christopher prendergast

MODERNISM’S NIGHTMARE?

Art, Matter, Mechanism

W
. H. Auden said he had two questions when reading
a poem: ‘The first is technical: “Here is a verbal con-
traption. How does it work?”. The second is: “What
kind of guy inhabits this poem?”.’1 Disarmingly—and
deceptively—simple, Auden’s questions, jointly, take us to all manner
of places, many of which have long since been vacated, most notably by
those on indefinite postmodernist leave in the playground of ‘forms’.
In particular, the second question—addressed to the quality of the
human presence in the verbal machine and thus to the poem’s ethical
significance—might well be viewed by some representatives of contem-
porary critical persuasions (for example, followers of Paul de Man) as the
residue of a naive and sentimental humanism. Yet what happens when
this second question is liquidated by the first, when the human leaves
the contraption to its own devices—in various senses of the term, includ-
ing the Russian Formalist one—is an issue of considerable importance.
The following—a collection of strictly provisional thoughts inspired, in
part, by T. J. Clark’s recent book on Modernist painting, Farewell to an
Idea—engages with what is most uncomfortable in that issue, by way of
a reflection on a modern view of art as, fundamentally, the application of
technique to matter.2

Put in this way, of course, my topic could be said to implicate the whole
of art, since this, by at least one definition, is what art is, in the history
of aesthetic thought that flows from, and variously modifies, the Greek
notion of technē. However, consciousness of what such a definition
might ultimately entail when we press it to the point of saying, not just
that art is the application of technique to matter, but that art is only the

new left review 10 jul aug 2001 141

application of technique to matter, is a relatively recent historical phe-
nomenon. According to Clark in Farewell to an Idea, there is a particular
emphasis on both technique and matter, in the period we call modernity
and the movements we call Modernism, whose implications and conse-
quences we have still not yet fully thought through. These implications
and consequences are grim, and I should make immediately clear that
what follows is very far from being good news. It has nothing whatsoever
to do with the all-too-easy, complacent celebrations that have so often
accompanied what we like to call the materiality of art and the associated
moves of the so-called reflexive turn in contemporary literary theory.

From the Frankfurt School to the moment of Tel Quel, mise en abyme, the
self-conscious display by the art work of its own procedures, was hailed
as liberating, even revolutionary, in so far as it was held to extricate us
from the grip of ideology and its naturalizing habits. Positing represen-
tations as self-consciously made artefacts meant that the meanings these
encoded could also be unmade, and remade, in the perspective of a per-
manent revolution. But, as we tumble into the abyss of the reflexive turn,
there is, alas, a far more dispiriting conclusion that can be drawn, close
to the paradoxical outcomes of the scientific revolution. At the moment
of its birth and early development, science was supposed to free us from
the dead weight of authority and superstition; but, in so doing, its ulti-
mate lesson may be to deny the very foundations of freedom, by teaching
us that we are caught in the blind determinisms and mechanisms of a
purely material world. This is the thought that would come to haunt,
amongst others, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Conrad and Walter Pater, in the
nineteenth century.3

References to matter, material world and materiality take us to the

threshold of the various doctrines known as materialism. I want to start
by discriminating some of the relevant meanings and contexts involved
here, as well as gesturing towards a history which might encompass
them. In the study of art and literature, these meanings and contexts
are essentially threefold: for shorthand purposes, I shall call them the

1
The Dyer’s Hand, London 1962, pp. 50–1.
2
T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea. Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven
and London 1993.
3
The anxiety over the machine and the mechanical can be traced back to the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: see the fascinating study by Catherine Liu,
Copying Machines. Taking Notes for the Automaton, Minneapolis 2000.

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Romantic, the positivist and the semiotic. The first discrimination con-
cerns materialism in the senses evoked by modern science and modern
economy: the place and role of art in the age of industrialization. This first
context yields what is of course a familiar story—basically, one of oppo-
sition. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanticism,
scientific method was perceived as resting on a deadly atomism, an
analytics of matter that drained it of meaning and destroyed the intui-
tive sense of connexion with the living presences and processes of
Nature—in whose name Goethe and Wordsworth attacked the modern
scientific spirit. Relatedly, economic materialism—the new forces of
production and the culture of secular techno-rationality that accompa-
nied them—was held to have installed the rule of instrumental reason,
which marked the emergence of the disenchanted world of modernity.
In this moment, art and literature—or, more generally, the category of
the aesthetic—are commonly seen as a rearguard action against this
hegemony. Counterposed to mechanical materialism is the organicist
materialism which underpins a redemptive view of the nature of art: of
aesthetic experience as the royal road to the reunion of matter and spirit,
sundered by modernity. In this conception, matter is redeemed through
its infusion by spirit; as for example, in the quasi-Spinozist aesthetic
pantheism of the Romantics and the accompanying artistic doctrine of
correspondances, whereby the materiality of the poetic word was held to
embody or, literally, incorporate, the sphere of the transcendental—a
theory of poetry as onomatopœia married to metaphysics; one term for
which, in Romantic aesthetic thought, was the ‘symbol’.4

The two other moments that I have listed as the historical successors
to the Romantic—the positivist and the semiotic—are quite different in
their respective ways with the category of materiality. Positivism applies
rather than resists the application of science to the understanding of
art and literature, broadly as the analysis of the material and social con-
ditions of literary production, with a corresponding demystification of
the Romantic–organicist view. Marxism expands this approach, with

4
Clark makes the interesting point that, against all the odds, these ideas survive
in a certain way of thinking about Modernist abstract painting: the belief that
pure ‘forms’ of paint are embodiments of meaning. He describes this belief as ‘late
Romantic’ and characterizes it as the attempt to ‘move signification from the realm
of the discursive into that of the symbol—where symbols would simply make or
be meaning, with meaning inhering in them, as substance or essence’: Farewell
to an Idea, p. 253.

prendergast: Modernism 143

its stress on the materiality of signifying practices, or what Clark calls
‘the historical, material place and determination of the whole language-
game’. Clark however also takes this to mean ‘not just the phenomenal
“stuff” of any one token within it’, but rather a set of practices, saturated
with historically realized human meanings and values; a whole phenom-
enology of the making of lived meanings, articulated through the body
and work on the world.5

The notion of materiality as ‘phenomenal stuff’, or what we have come

to call the materiality of the signifier, is rather the theme of the third
moment, the semiotic, and the related cluster of labels that go with
it: formalism, structuralism, deconstruction. In this third moment, the
sign is material in the literal sense of physical matter (phonic or graphic)
and is decisively recast in the association with the Saussurian notion
of arbitrariness. As arbitrary physical mark or sound, the sign is char-
acterized by thickness and opacity rather than transparency. Unlike the
organic integrations of Romantic ideology, or the dense weave of social
meanings foregrounded by Marxist materialism, what is here empha-
sized is rather the sign as the site of a resistance to meaning: the pull
of the material is a pull away from (the fiction of) embodied meaning.
This, famously, is the approach of Paul de Man, who deploys the idea
of the linguistic and literary sign as brute matter with the express inten-
tion of wrecking all possible groundings of art as humanly meaningful,
under the general heading of the illusions of Romantic anthropomor-
phism—described, in the essay on Rousseau in Allegories of Reading,
as ‘the loss of the illusion of meaning’.6 Another way of putting this
is to equate materiality with mechanism, the work of literary art as
‘verbal contraption’.

5
Farewell to an Idea, p. 259.
6
There has recently been an attempt to take de Man’s notion of ‘materiality’ fur-
ther, by way of the stress in his posthumously published collection Aesthetic Ideology
on the themes of ‘inscription’ and ‘performativity’, whereby textual materiality
is seen as ‘material event’ intervening in history ‘to make something happen’.
See Material Events. Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen et
al, Minneapolis 2001. T. J. Clark is a contributor to this discussion. One of
the other contributors, Jacques Derrida, glosses the relevant notion as follows:
The materiality in question—and one must gauge the importance of this irony
or paradox—is not a thing; it is not something (sensible or intelligible); it is not
even the matter of a body. As it is not something, as it is nothing and it works,
cela œuvre, this nothing therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance. It

144 nlr 10
Over the course of 150 years or so, we thus encounter a remarkable
shift: from the Romantic way with matter as an attempt to rescue it
from the purely mechanical, passing by way of the organic, to a radi-
cally anti-Romantic conception, which restores the materiality of art and
language to the realm of the mechanism. Behind, or accompanying this
shift, lies a massive cultural and political history. For the Romantics,
the aesthetic was at once a term of resistance and redemption, saving
us from submission to the meaninglessness of material determinations.
In Schiller’s theoretical writings, for example, the Aesthetic State (where
‘state’ signifies both subjective condition and political form) is one in
which wholeness of being is recovered from the atomistic fragmenta-
tions inflicted by modern science and political economy. The Aesthetic
State is at once the ground and guarantee of what Schiller understands
by freedom, where freedom is to be grasped partly in the Kantian sense
of freedom from the blind determinations of material nature. Art, in the
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, offers the escape route from
that potential or actual submission.

Webs of necessity

But consider what happens later in the century to the idea of freedom in
its relations with the categories of art, science and material nature. Here,

resists both beautiful form and matter as substantial and organic totality. This is
one of the reasons why de Man never says, it seems to me, matter but materiality.
Assuming the risk of this formula, although de Man does not do so himself, I
would say that it is a materiality without matter . . . (p. 350).
The gloss is difficult and opaque, but interestingly related by Derrida to a distinc-
tion between the organic and the mechanical; materiality without matter belongs
with the machine or the machine-like, as a point of resistance to the illusion of
meaningful aesthetic wholeness. This would seem to be in many ways consistent
with the emphasis in earlier de Man on textual materiality as an arbitrariness or a
contingency that disrupts and disfigures the drive towards an achieved plenitude
of meaning. This—a force or effect, rather than a substance—is what materiality
‘makes happen’ as ‘event’ in history, whereas aesthetic ideology seeks to freeze
and transcend the historical. This is certainly a novel re-location of the relations
between language, art and matter and, as Derrida notes, has nothing in common
with our more traditional understandings of ‘materialism’. Quite how one might
handle the ‘paradox’ of a ‘materiality without matter’ is, as yet, far from clear. It
presumably has some connexion with the anti-foundationalist distinction between
ontology and ‘hauntology’, the ‘spectral’ reality inside all material incarnations,
mapped out in Spectres of Marx.

prendergast: Modernism 145

first of all, is a passage from one of Joseph Conrad’s letters on the theme
of the world as a freedom-denying machine:

There is a—let us say—a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific)

out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at
the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider—but it
goes on knitting. You come and say ‘This is all right: it’s only a question
of the right kind of oil. Let us use this—for instance—celestial oil and the
machine will embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold’. Will
it? Alas, no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with
a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous
thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience,
without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident—and
it has happened. You can’t interfere with it . . . you can’t even smash it. In
virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it
spring into existence it is what it is—and it is indestructible!
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death,
corruption, despair and all the illusions—and nothing matters. I’ll admit
however that to look at the remorseless process is sometime amusing.7

This, as Edward Said notes in Beginnings, not only expresses an attitude

to life; it also has profound implications for Conrad’s conception of nar-
rative art, as the place of an almost unmanageable conflict between the
desire for freedom in the form of an authoring hero or human agent and
the recalcitrance of a world perceived and posed as inhuman machine.8
Consider now a passage from Walter Pater’s study of Winckelmann on
the relations between art, world and freedom:

Let us understand by poetry all literary production which attains the power
of giving joy by its form as distinct from its matter. Only in this varied liter-
ary form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which
will enable it to deal with the conditions of modern life. What modern art
has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern
life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. And what does the spirit
need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough
sense of freedom, which supposes man’s will to be limited if at all only by a
will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it
in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninterest-
ing. The chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself
is the intricacy, the universality of natural law even in the moral order. For

7
Letter to Robert Cunninghame Graham, 20 December 1897, in Gerard Jean-
Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, London 1927, p. 216.
8
Beginnings: Intention and Method, New York 1975, p. 133.

146 nlr 10
 us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do war-
fare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic
system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network
subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the
world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as
to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?9

This intriguing passage calls for careful reading. It asks a question about
modern art in relation to modern life, based on the assumption that
the task of the former is to ‘re-arrange’ the latter in order to ‘satisfy the
spirit’. The needs of the spirit are defined in terms of what Pater (echo-
ing Schiller) calls ‘the sense of freedom’. Freedom, as the requirement
of spirit, is not what is spontaneously on offer from modern life. On
the contrary, modern life teaches us that we are caught in the trammels
(the ‘bewildering toils’) of necessity—not the realm of necessity of pre-
modern life, but rather necessity as understood by modern science, the
play of physical determinations penetrating our subjectivities and nerv-
ous systems with ‘the central forces of the world’. The function of art
is to liberate us from these bewildering toils by giving to the spirit ‘at
least an equivalent of the sense of freedom’. It is here that Pater’s precise
phrasing demands close scrutiny. Pater does not say that ‘culture’, in
attempting to satisfy the needs of the spirit, supplies us with freedom
(this rather is Schiller’s far more optimistic argument); what it supplies
or can supply is the ‘sense’ of freedom. This is already a weakening of
Schiller’s strong claim, and it is further accentuated in the account of art
as a representation delivering not freedom nor even the ‘sense’ of free-
dom but, in the last sentence, an ‘equivalent’ of the sense of freedom.
So, a simulacrum, a substitution, which may console us for what we
lack in the disenchanted world of science, but which cannot be confused
with the real thing. It is a mere equivalent, a fiction, an illusion of free-
dom, or a mechanism, which, once subjected to conscious examination,
can be seen as such. Whence Pater’s repeated insistence throughout his
critical writings on the ethical demand that literature be made and read
reflexively, so as to demonstrate its fabricated character, to reveal the
mechanism that underlies the effects it produces.

This is, of course, a first version of what we ourselves have come

more routinely to know as the honesty, the good conscience of the

9
The Renaissance, London and New York 1893, pp. 244–5.

prendergast: Modernism 147

reflexive turn, opposing the bad faith of the organicist and the anthropo-
morphic. But it can be seen, in Pater’s terms, that a grave problem
immediately arises: what are the consequences if what is revealed in
the reflexive moment is precisely the pure mechanism behind the fic-
tions of freedom? This is modernism’s nightmare. Take for example
Mallarmé’s spectacularly convoluted address to this problem in La
Musique et les lettres:

We know, captives of an absolute formula, that indeed there is only that

which is. Forthwith to dismiss the cheat, however, on a pretext, would
indict our inconsequence, denying the pleasure we want to take: for that
beyond is its agent, and the engine I might say were I not loath to perform,
in public, the impious dismantling of the fiction and consequently of the
literary mechanism, display the principal part or nothing. But I venerate
how, by a trick, we project to a height forfended—and with thunder!—the
conscious lack in us of what shines up there. What is it for? A game.10

The motif of the game, the word ‘jeu’, is a constant companion in

Mallarmé’s poetry and writings about poetry: the Jeu suprême of the
sonnet ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’, the jeu littéraire of the famous letter to
Verlaine, the jeu de la parole in the preface to René Ghil’s Traité du verbe.
The ‘game’ here is the game of art and poetry, the Jeu with a capital ‘J’
in ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ as signifier of its supreme value, its prestige. But
Mallarmé is haunted, too, by the thought that the game is also an empty
and futile one—the jeu insensé of his homage to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.
He thus shuttles between a view of the greatness of art and a view of its
vanity. In the passage from La Musique et les lettres, Mallarmé addresses
the question as to how much of this uncertainty should be revealed, or
hidden. Relatedly, there is the question as to whom he addresses: is it
himself, in a kind of private soliloquy, or a notional reading public? In
the passage, the word ‘game’ thus comes to designate a double game:
there is the literary game (here variously defined as the ‘fiction’, the
‘literary mechanism’ and the ‘trick’), and the intellectual game of con-
cealment and disclosure played with the public as to the basis of the
literary game—that is, whether to mystify or demystify. Mallarmé thus
turns inside a dilemma: whether to open up the basis of the literary
game to the public gaze, or to refrain from making public a private
knowledge (his being loath to ‘perform in public the impious disman-
tling of the fiction’). And, being Mallarmé, this reluctance to expose

10
Œuvres complètes, Paris 1945, p. 657.

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the possible truth of the game, its status as mere ‘trick’, is reflected in
his own opaquely hermetic syntax and the corresponding struggle the
reader has to make sense of it. In The Field of Cultural Production, Pierre
Bourdieu glosses this passage as follows:

Hermeticism, in this case, perfectly fulfils its function: to utter ‘in public’
the true nature of the field, and of its mechanisms, is sacrilege par excel-
lence, the unforgivable sin which all the censorships constituting the field
seek to repress. These are things that can only be said in such a way
that they are not said. If Mallarmé can, without excluding himself from
the field, utter the truth about a field which excludes the publishing of its
own truth, this is because he says it in a language which is designed to
be recognized within the field because everything, in its very form, that of
euphemism and Verneinung, affirms that he recognizes its censorships.11

Flaubert’s puppets

Bourdieu here takes a robustly critical view of the elitist, anti-democratic

implications of Mallarmé’s devious circling around a form of knowledge
(the disenchanted knowledge of art as mechanical trickery) that cannot be
made public. These are serious ethical, and political, considerations. But a
straightforward denunciation of Mallarmé’s ambiguous stance, however
strongly motivated, does nevertheless ignore the delicacy of the relevant
problematic—that which, perhaps somewhat theatrically, I have termed
Modernism’s nightmare. Let us now venture a little further into this
nightmare—or, shall we say, anxiety—by way of three further reference
points: Flaubert, Kleist and Thomas Mann. This may appear prima facie
to be a most improbable alignment, and even more so when I add, even
if only as footnotes, two others: Cézanne and Paul de Man. A devilishly
exotic brew, to be sure; but hopefully the more general line of argument
I will be trying to run through these diverse sources will be clear.

I start with my principal example, Flaubert. Positioning Flaubert as a

pivotal figure in this story may come as no surprise, but a somewhat
curious anecdote from Flaubert’s correspondence may perhaps enliven
this otherwise predictable move. On January 30th, 1879, the very same
day on which Flaubert received a letter from Turgenev recommending,
for reasons of health, that Flaubert take more walks, he fell and broke
his leg. Being Flaubert, he did not go so far as to interpret this unhappy

11
The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge 1993, p. 73.

prendergast: Modernism 149

coincidence as a ‘sign’ that the world does not accommodate itself to
human designs. But he might have found himself musing on another
letter that he himself had written to his admirer, Mme Brainne, six
months previously, on August 1st, 1878, in which he also spoke of his
leg—his youthful one:

When I compare myself to what I was then, I think I am a wreck, I remem-

ber my arm and my leg, so plump and shapely they were, but I abandon the
quotation because thirty years ago the extremity of your youth would have
placed you out of my reach. However, we do not choose our lives, they are
thrust upon us. Poor little puppets that we are!12

Puppets, or marionettes, are also a key analogy for human beings in

another letter, written some twenty-five years earlier, where the figure of
the puppet is not a passing metaphor for the vicissitudes of human life
but a constitutive element of a conception of art and the artist. The pas-
sage in which the analogy is embedded is, by any measure, scary.

This urge to cheapen everything is profoundly French, the land of equality

and anti-liberty. For liberty is detested in this dear country of ours. The ideal
form of the state, according to the socialists, is it not a kind of huge monster
absorbing into itself all individual action, all personality, all thought, man-
aging everything, doing everything . . . And consequently, ever since 1830,
France has been in the grip of an idiot realism. The infallibility of universal
suffrage is about to become a dogma which will take the place of papal infal-
libility. Brute force, weight of numbers, respect for the masses has taken
the place of the authority of the name, of divine right, the supremacy of the
Spirit . . . Republic or monarchy, we won’t get beyond all that stuff for some
time. It’s the outcome of protracted endeavours in which all have played
their part from de Maistre down to père Enfantin. And the republicans have
done more than most. What is equality then if it is not the negation of all
liberty, all forms of superiority, of Nature itself? Equality, it’s slavery. That
is why I love art. There, at least, all is liberty in this world of fictions. Every
wish is granted, you can do anything, simultaneously be king and subject,
active and passive, victim and priest. No limits there; for you and your kind
humanity is a puppet with little bells on its costume to be set jingling with a
prod of the pen, just like the street-corner puppeteer who works the strings
with his foot.13

12
Selected Letters, London 1997, p. 415.
13
Selected Letters, pp. 176–7. Elsewhere in the correspondence Flaubert describes
the (modern) work of art as a ‘game of skittles’ and a ‘hoax’. That this is seen as
related to a distinctively modern obsession with ‘technique’ is made clear in another
letter, in which Flaubert refers to the great literary predecessors as writers who
‘have no techniques’.

150 nlr 10
There is much that is disturbing in this passage, above all the way
the detached, alienated image of the artist as puppeteer, manipulating
a puppet-like humanity with ‘a prod of the pen’, is embedded in an
openly reactionary reflection (if not a semi-hysterical denunciation) of
the modern politics of equality; offset by the further, and related, image
of the artist as the one who enjoys absolute, untrammelled liberty, the
being for whom there are ‘no limits’, who is free to ‘do anything’. This,
basically, is a dream of inhuman or anti-human omnipotence, with a
strong echo of the Faustian pact in which ‘every wish is granted’. I
shall return briefly to the politics of this at the end, in connexion with
that other modern Faustian pact, in Thomas Mann. For the moment,
what should interest us here is the identification of art with mecha-
nism. As a conception of art and the artist, it also resonates into other
moments of the correspondence, notably the letters in which Flaubert
represents literature as lourde machinerie, ‘heavy machinery’, and a ‘piece
of machinery’ (quelle mécanique). This is one version of what is entailed
by Flaubert’s famous self-description as an homme-plume. The phrase is
an arresting one. It may call to mind the more-or-less standard English
‘penman’, of which Joyce makes great use in Finnegans Wake; but the
French of course reverses the terms of the English: not a penman but a
man-pen. The man-pen is the one who writes simply for the sake of writ-
ing, and from there it is but a step to the picture of Flaubert pacing his
room at Croisset, turning inside what he called ‘the pangs of style, the
agonies of assonance, the tribulations of syntax’, cranking out sentences
as pure verbal forms, detached from considerations of human reference,
linked to the project of the ‘book about nothing’. Writing, that is to say,
as, precisely, mechanics: rather like the mechanical rhythms of Binet’s
lathe churning out napkin rings in Madame Bovary.

I do not, of course, wish to imply that Flaubert’s actual novels are

reducible to this chilling programme; only that it represents one side
of the Flaubertian imagination that is exemplary for understanding one
of the problematic faces of Modernism. In the novels themselves we
have a glimpse of what this looks like, in the account of the first meet-
ing of Bouvard and Pécuchet on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin.
They walk to and fro, greet each other and finally sit down to talk,
in a sequence of gestures that reminds us of nothing so much as the
signals of a clown routine. It might therefore be appropriate to recall
here Bergson’s remarks about the clown figure in his essay on laughter,
where he argues that the point of the clown’s routines is to generate and

prendergast: Modernism 151

intensify a process of mechanization, whose cumulative effect is one
of dehumanization.14 Thus, as a first encounter, a narrative incipit, the
beginning of Bouvard et Pécuchet mocks the whole convention of narra-
tive beginnings as introducing the reader to a human world; here, we are
rather thrust into a place that resembles the world of the marionette.

Kleist, Cézanne and Mann

Flaubert’s use of the marionette figure is ad hoc and casual, but it may
direct our thoughts to its far more systematic deployment in Kleist’s
essay on the Marionettentheater. Kleist’s essay is the great anomaly in the
Romantic corpus, staking all on the mechanical rather than the organic,
but it is not my intention here to add yet another drop to the great
swell of readings that have followed in the wake of Paul de Man’s semi-
nal, if controversial, account in The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Instead, I
refer to Kleist as a cue for a double move, two last references: the first
is a return to the book I mentioned at the beginning, Clark’s Farewell
to an Idea; the second, with which I shall conclude, is to Mann’s Dr
Faustus. Clark’s book is about modern painting but also many other
things besides. In his long chapter on Cézanne’s Bather pictures he
takes us from what he sees as the terrifying machine of Cézanne’s picto-
rial representation of the human body, via Freud’s positivist–materialist
‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, into a brief meditation on Kleist’s
essay and its interpretation by de Man. I quote, in extenso, from the con-
cluding paragraphs of the relevant chapter:

This is what I have been trying to say all along. Not just that the Bathers
are haunted by figures of inconsistency and displacement, or by kinds
of coexistence (of marks and objects) that are more painful than natural,
more like interruption than juxtaposition, more like the grating and lock-
ing of the parts of a great psychic machine than the patient disclosure of a
world . . . [T]he kind of consistency it has is hard for us to deal with—that
is why we retreat into the world of the imaginary—just because it is ulti-
mately inhuman, or nonhuman, or has humanity as one of its effects. That
is what the relation of bodies to the picture rectangle in the Philadelphia
Bathers has most powerfully to say, I think. We do not like the proposition,
so we call it forced or artificial. Even the best commentators on Cézanne—
Roger Fry and Meyer Shapiro, for instance—can be found recoiling from
the Bathers on these grounds. Or inventing a Bathers with no inorganic
chill in the air—having its surface be vibrant, tense, or sensitive. Having

14
Henri Bergson, Le Rire, Paris 1900.

152 nlr 10
it ‘breathe’. But no surface has ever been less animate than this one. No
handling has ever been less a means of laying hold of (getting one’s hands
on) a human world.
I realize these last few sentences have essentially crossed from Freud’s
territory to that of another, more savage kind of materialism, which I asso-
ciate with the mechanists of the high Enlightenment, and with the writer
who seems to me their best spokesman in our own day, Paul de Man.
But I do think the two territories—the Freudian and the mechanistic–
materialist—overlap. The ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ is linked in
my mind with the great essay by de Man on ‘Aesthetic Formalization in
Kleist’ . . .
Mr C in Kleist’s text is the principal dancer in the opera at M, and an
enthusiast for the puppet theatre in the park. He prefers it by far to the
human ballet. The narrator expresses his astonishment ‘at the attention C
is paying this species of art form intended for the masses’:
—I said that the job of the puppeteer had been presented to me
as something done without sensitivity, something like turning the
handle of a barrel-organ [das Drehen einer Kurbel sei die eine Leier
spiett].
—‘Not at all’, he answered. ‘In fact, there is a rather ingenious rela-
tionship between the movement of the attached puppets, somewhat
like that of numbers to their logarithms or the asymptotes to the
hyperbola.’
—And yet he believed that even the last trace of human volition
to which he had referred could be removed from the marionettes,
that their dance could be transferred completely to the realm of
mechanical forces and that it could be produced, as I had thought,
by turning a handle . . .
—[If that were done,] he said, it would be impossible for a man to
come anywhere near the puppet. Only a god could equal inanimate
matter in this respect . . .
This is not offered as a description of Cézanne’s last Bathers—not even of
the London version—but rather of a logic that threatens to overtake them,
and which strikes me as the key to their mixture of Grand Guignol and
utopia, or absurdity and perfection. I only say ‘threatens to overtake them’,
and of course what is ultimately most touching in the Bathers is their will
to resist the vision of bodies that the pictures’ own ruthlessness makes pos-
sible. What Kleist gives voice to, in de Man’s reading, is the necessary other
dream of materialism—the one to which the various (but limited) mecha-
nisms we call aesthetic gives access, and from which we regularly draw
back. It is the reason we all hate the beautiful so much.
Modernism, I am convinced, would not anger its opponents in the way
it seems to if it did not so flagrantly assert the beautiful as its ultimate com-
mitment. And if it did not repeatedly discover the beautiful as nothing but
mechanism, nothing but matter dictating (dead) form . . . We might say

prendergast: Modernism 153

 that aesthetic, as Kleist depicts it, is materialism’s uncanny. Which is to say,
its repressed truth, its ridiculous conclusion—its familiar. And who could
look at the striding woman in the Barnes Bathers, or the double figure in
Philadelphia, or the terrible, cramped repetitions of bodies in London, with-
out realizing that ultimately the horror in these pictures reaches beyond
any recoverable or irrecoverable human content to the sheer turning of
the handle of the representational machine? I stand in front of the Barnes
Bathers and hear a hurdy-gurdy playing.15

The account here is dense, elliptical, at times compacted to the point

of impenetrable opacity, but I take it that any reader would be struck
by its terminus: the curious synæsthesic trope of hearing a barrel-organ
while looking at Cézanne’s painting. The mechanics of the hurdy-gurdy
is a very unusual and, indeed, provocative image of Cézanne’s pictorial
effects; but the intended provocation finds its place in a more general
argument about Modernist painting. In a nutshell, Clark’s argument
(or, at least, the Weberian dimension of that argument) has it that
Modernism battles with the grim facts of mechanism and brute mate-
riality, as the consequence of its confrontation with—but, at critical
moments, also its surrender to—the instrumentally rationalized world
of disenchanted modernity.16 In that battle, it is torn by a contradictory
set of imperatives: at once obliged to accept those facts and seeking to
escape them, simultaneously to display and repress them, in a desper-
ate struggle to hold on to a relation of art to human world while at the
same time acknowledging that this relation, along with the whole tradi-
tion of the presuppositions of Western art, has been wrecked. This is
what Clark means when he speaks of modern painting as painting ‘at
the end of its tether’. There is indeed a note of terror here, a sense of
nightmare. Its drift is very different from Bourdieu’s ethical censoring
of Mallarmé’s reluctance to disclose the working of the mechanism in
art. It is concerned more with the moral and political implications of
demystification and the corresponding entry into the cold universe of
the ‘representational machine’, the universe that in Dr Faustus Zeitblom
will describe, in connexion with Leverkühn’s mathematical musical plot-
ting, as ‘the frightful clockwork of the world-structure’.

15
Farewell to an Idea, pp. 166–7.
16
Although, for the purpose of these reflections, I have taken my cue from Clark’s
account of Modernism, this should not be taken to imply full endorsement of his
theses, to which I hope to return on another occasion.

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The frightful clockwork of the world-structure is what underlies
Leverkühn’s piece, the Gesta Romanarum, a piece of theatrical music in
which ‘the characters were not to be men but puppets’. And it will come
as no surprise that Kleist’s marionette essay is one of the sources of
Leverkühn’s inspiration. In Leverkühn’s library, as noticed by Zeitblom,
‘a few books lay on the table: a little volume of Kleist, with the bookmark
at the essay on marionettes’. The essay subsequently provides the basis
for a more extended exchange betwen Leverkühn and Zeitblom on the
subject of aesthetics. This is what Leverkühn says:

‘There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is its name. How
does one break through? . . . Here too’, he said, and twitched the little red
marker in the volume of Kleist on the table, ‘here too it treats of the break-
through, in the capital essay on the marionettes, and it is called straight out
“the last chapter of the history of the world”. But it is only talking about aes-
thetic, charm, free grace, which actually is reserved to the automaton and
the god; that is, to the unconscious or an endless consciousness, whereas
every reflection lying between nothing and infinity kills grace’.17

‘But it is only talking about aesthetic’. We of course know, from

Zeitblom’s discourse and the narrative ending, that the concept of the
‘breakthrough’ is not just a matter for aesthetics. It is also, and cata-
strophically, a matter for politics, of Germany breaking through on the
tide of Nazism—although whether this authorizes a convincing parallel-
ism between Leverkühn’s experimental music and fascism, as distinct
from a forced analogy, remains very much open interpretative business.

At one level, Nazi ideology, in its reliance on magical and mythic forms
of thought, was a modern version of reenchantment, and it is largely
on this ground that the story of Modernism’s more direct involvements
with fascism is usually told: as varieties of the dream of reenchantment,
from archaic fantasies of regeneration and ‘order’ to the Futurist wor-
ship of the dynamic, transforming ‘charisma’ of the machine—which,
of course, did not prevent the Nazis from proscribing Modernist art
as entartete Kunst.18 But what matters for the purposes of the present

17
Thomas Mann, Dr Faustus, London 1951, pp. 307–8.
18
It is no accident that the Italian Futurists were also obsessed with puppets and
marionettes: see Harold Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny. Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons
and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama, Baltimore and London 1995, pp.
260–96. Segel construes the general significance of the interest in the puppet as

prendergast: Modernism 155

argument are not the explicit forms in which particular versions of
Modernist ideology aligned themselves with fascist ones, but rather the
ways in which certain Modernist or proto-Modernist anxieties progres-
sively drew the mind towards revealing and confronting what these
ideologies concealed. For this reason it might make sense to bring
Leverkühn’s Gesta Romanarum and its coldly rational composition more
into the foreground of discussion (it is normally viewed as secondary
to the later twelve-tone pieces, most notably the Apocalypsis cum figuris
which, in its traffic with the regressive and the archaic, is seen as impli-
cated in what will become the mythic thinking of Nazism). The reality
of Nazism was, of course, the exact opposite of the reenchanted, as
the ruthless deployment of disenchanted techno-rationality. Zeitblom
appears to veer between the two poles: in the early pages of the novel
he envisages the ‘breakthrough’ with high idealist enthusiasm; but later
comes to see it as bleakly and irretrievably identified with the mech-
anized, omnipotent destructiveness of Nazism, the new god playing
wantonly with the machine, working the strings of humanity like a mas-
ter-puppeteer. Modernism’s nightmare.

follows: ‘More profoundly, it reveals a yearning to play god, to master life. By con-
structing replicas of human beings whose movements they can then exert complete
power over, artists play at being gods instead of being merely playthings of the
gods’ (p. 4). One notes the uncanny echo of Flaubert.

156 nlr 10