Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923-2003): The Newton of Modernism

Abstract

Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923–2003)The Newton of Modernism Gerald Bruns (bio) By Newton's time the planets had proved to trace elliptical orbits, not the circular ones we find congenial. . . . The better to purify the observations by which such knowledge is gained, men learned to follow method, not caprice . . . to cherish the pure detachment which telescope and microscope confer on the eye, and to exercise a comparable detachment when we are using neither telescope nor microscope, but the very eye with which we regard the things we love. Such is the discipline of becoming, for specific purposes, something other than a human being. [TC, 125] Hugh Kenner's intellectual foundations lie in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century British Enlightenment. Our modern European world was invented there and then, but Kenner's Enlightenment is a self-conscious construction, an intellectual framework that he assembles like an anthropologist; it gives his critical and historical writing its basic concepts and distinctions, method, lucidity, and above all characteristic irony. This Enlightenment is not a postmodern concept, not a terminal or unfinished project of rationalization and disenchantment; it is an Augustan schema whose rationality involves critical observation of particulars rather than the deployment of integrated, self-regulating systems. This is not the Enlightenment of Descartes and Leibniz, who want self-evident truths, but that of Bacon and [End Page 477] the Royal Society, of Defoe, Swift, and Pope, of Locke and Newton—figures whom Kenner consulted repeatedly. Descartes appears in Kenner's reading of Beckett, because Beckett's characters parody Cartesian subjectivity. Kenner's is an empirical, rather than rule-governed, rationalist Enlightenment that thinks self-evident truths need to be tested and, often, unmasked. Human reason is not all that philosophy claims for it. The documentation of states of affairs, indistinguishable from the stripping away of appearances, trumps totalities of every sort: encyclopedias and dictionaries, essays and inquiries, notes and epistles, lists and enumerations, satires and parodies—these, together with the novel that imitates them, are basic genres of Kenner's Enlightenment, in which distrust of general ideas motivates an irrepressibly corrosive wit aimed at the consequences of unchecked reasoning. The purpose of logic and mathematics in this event is practical rather than theoretical: namely the construction of productive machinery, not the formation of abstract structures. Mathematics is a useful science: it can make things work—a Geodesic dome, for example. Automatons are more interesting than ideas. Kenner's is a ground-level Enlightenment that knows the importance of small increments and the fraudulence of every idealism. Collect anecdotes, scorn theories. Each random particle deserves scrutiny. So, lower the threshold of description and follow the method of detail. This is the motto of Kenner's practice. The opening pages of Dublin's Joyce describe Dublin as "an eighteenth-century time capsule" whose citizens are clichéd in thought and speech because they incarnate Augustan ghosts. Kenner does not see this as altogether bad: Through other countries other rivers flowed, bearing away all the past that floats. . . . Only Dublin had kept its past above the waters; evading the cataclysmic mutation of the Romantic revolt, it had chosen to preserve its form rather than its life. And a man born into that Dublin, exhorted to admire the image of old buildings in the stream, might seek instead to seize the once-living City. . . . such a man—James Joyce . . . —would find himself simultaneously citizen and exile. [DJ, 2–3] Dublin's Joyce is an Augustan satirist or, more accurately, a parodist who wants to restore the coherence of words and things by documenting in detail their echoes in his fellow Dubliners' talk. But parody is also a redemptive genre. For Kenner the paralysis of Joyce's Dublin saves it from becoming a nineteenth-century London debauched by industrial and romantic revolutions. Kenner came to maturity in an age that defined itself critically against the romantic period: that is what Kenner's modernism is in its deepest motivation, namely a rejection of subjectivist poetics, tending toward a rejection of any interest in human subjectivity (such as psychoanalysis, which Kenner ridiculed).1 Joyce's Dublin is a utopia: a city of the dead which preserves...