The Great Beyond: Art in the Age of Annihilation

By Philip D. Beidler

Essays from a master critic on how artistic giants from modernism onward confronted mortality—forging unexpected links between Twain, Woolf, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Toni Morrison, and more
 
While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting.
 
It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler’s exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond:Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s Death in Venice; and the author’s own long fascination with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
 
The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler’s analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane’s 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394035

Book preview

Introduction

The Great Beyond

In the sciences, the humanities, and most of public life, we accept death as certain, universal, and utterly final: an annihilation. Indeed our extended historical present might itself be called the age of annihilation—a century and more of ceaseless warfare; genocide; religious, racial, and ethnic hatreds; geopolitical terror; and environmental devastation, an era of global death. World War I (1914–18)—initially called the World War or the Great War—killed 25 million combatants. World War II (1939–45), still within memory for many of us, is estimated to have killed 80 million. The Nazi murders of the Jews alone accounted for 6 million. Meanwhile, it is estimated that between 3.3 and 5.7 million Russian prisoners of war died in German captivity. The mainland Asia Sino-Japanese War of the same period (1937–45) took between 10 and 25 million lives. Allied strategic bombings over Europe killed 350,000 Germans and left 7.5 million homeless. American firebombing of Japan killed 100,000 in Tokyo alone. Nuclear bombing of Hiroshima killed between 90,000 and 144,000. Between 39,000 and 80,000 died in Nagasaki. Total Japanese military deaths during World War II were 2.12 million. Total civilian and military deaths were between 2.5 and 3.1 million.

Nor was the new century of mechanized death without the ancient catastrophes of history and nature. Great famines of the century, frequently inflicted by totalitarian regimes on their own people, included those of Stalin (1932, 7–10 million), Mao Tse Tung (1959–61, 20 million), and Ho Chi Minh (1944–45, 1–2 million). The century’s recurrent genocidal wars meanwhile took place in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians are thought to have died in the Turkish-Armenian War (1915–18). The war of Bangladesh independence from Pakistan (1971) had a death toll estimated of between 500,000 and 1 million. The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) killed 300,000 combatants. The Rwandan Civil War (1990–94) resulted in the deaths of 500,000 to 1 million of opposing tribal factions. The U.S. war in Indochina (1967–75), with a U.S. military death toll of 58,000, is now thought to have killed between 2 and 4 million Vietnamese. In 2001 the destruction by Islamic terrorists of the World Trade Center in New York City, taking the lives of 2,977 Americans, has been followed by a fifteen-year U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2019 coronavirus pandemic was the fifth such global contagion in a century, preceded by Spanish (1918), Asian (1957), and Hong Kong influenzas (1968), and later by SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) (2003). As of this writing, well over 100 million people worldwide have contracted the COVID-19 virus, and more than 2.5 million have died. In the United States 28 million have become infected; more than a half million have died. By the time you hold this book in your hand, those numbers will be higher.

With a century of mass extinctions came the attendant loss of traditional structures of meaning, value, and belief—political, philosophical, and religious. Accordingly, for many thinkers and writers came a uniformly deterministic view of death—faceless, omnipresent, unrelenting, utter in its finality. Death has now increasingly come to be seen as the end of us, period. It is now, in the words of Zadie Smith, death absolute. There is no life after death or any semblance thereof. Whether individually or collectively, annihilation becomes total obliteration. We simply cease to be. Stripped of even the longest-held visions of a possible afterworld or afterlife, it is the figure of our common extinction.

In this respect, such modern death-consciousness is to be differentiated from the old vision of memento mori—with its message of grim foreboding nonetheless nearly always linked to some traditional philosophical or religious conception of a life to come—be that life a heaven or a hell or somewhere in between. So, in its succeeding literary and artistic permutations, it must be seen as similarly distinguishable from the Anglo-European and American romantic cult of beautiful death—as in Goethe, Shelley, Baudelaire, Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson—and the ensuing, mawkish strain of morbid Victorian sentimentalism—as in Tennyson, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Felicia Hemans, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney. Rather, for many of us finding ourselves afoot upon the landscape of late modernity, there is only the bleak visitation of the reviele mortel—death’s wake-up call as Julian Barnes artfully phrases it: the jarring awareness of life’s passage toward what Philippe Ariès has called the dark, mysterious, utterly final hour of our dying.

This is not to say that Western philosophy and religion have ever been without major figures insistent on an independent, profoundly individualized consciousness of the life-defining fact of our inescapable and terminal mortality. From philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, and David Hume, we confront repeatedly the idea of the philosophical life as itself an education in how to die. Meanwhile, more generally in the literature and art of the Western tradition, we proceed from haunted medievals to death-obsessed Elizabethans, metaphysicals, neoclassicals, Romantics, and Victorians. Yet well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the new, distinctly secular, soulless age of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein—with the occasional exception of such radical outliers as Friedrich Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell, the concept of death as a final and absolute annihilation has continued to be fended off by some wishful trace invocation of the traditional consolations of religion and philosophy. To some degree, a late twentieth-century literature in various clinical and theoretical disciplines has emerged in an attempt to address the matter: Herman Feifel’s post–World War II collection, The Meaning of Death; the groundbreaking study by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Death and Dying; Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death; Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process; Phillipe Ariès’s The Hour of Our Death; Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die; Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s The Sixth Extinction; Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal; and Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead. But only with prominent contemporary cross-disciplinary figures such as Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Simon Critchley has resistance to a traditionally prevailing atavistic spiritualism become a major topic of widespread cultural discussion, with a belief in any kind of transcendental great beyond—the conception of a next world or next life—challenged by a resolute insistence on death and dying as a complete physical and spiritual obliteration, what Critchley calls the inescapable working out of our creatureliness. Any sense of human relation to the world must be understood through the decidedly nonreligious tropes of mechanical and biological necessity. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail, wrote Stephen Hawking, the most brilliant and influential astrophysicist of our times. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. In a similar pronouncement, the novelist Ian McEwan writes, Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? No. I guess my starting point would be: the brain is responsible for consciousness, and we can be reasonably sure that when that brain ceases to be, when it falls apart and decomposes, that will be the end of us. The evolved material entity we call the brain is what makes consciousness possible. When it is, so is mental function. There is no evidence for an immortal soul, and no good reason beyond fervent hope that consciousness survives the death of the brain.

It is in this context that I myself—at age seventy-six, now quite surely nearing the end of my own life—have chosen to write about contemplations of mortality by a collection of late nineteenth- through early twenty-first-century modernist figures in literature, music, and the visual arts, each distinguished by a prescient willingness to venture beyond the tenets of conventional understanding or belief—often through the agency of some identifiable personal or historical experience—to look extinction in the eye and attempt through art to come to terms with the finitude that is our common condition.

The period of roughly a century described above comprises more or less the historical era that we associate with the term modernism. This is fully intentional, and therefore one wishes from the outset to be clear and specific in terminology and definition. In the simplest terms of intellectual history, we might call the modernist sensibility an evolving consciousness, in the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and beyond, of the accelerated dissociation in life and culture of existential or experiential fact from traditional canons of meaning, value, and belief. At its most extreme cultural position, modernism is commonly described as a rejection of all prior conventional forms, customs, institutions, and observances, a permanent destabilization of precisely those inherited codes described above. Such an outlook is encapsulated in Ezra Pound’s radical twentieth-century dictum: make it new. The task of the artist, decreed Pound—himself a cultural polymath of the new era destined to become one of its most notorious fascist mystagogues—was to become the artificer of order, the creator of Kulchur.

On the question of some permanent, decisive rupture in history, modernists generally came to subscribe to the idea of a divide in cultural consciousness that had been opened between what seemed an ordered past and an endlessly entropic future—what Henry Adams (albeit with a reductive logic more persuasive as metaphor than as history) called the Virgin and the Dynamo, medieval unity and modernist multiplicity. On the matter of individual personality, there was the formulation of Virginia Woolf on a corresponding shift in the very idea of the human. To be specific, as she wrote, On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. In Dublin 1904 came to mark Bloomsday; the locus of events in James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses. The 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia, initiated the Great War. In 1916 Albert Einstein published the General Theory of Relativity. On or about the year 1910: sometimes the numbers do not lie.

Nor, from the beginning, do the works of the late nineteenth- through early twenty-first-century figures represented here, in their unwavering concentration on the attendant visions of sociopolitical upheaval and human catastrophe arising out of the era. I have the imagination of disaster, wrote the cultural cosmopolitan and late-life Anglo-American Henry James, among the most prescient of their number. I see the world as essentially ferocious and sinister. Accordingly, the age of the modern would itself become the age of annihilation—a century of mass death and destruction, of endless warfare, genocide, pandemic, mass starvation, geopolitical terror, ethnic violence, and racial, sexual, and religious hatred—an age in which the very idea of civilization itself would cease to exist as a sustaining vision in people’s lives.

The sixteen essays here are based on such a diverse and intentionally eclectic set of modernist figures and texts—each in their way a providing a wise and brave meditation on radical human temporality. Topics range from the Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture commissioned for the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C.; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and later writings of Mark Twain; Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat; the major symphonies of Gustav Mahler; Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; the novels and short stories of Ernest Hemingway; Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts; the works of the German poet Gertrud Kolmar; Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet; Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; Michael Cunningham’s The Hours; W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz; and the environmental writings of Robert Macfarlane.

The essays themselves, in their choices of central figures and artistic productions, may frequently be seen as originating out of my own peculiar moments of experiential or historical encounter. This is to say that a significant number of these chapters are premised not just on academic study of the subject in question but also on some deep sense of personalized cultural engagement—in my case, part of a long career of research, travel, teaching, and writing, coupled with an authorial record of mass-culture interests and fascinations. Accordingly, such discussions in many cases also carry a subtext of my personal moments of engagement with what Pierre Nora has called sites of memory—places of history or commemoration that also become loci of historical imagining and reimagining—but here expanding the concept to partake of remembered encounters with times, places, objects, and artifacts from literature, film, music, and the visual arts.

The overall chronological contours of the period chosen are meant to cover in history and memory the record of what I should now like to think of personally as an extended biographical lifeline. My parents were born at the turn of the last century. I have lived through the middle years of the twentieth century. My daughter now makes her way through the first decades of the twenty-first. Born in the 1940s, a child of the American 1950s, and a youth of the 1960s, I am dead center a citizen of the modern world.

On just this basis of definition, the particular figures chosen here speak to me across the era, precisely as they come within this framework of chronological understanding—those who in living memory have seen the death-haunted modernist epoch unfold and who have committed to the artistic record significant acts of human encounter, giving strange permanence to their own lives and creations through myriad forms of autobiography, history, fiction, poetry, drama, film, painting, sculpture, photography, music, and popular performance. Some in their lifetimes oversaw the passage from traditional nineteenth-century European and Anglo-American life and culture into a new era of modernity. Others contemplated modernity from within the era itself. Still others have lived long enough to see out the century and experience the early decades of yet another lying beyond. One common feature unites them: in some direct encounter with the vision of a new catastrophic century they understood themselves and accepted their roles as inescapably liminal figures in a liminal world opening unto the realm of the last great, liminal mystery. The Great Dark the bitter, death-ravaged, and increasingly solitary Mark Twain called it in the opening decade of the twentieth century: the prospect of an annihilation at once personal, collective, and now, in the opening decades of the next century, perhaps even planetary.

As to a host of other possible figures and works that might have been discussed at length here, given such a topic and focus, many readers will no doubt wonder amid likely categories about notable, even glaring omissions: prominent witnesses to the horror of modern combat; survivors of colonial oppression and political terror; inmates of the Nazi concentration camps or of the Russian Gulag; victims of sexual violence, childhood trauma, domestic abuse, epidemic disease, widespread famine, and natural disaster. A number of such figures I have written about elsewhere over the years, often in related contexts: the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, the British poet Robert Graves, the British novelist Graham Greene, the Austrian painters Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, the American novelists William March, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Tim O’Brien, and Robert Stone, and the American dramatist August Wilson.

The novelists Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque, the poets Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound have also been much written about by others in an analogous vein. Still other possible candidates for inclusion—Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Ravel, Günter Grass, Jean Paul Sartre, and Primo Levi—have been the subjects of well-established major studies and critical explorations. My most pertinent explanation for the subjects selected here is simple. They concern figures and particular works—some well known, others relatively obscure—that have beckoned to me over the years, attracting my sustained interest and admiration. As a set of critical reflections arising out of a long career of writing in literature, history, and the arts, they also comprise an attempt, as I near the end of my own existence, to extend personal interest into ongoing personal and cultural discovery. I have always thought that this was what writing was about. Call these then, if you will, my own late-life essays on mortality.

1

Time and Eternity in Washington, D.C., NW 20011

From the center of Washington, D.C., the most direct way to get to Rock Creek Cemetery is roughly four miles out Capitol Street, following the same route Abraham Lincoln used to get out to his summer residence and Civil War headquarters at the Old Soldiers Home—though driving now would probably get one there less quickly than Lincoln on his mare. Simpler is to take the Metro Red Line out to the Fort Totten station and follow a short walking route through a somewhat worn-down neighborhood called Petworth where green spaces and garden plots mix with fading middle-class residential streets. On the larger arteries, blocks of plain row houses and old-style apartment buildings are interspersed with auto parts dealers and storefront insurance agencies. The cemetery itself is hard to miss—eighty-four acres of it—although one walks a good distance to get to the only open point of entry across the street from the Soldiers Home. In the process of circumnavigation, one will note that it is now pretty much a typical older suburban cemetery, mainly full of tombstones, but also dotted with imposing mausoleums and works of ostentatious funereal sculpture in varying degrees of quality. If one has done one’s homework, one will know that the property is owned and administered by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Rock Creek Parish, on whose website will be noted the names of eminent Washingtonians buried there—Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s postmaster general; Alice Roosevelt Longworth, celebrated wit and daughter of Theodore Roosevelt; and Harlan Stone, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. As the worthies of St. Paul acknowledge, however, there is one thing that most people come to Rock Creek Cemetery to see. The cemetery’s parklike setting, they note, is now a place of pilgrimage for people from all over the world who come to view the renowned Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

What is referred to as the Adams Memorial is rather more complex in design than the phrasing would suggest. It is the final resting place of the American historian and autobiographer Henry Adams and his wife, the society hostess and pioneering American photographer Marian Hooper Adams. More precisely, the memorial marks the site where Marian Hooper Adams was buried in 1885 after committing suicide by ingesting her photographic developing fluid, and where she was joined by her husband in 1918. The place, set inconspicuously down the hillside from the church amid a host of other gravesites, is marked by a copse of evergreen shrubs, surrounded by a modest iron fence. The memorial itself is best described as an enclosure and meditation space, with granite privacy panels and a seating area designed by the architect Stanford White. But even that is not what most people have come to see. Rather, they have come to see it—the sculpture, the statue, the cast bronze figure—the image of death created by the nineteenth-century artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens. To this day, no one knows quite what to call it. Most people just say, the Saint-Gaudens. Nor has anyone from the beginning seemed to have had any better success. The artist named it The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace of God That Passeth Understanding. Henry Adams went to his grave insisting that it have no particular name attached to it at all. The whole concept, he insisted, was the figure’s refusal of final meanings. The interest of the thing, he said repeatedly, lay not in some objective signification but in the response of the observer. In time, he eventually seemed to turn the idea into a kind of popular crusade. Do not allow the world to tag my figure with a name! he wrote to the sculptor’s son. "Every magazine writer wants to label it as some American patent medicine for popular consumption—Grief, Despair, Pear’s Soap, or Macy’s Men’s Suits Made to Measure. Your father meant it to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the