Any account of modernism is bound to be incomplete, and incommensurable with others that are just as good. Hugh Kenner’s, as delivered in a 1983 lecture,1 is a spin on the by-now familiar story of margin-becoming-center:
Since Chaucer, the domain of English literature had been a country, England. Early in the twentieth century its domain commenced to be a language, English.
For Kenner, the greatest modernist writers in English were from America or Ireland, and were international in outlook: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Americans living in the “vortex” of London, filling their poems with foreign words; James Joyce living in Europe, and William Carlos Williams living in America, sending their work to London for publication on the island of Great Britain. (When Eliot moved to London, he “brought Prufrock in his luggage.”) Kenner implies that, in the old times, a literature was tied to a people. If you were English, you were, in virtue of the cultural knowledge accompanying that identity, well-positioned to appreciate English literature. In the modernist age, this fell apart: Joyce’s Ulysses, the central paradigm, is a novel written by an Irishman, set in Dublin, but drawing on “alien canons of which his systematic parallel with a Greek epic is probably the least radical.” Ulysses’s “sense of what business a large work of fiction ought to be about is continuously alien to English expectations.” Similarly, British critics missed Williams’s importance because “his American-ness, the cisatlantic tang of his cadence” eluded them: “American literature was no longer English literature that had happened to get written somewhere else.” (“Cisatlantic tang”: that’s good. Kenner was Canadian.)
Technological innovation is also part of Kenner’s modernism (as, surely, it would be of anyone’s). The automobile ended “the domination of the railroad,” but it was not just other technologies that were made obsolete:
Wireless, transmitting sounds and later pictures, was to terminate printed fiction and live drama as the normative media for entertainment; the play, the short story, in part the novel, became “art forms,” art being the name we give an abandoned genre.
Marx Max Plank’s discovery of quantum mechanical phenomena upended old certainties about physics, and finding parallels in literature is all too tempting:
Mysterious energies, sudden transitions, are as congenial to the twentieth-century mind as they would have been unthinkable to our great-grandfathers. It is pointless to ask whether Eliot, who made Plank-like transition in The Waste Land, did so on any scientific analogy...The life of the mind in any age coheres thanks to shared assumptions both explicit and tacit, between which lines of causality may not be profitably traceable.
I guess you can get away with such borderline Sheldrakean morphic resonance if you’re a literary critic.
The limits of Kenner’s modernism are evident in its omission of, among others, Virginia Woolf (“an English novelist of manners, writing village gossip from a village called Bloomsbury”); William Faulkner; and Wallace Stevens (“His touch is uncertain; fully half his work is rhythmically dead”). Writing from Emerson’s old stomping grounds, I’ll also remind everyone that American literature stopping being “English literature written somewhere else” a while before 1910. But these may be forgiven in return for Kenner’s insight into those he canonizes, particularly Ezra Pound, who himself thought that English poetry, to be “made new,” needed infusions from other traditions:
Pound discovered that the way for a poet to write the poem he wants to write, life having prompted some chemistry of desire, may be to co-opt an alien precursor whose sense of the world, in wholly foreign words, may guide English words today.
My favorite Pound poem is a translation, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”:
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chōkan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever, and forever. Why should I climb the look out? At sixteen you departed You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Chō-fū-Sa.
See also: Romanticism II: Art and Politics.
“The Making of the Modernist Canon.”
“Marx Plank”? Is that a modernist joke?
Modernism in literature will be how we consume the literature. As reading (and listening) on phones continues to grow, it will change how we write, with shorter, punchier sentences and paragraphs. Shorter and punchier is generally considered better anyway, so it's a win all around.