Kenner on Modernism

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: