I don’t think he would find it that way either. How he chooses to respond to modernity – as a condition, a literature, an engagement with people – is defined by his character as a critic and the manner in which his work raises personality as an integral part of literary value. Frank’s personality and passions make this a consistent and worthwhile collection, especially for readers interested in how the complicated history of the twentieth century is articulated in the competing habits, mannerisms, and values of public intellectuals. If it’s overly easy to focus on the institutional problems affecting criticism in the current scene, Frank’s work reminds us that a large part of what is vital about criticism cannot be removed from the personal.

    Nick Levey teaches in the Department of English at La Trobe University (AUS). His doctoral dissertation, entitled “Giants and Junk: Contemporary Maximalism and the Uses of Detail,” was devoted to writers such as David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Nicholson baker, among others. He is currently writing about Post-Press Literature and the recent rise of digitally self-published authors, the anxieties of legitimacy that surround self-publishing in the current market and how means of publication affect our understanding of literary value, enjoyment, and agency.

    Notes

    1. James Ley, The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1.
    2. Michelle Grattan, ‘University Fee Deregulation Blocked but Pyne Pledges to Fight On,’ The Conversation, March 17, 2015, accessed April 5, 2015. https://theconversation.com/university-fee-deregulation-blocked-but-pyne-pledges-to-fight-on-38912.
    3. See for example Stephen Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 31.
  • Cinema & Painting

    Cinema & Painting

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    Michelle Menzies and b2er Daniel Morgan, with The Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, present Cinema & Painting:

    Cinema & Painting examines the intersection of two screen-based arts within the wider frame of digital culture. Organised around artists, both contemporary and historical, who make volumetric cinemas and paintings that spill off the wall, the exhibition maps the genealogy and continuing life of a modernist tradition of depth. By addressing the materiality of projective space—that physical zone beyond the picture plane activated by the body of the spectator in conjunction with the beam of the projector or the intricacies of painted forms—Cinema & Painting examines the interconnection of these arts not only in pictorial but in explicitly phenomenological terms.

    Hosted from 11 February to 11 May 2014. Find out more here, and check out the representative images for the gallery below.
    (cover photo: Phil Solomon, film still from American Falls, 2000-12. Digital video, altered archival footage.)


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    Colin McCahon, View from the Top of the Cliff, 1971. Acrylic on paper.


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        Len Lye, stencil from Musical Poster #1, 1940. Paint on heavy card, occasional pencil inscriptions.


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        Jim Davis, film still from Sea Rhythms, 1971. 35mm transferred to digital video.


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        Matt Saunders, film still from Century Rolls, 2012. Digital video.


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