When does Modernism begin? That seems an innocent enough question, but it is actually the source of many of the problems we have in coming to terms with it. Since the passages I quoted in the last chapter from Mallarmé, Hofmannsthal, Kafka and Beckett all fall between the years 1850 and 1950 the temptation is strong to date Modernism in that hundred-year period. This is certainly when it flourished and when its manifestations were so prevalent that no-one could ignore it. The danger in seeing it like that, though, is that Modernism is thereby turned into a style, like Mannerism or Impressionism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us. I, on the other hand, want to argue that Modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way, as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen in this way, Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.

That phrase was given currency by the sociologist Max Weber in the early years of the twentieth century. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) and in later essays, he argued that the Reformation was part of a historical process ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (die Entziehung der Welt), whereby the sacramental religion of the Middle Ages was transformed into a transcendental and intellectualised religion, which led to the disappearance of the numinous from everyday life. In England this shift has mainly been seen as what the authors of 1066 and All That would have called a Good Thing, since it led us from an era of superstition to our modern era of common sense and scientific understanding, from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the light of the Enlightenment. A monument of English Renaissance history, Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) is a fine example of this attitude. ‘Despite the studiously agnostic, anthropological spirit in which he conducted his inquiry’, a recent historian has written about this, ‘he … subscribed implicitly to the view that the Reformation helped to emancipate the English populace from a “superstitious” understanding of the world around them, from assumptions which, he wrote in the foreword, were now “rightly disdained by intelligent persons”.’ And, despite the splendid work of writers such as Eamon Duffy, who for over twenty years has been attempting to rescue late medieval culture from the contempt of (largely Protestant) historians, this view has remained the common one in the English-speaking world.

This is not surprising, since it feeds into another powerful myth, that of the Renaissance as the triumph of the individual after centuries of subservience to authority and tradition, centuries of being bound to the yoke of religion and superstition. Both these myths, the myth of light coming out of darkness and the myth of the emancipation of the individual, were of course first propagated by Protestants and Humanists themselves, and both have been shown to be, if not downright lies, at least only one side of the story, but the assumptions behind them live on in our culture as obvious truths, repeated every time religion is criticised as mere superstition or when a caption to a painting in a gallery draws attention to the lifelikeness of what is being depicted, implying that ‘lifelikeness’, that Renaissance ideal, is what all art aspires to.

Things are rather different in the German tradition. There cultural analysts such as Erich Heller, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg have sought to bring out what has got lost as well as what has been gained by the transition from older ways of thinking to modernity. This is perhaps not surprising when we remember that the phrase, ‘the disenchantment of the world’ is originally Schiller's, and that all Schiller's mature critical writing is an attempt to come to terms with what he eloquently describes as the disappearance of a glorious earlier age (he is thinking, in somewhat idealised terms, of the Greeks), an age in which man was simply a part of the world, while now he stands outside, looking in, aware only of what he has lost. The feeling is ubiquitous among the Romantics, especially the German Romantics; perhaps its most eloquent expression is to be found in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where the philosopher explores what he calls ‘the unhappy consciousness’. ‘Trust in the eternal laws of the gods has vanished’, he writes,

and the Oracles, which pronounced on particular questions, are dumb. The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. The works of the Muse now lack the power of the Spirit, for the Spirit has gained its certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and men. They have become what they are for us now — beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly Fate has offered us, as a girl might set the fruit before us. It cannot give us the actual life in which they existed, not the tree that bore them, nor the earth and the elements which constituted their substance, not the climate which gave them their peculiar character nor the cycle of the changing seasons that governed the process of their growth. So fate does not restore their world to us along with the works of antique Art, it gives not the spring and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled recollection of that actual world.

Critics and cultural historians are sharply divided into those who find remarks of this kind illuminating and those who think them either arrant nonsense or the expression of a purely private anxiety. But the position you adopt does not depend simply on faith. Those, including myself, who find remarks like Hegel's or Schiller's illuminating, do so in part because they help us to recognise that this sense of somehow having arrived too late, of having lost for ever something that was once a common possession, is a, if not the, key Romantic concern.

But is this not merely setting back the onset of Modernism by half a century? If you wish to see ‘the disenchantment of the world’ as a key ingredient in Modernism, a critic of this line of thought might argue, is not what you are doing merely eliding Modernism and Romanticism? To pose these questions is once again to misunderstand what is at issue. It is to deny that Hegel's present tense, his insistent ‘now … now … now …’, is still the present tense for us — i.e., that we still live in the world Hegel so movingly describes. That, I suspect, is what divides English and continental philosophy, and that is the task of this book: to try to bring home to readers the sense in which Hegel's present tense is still present for us.

There is a further point. To see Modernism as beginning in 1800 rather than 1850 is short-sighted in another way. T.S. Eliot famously located a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in the mid-seventeenth century, while cultural critics like Heller and Blumenberg, perhaps taking their cue from Weber, would take it back even further, to the early sixteenth century and the coming of Protestantism. Heller even, and only half in jest, once pointed to a moment in 1529 when, he said, the problems of modern poetry began. The occasion was a disputation in the ducal castle in Marburg between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, who had been brought together by Philip of Hesse in an attempt to heal the splits that were beginning to show in the ranks of the Reformers less than a dozen years after Luther had nailed his theses to the Castle Church doors in Wittenberg and unwittingly set the Reformation in train. The subject of dispute was the nature of the eucharist: were the bread and wine administered by the priest, as Luther, in this still a man of the Middle Ages, insisted, really the body and blood of Christ, or were they, as the Humanist Zwingli maintained, merely symbolic? Zwingli could not believe that Luther, who had challenged the authority of pope and councils and denounced pilgrimages and purgatory as superstitious practices designed to make money for the Church, could really believe that Christ, who sat in heaven on the right hand of God, could also be present in the wine and bread used by priests all over Christendom every day of the year. But Luther, for his part, clung to his belief: a cultured man like Zwingli might laugh, but he knew in his soul that the mystery of the eucharist was real, that the ritual was not designed merely to bring to the memory of the participant that first sacrifice of Christ; it was actually to partake, in some way, in that sacrifice.

The parties could not agree and could not even devise a face-saving formula. As Heller points out, the dispute was not even new, since theologians had been arguing about the precise nature of transubstantiation for centuries. But it had taken on a new importance and after the Marburg disputation there was no going back, for theology or for Western man. ‘Of course,’ says Heller,

I do not confuse a theological controversy with an exercise in aesthetic theory. But I do suggest that at the end of a period that we rather vaguely call the Middle Ages there occurred a radical change in man's idea of reality, in that complex fabric of unconsciously held convictions about what is real and what is not. This was a revolution comparable to that earlier one which Nietzsche called the victory of the Socratic mind over the spirit of Dionysian tragedy. And indeed both victories saddled us with the unending bother of aesthetic philosophy.

The Marburg debate brings out the fact that the Protestant revolution was not one thing which in a single moment changed the face of European politics, religion and thought. The world did not become disenchanted overnight. It was, rather, the coming out into the open of doubts and confusions that had not, until then, found a clear voice. As Luther's stance at Marburg suggests, the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’ were to coexist for a long while yet. But the fabric of thought was changing. Take the Reformers' polemics against Purgatory. The idea that there was a middle state ‘in which’, as a recent historian has put it, ‘those whom God loved would have a chance to perfect the hard slog towards holiness that they had begun so imperfectly in their brief earthly life’ was nowhere to be found in the Bible, and by the fifteenth century, when rich nobles could set up chantry chapels and hire priests to sing daily masses in perpetuity to help speed them through Purgatory as quickly as possible, the whole doctrine had begun, to some, to seem meaningless and mechanical. But the idea of men on earth, by their devotions, helping those who had died and earning themselves benefit from their labours in the eyes of God was one which would have been understood by most so-called primitive peoples, for it is based on the belief that there is a profound link between groups of human beings and between the living and the dead. In the Choephori of Aeschylus, the second play of his trilogy about the House of Agamemnon, known as the Oresteia, Agamemnon's two surviving children, Electra and Orestes, egged on by the chorus, pray at the tomb of their murdered father for him to help them avenge his fate on the culprit, their mother. At the climax of this extraordinary scene Orestes cries out to his father:

And do not wipe out this Pelopid seed; for then [i.e. if you do suffer them to be wiped out], even though dead, you will not have perished. For to a dead man his children are the fame that preserves him; like corks they bear the net up, keeping safe the spun flax that stretches up from the depths.

(ll.503–7, tr. Alan H. Somerstein)

For Aeschylus, the unit is not the individual but the family, the House, here defined by reference to the first ancestor, Pelops. Man by himself is nothing; only the family, the House, gives meaning to his life. Just as for Aristotle a little later, man is less than human if he is not functioning within a unit larger than himself, the polis or city state. When in the sixteenth century Reformers everywhere rounded on the doctrine of Purgatory, they were, like Zwingli in his argument with Luther, absolutely right in their own eyes; what they were attacking was nonsense, it was a form of superstition. But what they could not see was that their new clear-sightedness was the result of the disappearance of an older way of looking at things which was itself dependent on older forms of social organisation. In the nineteenth century scholars were in no doubt at all that the Reformers were right every time, that they were finally waking up to the absurdities of superstition. In the twentieth century, though voices like those of Keith Thomas were still in the majority, there were some who were no longer quite so sure. And there were some, like Heller, who were prepared to see what had got lost in the transition as well as what had been gained, who would even see the transition as tragic. That certainly, is the stance of Thomas Mann, in the most eloquent artistic exploration of the issue, his last major novel, Doctor Faustus.

Adrian Leverkühn, the novel's composer-hero, is profoundly aware, as his friend and biographer Serenus Zeitblom is not, of the crisis that has engulfed art since the sixteenth century; Leverkühn's entire intellectual and artistic life is built out of a deep awareness of the contrast between the ‘age of cult’ and the ‘age of the individual’, that is, between the Middle Ages and what followed. Practically every page of this long novel has some remarkable critical insight based on that distinction, so, rather than following the well-trodden paths and examining again what is said in a general and philosophical way in the central chapters of the book, let me turn to a passage close to the end, where Mann/Zeitblom is attempting to describe the effect of Leverkühn's last great work, ‘The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus’:

The Lamentation, that is — and what we have here is an abiding, inexhaustibly accentuated lament of the most painfully Eccehomo kind — the Lamentation is expression itself; one may state boldly that all expressivism is really lament; just as music, so soon as it is conscious of itself as expression at the beginning of its modern history, becomes lament and ‘lasciatemi morire’ [die Klage ist der Ausdruck selbst, man kann kühnlich sagen, dass aller Ausdruck eigentlich Klage ist, wie denn die Musik, sobald sie sich als Ausdruck begreift, am Beginn ihrer modernen Geschichte, zur Klage wird and zum ‘Lasciatemi morire’], the lament of Ariadne, to the softly echoing plaintive song of the nymphs. It does not lack significance that the Faust cantata is stylistically so strongly and unmistakably linked with the seventeenth century and Monteverdi, whose music — again not without significance — favoured the echo-effect, sometimes to the point of being a mannerism. The echo, the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, and the revelation of it as nature-sound, is essentially a lament: Nature's melancholy ‘Alas!’ in view of man, her effort to utter his solitary state. Conversely, the lament of the nymphs on its side is related to the echo. In Leverkühn's last and loftiest creation, echo, a favourite device of the baroque, is employed with unspeakably mournful effect.

Thus, says Mann, when the choral music of the Middle Ages, the music of community, gives way in the Renaissance to opera, with its celebration of the individual, this is, for music, not entirely a matter for rejoicing. It is no coincidence that Monteverdi's first and greatest opera, Orfeo (1607, usually seen as the first opera tout court), should take as its subject one of the ancient world's main legends of irreparable loss, a legend that has haunted modern artists from Rilke to Birtwistle as it haunted the Renaisssance. Like Dowland's almost contemporary Lachrymae (1605), recently so beautifully touched into life by Birtwistle in his Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens, and, like countless Renaissance sonnets, it is specifically about the loss of a beloved woman, but the reason it has exerted such a hold is clearly that, like Monteverdi's ‘Ariadne's Lament’, it is about some deeper, more primal and all-encompassing loss. The Middle Ages, of course, had their fair share of poems and songs about the loss of a loved one, but these songs have a kind of upswing and energy that belies their subject-matter. What is so extraordinary about ‘Ariadne's Lament’ and Dowland's Lachrymae is the way the music seems to enact the very loss it laments. The Middle Ages also had a central place for a story of darkness and death, the story of Christ's Passion. But that story, whether expressed in the Easter liturgy, in the miracle plays or in stained glass windows across Europe, does not stop with Christ's death on the cross. That death, terrible though it is, is but a moment in a larger story, one that will end with the Resurrection and the Last Judgement, a story the Middle Ages would have called, as Dante called his poem, a comedy, because it starts badly but ends well. When, in the sixteenth century, religion takes its inward turn, the shape of that story is lost. The world becomes a colder place.

Some will dismiss all this with the boo-word ‘Hegelianism’ and accuse me, along with Heller, Mann and the rest, of nostalgia or, worse, of proto-fascism, in our longing for an ordered world of community to contrast with the fragmented, liberal and individualistic world in which we live. Even Frank Kermode, a scholar noted for his openness to the new, once accused Eliot of being a closet Romantic for his notion of a moment when unity fragmented and ‘sensibility’ grew ‘dissociated’. That there is a real issue here, and one that has to be faced head-on, is attested to by Eliot's career. His prose writings of the 1930s and 1940s do seem to spring from a longing for a once-unified Europe, and it is there that some of his most notorious anti-Semitic remarks occur. Does that then invalidate his insight into seventeenth-century poetry and culture? Does not everyone who responds to poetry know what he means when he contrasts Marvell's ‘unified sensibility’ with that of the poets who followed him? Is it not possible to separate the cultural critique from the nostalgia and the prescriptiveness of how a once-lost unity can be found again? T.J. Clark, the art historian, puts the problem most clearly when, in an early footnote to his splendid Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, he writes:

I realize that I shall be taken here and elsewhere to be idealizing pre-modern society, and inventing a previous watertight world of myth and ritual, agreed-on hierarchies, implicit understandings, embodied places, and so on. There is no easy way out of this dilemma. Of course pre-Modern societies (and certainly the ones existing in Europe immediately before the spread of mercantile capitalism and the seventeenth-century crisis) were conflicted and ideologically incomplete. I am on the side of historians who have fought against the picture of a pre-modern Europe characterised by absolute cultural uniformity, immovable religious consensus, the unthinkability of alternative views of the world, etc. Nonetheless, if we do not make a distinction between societies built, however inefficiently, upon instanced and incorporated belief, with distinctions and places said to be inherited from time immemorial, and societies driven by a new kind of economic imperative, in which place and belief are subject to constant revision by the very forces that give society form, then I reckon we forfeit the chance of thinking critically about the past two hundred years. To call such comparative thinking ‘nostalgia’ (or in the present techno-ecstatic conjuncture, ‘Luddism’) is just the latest form of philistinism about history in general.

Thomas Mann himself was well aware of the problem. In fact Doctor Faustus is nothing other than his desperate and impassioned struggle with it (as, in its way, is The Magic Mountain, written twenty years earlier). The source of Leverkühn's power as a composer, as well as his despair, is his recognition of the truth of Hegel's vision of a present in which the oracles are dumb, the social structures which made their existence possible having long since given way to modern capitalist individualism. On the other hand the Germany he inhabits, which is in the grip of a party which believes that it is possible to forge a new cultic and communal society in the post-industrial world, appals and terrifies him, as much as it does Zeitblom. Can one retain the critical insights, feel the loss as real, without at the same time opting for the demented Nazi vision of a new cult? This is the question out of which the tortured novelist, writing in distant California as the Nazi dream drags Europe to its destruction, forges one of his greatest works.

Let me try to give a little more life to that striking phrase, ‘the disenchantment of the world’, by focusing on the work of a few artists, working from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. I could have chosen others, but these will do both as examples and as a way of introducing some of the themes that will come into prominence when we turn to the modernism of our own time.

I want to begin with three sixteenth-century artists, and, first, with a visual artist and with a work made in 1514, three years, that is, before Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. I do this because I want to show, among other things, that these intuitions of a change in man's relation to the world are not dependent on external events such as the Protestant and French revolutions, though of course these are important contributory factors, but that all are part and parcel of the same thing, the coming to the surface of tensions which had been growing for some time and which finally burst out into the open. In that year, 1514, Albrecht Dürer, recognised even in his lifetime as the greatest Renaissance artist of the North, made an engraving to which he gave the enigmatic title Melencolia I [figure 1]. An enormous brooding woman in flowing robes, with wings and a crown of leaves, sits leaning her head on her hand in an indeterminate space next to a ruined house against which a ladder is propped. An eerie moonlight blankets the scene and on the left, above a sheet of water, an ugly-looking bat spreads its wings, on which the mysterious title of the engraving is displayed. In her right hand the woman holds a compass and all around her lie other measuring instruments and tools: a pair of scales, a turned sphere of wood, a truncated rhombo-hedron, pliers, nails, a saw. On the wall behind her is an hourglass and next to it a magic square with a bell above it. From her belt, in equal disarray, hang a bunch of keys and an open purse. Sitting a little above her is a putto, busily scribbling. The two figures convey the overwhelming impression of tension and anxiety in the midst of what we paradoxically experience as both stasis and chaos.

One cannot look at Dürer's

Melencolia I

or read a chapter of Rabelais or Cervantes without sensing that they knew in their bones that they were living through a period of decisive change. Every major artist of the time sensed this, but most, from Leonardo to Michelangelo, from Petrarch to Spenser, saw only the opening up of new possibilities as older traditions crumbled and were swept away. The repressive tyranny of the Church was being destroyed and Protestantism had got rid of old superstitions while Humanism gave the individual a new freedom to express himself — that at least is the myth that was perpetuated by both Protestantism and Humanism, and one that in its simplicity and apparent self-evidence still shapes the popular imagination. Throughout the last century, though, and often under the impetus of Modernism itself, this picture has slowly been eroded. It now seems clear that what happened was that Protestantism and Humanism between them brought into being the world picture that was to dominate the following three centuries, a picture that seemed to explain everything and that propelled Europe into leading the world in science and technology, but that really was only

a

picture of the world. Artists who felt ill at ease in the dominant traditions started to look behind that picture to the Middle Ages or beyond it to Africa, Japan or Bali, while historians, anthropologists and cultural analysts began to discover that cultures other than the dominant one were anything but benighted and barbaric, were in fact highly sophisticated and rich in tradition, though the premises on which their world pictures were based were radically different from those of the West.

As historians have increasingly been showing, and as I suggested in my discussion of the two Dürer engravings, the disenchantment of the world was not something that happened overnight, or even in the decade between 1517 and 1527. Things were quite different with the French Revolution. No-one in Europe had any doubt that something decisive, whether wonderful or terrible, had happened in 1789. What the Revolution did was give everyone the sense that even the most ordinary life could be changed. You were not stuck for ever in the place or the role into which you had been born. Everyone was now equal and everyone, in principle, had equal opportunities. By the time Napoleon was crowned Emperor not only did every soldier feel that he had a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack, every citizen felt that he too could be Emperor. ‘Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century,’ wrote Emerson many years later, ‘Bonaparte.. owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men.’ He owed his success, Emerson continues, entirely to the fact that he asked help of no-one, that he did things his own way. ‘I should have done no good if I had been under the necessity of conforming to the notions of another person,’ he quotes Napoleon as saying in 1796. In a world run by kings and rulers who had inherited their power and wealth, and who had no idea how to use it or what to do, ‘here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do next’.

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. ‘There shall be no Alps,’ he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France … Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put out all his strength. He risked everything and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.

Unfortunately such a combination of qualities is rare; besides, there is only room for one emperor at any one time. What happened in post-Napoleonic Europe was that educated and ambitious young men found themselves in menial employment as badly paid tutors to the children of aristocrats, or as minor civil servants, when in their heart of hearts they felt it was their destiny to be Napoleons. That is the fate of Stendhal's Julien Sorel. Above all it is the fate of Dostoevsky's characters. In Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, it is quite explicit: he is nobody, he cannot even earn enough to help his family, yet he senses that he is destined for great things, that he is a second, Russian, Napoleon. (The hero of The Adolescent wants to ‘become Rothschild’ — the principle is the same, for in the imagination of nineteenth-century Europe Rothschild was to finance as Napoleon was to war.) In the end, as the examining magistrate, Porphyry, explains to him, he murdered the old money-lender and almost asked to be caught for the simple reason that, like the rest of us, he prefers to be someone, even a murderer, than no-one at all. For the reverse side of the French Revolution was that, coinciding as it did with the growth of urbanisation and the drift to the cities, people who had once had a clear if lowly place in life, as farmers, masons, farriers or parish priests, now had none. That is the trouble with Dostoevsky's Underground Man. He wants to be pushed into the gutter because that will at least give him a sense that he exists, whereas living anonymously in the indifferent spaces of the modern city, he is not even sure that he does. That is the trouble with Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, those tragic heroines of the post-Napoleonic age who are prepared to destroy their lives and those of the human beings close to them in order to feel they are alive. That is the trouble with Melville's Bartleby. He becomes a copyist in Wall Street but something in him rejects everything that that district, in the 1850s, is starting to stand for. Soon he stops even pretending to copy for his employer, and, when asked why, merely says: ‘I would prefer not to.’ In the end, of course, he is driven out of Wall Street and eventually dies, alone and unmourned, in the great cold metropolis of New York, that monument to the twin gods of the nineteenth century, Capital and Progress.

It is possible to recount a story of art and how it has developed since the 1790s which parallels this story of politics and people. Looking at music one could ask why it is that a composer like Haydn could write a hundred symphonies and only a few years later a composer no less gifted, no less industrious, Beethoven, could write only nine. The answer, quite simply, is that Haydn didn't feel he needed to start from scratch each time. Haydn is the last major composer to work as Dürer showed St Jerome working: at ease within a tradition. What he had to do, to put it schematically, was to fill in a form. That he filled it in supremely well, far better than any of his contemporaries except Mozart, is neither here nor there. In a wonderful passage in Mann's Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn tries to explain to his friend and future biographer how what happened to sonata form at this time encapsulates what happened to music at large. When the form first developed, he explains, there were clear rules governing its deployment: first came an introduction, followed by a first theme, a second theme, a development section, a recapitulation, and finally a coda. What happens with Beethoven, argues Leverkühn, is that the development section, which had been ‘a small part of the sonata, a modest republic of subjective illumination’, grows out of all proportion to the rest till it overwhelms the whole, its growth synonymous with the expression of the composer's demonic subjectivity. Even today Beethoven's symphonies stand in the public imagination for the most powerful expression of an individuality we all believe we possess but which it is given to few of us to be able to express.

Unfortunately, after Beethoven (who, it will be observed, plays in this story the role that Napoleon played in the previous one — ‘In the plenitude of his resource, every obstacle seemed to vanish’, etc.) composers were left with nothing to hold on to except for their individuality, and, without Beethoven's dynamism or optimism, this gradually led, in the course of the nineteenth century, to an art more and more prone to stasis, dreaminess and disintegration. Technically what happened was that the key system, on which the classical sonata form had depended for its articulation, was first tweaked in the interest of colour and originality, and then gradually lost its power to control and started to seem unnatural and artificial, yet without any other system being found to replace it. The composer at the start of the twentieth century, an Arnold Schoenberg or an Adrian Leverkühn, was thus caught between repeating forms he could no longer believe in or trusting a subjectivity that was growing daily more problematic. And the same trajectory could be described for the other arts, with Eliot and Joyce, Cézanne and Picasso, taking the place of Schoenberg and Leverkühn.

I will come to them in good time. For the moment I want to stay with the paradoxes that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The person who can best help us understand them, to my mind, is a reclusive genius who lived on the edge of Europe in the middle of the century, the Dane Søren Kierkegaard. In a dazzling torrent of works that seemed to burst out of him like a natural force in the decade between 1840 and 1849 (he was born in 1813), he produced what is in effect a kind of Divine Comedy of the nineteenth century. Dante, working in an age when an ordered universe was taken for granted, could build his poem out of a hundred cantos precisely (three canticles of thirty-three cantos plus a prologue) and place his sinners and saints in carefully graded positions in both Heaven and Hell, while drawing on a rich tradition to bring home to the reader how each of us can be saved and what steps need to be taken to find our way up the mountain of Purgatory. By 1840 all that has long gone. All Kierkegaard can do is to try and explore in every way imaginable the troubled heart and soul of nineteenth-century man, one who has been given his freedom twice over, first by God and then by the French Revolution, but who does not know what to do with it except torment himself with the sense that he is wasting his life.

Already in his first mature work Either/Or (1842), he had begun to explore what it might mean for a youth with brains and imagination to grasp that he was free to do what he wanted and to grasp at the same time that that freedom condemned him to a life of melancholy and inaction, as though the plethora of possibilities made all actualities seem pale and insubstantial. Coleridge of course had already sketched out such a fate in his examination of and identification with Hamlet. Kierkegaard carries on the work in a much more rigorous but also much more ironic manner, since the Hamlet-like young man who ostensibly writes the essays that make up Part I, the ‘Either’ of the title (it is probable that they were Kierkegaard's own early essays, given new life by being set in a new context), is pitted against a mature married man, a Judge, who speaks in Part II (‘Or’), arguing that all the young man has to do is make just one choice, that of a partner for life, and all his problems will be solved, his agony and frustration will drop away and happiness will be his for ever. In a sense this was the alternative Dürer presented in his two engravings, but one feels that St Jerome is at least an imaginative possibility for Dürer, whereas the Judge is a wooden figure in whom neither the reader nor the author can quite believe. And that for a simple reason. He has really no response to the young man's question: What determines my choice of partner, and, if it is simply a matter of choosing rather than of the person one chooses, how is one to decide whom to choose? To say that God will provide, or that when that person turns up it will be obvious, is not to answer the young man at all; on the other hand, to say that it doesn't matter whom one chooses, that once she is chosen and becomes a partner for life all will be well, still does not answer the question and, besides, is not quite the sort of thing the Judge seems to want to endorse. On the other hand, in an abstract way, it is clear to the young man that the Judge is right: if only he himself was on the other side, had already chosen, he too would be like the Judge and all would be well. But he is not, and he doesn't know how to get to the other side, given his ironic and sceptical attitude to all choice.

The problem presented in Either/Or is essentially the problem the young Adrian Leverkühn resolves, in Mann's novel, by making his pact with the Devil. Too cold or too clear-sighted to go on playing the game of composition as Strauss and Mahler are playing it, yet desperate to compose, he needs something that will carry him over to the other side, as it were, give him back the excitement of composition. Stravinsky found that something in the Orthodox Church; a novelist like Muriel Spark in the Catholic Church; for a German Protestant like Leverkühn perhaps it could only be the Devil. Kierkegaard, though, went on believing that it had to be God. If he could only work his way through the Romantic disease of excessive freedom, he knew God would be waiting for him. But how? Two years after Either/Or he devoted an entire work to this mysterious disease. He called it The Concept of Anxiety. Anxiety, he points out, is to be distinguished from fear. Fear refers to something definite, ‘whereas anxiety is freedom's actuality, the possibility of possibility’. This opaque formulation is partly elucidated by the later examination of ‘the anxious possibility of being able’ and of the fact that ‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’. But however suggestive some of his phrasing is, the book remains relentlessly abstract. Five years later though, in The Sickness Unto Death, he hits upon a method that will do justice to his subject.

He begins from the obvious fact, also highlighted by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground, that Plato misunderstood the nature of man since he held that sin is ignorance and can therefore be rectified by knowledge, whereas Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky follow St Augustine in believing that sin is a misdirection of the will. The grim refrain of Notes from Underground is that man is a perverse creature who will often do things he knows will harm him merely to prove to himself that he is alive and free. The classic example is the young Augustine's attempt to steal the pears from the orchard when he knows it is wrong, because he is driven by some powerful inexplicable impulse to do so. Hell, as Dante brings out so powerfully, is the fall into despair because we both want and do not want to do certain things, just as the addict both wants his drug and, clearly aware that it is ruining him, does not want it. Why some will allow the wanting to triumph and others will be able to overcome it is a mystery, one that the Augustinian tradition fully respects. For Kierkegaard it is the problem of the young man and the Judge translated into a religious dimension. To deal with it he adopts what he calls ‘the dialectic method’, his version of that Hegelian method he both admired and loathed. This means always seeing the topic under consideration alongside its opposite, never allowing it to take centre stage alone. Thus man, he says, is a synthesis of finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity. He begins his discussion of possibility and necessity, for example, with the point that ‘a self that has no possibility is in despair, and likewise a self that has no necessity’. This he proceeds to develop in almost musical fashion:

Now if possibility outstrips necessity, the self runs away from itself in possibility so that it has no necessity to return to. This then is possibility's despair. Here the self becomes an abstract possibility; it exhausts itself in floundering about in possibility, yet it never moves from where it is nor gets anywhere, for necessity is just that ‘where’ … Thus possibility seems greater and greater to the self; more and more becomes possible because nothing becomes actual. In the end it seems as though everything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss.

Remember Picrochole? And Dürer's Melencolia? Do the words not apply perfectly to them? ‘In the end it seems as though everything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss.’ What the self lacks here is necessity. And wherein does necessity lie? ‘What is really missing’, says Kierkegaard, ‘is the strength to obey, to yield to the necessary in one's self, what might be called one's limits.’ But here we come up against the same problem as that which rendered the Judge's side of the argument so unconvincing in Either/Or. It was much easier to find one's own limits when there were external limits in place, precisely those limits which began to be called into question in the Renaissance and the Reformation and which had been abolished once and for all, in principle at least, by the French Revolution. In the modern world necessity seems too often a form of imprisonment rather than release, ‘for without possibility it is as though a person cannot draw breath’. Thus ‘necessity's despair is to lack possibility’. Is this not a striking analysis of the situation Raskolnikov finds himself in? And Emma Bovary? But — and this is why we must stick to the dialectical method — at the same time possibility's despair is to lack necessity. That is why when Raskolnikov or Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina acts, not tragedy but a kind of dreadful farce ensues. Agamemnon may, in his wife's eyes, have been wrong to sacrifice their daughter; Clytemnestra, in her son's eyes, may have been wrong to murder her husband: but in each case they were driven by an objective and clearly defined necessity — to allow the fleet to sail and thus fulfil his obligation as brother of Menelaus and commander of the Greeks on his part, to avenge the murder of her daughter on hers — and thus what ensues is tragedy. The contrast with Raskolnikov, Emma and Anna could not be clearer.

In the later portions of his book Kierkegaard explores ‘the despair of not wanting to be oneself’ as well as ‘the despair of wanting in despair to be oneself’. Not surprisingly, he finds confirmation of his insights not in other philosophers, who have rarely recognised the unfathomable complexities of the self, but in the poets, and especially in Shakespeare. Not Hamlet, this time, but Macbeth. ‘It is a psychological master-stroke’, he remarks, ‘that Shakespeare has Macbeth say (Act III, Scene 2): “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.” In other words, sin has an inner consistency and in this consistency of evil it also has a certain strength.’ And again, quoting the lines in Act II, Scene I, ‘For from this instant [the murder of Duncan] there's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead.’ ‘What is masterly is the double stroke in the final words (renown and grace)’, he comments. Here Kierkegaard is drawing attention to the brilliance with which Shakespeare, in three words, conveys Macbeth's loss of both public and private realms, the older, Homeric realm of kleos, fame, honour among one's peers, and the newer, Christian realm, in which one is alone before God, on whose grace one's eternal life depends.

Though Kierkegaard sets out The Sickness Unto Death as an argument built up step by step, it is difficult, unless perhaps one is his kind of Christian, to follow it as such. Rather, it seems to me, the book is a compendium, an encyclopaedia of the sickness that has befallen man in the nineteenth century. On every page there are remarkable formulations, worth any number of books on Romanticism or Modernism, such as: ‘If one wants to compare running astray in possibility with the child's use of vowels, then lacking possibility is like being dumb. The necessary is as though there were only consonants, but to utter them there has to be possibility.’ Does this not provide us with a way of grasping the mixture of silence, confusion and despair evident in so many of the greatest nineteenth-century novels — Michael Kohlhaas, Madame Bovary, The Devils? In fact, as we will see, whatever aspect of Modernism we look at, Kierkegaard will be an invaluable guide.

But before we turn to Modernism proper it may be useful to take a slightly more extended look at an artist working in the heyday of the French Revolution. It is important to do this to give flesh to what might seem too abstract and general, just as we turned to Dürer, Rabelais and Cervantes to anchor the discussion of the sixteenth-century ‘disenchantment of the world’. Wordsworth was born in the same year as Beethoven, 1770, and is perhaps, like him, so remarkable an innovator just because he was still rooted in the eighteenth century. He has much to teach us about the paradoxes of the freed imagination, that poisoned chalice passed on from Romanticism to Modernism. Precisely because he is not usually seen in this light he may help us get away from the clichés that everywhere impede a proper understanding of Modernism. At the same time I want to try and show that not just music and poetry but all the arts were profoundly affected by the changed climate of the last years of the eighteenth century, and so following the lead of one of his finest critics Joseph Leo Koerner, I propose to bring in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich whenever it seems relevant to do so.

Part of the problem of getting to grips with Wordsworth and Friedrich is that both of them seem early on to jettison the notion of genre. A genre is a bit like a family: when you are with your family you do not have to explain who you are each time you enter a room; you are taken for granted. But families can seem constricting as well as enabling, and a moment comes when confidence in genre starts to wane. We have already seen this at work in the emergence of the strange new productions of Rabelais and Cervantes, and we have seen Cervantes playing with the whole business of the genre of the Prologue. But if we want a symbolic moment in the eighteenth-century perception of genre to mirror 14 July 1789, then we have it in Dr Johnson's criticism of Milton (in his Life of the poet, 1779) for choosing to express grief at the death of his friend Edward King in the form of a pastoral elegy. ‘Lycidas’, says Johnson in his magisterial way,

is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fawns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief.

At this point it is clear that genre has come to seem, like aristocratic privilege, a false imposition rather than a natural condition. The subtitle ‘epic’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘pastoral elegy’ had prepared readers or spectators for what they were about to experience and helped the writer enter his subject and establish an agreement with the reader. Johnson, that great classicist who nevertheless was also open to changing conditions, would have none of it. Like Kierkegaard's young man, what tradition has to offer seems to him false and no longer to chime with how things are. And this is even more true of Wordsworth and Friedrich, who were, after all, born a full sixty years after Johnson.

Geoffrey Hartman has noted of one of Wordsworth's earliest poems, ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’, that ‘its value … does not seem to depend in any way on the recognition of the species to which it may belong’, and later in the same essay he argues that ‘Wordsworth's form appears to be self-generated rather than prompted by tradition; and the greater the poem the clearer the effect.’ Koerner, for his part, poring over the two little paintings sometimes called ‘Aus der Dresdner Heide I and II’ (From the Dresden Heath I and II), comes to the conclusion that

each picture depicts a radically unremarkable nature, purged of human meaning and therefore of any clear relation to yourself, within a composition so centralised and intensely focused that it appears endowed with a quite particular and momentous significance. This significance eludes you, and you stand before the pictures as before answers for which the questions have been lost.

Koerner places this problem in the context of art history:

Before Friedrich, pendant canvases like ‘From the Dresden Heath I and II’ would have been linked together as episodes in legend or history, as distinct stages within a natural cycle (Seasons or Times of the Day), as examples of discrete types of landscape (heroic, pastoral, elegiac, etc.), or as natural analogues to differing human characters or qualities (the Four Humours, the Five Senses). Each image would correspond to a separate category within a system whose perimeters coincide with the whole of nature humanity … Friedrich's two canvases, on the other hand, are paired as exemplary moments within a single continuity of experience: the artist's personal Erlebnis [experience] of landscape.

It's uncanny how easily Koerner's words about the German painter apply to the English poet. For from the start Wordsworth's best poetry defies genre because it is not about this or that but is rather the encapsulation in words of an event which has filled him with wonder and which remains — for him and for us — mysterious, incapable of being absorbed into any system. A good example is the little poem ‘A Night-Piece’, written in the richly productive year of 1798, though not published till 1815.

The poem begins with what seems like pure description:

The sky is overcast

With a continuous cloud of texture close,

Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon,

Which through that veil is indistinctly seen,

A dull, contracted circle, yielding light

So feebly spread that not a shadow falls…

But suddenly there is a double change: in the landscape being depicted and in our sense of where the focus of the poem lies. The two are connected:

At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam

Startles the pensive traveller while he treads

His lonesome path, with unobserving eye

Bent earthwards; he looks up — the clouds are split

Asunder, — and above his head he sees

The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.

There in a blue-black vault she sails along,

Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small

And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss

Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away,

Yet vanish not! — the wind is in the tree,

But they are silent; — still they roll along

Immeasurably distant; and the vault,

Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds,

Still deepens its unfathomable depth.

The emergence of the moon from the clouds seems to conjure up the traveller, to us and even to himself, as though till that moment he had been walking without any awareness of himself and his surroundings, locked in his own thoughts, ‘pensive’, ‘unobserving’, in a sense ‘not there’. But the sudden emergence of the moon makes him look up and the poem itself suddenly takes off from the flat, almost prose-like opening, into something powerful and grand, as the impact of the scene he now looks at in the sky calls forth (in recollection) a language which strives, successfully, to be commensurate with it. In one great sentence Wordsworth does what he does best, uses syntax to convey the unfolding of something majestic and beyond thought. Yet the majesty never turns into what the eighteenth century called ‘the sublime’, the vague and awesome; it achieves its own sublimity, rather, by remaining focused — the beautiful touch ‘the wind is in the tree’, not ‘in the trees’, and the powerful contrast between the sound of the wind and the silence of the stars, whose immeasurable distance from us is conveyed with effortless economy. The repetition of ‘clouds’ reminds us that the focus of the poem is the traveller, whose perceptions exist in time, not the sky, which is eternal. This is a poem about experiencing a vision, not, like Blake's prophecies, about a vision:

still they roll along Immeasurably distant; and the vault,

Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds,

Still deepens its unfathomable depth.

But the poem does not end there. It is important, indeed central, to it that we experience, with the traveller, both the onset of the vision and its end:

At length the Vision closes; and the mind,

Not undisturbed by the delight it feels,

Which slowly settles into peaceful calm,

Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.

There the poet wisely leaves it to us to decide what form such musings take. Though for Wordsworth the scene may be ‘solemn’, what it brings to the viewer is ‘delight’ settling slowly into ‘peaceful calm’. And we realise that what we are reading is the reconstruction, later, of the experience, the experience being both the content of the poem before us and its trigger. For the traveller at the start would not have wanted or been able to write, closed in upon himself as he was. Only the parting of the clouds, the vision of the moon, making the bent traveller straighten and look up, leads us to the present, the poem we are now reading.

However, nature is not always the source of serenity and joy. The most powerful passages in the first books of The Prelude concern an altogether more frightening image of nature. Once, having stolen a woodcock from a snare set by someone else,

I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds

Of undistinguishable motion, steps

Almost as silent as the turf they trod. (I.321–4)

Another time, rowing out into the middle of a little-known lake from a boat he had untethered from its mooring place, he has the nightmarish feeling of something rising up from the horizon and coming after him faster than he can row:

a huge peak, black and huge

As if with voluntary power instinct,

Upreared its head. I struck, and struck again,

And growing still in stature the huge cliff

Towered up between me and the stars, and …

…like a living thing,

Strode after me. (I. 378–85)

We could say that in both instances Wordsworth has simply given concrete shape to his feelings of guilt at having done something morally wrong. But that would be to misunderstand what is going on. What both instances do is to dramatise his sense of feeling a stranger in the landscape and of somehow inflicting harm on it precisely because he is a stranger, an intruder. No poem expresses this better than another of the little poems he wrote in 1798/9, ‘Nutting’.

This time he sets out on a perfect day, ‘One of those heavenly days that cannot die’, a bag on his back, a nutting crook in his hand. Forcing his way through brambles and matted ferns he comes at last to

one dear nook

Unvisited, where not a broken bough

Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign

Of devastation…

It was, he says, ‘a virgin scene’. This he stands surveying for a while, ‘Breathing with such suppression of the heart/As joy delights in’. He sits down beneath the trees and feels like those who, ‘after long/And weary expectation, have been blest/With sudden happiness beyond all hope’. What brings this joy is the sense of the spot never having been seen before by human eye and its being a place where the human voice has never been heard, a place ‘Where fairy water-breaks do murmur on/For ever’; and, as so often, it is the sound of water running deep in the earth that rouses his deepest feelings:

And — with my cheek on one of those green stones

That, fleeced with moss, under the shady trees,

Lay round me, scattered like a flock of sheep –

I heard the murmur and the murmuring sound.

But then — and typically Wordsworth does not try to explain the action, only record it with puzzled honesty — he rises up and in a fit of vandalism proceeds to destroy this earthly paradise, dragging down the boughs and tearing at the nuts upon them: ‘and the green and mossy bower,/Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up/Their quiet being’. The child he was, he now recalls, turns from the ‘mutilated bower’, exulting in his new-found riches, and then feels ‘a sense of pain when I beheld/ The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky’. The very quietness of the spot, which had been one of its sources of power, that which had allowed him to hear the revivifying murmur of the waters, is what he has destroyed, the silence turning now into a mute accusation, almost a sense of shame as the sheltered nook is opened up to the sky through his destructive act.

The poem is so shocking because we sense that it is not so much the act of violence which is seen as a rape of nature as the very presence of the child; the act merely dramatises what had been latent all along, just as Rabelais and Cervantes had merely brought out into the open the fact that a book is always written by a fallible human being. Indeed, with hindsight we could go further and say that for the two earlier writers as, later, for Kafka, the act of writing was itself seen as a kind of violation of the world, and had to be recognised as such. The paradox for Wordsworth is that only in the midst of nature does he feel fully himself, as in some sense he was created to be, and yet his very presence in nature robs it of precisely that which made it such a source of healing and joy. Is there a way of interacting with nature which is not destructive?

The answer, and it is ‘yes’, is to be found in another poem written in 1798 and later incorporated into The Prelude, ‘The Boy of Winander’. It begins with the kind of blunt assertion that so often heralds Wordsworth's best poetry: ‘There was a Boy’. At the same time it establishes the central theme of the poem, the interconnection between person and place:

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs

And islands of Winander! — many a time,

At evening, when the earliest stars began

To move along the edges of the hills,

Rising or setting, would he stand alone,

Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth

Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,

That they might answer him. — And they would shout

Across the watery vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call…

And, when there came a pause

Of silence such as baffled his best skill:

Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise

Has carried far into his heart the voice

Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene

Would enter unawares into his mind

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received

Into the bosom of the steady lake.

The boy interacts with the landscape and its inhabitants not by wilfully desecrating it but by becoming a part of it, calling forth the cry of the owls by using his own fingers and vocal chords, to which they joyously respond; and this leads in turn, in the silence that ensues, to a complete incorporation of the landscape into the boy and the boy into the landscape. Remember Mann's comments on echo in Monteverdi: ‘The echo-effect, the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, and the revelation of it as nature-sound, is essentially a lament: Nature's melancholy “alas”, the lament of the nymphs as related to the echo.’ But it is not lament here in Wordsworth, showing that art, in the hands of the greatest masters, will always find a way out of the impasses philosophy and cultural history reveal.

At his best Wordsworth makes syntax, rhythm and enjambment do most of the work, and here, ending one line on the word ‘pause’ and another on the word ‘hung’, he enfolds us too, as we read and feel the weight of the words and the rhythm, in the magical reciprocity: ‘a gentle shock of mild surprise/Has carried far into his heart the voice/Of mountain-torrents’. The body — of the boy, of the poet, of the reader — becomes more than a thing, it itself becomes a landscape, a place of depths and secret springs and rivers as the forward drive of the syntax in the last part of this extraordinary sentence curves back on itself to mimic the description. There is much that could be said about the placing of ‘uncertain’ here: is the sky uncertain because it is reflected (though Wordsworth prefers the more human and affective term, ‘received’) in the lake? Because the sky does not have a surface like the lake? Or because the whole scene is already in some sense lodged in the mind and body of the boy — and of the reader?

The poem is not over, though. Wordsworth, as always, wishes to convey a visionary experience, but also, like Proust, to place that experience in the context of life. His poet is a man speaking to men, not the unacknowledged legislator of the world. The context in which this experience, this habitual experience (‘many a time’), is placed, is as powerfully shocking as the experience itself: ‘This boy was taken from his mates, and died/In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.’ And the poet goes on to describe the place where he is buried, bringing back the word ‘hangs’, disturbingly, also in enjambment:

Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale

Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs

Upon a slope above the village-school…

But the sentence, like that which ended the main part of the poem, changes direction and we are left with a final surprise:

And, through that churchyard when my way has led

On summer-evenings, I believe that there

A long half-hour together I have stood

Mute — looking at the grave in which he lies!

This part of the poem might look at first as though it were merely anecdotal and sentimental: this wonderful boy with his ideal relationship to the world in which he grew up died tragically young. But the poem, like the late piano sonatas and quartets of Beethoven or the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, asserts a quiet authority, so that its eccentricities cease to be that and become as inevitable, as unquestionable and there as an outcrop of rock. The final image, of the poet silently contemplating the grave, in a curious way takes us back to the boy and the owls: the poet becomes the boy as the boy became the owls, by mimicking him in the very poem we have been reading. For, no less than Dante's Commedia and Proust's A la Recherche, this poem ends with the poet preparing to write what we have just been reading. To achieve that he too must be silent, must ‘hang listening’, in order to become a part of the landscape, a part of the cemetery, rather than intruding on it destructively, like the boy in ‘Nutting’. Only then can he reproduce, in language, that murmuring of the underground waters which is for him the sound of life itself.

To arrive at that point he must also have understood that dying in childhood, far from being a mere accident, was the boy's destiny; or, to put it more neutrally, that death and life form part of the same warp and weft and must be grasped as one. That this is what the poem, at its deepest, is saying is confirmed by another group of poems written in those miraculous years, the so-called ‘Lucy’ poems, especially the greatest and most compressed of them:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Lucy, we learn from the other poems in the cycle, died, like the Boy of Winander, while still a child. What this poem asserts and the others merely hint at is that by dying she fulfilled herself and that now in death she really is what the poet always sensed her to be, as mortal and immortal as the earth itself. Wonderfully, he conveys that this is a dynamic, not a static state: she is not beneath the earth but, like the rocks and stones and trees, ‘rolled round in earth's diurnal course’, the passive verb here strangely active, or rather, managing — and this is the heart of Wordsworth's genius — to escape the grammatical distinctions of active and passive in order to convey a state where our grammar no longer applies. It is only when he is sealed off from the world in a slumber that itself resembles nothing so much as death that the poet can grasp what Lucy really is. No less than Rilke, Wordsworth suggests that we diminish life by denying death.

Hence Wordsworth's solitaries, and the problems Wordsworth experiences in talking about them. The overt lesson of ‘Resolution and Independence’ is that simple poor people bring light to our complicated lives because they are contented with their lot. But the poem implies something quite different. It says that the Leech-Gatherer, first seen as resembling a stone lying in the landscape, is, like Lucy, a figure who touches the poet's heart because he exists beyond language, beyond most of what we think of as making up a man, and has started to merge with nature.

This figure of the solitary in Wordsworth takes many forms. Often he is an ‘old man travelling’, walking the country roads, or a lonely farm dweller. But sometimes the human beings who arouse a powerful feeling in the poet are very strange indeed. In Book VII of The Prelude, for example, once, when he was lost in some outlying part of London,

I was smitten

Abruptly, with a view (a sight not rare)

Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,

Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest

Wearing a written paper, to explain

His story, whence he came, and who he was.

Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round

As with the might of waters; an apt type

This label seemed of the utmost we can know,

Both of ourselves and of the universe;

And on the shape of that unmoving man,

His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,

As if admonished from another world. (VII. 637–49)

We are in Beckett country here. But also in Hofmannsthal country. Remember Lord Chandos's:

For it is something that has never been named and that is probably impossible to name, which manifests itself to me at such moments, taking some object from my everyday surroundings, and filling it like a vessel with an overflowing torrent of higher life … A watering-can, a harrow left abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun, a poor churchyard, a small farmhouse — any one of these can become a vessel for my revelation.

These objects move him, we now see, precisely because they have somehow returned to the earth, because they do not belong to the unnatural human urge to use the world merely as a natural resource, are as far as it is possible to be from ‘civilisation’.

What causes the poet's mind to turn ‘as with the might of waters’ is not just the stillness of the man and his sightless eyes, but the combination of those eyes with the paper pinned to his chest. Why should this combination affect him in this way though? Wordsworth does not explain, or rather fobs us off with the trite observation that this is a kind of emblem of our condition, showing us ‘the utmost we can know,/ Both of ourselves and of the universe’. But is that quite right? It seems rather as though the image forces us to recognise our folly in thinking that we can understand who we are and control our own destinies. Our eyes are sightless and our stories are pinned to our chests, readable to the world but never to ourselves. There is a grandeur to the man which is close to that of Oedipus when, in Sophocles' last play, he goes to his death at Colonus. He moves the poet as does the sudden appearance of the moon as the clouds part or the vision of a mountain reflected in a lake, because, like them, he leads the poet out of himself and his thoughts and anxieties to a renewed and totally unsentimental understanding of his place in the universe.

The last book of The Prelude begins with a different kind of vision. The poet has decided to climb Mount Snowdon at sunrise with a group of friends. A thick fog hangs over the mountain as they begin the ascent. He is in the lead,

When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,

And with a step or two seemed brighter still;

Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,

For instantly a light upon the turf

Fell like a flash, and lo! As I looked up,

The Moon hung naked in a firmament

Of azure without cloud, and at my feet

Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.

The tops of the mountains rise up like so many hills out of this sea of mist, but the sky is wonderfully clear; the Moon has banished the stars and seems to gaze

Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay

All meek and silent, save that through a rift –

Not distant from the shore whereon we stood,

A fixed, abysmal, gloomy breathing-place –

Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams

Innumerable, roaring with one voice!

Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,

For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens. (XIV. 35–62)

The Prelude does not quite end here. As always, the poet wishes to place the vision within the continuum of human life. And this is important. Joseph Koerner has some remarkable pages, in his book on Friedrich, about the painter's fondness for what he calls the Rückenfigur, the figure who is and is not the painter, who is and is not the viewer, who stands at the limit of the picture, with his back to us, so that what we see is not what he sees, but him seeing. It is very important to Friedrich, Koerner points out, that this figure should be there, for he reminds us that vision is always vision at a particular moment, from a particular place, and that though vision may be the goal it does not subsume life but is only one moment, one experience, within life. And it is also very important that this figure should be, as he is for Wordsworth on Snowdon, bathed in mist, for mist is what unites the elements of the picture, what brings individual and vision into one orbit. It is also, of course, a figure for paint itself, which conceals the canvas and reveals figures, yet is the medium in which the entire scene exists. ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ (figure 3), writes Koerner, ‘stands suspended between two notional paintings: on the one hand, the total replication of a valley in all its detail that has been overpainted in white; on the other hand, a blank canvas in which have begun to appear, here and there, the fragments of a scene.’ What this is saying, I take it, is that such Romantic artists as Friedrich (and Wordsworth) are not so much visionaries as explorers of what it means to see and what it means to paint or write. They approach the final vision, the apocalyptic covering of the earth by water, the merging of self and landscape, with mingled excitement and apprehension, but something tells them to stop, to wake up before the earth is engulfed, to remain on firm land gazing into the mist beyond. ‘In the end,’ Kierkegaard had written in The Sickness Unto Death, ‘it seems as though anything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss.’ Friedrich and Wordsworth point us to that moment but step back from the final annihilation. Perhaps it is their eighteenth-century roots. Perhaps it is their temperament. The result is to leave them — and us — with a sense of loss at what has not quite been surrendered to, but also exaltation at the memory of what was experienced. It leaves a place, too, for art, which is the activity by which the vision can be recaptured and the sense of loss anchored. In a difficult passage Koerner makes the case for Friedrich, relating his view of him to the later history of art. What he says holds also for Wordsworth, and gives us a template for assessing the complicated dance of art and vision, hand and eye, which is one central aspect of the history of Modernism: ‘In the framed nothingness of From the Dresden Heath, or into the passage into loss plotted by Fog’, he writes,

If Wordsworth and Friedrich abandon genre they nevertheless produce works which immediately assert that they are art and not something else, Wordsworth because he writes in verse, Friedrich because he paints in oils and frames his pictures. The novel's denial of genre was more radical. For the novel is precisely the form that emerges when genres no longer seem viable. From the start it pretended or pretended to pretend to be something else: a translation from a lost Arabic manuscript, the true account of the wreck of a boat on a desert island, the memoirs of a whore, a rake or an orphan. At the same time novels asserted, like Descartes at the start of his

Discourse

, that their creators would bow to no authority, would rely on nothing but themselves as honest and reasonable men. Genres were the sign of submission to authority and tradition, but the novel, a narrative in prose, was the new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition. It is no coincidence that so many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels are precisely about young men refusing to do what their fathers wish, refusing to take on the roles that their fathers have mapped out for them. Yet usually the hero ends up inheriting after all, though on his own terms. And this alerts us to a paradox faced by the novel. For if it throws off all external authority, where does it get its own authority from? The answer has to be: from the inspiration or experience of the novelist himself. But who confers this authority upon him? No-one but himself. From the beginning, then, the novel was caught in the same double-bind as Don Quixote in giving himself a name and an epithet, asserting its truth and the value of what it was doing (which genre-derived works had

never needed to do since it was the tradition that provided them with these things), yet knowing at heart that these were assertions and nothing more. Or perhaps not knowing but believing in the ability of the self to produce, and in the meaning and value of what is produced — that is what gives the works of Balzac and Dickens their sense of magisterial authority, and has made them the envy of many later novelists. Isaiah Berlin once called Verdi the last naïve artist, and in a sense the same could be said of Dickens and Balzac: none of them ever had any doubts about the nature of his vocation or his own ability.

In his essay on Verdi's naïveté Berlin identifies this with Schiller's use of the term in his contrast between the ‘naïve’ and the ‘sentimental’, but that seems to me misleading. Schiller's ‘naïve’ artist is one who belongs to what I have described as the world before its disenchantment in the sixteenth century. There are of course candidates for the term working long after 1600 — Benjamin examines one such in his essay on Nikolai Leskov, and the stories of Johann Peter Hebel would also probably qualify. The naïveté of Dickens, Balzac and Verdi is of a quite different kind. They were, after all, amongst the canniest operators ever known in their pursuit of popularity and success. I think John Bayley puts his finger on it in a brilliant essay on Oliver Twist. ‘No novelist has profited more richly than Dickens from not examining what went on in his own mind’, Bayley remarks. And though he rightly loves this aspect of Dickens, he is aware of its limitations. Dickens' novels, he suggests, lack the objectivity of the greatest art; their appeal is precisely that they remain in the realm of childhood nightmares, powerful precisely because such nightmares never really leave us:

Iago and Verkhovensky are monsters because they know what they are doing; their actions let us loathe them and recoil from them into freedom, but we cannot recoil from Dickens' villains: they are the more frightening and haunting because we cannot expel them for what they do; they have the unexpungeable nature of our own nightmares and our own consciousness.

This is very fine. It catches the childish aspect of Dickens (as indeed of Verdi and Balzac) implied in the term naïve, in all its strength and its weaknesses.

Not having doubts is a blessed state, but it is not the same thing as having genuine authority. There is something hollow about Balzac, Dickens and Verdi compared with Dante or Shakespeare, but even compared with their older contemporaries, Beethoven and Wordsworth. It doesn't rest on their frequent clumsiness, for that is to be found in Beethoven and Wordsworth. It rests more on the very thing that is the root of their strength as artists and their enormous success as entrepreneurs: their inability to question what it is they are doing. In that sense they are the first modern best-sellers and in their work one can see the beginnings of that split between popularity and artistic depth which is to become the hallmark of modern culture.

But even as Balzac and Dickens were writing their spirited works, others were anxiously assessing what was really at issue. Chief among them, as I have suggested, was Søren Kierkegaard. His book On Authority and Revelation, though it deals with what he sees as a vital religious issue, is nevertheless a key work for understanding the artistic problems of the age. The book examines a curious case which had come to Kierkegaard's attention and which he felt to be, despite its superficial absurdity, exemplary. In the preface to a published volume of sermons a certain priest, Magister Adler, made the following claim:

One evening I had just developed the origin of evil [sic], when I saw, illuminated by a flash of lightning, that everything depends, not upon the thought but upon the Spirit. That night a hateful sound went through our chamber. The Saviour bade me stand up and go in and write down the words.

However, when the authorities, in alarm, asked him to explain himself, he began a series of complicated defences, both insisting on the accuracy of what he had recounted and somehow diluting it, so that by the end it was no longer clear if what he had had was just a profound thought or an actual visit and instruction from Jesus. Kierkegaard saw this as what he called a ‘bitter epigram upon our age’, and wrote his book to tease out its implications. Essentially the point he is making is that we have today confused a genius and an apostle, a ‘very great man’ or a ‘very great writer’, and one who speaks with authority. If St Paul were to say to someone: ‘Go, and do this’, we could analyse his words till we were blue in the face and they would in the end turn out to be no different from the injunction you or I might give to someone: ‘Go, and do this.’ The difference lies in who we are, not in what we say. The difference lies in the fact that St Paul has authority and you and I have none. Kierkegaard sees what Dürer and Cervantes saw, that without authority we are reduced to claiming authority for ourselves when we know deep down that we have none. But, Kierkegaard feels, our age has not only lost access to authority, it no longer even recognises the crucial distinction between one who has authority and one who only has genius.

It is his preface that is of immediate relevance to us in our attempt to understand the nature of this new form, the novel. ‘For it is one thing that a life is over, and a different thing that a life is finished by reaching its conclusion’, he begins. A man, he goes on, may perhaps one day decide to become an author. But, says Kierkegaard,

he may have extraordinary talents and remarkable learning, but an author he is not, in spite of the fact that he produces books … No, in spite of the fact that the man writes, he is not essentially an author; he will be capable of writing the first … and also the second part, but he cannot write the third part — the last part he cannot write. If he goes ahead naively (led astray by the reflection that every book must have a last part) and so writes the last part, he will make it thoroughly clear by writing the last part that he makes a written renunciation to all claim to be an author. For though it is indeed by writing that one justifies the claim to be an author, it is also, strangely enough, by writing that one virtually renounces this claim. If he had been thoroughly aware of the inappropriateness of the third part — well, one may say, si tacuisset, philosophus mansisset [had he kept quiet he would have remained a philosopher].

It could not be put more clearly. In our modern age, an age without access to the transcendental and therefore an age without any sure guide, an age of geniuses but no apostles, only those who do not understand what has happened will imagine that they can give their lives (and their works) a shape and therefore a meaning, the shape and meaning conferred by an ending. The task of those who have grasped the implications of this will be to try and bring home to those who haven't what it is that has been lost. Kierkegaard brings this part of his argument to an end with a pregnant aphorism: ‘To find the conclusion it is necessary first of all to observe that it is lacking, and then in turn to feel quite vividly the lack of it.’

This dialectical movement is typical of Kierkegaard, and of Modernism. In his last great pseudonymous work, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1847), he describes, partly tongue in cheek, how, as a young man in Copenhagen, he would often sit in the beautiful Frederiksberg Gardens and ask himself what he should do with his life. The world is full of great new inventions, he would think, the telegraph, the steamship, the railway; what is there left to do for mankind? And then the thought came to him: what he could do was to make men aware of what they could not do! He could become the spokesman for the negative in this world that worshipped so many positives! However, he goes on, negativity is a very delicate thing; all too often even those who talk of negativity, by talking, turn it into its opposite:

Among so-called negative thinkers, there are some who after having had a glimpse of the negative have relapsed into positiveness, and now go out into the world like town criers, to advertise, prescribe and offer for sale their beatific negative wisdom — and of course, a result can quite well be announced through the town crier, just like herring from Holstein … But the genuine subjective existing thinker … is conscious of the negativity of the infinite in existence, and he constantly keeps the wound of the negative open, which in the bodily realm is sometimes the condition for a cure.

Finding the conclusion means giving everything that has gone before a meaning. Simply giving something an end does not mean giving it a meaning, any more than a man's life acquires a meaning by coming to its end. To confuse a conclusion with a mere end is like confusing an apostle and a genius. Why it is so difficult to grasp exactly what novels do, how they work on us, is because novels look innocent, look artless. All they are doing is showing us ourselves in a mirror — or are they? Sartre, engaged in the same pursuit a hundred years later, teased out, with his usual rhetorical brilliance, the implications of Kierkegaard's remarks in a famous passage of La Nausée. I walk down the road, he says, my life is open before me. I do not know what will happen to me, and, if my life so far is anything to go by, nothing will. Even if something dramatic happens, if a car, say, runs me over and kills me, that will not have conferred meaning on a meaningless life, only brought it to an end. But if I open a novel and read in its first pages that the hero is walking down a deserted road I know that this is the beginning of an adventure, of love, perhaps, or espionage, it does not matter, it is an adventure. I feel the comforting thickness of the remainder of the novel between the thumb and index finger of my right hand and I settle back with satisfaction. This, after all, is why I am reading the novel in the first place. Not, as the banal view has it, in order to entertain myself, but to give myself the feeling that meaning exists in the world, even if I have not yet found it. That is the secret power of novels: they look like mirrors held up to the world, but what they are is machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world and so muddy the waters of genuine understanding of the human condition.

I have been talking about the classic novel as a lure and a temptation, to which the

real

writer, in Kierkegaard's terms, succumbs at his peril. I have been suggesting that because it subtly confuses possibility and actuality it produces in the reader the impression that he or she understands something — what it feels like to be a tiger, to be boiled alive as lobsters are — when full understanding is impossible and what the writer who cares for reality should be doing is making us grasp the distance that separates us from the tiger in his tigerness, the lobster dying. Further, since we cling to the belief that we ourselves will never die and use our imaginations to bolster that belief, the novel, the unfettered product of the imagination, actively prevents us from having a realistic attitude to ourselves and the world, and therefore from achieving any sort of firmly grounded happiness. Novels, in this analysis, are like drugs — a view Wordsworth seemed to have reached two centuries ago (‘The invaluable works of our older writers’, he writes in the Preface to the

Lyrical Ballads

, ‘are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’) and the sooner we are weaned off them the better.

But there are less apocalyptic reasons for feeling uneasy with the classical novel, for feeling that to write well one must somehow write against it. One of them is the sense of the novel's distance from gut feeling, and, linked to it, the sense of the arbitrariness of its plots. Holden Caulfield, in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, catches this brilliantly when he describes an English film he sees:

Then he meets this nice, homey, sweet girl getting on a bus. Her goddam hat blows off and he catches it, and then they go upstairs and sit down and start talking about Charles Dickens. He's both their favourite author and all. He's carrying this copy of Oliver Twist and so is she. I could have puked.

In his conversations with David Sylvester, Francis Bacon returns again and again to the contrast between what he calls ‘illustration’ and what he himself is trying to do. ‘Is that what illustration means?’ asks Sylvester, ‘a kind of caution, a lack of relaxation?’ ‘Well,’ answers Bacon, ‘illustration surely means just illustrating the image before you, not inventing it. I don't know how I can say any more about it.’ But he does say more in another conversation:

When I was trying in despair the other day to paint that head of a specific person, I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint and I put it on very, very freely, and I simply didn't know in the end what I was doing, and suddenly this thing clicked, and became exactly like this image I was trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it anything to do with illustrational painting. What has never yet been analysed is why this particular way of painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because it has a life completely of its own. It lives on its own like the image one's trying to trap; it lives on its own and therefore transfers the essence of the image more poignantly. So that the artist may be able to open up or rather, should I say, unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently.

‘It lives on its own like the image one's trying to trap.’ That is the key. That is what Wordsworth achieved in his greatest poems, what Rabelais and Cervantes, in their own ways, achieved. Illustration is accurate but dead. Bacon does not want to produce an image of what he has before him or in his mind, he wants in some sense to make what he does live a life of its own, just as what he has before him or in his mind lives its own life. He also, as he tells Sylvester, tends to prefer to paint one figure only because more than one leads to what he calls ‘story-telling’, the anecdotal, which is an extension of illustration: ‘I think that the moment a number of figures become involved, you immediately come on to the story-telling aspect of the relationship between figures. And that immediately sets up a kind of narrative. I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative.’ ‘As Cézanne does in the bathers?’ asks Sylvester. And Bacon replies: ‘Exactly.’

Yes, said Forster ruefully, novels tell stories. But, for the writer who feels as Bacon does, there must be ways of fighting this similar to Bacon's. First, as Kierkegaard said, it is necessary to feel that something is lacking and then to feel quite vividly the lack. In his great essay on reading Proust talks with what might seem surprising passion about the tyranny of the imperfect indicative, ‘that cruel tense which portrays life to us as something at once ephemeral and passive, which, in the very act of retracing our actions, reduces them to an illusion, annihilating them in the past without leaving us, unlike the perfect tense, with the consolation of activity’. ‘Even today’, he adds,

I can have been thinking calmly about death for hours; I need only open a volume of Sainte-Beuve's Lundis and alight, for example, on this sentence of Lamartine's (it concerns Mme d'Albany): ‘Nothing about her at that time recalled [rappelait] … She was [c'était] a small woman … etc.’ to feel myself at once invaded by a profound melancholy.

As so often, Roland Barthes merely develops the insights of the great Modernists, though with characteristic acuity. He discusses tenses in his first major work, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (1953). It's perfectly possible, he points out, to write novels in the form of letters and to write history through analysis and economic tables, but at a particular moment, in the nineteenth century, both history and the novel chose as their preferred form what he calls the récit. And the keystone of the récit is the passé simple:

Through its passé simple the verb implicitly takes its place in a causal chain, it participates in a group of actions which are of a piece and forward driven, it functions as the algebraic sign of an intention … It supposes a world which is constructed, elaborated, detached, reduced to a few significant lines, not a world which is thrown, displayed, offered [jeté, étalé, offert]. Behind the passé simple there always hides a demiurge, god or reciter; the world is not inexplicable when one recites it.. When the historian affirms that the duc de Guise died [mourut] on 23 December 1588, when the novelist recounts how the marquise went out [sortit] at five, these actions emerge from a past without density; freed of the trembling of existence [du tremblement de l'existence], they have the stability and the pattern of an algebra, they are a memory, but a useful memory, whose interest counts for much more than its duration.

…For all the great storytellers of the nineteenth century the world may be filled with pathos, but it is not abandoned, since it is a cluster of coherent relations, since there is no friction between the written elements, since he who recounts has the power to challenge the opacity and the solitude of the existences which make it up, since he can testify with each phrase to the possibility of communication and to a hierarchy of actions.

And he sums up:

The passé simple signifies a creation: that is, it signals it and imposes it. Even engaged in the most sober realism, it reassures, because, thanks to it, the verb expresses an act which is closed, definite, substantive. The récit has a name, it escapes the terror of a speech without limit. Reality grows thinner and becomes familiar.

Barthes' example of the marquise going out at five o'clock is a reference to a famous remark by Valéry, quoted by Breton in The Surrealist Manifesto, that the phrase was one he would always avoid, as it was the type of bad opening of classic nineteenth-century narratives. What Valéry hates about the phrase is its anecdotal character, what Bacon would call ‘the story-telling aspect’. What Bacon and Valéry object to is the arbitrariness implied in the use of the phrase. The marquise went out at five o'clock, but why not at six or seven, and why a marquise and not a duchess? The classic novelist will reply: because in my story it's a marquise and she goes out at five, not six or seven. But there is something a little disingenuous in this. It's a marquise and not a duchess and she goes out at five and not six or seven because he has decided, for the purposes of his narrative, that this is how it will be. But the old question, raised already, we have seen, by Rabelais and Cervantes, still remains: What gives you the authority to decide that it will be this rather than that? No authority, the classic novelist will reply, but simply the requirements of realism, the requirements of my plot. But do these things have to do with anything other than ensuring that your novel is saleable? That of course is a very reasonable requirement, but let us then simply relegate it to the world of consumerism, of fitted kitchens and package holidays, and not pretend that we are dealing with aesthetic or ethical issues.

The problem, as always with the novel, is more complicated than either party quite realises. For when we talk about anecdotes, when we talk about what is arbitrary and what is necessary, we are not just talking about art, we are also talking about life. Kierkegaard and Sartre were right: we cannot hive off these problems as being merely problems of narrative. Narrative is so potent because telling stories is part of what being human is about. But that is all the more reason to be wary about how stories are told.

The way old Freddie told me the story it was as limpid as dammit. And what he thinks — and what I think too — is that it just shows what toys we are in the hands of Fate, if you know what I mean. I mean to say, it's no good worrying and trying to look ahead and plan and scheme and weigh your every action, if you follow me, because you never can tell when doing such-and-such won't make so-and-so happen — while, on the other hand, if you do so-and-so it may just as easily lead to such-and-such.

Life, P.G. Wodehouse's narrator suggests here, is all a matter of chance, or fate: I do so and so and such and such results, but I might well have done something slightly different and then something quite different would have resulted. But if life is like that can fiction afford to be? In fact it can't, or there would be no artefacts but an endless series of disorganised coincidences which would quickly bore the reader; yet it has to pretend it is doing just that if it is to retain the reader's belief that it is ‘true to life’. Most novels are uneasy compromises between these two positions.

As always, what Modernism does is to drive the contradictions out into the open. In Borges' story, ‘Death and the Compass’, the dull police inspector, Treviranus, faced with a number of facts — a dead body in a hotel room, precious stones in the next room — comes up with the obvious explanation:

‘No need to look for a three-legged cat here. We all know that the Tetrarch of Galilee owns the finest sapphires in the world. Someone, intending to steal them, must have broken in here by mistake, Yarmolinsky got up; the robber had to kill him. How does it sound to you?’

‘Possible, but not interesting’, replies the detective hero, Lonnröt.

‘You'll reply that reality hasn't the least obligation to be interesting. I'll answer you that reality may avoid that obligation but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you propose, chance intervenes copiously. Here we have a dead rabbi; I would prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.’

Lonnröt of course is right. He recognises that there is the banal reality of facts and probable causes and there is the aesthetic and existential need for pattern; the effort of the nineteenth-century novelist and historian to imply that the two are one does not hold up. But in Borges' brilliant story Lonnröt's intuition leads to his own demise, for the villain is, in this story, one step ahead of the detective. He has, in fact, produced an ‘interesting’ series of crimes precisely because he knows that Lonnröt has a weakness for the ‘interesting’, for the type of explanation in which chance is most fully eliminated. So, as a result of this, he ends up, like Oedipus, as the victim as well as the solver of the crime. But the ultimate victor is, of course, neither the villain nor the detective, but the story. Borges has succeeded in writing a story that avoids the vagaries of chance, the arbitrariness of Valéry's sentence about the marquise, that is as gripping as any detective story, and yet makes us recognise that it is human agency that is always at work.

It is precisely because Borges senses the world as ‘thrown’, ‘offered’, ‘abandoned’ (Barthes' surprisingly Heideggerian terms) and because for him, as for Proust and Kafka and Virginia Woolf, writing is a way of surviving in such a world, that he wages constant war on the classic tradition of fiction. In ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ he imagines the answer to P.G. Wodehouse: a book in which the arbitrary would be abolished. In all books, he has a character here say, one incident leads on to another and the paths not taken are passed over in silence; but in the book of the Chinese ancestor of one of the two protagonists every possible forking of the paths is followed up and a garden of infinite paths is envisaged. It is envisaged in Borges' story, however, only in order to bring home to the reader that which is other than all these forks, the now in which a person, a flesh and blood individual, an ‘existing individual’, as Kierkegaard would say, meets his death: ‘Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now.’

Anecdotes, like the chain of past tenses of the classic novel, cannot ever convey that sense of ‘the now’, the sense that everything that happens to us happens precisely now. Anecdotes, rather, take us away from the now into a before and an after. In ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Borges approaches the problem in a different way. The narrator becomes aware of a purely imaginary world which is slowly encroaching upon our own, a world in which everything grows slender and pure and without density, in Barthes' words, a world frighteningly like the world of novels, but also like the one, the story suggests, which the Nazis tried to impose on our world in the years 1933 to 1945. In a very modern gesture of passive resistance or quiet heroism the narrator wages his own battle on this by retiring to a hotel by the sea to pursue, like a latter-day (stoical) St Jerome, his translation into Quevedian Spanish of Sir Thomas Browne's baroque masterpiece, Urne Burial. I say stoical because he is no longer confident that what he is doing is passing on the tradition, as St Jerome was doing. He has lost confidence in time. What he hopes for, simply, is that the quiet daily work of translation will keep him anchored to reality and prevent his being sucked into the seductive world of Tlön. That is the best that, in our modern world, we can hope for.

Borges' most famous story, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, is his most ingenious, witty and melancholy exploration of these themes, with the quietly heroic narrator of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ turning into a demented Quixote- or Ahab-like artist determined to escape the Arbitrary and to find the Necessary at any cost. A fin de siècle Symbolist writer devotes his life to rewriting Don Quixote, not in his own modern way but in Cervantes' way, that is, trying to feel himself into the necessity behind every arbitrary sentence of Cervantes. As always in the best of Borges the story is wonderful because it is so rich — not only is the central idea fascinating, but the world of hushed reverence he conjures up is both accurate and hilarious. ‘It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes’, says the awed narrator.

The latter, for example, wrote (part one chapter nine):

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an enquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases — exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor — are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard — quite foreign, after all — suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

‘This poem’, Tolstoy wrote in

What is Art?

about Mallarmé's ‘A la nue accablante tu’, ‘is not exceptional in its incomprehensibility. I have read several other poems by Mallarmé and they also had no meaning whatever.’ Tolstoy was not alone in his suspicions, but neither was Mallarmé alone in being the subject of general incomprehension. In his early, rather romantic memoir-cum-meditation,

La Corde raide

, Claude Simon, who himself started out as an artist, describes a taciturn, friendless, obsessive painter, who also like himself had been born and bred in the South, returning day after day to the same spot, tramping over mountain and quarry, endlessly repeating the same motif, never satisfied, never stopping, his whole existence funnelled into the walk out to the mountain, and then the struggle to relate what he sees to what appears on his canvas until the light fades and he has to pack up his things and tramp home, unappeased, ready to start again the next day.

What is it that so obsesses him? That takes him from his family and friends into the same unyielding arena, day after day, with nothing but the mountain, the quarry, the trees and the sky, and that canvas rectangle on which he leaves his marks? Why is it that the paintings left by this man satisfy him, Simon, in a way no other artwork has ever done? Is it that while other paintings tell a story these seem to be alive? Is it the sense that everything on that canvas rectangle relates to everything else? That while never relinquishing the motif, Mont Saint-Victoire, the quarry at Bibémus, he reaches the point where, on his canvas, background and foreground cease to function as such and are replaced by a reticulation of painterly gestures with no slackness, no coasting, in any area? Talking later, Simon was to make just this point. Cézanne's mature work, he says, is characterised by a ‘refus de valorisation sélective’, a refusal to think of one element as more important than another: ‘In his work the attention of the spectator is solicited by the whole surface’, he says, ‘and not only certain privileged spots or objects or people.’

Merleau-Ponty has unpacked for us what traditional landscape painting before Cézanne consisted of. When a painter is confronted by a landscape, he writes,

he chooses to depict on his canvas an entirely conventional representation of what he sees. He sees a tree nearby, then he directs his gaze further into the distance, to the road, before finally looking to the horizon; the apparent dimensions of the other objects change each time he stares at a different point. On the canvas, he arranges things such that what he represents is no more than a compromise between these various different visual impressions: he strives to find a common denominator to all these perceptions by rendering each object not with the size, colours, and aspect it presents when the painter fixes it in his gaze, but rather with the conventional size and aspect that it would present in a gaze directed at a particular vanishing point on the horizon, a point in relation to which the landscape is then arranged along lines running from the painter to the horizon. Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air of respectful decency, which comes of their being held beneath a gaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer. They are polite company: the gaze passes without hindrance over a landscape which offers no resistance to this supremely easy movement.

It's amazing how close this description of traditional landscape — the pleasures it offers and the simplifications and distortions that entails — is to Barthes' description, quoted earlier, of the use of the passé simple in the traditional novel. And, as with the classic novel, this is not meant as an indictment of a whole tradition — we have seen Friedrich working very differently with landscape — but simply as a means of making us aware of the fact that what at first seems natural is actually highly artificial and constructed (one could make the same sort of analysis of the role of the key-system that underlies classical music). And, as Kierkegaard and Proust and Sartre noted with classic narrative, so here. ‘This is not how the world appears when we encounter it in perception’, Merleau-Ponty goes on:

When our gaze travels over what lies before us, at every moment we are forced to adopt a certain point of view and these successive snapshots of any given area of the landscape cannot be superimposed one upon the other. It is only by interrupting the normal process of seeing that the painter succeeds in mastering the series of visual impressions and extracting a single unchanging landscape from them … by subjecting all such details to this analytical vision he fashions on the canvas a representation of the landscape which does not correspond to any of the free visual impressions. This controls the movement of their unfolding yet also kills their trembling life.

Claude Simon, in La Corde raide, had made the same point, more dramatically. In Cézanne we see, he says,

a universe for the first time bereft of all signposts, so totally bereft of everything except for truth and cohesion that for the first time it offered in its total magnificence, with neither commentary nor restriction, the visible world and, through it, the world itself … It was something like the loss of all illusion. The loss of a dreamy and romantic virginity in exchange for a substantial knowledge, at once dazzled and disenchanted.

In traditional landscape the elements making up the scene — trees, hills, houses, sky — had been made visible, as it were, by being placed within a single perspective and given an outline, delineated. Cézanne came to understand, as he obsessively returned to his mountain, day after day, not only that nature does not conform to the laws of perspective set out in the manuals, but also that nature has no edges, that perspective and delineation are for the convenience of the artist who depicts it and the viewer who looks at it. But then what is to be seen? What is seeing itself? For Cézanne that mountain became what the white whale had been for Ahab, an element of the natural world which in time grew into a metaphysical obsession. How to capture it without humanising it, without turning it into an anecdote, ‘that mountain which I, Cézanne, painted one day’? How, in Wallace Stevens's words, ‘to see the earth again/ Cleared of its stubborn, man-locked set?’ how, in Bacon's words, to give it a life on the canvas at least equal to the life it had in actuality? Partly this was a problem of seeing: how to see it as it is and not as I see it? And partly it was a problem of painting: how to mark the transitions from background to foreground, from that which surrounds a tree or mountain to the tree or mountain itself, since in nature there is no such thing as background and foreground? ‘We must render the image of what we see’, Cézanne wrote to a young painter, ‘forgetting everything that existed before us.’

Was it, like Ahab's quest, an ambition doomed to failure? Can any throw of the dice abolish the hazard of the contingent? Had not the traditional method of landscape in effect made the best of an impossible task? Perhaps so, but that did not satisfy Cézanne. And in the process of struggling, isolated and forgotten, with his demon, Cézanne produced a body of work which seemed to certain discerning artists who came after him and sensed what it was he was struggling with, to bring things to a new pitch. In his Bathers in the Barnes Collection, for example, the movements of the bathers seem, to Claude Simon, to have no discernible beginning or end: ‘These almost asexual bodies in motion in an eternity without end and without any other reason than the radiant shimmering of their gestures without beginning or end [et sans autre raison que l'irradiant frémissement de leurs gestes sans commencement, sans fin].’ For Francis Bacon, as we have seen, they solved the problem of how to depict more than one figure yet not turn the painting into a story, an anecdote. At the same time, as Merleau-Ponty points out in his great essay, ‘Le Doute de Cézanne’:

It is Cézanne's genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organising itself before our eyes [d'un ordre naissant, d'un objet en train d'apparaître, en train de s'agglomérer sous nos yeux]. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry. If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather the ideal limit toward which the sides of the apple recede in depth. Not to indicate any shape would be to deprive the objects of their identity. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth — that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality full of reserves [non comme étalé devant nous, mais comme pleine de réserves et comme une réalité inépuisable]. That is why Cézanne follows the swelling of the object in modulated colours and indicates several outlines in blue. Rebounding among these, one's glance captures a shape that emerges from among them all, just as it does in perception.

The agony for Cézanne, the doubt that he constantly feels about the value and even the point of what he is doing, stems from this, that he does not start with a given image, ready-made, but seeks instead to recreate each time the sense we have of the world coming to life as we look at it and live in it. As Merleau-Ponty says:

We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakably. Cézanne's painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself. This is why Cézanne's people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species.

We have come across this sort of thing before, of course, in Wordsworth. But Wordsworth's intellectual error was to imagine that there was an earlier time in life when the world presented itself in this fashion, and he despaired of ever finding it again once he grew up. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of Cézanne suggests, rather, that this primal time is always there, waiting to be rediscovered by the artist. Of course there is no guarantee that it will be and no clear sense of what it is that is waiting to be rediscovered, but one thing is certain: it has to do with a dialogue between us and the world, a dialogue conducted through the medium of our art (the dialogue we saw taking place between the Boy of Winander and the owls and the poet and the boy). ‘The painter’, says Merleau-Ponty, concluding this part of his essay, ‘recaptures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearance which is the cradle of things.’

Of course, as with Mallarmé, what Cézanne was doing was merely taking a little further what had been a key element in painting since its inception, though, as Bacon suggests in his conversations with David Sylvester, that had been partly hidden (perhaps fortunately, he says) by the many other functions which painting once had. But taking it further, which, to the artist himself, seemed the most natural thing in the world and indeed the only thing worth doing, led to accusations of wilful disregard of the public, to Tolstoy's dismissal of Mallarmé and to charges of deliberate uglification levelled at Cézanne. Ironically, today, over a hundred years after their work appeared, Mallarmé is still considered ‘too difficult’ even by those who make a habit of reading poetry, but reproductions of Cézanne hang on every student wall. One wonders which is the kinder fate.

Here is a cultural historian's view of Cubism:

For centuries painters had faced the task of providing an illusion of three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional medium … Now the first Cubists … Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, rejected these time-honoured solutions: they were intent on making works of art that would not let the viewer forget their distinct essence as human products. They shattered surfaces that in nature belong together and reassembled fragmented reality by transforming a curved object like a woman's breast or a man's cheek into some strange geometric contour that resembled virtually nothing, certainly not a breast or a cheek … After the austerity of the founding years, the time of analytic Cubism, its successor, Synthetic Cubism, worked with a brighter palette and its canvases intensified their alienation from nature with stencilled inscriptions and arbitrarily added pieces of paper.

What Barthes said about the classic novel and Merleau-Ponty about the classic landscape applies to this bit of prose. The story moves forward in its inevitable progression, imparting information evenly and calmly: ‘the first Cubists … They shattered surfaces … After the austerity …’ Nothing is at stake here, nothing signals to us that at every moment choices were being made, decisions taken, lives being ruined or saved. And I am not talking about a more biographical approach being needed, only an awareness that living and telling are not the same thing at all, and that though we, as readers and viewers looking back, inevitably lack the sense of what it was like to live certain moments, the historian can work to counter that, as indeed the best ones do, and, when dealing with works of art we can, if we are good enough critics, get close enough to them to convey something of what their making involved for their makers and first viewers.

Such a critic is Rosalind Krauss. Here is the start of her remarkable long essay on the series of little collages Picasso made between the autumn of 1912 and the spring of 1913, as he was gradually emerging from his passionate involvement with Cubism:

At first they seem to rotate through the crystalline atmosphere like so many weightless facets, the glittering light of an invisible gem. Now one of the fragments appears aqueous, like water beading the side of a bottle; now it dries to the shimmer of dust motes struck by a ray of sunlight…

But then there arises the sound of voices. They speak of a political meeting, of market shares. Someone tells of a woman who poisoned her lover, ‘A chauffeur kills his wife,’ says another. Who says? Whose voice?…

Though she does not say so in so many words, Krauss sees these collages as constituting as remarkable a series as any in the artist's oeuvre, and as marking a crucial moment in Modernist art. But she senses that, if she is to open our eyes so that we can see what she sees, she will have to work from the inside, not merely repeat the clichés of previous commentators.

The voices she is talking about are those that spring out of the fragments of newspaper the artist has cut up to use in these works. Scholars have recently begun to read these as well as seeing the shapes that have been made out of them, and have come up with fascinating facts. Picasso made great use of articles on the looming Balkan wars (‘Les Alliés signent l'Armistice. La Grèce s'abstient’), as well as of the kind of faits-divers Félix Fénéon used in his delightful Nouvelles en trois lignes (‘In Fontainebleau a tramp turns himself in for murder’), the financial news, and advertisements for everything from biscuits to massage parlours. He also, and more obviously, cut up headlines to provide witty allusions, ‘Un Coup de Théatre’, for example, becoming ‘Un Coup de Thé’, not only a (sort of) cup of tea but an allusion to Mallarmé's great poem, recently published in its correct format.

How are we to read these fragments? Who, as Krauss puts it, is talking? Some scholars have argued that they reflect Picasso's own anarchist, left-leaning views: ‘The news items accumulate’, Krauss quotes Patricia Leighton as saying, ‘to project an image of French politics as venal, power-mongering, and posing a crazy threat to all those values of humanity and civilisation that Picasso's work had always embraced.’ Others say that we are required simply to get the ‘feel’ of the different voices, not to decode them, that they represent Picasso and his friends sitting round a café table (the objects depicted in these collages are, apart from the musical instruments, the common furniture of the café tables of the time: glass and jug, bottle, newspaper, etc.) and talking endlessly about politics and life.

And what of the visual look of these little collages? Writing about Violin of autumn 1912 (figure 4), Krauss points out that ‘One of the fragments of newspaper is the other's twin — having originally been scissored from the same sheet, so that, as in a jigsaw puzzle, both match along their common edge — only now flipped relative to the other, back to front.’ She goes on to demonstrate how Picasso conjures the violin into life and how he forces us to work to keep up with him. One of the pair of cut-outs, she argues, the lower one, ‘exploits the scrollwork of its left-hand edge to assume the profile of a violin. Or rather half a violin, since it depends on Picasso's drawn addition of bridge and neck and right-hand side to elaborate the musical instrument.’ The other fragment of newsprint, ‘placed above the violin's shoulders, deploys its own notches and curves to cup the pegs and scroll of the instrument, becoming thus their “background”. In this position the lines of type now assume the look of stippled flecks of graphite.’ Thus, she goes on, where the first fragment produced the meaning: density and opacity of physical object, this one ‘summons forth a different sign. Light, it declares, or atmosphere’.

But Krauss has not finished. The magic of the whole collage, she suggests, rests on the fact that the two opposite meanings, light and opacity, are generated from the identical scrap of paper, the same physical shape. ‘Like Saussure's phonetic substance’, she says,

this support is seen to take on meaning only within the set of oppositions that pits one against another, the implosive p of up against the explosive p of put. Picasso's sheet, sliced in two, is thus a paradigm, a binary couple married in opposition, each taking on a meaning insofar as it is not the other. Figure and ground become this kind of contrary here, joined and redoubled by opaque and transparent or solid and luminous, so that just as one fragment is, literally speaking, the back side of the material from which the other was cut, the circulation of the sign produces this very same condition, but semiologically, at the level of the sign: front, solid, shape: behind, transparent, surround.

What Rosalind Krauss discerns as happening in the Picasso collages of 1912–13 is a key moment in Modernism's understanding of itself, not just a moment in Picasso's personal odyssey. For it is the moment when artists grasped that what they were producing were signs or emblems for the external world, not mirrors reflecting it. With that insight, however, as Rosalind Krauss realises, a new abyss yawned: is art then nothing but the circulation of signs?

Picasso's hatred of Futurism and of abstraction is well documented. As always with these things motives are mixed and strongly held views overdetermined. Krauss quotes a letter from Picasso to Braque in May 1912: ‘Fernande has left with a Futurist. What am I going to do with the dog?’ But, as she shows, personal pique connected with his loves, wounded pride at feeling that he, the torchbearer of the Modern, was being outflanked on two sides and starting to look distinctly vieux jeu, and a deeper, more purely artistic instinct, all played their part. ‘The avant-garde had moved on in the early teens and was now lying in wait for cubism’, she writes. ‘It had other tricks up its sleeve, not the least of which was pure abstraction on the one hand and the photomechanical conception of art — in which the readymade combines with the photograph — on the other.’ But Picasso clearly loathed the idea that Cubism should be thought of as ‘non-objective art’, just as he hated the notion that it had opened the way for the mechanical strategy of the readymade as Duchamp and Picabia were busy developing it.

Picasso turned his back on both abstraction and the mechanical, returned to his study of late Cézanne, and began, in the years that followed, to move towards what came to be called Neoclassicism. His disciples never forgave him. It was in those years, 1915–20, that the label of pasticheur, which has clung to him ever since, was first attached to him. Marinetti, Picabia, Rodchenko, Malevich, Mondrian — they were the purists, who saw how things were and drew their stern conclusions. Picasso seemed to be lost in a venture that was at once bourgeois and retrograde, suggesting in retrospect that even in Cubism, the one ‘movement’ he claimed all his life to have been his invention, he was only imitating others, in this case Braque.

However, in the light of Picasso's entire artistic career such a view, though maintained by critics with an axe to grind, like John Berger, has to be drastically revised. We can now see what Picasso was after, all along, in his insistence that it was the world he was interested in as much as art, and in his denunciation of Futurism, abstraction and the photomechanical production of art. As Leo Steinberg and others have shown, he went on till the very end exploring possible ways in which the multiple voices could be kept in play, and if he had dips in form or went down blind alleys then that is what engaging with the world through art is about. Rosalind Krauss is coy about the degree to which she believes that the charges of pastiche levelled at Picasso since that time are justified, and the degree to which she feels that he did indeed lose his way. But in her questioning of Berger and of his mentor Adorno, whose Philosophy of Modern Music she rightly sees as articulating most clearly the case against both Stravinsky (its immediate target) and Picasso, she is, as usual, both perceptive and profound. ‘It is the historical logic of modernism’, concludes her wonderful book on Picasso, that ‘the newly liberated circulation of the token-sign always carries as its potential reverse an utterly devalued and empty currency. Pastiche is not necessarily the destiny of modernism, but it is its guilty conscience.’

Duchamp was the only other artist apart from Picasso to grasp this, so that actually to align him with Picabia and the new mechanisation of art is to do him an injustice. More clearly even than Picasso (he was the more cerebral artist), Duchamp understood what was at stake in the crisis of authority and tradition that had engulfed the arts in the last years of the nineteenth century, what it meant that ‘the newly liberated circulation of the token-sign always carries as its potential reverse an utterly devalued and empty currency’. In an interview with Georges Charbonnier in 1961 he summed up his position with his customary wit:

The word ‘art’, etymologically speaking, means to make, simply to make. Now what is making? Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting some of it on the palette, and always choosing the quality of the blue, the quality of the red, and always choosing the place to put it on the canvas, it's always choosing. So in order to choose, you can use tubes of paint, you can use brushes, but you can also use a ready-made thing, made either mechanically or by the hand of another man, even, if you want, and appropriate it, since it's you who chose it. Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.

In the old days the painter had been a craftsman, almost an alchemist. He alone knew how to mix the paints that led to his special effects, it was something that had been passed down to him from the master to whom he had been apprenticed, often his father, and he would in turn pass it on to his sons or apprentices. Once artists were able to buy paint ready-made in tubes open-air painting became possible, but something had also been lost (as with the coming of print for writers). The nineteenth century had seen a growing awareness of what was implied by choice, both in life and in art, and desperate attempts both by sensitive individuals and by ever more self-conscious artists to escape its arbitrariness. But ‘Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard’, and Duchamp draws the inescapable conclusion: since all art is choice and all choice is in the end arbitrary, a mere throw of the dice, why not face up to this fact, make one big choice right at the start and leave it at that? (Had not Kierkegaard's wise Judge in Either/Or made that the prescription for happiness?)

Of course, as we have seen in the case of Picasso, these things are always overdetermined. Though Duchamp made a big splash with his painting, Nude Descending the Stairs, the shock success of the Armory Show of 1913, he had never been much of a painter, so it is perhaps no surprise that in the years following that success he abandoned painting for ever and took up the idea of the readymade, first with his Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914), and then, in 1917, with his most famous work, the urinal he called Fountain. On the other hand it could be argued that he had never been very good at painting only because he had always been suspicious of it, had sensed from the start, what he was only to articulate much later, a deep suspicion of the whole enterprise of easel painting. Who can tell? (Who can tell why some sinners repent and others do not, some addicts manage to kick the habit and others do not?) In any case, as his most discerning critic, Thierry de Duve has shown in fascinating detail, the story of Fountain is a kind of parable, largely orchestrated by Duchamp, of the nature of art in our age. Readers of literature, eagerly snapping up the latest Goncourt or Booker Prize winner would do well to ponder its implications.

Duchamp submitted Fountain anonymously (he ‘signed’ it ‘R. Mutt’) to the hanging committee of the first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists, on whose jury he himself was. The society based itself on the Parisian society of the same name (the Salon des Indépendants) set up in 1884, to wrest control of the future of art from the Academy. In both cases the motto was the same: No jury, no prizes. In theory anyone could hang, for why should I, an independent artist, submit to the judgement of a jury of straight-laced traditionalists who wouldn't be able to discern good art if it was thrust into their faces? Duchamp had been invited onto the committee because of the triumph of his Nude at the Armory Show. His presence guaranteed the Independents' avant-garde credentials. Unfortunately neither life nor art is ever as simple as that. What the Independents of New York wanted was to be both liberal and avant-garde, to do what they wanted and have themselves proclaimed as important avant-garde artists. We have seen what such self-naming leads to in the case of Don Quixote and others. It was no different here. The Cervantes who drew the right conclusions from their efforts was, of course, Duchamp. By submitting not a new version of the Nude, but, anonymously, a signed urinal, he lit up, as with a flare, the contradictions of art today: for Fountain was, as everyone knows, rejected by the committee as obscene and ‘not art’.

Actually, as de Duve shows, the story is a little more complicated than that, and Duchamp had to ‘help’ his readymade into the limelight. The offending object, anonymously submitted, would have simply disappeared had not Duchamp made sure it was photographed by the most famous photographer of the day, Joseph Stieglitz, and reproduced in a small satirical magazine, The Blind Man, whose first issue was devoted to the Independents' show. Thereafter Fountain literally disappeared, so that all we have is Stieglitz's photo, from which numerous models have of course been made and exhibited round the world, perhaps the most famous piece of modern art, and still as capable of dividing viewers as it ever was. Is it art? Is it art because of its intrinsic merits? Or because the institution says it is? And if the latter, does that mean that we have reached the end of art as it was known in the West since men began to draw in caves? It calls into question all competitions and all juries where art is concerned, and it reminds us of the dream of every artist (and all impresarios, whether publishers or galleries or agents) to be both unbeholden to any tradition and yet proclaimed King of the New.

Had Beethoven had Mozart's lyric gifts, Stravinsky says somewhere in his conversations with Robert Craft, he would never have developed his rhythmic capacities to the degree that he did. Duchamp was always more interested in conceptions than in the possibilities of drawing or working in three dimensions. When he took a bottle-rack or a urinal and relabelled them and exhibited them, he made all those who saw what he had done think again and think hard about what constitutes a work of art, what the function of art is in our society, what it is that gives us pleasure, what our relation is to the objects we use in everyday life, etc., etc. When Picasso took a toy car and made of it the head of a monkey he saw in what he had made something touching and funny and added a baby monkey clinging to the mother's belly, calling the whole thing Mother and Child. The wit is as sharp as Duchamp's, but there is more: his welded sculpture tells us something about monkeys, about ourselves, and about mothers and their children. It's absurd to ask which is better, Duchamp or Picasso. Both, in a sense, fulfil the Bakhtinian principle of releasing the multiple voices which would not have been given a hearing had something not been made (or nudged into being) by an artist.

Both Picasso and Duchamp grasped what was at issue, and both have their ‘descendants’. Those of Duchamp have of course grabbed more of the headlines, though it is difficult not to feel that, in their case, the Master has made them redundant. Duchamp himself, supreme ironist that he was, was extremely reticent in what he chose to say and extremely choosy about the art he subsequently chose to make, thereby, in Kierkegaard's terms, retaining our trust in him as a ‘real’ artist. His descendants and disciples, lacking the clarity of his insight into what is really at issue, have been less parsimonious. Picasso's descendants have had, so to speak, a larger field to play in. One of the chief among them is of course Bacon. We have already examined his contrast between ‘illustration’ and the sort of art he himself was trying to make, but he was equally forthright about abstraction. Talking to David Sylvester about the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence (figure 5), he points out that ‘if you analyze it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational’. And he adds:

I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, is that there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image. Well, of course, only part of this is accidental. Behind all that is Rembrandt's profound sensibility which was able to hold onto one irrational mark rather than onto another.

Bacon is trying to say something very difficult, and very close to himself as a painter, and it is a tribute to David Sylvester that he takes the trouble. What differentiates a painter like him (and Picasso) from someone like Duchamp, this passage suggests, is that while he is just as aware of the chance nature of the marks he is making, he also has a sense that he can, because of who he is, because of what he has learned in the course of his life, make a more than merely arbitrary choice about which marks to reinforce, which to ignore, and here he is claiming Rembrandt as a precursor. But he immediately notes that abstract expressionists too have claimed Rembrandt as a precursor, and he goes on to differentiate himself from them. With Rembrandt, he says, the marks have been done in

I grow old …I grow old…

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered by the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

A

t first sight the form and title of the poem — ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ — suggest that it is, like one of Browning's monologues, an exercise in characterisation. But this soon turns out to be an error. Eliot's poem too insistently breaks down the boundaries between the main character, the writer and the reader: Prufrock is not a figure from the past but from the present, not someone ‘out there’ but someone uncomfortably ‘in here’, not someone with a story to tell but only someone who seems to feel the need to speak. It's true that the speaker is given a name and a comic name at that, but this is a lure, an attempt by the poet to isolate his anxieties by dramatising them, much as Hamlet ‘puts an antic disposition on’. In fact, we soon realise, the poem is really a kind of ode, like Wordsworth's Immortality Ode or Keats's ‘Ode to Melancholy’, a

poem in which the first person speaks for all of us and speaks in order not to instruct but to understand. And just as we have to take the pronouncements of Wordsworth and Keats seriously, so here, when Eliot/Prufrock says: ‘I have heard the mermaids singing each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me’, we must take him as seriously as we would take the pronouncements of any poet. Were he prepared to roll up the bottoms of his trousers and walk upon the beach without self-consciousness all would perhaps be well. He would be a novelist, perhaps, or a minor poet, commenting on the seascape. Were the mermaids to sing to him as the Muses sang to Homer all would be well. He would write down their words and be the spokesman of the community. But no, he has heard the mermaids singing and so can never again return to his old life; but because they weren't singing to him but only to each other, he is in the unenviable position of having to live with the sense that what would give meaning to his life is there, but just out of earshot. ‘There is salvation’, as Kafka once said, ‘but not for us.’

In such a situation the very notion of a craft of poetry becomes a mockery. The two lines, ‘I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach’, and ‘I have heard the mermaids singing each to each’ form a perfect rhyming couplet, but the rhyme remains empty because ‘each to each’ turns in on itself and remains, semantically, in a different universe from that of the poet walking on the beach. Hence what follows is a line that cannot have a rhyme because it is a description of solitude and loss: ‘I do not think that they will sing to me.’

Of course the world of so-called culture (what Pound ironically Americanised as Kulchur) goes on its way, as it always does, blithely unaware that anything is amiss: ‘In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.’ Pope too used the rhyming couplet to signal the disjunction rather than the conjunction between the ideal world and the social world, but in Eliot the disjunction goes deeper because there is no sense that a change in the attitudes of society would set things right, only the bleak acknowledgement that things are not right. After such knowledge, how is lyric poetry any longer possible? (A question that Eliot is asking not only long before Adorno postulated it in the aftermath of Auschwitz, but even before the First World War, for ‘Prufrock’ was written in 1911.)

Yet the final lines do seem to salvage something from the wreck: the speaker will never be able to hear what the mermaids are saying, but, like Wallace Stevens in his great poems of the sea, he manages to convey something of its voice in his image of the ever oncoming and outgoing waves:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

The final triplet, however, reminds us that our sense of what the mermaids are and what they may be saying is a precarious one, which will last only as long as we are reading (and the poet is writing) the poem: when we look up from it, in the end, ‘human voices wake us, and we drown’. We are left with the disintegrating vision and with the insistent and meaningless rhyme of ‘red and brown’/ ‘and we drown’.

When Bartleby is asked by his employer to do something, it will be remembered, he takes to answering: ‘I would prefer not to.’ In an interview with his dealer, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Picasso recalled: ‘I well remember what I told [Braque and Gris] in the cubist room at the Indépendants, where there were some Gleizes and Metzingers: “I thought we'd enjoy ourselves a bit, but it's getting bloody boring again.”’ ‘The whole scaffolding of art bores me and gives me a headache’, remarks Thomas Mann's composer-hero, Adrian Leverkühn. And Beckett: ‘I speak of an art … weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.’ On a lighter note Salinger's Holden Caulfield begins his narrative:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me.

In all these cases doing something other people seem to have no difficulty in doing becomes an intolerable imposition, not because it is fiendishly difficult but because it is so boring. And what makes a thing boring? That it is meaningless, and that therefore spending time on it feels as though it were robbing one of a portion of one's life. None of the other toilers in Wall Street appears to feel this, but Bartleby does. Picasso does. Leverkühn does. Beckett does. Holden Caulfield does. In the case of Picasso that is a sign that he must move on, find something less boring, more meaningful, to do, but the others don't seem to have that option. For them it seems to be a question of either boring themselves to death or giving up altogether. Kafka's Hunger Artist is their patron saint. He has lain dying of hunger in the straw of his circus cage for days before he is noticed.

They poked into the straw with sticks and found him in it. ‘Are you still fasting?’ asked the overseer, ‘when on earth do you mean to stop?’ ‘Forgive me, everybody’, whispered the hunger artist; only the overseer, who had his ear to the bars, understood him. ‘Of course’, said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let the attendants know what state the man was in, ‘we forgive you.’ ‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting’, said the hunger artist. ‘We do admire it’, said the overseer, affably. ‘But you shouldn't admire it’, said the hunger artist. ‘Well then we don't admire it’, said the overseer, ‘but why shouldn't we admire it?’ ‘Because I have to fast, I can't help it’, said the hunger artist. ‘What a fellow you are’, said the overseer, ‘and why can't you help it?’ ‘Because’, said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, ‘because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’ These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.

The young Kafka dreamed of becoming a writer in order to escape the meaninglessness of the life he saw around him, in the first instance the life of his parents. Like all artists, he dreamed also, no doubt, of fame and glory. As he watched that fame and glory settle effortlessly on the shoulders of his friends Franz Werfel and Max Brod, while his own writing passed, for the most part, into obscurity, he struggled to understand what was happening. He knew their work was meretricious, sentimental, littered with cliché — yet was his own any better? Could the public be that wrong? Was it not rather his own work, obscure, crabbed, incomprehensible sometimes even to himself, that was without merit? After all, Werfel and Brod at least gave pleasure to thousands while his writing hardly even gave pleasure to himself. All he could say, at the end of his life, when ‘The Hunger Artist’ was written, was that he had had no option. His very body shied away from following the path of Werfel and Brod. Had his body accepted it he would have gone willingly down that path, but it didn't. It couldn't process food like that and so he couldn't eat it, and if the alternative was starvation, so be it. He mostly took no pride in this, had no wish to boast that they were passé, old hat, while his was the way of the future, as would one day be acknowledged. All he knew was that he could not do it. He who had not been able to find nourishment in a job, in a prospective marriage, who had imagined that writing would provide it, had come to see at last that writing could not help him either. More than that, as his anguished 1922 letter to Brod, from which I quoted at the start, suggests, he felt, like the young Wordsworth in the nut wood, that by writing he was desecrating, polluting, God's earth. All he had been was a burden and a disappointment to his family and friends and the sooner he was dead the better.

‘Well, clear this out now!’ said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all. Into the cage they put a young panther. Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary … His noble body, furnished almost to bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it.

Clearly what we might call the threshold of boredom is different for different people. For Duchamp the very thought of painting became a horror. And when Stieglitz asked him in 1922 for his views on photography, no doubt expecting support from his new ally, Duchamp replied, in very Beckettian style: ‘Dear Stieglitz, Even a few words I don't feel like writing. You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are. Affectueusement, Marcel Duchamp.’ For Jarry, Ionesco and Beckett, the idea of having people on a stage pretend to be ‘characters’ embroiled in a ‘plot’ is something they cannot countenance. They have to make it clear from the start that what they are doing is completely ridiculous, preposterous in fact, and they find different ways of doing so and then of filling up the length of time an audience expects to sit in a theatre. Jarry turns to Grand Guignol for his inspiration and starts his play with the one word nobody had ever thought to utter on stage: ‘Merde!’ (Ubu actually says ‘merdre’, which adds an element of wit to the scatological humour); Ionesco discovers that he can use a manual for learning English to determine the nature of the characters and what they say to each other; Beckett that he can fill the time by having two characterless characters talk about how they are filling in the time. Pinter and Bernhard, on the other hand, seem able to put on stage characters who are at least recognisable, even if extreme, and to abide by the conventions of realism even if they strain them at every turn. In fact seeing how far these artistic conventions (which mesh of course with the conventions by which bourgeois society lives) can be strained, becomes part of what drives their dramaturgy. In fiction Beckett again, from Molloy onwards, finds himself compelled to do away with most of the trappings of the novel, while Nabokov seems able and happy to work within them. In all these cases the borders of what they ‘prefer not to’ do are slightly different, and in every instance, one feels, it is not the mind that decides, but — one almost wants to say — the body.

Is the threshold even constant for the lifetime of an artist? One can see a poet like Eliot or a playwright like Stoppard moving from a fairly radical to a relatively moderate approach and style as they grow older — and are we sure that what we are witnessing is a decline? What is certain is the truth of Barthes' remark that ‘to be modern is to know that which is not possible any more’. And this suggests that Modernism is, historically, deeply intertwined with the emergence of a critical conscience. This is as true of Rabelais and Cervantes in the Renaissance as it is of Wordsworth, Mallarmé and Eliot. And is the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads not the first avant-garde manifesto in Western cultural history? ‘They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers’, writes Wordsworth, ‘if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.’ Eliot could have said the same thing about his first volume of poetry, and we have seen Evelyn Waugh's response to Picasso: ‘Very interesting, no doubt, but not art.’

I recently shared a platform with an eminent English novelist with a passion for art, who amused the audience by telling them that Mondrian felt he could not make any diagonal lines. ‘I feel there are no limits’, she said. ‘Why should we not make diagonal lines if we want to?’ This sounds like an admirable sentiment, a robust assertion of artistic independence. But if we look into the case of Mondrian, his denial is clearly not a kowtowing to the unspoken rules of society, but comes from some deep impulse within the artist himself. Mondrian's search was, from the start, not for beauty but for truth. He gravitated towards the grid because the grid implies that pictures have no beginnings and no ends, and no heroic or bucolic drama either, unless it is a factitious one introduced by the artist. He wanted to escape from such arbitrariness and at the same time to acknowledge the human and physical dimension of painting. As one of his most perceptive critics, Yve-Alain Bois, has remarked: ‘The essential argument in Mondrian's famous critique of Theo van Doesberg's use of oblique lines [is that it] presupposes, according to Mondrian, an eye liberated from the human body: neoplasticism is “the true and pure manifestation of cosmic equilibrium from which, as human beings, we cannot separate ourselves”.’ One can disagree with the premise, as one can disagree with this or that pronouncement of Beckett or Bernhard, but what one cannot do is dismiss what they are doing, or rather what they refuse to do, as merely cranky, like only eating nuts.

Francis Bacon explained to David Sylvester that what he was trying to do was to get away from the anecdote and make his paintings more immediate.

How many poems he denied himself

In his observant progress, lesser things

Than the relentless contact he desired

we remember Wallace Stevens's Comedian saying. Perhaps in the end it is the search for this ‘relentless contact’ that explains what makes all these artists feel that there are things they cannot do, things that bore them beyond endurance — from Rabelais to Picasso and from Cervantes to Schoenberg. What they want is to make something that will be as alive as the world they inhabit, something that, in Barthes' words, possesses ‘the trembling of existence (le tremblement de l'existence)’; they are made sick by the thought that all the tradition seems to offer them is, instead, ‘a world which is constructed, elaborated, detached’, a world in which everything has its place, in which everything, even the most terrible, has ‘a peaceful look, an air of respectful decency, which comes of their being held beneath a gaze fixed at infinity,’ as Merleau-Ponty put it. Sometimes they feel that the way to escape this, to experience that relentless contact, is through a torrent of words and invective, as in Beckett or Bernhard. Sometimes they try to do it by a sly subversion of what is expected, as when Eliot fills the empty form of the quatrain, so popular with the Georgians, with vocabulary far from Georgian, and in doing so brings the nonsense verse of Lear and Carroll back into the mainstream of poetry:

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Or as when Queneau begins Zazie dans le métro with a word we have to say out loud in order to make sense of it: ‘Doukipudonktan’ (roughly: ‘Where's this stink coming from?’).

In the end we have to remember that Bartleby's is an extreme case, or rather, that both the novella, Bartleby, and the short story, ‘The Hunger Artist’, while needing to be taken very seriously, are fictions, ways in which their respective authors manage (as great artists always do) to have their cake and eat it (we saw this at work already in Cervantes' Prologue to Don Quixote). My point is that certain ways of writing or painting or composing ‘are not possible any more’ because they are worn out, thin, lacking in interest, as well as because there are certain things we are not capable of doing any more. In one of the brief passages which go to make up his posthumous book, On Certainty, Wittgenstein says: ‘Certain events would put me into a position in which I could not go on with the old language-game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game. Indeed, doesn't it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts?’ This sounds wonderfully clear. The old language-game cannot be played any more because the circumstances have changed, and those who are not aware of this are the enemies of true thought. But that does not stop Wittgenstein, in this so typical of the greatest Modernists, struggling, in the Preface to the Philosophical Investigations, with the conundrum of whether he has written the series of fragments which follow because he is, whether through personal weakness or because of the temper of the times, not up to writing the kind of large, coherent argument which came naturally to Locke or Kant, or whether he wrote it as a series of fragments because that is precisely what the argument he was trying to put forward demanded. Sometimes he thinks it is the one, sometimes the other. There is no-one to tell him which is right. All he knows is that he, being who he is, could have done it in no other way.

What we need is an example of a different language-game. Rabelais, we saw, played his own work off against the Bible, and Cervantes his against

The Odyssey

Schiller's great essay on the travails of modern art, ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’, set the ‘naïve’ poetry of the ancients against the ‘sentimental’ or self-conscious poetry of his age. If we are to take an Eliot, a Kafka or a Wittgenstein seriously, then we need to try and focus on a period in which there was no ‘dissociation of sensibility’, in which Alexander's sword did point the way to his goal, in which there was a ‘sureness’ about the language-game being played.

Could Greek tragedy provide us with our example? Kierkegaard certainly thought so, for one of the key essays in Either/Or is the essay, in Part I, entitled ‘The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern’, in which he seeks to bring out the essential difference between ancient and modern tragedy. Our age is more melancholy than that of the Greeks, and so more in despair, says Kierkegaard. The reason for this is that today each person is deemed to be entirely responsible for his actions while ‘the peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not issue exclusively from character, that the action does not find its sufficient explanation in subjective reflection and decision’. We can see this in the very form of ancient and of modern tragedy. Modern tragedy, like all modern drama, proceeds by means of dialogue; in ancient Greek drama dialogue formed only one component of the play, alongside monologue and, above all, the chorus. ‘The chorus’, says Kierkegaard, ‘indicates … the more which will not be absorbed in individuality.’ (And this, incidentally, explains why opera, as Kierkegaard demonstrates in the previous essay in the volume, on Mozart's Don Giovanni, can say so much more than drama — music, in opera, has taken over the role of the chorus in ancient Greek drama.)

What is this ‘more’? Why does it define ancient tragedy? And why is it absent from its modern counterpart?

The reason for this naturally lies in the fact that the ancient world did not have subjectivity fully self-conscious and reflective. Even if the individual moved freely, he still rested in the substantial categories of state, family and destiny. This substantial category is exactly the fatalistic element in Greek tragedy, and its exact peculiarity. The hero's destruction is, therefore, not only the result of his own deeds, but it is also, suffering, whereas in modern tragedy, the hero's destruction is really not suffering, but is action.

The hero of Greek tragedy was not an autonomous individual. He was caught in and made by a whole web of different interpenetrating elements. These were what led to tragedy but also what absolved him from full responsibility. Terrible things might happen to him, but he could not blame himself, or, to put it in terms of Greek tragedy itself, he might be polluted but he was not guilty. In modern tragedy, on the other hand, ‘the hero stands and falls entirely on his own acts’. ‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state and race. It must leave the individual entirely to himself, so that in a stricter sense he becomes his own creator, his guilt is consequently sin, his pain remorse; but this nullifies the tragic.’ For the Greeks, ‘life-relationships are once and for all assigned to them, like the heaven under which they live. If this is dark and cloudy, it is also unchangeable.’ And, argues Kierkegaard, this is what gives Greek tragedy its soothing quality. It is, he says, surprisingly but acutely, like a mother's love, whereas modern tragedy, where the whole burden is placed on the responsibility of the hero, is (like the father, he implies) ethical, cold and harsh. Tragedy leads to sorrow, ethics to pain. ‘Where the age loses the tragic’, he concludes, ‘it gains despair.’

Early on he makes a vitally important point which, like so much else in his essay, it is easy to pass over at first reading. He has been talking about the chorus and he says: ‘In ancient tragedy the action itself has an epic moment in it; it is as much event as action.’ To grasp fully what he means by ‘an epic moment’ and to show how what he is saying here and elsewhere in his essay can help us understand the nature of Modernism, we need to turn from Kierkegaard to another remarkable study of Greek tragedy which has not received its due, a book written by an Oxford English don trained in the law, John Jones. The book, written in 1962, is entitled On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. Surprisingly, Jones, who seems to have read everything, makes no mention of Kierkegaard's essay, but his book can and should be seen as a more scholarly and sustained attempt to tease out its implications.

Jones begins with a chapter on Aristotle's Poetics, arguing that we have misread this seminal text because we have been obsessed with the notion, quite alien to Aristotle, of the Tragic Hero. Aristotle, as Kierkegaard had noted, subordinates character to action: ‘Tragedy is an imitation not of human beings’, says Aristotle, ‘but of action and life.’ It is the mimesis of a praxis, the imitation of an action. Jones demonstrates how nineteenth-century translators of the Poetics, though many of them were notable scholars, consistently mistranslated it because their (essentially Romantic) world view led them to read into Aristotle what was not there. Take, for instance, the Aristotelian notion of the plays showing us a change of fortune from good to bad.

The truth is, they are unable to ask themselves whether Aristotle means what he says; they are prevented by an almost invulnerable habit of mind which discredits the situational autonomy of [Aristotle's] ‘change of fortune’, forces a kind of human dependency on it, attaches it to the heroic, suffering solitary who is supposed to stand at the centre of the stage and of attention, like Hamlet.

Jones shows how this affects every decision the translator has to make and how a series of local choices leads in the end to the creation of a quite unreal figure, the Tragic Hero, more Lear than Oedipus, more Lady Macbeth than Clytemnestra (actually more a Romantic reading of Lear and Lady Macbeth and Hamlet than a truly Shakespearian one).

This does not of course mean that Aristotle does not imagine that tragedy deals with human beings. ‘Aristotle's treatise begins and ends, as any sane aesthetic might, with art confronting life in an effort of interpretation’, Jones sensibly remarks. Yet tragedy is not the imitation of human beings, it is the imitation of an action which involves human beings. As Kierkegaard points out, we tend to think of action as issuing from the solitary consciousness, ‘secret, inward, interesting’. For us action is adjectival, it tells us something about character. But, says Jones, ‘to our sense of characteristic conduct Aristotle opposes that of characterful action’. Drama based on this view will have no notion of Hamlet's ‘I have that within which passes show’, because in it a person ‘is significantly himself only in what he says and does’. That is why Greek drama is essentially a masked drama. To us moderns a mask hides something, to the Greeks it revealed. ‘Masking’, says Jones, incidentally revealing that the good critic must be an etymologist, a psychologist, an anthropologist and someone with his finger on the pulse of the present, ‘flourishes in totemistic societies — the mask, like the wooden body of the totem, shows forth the psychophysical and institutional solidarity of the descent group’. And masked drama implies that what we see enacted before us is not a fiction or a reconstruction, but in some sense a re-enactment: ‘What was done by the man in the story is done again by the mask.’ For ‘the actor-mask is not a portrait; it presents, it does not represent; it gives us King Oedipus.’

In the light of these remarks, Jones goes on, in the bulk of his book, to analyse the plays of the three tragedians whose work has come down to us. He brings out how little we will understand the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the oldest of the three, unless we realise that it is first and foremost not about individuals but about the house (oikos) of Atreus (as we still speak of ‘the House of Windsor’). The oikos consists of ‘house and household, building and family, land and chattels, slaves and domestic animals, hearth and ancestral grave: a psycho-physical community of the living and the dead and the unborn’. It is on this house that the lookout stands to speak the opening lines of the play; it is to this hearth that Agamemnon returns; it is the physical wealth of the house that Clytemnestra tempts him to trample underfoot as she begs him to walk on a richly woven carpet; it is the house that suffers a blow as Agamemnon is cut down; the house that is restored as Orestes avenges his father's murder. We make a great mistake, Jones points out, to try and make the carpet symbolic; it is part of our mistaken search for what lies behind, instead of focusing on what lies before us. The carpet is precious, a lot of work has gone into it, to tread on it is to despoil the house — that is enough.

Similarly, we must take care not to see Agamemnon's dilemma at Aulis as a struggle between King and Father, a conflict between duty and feeling; he has a duty to both his positions: as commander of the fleet he has a duty to sacrifice his daughter if that will allow the fleet to sail; as father he has a duty to protect her, as a member of his family, his oikos. Nor should we see Clytemnestra as being motivated in the first place by jealousy of Cassandra or lust for Aegisthus. Aeschylus presents her as simply a threat to the oikos, a perverter of the natural order of things. When Orestes is about to kill her, in the second play in the trilogy, he says he will kill her next to Aegisthus, ‘for he is the man you love and you hate that other whom you were bound to love’. Jones comments: ‘When he says that Klytemnestra was bound to love Agamemnon Orestes does not mean that she should have striven to ensure a feeling of love in herself, but that she should have conformed to the love-situation in which she was placed.’ This of course brings out how difficult it is in our post-Enlightenment age to make sense of these plays and how our response to art can never be completely separated from our response to the world: we are outraged at the thought of arranged marriages and our individualised society cannot make sense of a term like philia, which does not mean romantic love but, as Jones puts it, clumsily as he admits, ‘a state of nearness and dearness’ — my wife is philia to me, but so are my cattle and my spear. Though this may be offensive to us, unless we are prepared to make the imaginative leap we will always simply project our own world picture onto that of other cultures and remain locked up in ourselves, and so deeply impoverished.

Without the music and the choreography we are of course left with a shell of what the Athenian audience would have experienced. Nevertheless, it is possible, with a sensitive masked production like Peter Hall's at the National in 1981, to understand why Kierkegaard should have felt that witnessing these terrible plays is strangely soothing. As Jones puts it: ‘The Necessity that crushes a man also vindicates the world's sense.’ The tearing of the fabric of the House of Atreus which we witness also brings home to us the strength and resilience of that fabric, and the nourishing virtues of the world's order.

In Aeschylus that order is displayed through the medium of the oikos; in Sophocles we move from family to place and from household to person. ‘No question of Sophocles’ superiority arises', notes Jones, ‘but merely of his difference.’ The key to Sophocles, he suggests, is his empathy with blindness — the blind Tiresias, the blind Oedipus. Very beautifully, he says:

All men … are teleologically blind. All life moves within a shell-like containment of final ignorance and impotence. To act or think in self-founded certainty of what tomorrow will bring is to ape the poor blind mad man who throws away his stick, shakes off the guiding hand and plunges forward alone. Humanity's stick is its ritual life … The guiding hand is lent by the gods.

And death, for Sophoclean man, is not the end-point of life; rather it is that which surrounds humanity like a sea, and men feel this rather as the blind Oedipus feels the sunlight on his body. In a passage which could almost have been written by Kierkegaard, Jones notes:

In both Aeschylus and Sophocles, the moment when a man perceives the operation of the powers that are destroying him is one of solemn religio-tragic exaltation — not because the individual is ‘saved’ thereby, but because Necessity and Fate and the ways of Zeus have been exposed for human consciousness in a flash of perfect clarity … While Death is terrible, it is also Deliverer and Healer.

Oedipus, after all, performs the task the city has asked of him, that of finding the murderer of Laius and thus cleansing the city of pollution; that this means cleansing the city of himself is terrible for him and his family and sad for the citizens, but it is the price that has to be paid if the city is to survive. His objective pollution and his subjective innocence, explains Jones,

are features, so to speak, of the tragic mask, visible side by side. Their non-communication is not mysterious, it is the norm of the Greek masked drama. The mystery is created by ourselves when we seek to validate them in depth, bending them back so that they converge upon a single stable seat of consciousness … Instead of which they lie calmly printed on the mask.

Even at the moment of death the two do not come together. In Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus, when the thunder sounds, knows what it is he has to do and ‘he begins to move with mysterious confidence towards his place of death’, as Jones says, a representative of ‘all humanity at the dark limit of life, blind, committed to action (there is no doing nothing in Greek tragedy), with a god leading’.

Before that he speaks to his daughters:

My children, this day you lose your father; here and now there perishes all that is I, and you will not any longer bear the burden of tending me — a heavy burden, my children, as I know. And yet one word, quite alone, resolves all this pain. That word is love. Love was the gift you had from me as from no one else, and now you must live out your lives without me. (ll.1611–19)

Jones's comment on this, in its precision and non-sentimentality, suggests why some of us consider him the best English critic of the second half of the twentieth century:

What renders innocent — sanctifies even — Oedipus's thought of his own love lightening his daughters' labours on his behalf, is an obscure literal acceptance of the work which the one little word has been doing; he is not using the word solely to denote the fact of his love, he is looking at the word as at a half-domesticated life which remains still outward and alien at the moment of appropriation. For utterance is appropriation: the word is Oedipus's.

The effect, he rightly says, ‘is a brilliant impenetrability; groping for the people whose words these are, we explore the hard surface of the mask in its linguistic and acoustic dimension’. In other words, we have to learn to live with such impenetrability, to relax and savour it. For it is very precious.

It is the mask that becomes redundant in the exhilarating but perverse plays of the last dramatist of the group, Euripides. For Jones, Euripides arouses the same feelings of an art form in decline, he says, as listening to Beethoven would arouse in a lover of Bach and Haydn. Here at last we find the solitary and inward self of nineteenth-century translations of Aristotle. In Iphigeneia in Aulis, for example, we have an Agamemnon who hesitates and changes his mind. First he decides to disband the army; then, persuaded by Menelaus, he alters course and writes a letter (yes, we are finally on familiar dramatic territory) to Clytemnestra, bidding her bring Iphigeneia to Aulis so that she can be married to Achilles (a ruse to get her to come of course). When the play opens he is composing a new letter, having changed his mind once again, telling his wife to keep their daughter at home. At this moment a herald enters to announce that Clytemnestra and Iphigeneia have landed. But Euripides isn't done with us yet. Menelaus now tells his brother that he has been persuaded by him and is abandoning his former standpoint: ‘Let the army be disbanded and leave Aulis.’ But it is too late. Agamemnon points out that Calchas the seer will tell the army about the divine demand for Iphigeneia's life. Menelaus suggests they kill him, but Agamemnon replies that Odysseus too knows about the oracle. There is no escape.

The focus on the inward thus leads to the development of plot, the manipulation by the dramatist of the audience through the introduction of unexpected twists and reversals. In Iphigeneia in Tauris Euripides develops the legend that Agamemnon's daughter was transported by Artemis at the moment of sacrifice to the Asian land of Aulis and a deer put in her place. Iphigeneia is now the priestess of Artemis and in charge of sacrificing to her any Athenian youth found in the land. Orestes and Pylades, who have come to Tauris to steal the statue of Artemis, are discovered and brought before Iphigeneia to be sacrificed. The first half of the play ends with brother and sister eventually recognising each other. This would have been enough to fill a whole play by the two older dramatists, but for Euripides it is just the start. The second half consists of the successful carrying out of the plot hatched by Iphigeneia to get all three of them and the statue out of Tauris and en route to Athens.

This is more like the kind of play we are used to. Not just because seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatists and opera librettists turned more often to Euripides than to the other two, but because it's more like the kind of drama we see coming out of Hollywood and on our television screens every night. How exactly does it differ from Aeschylus and Sophocles? First of all, there is no longer any need for the mask. Indeed, masking is a positive hindrance, since so much in these plays turns on the contrast between appearance and reality, or on the nuances of doubt and uncertainty. Jones puts it this way: Sophoclean privacy has been replaced by Euripidean inwardness, which gives us our modern category of the subjective. ‘When Orestes saw the Furies in the Oresteia’, he says, ‘he was not experiencing an hallucination: he was polluted. But when the Euripidean Orestes thought he saw the Furies (Orestes, 408), he knew that his guilty ‘conscience’ (396) lay at the back of the apparition. At the same time Euripides’ new interest in human beings and his new fascination with plot brings with it a failing confidence in praxis, action. This is what Kierkegaard was after when he said: ‘In ancient tragedy the action itself has an epic moment in it; it is as much event as action.’ What he meant was that in the Agamemnon or the Oedipus at Colonus we witness essentially a single event: the return home and murder of Agamemnon; the arrival at Colonus and going to his death of Oedipus. It unfolds slowly before us, each moment having the same weight as every other; when the event has been explored from all sides, as it were, the play is over, leaving us with that double experience of pity and sorrow, calmness and joy, which Kierkegaard and Jones explore so well. In Iphigeneia in Tauris, on the other hand, as in most of Euripides, as in the modern drama against which Jarry, Brecht, Beckett and Ionesco were reacting, we witness the author's manipulation of plot to create exciting theatre, driving towards its (surprising and often unexpected) conclusion. ‘Clearly defined terminal climax, so impressively absent in the older drama’, concludes Jones, ‘becomes a felt need in Euripides.’

Here are three quotations:

He spoke sententiously, breaking off abruptly. I had an uneasy feeling, unlikely as this would be, that he might be about to ask me to act as best man at his wedding. I began to think of excuses to avoid such a duty. However, it turned out he had no such intention. It seemed likely, on second thoughts, that he wanted to discuss seriously some matter regarding himself which he feared might, on ventilation, cause amusement.

If it had not been such an intolerably hot evening, Bernard would have suggested remaining in their seats in the interval. He could see no point in a meeting between Eric and Terence, though he had never hidden his relationships from either of them. They would, he felt sure, dislike one another and he dreaded a little his own acquiescence in their criticisms. They would both be so perfectly right, and they would both so perfectly miss the point.

‘Jake,’ said Madge into my shoulder, ‘don't leave me.’

I half carried her to the settee. I felt calm and resolute. I knelt beside her and took her hand, brushing her hair back with my hand. Her face rose towards me like a lifting flower.

‘Jake,’ said Madge, ‘I must have you with me. That was what it was all for. Don't you see?’

I nodded. I drew my hand back over her smooth hair and down to the warmth of her neck.

Each of these extracts, chosen at random, comes from a novel by the writers recommended, back in 1958, by the then Professor of English at Oxford, Lord David Cecil, as being in the vanguard of fiction writing in English. (Why, I wonder now, did he make no mention of Ivy Compton-Burnett? Probably because, his taste being typical of the English establishment, then and now, he did not rate her.) The first comes from At Lady Molly's, by Anthony Powell, published in 1957, the second from Hemlock and After, by Angus Wilson, published in 1952, and the third from Under the Net, Iris Murdoch's first novel, published in 1954. Occasionally they sound dated, as in Powell's ‘which he feared might, on ventilation, cause amusement’, or Wilson's ‘They would both be so perfectly right, and they would both so perfectly miss the point’. But by and large they have stood the test of time pretty well; or rather, they could have been extracts from novels published in England in 2009. They all three do what they set out to do perfectly adequately: they help tell a story and create a world and characters to inhabit that world that do not flout the laws of probability. We never doubt what they are telling us, whether it is about the way someone speaks (‘sententiously’), the weather (‘an intolerably hot evening’) or an action (‘I half carried her to the settee’). It does not matter whether the narrative is in the first or the third person, what the narrator says is, as far as we are concerned, the truth. Such narratives are easy to read. They are also illustrative, in Bacon's sense: they tell a story, they have no life of their own. The two things go together, as both Barthes and Merleau-Ponty showed: the smooth chain of the sentences gives us a sense of security, of comfort even, precisely because it denies the openness, the ‘trembling’ of life itself; the very confidence of the articulation of the narrative gives the lie to our own sense of things being confused, dark, impossible to grasp fully. That of course is why we read them: they take us, for a while, out of our confusions, drawing us into a world that makes some sort of sense, that at the very least can be articulated. By the same token they cannot really satisfy us, since they do not speak to our condition, only make us hungry for more.

As I hope I have made clear, in my discussions of Cervantes and of Golding, for example, a sense of narrative being alive does not depend on the disruption of syntax or the use of demotic speech, but on a much more fundamental relation of the writer to his medium. If Barthes is right and to be modern is to know that some things can no longer be done, then Cervantes is modern and these writers are not.

And what of their successors? Here again are three extracts, chosen at random, all from living writers. The first comes with an endorsement from Anthony Thwaite (‘a prose that has a feline grace’), the second with one from Karl Miller (‘the masterpiece of someone I think of as the best novelist writing in England’), and the third with one from John Braine (‘a beautifully written story’):

‘What is it, Mary?’ Colin said, and reached for her hand. She shrank away, but her eyes were on him … and he shivered as he fumbled for his shirt and stood up. They faced each other across the empty bed. ‘You've had a bad fright,’ Colin said, and began to edge round towards her. Mary nodded and moved towards the french window that gave on to the balcony.

She had always seen decay about her, even while going through all that the society asked of her. Slot machines on railway stations were full of sweets, but she knew they would be empty again; they were meant to be empty, as they had been when she was a child, pieces of junk that no one yet thought of taking away.

We had by now descended the long incline of our street and reached Elizabeth Avenue. No lawn we passed, no driveway, no garage, no lampost, no little brick stoop was without its power over me. Here I had practised my sidearm curve, here on my sled I'd broken a tooth, here I had copped my first feel, here for teasing a friend I had been slapped by my mother, here I had learned that my grandfather was dead.

It is clear, again, that all three passages have more in common than they have differences. One may employ dialogue, one what linguists call style indirecte libre, and one a first person narrator, but all three are concerned with telling a story and telling it in such a way as to make readers feel that they are not reading about a world that has been freshly made but about one that has always existed. Writing in the 1950s about the Citroën DS 19, Barthes pointed out: ‘It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object’. It is characterised, he goes on, at once by ‘a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter’. A recent commentator on this essay adds: ‘One of the most noteworthy features of the car was its lack of noticeable joints; its panels were not visibly riveted, they appeared to coexist in a state of magical juxtaposition. That is to say, the tangible signs of fabrication, of the labor expended in transforming raw matter into consummable object, had been magicked away.’ Like the Citroen DS 19, the works from which I have just quoted (like the earlier ones of Powell, Wilson and Iris Murdoch) are carefully made objects, exquisitely crafted in order to conceal the joints. The price they pay for this is that they are thin, illustrative, again, in Bacon's sense, recounting anecdotes which may or may not hold our attention but to which we certainly would not want to return, since they lack that sense of density of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words, which we experience when reading Proust or James or Robbe-Grillet. We read them to pass the time, to reassure ourselves that the world has meaning, and then we leave them and move on to the next book.

The first is by a Booker Prize winner, the second by a Nobel Prize winner, and the third is — by Philip Roth. But surely, you may say, Philip Roth is an experimental writer! He writes novels in which a character called Philip Roth appears; he writes novels with titles like The Counterlife, which play with the notion of possible other worlds. Is that not what Modernism is about?

If that is your reaction you have not really been taking in what I have been saying. Cervantes may suddenly suspend his narrative and go on to tell us that the manuscript broke off at this point; Proust may later reveal that what had been said earlier was wrong, and then later still that this new revelation was itself wrong. But it is not these things that make their novels modern. It is partly that they hunger for that ‘relentless contact’ which so haunted Stevens's Comedian and for a form of fiction which transcends the anecdotal — the dreariness of ‘the marquise went out at five’ — so that they are unwilling to settle for that fixed distance from the language they are using and the story they are telling, which is such a feature of the English writers I have just been looking at; and partly (the two are of course interconnected) that they understand that, in Wittgenstein's words, a certain language-game can no longer be played, and that this does not mean that we can simply shift the ground and find another language-game to play. For all Philip Roth's playfulness (a heavy-handed playfulness at the best of times), he never doubts the validity of what he is doing or his ability to find a language adequate to his needs. As a result his works may be funny, they may be thought-provoking, but only as good journalism can be funny and thought-provoking. Those of us who cannot find the words to make sense of our lives may look on in admiration but not feel, as we feel with Sophocles or Duras, that this speaks to us.

Writers of course only do what they can. They instinctively sense, or quite soon work out, what they can and can't do, and what they want and do not want to do (the two are not always the same). Even Dickens, that most self-assured of novelists, provides, in The Pickwick Papers, a fascinating glimpse into all the directions in which he thought for a moment he might go but in the end decided (not consciously, I'm sure) not to explore. Don Quixote hovers over the whole book of course, as it does not over later Dickens, and in Chapter 11 we even find him flirting with two of Poe's favourite genres, Gothic horror (the inset story of the madman's confessions) and the decipherment by the rational mind of a mysterious inscription. His comic take on the latter is evidence both of the English novel's robust common sense, its refusal to be taken in by the pseudo-profound, and of Dickens' rueful acknowledgement that the direction of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville can never be his. But if writers do what they are drawn to do, critics and cultural analysts need to do a little better. It is not Powell, Wilson and Murdoch, not our current Booker and Nobel Prize winners who give cause for concern, but the cultural climate that cannot see the difference between them and those writers who, in Kierkegaard's terms, sense vividly what is lacking and then endeavour to convey a sense of this lack, between works that illustrate and works that live.

An interesting example of our current confusions is the reception recently accorded to Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. Némirovsky was a Russian-born Jew living in France who wrote in French. The book was written in 1941–2, shortly before its author was deported and murdered. The manuscript surfaced in the early 1990s (it had been lying in her daughter's trunk all the time) and was published to some acclaim in France, but to nothing like the rapturous reception it received in Britain. Doris Lessing and the journalist Robert Fisk compared it to Tolstoy, and Victoria Glendinning, the distinguished biographer, described it as one of the most significant books of the last century.

The first part deals with the fall of France in May 1940 and the subsequent exodus from Paris. Here is an extract from the first pages:

In the Péricand household they listened in shocked silence to the evening news on the radio, but no one passed comment on the latest developments. The Péricands were a cultivated family; their traditions, their way of thinking, their middle-class, Catholic background, their ties with the Church (their eldest son Philippe Péricand was a priest), all these things made them mistrustful of the government of France. On the other hand Monsieur Péricand's position as curator of one of the country's national museums bound them to an administration that showered its faithful with honours and financial rewards.

A cat held a little piece of bony fish tentatively between its sharp teeth, he was afraid to swallow, but he couldn't bring himself to spit it out either.

Madame Péricand finally decided that only a male mind could explain with clarity such strange, serious events.

Némirovsky was a popular novelist of the day and she uses the clichés of the middlebrow novel without embarrassment, quickly filling in the background and sketching in her chosen representative family with the minimum of fuss, then cutting to the cat so as to convey the sense of ordinary life going on regardless of the great events that are unfolding. ‘The Péricands were’, ‘a cat held’ — we remember how Proust felt the chill of death enveloping him when he came across such a use of the past tense in Sainte-Beuve and elsewhere. A story is told and, as in the English extracts above, everything is done to make sure the inventing author is concealed, but the work lies inert on the page, without any life of its own.

The very poignancy of what happened in France in those days in May 1940 makes such stale narrative retellings all the more grotesque. Will it get better when we reach the actual fighting?

‘This is a disaster,’ thought Hubert with a sigh. ‘This is defeat! I am here, watching an enormous defeat, worse than Waterloo. We are all lost. I'll never see Mother or any of my family again. I'm going to die.’ He felt doomed, numb to everything around him, in a terrible state of exhaustion and despair. He didn't hear the order to retreat. He saw men running through the machine-gun fire. Rushing forward, he climbed over a wall into a garden where a baby's pram still stood in the shade. The battle wasn't over. Without tanks, without weapons, without ammunition, they were still trying to defend a few square metres of ground, a bridgehead, while from all directions the German conquerors were sweeping through France.

Though utter chaos is being described, the collapse of a world, Hubert has time to talk to himself in cadenced phrases, to draw comparisons from history. And notice how the baby's pram is conveniently waiting ‘in the shade’ to make the same sort of point as was made by the description of the cat in the first extract. This is run-of-the-mill middlebrow narrative, given poignancy by the subsequent history of its author and of the manuscript itself. It is this, I feel, that has allowed commentators, who secretly warm to this kind of writing but don't quite dare admit it, to grow ecstatic about the book with a clear conscience: the events it describes were terrible and dramatic, the author's fate was tragic, the fate of the manuscript miraculous, so it must be a great book. Contrast (even in my clumsy translation) a real writer tackling the same subject, Claude Simon's attempt to convey what was engulfing France and its army in that same moment of May 1940, seen through the eyes of a cavalry officer still, unbelievable as it might appear, as in 1914, astride a horse, in the face of the armoured onslaught of the Germans. Through the eyes, though, is wrong, itself a cliché: part of the power of Simon's novel comes from the fact that it is an anguished monologue as the narrator tries to explain to the woman in whose bed he is lying, and to explain to himself, what had just happened:

on this road which was nothing but a death-trap, that is, not war but murder pure and simple, a place where they cut you down before you could say ouch, the snipers calmly installed behind a hedge or a bush and taking all the time in the world to get you into their sights, in short a bloody shooting-gallery … which did not stop him from always holding himself stiff and upright in his saddle, as upright as though he'd been reviewing a march past at a 14 July parade and not in the middle of a retreat or rather a rout or rather a disaster in the midst of this kind of decomposition of everything as though not simply an army but the world itself in its entirety and not just its physical reality but the image the mind can make of it (but perhaps it was also the lack of sleep, the fact that for ten days we had practically not slept except in the saddle) … two or three times someone shouted out to him not to go on (how many I don't know, nor who they were: the wounded I imagine, or men hidden in the houses or in the ditch, or perhaps civilians who doggedly went on wandering about in incomprehensible fashion, dragging a battered suitcase after them or pushing one of those children's perambulators filled with vague belongings (not really belongings: just things, useless objects, simply no doubt so as not to wander empty-handed, having the illusion of taking with them, of possessing anything so long as it was personal: a torn pillow or an umbrella or the colour photograph of the grandparents — and so had the arbitrary notion of price, of treasure attached to it) as though what mattered was simply to walk, no matter in what direction…)

My instinct is to say: the difference between the two descriptions is not one of degree but of kind. It is not that Némirovsky is a lesser novelist than Simon, but that she is simply unaware of the inappropriateness of what she is doing, and one has to say that by her writing she makes ‘a written renunciation to all claim to be an author’. Or is this too apocalyptic? Is it simply that she is less good, less aware of what can and cannot be done, less aware of just what it is she wants to convey and therefore of the need to forge a style that will answer to that need?

Again, the question is not why she should have written as she did, but what has happened to our culture that serious and intelligent and well-read reviewers, not to speak of prize-winning novelists and distinguished biographers, many of whom have studied the poems of Eliot or the novels of Virginia Woolf at university, should so betray their calling as to go into ecstasies over books like Némirovsky's while, in their lifetimes and now after their deaths, ignoring the work of novelists like Claude Simon, Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard and Gert Hofmann.

To answer this would require a sociologist, perhaps, and another book. But a few points are worth making. The first is that though, as the example of Némirovsky shows, we are not dealing here with a purely English phenomenon, there is a greater resistance to or lack of awareness of Modernism right across the board in England than there is in the rest of Europe and even in America. Modernism has its friends over here but they are what the art historian T.J. Clark has called ‘false friends’, that is, those who defend a version of Modernism that is at once crude and superficial and therefore make it even more difficult to grasp what it truly is. A case in point is a recent book by the young English novelist Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert, which deals with many of the themes and authors I have been writing about here, but seems (to me) consistently to misrepresent and misunderstand them.

I have already had occasion to quote Thirlwell on Don Quixote, which he reads as ‘the juxtaposition of chivalrously good intentions with the prose of real life’. This, I suggested, is to misunderstand the questions raised by the novel about truth and authority and especially the authority of the novelist himself. For Cervantes, the question of what is ‘real life’ and how an artist today (his today and our today) can claim to deal with it is a fundamental concern; for Thirlwell it isn't an issue. Thus his misreading of Cervantes is symptomatic of his whole book. What he takes both the novel and Modernism to stand for, as far as I can see, is an unflinching realism which resolutely refuses the consolations of poetry and Romanticism. He quotes Flaubert: ‘I want a touch of bitterness in everything — always a jeer in the midst of our triumphs, desolation even in the midst of enthusiasm’, and remarks: ‘That last sentence is Flaubert's description of his new literary form: the novelistic scene, the anti-lyrical poem.’

The touchstone of this new form, a form which will at last ‘be true to the mess which is real life’, is the telling detail: the faint scar on a forehead, the stair carpet turned up at one corner. Thirlwell purrs with pleasure when he finds it in Diderot or Flaubert, in Tolstoy or Nabokov. It is the detail which shows up the impurity of grandiose feelings, which does the job of the novelist and the Modernist, deflating the sentimental, the romantic, the serious. ‘The most radical novels find comedy in places which people do not want to see as comic at all — like sex, or concentration camps.’ This is meant to be shocking but it is merely in bad taste. For Hitler and the camps seem actually to be immune to comedy, as the films Chaplin and Roberto Benigni devoted to those subjects, The Great Dictator and Life is Beautiful, merely serve to demonstrate. Even a great comic novel like Catch22 only works, as David Daiches once pointed out, because it is set at a moment in the Second World War when the Allied victory was already assured.

The notion that the new reality inhering in novels depends on their attention to detail fails to distinguish between ‘reality’ and what theoreticians call ‘the reality-effect’. In fact Thirlwell uses the two terms indiscriminately. But putting a faint scar on a face or alerting us to the fact that the carpet is turned up in the corner, like describing the smell of sweat and semen during the act of sex, no more anchors the novel to ‘reality’ than writing about stars in the eyes of the beloved. The novel is still made up of words, is still the product of a solitary individual, inventing scars, carpets, smells or stars. Of course we warm to a novelist who surprises us with his attention to detail, though as much or more depends on the way it is done, the style, rather than the detail itself, as when Dickens has Sam Weller say: ‘Look at these here boots — eleven pairs o'boots; and one shoe as b'longs to number six, with the wooden leg’, or Proust writes of Swann's arrival at a grand party and the footman's taking his hat and gloves: ‘As he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.’ Too often though, especially in Flaubert and the Goncourts, detail seems to be there as a way of convincing us (and the authors themselves?) that what we are dealing with is the stuff of life. Too often the attention to detail in modern novels reminds me of what Clement Greenberg once said of nineteenth-century academic painting: ‘It took talent — among other things — to lead art that far astray. Bourgeois society gave these talents a prescription, and they filled it — with talent.’

Thirlwell's failure to distinguish reality and the ‘reality-effect’ is symptomatic of his — and his English colleagues' — failure to grasp what was obvious to every artist I have been looking at in the course of this book, that what is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claim to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing. This is not an issue for Thirlwell. ‘The problem of living in Brazil, or Cuba, or Russia, and wanting to write a novel’, he says grandly, ‘is the same problem as living in France, or Britain, and wanting to write a novel. The problem is universal: it is about finding a way of describing real life.’

Thirlwell and his mentor Craig Raine, for all their waving of Modernist credentials, seem as confident as Jane Austen that the ground they stand on is solid. What I have tried to suggest in the course of this book is that, for some artists at least since the time of Dürer, and for any serious artist since 1789, the ground has been anything but solid. And that if this is the case then it is not enough to examine the surface of a work, to admire the artist's skill in doing this or that. What we need to do is to see it from the point of view of the artist — not of course Picasso or Stravinsky or Eliot the man but the maker. The reason for this is that the work itself asks for such a reading. Don Quixote, like Prufrock or Kafka's ‘The New Advocate’, is not just ‘about’ the juxtaposition of romantic beliefs and the world's reality; it recognises itself as implicated in an impossible struggle to reconcile these two, and it implicates the reader.

But our English pseudo-Modernists cannot or will not see this. They pride themselves on their realism, which means their beady-eyed refusal to be taken in by highfalutin language and all the temptations of Romanticism. Love is not about stars in your eyes, it is about the itch of sex; death is not a consummation devoutly to be wished but a dingy and degrading experience; art is there not to make you rejoice but to rub your nose in the dirt. As well as thanking, in the course of his book, his old tutor Craig Raine, Adam Thirlwell thanks Julian Barnes, and Barnes's latest book, Nothing to be Frightened of, perfectly exemplifies this mindset. Shocked by the death of his parents and his realisation that, at sixty, he has not all that much time to go himself, Barnes spends 250 pages telling himself and us how frightened he is at the prospect. What is terrifying about old age is the loss of control, and this is particularly difficult for Barnes because he seems to have inherited his mother's need to be in control at all times and never to be taken in by sentiment, though he recognises the ambiguous roots of such feelings. ‘I was an idealistic adolescent’, he writes, ‘who swerved easily into suspicion when confronted with life's realities. My kicks were those of a disheartened Romantic.’ This is insightful, but he doesn't follow it up. Rather, he seems happy to accept himself as a clear-eyed realist. ‘I hope, Barnes’, one of his teachers says to him, ‘that you're not one of those bloody back-row cynics.’ ‘Me, sir? Cynic, sir? Oh no — I believe in baa-lambs and hedgerow blossoms and human goodness, sir’, the grown-up Barnes responds across the years. But this kind of smartness soon palls. It's bright but it tries too hard to shock, like the joke which he likes so much he repeats it: ‘Alzheimer's? Forget it.’ Barnes, like Thirlwell and Raine, prides himself on his realism, which he likes to think brings him closer to his beloved Flaubert. But the trouble with this English brand of Realism is that it yields an impoverished view of life and leaves Barnes prey to all the fears he has striven to repress.

Reading Barnes, like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. Ah, they will say, but that is just what we wanted, to free you of your illusions. But I don't believe them. I don't buy into their view of life. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world. It is sad to see this has infected a writer from the next generation like Adam Thirlwell. All of them ultimately come out of Philip Larkin's overcoat, and clearly their brand of writing and the nature of their vision speaks to the English, for they are among the most successful writers of their generation. I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock. We don't find it in Irish or American culture, or in French or German or Italian culture. The English have always been both sentimental and ironical, but there was never that sense of prep-school boys showing off, which is the taste these writers leave on my tongue.

How has it come about? I would venture three points. ‘Like most Victorian novelists’, writes John Bayley, ‘[Dickens'] sense of other places and people was founded on fear and distrust. The Boz of the Sketches seems to hate and fear almost everything even though it fascinates him.’ But this is something that antedates the Victorians. As Linda Colley has shown in her fine book, Britons, from the early eighteenth century on Britons defined themselves in opposition to others, in particular to the large, aggressive Popish nations of Spain and France: Britons are different; Britons never will be slaves, to other nations or to the ideas of other nations. To this must be added the fact that England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one. Though there is something appealing in the resolute determination not to be taken in evinced by Larkin and Amis in the face of European Modernism, something that reminds me of the Just William books I so enjoyed as a child, it soon begins to pall. Taken as a cultural rallying-cry it is little short of disastrous.

Second, and paradoxically, ours is an age which, while being deeply suspicious of the ‘pretentious’, worships the serious and the ‘profound’, so that large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia, or historical novels with a ‘majestic sweep’, are automatically considered more worthy of attention than the novels of, say, P.G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinget.

Finally, ours is the first generation in which High Art and Fashion have married in a spirit joyously welcomed by both parties. When the speakers at major literary festivals are for the most part politicians, television personalities or foreign correspondents; when we are enjoined to buy three books for the price of two in our major bookshops and a serious newspaper like the Independent offers its readers the chance, as a Christmas bonanza, to gatecrash a book launch of their choice with one of the paper's literary critics, we have truly arrived at an age where art and showbiz are one and the same.

In his delightful novel, Rates of Exchange, Malcolm Bradbury touches on the first of my points when he has his East European magical realist femme fatale, Katya Princip, explain his own history to the bemused British Council lecturer, Dr Petworth:

Oh, Mr. Petwit, I have told you. You are really not a character in the world historical sense. You come from a little island with water all round. When we were oppressed and occupied and when we fought and died, and there were mad mullahs and pogroms against the Jews, what did you have? Queen Victoria and industrial revolution and Alfred Lord Tennyson. We sent Karl Marx to explain everything, but you didn't notice. What did you do with him? Put him in Highgate cemetery, some would say the best place, I know. You never had history, just some customs.

This is so brilliant because it is at the same time an acute assessment of how England relates to Europe, a sending up of what ‘Europe’ in this equation stands for, and a covert thumbs up to traditional English ways. For who, reading this, would not opt for customs rather than history, for Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson rather than mad mullahs and pogroms? But is that really the choice? You cannot escape from history with a few comic phrases. As historians, not all Marxist, have been pointing out for rather a long time now, naturally Britain has had a history, but it has preferred to ignore that history. Perhaps the best one can say is that it has had the luxury of not having that history thrust upon it as most of the European nations have.

So many English novelists today confess to wanting to write like Dickens that it might be thought that the difference between England and France and Germany is that we have no great model to look back to, who might give us an understanding of what it might mean to have a European sensibility, that is, to be as English as they come and yet have a real historical awareness. But there is one, as I have suggested: Wordsworth. Unfortunately within English culture he has been consistently misrepresented as either a bucolic poet or a political reactionary. This is a travesty. He occupies the same place in English literary history as, say, Hölderlin and Baudelaire occupy in German and French: someone with all the powers of the Romantic poet at his fingertips but aware of the deep paradoxes of his calling in an age when art itself is in question. Wordsworth, James, Eliot and Virginia Woolf all flourished on these shores. We need to go back and try to understand what they were up to as writers, not dismiss them as reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.

Naturally I think the story I have just finished telling is the true one. At the same time I recognise that there are many stories and that there is no such thing as

the

true story, only more or less plausible explanations, stories that take more or less account of the facts. I am aware too that these stories are

sites of contestation

; more is at stake than how we view the past. That is what is wrong with positivist accounts of Modernism, which purport simply to ‘tell the story’, like Peter Gay's

Modernism

These make a show of impartiality but are of course just as partial as any other account.

What I characterised at the start as the prevalent English view, epitomised by Waugh, Larkin and Amis, that Modernism was just a blip in the serene history of the arts, might appear at first sight to be not very different from Gay's position, but it is in fact profoundly different, for it is deeply polemical, even if the polemic is fuelled by anxiety rather than anything else. A slightly more sophisticated version of this is the one espoused by those I have just called, borrowing the term from T.J. Clark, the false friends of Modernism. This sees Modernism, in a very English way, as a Good Thing because it debunks Romanticism and idealism. Modernism, according to this story, is the equivalent of Realism, a view which allows those who espouse it to feel both that they are in the vanguard and that they are upholding essential English values.

The opposite but equally misleading view is the one taken by certain artists in particular, that there is nothing of any interest in the arts before Duchamp. Thus the American artist Joseph Kossuth claims that ‘As far as art is concerned, Van Gogh's paintings aren't worth any more than his palette is’, and that ‘all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually’. Parallel to this is the view of the critic who is only interested in the art of the past to the degree that in it are to be found hints of the Modernism to come, a view that even so intelligent a critic as Barthes at times comes dangerously close to espousing.

Despite such extreme claims as those of Kossuth, the fact remains that it is in the domain of art rather than literature and music that the most interesting and sophisticated explorations of Modernism are to be found, as my quotes from Joseph Koerner, Rosalind Krauss and Thierry de Duve in the course of this book demonstrate. I think this has to do with the fact that literature is too embroiled with the world while music can only properly be discussed by those with the technical know-how; painting, on the other hand, is ‘purer’ than literature, so that one can see more clearly what is at stake in painterly choices, while being, in principle at any rate, accessible for anyone to comment on.

The most powerful exponent of the purist view of Modernism was the New York art critic Clement Greenberg in the middle years of the twentieth century. ‘I identify Modernism’, he wrote,

with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency, that began with … Kant … The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline to criticize the discipline itself — not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.

Thus art is seen as searching for its essence, for that which is only art and nothing else — for all else is frippery, ‘mere’ convention. In this story all art is seen as moving towards abstraction, and then finally to Abstract Expressionism, New York style, as inevitably as history moves towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. The trouble with this is that it is deeply puritanical, and behaves towards the past rather as Mary Douglas accused Protestantism of behaving towards sacred history: it certainly has a vision of history, but it is a thin and selective one. Here, for example, is Greenberg on Mondrian: ‘His pictures … are no longer windows in the wall but islands radiating clarity, harmony and grandeur — passion mastered and cooled, a difficult struggle resolved, unity imposed on diversity. Space outside them is transformed by their presence.’ This says something about Mondrian and helps us look at his pictures. It does so largely by means of a stark contrast between his pictures and all those that preceded them: they were windows let into the wall; his are islands of purity placed on the wall. That, in a way, is beautifully put, and illuminating (it occurs in a moving obituary of the painter). But after a while we start to ask: Are all pictures before Mondrian ‘windows’? And, even if they are, are not the differences between them, between the windows of Leonardo and Rembrandt, say, or those of Vermeer and Cézanne, more important than the fact that they are all ‘windows’, that all of them ask us to look at some form of representation of the world isolated within the frame? Perhaps the answer is no, but Greenberg would have to do a lot more work to persuade us.

Thierry de Duve's book on Duchamp and Modernism, from which I have had occasion to quote, is similarly absolute, though more sophisticated. He brings out well how Duchamp's art as it evolved in the second decade of the twentieth century was aimed at subverting the pretensions of the pioneers of abstraction, especially Kandinsky, as much as the prejudices of the traditionalists. He quotes a lyrical passage from Kandinsky's Reminiscences, which ends: ‘And then comes the imperious brush, conquering [the canvas] gradually first here, then there, employing all its native energy, like a European colonist who with axe, spade, hammer, saw, penetrates the virgin jungle where no human foot has trod, bending it to conform to his will.’ And he comments:

The text presents the tube of paint, then the palette, next the virgin canvas, and finally the brush, not as the tools of the painter.. but as metonyms of potential yet accomplished paintings. But the tube of paint, the palette, the canvas and the brush are also the protagonists of an erotic saga which the rest of the text then unfurls, with dubious lyricism infused with machismo and colonialism.

De Duve rightly contrasts this with Duchamp's sending up of the colonialist enterprise in scattered remarks throughout his life, which he compares to that of Raymond Roussel in Impressions d'Afrique, but which could also be compared to Apollinaire's magnificent Les Mamelles de Tirésias. ‘For Kandinsky's abstract expressionism, for Malevich's suprematism, for Mondrian's neoplasticism and for all the purisms that sprang between 1912 and 1914 from the idea of pure colour,’ he goes on, ‘Duchamp substituted eroticism, which, as he very seriously explained to Pierre Cabanne, he wanted to turn into a new artistic “ism”.’ There is, however, nothing very macho about Duchamp's eroticism, as we have seen, since the poor Bachelors never get to the Bride and have to be satisfied with what Duchamp, commenting on his chocolate-grinding machine, termed ‘olfactory masturbation’.

De Duve uses Duchamp to throw doubt upon the enterprise of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, but also upon that of a later idealist like Beuys, whom he rightly sees as dreaming, like Novalis, of an ideal world replacing the real one. But of course he also uses Duchamp to throw doubt upon the whole notion of a tradition which, unaware that its foundations have been sapped, goes on acting as if it were imbued with authority, the authority to say what art is good and what art is bad; the authority to award prizes and to decide what art will be in and what out; the authority, finally, to decide what is art and what is not (is a bicycle wheel art? an enamel urinal?). Yet de Duve is no Duchamp. He does not quite know when to keep his mouth shut or how to speak only in riddles. With his back to the wall, so to speak, he is as prescriptive as Greenberg: ‘When push comes to shove’, he admits towards the end of his long book, ‘Rodchenko is an artist and Bonnard is not.’

A painter friend of mine tells how, when he was a student at the Slade in the mid-1960s, Greenberg's was the view of art history with which they were confronted: Modernism went from Manet to Pollock via Cézanne, Cubism and abstraction. This explained everything that needed explaining in the eyes of the tutors, but it left no room for twentieth-century artists who interested my friend, such as Bonnard, Balthus, Beckman and Bacon, to stick only to the Bs. A decade or two later the scene was so dominated by Duchamp that the story would be very different: it would go from Seurat to Duchamp to Pop Art to all the varieties of conceptual art now being practised. There would still be no room for the four Bs. The question is: how to tell a story compelling enough yet supple enough to contain both Mondrian and Bonnard, both Schoenberg and Satie, both Kafka and Queneau?

One recent critic who has managed to do just that, it seems to me, is T.J. Clark in his magnificent Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. Clark rightly recognises that modernity is bound up with disenchantment, which is linked to secularism. He quotes Hegel in the Aesthetics: ‘Art, considered in light of its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.’ This does not of course mean that art ceases after 1820, only that its ability effortlessly to articulate the world has gone. Viewing Modernism through the prism of Hegel's chapter on the Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology, he argues that for art to remain meaningful in these changed circumstances it has to accept what he calls contingency, and I have called arbitrariness. Art's being able to continue, he argues, has depended on its being able to make Hegel's dictum in the Asesthetics ‘specific and punctual’. ‘That is to say, on fixing the moment of art's last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible nonetheless.’ This he calls, invoking Beckett, the ‘can't go on, will go on’ syndrome. And he understands that once the Hegelian view is accepted technique will always be seen as ‘a kind of shame’, while at the same time artists, desperate for something stable beneath their feet, will tend, like Flaubert, to fetishize the notion of the sheer hard practical and technical work involved in making art.

One of the great strengths of Clark's book is that he understands (as I perhaps have been slow to do here) that even if there is a single story of Modernism it cannot be told in purely linear fashion — hence his subtitle. Writing about episodes in a history of Modernism, he is free to explore a whole web of stories rather than trace any linear sequence, and thus to restore a sense of history as being made — by artists, by events — rather than simply lived out, that the blindalleys down which artists have gone at certain periods of their lives are as important as their achieved successes, and that different responses are called for in pre-First World War France, in post-Revolutionary Russia and in America after the Second World War.

Though I have borrowed the notion of the false friends of Modernism from him to describe those who purport to be its champions but who in fact distort and mislead, I have applied it to a different group of people. For Clark the false friends are those like Greenberg and Herbert Read who, in the 1950s, were Modernism's most passionate advocates.

Even at the time it was chilling to see Greenberg's views become an orthodoxy. What was deadly, above all, was the picture of artistic continuity and self-sufficiency built into so much modernist writing: the idea that modern art could be studied as a passing-on of the same old artistic flame (…) from Manet to Monet to Seurat to Matisse to Miró…

He would have found a parallel in literary studies during that same period, though rarely articulated with the passion and elegance of Greenberg and Read. There Eliot, Proust and Virginia Woolf were co-opted into an essentially Christian discourse which stressed the redeeming powers of art and so, in like manner, blunted the anguish and often despair of these writers, and thus distorted their achievement. Today such readings seem not merely inadequate, but quaint. On the other hand, as I have suggested, Modernism is never short of false friends, whether in the guise of fervent American deconstructionists or coolheaded English poets and novelists.

One of the great strengths of Clark's book is the intensity with which he questions the art he is dealing with: it matters. As a result his book is full of brilliant aperçus. Two that chimed particularly with my own explorations here are, first, his comparison at one point of Pissarro's Two Young Peasant Women of 1892 with the exactly contemporary popular painting by Jules Breton, June. The latter presents us with an idealised scene of country folk at rest for us to gaze at in comfort: this is June in the countryside as we would like to imagine it. In contrast, in the Pissarro ‘we could worry endlessly about the peasants' actual poses, and the distance between them, and where the ground plane is; but of course the painting does not offer us sufficient clues to answer these kinds of questions, and does not mean to. It means us to be in limbo. We have to come in close — too close to get the whole picture.’ This is precisely the kind of contrast I was trying to establish between Némirovsky's treatment of the events of May 1940 and Claude Simon's. The difference is that no-one today would make any claim for Jules Breton but Némirovsky is compared to Tolstoy.

The second passage that struck a particular chord with me was Clark's discussion of what Picasso was up to in the summer of 1910 at Cadaqués. Picasso felt that the work he did in that period was a failure, not, Clark suggests, because he didn't get very far in his explorations, but because he got too far:

Picasso was the last person to want, or perhaps to see how, to pursue the Cadaqués solution to its logical conclusion (Mondrian being the first). Therefore he changed course. He made his way back to the world of phenomena. He put together a great counterfeit of everything that had, at Cadaqués, evaporated under his brush.

I have followed Krauss in seeing the moment in which Picasso looked into the abyss of abstraction and then drew back as coming two years later, in the autumn of 1912, but the precise moment is not important, and the fact that Clark comes to the problem from so very different a starting point only reinforces my feeling that the shape of the argument is essentially correct and, again, can be applied across the arts: I suggested that Robbe-Grillet, faced with a similar moment, slipped over into the world of abstraction (which was also, for him as for Duchamp and his friends in 1913, the world of both commercial assembly-line production and of pop).

Where I part company with Clark is in his nostalgia for an art that will be both accepting of its contingency and yet public. That is why David means so much to him, and the work that Malevich and Lissitzky did together in Vitebsk in the early years of the Russian Revolution. That is why Cubism, that joint venture of Picasso and Braque, is seen by him as one of the heroic moments of Modernism. It is to this idea that he, invoking Wallace Stevens in his title, bids a reluctant farewell. Though rightly suspicious of the danger of being ‘dazzled by old men musing on the days of their youth’, he quotes what Picasso is reputed to have said to Françoise Gilot about those years and how they came to an end: ‘As soon as we saw that the collective adventure was a lost cause, each one of us had to find an individual adventure. And the individual adventure always goes back to the one which is the archetype of our times: that is, van Gogh's — an essentially solitary and tragic adventure.’

Clark is profoundly suspicious, in what sometimes seems to me a very Marxist way and sometimes a very English way (let us say an English Marxist way), of what Walter Benjamin called ‘aura’, the resonance of a work of art or a fragment of the world at a particular moment, for each of us. He calls it ‘coquetting with the unknowable’, while Julian Barnes would call it ‘believing in baa-lambs and hedgerow-blossoms and human goodness’. Not for them Wordsworth's ‘deep inland murmur’ or Proust's sudden access of joy at eating the madeleine or feeling the uneven paving-stones beneath his feet. My own temperament and background being different, I am deeply moved by those passages. I think of Modernism as that paradox, a tradition of those who have no tradition. And it does not seem to me that this is wholly tragic. Merleau-Ponty's reflections on Cézanne and Francis Bacon's remarks to David Sylvester help point the way: neither illustration nor abstraction but the daily struggle of a dialogue with the world, without any assurance that what one will produce will have value because there is nothing already there against which to test it, but with the possibility always present that something new, something genuine, something surprising, will emerge.

And here Rosalind Krauss's explorations of Picasso and pastiche become seminal. Her argument, if I understand it correctly (for she likes to play with possibilities rather than committing herself to a viewpoint, feeling, rightly, that too often to pin down is to distort), is this: Adorno, in his Philosophy of Modern Music, so presented his case that Schoenberg was seen as the necessary culmination of a century of musical striving, while Stravinsky, his great rival, was seen as having sold out to fashion and bourgeois comfort in the years immediately following the First World War, with the invention of a ‘classicism’ which merely plundered the past, magpie fashion, for whatever would suit his current needs, producing in the process music that was superficially attractive but was in the end merely opportunist. In the same way, Krauss suggests, John Berger makes the case against Picasso, arguing that when, after the war, his art no longer reflected social conditions, it lost itself in a flurry of brilliantly executed pastiches. In both cases, interestingly, Cocteau is the social butterfly who, in real life, leads the artist to betray his calling. But, asks Krauss, what if pastiche were not something modern art could simply eradicate in an access of purity but its dark shadow, the trap into which it was and is always likely to fall if it is to remain true to its calling? It is the purists like Adorno and Berger who have got it wrong, she implies; we cannot simply slice through Modernism in this way; each artist, each work even, must be judged separately and in its own terms, within the larger story of which each is a part. This means that argument and disagreement will never end, which is as it should be. I may feel that Chagall grew soft and vacuous after fifteen or so glorious years, but others may disagree. Our disagreement will have in the end to recognise what we each of us take the story of Modernism and even the story of art, or perhaps even the story of the world, to be, but none of these entities is fixed. They could always persuade me or I them, or further reading or viewing will persuade me, that I need to rethink. Randall Jarrell, in a famous essay on Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems, recounted how, when Stevens was publishing the great poems of his late middle years, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, he, Jarrell, had taken him to task for becoming verbose and over self-conscious, but that now, with the evidence of the late poems before him, he had to admit that those miraculous works would never have come into being had it not been for the poetry of the middle years. In other words, the poet knew best, even if what he knew was hidden even from himself. The same may be true of Hockney; only time will tell. But of course that does not mean that the critic who admired the early Hockney should not lament what he sees, at present, as the taking of too many wrong turns, even if in the end he has to eat his words. And what does ‘in the end’ mean here? Even death may not bring an end to debate. Mallarmé can talk of eternity changing Poe into the being he always, essentially, was, but how we evaluate Poe (or Bacon or Stockhausen) will never be resolved once and for all. Donne remained an interesting minor poet till Eliot showed us how to read him.

There cannot, then, be a definitive ‘story’ of Modernism. We cannot step outside it, much as we would like to, and pronounce with authority on it. We can only try to persuade people to see it from our point of view. And we all have a parti pris. It was because Eliot was groping for a certain sort of poetry himself that he championed Donne in place of Milton; because Boulez composes a certain sort of music that he champions Debussy and Varèse (and Mallarmé); because my friend seeks to paint certain kinds of paintings that he wishes to fight for Bonnard and Beckman. A tradition is a living thing, and each major artist, as Eliot understood, leads to its reconfiguration, however minutely.

Krauss's admirable openness in relation to Picasso does not appear to extend to other modern artists. Her exploration of just why Picasso resisted abstraction, which seems to suggest that she sympathises with him, takes on a different colouring when seen in the context of her other critical writing on Modernism, which is concerned mainly with abstraction and photography, and appears to have little time for artists who have struggled to remain at the crossroads of figuration and abstraction, such as Bonnard or Bacon. My own ‘story’, as I have tried to present it here, discovering what it was as I went along, is that only an art which recognises the pitfalls inherent in both realism and abstraction will be really alive. That is why I warm to the novels of Perec and Bernhard more than to Finnegans Wake or the novels of Updike and Roth, to the pictures of Bacon and early Hockney more than to Pollock or Tracey Emin, to the music of Birtwistle and Kurtág more than to Cage or Shostakovitch.

But I realise that this may be largely because of who and what I am. The late R.B. Kitaj compared Cézanne's rootedness in his native Provence to what he called the ‘diasporist’ (horrible term) imagination of the uprooted Picasso, and he suggested that at some deep level Modernism and the diasporist imagination go together. This may be true if we have a flexible enough notion of diaspora to accept that an apparently rooted Frenchman like Bonnard or Englishwoman like Virginia Woolf could also have created a ‘diasporic’ art — and then one would want to look at Bonnard's relocation to the South of France in the latter part of his life as a kind of exile into which he went with his problematic wife, and at Virginia Woolf's sense of herself as a woman excluded from a male-dominated society. To that extent the Marxist critique of Modernism I mentioned at the start may have a point: Modernism may not be a consequence of the crisis of the bourgeoisie but it may be the product of a general European rootlessness in the wake of the French and Industrial revolutions. All will then depend on whether we see such rootlessness as pathological or as giving those who are imbued with it a certain vantage point, allowing them to see things which might otherwise have remained hidden. In other words, are we to see our own history, that which makes us what we are, as something which blinkers us or which sharpens our vision? This is, in itself, of course, a very Modernist question.