auerbach to the future

"There is [in modernist works] a hatred of culture and civilization, brought out by means of the subtlest stylistic devices which [its own] culture and civilization have developed, and often a radical urge to destroy" (Auerbach 551).

Towards the end of his analysis of the modernist literary technique (with detailed reference to Woolf and to a lesser degree Proust), Auerbach attempts to situate the development of such stylistics within the larger reach of contemporaneous history, but with nary a reference to colonialism or imperialism except in the setence I have quoted above. (I think of Iraq, Tibet and South Ossetia.) The violence which Auerbach accords to modernist writers is analogous to that enacted upon the colonised Other by the colonising European Selves. Except for one thing. Modernist writers inflict the violence upon its originating culture and its own perception of reality, not on other Third World backwaters.

Modernism therefore allows for the problematization of the relation to the Other by problematizing the Self. The multiplicity of voices in Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse' emphasizes alterity and difference, not homogenity - which is the goal of colonialism - as Levine has pointed out in her piece. To further synthesize Auerbach and Levine, the Empire, with all its perceived attendant threats of contamination and adulteration, served as a source of deep-seated discomfort and allowed modernist writers to deploy such fears towards the fragmentation of the identity of continental Europe as a economic force, as a cultural cradle and as a beacon for mankind.

Gikandi, who in his article points out the ironies in how modernism has itself become institutionalised when its practitioners conciously sought to work against the prevailing aesthetics that reinforced the white man's superiority, also underscores this inherent link between modernism and colonialism. The fracturing of European colonial identity is enabled by the modernist technique, characterised by the extract of Woolf’s work, which gestures towards the gap between what it can explicitly articulate and what it must finally say. This disjunctive ultimately and finally allows for a critique of the colonial enterprise.


(p.s. Am I the only one who noticed that pages 542-543 are missing from Auerbach's essay?)
Lucas Ho