Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason

245 Pages·2016·1.74 MB·English

by  Robert Lehman

Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system
without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lehman, Robert S. (Robert Scott), author.
Title: Impossible modernism : T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the critique of historical reason / Robert S.
Lehman.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016001497 | ISBN 9780804799041 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Eliot, T. S.
(Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965—Criticism and interpretation. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Criticism
and interpretation. | Literature and history. | Modernism (Literature) Classification: LCC PS3509.L43
Z69177 2016 | DDC 821/.912—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001497
ISBN 9781503600140 (electronic)
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro
IMPOSSIBLE MODERNISM
T. S. ELIOT, WALTER BENJAMIN, AND THE
CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL REASON
ROBERT S. LEHMAN
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
For Audrey
One is soon forced to resort to paradoxical formulations, such as defining the
modernity of a literary period as the manner in which it discovers the
impossibility of being modern.
—Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity”
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Poetry and the Prose of the Future
PART 1: GATHERING DUST, T. S. ELIOT
1. Lyric
2. Satire
3. Myth
PART 2: KILLING TIME, WALTER BENJAMIN
4. Order
5. Anecdote
6. Allegory
Conclusion: The Lightning Flash and the Storm of Progress
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The initial development of my arguments in this book benefited from the
attention of my mentors at Cornell University. I want to start by thanking
Jonathan Culler, Peter Gilgen, Douglas Mao, and Neil Saccamano. All were—
and are—valued advisers, interlocutors, and examples of the sort of scholar that I
hope someday to be.
Much of what made it into this book I learned through countless exchanges
with teachers, colleagues, and friends. Any listing of names is bound to be
incomplete; nonetheless, I want to thank Kevin Attell, Alexis Briley, Becky
Colesworthy, Bradley Depew, Ben Glaser, John Hicks, Aaron Hodges, Jess
Keiser, Tracy McNulty, Douglas McQueen-Thomson, Steven Miller, Julia Ng,
Jeff Pence, Robert Ray, Robin Sowards, Danielle St. Hilaire (for Chaucer!), Phil
Wegner, and Alan Young-Bryant; as well as all of the members of the Theory
Reading Group and the Hegel Reading Group (in Ithaca as well as in Paris).
Beyond any particular institutional context, Nathan Brown, Anna Kornbluh,
Knox Peden, and Josh Robinson have been vital sources of intellectual energy.
Martin Hägglund provided invaluable advice and support during the completion
of this project, especially in its final stages.
I completed this book as a member of the English Department at Boston
College. For the warm scholarly welcome I have received there, I owe thanks to
all of my colleagues. I am especially grateful for advice I received on this project
from Marjorie Howes, Suzanne Matson, Kevin Ohi, and Frances Restuccia.
Across the river, the Mahindra Seminar in Dialectical Thinking at Harvard
University has provided further intellectual stimulation, and for this I thank
friends and co-organizers (past and present) Will Baldwin, Jamey Graham, Julie
Orlemanski, Gordon Teskey, and Andrew Warren.
The final version of this manuscript has profited from the incisive comments
of two anonymous reviewers, while my editors at Stanford University Press,
Emily-Jane Cohen and Friederike Sundaram, have been helpful and responsive
every step of the way.
My family in Ohio has always supported me. To my late grandparents John
and Anne Chambers and especially to my mother Sally Chambers—thank you
for all that you have done and know that I love you very much. Finally, and with
all of my heart, I dedicate this book to my partner, Audrey Wasser, doubtless the
better craftsperson, who scrutinized every page and without whom none of this
would have been possible.
• • •
An early version of Chapter 6 first appeared as “Allegories of Rending: Killing
Time with Walter Benjamin,” in New Literary History 39.2 (Spring 2008): 233–
250. Copyright © New Literary History, The University of Virginia, 2008; a
portion of Chapter 2 appeared as “Eliot’s Last Laugh: The Dissolution of Satire
in The Waste Land,” in Journal of Modern Literature 32.2 (Winter 2009): 65–
79. Copyright © Indiana University Press, 2009; Chapter 5 includes some
formulations that first appeared in “Finite States: Toward a Kantian Theory of
the Event,” diacritics 39.1 (Spring 2009): 61–74. Copyright © Cornell
University, 2011.
PREFACE
This book advances an interpretation of European modernism and, more
specifically, of the relationship between European modernism and historical
representation. I characterize this relationship as one of critique, not in the more
colloquial sense of “assessment” but in the technical sense given to the term by
Immanuel Kant and his successors, for whom critique describes an interrogation
of the conditions of possible experience. My claim is that modernism’s critique
of history operates not (or not only) as the negation of tradition itself or as the
extension of past forms through the creation of the new work of art but rather as
a struggle to grasp and transform the formal conditions of historical experience,
the conditions under which events come to appear as repetitions or innovations,
as traditional or “new.” More concretely, my contention is that when modernist
authors struggle with history, they struggle not only with the massacres and wars
that made the last hundred years “the most terrible century in Western history”
(Berlin, qtd. in Hobsbawm 1) but also with the way that these events and others
have been made meaningful. They struggle, that is, with history itself, with the
way that, through the stories it tells, history secures the past and sets limits on
the present. It is with this struggle in mind that I read the formal experimentation
characteristic of modernist writing. Directed at the problem of historical
representation, modernist experimentation is an attempt to imagine an alternative
architecture of history, one open to artistic innovation or political transformation.
My particular focus is on the critique of history as it is articulated in the
writings of two roughly contemporaneous authors: T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Despite their striking personal and political
differences, Eliot—the self-proclaimed “Anglo-Catholic, classicist, royalist”; the
individual who was, perhaps more than anyone else, responsible for the shape
that the study of literature took during the last century—and Benjamin—the
“Marxist rabbi,” forced into intellectual, then literal, exile, and driven finally to
suicide—shared for a time in what was fundamentally the same project: the
project of challenging an image of history regnant since the early years of the
nineteenth century, one that came into being in the wake of the French
Revolution and found its watchword in Leopold von Ranke’s exhortation to
write history “as it actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist; Ranke 57).
Against this image of history, Eliot and Benjamin tapped into a submerged
tradition of thinking about the relationship between historical representation and
literary form, one that connects (via many intermediaries) Aristotle’s elevation
of poetry over history in book 9 of the Poetics to Nietzsche’s subordination of
history to life in the second of the Untimely Meditations. Fundamentally, they
took as their starting point an understanding of history not as a collection of
empirical facts but as something formed, something written; and so they turned
to specifically literary devices—devices such as lyric, satire, allegory, and myth
—to reimagine the shape of historical time and the possibility of historical
change. This shared project developed over the course of their careers; and it
culminated in their respective masterworks—The Waste Land and The Arcades
Project—which stand as monuments to the possibilities and limitations of a
particularly modernist historical thinking.
My objective, again, is to understand how modernism—the sort of modernism
exemplified in the poetic, critical, historical writings of Eliot and Benjamin—
addresses itself to historical representation rather than to a particular set of facts
about the past. This particular topic has, I believe, been neglected in the
contemporary scholarship. A cursory glance at recent work on modernism finds
books dealing with modernism and the Great War, as well as with modernism
and the New Deal; with modernism and technology, as well as with modernism
and spiritualism; with modernism and fashion, as well as with modernism and
food. Most generally, these studies locate twentieth-century cultural texts—a
heading that now cuts across the arts, high and low, Western and non-Western—
within their respective social, economic, or political contexts. These texts are
then interrogated with an eye toward how they respond (critically, ideologically)
to the givenness of historical facts, which facts can be as undeniably significant
as a war or as apparently mundane as the closing of a music hall. The ubiquity of
this approach has provided the inspiration for new book series and for major
conferences in the field; and it underlies the “expansionist” rhetoric of what
Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have termed the “New Modernist
Studies.” My intention is not to deny the value of the historicist project, which
has done much to fill in our picture of twentieth-century culture. And yet, I want
to insist, in this project history itself remains a blind spot. By “history itself” I do
not mean those objects or events that pile up at the feet of Benjamin’s angel or
accumulate in Eliot’s wasteland; rather, I mean the historical worldview that
continues to determine our representations of the past. In their eagerness to read
modernism historically, critics have rarely paused to consider how history is read
by modernism. As a result, they have not asked how modernism might
encourage them to rethink the very historicism they bring to bear on it.
It is a contention of this book, then, that Eliot and Benjamin present us with an
understanding of history much richer and more varied than that of modernism’s
present-day critics. What I mean by this claim becomes clearer when we
compare modernism to its historically minded readers on the matter of their
shared historical inheritance. The latter does not describe a mere consciousness
of the past (in the pleonastic sense that history is what we inherit and every
inheritance is historical) but something closer to what Flaubert had in mind when
he wrote to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in 1860 that “the historical sense
dates from yesterday. And it is perhaps the best thing about the nineteenth
century” (23). Flaubert’s approval of the nineteenth century’s “historical sense”
was not necessarily shared by his contemporaries, who were as likely to worry
over the threat that this new recollection of the past might pose to “la mémoire
du présent.” Regardless, what Flaubert is describing—even as he is living
through the final phase of its development—is the shift from a worldview based
on static relations of identity and difference to one focused on temporal
becoming, a shift that Michel Foucault would describe a century later as the
“mutation of Order into History” (The Order of Things 220).1 The names
associated with this mutation are more or less well known—Kant, Herder, and
Hegel, and then Niebuhr, Humboldt, and Ranke—and the changes wrought by it
affected all of the traditional humanistic disciplines as well as the newly minted
romantic theory of literature. So Friedrich Schlegel, one of the founders of Jena
romanticism, could write to his brother August that “I am revolted by any theory
that is not historical” (qtd. in Schaeffer 108), a remark that would have been
impossible a generation earlier. To inherit history in this sense is to inherit a
developmental model of the world, one in which the present makes up a
meaningful whole, the truth of the present is contained in the events of the past,
and the continuity of past, present, and future can be taken for granted.
At issue in the remarks of Schlegel and Flaubert, as well as in the works of
Hegel and Ranke, is the codification of history both as an academic discipline—
a method of analysis and a body of knowledge to be studied alongside theology,
law, medicine, and so on—and as an increasingly hegemonic worldview. This all
occurs in the nineteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution and
roughly concurrent with the birth of romanticism in the arts. Hayden White
describes the creation of an autonomous discipline of history in the following
terms:
Chairs of history were founded at the University of Berlin in 1810 and at the Sorbonne in 1812. Societies
for the editing and publication of historical documents were established soon after: the society for the
Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1819, the École des Charles in 1821. Government subsidies of these
societies—inspired by the nationalist sympathies of the time—were forthcoming in due course, in the
1830s. After mid-century, the great national journals of historical studies were set up: the Historische
Zeitschrift in 1859, the Revue historique in 1876, the Rivista storica italiana in 1884, and the English
Historical Review in 1886. The profession became progressively academicized. (136)