Art History and Postwar Fiction Kevin Brazil Full Chapter

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction Kevin
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OX F O R D E N G L I S H M O N O G R A P H S
General Editors
PAULINA KEW ES LA URA MA RCUS P E T E R M c C U L L O U GH
HE ATHE R O ’ DON OG H UE S EA MUS PE R R Y L L O Y D P R A T T
FION A S T A FFORD
Art, History, and

Postwar Fiction
KEVIN BRAZIL
1
3
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This book is for my parents

Acknowledgements
This book began life as a DPhil thesis under the sage supervision of Laura
Marcus, without whom, in more ways than one, what follows would not
have been possible.
I am grateful for the valuable readings and advice offered at various
stages by Rebecca Beasley, Michael Whitworth, Jean-Michel Rabaté, David
James, Sianne Ngai, Andrew Dean, Alys Moody, Jarad Zimbler, Peter
Riley, Katie Fleishman, and Alexis Brown, all of whom improved what
follows no end. For guidance through authors’ archives I would like to
thank Mark Nixon of the Beckett International Foundation, University of
Reading; Joel Minor of the Olin Library, Washington University, St Louis;
and Pat Fox of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present early drafts
of chapters at a number of conferences, and would like to thank their
respective organizers for their invitations: Peter Fifield for the Samuel
Beckett Debts and Legacies Seminar, University of Oxford; David James
and Urmila Seshagiri for Modernist Reformations and Reactivations at
the 15th Modernist Studies Association Conference at Sussex University;
Elleke Boehmer for Planned Violence at King’s College, London; Egzi
Aranyosi and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay for the Unconventional Archives
Workshop at Ertegun House, Oxford; Clare Bucknell and Mary Wellesley
for Periodization: Pleasures and Pitfalls, at All Souls College, Oxford;
and Alexandra Kingston-Reese for a panel on Reading the Novel with Art
at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 2017. At Oxford
University Press, Eleanor Collins and Catherine Owens provided exem-
plary editorial advice and efficiency.
I would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by an Arts
and Humanities Research Council Studentship and a 1379 Old Members
Scholarship from New College, Oxford. I am grateful to the School for
Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, and the Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst for providing funding for further research visits that
sharpened this book’s evidence and arguments. The Department of English
at the University of Southampton provided further financial support
that helped bring this book to completion, as well as providing the most
collegial of environments in which to complete it.
My greatest debt is not financial—it is to my parents, to whom this
book is dedicated.
Permissions
Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s manuscript of The Unnamable and an

image from the same are reproduced by kind permission of the Estate
of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London.
Extracts from William Gaddis’s archive are reproduced by kind permis-
sion of the Estate of William Gaddis and the Wylie Agency, New York.
Extracts from the letters of John Berger and Fredric Warburg from the
Random House Group Archive are reproduced by kind permission of The
Random House Group Ltd.
Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in slightly different form in ‘Beckett,
Painting, and the Question of “the Human” ’, published in the Journal of
Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Spring 2013), pp. 81–99. They are
reproduced here by kind permission of Indiana University Press.
Contents
List of Figures xi
Introduction: Reviewing Postwar Fiction 1

1. Pig Vomit: Beckett’s Art Historical Necessities 23
2. Canvas in the Cold War: William Gaddis and
the Context of Art 63
3. The Moment of History: John Berger’s Modernism
After Realism 97
4. Art’s Swindle: W. G. Sebald and History After Trauma 129
Conclusion: The Perspective of the Present 166
Bibliography 173
Author Index 193
List of Figures
1.1. Drawing by Samuel Beckett in the manuscript of L’Innommable,
Notebook 2, page 41. © The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Image
by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas
at Austin 57
1.2. L. Debricon, ‘La Sensation’, in Descartes: choix de textes avec étude
du système philosophique et notices biographique et bibliographique;
16 gravures et portrait par L. Debricon; préface de Labescat (Paris:
Louis Michaud, n.d.), 200. © The British Library Board 59
2.1. Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, ca. 1955, San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/DACS, London/
VAGA, New York, 2017 78
Introduction
Reviewing Postwar Fiction
In 1957 Jasper Johns covered a book with red and yellow encaustic paint
and stuck it to a blue wooden frame. An object became a work of art, a
book became Book (1957). That book was Lost Worlds by Anne Terry White,
a popular history of archaeological adventures. The pages Johns painted
describe the moment when Carter and Carnarvon, on the threshold of
their discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, begin to feel ‘strangely suspended
in time and space’, and suddenly not ‘the unbelievable tomb, but the
actual world of the twentieth century seemed unreal to these enchanted
explorers’.1 Buried under layers of paint, these words are invisible to the
naked eye: like the tomb in the desert, exposed and disguised, they are
hidden in plain sight. Some tantalizing and carefully chosen fragments of
text can be glimpsed, if you look hard enough: ‘first sight’, ‘swathed’, ‘folds’,
and down at the bottom, ‘that is what he found’. Yet there is nothing to be
found at first sight in this Book, where seeing and saying are in opposition.
Paint disguises words, yet knowledge of the book they came from is neces-
sary to grasp Book’s ironic attitude towards the resistance between text and
image upon which its formal effects depend. By painting over a book
called Lost Worlds, Johns signals an awareness of past explorations of the
relationship between text and image, and incorporates an archaeology of
this past into his own historically self-conscious investigation of the dif-
ferences between artistic media. In Book the past is an inescapable part of
the object presented for consideration: the relationship between art and
literature in the ‘actual world’ of Johns’s twentieth-century present.
1 Anne Terry White, Lost Worlds: Adventures in Archaeology (London; Toronto; Wellington;
Sydney, 1943), 119; James Coddington and Suzanne Siano, ‘Infrared Imaging of Twentieth-
Century Works of Art’, in Tradition and Innovation: Advances in Conservation, ed. by Ashok
Roy and Perry Smith (London, 2000), 39–44. I am grateful to Katherine Hinds, Curator of
the Margulies Collection, Miami, and James Coddington, Chief Curator of the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, for this information about Johns’s Book.
2 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction
That relationship is the subject of another book: this one. Art, History,
and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists since 1945 have
viewed, commented upon, and often vociferously complained about visual
art. It argues that as well as offering a surprisingly vital means for reflecting
on the aesthetic implications of political developments like McCarthyism,
the rise of the New Left, or the memorialization of the Holocaust, engaging
with art provided novelists with new ways of conceptualizing the novel’s
relationship to history. The sense that not only the novel but culture and
society more broadly had become unmoored from history was pervasive
in the postwar decades. This was most influentially expressed in Fredric
Jameson’s detection of a ‘waning of our historicity’ in the representations
produced in Western late capitalism, and a scepticism about historical
change was central to many theorizations of postmodernism.2 Yet post-
modernism never became the dominant cultural logic of the postwar
decades: it quickly passed from emergent to residual over the course of a
decade or so. In showing the ways in which visual art, especially modernist
painting, enabled postwar novelists to imagine diverse ways of relating
their work to history, this book argues that attention to one of the oldest
topics in aesthetic theory, interactions between artistic forms, also offers
the literary critic new ways to think about an equally perennial question:
the relationship of literature to history.
Pursuing this argument concentrates the scope of this book primarily
on the work of four writers, each of whom develops out of their engage-
ments with art a distinctive way of figuring the relationship of the novel to
history: Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald.
If the scope of these chapters is focused, and that focus is part of an argu-
ment for sustained and close attention to manuscripts, composition, and
literary form in studying the relationship between text and image, the
scope of the arguments they collectively inform expands outwards into
broader considerations of the comparative study of literature and visual
culture. You don’t need to take as obvious an example as Johns’s Book to
show that an artwork’s relationship to the history of art is often central to
its meaning—often its primary, even exclusive theme for the critics and
novelists who view it. But the history of art is not the same as the history
of literature, and as a consequence of what was once quaintly called the
‘new art history’, it would be more accurate to speak of an artwork’s rela-
tionship to a range of institutionally formed and contested histories of
2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London,
1991), 20.
Introduction 3
art.3 In studying literary engagements with art in the postwar decades, this
book proceeds from the argument that the histories of art are multiple,
non-simultaneous, and often generatively out of sync with the formal
and institutional histories of literature. It is the difference between art and
fiction, and the differences between art history and literary history, that
make art important to the study of postwar fiction.
Novelists’ responses to works of art are neither passive reflections of
their content (whatever ‘content’ might mean), nor of their institutionally
codified histories; rather, they are a form of interpretative work, whose
outcome can be traced in the form and style of a novelist’s prose. In focus-
ing as much on the ways in which fiction is made through an engagement
with art as on the final published work, this book provides a hermeneutics
of poeisis which tracks the moments in which writers produced their
own interpretations of works of art, and used these simultaneously as
interpretations of their writing and the form of the novel. In doing so,
this book offers a different way to approach the self-reflexivity and self-
referentiality that has long been seen as one of the characteristic traits of
the postwar novel: as a process of productive self-interpretation through
a different medium rather than a metafictional closure where ‘forms of
fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed’,
or as a terminal self-consciousness that leaves writer and reader alike ‘lost
in the funhouse’.4 By drawing attention to the historicizing ways in which
writers interpreted art as part of the production of their own work, this
book foregrounds the ways in which postwar writers historicized them-
selves and the novel more broadly. It therefore revises our understanding
of the postwar novel as characterized by a waning of historicity, arguing
instead for an understanding of modern and contemporary historicity as
complex, plural, and articulated by visual and verbal forms, and it shows
the different modes of thinking about the relationship of the novel to
history developed from the aftermath of the Second World War to the
beginning of the twenty-first century.
History emerges as a central concern of these writers’ engagements
with art not only because of their shared if diffuse sense of a waning of
historicity, or because a reflection upon the art of the past, whether by
Vermeer or Pisanello, reveals historical difference in a fairly obvious way.
Visual modernism of the postwar period was theorized, institutionalized,
and practised according to a historical periodization that was very different
3 For an overview, see John Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London,
2001).
4 William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York, 1970), 25; John Barth, Lost
in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (London, 1969).
to that of literary modernism, or rather, the version of literary modernism

these writers had themselves periodized in order to relate themselves to it.
Whether in Beckett’s perfect-tense description of T. S. Eliot’s poetry as
‘the new thing that has happened’, Gaddis’s transformation through
satire of modernist style into a commodity, or Sebald’s doctoral research
on Döblin, these novelists, like many others of the period, saw themselves
as coming after, if not exactly fully escaping from, the moment of literary
modernism. But when faced with French tachisme, American Abstract
Expressionism, or postwar British sculpture, or with the hugely influen-
tial criticism of Clement Greenberg, it was as clear then as it is now that
visual modernism extended well into the 1950s and 1960s. It is a testa-
ment to Greenberg’s influence that the art historians who have provided
the most developed justifications for the extension of visual modernism
backwards as well as forwards in time, T. J. Clark and Michael Fried, have
both positioned themselves as inheritors of different strands of Greenberg’s
criticism.5 This striking difference between what modernism means across
literature and art opened up for these writers a necessarily more complex
and differentiated understanding of the periodicity and historicity of
their own work. Furthermore, this extension of modernism was enabled in
theory and practice by a distinctive historicist modernism, according to
which certain forms were the product of a logical historical development
and which expressed that sense of historical continuity as their primary
meaning. To paraphrase a famous claim made by Michael Baxandall, if
‘[a] fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship’, then
a postwar modernist painting is the deposit of a historical theory.6
Modernism thus has an important place in this book, and the arguments
it makes concerning modernism’s relationship to postwar and contemporary
fiction and about periodicity more generally are part of a broader series of
debates about the historicity of modernism and its relationship to the
present. The geographical and historical expansion of the scope of mod-
ernist studies has brought to the fore the question of the periodization of
modernism as the cultural response to modernity. One response to the
theoretical difficulties this entails has been to reject the periodization of
modernism and modernity altogether, whether because it is merely a tool
of institutional legitimization, according to Eric Hayot, or inherently
5 T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry, 9/1 (1982), 139–56;
Michael Fried, ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark’, Critical Inquiry, 9/1
(1982), 217–34; T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes From a History of Modernism (New
Haven; London, 1999); Michael Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, in Art and
Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago; London, 1998), 1–76.
6 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the
Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1988), 1.
Introduction 5
ethically dubious, according to Susan Stanford Friedman.7 Another

response would be to complicate our understanding of the concept of a
period and the practice of periodization, a practice which, as David James
and Urmila Seshagiri have pointed out, is undertaken by novelists as well
as critics and thus cannot be ignored without sandpapering over a signifi-
cant feature of postwar and contemporary writing.8 Attending to the dif-
ference between visual and literary modernisms and their postwar critical
constructions is one way to achieve this complexity. It breaks apart the
view of modernism as taking place within a single historical period with-
out the concept of periodicity being discarded altogether; related develop-
ments in different forms can be seen as taking place on different timescales
and according to different rhythms; and it is this lack of fit that makes the
questions of periodicity and historicity more rather than less pressing for
the literary critic.
The problem of the uneven development of cultural formations (since
that is what modernist art and modernist literature ultimately are) was
suggestively raised in Marx’s Grundrisse, which speculates on ‘[t]he uneven
development of material production relative to e.g. artistic development. In
general, the concept of progress is not to be conceived in the usual
abstractness. Modern art etc [italics original]’. Furthermore, ‘this is the
case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of
the arts . . . The difficulty consists only in the general formulations of these
contractions’.9 That, it might be observed, has proved to be no small dif-
ficulty. These speculations have been elaborated by subsequent Marxist
theorists, as in Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar’s notions of dif
ferentiated and relatively autonomous temporalities interacting in a
conjecture, or Raymond Williams’s model of emergent, dominant, and
residual formations.10 But this issue also has a long genealogy within the
discipline of art history, intersecting with Marxist theory in the writings of
Ernst Bloch. Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit, or the ‘non-synchronous’,
attempted to address the issue of the differential development of culture
raised by Marx in the context of twentieth-century modernity.11 But this
concept, as Frederic J. Schwarz has written, was lifted ‘out of a debate
7 Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York, 2012); Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary
Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York, 2015).
8 David James and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and
Revolution’, PMLA, 129/1 (2014), 87–100.
9 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft),
trans. by Martin Nicolaus (London, 1973), 109; 110.
10 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 121–8; Louis Althusser
and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. by Ben Brewster (London, 1997), 91–118.
11 Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, trans. by Mark
Ritter, New German Critique, 11, 1977, 22–38.
among art historians and theorists of culture about periodicity and the
nature of historical time’, specifically the response of Wilhelm Pinder to
the historicism of Aloïs Riegl, Max Dvorák, and Heinrich Wölfflin.12
Reflecting upon the use of different styles within the same historical
moment, Pinder concluded that ‘[t]here is no simple “present” because
every historical “moment” is experienced by people with their own differ-
ent senses of historical duration’, and that different cultural artefacts must
be analysed through the concept of ‘the non-simultaneity of the simulta-
neous’, a concept which retains a notion of a historical period but allows
for a more complex sense of its internal differentiation.13 Like his more
well-known contemporaries Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, Pinder
was theorizing the experience of time, but his objects of analysis, as
Erwin Panofsky pointed out, were cultural artefacts.14 It is from the non-
simultaneity of styles that the non-simultaneity of history is inferred, and
not the other way around.
This overlap between the problematics of Marxism and art history is
one example of the ways in which both fields have complex and rich
theorizations of the relationship between form and historicity. These over-
laps provide the grounds for understanding that the uneven development
of modernism across media does not reflect but in a concrete sense is a
manifestation of the differentiated temporality of modernity. Of course,
this insight has long been central to accounts of modernism within indi-
vidual disciplinary confines, whether those offered by T. J. Clark in art
history, or Michael Levenson in literary studies.15 The aim of this book is
to use comparison not to generate a more unified understanding of mod-
ernism—usually the goal of comparisons between the arts—but a more
disaggregated one. For the writers discussed in this book, the striking dif-
ference between what modernism meant across the arts in the postwar
decades opened up a more multifaceted understanding of modernism and
of the historicity of their present. The argument that visual-verbal com-
parison opens up differentiated understandings of history for novelists and
critics alike underpins this book’s methodological claims for how to
undertake comparative work on literature and art, how to relate modern-
ism to the contemporary, and how to bring together literary studies and
art history in the study of postwar culture. By showing that an engagement
with visual art was a means by which postwar novelists produced their own
12 Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder: Out of Sync’, Grey Room,
3 (Spring 2001), 55; 57.
13 Quoted in Schwartz, ‘Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder: Out of Sync’, 62.
14 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Reflections on Historical Time’, Critical Inquiry, 30/4 (2004),
697–8.
15 Clark, Farewell To An Idea; Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven, 2011).
Introduction 7
understandings of the relationship of their work to history, it follows that

this engagement can be used retrospectively to understand postwar fiction
in history. In history, and as history, for how to historicize postwar litera-
ture has emerged as a pressing debate in recent literary scholarship. As
many critics are now asking: when exactly does literary history begin?
H I S TO R I C I Z I N G P O S T WA R F I C T I O N
Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events’, newly created one moment

from the next? No links? Is it the end of history?16
Moving chronologically from the end of the Second World War to the turn
of the millennium, this book concerns itself with what Amy Hungerford
has influentially defined as ‘the period formerly known as contemporary’.17
On the one hand her argument is disarmingly simple. With the passing of
time, and of the authors of that time, the decades since the war are now
‘history, not memory’, and that distance—or rather the methodological
adoption of such a distance—is ‘an advantage when it comes to the business
of historicizing’.18 On the other hand, distinguishing a past constructed
through the adoption of historicizing distance from the contemporary makes
any definition of the postwar as a period d ependent upon a definition of
the contemporary. What ‘the contemporary’ means has been the subject of
a wave of recent reflection in work by Giorgio Agamben, Terry Smith,
Lauren Berlant, Robert Eaglestone, and particularly Peter Osborne, who has
provided the richest account of what it means to think the contemporary,
offering a suggestive model for literary studies.19 Osborne draws a distinction
between the postwar and the contemporary from the opposite perspective
to Hungerford. He wants to preserve the ‘increasingly complex temporal-
existential, social, and p
olitical meanings’ of the contemporary against its
reduction to ‘a simple label or periodizing category’. The ‘distinctive
conceptual grammar of con-temporaneity’, he writes, expresses ‘a coming
together of different but equally “present” temporalities or “times”, a temporal
unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times’, and ‘[t]his
16 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 1973), 56.

17 Amy Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, American
Literary History, 20/1–2 (2008), 418.
18 Hungerford, ‘On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary’, 416.
19 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’, in What Is an Apparatus? And Other
Essays, trans. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, 2009), 39–54; Terry Smith,
‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’, Critical Inquiry, 32/4 (2006), 681–707; Lauren
Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham; London, 2011); Robert Eaglestone, ‘Contemporary Fiction
in the Academy: Towards a Manifesto’, Textual Practice, 27/7 (2013), 1089–102; Peter Osborne,
Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London, 2013).
problematically disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward,

historicist uses of “contemporary” as a periodizing term [italics original]’.20
As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, there is nothing particularly ‘con-
temporary’ about this definition of the contemporary as a disjunctive
relationship towards one’s present: it goes back to Nietzsche’s critique of
nineteenth-century historicism.21 For Osborne, it is in fact the historicizing
gaze which produces the difference between the time of the contemporary
and the time of the historicized past. Hungerford and Osborne end up
neatly symmetrical: what the philosopher of contemporary art wants to
avoid, the historian of postwar literature wants to embrace.
This embrace of the historicizing gaze has underpinned much recent
revisionary work on postwar fiction. Steven Belletto, Julia Jordan, and
Alex Houen have found common ground between British and American
literature in their concerns with chance and potentiality, discerning
aesthetic and thematic concerns as responses to Cold War politics and
postwar disciplinary transformations in game theory, economics, and
existential philosophy.22 Like these critics, when historicizing the relation-
ship between logical positivism and postwar fiction, Michael LeMahieu
has uncovered its impact on a group of writers—John Barth, Saul Bellow,
and Iris Murdoch—that cuts across boundaries between national cultures
and so-called experimental and conventional authors, forming the kind of
unexpected but suddenly convincing constellation that makes such revi-
sionary work so important. In contrast, when Mark McGurl, Stephen
Schryer, and Michael Trask have historicized the institutional role of the
university and its discourses of professionalism in defining postwar
American literature, they show just how distinctly American this develop-
ment was. As McGurl admits, professionalized ‘[c]reative writing is, in
sum, as American as baseball, apple pie, and homicide’. Less convincing is
his claim that the spread of the writing programme throughout the world
is not an instance of ‘Americanization’ but part of the overall process of
‘reflexive modernity’.23 One central insight of postwar art history has been
that the American institutionalization of forms of modernism and mod-
ernization elided in their constitution the national political contexts from
which they emerged, and this elision was witnessed in action by the writers
20 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 17.

21 Agamben, ‘What Is the Contemporary?’, 40–1; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, ‘On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. by
R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1997), 57–124.
22 Steven Belletto, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American
Narratives (New York, 2011); Julia Jordan, Chance and the Modern British Novel (London, 2011);
Alex Houen, Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (Oxford, 2011).
23 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
(Cambridge, MA; London, 2009), 364–5.
Introduction 9
discussed in this book.24 For both novelist and critic, engaging with postwar
art involves entering a transnational field shaped by national and political
commitments in a way which enables writing beyond the confines of a
single nation while remaining sharply aware of the slippage between the
trajectory of one national culture and the wider development of modernity.
Just as influential for the impetus towards revisionary work on postwar
literature and recent theoretical attention to the contemporary has been
the perceived waning of postmodernism as the postwar era’s dominant
cultural logic, with David James and Lisa Siraganian making strong cases
for the continuing relevance of modernism to postwar and contemporary
fiction.25 When Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls compiled one of the
first literary histories of England spanning the twentieth century as a
whole, they observed that ‘the notion of the Postmodern, in apparent
violation of its own terms, has not proven to be an efficient periodizing
concept that clearly situates us in a context distinct from modernity;
rather, it affirms a continuing and troubled relation to a modernity we
cannot evade’.26 On the other side of the Atlantic, both postmodernism
and postmodernity are absent from Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus’s
A New Literary History of America.27 As Jason Gladstone and Daniel
Worden reflected in response to that volume, postmodernism now seems
understood either as ‘a symptom for the postwar condition’ or ‘one aes-
thetic among many’.28 Intentionally or not, this is a direct refutation of
Jameson’s central claim: ‘I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction
between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) style among
many others available and one which seeks to grasp it as the cultural
dominant of the logic of late capitalism’.29 ‘Late capitalism’ was always the
weakest link in Jameson’s thesis, never quite recovering from Bill Warren’s
retort: ‘late for what?’30 But Jameson’s account of postmodernism was as
much motivated by the need for periodization as by the need to schematize
a cultural dominant to follow realism and modernism: it was, after all,
24 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago; London, 1983).
25 David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel
(Cambridge, 2012); Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life
(New York, 2012).
26 Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge History of
Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge,
2004), 4.
27 Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America (Cambridge,
MA; London, 2009).
28 Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden, ‘Introduction: Postmodernism, Then’,
Twentieth-Century Literature, 57/3–4 (2011), 292.
29 Jameson, Postmodernism, 45–6.
30 Quoted in Fred Halliday, ‘The Ends of Cold War’, New Left Review, I, 180, 1990, 18.
‘a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception

of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed’.31
It is on the problems of periodization and historicization that Jameson
and his successors converge.
David J. Alworth has observed that for all that such revisionary work on
postwar literature rejects Jameson’s claim that postmodernism is the cul-
tural logic of the period, it adheres closely to a different claim of his work:
his imperative to ‘Always historicize!’.32 Like a number of other critics, he
worries that if scholarship on postwar literature succumbs to a routine
historicism, it will fail to respond to calls for surface, enchanted, or distant
readings, or even simply more temporally wide-ranging methodologies in
which we ‘historicize differently’, as Sianne Ngai has written.33 These crit-
ics have caught a postwar strain of what Jennifer Fleissner has diagnosed as
the ‘Historicism Blues’. She points out that across the discipline of literary
studies historicism has been cathected with a complex of anxieties con-
cerning the political salience, moral purpose, and seeming theoretical sta-
sis of criticism since the 1990s. Fleissner doesn’t have a cure; instead she
suggests the couch. For her, the inescapable urge towards historicization
and the anxieties it generates show the ‘constitutive elusiveness of the his-
tory that is its aim’, and turns to Nietzsche, Freud, and Dominick LaCapra
to prompt critics to theorize more fully what is assumed and produced by
the act of historical explanation.34
It is important to point out that the historicism under discussion in
these debates, and that targeted by a strand of critique running from Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick to Rita Felski, is not historicism tout court but rather
New Historicism.35 As the name for a methodology of interpretation,
historicism signifies a diverse range of approaches. It can be a philosophy of
language in which linguistic meaning is contextual, as in Schleiermacher’s
hermeneutics or Cambridge School historiography; it can be a Hegelian
belief in a teleologically unfolding process of development according to
31 Jameson, Postmodernism, 3.
32 David J. Alworth, ‘Hip to Post45’, Contemporary Literature, 54/3 (2013), 630.
33 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations,
108/1 (2009), 1–21; Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge,
MA; London, 2012), 14; other attempts to historicize postwar literature differently include
Michaela Bronstein, ‘Ng˜ug˜ı’s Use of Conrad: A Case for Literary Transhistory’, Modern
Language Quarterly, 75/3 (2014), 411–37; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as
Origin of the Present (Stanford, 2013); David J. Alworth, Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social
Form (Princeton, 2016).
34 Jennifer Fleissner, ‘Historicism Blues’, American Literary History, 25/4 (2013), 707.
35 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity (Durham; London, 2003), 123–51; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago,
2015).
Introduction 11
a unifying principle; or it can be an evaluative approach to the diversity

of individual cultures, as in Herder’s anthropology or contemporary identity
politics. New Historicism involves a rather different set of assumptions,
largely descending from Foucault’s archaeologies.36 It is the continuous
and therefore contingent relationship between literature and the totality
of culture considered as a text that has triggered anxieties about the
reduction of literature to its contexts, and it is the belief that power
circulates on the surface of the text yet still requires the act of critical
exposure that has led to fatigue with the hermeneutics of suspicion and
calls for modes of enchanted or surface reading—with the metaphor of
surface ironically describing two contrasting approaches, as Felski has
pointed out.37
Although methodological debates about historicism have been taking
place across the discipline of literary studies, they have a particular salience
for critics working on postwar literature. If only because it is being done
for the first time, thinking about your relationship to the most recent past
is a different task than engaging with a past already assumed as separate
from the present. That assumed separation is the condition for the dra-
matic finale of much literary scholarship on earlier eras: the revelation that
we remain Victorians, still share Enlightenment print culture, are socially
networked like early modern intellectuals, and so on in the upending of
naïve presentist assumptions. Historicizing the recent past, in contrast,
cuts a line through a present in which we think we still belong. Part of Eric
Hayot’s critique of periodization is that it is ‘the untheorized ground of the
possibility of literary scholarship’.38 For Joshua Kates, periodization in
contemporary literary studies homogenizes its temporal objects, pointing
instead to Althusser’s elaboration of a theory of periodization governed by
a ‘differentiation at once temporal and object oriented’, with different
classes of events answering to various structures of time.39 Yet the reasons
the postwar period might now be so generatively unsettling for assumptions
about periodicity and historicism have been theorized by both Hannah
Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno. Countering the homogenization of
historical time and the assumption that periodizing claims are merely
pragmatic acts for the convenience of scholarship, impulses they developed
out of a shared engagement with Walter Benjamin while rejecting Benjamin’s
complete historical relativism in the service of politico-theological redemp-
tion, Arendt and Adorno both identified a temporal relationship called the
36 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago,

2000), 1–19.
37 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 52–6. 38 Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 154.
39 Joshua Kates, ‘Against the Period’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,
25/2 (2012), 137; 143.
‘vantage point’ of the ‘most recent’: a unique and ever-shifting alignment

between the present and the past from which it has just departed.40 This
was their formulation of the historiographical problem given metaphorical
expression by Hegel’s famous claim that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of dusk’, arguing that we ascend to knowledge
of history, the apprehension by the ideal of the real, only when an event
has come to an end.41
What we call ‘the postwar’ is now simply this ‘most recent’ past, and in
this book I argue two things: that some of the novelists of this recent past
used an engagement with art to develop their own ways of thinking about
the relationship of literature to history, and that studying these engage-
ments can offer the critic a way to navigate between the reductive under-
standings of historicism and formalism that tend to emerge in response to
the eternally recurring question of the relationship of literary criticism to
historical explanation. By carefully tracing acts of commentary and com-
position, and by approaching these as mediating interpretations rather than
continuities or reflections, this book avoids the affective anxieties generated
by New Historicism’s arbitrary use of a single text as a metonymic encap-
sulation of a historical period. By approaching literary form as having its
own historical developments, often out of sync with political history, and
by seeing writers’ uses of forms as acts of self-historicization, I argue that
not all objects of historicist analysis are the same: productively, challengingly,
and generatively so. In doing so, this shows there are better ways to attend
to literary form as a justifiable reaction against an overtly contextualizing
historicism than becoming naïve and uncritical readers enchanted by the
surface of our texts. And simply by the fact of not focusing only on litera-
ture, but by working comparatively across fiction and visual art, this book
shows up the frequent lack of interdisciplinarity in debates about historicism
or a putative postwar studies and uses such comparisons to show what a
more interdisciplinary analysis of the period looks like. Worries that the
study of postwar literature is suffering, as Nietzsche wrote of his own time,
from a ‘surfeit of history’ are misplaced. After all, Nietzsche’s counsel was
that ‘the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the
health of an individual, of a people, and of a culture [italics original]’—and,
one might add, a discipline.42
40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn (Chicago; London, 1998), 5;
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), 359.
41 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox
(Oxford, 1942), 13.
42 Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, 63.
Introduction 13
H I S TO RY B E T W E E N A RT A N D F I C T I O N
When Susan Sontag offered in ‘Against Interpretation’ (1966) one of the first
attempts to define a new postwar sensibility by detecting a ‘flight from
interpretation’ into formalism across the art of Frank Stella and Jasper
Johns and the fiction of Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs, she was
doing more than fulfilling her self-appointed role as her era’s most sensitive
cultural antenna (or perhaps its hippest cultural consumer).43 In basing
her claim for a new historical period on a comparison between the arts, she
was relying on an art historical assumption that dates all the way back to
Vasari, and forward through Vico and Hegel into the works of Riegl,
Wöllflin, and Panofsky, that laid the foundations for the field as a profes-
sionalized academic practice.44 Vasari developed ‘a historical point of
view’, according to Panofsky, in proposing the periodization of the history
of art, and that each period be evaluated according to the criteria of its own
time, on the basis of a connection between different art forms in the same
historical epoch.45 This assumption is almost always latent in acts of
comparison between art and literature—as Jacques Lacan once quipped,
‘everybody is a Hegelian without knowing it’—but self-consciousness
about it surfaced in the more astute comparisons between art and litera-
ture during the postwar decades.46 In trying to show that ‘the post-war years
gave birth to a period of artistic achievement quite distinct to modernism’
that nevertheless could not be reduced to postmodernism, Christopher
Butler compared techniques across the arts because it is in technique ‘that
the close analogies between the arts can be appreciated and an implied
Zeitgeist discerned’.47 In studies of postwar poetry, when Charles Altieri
wanted to discuss John Ashbery’s ‘contemporaneity’ with his time, he
turned to ‘Ashbery’s relationship to the experiments in visual art that first
set themselves the task of constructing a postmodern sensibility’, although
as he subsequently reflected, the ‘postmodern’ too unreflectively replaced
what was primarily an attempt to use comparison to theorize a writer’s
contemporaneity with his time.48
43 Susan Sontag, Essays of the 1960s & 1970s (New York, 2013), 16; 733–44.
44 See Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, 1985).
45 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The First Page of Giorgio Vasari’s “Libro”’, in Meaning in the Visual
Arts (Garden City, NY, 1955), 205.
46 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in
the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge, 1988), 73.
47 Christopher Butler, After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde (Oxford,
1980), 160; x.
48 Charles Altieri, Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts (University
Park, PA, 1998), 55; 7.
Altieri’s unease about how postmodernism too quickly suffocated other

attempts to use comparison to theorize the relationship between literature
and history was not widely shared. Reflecting on the theory and practice
of the 1960s and 1970s, on Robert Smithson as much as Paul de Man,
Craig Owens defined postmodernism in terms of its ‘allegorical impulse’.
Postmodern allegory proposes a ‘reciprocity . . . between the visual and the
verbal: words are often treated as purely visual phenomena, while visual
images are offered as a script to be deciphered’. This reciprocity stems from
the belief that all representations are contingent, fragmentary, and incom-
plete—all melancholy ruins—and this carries with it ‘a conviction of the
remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present’.49 But that
history only gets recovered as a signifier, and the desire to redeem the past
produces the lack it cannot fulfil. A postmodernist allegorical blurring of
the difference between visual and verbal representation has been explored
in the work of writers such as Angela Carter, Alasdair Gray, and Salman
Rushdie.50 Relating art and fiction through allegory extends to these
writers’ ambivalent rejection of history as a meaningful frame for their
writing: as Amy J. Elias has written of the ‘postmodernist metahistorical
romance’ more broadly, history is their sublime object of representation at
the same time as it is a reality they want to deny.51 Linda Hutcheon has
argued that parody is a major form of ‘inter-art discourse’ in postmodern-
ism. However, the contrast she draws between the Russian Formalist
emphasis on the ‘historical role of parody’ in marking formal change and
her own definition of parody as ‘imitation with critical difference’ pro-
duces a contradiction in an argument that attempts to make parody a
defining form of inter-art discourse relating literature and visual art in the
twentieth century.52 As with Owens’s allegorical impulse, attempts to
make postmodernism a stylistic and periodizing category fray under the
pressure of the history that postmodernism seeks to escape.
For all its paradoxes, postmodernism was a cause with which many nov-
elists explicitly allied their engagements with the visual arts. While postwar
feminism was never identical with postmodernism, writers such as Angela
Carter and Kathy Acker did see themselves as practising a ‘conjuncture of
49 Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’, October,

12 (1980), 74; 68.
50 Katie Garner, ‘Blending the Pre-Raphaelist with the Surreal in Angela Carter’s Shadow
Dance (1966) and Love (1971)’, in Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, ed. by Sonya
Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips (London, 2012), 147–64; Robert Crawford and Thom
Nairn, eds., The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh, 1991); Ana Cristina Mendes, ed., Salman
Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders (London, 2012).
51 Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore, 2001), xiv.
52 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms
(London, 1985), 2; 36.
Introduction 15
feminism and postmodernism’, a practice of transgression in order to liberate

desire.53 This conjuncture equated social transgression with transgressing
the boundaries between different art forms and saw more use in rejecting
the legacy of art historical modernism rather than engaging in the kind of
revisionary project advocated by Griselda Pollock—who distances herself
from Carter’s dismissal of Picasso—of differencing the canon of modern-
ism and rethinking its relationship to the present.54 Although the focus of
the chapters that follow is on writers who engaged with the legacy of
modernist art in order to rethink their relationship to history, and who saw
the visual as resistant to language rather than easily transgressed, a number
of comparisons developed throughout this book spotlight moments when
such approaches were not taken, and what in contrast was gained or lost.
Gertrude Stein’s engagement with Cubism was an ambivalent model for
both Beckett and Gaddis, yet her investment in modernist issues such as
the tension between convention and representation was denied by a later
generation of writers who came to see her as a harbinger of poststructural-
ism. Berger and Doris Lessing were equally committed to the cause of
postwar social realism as an initial reaction against modernism, but while
Berger went back to Cubist painting to develop a revolutionary historiog-
raphy of deferral and delay, Lessing soon drifted out of any engagement
with art into explorations of a post-historical and increasingly post-human
future. Kathy Acker’s work shows the most sophisticated literary engage-
ment with postmodern art and theory: as she said of her own practice of
appropriation: ‘[w]hen I did Don Quixote, what I really wanted to do was
a Sherri Levine painting. I’m fascinated by Sherri’s work’.55 Like Gaddis,
Acker saw stylistic authenticity as almost irredeemably threated by post-
war consumer capitalism, but if for Gaddis that was a wound which art
helped him salt, for Acker it enabled a l iberation from the historical strait-
jacket of style and the release of the timeless libidinal energies of the body.
Yet as Gaddis’s prefiguration of what Michael Fried termed the problem of
art and objecthood shows, the rejection of history in favour of immanent
bodily desire mystifies the body’s own h istorical formation and contingent
relationships to sites of spectatorship and display.
53 Kathy Acker, ‘Kathy Acker Interviewed by Rebecca Deaton’, Textual Practice, 6/2
(1992), 275; Angela Carter, ‘Angela Carter’, in Novelists in Interview, ed. by John Haffenden
(London, 1985), 76–96.
54 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (London, 2003), 218; Griselda Pollock,
‘Feminism and Modernism’, in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–85,
ed. by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker (London, 1987), 79–124; Griselda Pollock,
Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London, 1999).
55 Ellen G. Friedman and Kathy Acker, ‘A Conversation with Kathy Acker’, The Review
of Contemporary Fiction, 9/3 (1989), 12.
The impact of photography on postwar fiction was decisively shaped by

suspicion of its role in facilitating what was increasingly critiqued as the
‘society of the spectacle’; or as Sontag wrote in her influential On Photography
(1979): ‘the narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption
requires the unlimited production and consumption of images’.56 This
tempered an earlier generation’s enthusiastic and r etrospectively somewhat
uncritical embrace of what Julian Murphet has termed the shifting media
ecology of the early twentieth century.57 For writers like Ralph Ellison,
Richard Wright, and Michael Ondaatje, photography was often more of
interest in its relationship to questions of documentation, memory, and
autobiography rather than its status as a putative ‘art’, or in offering access,
as André Bazin argued, to an ontological confirmation of reality.58 Strange
as this may seem, the view that the significance of photography as a tech-
nology and cultural form is lost when it is reduced to the fine art practice
of, say, Ansel Adams or Diane Arbus has been a major strand of photog-
raphy theory and art history, and there is much to commend in separating
inquiries into the history of art from those into photography, not to men-
tion media history more broadly.59 Indeed, Friedrich Kittler’s histories are
a refreshingly strange picture of what the history of art looks like when all
history is the history of media.60 Nevertheless, this use of photography as
an ‘anti-art’ is discussed in this book’s chapter on Sebald, and the opposition
in his work between photography and painting is his own characteristically
muted engagement with this broader issue of photography’s relationship
to art and aesthetic theory as well as to the novel.
No book aiming to work across a historical period, unless it were to
model itself on Borges’s Book of Sand, can ever be fully comprehensive,
and to borrow again from Borges, these are the paths this study has not
taken. But the paths it does take in the following chapters do link up with
the work of these other novelists and their critics, as well as tracing a
56 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith

(New York, 1994); Sontag, Essays, 654.
57 Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-
Garde (Cambridge, 2009).
58 Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth
Century (Princeton, 2007); Lee-Von Kim, ‘Scenes of Af/filiation: Family Photographs in
Postcolonial Life Writing’, Life Writing, 12/4 (2015), 401–15; André Bazin, ‘The Ontology
of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly, 13/4 (1960), 4–9.
59 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’, in The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 131–50; Douglas Crimp, ‘The
Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject’, in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of
Photography (Cambridge MA, 1989), 3–11; Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays
and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax, 1984).
60 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. by Anthony Enns
(Cambridge, 2010).
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that they implied was, if not acknowledged, at any rate felt, witness
the tapestry backgrounds with which the real depth of space was
covered up by a pious awe that disguised what it dared not exhibit.
We have seen how just at this time, when the Faustian (German-
Catholic) Christianity attained to consciousness of itself through the
institution of the sacrament of Contrition—a new religion in the old
garb—the tendency to perspective, colour, and the mastering of
aerial space in the art of the Franciscans[313] transformed the whole
meaning of painting.
The Christianity of the West is related to that of the East as the
symbol of perspective to the symbol of gold-ground—and the final
schism took place almost at the same moment in Church and in Art.
The landscape-background of the depicted scene and the dynamic
infiniteness of God were comprehended at the same moment; and,
simultaneously with the gold ground of the sacred picture, there
vanished from the Councils of the West that Magian, ontological
problem of Godhead which had so passionately agitated Nicæa,
Ephesus, Chalcedon and all the Councils of the East.
The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a

space-forming and quasi-musical motive, the handwriting of the
visible brush-stroke. The Florentine masters had never at any time
challenged the fashion—would-be Classical and yet in Gothic
employ—of smoothing out all turns of the brush so as to produce
pure, cleanly-outlined and even colour-surfaces. In consequence,
their pictures have a certain air of being, something felt,
unmistakably, as the opposite of the inherent motion-quality of the
Gothic expression-means that were storming in from over the Alps.
The 15th-Century manner of applying colour is a denial of past and
future. It is only in the brushwork, which remains permanently visible
and, in a way, perennially fresh, that the historical feeling comes out.
Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something
that has become but something that is becoming. And this is
precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid. A piece of
Perugino drapery tells us nothing of its artistic origin; it is ready-
made, given, simply present. But the individual brush-strokes—first
met with as a complete new form-language in the later work of Titian
—are accents of a personal temperament, characteristic in the
orchestra-colours of Monteverde, melodically-flowing as a
contemporary Venetian madrigal: streaks and dabs, immediately
juxtaposed, cross one another, cover one another, entangle one
another, and bring unending movement into the plain element of
colour. Just so the geometrical Analysis of the time made its objects
become instead of being. Every painting has in its execution a
history and does not disguise it; and a Faustian who stands before it
feels that he too has a spiritual evolution. Before any great
landscape by a Baroque master, the one word “historical” is enough
to make us feel that there is a meaning in it wholly alien to the
meaning of an Attic statue. As other melody, so also this of the
restless outlineless brush-stroke is part of the dynamic stability of the
universe of eternal Becoming, directional Time, and Destiny. The
opposition of painting-style and drawing-style is but a particular
aspect of the general opposition of historical and ahistorical form, of
assertion and denial of inner development, of eternity and
instantaneity. A Classical art-work is an event, a Western is a deed.
The one symbolizes the here-and-now point, the other the living
course. And the physiognomy of this script of the brush—an
ornamentation that is entirely new, infinitely rich and personal, and
peculiar to the Western Culture—is purely and simply musical. It is
no mere conceit to compare the allegro feroce of Frans Hals with the
andante con moto of Van Dyck, or the minor of Guercino with the
major of Velasquez. Henceforward the notion of tempo is comprised
in the execution of a painting and steadily reminds us that this art is
the art of a soul which, in contrast to the Classical, forgets nothing
and will let nothing be forgotten that once was. The aëry web of
brush-strokes immediately dissolves the sensible surface of things.
Contours melt into chiaroscuro. The beholder has to stand a very
long way back to obtain any corporeal impression out of our coloured
space values, and even so it is always the chromatic and active air
itself that gives birth to the things.
At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting
another symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and
more the actuality of all colour—the “studio-brown” (atelierbraun).
This was unknown to the early Florentines and the older Flemish and
Rhenish masters alike. Pacher, Dürer, Holbein, passionately strong
as their tendency towards spatial depth seems, are quite without it,
and its reign begins only with the last years of the 16th Century. This
brown does not repudiate its descent from the “infinitesimal” greens
of Leonardo’s, Schöngauer’s and Grünewald’s backgrounds, but it
possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the
battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails
over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake
off its Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it
and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is
an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end
dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world—the world of
moments and foregrounds—into atmospheric semblances. Line
disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only
dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust
aside the laws governing corporeal existence within the world-
cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an
infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the
Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. As
contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has something
Protestant in it. It anticipates the hyperbolic[314] Northern pantheism
of the 18th Century which the Archangels voice in the Prologue of
Goethe’s “Faust.”[315] The atmosphere of Lear and the atmosphere of
Macbeth are akin to it. The contemporary striving of instrumental
music towards freer and ever freer chromatics (de Rore, Luca
Marenzio) and towards the formation of bodies of tone by means of
string and wind choruses corresponds exactly with the new tendency
of oil-painting to create pictorial chromatics out of pure colours, by
means of these unlimited brown shadings and the contrast-effect of
immediately juxtaposed colour-strokes. Thereafter both the arts
spread through their worlds of tones and colours—colour-tones and
tone-colours—an atmosphere of the purest spatiality, which
enveloped and rendered, no longer body—the human being as a
shape—but the soul unconfined. And thus was attained the
inwardness that in the deepest works of Rembrandt and of
Beethoven is able to unlock the last secrets themselves—the
inwardness which Apollinian man had sought with his strictly somatic
art to keep at bay.
From now onward, the old foreground-colours yellow and red—the
Classical tones—are employed more and more rarely and always as
deliberate contrasts to the distances and depths that they are meant
to set off and emphasize (Vermeer in particular, besides of course
Rembrandt). This atmospheric brown, which was entirely alien to the
Renaissance, is the unrealest colour that there is. It is the one major
colour that does not exist in the rainbow. There is white light, and
yellow and green, and red and other light of the most entire purity.
But a pure brown light is outside the possibilities of the Nature that
we know. All the greenish-brown, silvery, moist brown, and deep gold
tones that appear in their splendid variety with Giorgione, grow
bolder and bolder in the great Dutch painters and lose themselves
towards the end of the 18th Century, have the common quality that
they strip nature of her tangible actuality. They contain, therefore,
what is almost a religious profession of faith; we feel that here we
are not very far from Port Royal, from Leibniz. With Constable on the
other hand—who is the founder of the painting of Civilization—it is a
different will that seeks expression; and the very brown that he had
learnt from the Dutch meant to him not what it had meant to them—
Destiny, God, the meaning of life—but simply romance, sensibility,
yearning for something that was gone, memorial of the great past of
the dying art. In the last German masters too—Lessing, Marées,
Spitzweg, Diez, Leibl[316]—whose belated art is a romantic retrospect,
an epilogue, the brown tones appear simply as a precious heirloom.
Unwilling in their hearts to part with this last relic of the great style,
they preferred to set themselves against the evident tendency of
their generation—the soulless and soul-killing generation of plein-air
and Haeckel. Rightly understood (as it has never yet been), this
battle of Rembrandt-brown and the plein-air of the new school is
simply one more case of the hopeless resistance put up by soul
against intellect and Culture against Civilization, of the opposition of
symbolic necessary art and megalopolitan “applied” art which affects
building and painting and sculpture and poetry alike. Regarded thus,
the significance of the brown becomes manifest enough. When it
dies, an entire Culture dies with it.
It was the masters who were inwardly greatest—Rembrandt above
all—who best understood this colour. It is the enigmatic brown of his
most telling work, and its origin is in the deep lights of Gothic church-
windows and the twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave. And the
gold tone of the great Venetians—Titian, Veronese, Palma,
Giorgione—is always reminding us of that old perished Northern art
of glass painting of which they themselves know almost nothing.
Here also the Renaissance with its deliberate bodiliness of colour is
seen as merely an episode, an event of the very self-conscious
surface, and not a product of the underlying Faustian instinct of the
Western soul, whereas this luminous gold-brown of the Venetian
painting links Gothic and Baroque, the art of the old glass-painting
and the dark music of Beethoven. And it coincides precisely in time
with the establishment of the Baroque style of colour-music by the
work of the Netherlanders Willaert and Cyprian de Rore, the elder
Gabrieli, and the Venetian music-school which they founded.
Brown, then, became the characteristic colour of the soul, and
more particularly of a historically-disposed soul. Nietzsche has, I
think, spoken somewhere of the “brown” music of Bizet, but the
adjective is far more appropriate to the music which Beethoven
wrote for strings[317] and to the orchestration that even as late as
Bruckner so often fills space with a browny-golden expanse of tone.
All other colours are relegated to ancillary functions—thus the bright
yellow and the vermilion of Vermeer intrude with the spatial almost
as though from another world and with an emphasis that is truly
metaphysical, and the yellow-green and blood-red lights of
Rembrandt seem at most to play with the symbolism of space. In
Rubens, on the contrary—brilliant performer but no thinker—the
brown is almost destitute of idea, a shadow-colour. (In him and in
Watteau, the “Catholic” blue-green disputes precedence with the
brown.) All this shows how any particular means may, in the hands of
men of inward depth, become a symbol for the evocation of such
high transcendence as that of the Rembrandt landscape, while for
other great masters it may be merely a serviceable technical
expedient—or in other words that (as we have already seen)
technical “form,” in the theoretical sense of something opposed to
“content,” has nothing whatever to do with the real and true form of a
great work.
I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it
makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness
and future, and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous
element that may be represented. The other colours of distance
have also this significance, and they lead to an important,
considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western
symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and
even gilt-bronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the
radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of
the individualness of any and every corporeal thing.[318] Now, when
the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and
green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its
piety and longing, fastened on to this—and from that time forth our
form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day
our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze—an
ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of art is
something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a
cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina
which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of
remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of
artificially producing this patina?[319]
But even more than this is involved in the ennoblement of decay to
the level of an art-means of independent significance. That a Greek
would have regarded the formation of patina as the ruin of the work,
we can hardly doubt. It is not merely that the colour green, on
account of its “distant” quality, was avoided by him on spiritual
grounds. Patina is a symbol of mortality and hence related in a
remarkable way to the symbols of time-measurement and the funeral
rite. We have already in an earlier chapter discussed the wistful
regard of the Faustian soul for ruins and evidences of the distant
past, its proneness to the collection of antiquities and manuscripts
and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum Romanum and to Pompeii, to
excavations and philological studies, which appears as early as the
time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to a Greek to bother
himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns?[320] Every Greek knew
his “Iliad” but not one ever thought of digging up the hill of Troy. We,
on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to preserve the
aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of Luxor
and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes,
Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish—but we keep
them as ruins, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would
deprive them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be
reproduced.[321] Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this
reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a
formerly. It cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the
present; never was the old preserved because it was old. After the
Persians had destroyed old Athens, the citizens threw columns,
statues, reliefs, broken or not, over the Acropolis wall, in order to
start afresh with a clean slate—and the resultant scrap-heaps have
been our richest sources for the art of the 6th Century. Their action
was quite in keeping with the style of a Culture that raised cremation
to the rank of a major symbol and refused with scorn to bind daily life
to a chronology. Our choice has been, as usual, the opposite. The
heroic landscape of the Claude Lorrain type is inconceivable without
ruins. The English park with its atmospheric suggestion, which
supplanted the French about 1750 and abandoned the great
perspective idea of the latter in favour of the “Nature” of Addison,
Pope and sensibility, introduced into its stock of motives perhaps the
most astonishing bizarrerie ever perpetrated, the artificial ruin, in
order to deepen the historical character in the presented landscape.
[322]
The Egyptian Culture restored the works of its early period, but it
would never have ventured to build ruins as the symbols of the past.
Again, it is not the Classical statue, but the Classical torso that we
really love. It has had a destiny: something suggestive of the past as
past envelops it, and our imagination delights to fill the empty space
of missing limbs with the pulse and swing of invisible lines. A good
restoration—and the secret charm of endless possibilities is all gone.
I venture to maintain that it is only by way of this transposition into
the musical that the remains of Classical sculpture can really reach
us. The green bronze, the blackened marble, the fragments of a
figure abolish for our inner eye the limitations of time and space.
“Picturesque” this has been called—the brand-new statue and
building and the too-well-groomed park are not picturesque—and the
word is just to this extent, that the deep meaning of this weathering
is the same as that of the studio-brown. But, at bottom, what both
express is the spirit of instrumental music. Would the Spearman of
Polycletus, standing before us in flashing bronze and with enamel
eyes and gilded hair, affect us as it does in the state of blackened
age? Would not the Vatican torso of Heracles lose its mighty
impressiveness if, one fine day, the missing parts were discovered
and replaced? And would not the towers and domes of our old cities
lose their deep metaphysical charm if they were sheathed in new
copper? Age, for us as for the Egyptian, ennobles all things. For
Classical man, it depreciates them.
Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling
leads it to prefer “historical” material—meaning thereby not so much
demonstrably actual or even possible, but remote and crusted
subjects. That which the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could
not be expressed by any event of purely momentary meaning,
lacking in distance of time or place, or by a tragic art of the Classical
kind, or by a timeless myth. Our tragedies, consequently, are
tragedies of the past and of the future—the latter category, in which
men yet to be are shown as carriers of a Destiny, is represented in a
certain sense by “Faust,” “Peer Gynt” and the “Götterdämmerung.”
But tragedies of the present we have not, apart from the trivial social
drama of the 19th Century.[323] If Shakespeare wanted on occasion to
express anything of importance in the present, he at least removed
the scene of it to some foreign land—Italy for preference—in which
he had never been, and German poets likewise take England or
France—always for the sake of getting rid of that nearness of time
and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a
mythological subject.
CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC

II
ACT AND PORTRAIT

CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC

II
ACT AND PORTRAIT
I
The Classical has been characterized as a culture of the Body and

the Northern as a culture of the Spirit, and not without a certain
arrière-pensée of disprizing the one in favour of the other. Though it
was mainly in trivialities that Renaissance taste made its contrasts
between Classical and Modern, Pagan and Christian, yet even this
might have led to decisive discoveries if only men had seen how to
get behind formula to origins.
If the environment of a man (whatever else it may be) is with
respect to him a macrocosm with respect to a microcosm, an
immense aggregate of symbols, then the man himself, in so far as
he belongs to the fabric of actuality, in so far as he is phenomenal,
must be comprised in the general symbolism. But, in the impress of
him made upon men like himself, what is it that possesses the force
of Symbol, viz., the capacity of summing within itself and intelligibly
presenting the essence of that man and the signification of his
being? Art gives the answer.
But this answer is necessarily different in different Cultures. As
each lives differently, so each is differently impressed by Life. For the
mode of human imagining—metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining
alike—it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual
feels himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a
centre in endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone
distinctness or, on the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the
general consensus, that the directional character is asserted or, on
the contrary, denied in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these
ways the prime-symbol of the great Culture comes to manifestation:
this is indeed a world-feeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From
the Classical ideal followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous
instant, from the Western a not less passionate wrestle to overcome
it. The Apollinian soul, Euclidean and point-formed, felt the empirical
visible body as the complete expression of its own way of being; the
Faustian, roving into all distances, found this expression not in
person, σῶμα, but in personality, character, call it what you will.
“Soul” for the real Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body—
and thus Aristotle defined it. “Body” for Faustian man was the vessel
of the soul—and thus Goethe felt it.
But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly
in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck
expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear
gnawing tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is
achieved in Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak.
The Hellenistic portraiture tries to draw a spiritual type in the
structure of its heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si
tell of a wholly personal inner life by their look and the play of the
corners of the mouth.
The Classical tendency towards making the body the sole
spokesman is emphatically not the result of any carnal overload in
the race (to the man of σωφροσύνη wantonness was not
permitted[324]), it was not, as Nietzsche thought, an orgiastic joy of
untrammelled energy and perfervid passion. This sort of thing is
much nearer to the ideals of Germanic-Christian or of Indian chivalry.
What Apollinian man and Apollinian art can claim as their very own is
simply the apotheosis of the bodily phenomenon, taking the word
perfectly literally—the rhythmic proportioning of limbs and
harmonious build of muscles. This is not Pagan as against Christian,
it is Attic as against Baroque; for it was Baroque mankind (Christian
or unbeliever, monk or rationalist) that first utterly put away the cult of
the palpable σῶμα, carrying its alienation indeed to the extremes of
bodily uncleanliness that prevailed in the entourage of Louis XIV,[325]
whose full wigs and lace cuffs and buckled shoes covered up Body
with a whole web of ornament.
Thus the Classical plastic art, after liberating the form completely
from the actual or imaginary back-wall and setting it up in the open,
free and unrelated, to be seen as a body among bodies, moved on
logically till the naked body became its only subject. And, moreover,
it is unlike every other kind of sculpture recorded in art-history in that
its treatment of the bounding surfaces of this body is anatomically
convincing. Here is the Euclidean world-principle carried to the
extreme; any envelope whatever would have been in contradiction,
however slightly, with the Apollinian phenomenon, would have
indicated, however timidly, the existence of the circum-space.
In this art, what is ornamental in the high sense resides entirely in
the proportions of the structure[326] and the equivalence of the axes in
respect of support and load. Standing, sitting, lying down but always
self-secure, the body has, like the peripteros, no interior, that is, no
“soul.” The significance of the muscle-relief, carried out absolutely in
the round, is the same as that of the self-closing array of the
columns; both contain the whole of the form-language of the work.
It was a strictly metaphysical reason, the need of a supreme life-
symbol for themselves, that brought the later Hellenes to this art,
which under all the consummate achievement is a narrow one. It is
not true that this language of the outer surface is the completest, or
the most natural, or even the most obvious mode of representing the
human being. Quite the contrary. If the Renaissance, with its ardent
theory and its immense misconception of its own tendency, had not
continued to dominate our judgment—long after the plastic art itself
had become entirely alien to our inner soul—we should not have
waited till to-day to observe this distinctive character of the Attic
style. No Egyptian or Chinese sculptor ever dreamed of using
external anatomy to express his meaning. In Gothic image-work a
language of the muscles is unheard of. The human tracery that
clothes the mighty Gothic framework with a web of countless figures
and reliefs (Chartres cathedral has more than ten thousand such) is
not merely ornament; as early as about 1200 it is employed for the
expression of schemes and purposes far grander than even the
grandest of Classical plastic. For these masses of figures constitute
a tragic unit. Here, by the North even earlier than by Dante, the
historical feeling of the Faustian soul—of which the deep sacrament
of Contrition is the spiritual expression and the rite of Confession the
grave teacher—is intensified to the tragic fullness of a world-drama.
That which Joachim of Floris, at this very time, was seeing in his
Apulian cell—the picture of the world, not as Cosmos, but as a
Divine History and succession of three world-ages[327]—the
craftsmen were expressing at Reims, Amiens and Paris in serial
presentation of it from the Fall to the Last Judgment. Each of the
scenes, each of the great symbolic figures, had its significant place
in the sacred edifice, each its rôle in the immense world-poem. Then,
too, each individual man came to feel how his life-course was fitted
as ornament in the plan of Divine history, and to experience this
personal connexion with it in the forms of Contrition and Confession.
And thus these bodies of stone are not mere servants of the
architecture. They have a deep and particular meaning of their own,
the same meaning as the memorial-tomb brings to expression with
ever-increasing intensity from the Royal Tombs of St. Denis onward;
they speak of a personality. Just as Classical man properly meant,
with his perfected working-out of superficial body (for all the
anatomical aspiration of the Greek artist comes to that in the end), to
exhaust the whole essence of the living phenomenon in and by the
rendering of its bounding surfaces, so Faustian man no less logically
found the most genuine, the only exhaustive, expression of his life-
feeling in the Portrait. The Hellenic treatment of the nude is the great
exceptional case; in this and in this only has it led to an art of the
high order.[328]
Act and Portrait have never hitherto been felt as constituting an
opposition, and consequently the full significance of their
appearances in art-history has never been appreciated. And yet it is
in the conflict of these two form-ideals that the contrast of two worlds
is first manifested in full. There, on the one hand, an existence is
made to show itself in the composition of the exterior structure; here,
on the other hand, the human interior, the Soul, is made to speak of
itself, as the interior of a church speaks to us through its façade or
face. A mosque had no face, and consequently the Iconoclastic
movement of the Moslems and the Paulicians—which under Leo III
spread to Byzantium and beyond—necessarily drove the portrait-
element quite out of the arts of form, so that thenceforward they
possessed only a fixed stock of human arabesques. In Egypt the
face of the statue was equivalent to the pylon, the face of the temple-
plan; it was a mighty emergence out of the stone-mass of the body,
as we see in the “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis and the portrait of
Amenemhet III. In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles
and little signs that mean something. But, for us, the portrait is
musical. The look, the play of the mouth, the pose of head and
hands—these things are a fugue of the subtlest meaning, a
composition of many voices that sounds to the understanding
beholder.
But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West
more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we
have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that
began in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-
feeling. This change extended equally over the old German and the
vulgar Latin, but it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries
of the coming Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not
Rumanian). The change would be inexplicable if we were to regard
merely the spirit of these languages and their “influence” of one upon
another; the explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a
mere way of using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of sum,
Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu
habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitân; and again, daz wîp, un
homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle[329] because
families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is
solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The
Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use
grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of
this specific “I” is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was
so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal
absolution. This “ego habeo factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries
“have” and “be” between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the “feci”
which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one
of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic.
And this “I” and “Thou” is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic
portrait is the type of an attitude—a confession it is not, either to the
creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict
something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-
history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything
else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject “I” becomes
the centre of force in the Faustian sentence.
It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its
origin in the living direction, time, destiny. In the perfected “being” of
the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away,
but the “look” of a portrait leads this experience into the
supersensuous infinite. Therefore the Ancient art is an art of the near
and tangible and timeless, it prefers motives of brief, briefest, pause
between two movements, the last moment before Myron’s athlete
throws the discus, or the first moment after Pæonius’s Nike has
alighted from the air, when the swing of the body is ending and the
streaming draperies have not yet fallen—attitudes devoid equally of
duration and of direction, disengaged from future and from past.
“Veni, vidi, vici” is just such another attitude. But in "I—came, I—saw,
I—conquered" there is a becoming each time in the very build of the
sentence.
The depth-experience is a becoming and effects a become,
signifies time and evokes space, is at once cosmic and historical.
Living direction marches to the horizon as to the future. As early as
1230 the Madonna of the St. Anne entrance of Notre-Dame dreams
of this future: so, later, the Cologne “Madonna with the Bean-
blossom” of Meister Wilhelm. Long before the Moses of
Michelangelo, the Moses of Klaus Suter’s well in the Chartreuse of
Dijon meditates on destiny, and even the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel
are forestalled by those of Giovanni Pisano in Sant’ Andrea at
Pistoia (1300). And, lastly, there are the figures on the Gothic tombs
—how they rest from the long journey of Destiny and how completely
they contrast with the timeless grave and gay that is represented on
the stelæ of Attic cemeteries.[330] The Western portraiture is endless
in every sense, for it begins to wake out of the stone from about
1200 and it has become completely music in the 17th Century. It
takes its man not as a mere centre of the World-as-Nature which as
phenomenon receives shape and significance from his being, but,
above all, as a centre of the World-as-History. The Classical statue is
a piece of present “Nature” and nothing besides. The Classical
poetry is statuary in verse. Herein is the root of our feeling that
ascribes to the Greek an unreserved devotion to Nature. We shall
never entirely shake off the idea that the Gothic style as compared
with the Greek is “unnatural.” Of course it is, for it is more than
Nature; only we are unnecessarily loath to realize that it is a
deficiency in the Greek that our feeling has detected. The Western
form-language is richer—portraiture belongs to Nature and to history.
A tomb by one of those great Netherlanders who worked on the
Royal graves of St. Denis from 1260, a portrait by Holbein or Titian
or Rembrandt or Goya, is a biography, and a self-portrait is a
historical confession. To make one’s confession is not to avow an act
but to lay before the Judge the inner history of that act. The act is
patent, its roots the personal secret. When the Protestant or the
Freethinker opposes auricular confession, it never occurs to him that
he is rejecting merely the outward form of the idea and not the idea
itself. He declines to confess to the priest, but he confesses to
himself, to a friend, or to all and sundry. The whole of Northern
poetry is one outspoken confession. So are the portraits of
Rembrandt and the music of Beethoven. What Raphael and
Calderon and Haydn told to the priests, these men put into the
language of their works. One who is forced to be silent because the
greatness of form that can take in even the ultimate things has been
denied him ... goes under like Hölderlin. Western man lives in the
consciousness of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon
past and future. The Greek lives point-wise, ahistorically, somatically.
No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. As
the phenomenon of the nude statue is the completely ahistoric copy
of a man, so the Western self-portrait is the exact equivalent of the
“Werther” or “Tasso” autobiography. To the Classical both are equally
and wholly alien. There is nothing so impersonal as Greek art; that
Scopas or Polycletus should make an image of himself is something
quite inconceivable.
Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master
later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the
brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of
entirely non-personal, plantlike, soulless vitality? And may we not
ask ourselves whether this is the form-language that is capable even
of hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with
all passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he
works out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews
and organs of the inside; without deliberate intention, the living that
is under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy,
and not a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at
once that the personal destiny and not the material body has
become the starting-point of the form-feeling. There is more
psychology (and less “Nature”) in the arm of one of his Slaves[331]
than there is in the whole head of Praxiteles’s Hermes.[332] Myron’s
Discobolus,[333] on the other hand, renders the exterior form purely as
itself, without relation of any sort to the inner organs, let alone to any
“soul.” One has only to take the best work of this period and
compare it with the old Egyptian statues, say the “Village Sheikh”[334]
or King Phiops (Pepi), or again with Donatello’s “David,”[335] to
understand at once what it means to recognize a body purely with
reference to its material boundaries. Everything in a head that might
allow something intimate or spiritual to become phenomenal the
Greeks (and markedly this same Myron) most carefully avoid. Once
this characteristic has struck us, the best heads of the great age
sooner or later begin to pall. Seen in the perspective of our world-
feeling, they are stupid and dull, wanting in the biographical element,
devoid of any destiny. It was not out of caprice that that age objected
so strongly to votive images. The statues of Olympian victors are
representatives of a fighting attitude. Right down to Lysippus there is
not one single character-head, but only masks. Again, considering
the figure as a whole, with what skill the Greeks avoid giving any
impression that the head is the favoured part of the body! That is
why these heads are so small, so un-significant in their pose, so un-
thoroughly modelled. Always they are formed as a part of the body
like arms and legs, never as the seat and symbol of an “I.”
At last, even, we come to regard the feminine (not to say
effeminate) look of many of these heads of the 5th, and still more of
the 4th, Centuries[336] as the—no doubt unintentional—outcome of an
effort to get rid of personal character entirely. We should probably be
justified in concluding that the ideal facial type of this art—which was
certainly not an art for the people, as the later naturalistic portrait-
sculpture at once shows—was arrived at by rejecting all elements of
an individual or historical character; that is, by steadily narrowing
down the field of view to the pure Euclidean.
The portraiture of the great age of Baroque, on the contrary,
applies to historical distance all those means of pictorial counterpoint
that we already know as the fabric of their spatial distance—the
brown-dipped atmosphere, the perspective, the dynamic brush-
stroke, the quivering colour-tones and lights—and with their aid
succeeds in treating body as something intrinsically non-material, as
the highly expressive envelope of a space-commanding ego. (This
problem the fresco-technique, Euclidean that it is, is powerless to
solve.) The whole painting has only one theme, a soul. Observe the
rendering of the hands and the brow in Rembrandt (e.g., in the
etching of Burgomaster Six or the portrait of an architect at Cassel),
and again, even so late, in Marées and Leibl[337]—spiritual to the
point of dematerializing them, visionary, lyrical. Compare them with
the hand and brow of an Apollo or a Poseidon of the Periclean age!
The Gothic, too, had deeply and sincerely felt this. It had draped
body, not for its own sake but for the sake of developing in the
ornament of the drapery a form-language consonant with the
language of the head and the hands in a fugue of Life. So, too, with
the relations of the voices in counterpoint and, in Baroque, those of
the “continuo” to the upper voices of the orchestra. In Rembrandt
there is always interplay of bass melody in the costume and motives
in the head.
Like the Gothic draped figure, the old Egyptian statue denies the
intrinsic importance of body. As the former, by treating the clothing in
a purely ornamental fashion, reinforces the expressiveness of head
and hands, so the latter, with a grandeur of idea never since
equalled (at any rate in sculpture), holds the body—as it holds a
pyramid or an obelisk—to a mathematical scheme and confines the
personal element to the head. The fall of draperies was meant in
Athens to reveal the sense of the body, in the North to conceal it; in
the one case the fabric becomes body, in the other it becomes
music. And from this deep contrast springs the silent battle that goes
on in high-Renaissance work between the consciously-intended and
the unconsciously-insistent ideals of the artist, a battle in which the
first—anti-Gothic—often wins the superficial, but the second—Gothic
becoming Baroque—invariably wins the fundamental victory.
II
The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may

now be stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body
and space, instant and history, foreground and background,
Euclidean and analytical number, proportion and relation. The Statue
is rooted in the ground, Music (and the Western portrait is music,
soul woven of colour-tones) invades and pervades space without
limit. The fresco-painting is tied to the wall, trained on it, but the oil-
painting, the “picture” on canvas or board or other table, is free from
limitations of place. The Apollinian form-language reveals only the
become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming.
It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are
amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of the
Western art. In the Attic sculpture this motive is entirely absent, and
although in Hellenistic times the playful motive of the Cupid or Putto
came into favour, it was expressly as a being different from the other
beings and not at all as a person growing or becoming. The child
links past and future. In every art of human representation that has a
claim to symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of
phenomenal change, the endlessness of Life. But the Classical Life
exhausted itself in the completeness of the moment. The individual
shut his eyes to time-distances; he comprehended in his thought the
men like himself whom he saw around him, but not the coming
generations; and therefore there has never been an art that so
emphatically ignored the intimate representation of children as the
Greek art did. Consider the multitude of child-figures that our own art
has produced from early Gothic to dying Rococo—and in the
Renaissance above all—and find if you can in Classical art right
down to Alexander one work of importance that intentionally sets by
the side of the worked-out body of man or woman any child-element
with existence still before it.
Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood,
Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act
of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world,
so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual
member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All

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Art, History, and Postwar Fiction Kevin

Art, History, and

This book is for my parents

Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s manuscript of The Unnamable and an

Introduction: Reviewing Postwar Fiction 1

2 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

4 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

to that of literary modernism, or rather, the version of literary modernism

ethically dubious, according to Susan Stanford Friedman.7 Another

6 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

understandings of the relationship of their work to history, it follows that

Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events’, newly created one moment

16 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 1973), 56.

8 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

problematically ­disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward,

20 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 17.

10 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

‘a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception

a unifying principle; or it can be an evaluative approach to the diversity

36 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago,

12 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

‘vantage point’ of the ‘most recent’: a unique and ever-shifting alignment

14 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

Altieri’s unease about how postmodernism too quickly suffocated other

49 Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’, October,

feminism and postmodernism’, a practice of transgression in order to liberate

16 Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

The impact of photography on postwar fiction was decisively shaped by

56 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith

The Venetians discovered, and introduced into oil-painting as a

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

ACT AND PORTRAIT

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

The Classical has been characterized as a culture of the Body and

The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may

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Introduction: Reviewing Postwar Fiction 1

problematically disjunctive conjunction is covered over by straightforward,