(Other) Modernism(s): Auberbach and Gikandi Reading the Movement

Erich Auerbach’s famous last chapter, “The Brown Stocking” in Mimesis, his magisterial survey of Western realism, points to several key elements in Woolfian aesthetics, and indeed, Modernist aesthetics as a whole. W.B. Yeats had already sounded the profound epistemological and ideological uncertainty that was to pervade the mood of so much Modernist artistic works in his poem “The Second Coming” when he notes that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”; likewise T.S. Eliot in his High Modernist poem “The Waste Land” speaks of the “fragments” that although are irredeemably shattered and incommensurable, form his only bulwark against coming dissolution and annihilation. Auerbach thus speaks of the marked disappearance of the traditional “author, with his knowledge of an objective truth” (535-6) and his “position as the final and governing authority” (536), towards a literary stylistic in Woolf’s text that attempts to “approach [reality] from many sides as closely as human possibilities of perception and expression can succeed in doing” (536). Herein lies the important realization (for the Modernists) that reality had become too complex to accurately render from any one objective and omniscient viewpoint. Adumbrating post-modernity’s disillusionment of any grand narrative, modernist aesthetics tended, as Auerbach points out, towards an “increasing predilection for ruthlessly subjectivistic perspectives” (551). The emphasis then falls on the random, mundane and quotidian event in “the momentary present” (541) and what it releases in the individual consciousness that is presented in process, or as a stream. Indeed, it is probably of no small significance that the philosophical movement that we know as phenomenology emerged during the Modernist period, the former attempting to philosophically give shape as to how consciousness meaningfully intends, or gives shape to its experiences. This peculiar interiority, verging at times on solipsism in modernist writing, thus attempted to give voice to what Woolf elsewhere terms as “the dark places of psychology”.

It is however, precisely the reading of the primitive as representing these “dark places of psychology” in relation to a “pure” modernist aesthetic and ideology that is contested in Gikandi’s article. By simultaneously acknowledging, yet relegating the formative place of the African, or the cultural Other, to “the subliminal and subconscious or unconscious” (469), a process of violence is inflicted, whereby the Other is abjected and “purif[ied]” (471) as part of modernism’s “economy” (471). Modernist ideology and rhetoric then interpellates reading and criticism through a perpetuation of itself in a stable and symmetrical representational dichotomy of Self-Other without directly confronting and “understanding the Other” (458) as an entity that is precisely irreducible to the “simple opposite” of the Western Self. Gikandi reads this movement in terms of Harold Bloom’s much celebrated notion of the “anxiety of influence” (458) that relegates and discards the embodied and historical African subject in favour of an aesthetic sublimation towards artistic forms and conventions that serves modernism’s project as such. Picasso’s tenuous relationship with his African artistic models must then, as Gikandi suggests, be re-negotiated through “seeing the modern artist’s from the Other’s angle of vision” (475). Such a critique must undoubtedly be self-reflexive, as Gikandi’s text itself shows: by using modernist vocabulary such as “epiphanic” (455) and concepts such as the “unconscious” (469) to advance his points, he gestures towards a critical paradigm that exceeds these terms of reference, in its encounter with artistic and cultural alterity.

Ian