A bit more on Modernism

One observation that I ruminated over several times whilst plodding my way through Ulysses is that the Modernist idea has had a heck of a lot more success in visual art than in literature. The supreme importance of novelty and the creative power of the observer over the work of art itself seemed to utterly win the field in the visual arts, while in literature they were nothing more than a fad lasting perhaps 30 or 40 years. Not that there aren't new and different styles, occasionally, in literature, but they are never radical departures, and their newness per se is not counted as a major point in their favor.

I developed a bit of a theory about this, which in part takes what I'm here calling Modernism seriously and partly treats it as a hoodwinking of a class of willing dupes. I don't think I have to commit to either interpretation to say that people are clearly more willing to subject themselves to art that they don't enjoy but wish to praise if the experience is short rather than long. Even a long viewing of a piece of visual art (excluding films) is unlikely to go beyond, say, half an hour. And that half hour would certainly not be a period of continual attention to the piece. A book, though, even a novella, is likely to take several hours. A "difficult" book, a Modernist experiment, is likely to take much, much longer. So I think it's much more difficult to fool ourselves about Modernist literature. One can very easily look briefly at all sorts of visual garbage and believe each piece is inspiring deep thoughts. Or, to put a friendlier light on it, it is easy to "look away," literally or not, from a visual artwork, and form an intriguing web of personal associations. The same is not true of a book.

It is mechanically, physically awkward to stop and linger over every word or every sentence.
It can also be exhausting, and that is the core issue with something like Ulysses, in which, for a man of my age and weight, so many of the references are almost meaningless. To try to get out of this work what appears to have gone into it is hopelessly wearying.

And Ulysses brings up another good point. It is relatively easy for a visual artwork to be a unitary object, because it is delimited in space. Even if it fails to meet any traditional standards of symmetry, it clearly has a physical boundary. Even if it is a pastiche of seemingly unrelated parts, they ultimately all fit into a whole. But for a novel to attack structure and symmetry is a different matter. Over the course of the maybe two dozen hours I spent reading Ulysses, I confronted a discontinuous patchwork which never satisfyingly added up to anything. That in theory it might, that parsing it for several months or years would show the thematic resonances etc., is no recompense for this unhappy experience.

One more point I wanted to make along these lines: It's interesting to think of music as an intermediary point between literature and visual art in terms of the success of Modernist efforts. Unlike Modernist literature, Modernist music is still appreciated with pleasure outside the academy, though not by many. The experience of a piece of music generally takes longer than one with a piece of visual art, but not nearly as long as one with literature. It is easier to "skim" music than literature - nonsense music just drifts away into the ether at its own pace, while nonsense words can quickly become a discouraging morrass.

Another way to look at these things is economically. A work of visual art is generally experienced as one of many at a gallery or a museum. The viewer does not expect any one work to be "worth the price of admission." A piece of music is also generally not presented alone, but the dozen or fewer pieces in a concert are often less than the number of works one would see in a gallery or museum. The pieces are expected to "pay off" a bit more - hence the tendency to pad Modernist music with more familiar and readily likeable fare. Finally, a novel has to stand on its own and has to be entirely worth its cover value. If the reader is disappointed, he can avoid Modernist novels altogether by not buying them.

I note the similarity of the time and cost arguments. Just as devoting less money to any one piece of art makes the appreciator more willing to be disappointed, devoting less time to any one piece of art has the same effect.