10 Heeders of the
Call to Make It New
As Malcolm Bradbury, the English novelist and critic, explains at the outset
of ''The Modern World: Ten Great Writers'': he wrote the book to ''keep company
with'' a television series of the same title made by the South Bank Show at
London Weekend Television, for which he was literary consultant. (The 10-part
program is currently being shown here on the Bravo cable network.) Since the
book is a companion to a visual portrait of a literary movement, it might seem
to hold out dim promise, except as a picture book. But that is not at all the
case. Confining his illustrations to photographs of the 10 authors he
discusses, Mr. Bradbury - who edited, with James McFarlane, the estimable
volume ''Modernism'' in the ''Pelican Guides to European Literature'' - has
provided here a concise and lucid introduction to the movement that, beginning
in the 1860's and ending with the outbreak of World War II, provided new literary
forms for the age and thus helped to transform it.
His technique is simplicity itself. After a brief
introduction, called ''Make It New'' after Ezra Pound's famous diktat, he turns
to his 10 writers, devoting a chapter to each. Instead of trying to cover their
entire careers, he concentrates on one of their representative works -
Dostoyevsky's ''Crime and Punishment,'' Ibsen's ''Doll's House,'' Conrad's
''Secret Agent,'' Mann's ''Magic Mountain,'' Proust's ''Remembrance of Things
Past,'' Joyce's ''Ulysses,'' Eliot's ''Waste Land,'' Pirandello's ''Six
Characters in Search of an Author,'' Woolf's ''Mrs. Dalloway'' and Kafka's
''Trial.'' Through his treatments of these works, he reveals their creators'
lives and shows what made them modernists.
Yet it is remarkable what a variety of tasks he accomplishes
with this approach. He can concentrate on important details of scene and
language, for instance, interpreting the meaning of Hans Castorp's
vision in the snow at the climax of ''The Magic Mountain'' and showing how it
reflects the political dislocations of the early 20th century; or demonstrating
how Dostoyevsky's prose in the murder scene of ''Crime and Punishment'' serves
to heighten the impression that Raskolnikov's act is
unconscious and automatic.
He can bring up significant biographical facts without making
their fictional reflection seem overdetermined - the
murder by his serfs of Dostoyevsky's father, for example, or the insanity and
hospitalization of Pirandello's wife. It almost goes without saying how these
events must have influenced ''The Brothers Karamazov'' and Pirandello's
experimental dramas. And Mr. Bradbury can tie such artistic and biographical
details to the development of European literature. By describing Ibsen's early
plays, for example, he can show how the playwright's development traced such
pre-modernist artistic movements as romanticism, realism and naturalism.
Yet for all the book's detail, it's
striking to see what Mr. Bradbury's compression of literary history reveals. He
can reach back to show how Raskolnikov, in his
defiance of human laws, figuratively embodied the Nietzschean
mission of the modern artist. He can reach forward to suggest how Pirandello
anticipated the theories of role-playing espoused by the sociologist and psychologist
Erving Goffman in his 1959 study ''The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life.''
And in between, he reminds us how many major works - ''The
Magic Mountain,'' ''Ulysses,'' ''Remembrance of Things Past,'' ''The Waste
Land,'' ''The Trial,'' to mention only the most obvious - were either conceived
or begun ''in the hopeful experimentalism'' of the period before World War I,
and were completed in the disillusioned era that followed it. Few of these
insights are original, to be sure, but Mr. Bradbury has done a creative job of
integrating them. For any reader who has come to know these works exclusively
through their contents, seeing them in such a sweeping historical context will
prove enlightening.
Aside from introducing his 10 authors, Mr. Bradbury's main
purpose here is of course to show how their work defined literary modernism.
His introductory essay sums up what the movement meant, but it is not nearly as
useful as the essays that follow. Here again, it is the concrete details that
make the author's points hit home, not only by illustrating what specifically
was meant by such abstractions as alienation, exile, metropolitanism
and artistic self-consciousness, but also in showing why ''The Secret Agent''
was the ancestor of political thrillers, or why ''Ulysses'' was the ''seedbed''
for almost all literary experiment that has come after it, including Woolf's
''Mrs. Dalloway,'' despite its author's disapproval of Joyce's masterpiece.
Mr. Bradbury's elegant book concludes that literary modernism
won its battles and defeated its great adversaries, which he sums up as ''the
powers of Victorianism, of sure faith, of fundamentalism.'' It was distinctive
and successful enough to be followed by yet another movement, ''though whether
as its progeny or its adversary the term Postmodernism does not make clear.''
Whether these great figures set examples to be followed or
rebelled against, their discoveries and inventions continue to inform
contemporary literature. Even if reading their works did not continue to be instructive
and exciting, we could ill afford to stop studying them. As ''The Modern
World'' suggests, we are just beginning to understand in depth what they have
meant to our age.
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© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Bárbara Gasquet Carrera
Universitat de Valčncia Press
Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008