review

Tony Pinkney

Militants of Creativity
How does one write about artistic modernism without simply reproducing its own forms, styles and devicesall the way from the locally
minute to the massively architectonic? Raymond Williams, in his fine
Introduction to the collection Visions and Blueprints,1 opens the question
of the politics of modernism and the avant-garde with the following
vignette: In January 1912 a torchlight procession, headed by members
of the Stockholm Workers Commune, celebrated the sixty-third birthday of August Strindberg. Red flags were carried and revolutionary
anthems were sung. This, surely, is an Imagist poem in its own right,
an instance of cultural theory as haiku, offering in its single, compelling
visual image to present an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time (Pound) or to hand over sensations bodily (Hulme)
or to defamiliarize our automatized perceptions of the relations of the
political and the modernistic (as Russian Formalism might put it). And
as with local texture, so with structure; for in its overall organization,
ranging restlessly over a multiplicity of nations, cities, movements
and media, Visions and Blueprints reincarnates another major modernist
genrethe encyclopaedia. As nineteenth-century Hellenism metamorphoses into twentieth-century modernism, it loses the knack of totalizing
the stray, truculent fragments of modernity into significant order, of
alchemically converting an ordinary self into a best one (to borrow
Matthew Arnolds terms). The impulse to totalize remains, but the
philosophers stone that might pull it off is lost, and it must therefore
assume more lowly, provisional forms. If we are unable to put the
scattered jigsaw back together, we can at least make sure its pieces are
not lost, so that someone someday somewhere might do so: the modernist
becomes collector, and the text an inventory or encyclopaedia, scooping
in the whole history of English prose styles (the Oxen of the Sun
chapter of Ulysses), or the whole range of European argots, dialects and
national languages (The Waste Land), and rarely ending up less than a
thousand pages long (Pounds Cantos). And Visions and Blueprints,
ranging from Caligari to Caudwell, Trotsky to Turkey, Zhdanov to
Zionism, creates a recognizably modernist effect of exhilaration and
vertigo.
Within modernism, minimalism and gigantism strangely coincide. Ezra
Pound wrote both the shortest and the longest poems of the movement,
and if Samuel Becketts late plays last about thirty-five seconds (Breath),
his The Unnameable babbles compulsively for one hundred and twenty
pages and could in principle chatter for thousands more (I cant go on,
1

Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe,
edited by Edward Timms and Peter Collier, with an Introduction by Raymond Williams (Manchester
University Press, 1988), 29.50.

124

Ill go on). A similar paradox exists within modernist works as well as

between them, in a disjunction between local reading experience and
total organization. Moment by moment shock effectsthe leaps and
lurches of Leopold Blooms stream of consciousness, the shifts and
slippages of voice, place and episode in The Waste Landcontrast
strangely with the monumental stasis of the underlying structural
principles of these works. If Webster, in Eliots Whispers of Immortality, saw the skull beneath the skin, it doesnt take all that much critical
acumen to x-ray through the seductive flesh of Joyces novel or Eliots
magnum opus to a positively sclerous pattern beneath: Homer for Joyce,
The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance for Eliot. Such texts are
in a strict sense indeterminate: it remains impossible ever to say either
that local detail and Bergsonian flux subvert such stately synchronic
structures or that the latter announce a decisive rappel lordre to the
shards and orts that circulate frenetically about them. Visions and
Blueprints, which is a kind of modernist analytic of modernism, repeats
this structure tooit being far from clear whether the wealth of
detailed historical argument is ultimately brought to book around a few
commanding themes.
The editors of this collection offer us only limited help here. In the
Preface Edward Timms informs us that Eliot and Pound developed
right-wing sympathies which distort their poetic achievement. But such
sympathies inform rather than deform, constitute rather than castrate,
the poetry. The story of modernisms relation to politics is not that of
a theological Fall, with the Eden of the aesthetic being exchanged for the
burning plain of history; it is more a matter of ideological commitments
implicit in the verse from the start being later cashed out as overt
political stances. The problem arises, Timms remarks in his essay on
Treason of the Intellectuals? Benda, Benn and Brecht, when the poet
begins to confuse vision with blueprint, poetic image with political
programme. Far from advancing the politics of modernism argument,
this takes it back some twenty years to Frank Kermodes position in
The Sense of an Ending where, alarmed by the political excesses of the
men of 1914, Kermode sought to build a saving irony or Wallace
Stevens-inspired self-consciousness into modernist myth-making. No
road through to actionthe Symbolist dictum that he had finely
demystified in the name of a democracy or commonalty of the means
of discourse in Romantic Image, here found itself nailed firmly back into
place again. It is towards just such a transcendentalist cul-de-sac that
Timms seems to lead us when he remarks that Julien Bendas merits
are still not fully recognized. If this means that Benda may have had a
deep but still largely unremarked impact on some strands of highclassicist modernism, then we can agree;2 but if it means that Benda is
of the slightest use in thinking the relation of politics and modernism,
then we must reject the claim. For we hardly need to embrace Bendas
religion of disinterestedness to endorse Timmss rather modest point
that political literature should be more fun to read than a party tract or
Volume Two of Capital. Timmss co-editor, Peter Collier, at least does
not shackle himself with such unfortunate allies. He raises perhaps the
2 See my Nationalism and the Politics of Style: Samuel Beckett and Julien Benda, Literature and
History, forthcoming 1988.

125

key issue, valuably assembling much material from Gramsci, Trotsky

and Breton on the question of the relation of modernism to Leninism,
even if he does not then go on to press the argument home.
In Visions and Blueprints, as in Ulysses, local texture proves richer than
overall narrative structure; and this book contains many suggestive
detailed case studies. Helga Geyer-Ryan subtly traces the development
of Walter Benjamins philosophy of history, while Judy Davies dismisses
glib equations of Futurism and Fascism by probing the complex and
contradictory early politics of both movements. Far from simply constituting the aesthetic storm-troopers of a vicious counter-revolution, the
Futurists (at least until 1923) adhered to Fascism only as long as its
policies retained traces of a left-wing provenance. Michael Minden
meditates on The Politics of the Silent Cinema, contrasting Dr Caligari
and Battleship Potemkin, while Elsa Strietman probes the paradoxes at the
heart of De Stijl: how could these cultists of counter-nature, dedicated to
aesthetic abstraction, austerity, minimalism, at the same time harbour
aspirations towards social reform through the reform of art and the
environment? It was, of course, Theo van Doesburgs interventions in
Weimar in 1921 which shook Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus out of
their Expressionist-medievalist lethargy into the functionalist machineaesthetics of the Bauhauss Dessau period. Neither the Bauhaus nor the
related case of Russian Constructivism features in Visions and Blueprints.
Yet in these two movements above all the modernist project left the
garrets and ateliers, and sought to invest the sites and rhythms of
everyday lifethereby satisfying Peter Brgers theoretical requirements
for the category of the avant-garde.3 If the shortage of materials in the
young Soviet Union meant that many of the most daring Constructivist
projects didnt get beyond designs and models, the Dessau Bauhaus,
working in a period of relative German prosperity, contributed seminally to what John Willett in his The New Sobriety has persuasively
called something like an entire new civilization; and its absence from
Visions and Blueprints leaves a major gap at the very centre of the book.
If we seek for a second time to shift from a polyphony of national
traditions to a general thematic architecture, it is on the contributions
of Raymond Williams that we shall come to restwritten as these are
with a qualitatively deeper political seriousness than their neighbouring
studies. Indeed, it seems likely that these two powerful essaysIntroduction: the Politics of the Avant-garde and Theatre as a Political
Forumwill become key items in a posthumous revaluation of the
overall curve of Williamss own thought: not Raymond Williams on
modernism so much as Raymond Williams as modernist. It has often
been alleged that Williams evinced a strange reticence about modernism, that he had a blindspot towards it; and this imputation of a
Lukcs-like addiction to realism has been coupled with other key
reservations about his workthat he endorsed a notion of Englishness
or the nation with which, say, contemporary Black socialists have major
problems, or that there is a streak of moral puritanism in his work
which comes through most forcefully in, precisely, his own realist
novels. Such criticisms, however, sound increasingly remote and
3

See Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Michael Shaw, Manchester 1984.

126

otioseremote because the Williams who has mattered to many of us

is characterized by none of these qualities (or defects), otiose because
that Raymond Williams, our Raymond Williams, has directed precisely
such criticisms at his own earlier work. The issue here seems to be a
simple generational one, a matter of pre- and post-1968. For if you
began reading Williams in the late fifties, sixties or early seventies,
cutting your intellectual teeth on Culture and Society, Second Generation
and The English Novel, then Raymond Williams may quite plausibly have
seemed to be realist, organicist, reformist, English, even puritanical; and
then, measured against the exhilarating libertarianism of 1968, he came
to seem inadequate. For these men and women, who have indeed
composed a second generation in relation to Williams himself, he has
been a kind of stolid railway signalman to their own anxious Matthew
Prices: unavoidable but exasperating, impressively and indubitably there
as a socialist theorist yet stubbornly barking up all the wrong (nonBrechtian, non-Althusserian, non-modernist) trees. They have gone on
lamenting ever since that he didnt have more of the dynamic mobility
of his own Morgan Rosser.
But for those of us who began reading his work in the late seventies
and early eighties, Raymond Williamsour Raymond Williamswas
not English but a self-announced Welsh European, not a tepid
Hoggartian reformist but a staunch revolutionary, less a realist novelist
than a writer of future-oriented political thrillers, less puritanical
than an advocate of the cultural-political energies of the new social
movements and, crucially, a figure who seemed to spend an extraordinary amount of his time writing very substantial analyses of modernism
and the avant-garde. For these readers, a third generation almost too
young to remember what a Labour Government is, Williams perhaps
matters most for his difficult and diverse engagement with the frontiers
of cultural theory and the modern. This shift in his work, away from
the Lukcsianism of the sixties, was no simple coupure pistmologique:
it involved, rather, a return to his own roots in the native radical avantgarde culture of the late 1930sitself a richer phenomenon than the men
and women of 1968 have allowed it to be. In her spirited contribution to
Visions and Blueprints, Margot Heinemann seeks to demonstrate precisely
this, arguing that it is evident from Left Review itself that there was no
wholesale rejection by British Communist intellectuals of the experiments and achievements of the avant-garde; and that if there was a
Great Tradition, it did not centre (as Lukcss did) on the realist
novelists of the nineteenth century. Cambridge for the young Raymond
Williams seems to have consisted largely of Surrealist and Expressionist
movies, fictional exercises in the mode of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,
and the works of Henrik Ibsenwith, presumably, the odd weekly
essay on George Eliot thrown in for good measure.
Even in Williamss supposedly Lukcsian phase, these modernist predilections came through, in both content and style. Preface to Film
powerfully argues a case for German Expressionist film as an exemplary
aesthetic model for our century, and the very style of Border Country
delivers a counter-message to the organicist content of that novel,
harking back as it does to a modernist aesthetic of Imagistic hardness,
dryness, presentation. One almost wonders whether a similar point
127

might not be made in relation to Williamss style in general. Sometimes

pointed to as evidence of his Lukcsian rationalism, his mature style
strikes me as rather closer to late Henry James than, say, A.J. Ayer: its
key terms (which it also enacts)complexity, ambiguity, qualification,
ironyare distinctively modernist shibboleths. And there may well be
ways of reading even the early novels as deconstructions rather than
exemplifications of realism. Even as the second generation read Second
Generation a little judicious hermeneutic violence might have shown
them that Raymond Williams was not after all so far distant from their
modernist concerns.4
The argument about Williams as modernist will no doubt be worked
through elsewhere. But Williams on modernism, as exemplified in Visions
and Blueprints, reminds us that the enticing phrase politics of modernism
is actually a code word, and translates out as the nature of political
organization or, more colloquially, whats wrong with Leninism?.
Peter Collier sees Gramscis yoking of modernism and popular culture
as strategically elaborated in opposition to the other main Italian
Communist theoretician, Bordiga, who believed strongly in a Leniniststyle party; Helga Geyer-Ryan tracks Benjamins explorations of how
human subjectivity might be reconstructed in a way which would meet
the demands of cultural modernism without at the same time dissolving
the capacity for political action. In his Introduction, Raymond Williams
displays a penchant for montage as well as the Poundian Image,
juxtaposing Futurist accounts of revolution as carnival with Bolshevik
versions of it as dour as they are disciplined (though, as Judy Davies
reminds us, Lenin himself saw in the founder of Futurism a real
power for revolution and had famously referred to the festival of the
oppressed). But if Leninism remains problematic for most of the
contributors to this volume, carnival doesnt seem in much better shape
either. Williams sombrely reminds us that much avant-garde revolt was
dissident from fixed bourgeois forms, but still as bourgeois dissidents,
launched in the very name of the sovereign individual; and it is not
therefore surprising that so many of the libertarian impulses of 1968
have now been appropriated by the New Right. The phrase politics of
modernism achieves its provocativeness by veering perilously close to
oxymoron; it makes as much and as little sense as the New Left third
space between reform and revolution (of which it is indeed, up to a
point, an earlier version). It is neither an academic specialism nor a
historical specimen to be held up to the light with tweezers at arms
length but is, rather, where we live, baffled, and struggle now. When
the contributors to Visions and Blueprints bear this in mind, as they
mostly do, they offer much illuminating material to our pressing and
continuing debate.
4 For a more detailed demonstration, see my Raymond Williams and Modernism in Terry Eagleton,
ed., Raymond Williams: Critical Debates, Oxford, forthcoming 1989, and the special issue of News from
Nowhere on Raymond Williams: Third Generation (Autumn 1988).

128