Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce

By Leonardo F. Lisi

Two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have come down to us from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. In this revisionary study, Leonardo Lisi argues that these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form.

Lisi traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as his point of departure, Lisi examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce.

Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Release date: Dec 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9780823245345

Book preview

Marginal Modernity

The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce

Leonardo F. Lisi

Fordham University Press

New York

2013

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lisi, Leonardo F.

Marginal modernity : the aesthetics of dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce / Leonardo F. Lisi. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-4532-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Dependency (Psychology) in literature. 3. Aesthetics in literature. 4. Philosophy in literature. I. Title.

PN56.M54L57 2013

809'.9112—dc23

2012027756

First edition

For Emily—Lad saa Gud beholde Himlen, naar jeg maa beholde hende.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Citations

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Modernism

Part One: Philosophical Foundations

1. Presuppositions and Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

Part Two: Aesthetic Forms at the Scandinavian Periphery

2. Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the Autonomy of Art

3. Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

4. Nora’s Departure and the Aesthetics of Dependency

Part Three: Modernism and Dependency

5. Henry James and the Emergence of the Major Phase

6. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Language of the Future

7. Conflict and Mediation in James Joyce’s The Dead

8. Intransitive Love in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

It seems inevitable that a book concerned with the concept of dependency should be deeply conscious of the many debts it has incurred. The present project was begun in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University, where, from its inception, it received the invaluable support and encouragement of Pericles Lewis and Paul Fry. Many other members of Yale’s faculty were instrumental in providing feedback at early stages of the manuscript and in challenging me to explore some of these ideas in their initial form, including Karsten Harries, Katie Trumpener, Carol Jacobs, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Benjamin Harshav, and Moira Fradinger. No better beginning to this book could have been wished for, and I am deeply grateful for their continued interest and support.

Early on in the research for this book, I had the great fortune of spending a summer as a visiting researcher at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, then under the direction of Niels Jørgen Cappelørn. The opportunity to use the center’s resources, to engage in discussion with the outstanding scholars it has gathered, and to benefit from its director’s extraordinary intellectual generosity and dedication proved a utopian experience. Additional research stays at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and at the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College were likewise critical in developing my work. I am grateful especially to Cynthia Lund for helping to make my stay at St. Olaf as productive as possible.

The book obtained its final form after I had the privilege of joining the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. The vibrant intellectual life of this community is extraordinary, and the support and encouragement that my colleagues at the Humanities Center have offered me during this time have been invaluable. I am particularly indebted to Michael Fried, Gabrielle Spiegel, and Hent de Vries, who, with unlimited generosity, provided repeated guidance and assistance for this project during its concluding stages. Without them, my doubts about the possibility of finishing would certainly have been more frequent than they were, and the final product has benefited immeasurably from their involvement.

More people than I can thank here have had the kindness to share their ideas with me on many of the topics that I develop in the pages ahead. Ruth Leys, Paola Marrati, and members of the Johns Hopkins Mellon Seminar led by Gabrielle Spiegel have patiently listened to my arguments and challenged me to think about them in new ways. Jon Stewart at the University of Copenhagen has repeatedly encouraged me to pursue my work on Kierkegaard and first suggested that I write on Heiberg. Tobias Boes arranged for me to present an early version of the material on Hofmannsthal to the German Department at the University of Notre Dame, where I benefited greatly from the audience’s comments. I had the opportunity to share an early version of the chapter on Joyce with the English faculty at Bowdoin College, and their remarks and questions likewise helped me clarify my argument further. Frode Helland from the Ibsen Center at the University of Oslo and Mark Sandberg from the Scandinavian Department at the University of California, Berkeley, offered me extremely kind encouragement and support at a very early stage of this project. Glenn Odom and Gísli Magnusson made me question my reasoning anew at a point when I already thought that it was settled. At Fordham University Press, Helen Tartar’s outstanding editorial guidance, and the help of Thomas C. Lay and Tim Roberts, among many others, made the process of completing the manuscript and preparing it for publication as effortless and pleasurable as I could possibly have wished. Laura Iwasaki provided scrupulous and excellent copyediting of the manuscript. I am also indebted to the referees for Fordham University Press, whose detailed comments and suggestions were extremely useful in bringing this project to its conclusion.

Finally, my deepest gratitude is to my family. Dispersed across four countries and three continents, their love has been with me at all times. Emily, sola per cui…, shared every moment of this book. With infinite patience, she tested every thought that it contains and, in her superior intelligence, forgave the author for his failings.

An earlier version of chapter 1 of this book was published as Kierkegaard’s Epistemology of Faith: Outline towards a Systematic Interpretation, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2010, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Herman Deuser, and Brian Söderquist (New York and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 353–375. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in Heiberg and the Drama of Modernity, in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Litérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, edited by Jon Stewart (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), 421–448. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as "Allegory, Capital, Modernity: Peer Gynt and Ibsen’s Modern Breakthrough," Ibsen Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 43–68. Different sections of chapter 4 were first published in Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ibsen’s Form, Ibsen Studies 7, no. 2 (2007): 203–226; and Endelighedens æstetik: Modernismens problematik hos Kierkegaard og Ibsen, in Kierkegaard, Ibsen og det Moderne, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2010), 99–116. All previously published material has been substantially revised and expanded in the present context.

Note on Citations

Whenever possible, primary sources in languages other than English are cited first by page number in an English translation followed by a slash and the original-language edition. The only exceptions to this rule are references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which follow the standard convention of giving the page numbers in both the first and the second edition, indicated by A and B respectively, and likewise are separated by a slash. References to foreign-language works in the main body of the text will use the established English-language version of the title or, for cases in which no translation exists, my translation of the original title (although parenthetical citations will be given to the original title if more than one work by an author appears in the bibliography). I have provided my own translations when an English translation does not exist or I have preferred not to follow previously published translations. English translations of secondary sources have been used when accessible, except when the original version differs in relevant ways, in which case, references to both translation and original have been provided.

Introduction

The Aesthetics of Modernism

Whatever else there might be disagreement about with respect to modernism, a consensus exists that autonomy is central to it. This is visible not only in those critics who see it as the pivotal category of modernist aesthetics¹ but also in those who instead associate the movement with the principle of fragmentation that negates it, and which is habitually identified more strictly with the avant-gardes.² For all its prevalence, the very neatness of this opposition is suspicious. If the autonomy of modernism and the fragmentation of the avant-gardes are responses to the transformations of modernity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, then surely alternative aesthetic structures must be possible, unless these two responses are somehow all-exhaustive. In this study, I trace one such alternative aesthetic structure, which I term the aesthetics of dependency and which arises not at the core of European culture but at its Scandinavian margin, in the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen. Distinct from the modernism/avant-gardes binary usually relied on, this aesthetics of dependency not only provides a different formal organization of literary works but is also grounded on different philosophical assumptions, produced by different historical contexts, and has different sociological implications than those previously considered. By further mapping the dissemination of this aesthetics of dependency from Kierkegaard and Ibsen to authors at the center of European culture—Henry James, James Joyce, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke—this study also offers a new understanding of the geography and cultural contexts of modernist literature more generally.

In order to adequately clear the ground for such an investigation of alternatives to the standard conception of the literary aesthetics of European modernism, it is important to unpack more carefully the analytic scope of its central terms. With respect to the governing notion of autonomy, Friedrich Wolfzettel has usefully reminded us that it can be understood both in a sociological and in an aesthetic sense (432, 434). Sociologically, autonomy is a negative attribute and points to art’s independence from other ideological or disciplinary purposes or restraints, be they those of state, society, church, or party.³ Aesthetically, it refers to a positive, formal characteristic, which is most frequently described in terms of a work’s self-sufficiency, its unity as a self-enclosed totality or an organic whole, which has its organizing principle and meaning within itself.⁴In a frequently quoted discussion in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus defines a work’s "integritas in precisely such terms: But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness" (230).

As I will argue further below, it is important to insist on a conceptual distinction between these two kinds of autonomy (the sociological and the aesthetic), but it is notable that the historical origin of both has frequently been identified with Immanuel Kant and the idealist philosophy of the early German romantics.⁵ Unsurprisingly, the definition of the opposing aesthetics of the avant-gardes has consequently also centered on both of these concerns, emphasizing that its forms and strategies of fragmentation aim to break art’s isolation and to put it back in contact with everyday life.⁶

Implied in this kind of opposition between the aesthetics of modernism and that of the avant-gardes are two important points. First, it is clear that one must distinguish, as will be done from this point onward in this book, between the designation of a general period (Modernism with a capital M) and the designation of a particular aesthetic praxis (modernism with a lowercase m). The former term, on the one hand, in its broadest definition, is often taken to stretch from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II and includes a number of different aesthetic practices that share certain text-immanent characteristics. The latter term, on the other hand, refers to one of these aesthetic practices within Modernism, namely that defined in terms of the principle of autonomy, which has its origin with German idealist philosophy. The aesthetics of the avant-gardes that is defined in opposition to the mode of textual organization provided by autonomy therefore constitutes a rejection within Modernism of the idealist project as inadequate to properly represent the attributes of Modernist experience. Second, formulated in the above terms, it follows that the difference at stake between modernism and the avant-gardes is one of aesthetic principles, understood as attributes of the organization of the work as a whole, its total function or status,⁷ rather than of any particular aspect within it (on the basis of which they both belong to Modernism).

Both of these points are crucial and can be usefully clarified by means of the further distinction frequently imposed between Modernism and realism. It will be apparent that one implication of the present discussion is that the repeatedly emphasized opposition between the respective representational techniques and devices employed by Modernism and realism is insufficient to provide a distinction between them at the level of their aesthetic structures as a whole.⁸ This point is made by none other than Georg Lukács, one of the strongest proponents of such an opposition. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Lukács stresses that [w]hat must be avoided at all costs is the approach generally adopted by bourgeois-modernist critics themselves: to seek the separation of paths [between realism and Modernism] in the formal aspects, particularly in the mode of writing, the literary technique (The Meaning 17; trans. modified / Wieder 13).⁹ Instead, the difference between Modernism and realism must be located in what Lukács calls their opposing worldviews (Weltanschauungen) (ibid.; trans. modified). Thus, while both Thomas Mann and James Joyce make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, in the former, it can be defined as realist because it is merely a part of an objective totality, which it helps represent by serving a specific function within that larger whole (18 / 14–15). In Joyce, in contrast, stream of consciousness is Modernist because it is an end in itself (etwas künstlerisch Letztes) (18 / 14) and, as such, serves exclusively as a means to celebrate the subjective and unmediated experience of capitalist society as fragmented and chaotic.

In spite of Lukács’s vehement polemics against Modernism, his distinction between an analysis of particular literary techniques and an analysis of the function of those techniques in an aesthetic whole opens the door for an assessment opposed to his own. Insofar as the depiction of an objective totality that for Lukács defines realism is not restricted to mimetic modes of representation, works habitually classified as Modernist on the basis of their text-immanent attributes can in principle also achieve it. Franco Moretti has in fact forcefully argued as much in his influential study Modern Epic. According to Moretti, far from a literary device merely aiming at chaos, Joyce’s stream of consciousness in Ulysses is actually subject to strict organization through the opposing devices of the commonplace (160–163) and polyphony (205). While stream of consciousness is theoretically able to bring into play endless amounts of material, the commonplace and polyphony nevertheless subject it to a hierarchical structuration that limits its otherwise potential anarchy. Moreover, Moretti sees this simultaneous collaboration of expansive and reductive techniques as a central feature of Modernism at large (227–229), which, contrary to what Lukács claimed, allows Modernist texts to represent a social totality proper to the capitalist world-system (142–143; cf. also 210–211, 214–215, 229). What is even more significant in the present context is that Moretti sees this feature of Modernism as a direct continuation of the aesthetic project of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman (194–195), which likewise, as he argues in his earlier study, The Way of the World (9–10, et passim), provides an ideological compromise between opposing forces in capitalist society.

To be sure, Moretti and Lukács do not hold identical views about the nature of capitalism or of the totality represented in the works they analyze. But it is crucial to note that the aesthetic function of totality that serves each as a heuristic tool and standard of measurement is the same (as Moretti himself points out [Way viii]) and that it derives, moreover, from the same historical sources: the idealist aesthetics of autonomy developed by Kant and Schiller and associated with modernism.¹⁰ It should be noted that it is not important here whether or not one agrees with Moretti’s particular interpretation of Ulysses. Rather, what matters for the present argument is only that Moretti’s claim shows that, at the level of aesthetic analysis, it is possible to speak coherently of a continuous tradition of the aesthetics of autonomy that extends from German idealism, through nineteenth-century realism, and up to twentieth-century modernism, in spite of all the differences in modes of representation and thematic concerns that this period contains. And in this, of course, Moretti is not alone: already some twenty years earlier, M. H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism (297–324) and Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde (15–54) had made similar claims.

The latter work in particular is of interest here, since it continues to provide the most influential argument for the further distinction within Modernism between modernism and the avant-gardes. Although he does not sufficiently elaborate the point, Bürger’s argument relies on a distinction between particular artistic technique and overall aesthetic function akin to the one put forward by Lukács. As Bürger points out in a footnote much quoted for other reasons, a common feature of all these [avant-garde] movements is that they do not reject individual artistic techniques and procedures of earlier art but reject that art in its entirety, thus bringing about a radical break with tradition (109, n.4). The claim that the avant-garde movements seek to break free from modernism’s aesthetics of self-sufficiency and return to the praxis of everyday life is here likewise understood as a revolution not at the level of particular artistic techniques or contents but rather at the higher level of the aesthetic whole of the work as such.¹¹

A distinction between avant-garde and modernism that is based on the primacy of autonomy in the aesthetics of the latter, therefore, cannot be refuted by showing that the content of modernist works also has strong ties to popular culture (as Michael North has sought to do [10–11, 206–209]). Despite the importance of such attempts to open up the literary and cultural canon of modernism, they fail to understand that the aesthetics of autonomy can accommodate popular culture in its composition as easily as it can any other material. The same must be said for the attempt to dismantle the distinction in the opposite direction, by showing that modernist works exhibit disruptive artistic forms as much as avant-garde works do (as Astradur Eysteinsson has done [170, 216]), since, again, any particular artistic technique can in principle be shown to find its place within a whole that in its totality conforms to an organic structure. The distinction between the avant-gardes and modernism at the level of their aesthetic form, that is, must be drawn on the basis that they constitute different ways of organizing the entirety of form and content components in a work, not on the basis of the nature of those components themselves.

From this perspective, it is possible to draw the following conclusions: what frequently aligns modernism with realism is the similarity in their aesthetic structures, in spite of the differences in their particular representational techniques and thematic concerns. Conversely, what distinguishes modernism from the avant-garde is the difference in their respective overall aesthetic structures, in spite of the similarity of their representational techniques and thematic concerns. What tends to separate both modernism and the avant-garde from realism, then, is primarily the representational and thematic components found within the works associated with them (that which makes them Modernist in a general sense), rather than the composition of these works as a whole.

Unpacked in this way, it will be clear that to speak of an aesthetics of dependency in relation to Modernism is to posit a difference from both modernism and the avant-garde at the level of the aesthetic whole of the work, not at that of its particular formal or thematic components. Like the aesthetics of organic wholes and that of fragmentation, that is, the aesthetics of dependency designates a way in which the technical devices (anti-mimesis, semiotic ambiguity, fragmentation, etc.) and conceptual and thematic preoccupations (epistemological skepticism, crisis of modernity, relativity of values, subjectivity, modern urbanization, politics, etc.) habitually associated with Modernism are organized. More specifically, the aesthetics of dependency falls between both of its alternatives: like the aesthetics of the avant-gardes, it presents the work’s constitutive parts as ultimately irreconcilable, but like the aesthetics of autonomy, it insists that these parts must nevertheless be purposefully related. This mediation without unification occurs by formulating the principle according to which the work must be organized in terms incompatible with that work’s own representational and thematic structures, thereby making the purposeful relation of its parts depend on an interpretative perspective not coextensive with the logic of those parts themselves. The aesthetics of dependency in this way both provides a specific standard of measurement for how the work must be unified and prevents that unity from occurring by figuring it as wholly other to the structures at hand. It generates neither pure fragmentation nor organic harmony but rather makes the process of trying to convert the former into the latter the focus of the work.

Introduction of a further aesthetic category to the standard account of Modernism in these terms seeks to simultaneously deepen and widen the contemporary debate. With respect to the former purpose, it is important to point out that the centrality of aesthetics in the narrative of this book partakes of a recent return to the aesthetic in literary studies, exemplified by works such as Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999), Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Peter de Bolla’s Art Matters (2001), and Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004). Significantly, all these studies stress that the preceding decades witnessed an almost complete disappearance of the category of aesthetics from the field, which is frequently attributed to the reign of theory during that same period (culprits identified include deconstruction, Marxism, new historicism, and cultural studies).¹² However, in their efforts to recuperate the notion of aesthetics, none of these works examines the discipline’s original philosophical context in the late eighteenth century. In contrast to this approach, the present study grounds its discussion in a reconstruction of the philosophical issues underlying the aesthetic categories that we use. This is not to say that Marginal Modernity constitutes a history of philosophical aesthetics; it does not. But it does offer at least a basic outline of the original debate, which is necessary if one is to take full advantage of the opportunities that the return to aesthetics can provide. Three basic reasons for this can easily be identified.

First, if the aim of a return to aesthetics is, at least in part, to challenge the theory of the past thirty or forty years, then a return to the philosophical foundations of aesthetics is imperative. Aesthetics does not simply provide an alternative to theory that could allow us to sidestep its assumptions and concerns and to focus on other issues instead. Quite to the contrary, as a number of studies have pointed out (including Jürgen Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Robert Pippin’s Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, Manfred Frank’s What Is Neo-Structuralism?, Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute, to name but some of the most prominent examples), aesthetics and theory derive from largely the same philosophical context and debate. The project of a return to the aesthetic is thus also an opportunity to rethink the foundations of theory, the implications of finding different models for the formal organization of literary works also a way of finding conditions for reassessing the foundational questions of language and meaning, history and politics, with which theory has largely been concerned.

Such a project already implies a second, more general reason for returning to the original philosophical context of literary aesthetics, one that seeks to move beyond the parameters set out by theory. If we define the aesthetic organization of text-immanent elements (in broad terms that will be justified more fully in the chapters ahead) as the artistic enactment or representation of fundamental forms of knowledge and experience, and thereby of the fundamental conditions for our being in the world, then an examination of the philosophical origin of our aesthetic categories serves to elucidate the conceptions of experience and knowledge that these contain. This is important not only because it allows us to see the possibilities and limitations of specific versions of the aesthetic but also because it helps us become receptive to forms of organizing our relation to the world that fall outside the structures theorized by the tradition and which literary works continuously provide. That is, the task of a return to the aesthetic is not simply to reevaluate the categories that have been attacked in the past decades, to show that beauty, for example, is not necessarily a tool of ideological coercion and injustice but also one of ethics and liberation.¹³ Unquestionably this is true, but it is equally important to show that the category of beauty that we have inherited presupposes a certain understanding of truth and experience and that, to the extent that other conceptions of the conditions for meaning and experience exist, aesthetic categories and experiences other than beauty must be available as well. And vice versa: to the extent that aesthetic categories and experiences other than beauty exist, conceptions of the conditions for meaning and experience other than those we are familiar with and presuppose must be available.

Such a possibility is further confirmed by a third benefit of returning to the original discourse surrounding the emergence of aesthetics, namely, the way doing so makes clear that the tradition and concepts within which, knowingly or not, we have been operating are the product not only of specific philosophical questions and arguments but also of specific historical problems. The structures of meaning and experience with which aesthetics is concerned arise in particular social and cultural contexts, as responses to particular problems, and accordingly are unlikely to be absolute. This means not only that aesthetic forms will necessarily undergo historical change but also that different historical and cultural contexts are likely to produce different aesthetic projects, with different artistic, philosophical, and political implications. For example, as already indicated above, the aesthetic paradigm traced in this study, the aesthetics of dependency, is the outcome of the reception of German idealist aesthetics at the periphery of European culture, where it was able to develop and succeed largely because it emerged under a different perspective on the problems of modernity and in a different context in which to imagine a possible response.

This last point also indicates the way the present study seeks to widen the contemporary debate on Modernism. The methodological shift it suggests, from an examination of the aesthetics of European Modernism at its core to its periphery, takes seriously the point made by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane almost forty years ago: [W]hat is not always adequately acknowledged is that Modernism or the Modern, when viewed, say, from Berlin, or Vienna, or Copenhagen, or Prague or St. Petersburg, is a thing with a quite different chronological profile, with a rather different set of representative figures and influential precursors, with a very different group of origins (36). Somewhat surprisingly, this view has still received scant critical attention. With respect to Scandinavia, there is a striking absence of sustained work on the importance of its literary archive for a proper understanding of the aesthetics of European Modernism, even if lip service is frequently paid to the fact that a number of Scandinavian authors were instrumental to its development (Ibsen, August Strindberg, J. P. Jacobsen, Georg Brandes, and Knut Hamsun are among the usual references). It is notable, for example, that the editorial board of the influential journal Modernism/Modernity, the publishing organ for the Modernist Studies Association, boasts special editors for Central Europe, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Latin America (two), the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom and Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States (two), and the United States and Germany, but none for Scandinavia. Unquestionably this is due not least to the decision of most scholars to make Baudelaire and Flaubert the point of departure for Modernism and thereby implicitly to pursue its evolution almost exclusively along Anglo-French lines.¹⁴ That this is not merely an effect of national bias is suggested by the fact that Scandinavian critics frequently make the same point.¹⁵ Indeed, within the field of Scandinavian studies, a consensus has emerged that Modernism only reached the Nordic countries after World War II, at a time when the cultural centers of the West had already begun to speak of a post-modernism instead.¹⁶

Only very recently has this view begun to be revised and reassessed, in the Anglophone world most prominently in Arnold Weinstein’s Northern Arts (2008) and Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (2006).¹⁷ Like the present book, these works emphasize the pervasive neglect of Scandinavian literature in the scholarship and the need to overcome it.¹⁸ To do so, Weinstein in his study surveys an impressive range of authors and works with great mastery and knowledge, ranging from Kierkegaard’s 1843 Fear and Trembling to Lena Cronqvist’s 2001 Nurses, and including Ibsen, Strindberg, Hamsun, Edvard Munch, Pär Lagerkvist, Ernst Josephson, Ingmar Bergman, and Astrid Lindgren. In Weinstein’s view, all of these authors represent versions of breakthrough (genombrott), which he understands as the thematic and structural rupture with nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions: the negation of stable categories of subjectivity, meaning, religion, morality, and society, and the pervasive thirst for freedom. Although the concept of genombrott takes its origin from Georg Brandes’s 1871 lectures on modern literature at the University of Copenhagen, the breadth of Weinstein’s investigation makes it clear, as he himself points out, that he does not wish to write literary history with its movements and schools and trends (9) but rather traces a number of related concerns in vastly different media, styles, and periods. While Northern Arts provides a much needed rehabilitation of many of the central works of Scandinavian Modernism, it cannot be reduced to a theory of that period.

In this regard, Toril Moi’s study is more immediately related to the one conducted here. Moi similarly seeks to rethink the nature of Modernist aesthetics more generally and does so in light of Henrik Ibsen (21–36). As I understand Moi’s argument, her view of Ibsen’s Modernism focuses on three central features of his works: their anti-idealism, their self-consciousness, and their turn to the everyday. These three features underlie Moi’s larger claim that Ibsen’s art evolves from the rejection of idealism’s traditional criteria for meaning, through the danger of skepticism and pure absence of meaning that accompanies that negation, to the turn to a new ground for meaning in an aesthetics of the everyday that is able to overcome the skeptical threat. Such a reconstruction of the evolution and nature of Ibsen’s art shares several essential points with this book, and the two can be seen as complementary in numerous ways. On a closer look, however, significant differences also become clear, and these result not least from the absence in Moi’s analysis of precisely the kind of broader contextualization that Weinstein’s work provides. In her crucial account of idealism, Moi thus explicitly chooses to ignore the Scandinavian reception of that tradition (74), and the aspects of idealist aesthetics that she decides to emphasize are accordingly very different from those studied here. To Moi, the relevant elements of idealism tend to revolve around its supposed rejection of sexual or social taboos. It is, for example, Thomas Hardy’s fascination with the grotesque and the gruesome, his honesty about sex, and his uncanny grasp of women’s complexity that made his novels anathema to idealists (100) or Wilde’s brilliant paradoxes, his searing indictment of moralism that are as anti-idealist as Ibsen’s turn to the ordinary (101). While Moi’s book provides an extremely rich and rewarding reading of Ibsen’s work, it fails to adequately recognize that the central aspects of his engagement with idealism are to be found at the previously discussed level of aesthetic form, the mode of organization and mediation of different thematic and representational elements, not in the presence of specific themes and technical devices in themselves.¹⁹ More importantly, Moi thus also fails to correctly identify the kind of response that Ibsen’s rejection of idealism finds in his Modernism, and of which the self-consciousness of his theater forms a crucial part.

I explore the relation of Moi’s project to my own in more detail in chapter 4, in which their deeper philosophical differences will be put to interpretative use. What I would like to suggest here is that the striking contrast between the studies of Weinstein and Moi (the former emphasizing the rejection of realism and the break with the familiar and determined; the latter insisting on realism’s Modernism and the return to the everyday) might be due largely to their methodological divergences: where Weinstein emphasizes context and breadth at the expense of theoretical synthesis, Moi provides theoretical synthesis at the expense of context and breadth. My attempt to widen the standard image of European Modernism through a more productive incorporation of the Scandinavian context aims to combine the strengths of both approaches, providing both a theorization of the unifying characteristics of a specific marginal aesthetic project and its contextualization in the larger historical development that defined it. While I take this procedure to lay bare the complementarities of our studies, my results also provide a series of readings that differ from those of Moi and Weinstein not only in their understanding of individual texts but also in their view of those texts’ aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural importance in Scandinavia and Europe.

In addition to recovering a specific historical archive, the argument for the significance of the Scandinavian corpus for European Modernism that I pursue in this book also requires challenging a recent, prominent tendency in the study of international literary relations more generally, exemplified most forcefully by Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters. According to Casanova, formal influence is a unilateral phenomenon, exercised exclusively by the central Western powers (specifically Paris) on the cultural peripheries. The power relations that underlie these laws are based on the uneven division of the world republic of letters into a center and its peripheral dependencies, with the former possessing the sum total of cultural capital and power that make international success possible (11–12). While the peripheries are defined in terms of their political and specifically national agendas and concerns (77), the center is characterized by its violent imposition of an opposing aesthetics of—significantly enough—autonomy. Casanova’s account, however, suffers from the fact that she describes the latter exclusively in negative terms as an independence from, or irreducibility to, political aspects (e.g., 37, 45–46, 115–116, 350). Since Casanova does not discuss what she takes to be the relevant political and historical circumstances at stake, both political and autonomy remain vague concepts.

This absence of sufficient definition of her central terms would appear to be a consequence of Casanova’s chosen methodology, which deliberately aims at such a high degree of abstraction that any detailed analysis becomes impossible (cf. 175–176). Moreover, it also leads her deployment of the term autonomy into a crucial conceptual slippage between its previously discussed distinct sociological and aesthetic dimensions. On the one hand, Casanova makes use of the concept to characterize the institutions of consecration, embodied by translators, publishers, critics, academics, and the like, that are placed at the center of the world republic of letters and which supposedly exercise their power independently of actual political and economic relations between nations (e.g., 133–137, 143–153). On the other hand, Casanova also uses autonomy to describe the kind of aesthetic characteristics imposed by those institutions as the criteria of literariness, which are defined in terms of a radical de-politization and universalization of works of literature when viewed and produced according to the standards of the center (e.g., 154, 301, 353). This conflation of two distinct meanings of autonomy has at least three important consequences for Casanova’s argument.

First, it is clear that even if the institutional mechanisms that confer legitimacy on literary works are taken to be nonpolitical in Casanova’s sense, it does not follow from this that the aesthetic criteria that they favor are equally so. As Casanova offers no analysis of the formal features of autonomous works, her claim would appear to depend on a transfer of the notion of nonpolitical from the sociological level of institutions to that of aesthetics, which remains without explicit justification. As I shall show at greater length, however, the aesthetics of autonomy—understood as a specific artistic paradigm that arises with German idealism and continues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—is anything but independent of historical and political forces, which makes such a transfer highly problematic.

Second, a similar transfer of attributes from the level of institutions to that of aesthetics is at work in Casanova’s claim that the autonomy of the republic’s center unilaterally coerces the peripheries into conformity with its own preferred standards (e.g., 154, 250). In the absence of formal analysis that supports this claim, it appears that Casanova assumes that the absorption of a work from the periphery into the center’s institutional framework ipso facto implies an analogous absorption at the level of aesthetic praxis. Again, however, the former does not necessarily imply the latter, and proper attention to the historical and aesthetic nature of the center’s paradigms makes it possible to trace the change and impact exercised by the periphery. A case in point is Casanova’s disregard for the possibility that Ibsen’s success on the French and English stages might have actively influenced them in any way (157–163), which prevents her from seeing the profound impact, traced in this study, of Ibsen’s innovations on writers such as Henry James.

Third, and closely tied to the preceding point, a similar conflation of attributes means that Casanova has difficulties accounting for the changes that nevertheless clearly do occur in the center’s aesthetic preferences through the influence of peripheral writers. Because she assumes that the center’s institutions consecrate literary works on the basis of aesthetic criteria that have no grounding outside themselves (and thus remain autonomous), she is unable to provide an explanation for the predilection for one literary form over another. To Casanova, such changes can accordingly only appear miraculous (12, 304), since the notion of aesthetic autonomy on which she depends obscures the historical, philosophical, and literary conditions that influence the formal paradigms of both center and periphery. Only by taking such conditions into account, however, can the changes brought about by the periphery’s impact on the core be understood in terms of the contributions that the former can make to the perceived shortcomings of the latter.²⁰

Casanova’s argument is an important contribution to the current debate on