Modest modernism: Auerbach and Levine

I’m afraid that there was not much I gathered from the Gikandi reading. At best, the title and some phrases managed to spark some ideas that I hoped were relevant to the demands of this module. However, I am not sure that these ideas were what Gikandi was in fact driving at. For instance, when he talks of Picasso’s ability to separate the “fine African head” from the human being (which was, to be honest, for me the most engaging bit of the reading), I started to think of Picasso as a metaphor for the general European mindset that dehumanized and objectified the racial Other in imperial times. Is it not possible that an almost ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude would have created the same dismissive and alienating environment for the object of scrutiny as did the colonial and hierarchical approach towards the Other? Picasso, in the act of remarking on Williams’s “fine African head” could also be read as fragmenting Williams into parts (head and body at least), much like how European colonizers of the nineteenth century fractured, and carved their little flags into different parts of, Africa—indeed, the latter is something Conrad depicts rather vividly in Heart of Darkness when Marlow declares that Africa was “marked with all the colours of a rainbow”.

Sticking to readings I am fairly less likely to have misinterpreted, the Auerbach article (I think) put the framework of modernism across succinctly. Its very title, “The Brown Stocking”, mirrors the privileging of “minor, unimpressive, random events” that its content follows through on. Just compare the title of each article we were supposed to have read this week and you will find that Auerbach’s is the most humble—so humble it is deceptively more like a children’s story than a literary critique. This perhaps encapsulates what I believe is Auerbach’s main point: that it is precisely the “simple and trivial...[which] are at the same time essential and significant.” Life exists in the small moments as it does in the grand ones. The demolishment of absolutes in place of ambiguous subjectivity is also another feature of this very modest aesthetic movement—I like the fact that these authors (like Woolf) refrain from offering anything more than a “doubtful” humble opinion. Perhaps, this ‘humility’ can be seen as a natural progression from a realisation that the absolute, hard-handed and self-superior attitudes that were adopted under the regime of British empire were obsolete. The impulse to impose binaristic categorizations on the racial Other by the colonizers illustrate the kind of power imbalance and authoritative position that Woolf and other modernists want to avoid.

While Levine does not so much talk about modernism as she does empire, she does give us an overview of the kind of history that made the fertile aesthetic period of modernism possible, allowing me to make a valiant attempt at linking the two. I find the idea of hypocrisy very pronounced whenever I look at the British empire. Notions like the white man’s burden, the moralizing mission, the missionary mission for that matter, or the civilizing mission all reveal (on hindsight of course) the duality of the motivations behind the colonial conquests. Levine also tells us that colonialism was “clearly more a pragmatic than a moral stance, less concerned with Britain’s duties than with its political and economic success”. Furthermore, I gather that the tendency to regard the colonized as (in Levin’s words) “lesser peoples” and themselves as “the finest and noblest expression of humanity” speaks more of British self-importance and pride than it does of compassion and goodwill. Perhaps then modernist writers resist definition and embrace ambivalence in recognition of the ultimate inability to pin down an enduring sense of the way things are. If a person’s every intention or motivation is nuanced, then foregrounding one nuance of that motivation wholly over another is akin to creating an inaccurate representation of that motivation, and in being incomplete, it becomes dishonest. It is no wonder then that Auerbach lists a “haziness, vague indefinability of meaning” to be a quality of modernist texts. The multiple layers of Mrs Ramsey’s consciousness suggest a plurality of thought but never highlights one thought as being more significant than another. Some of her thoughts gain significance because the reader accrues to it more attention and wonder than others—for instance, the mystery of her past and why she looks sad—even while that point is not something the narrative accentuates in any particular manner. The fact that we get no answers reinforces the narrative’s desire to remain ambivalent and impartial by not pandering to the reader’s added interest in that single moment.