Deconstructing Modernism

Success-wracked cynics--in other words, many Americans--can’t resist the fascination of genius. Genius is celebrity vetted by history. Genius won’t be overthrown by tomorrow’s rating chart. Genius is an anchorage point for all of us disabused ones who are starved for absolutes. In pop culture, the ado about canonized genius (see all the feverish filming of Henry James and Jane Austen) has something of the energy vibrating through revival tents. In high culture, the study of genius has become a theology that can be tangily disputed.

In fact, “Extraordinary Minds,” the first of the two books under discussion here, reminds me of Christological tracts parsing the nature of the Savior. How much of the Son was identical with the Father? How much of Him was human? And how did those fractions fuse into redemption?

Howard Gardner’s “Extraordinary Minds” is similarly schematic about the divinely gifted. He categorizes them into (a) “Masters” such as Mozart who bring to virtuoso culmination already established genres, like 18th century opera; (b) “Makers” such as Freud who conceptualize entirely new domains, in this case, psychoanalysis; (c) “Introspectors” such as Virginia Woolf who dive into their own souls for insight and turn the plunge into art; and (d) “Influencers” such as Gandhi who power ideology with charismatic leadership.

But Gardner wants to do more than anatomize. He announces his aim with the penultimate word of his subtitle: “Portraits of Exceptional Individuals and an Examination of Our Extraordinariness” (my italics). Gardner tries to tease out dimensions in singularity (unique excellence) that can be tapped by us all, so that the mute, inglorious can flower, to some degree, into Miltons.

Again, this has a Christological ring. In the 13th century, Meister Eckhart saw the marvelous issuing from the ordinary, that is, “the daily Christmas in the manger of our hearts” through which the miracle of faith is born anew. Alas, Gardner lacks Eckhart’s depth and eloquence. His labeling is arbitrary (doesn’t Freud, not Woolf, deserve to be called the Introspector General?). His recipes for cultivating everybody’s extraordinariness amount to yet another “how to” manual, though this one traffics in the sublime rather than, say, in the antiquing of French Provincial furniture.

The general aspect of very special people is also the subject of William R. Everdell’s “The First Moderns.” His subtitle, too, needs close attention: “Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought.” The phrase embodies his central argument: that the writers, painters, composers, architects involved rethought 19th century reality as thoroughly and subversively as their contemporaries under the narrow rubric “thinkers”--namely the philosophers, scientists, mathematicians of modernist hue--and that no matter where the insurgents operated--in studio, laboratory or academe--one idiom marked their diverse mutinies.

Now, this is hardly a historiographic bombshell. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, among others, liked to tag each historical phase with a leitmotif tingeing all cultural facets. It is Everdell’s feat to give a familiar approach an electrically charged update.

He presents a paradox: What unites the pioneers of modernism is their sense of fragmentation. Everdell develops his thesis with a scholarship of astonishing versatility. Detail after resonant detail undergirds, for example, the links between Georges Seurat’s pointillism in painting and the “neutral atomism” discovered by the histologist Ramon y Cajal; and how both Seurat and Cajal connect to the discontinuities of matter proposed by the physicist Ernst Mach and to the disassembling of radiation waves into particles by Max Planck and the dissection of perceived motion by the psychologist Etienne-Jules Marey (who thereby helped father the “motion picture” of stitched-together still photographs).

Equally deft is the book’s tracking of the spoor leading from Edmund Husserl’s solipsistic philosophy to T.S. Eliot’s poetry of a wasteland of marooned souls, each aridly distant from all others. Concrete clue: Eliot borrows the critical term “objective correlative” from Husserl’s “Phenomenology.”

Everdell illuminates the impulse behind both Arnold Schoenberg’s atonality and Wassily Kandinsky’s abstraction: both men pushing beyond integral outer forms toward the inner, more fractured responses of a listener or a viewer. Everdell finds in Einstein’s relativity no less than in Picasso’s Cubism a dismantling of perspective and thus the breakup of an orientation dominant since the Renaissance.

By the time Everdell pursues parallels between Van Gogh’s explosive brush strokes and the moral injunctions churning through Joseph Conrad’s novels, a reader may well say, “Hey, wait a minute! Isn’t this too much? Is all this true percipience--or mere over-ingeniousness?”

Everdell, however, is too accomplished a documentarian not to be very intriguing even when he isn’t altogether persuasive. In the case of Van Gogh and Conrad, he produces this particular from the novelist’s life: In 1890, the sea captain Conrad consulted the French alienist Dr. Gachet on symptoms plaguing him since his trip to the Congo. On the walls of the doctor’s waiting room, he noticed (so he wrote to a friend) “nightmarish pictures of the Charenton school.” Most of them had been painted by Dr. Gachet’s patient, Vincent van Gogh. Twelve years later Conrad wrote “Heart of Darkness,” one of the first modernist nightmares, set in the Congo.

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The book brims with such encyclopedic juxtapositions. But even polymaths have pimples. Thank goodness. Everdell’s pyrotechnics of omniscience are positively blinding. We can rest our eyes when he fizzles. Any factual gaffes I spotted, though, are minor. Does it matter that the playwright Arthur Schnitzler was not a dermatologist (as this book has it) but a nose and throat man, like his father? Hardly. Some of Everdell’s misapprehensions, on the other hand, seem less trivial. Take his view that Freud considered the conscious and the unconscious “almost noncommunicating parts.” Of course, it is just the undertow between the two that psychoanalysis engages.

Still, this is not a crippling slip. Freud’s notion of the psyche’s ever-latent civil war exemplifies the divisive dynamics of modernism Everdell explores so searchingly. And so vivaciously. All that formidable learning, all that labyrinthine exegesis, is leavened by a champagne style.

And yet, and yet. Everdell’s achievement sparkles in a peculiar vacuum. After all, modernism would not have succeeded had it not reflected the street-corner exigencies and the meat-and-potato pressures of our career-driven, high-tech life. Everdell devotes to that fact just one paragraph. There he writes: “ . . . The fragmentation of lives is not only the perceived effect but very possibly the long-term objective consequence of industrial modernity.”

I wish he had spun out the implications of that sentence. And that’s why I wish that he had included in his palette of thinkers the German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies. In 1887, at the start of the modernist movement, Toennies coined a distinction lighting up the stress from which modernism was born--Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft represents the cohesive, localized, rooted, pre-industrial community; Gesellschaft, the anonymous, centrifugal, competitive society of industrial capitalism.

The contrast applies to areas Everdell covers as well as to late-modernist and post-modernist territories beyond. In Gesellschaft, the common coordinates of cognition and intuition erode. Reality pulverizes to be reconstituted absurdly in Dada or in the dizzying paradigms of relativity. A chasm opens between language and truth: Wittgenstein’s “Investigations.” Text is no longer the stable center of a reading commonalty but the shifting phantom of each reader’s mind--Derrida’s deconstruction.

It’s the fate of contemporary literature: The well-told tale turns stale. The story with its round-the-campfire wholeness; the story, which for thousands of years from myth to movie plot has tried to domesticate the anarchy of existence; the capital-S Story shatters at the hands of the anti-novelists who energize the avant-garde edge of the novel today. In metafiction, narrative self-destructs and with it the model by which life can be lived wholesomely.

All these are effects, aesthetic or epistemological, of Gesellschaft with its free enterprise Brownian movement of random, deregulated, rivalrous subjectivities. True, there have been significant essays at intellectual re-regulation. Chaos Theory, for example, which tries to triangulate the clandestine order in the chaotic. Or the Grand Unification Theory, positing that at the moment of the Big Bang, all species of matter were melted down into one surge of uniform energy, framed in “super-symmetry.” This astrophysical Eden recalls the Hindu conception of the all-pervasive One from which proceeds the conjuring of fragmented multiplicity, the cosmogenic Web of Maya that stages the illusion of a variegated universe.

Illusion or not, it is the jungle of the manifold that shapes our ethos and governs our metaphysic. The hearth has shattered into the marketplace. In that laissez faire arena, a multitude of gladiatorial egos simmers, lately abetted by the computer. This ultramodernist engine arms me with an infinity of information undisturbed by human presence. It wires me to an over-communicated, but ultimately unshareable and hence estranged, universe. In short, the computer provides state-of-the-art fragmentation, downloading the world into myriad solitaries. Everdell’s “The First Moderns” brilliantly maps the beginning of a path at whose end loom as many diasporas as there are men.