The Antony Memorial Lecture on Modernist Poetry

Rajiv C Krishnan


The Modernist characterization of the art object as autotelic gathers the question of the relationship between the subject and object into one of epistemological irrelevance. But the irreducible referentiality of words and the irrecoverable particularity of experience combine to make of poetry one of the most difficult—if not the most impossible—of the arts. For the epistemology of particularity proposes infinite tasks. The inexhaustibility of description and the inevitability of finitude conspire to work out the compromise or the ‘soft’ representation that describes Modernist poetics. The Modernists as a whole are in search of an art object that would be in apposition to nature and would thereby mediate the epistemological schism between subject and object. Memory becomes the model and instance of history, and the tropic dimension the only valid mode of artistic representation. Firstness loses its suchness on recapture, and all aesthetic experiences seem doomed to be the experience of lack. No wonder then that Modernism, repudiating the pretensions of realism, bravely announces the end of the age of mimesis.

The Modernist artist stands proxy for the self as originary experience. The givenness of the world of phenomena makes of perception the basis and building block of experience. Thus, the Modernist interrogation of reality is not so much a distortion of reality as a rhetorical assertion of the inevitability of distortion. Distortion produces new objects of and for perception. This is why the continuation and persistence of phenomena in art must not be taken as an indication of capitulation to objects. The ontological density of objects provides the model for the art object. But as against the pure contingency of natural objects, the birth of the work of art is attended by practices of choice and exclusion. The convergence of attention contends with the infinite particularity and differentiations of natural process, and so the Modernist premium on ‘making it new’ gains an urgency that verges on paranoiac anxiety.

The Romantics questioned perception because they feared the reduction of the human self into a bundle of perceptual experiences. The Modernist fear, on the other hand, is an ekphrastic fear, a fear of literalism, a fear that the poem may dwindle into a mere residue of perceptions—this in fact was what actually happened to vulgar Imagism. Since meaning represents the conjunction of sensation and purpose, the valorization of sensation leads to effete literalism, and the valorization of purpose leads to idiolectic symbolism. At no other time in history has the public nature of art and the private nature of experience been so much in conflict with each other.

Modernism devotes attention to perception not in order to dismiss the phenomenal world as unreal, but to rediscover its relationship to the creation of artistic meaning. This is why the primal apprehension of phenomena becomes the point of departure for the epistemological procedures of Modernism. But as long as the activity of perception in art is viewed as the smuggling of the world of objects into the preserves of the subject, perception must always represent an implicit threat to the self-sufficiency of the work of art. The search for non-objective modes in Modernist art highlights this anxiety. Thus the inextricability of words from reference is the inextricability of meaning from perception. Art thus becomes the quintessential symbol of the social and cultural entity of man. The dissolution of the conventional concepts of art must therefore be taken to be a questioning of the very basis of what it is to be human.

It is the experience of perception as an encounter with alterity that distinguishes the human use of phenomena. When sensation ceases to be the sensation of lack and absence, experience becomes the experience of self-sufficient and self-certifying fullness. The eradication of the order of priority between being and meaning makes perception and the use of perception indistinguishable. And this is what brings us to the self-reflexive moment of Modernism, which thus derives directly from its problematization of perception and representation. But the Modernist work, for all its play with the tropic dimension, is haunted by the fear of literalism: in consequence, it is self-reflexive, but pines for semiotic transparency, and desires, but falls short of openness. And this is once again why the Modernist experimentation with form displays a paradoxical tendency to remember wholes while presenting fragments, to interrupt freedom with the nostalgia for method, to find inscribed in representation a history of representation, and to attribute normative historical value to individual enterprise and experience. These are the very tendencies that have prompted the identification of the rise of Modernism with the rise of totalitarian ideologies.