The centre cannot hold

The best crash course in Modernism is still Irish Nobel-Prize winning poet William Butler Yeats’ (1865–1939) poem ‘The Second Coming’ from 1920.Reference Yeats¹ It contains the catch phrase ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’, which became a one-liner that every European poet could recite. The poem as a whole points both to the experience of ‘mere anarchy’ and to a vision of a ‘second coming’. In this way, it opens the door to the radical avant-garde from before and after the First World War, which set out to blow up any consistent value system, and in the same move it mirrors the arrière-garde of the same period, looking backward in a desperate and, at times, apocalyptic vision of a second coming, a return to yesterday's presumably cohesive world order.

Let me for a moment expand on Yeats’ crash course on Modernism to better understand the emergence of opposite world views in the same cultural context. First, from about 1850 onwards, the early modern poets reacted through various aesthetic strategies to the absence of a centre which kept together culture, social order and the traditional value systems. They did so either by demonstrating that it really was absent, as in the explosive and ceaselessly experimenting avant-garde movements, or by insisting that there was still time to reconstruct some kind of a centre of continuous cultural traditions of national, religious, political or aesthetical orientation as happened in various arrière-garde movements.

This double orientation of political ideologies and of literary and artistic creation dominated during most of the 20th century, at least in a Euro-American perspective, and formed between 1910 and 1940 what, in a more precise sense, is often called Modernism or high Modernism. Then, in the late 20th century, the post-modernists celebrated without regret the absence of a centre as a global historical juncture. This situation was translated into a positive invitation to perform a permanent and deliberate cultural bric-a-brac presence. Fragments of cultures and traditions could be mixed in architecture and life styles without being squeezed in the opposition between avant and arrière. Although global in perspective, we are still within a predominantly Euro-American horizon.

Finally, migrant literatures and various types of world literature react to the absence of a centre with a terse question: what else is new? This is the case and has basically always been the case everywhere in the world. Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance European literature as well as narratives from non-European parts of the world elaborate on incompatible values and social and cultural conflicts with no solution. There is no need for a tragic lament or an exaggerated jubilation in view of the collapse of a centre which, like any centre, always will show only a temporary stability. Anyone anywhere simply has to take on the fragmented culture in its concrete historical specificity and diversity wherever one lives. The Euro-American world does not occupy a more privileged position than any other place when it comes to the experience of the modern and globalized world.

The last statement evokes another fundamental contrast in Modernism, which also dates back to the early modern poets, namely that of local versus global. Modernism is a metropolitan movement building on the emerging transnational, industrialized urban culture that we today would call the forerunner of cultural globalization, which itself is the tacit precondition for the first sketchy ideas on world literature brought forward in Romanticism. But growing out of local languages and cultures, often within clear national boundaries, this globalizing trend is always defined by its contrast to the local conditions.

The contrast between the local and the global runs parallel to that between avant and arrière mentioned above. It was less debated in Euro-American Modernism than the avant-garde/arrière-garde contrast and the centre-cannot-hold issue, though. However, the recent focus in literary studies on migrant, witness, travel, and exile literatures in combination with a whole set of reconsiderations of what world literature might be, allows for another take on the local dimension in the Modern and post-modern context.

More often than not, the local focus has been linked without further reflexion to various arrière-garde movements as a reactionary and counter-modernist phenomenon bordering on proto-fascist ideas. Yet more recent reinterpretations of Modernism have revealed a more complex relationship between avant and arrière in different local cultural contexts around the globe. This approach has justified Modernisms, in the plural, as the proper term in a global perspective. Modernism as a transnational trend has always worked and still works through local refractions.

Avant and Arrière, global and local

When we study Modernism from an early 21st century perspective, the tension between avant-garde and arrière-garde and that between the global and the local are not only simultaneous and intertwined components in the general make-up of Modernism. They also constitute the dynamics of Modernism in its changing forms from its early days in Europe to its present manifestations as a family of Modernisms in various parts of the world that open up new horizons in the broader field of world literature. Early Modernism as a joint Euro-American venture is dominated by two trends, incorporated in two major poets.

Claussen and Jensen

In both cases, the avant-garde dimension necessarily goes hand in hand with that of the arrière-garde. Two major Danish authors, Sophus Claussen (1865–1931) and the 1944 Nobel Prize winner Johannes V. Jensen (1873–1950), exemplify this inherent ambiguity in Modernism. They are both local refractions of the universal ambiguity of Modernism as they represent the two main trends in Euro-American Modernism: Jensen was a world traveller and a devoted Whitmanian expressionist Modernist, Claussen an equally devoted Baudelairean symbolist modernist and a European traveller to modern France and classical Italy; both of them acted as translators for their favourite poets.

Both authors renewed the Danish language in various experiments. Claussen recast old themes in new forms and also introduced a new aesthetic self-reflexivity in his poems and prose, with an emphasis on anarchic and demonic eroticism that constantly challenges the possibility to contain it in an aesthetic form. He translated, among other texts, Baudelaire's poem with the provocative title ‘Les litanies de Satan’.Reference Claussen² On Baudelaire he said, in 1911 in a French article: ‘Je voyais en lui un agréable allié, qui aimait l'art par dessus tout et savait trouver l'idylle meme là où on l'aurait le moins cherché.’Reference Claussen³

If Claussen is sophisticated, Jensen is direct. In his first collection of poetry, Digte 1906 [Poems 1906], he threw a hand grenade into the Danish literary establishment: new words, new forms, audacious prose rhythms with an echo of the global world where he had been globetrotting. He translated, among other poems, parts of Whitman's Song of Myself (1855). The way in which one of the characters of his 1905 USA novel Hjulet [The Wheel] expressed his experience of a Ferris Wheel is a good indication of Jensen's attitude:

Both poets withdrew to the Danish province after years abroad, but kept drawing upon the multifarious metropolitan scene as a pivotal point. Both of them later came to see this type of experience as decadent, and adopted a locally based perspective on the world at large, be it regional or national. Claussen asked: what can art do in a world running mad? Jensen asked: how can I embrace the gradually opening and expanding wonders of the world when I'm just sitting in Jutland, Denmark?

In his powerful 1925 poem, ‘Atomernes Oprør’ [Rebellion of the Atoms],Reference Claussen⁵ Claussen envisioned that all constellations of atoms that keep things together would eventually fall apart, and that the goddess of destruction – in an earlier poem from 1912 called ‘Imperia, Queen of the earth mass’⁶ – would emerge and engulf the entire globe. ‘Imperia’ predominantly uses a proto-classical dactylic pentameter, whereas the poem on the atomic revolt is one of Claussen's rare poems in a pure, classical metre, the Homeric hexameter. It presents a vision of epic proportions that Claussen could not shape into any rounded form of poetry, notwithstanding its being a desperate call for the creative power of poetry to give the world a stable form in order to resist the dismantling powers of the modern world. His arrière-position is not one of positive engagement with anti-modern movements, but rather the resignation of a man trapped in a blind alley without being able to turn around.

Jensen's arrière-position is different and so is his itinerary toward it. He wrote serial novels, decadent novels, travel accounts, reviews and newspaper articles in the style of the new journalism. He gave up the belief that he could embrace everything; the entire world was open, but it was too large for one life. Then he invented a new type of local story from his home region where he settled during the 1910s. His Himmerland, as the region was called, was both a real (albeit vanishing) world and an imagined universe. It was populated with more or less grotesque local characters, which rendered this remote locality a place larger than life. At the same time, however, it was a slice of a recognizable Danish province, though moulded in a new syntax and a new vocabulary, pictured with humour and a sophisticated kind of naïveté.⁷ Hence, the local world is also infinitely large. But the way to experience it and the prerequisite for its description are the spontaneous sense of belonging to this communal world and a deep feeling of the infinite in its minute details. This feeling is based on a momentary experience, which Jensen called the mythical instance of experience.

In different ways both authors started out with an active engagement in a world of change and expansion, and ended up promoting resistance to change and dynamics. Claussen became engulfed by cultural disappointment, Jensen indulged in the rediscovery of a stable infinity in the experience of the fragmented, ephemeral world; both adjusted their Modernist aesthetic strategies to their respective situations.

Local refraction

In his seminal book What Is World Literature? David Damrosch (2003)Reference Damrosch⁸ suggests as one characteristic of world literature that it is ‘an elliptical refraction of national literatures’. Whether ‘national’ is a happy term or not, rather than ‘local’, ‘regional’ or ‘articulated in particular languages’, Damrosch's statement opens up the possibility that the study of transnational literary trends may take a privileged departure from inside particular literatures precisely in their local particularity. This approach is fruitful in the European context in that it underlines the very diversity of local literatures and languages as a transnational feature of European culture and literature. Consequently, shared features related to the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism or Modernism must be considered both in their abstract shared homogeneity as well as in their locally diversified refraction.

This attitude was already expressed in 1899 by Georg Brandes in his essay ‘World literature’ at the time when Claussen and Jensen began to have doubts about their position as international Modernists. Brandes argued that literature written in order to correspond to a conception of world literature would be deprived of power, and he continued: ‘World literature of the future will be more captivating the stronger its local origin is marked and the more diversified it is, provided it as art and science has a general human dimension.’Reference Brandes⁹ We could add: literature that is written to be Modernist literature according to an idea of some kind of avant-garde and that thus obliterates the constitutive tension between its avant and arrière perspective and between its local and global dimensions, does not reflect the cultural reality of modernisms in today's globalized world.