The Knower and the Artificer

Abstract

IT IS EASIER TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING IF YOU HAVE WORDS FOR IT. A LACK OF GOOD terms for talking about has rendered the study of much recent intellectual history a walk through a multisided room of mirrors. Each wall said to be modernist, yet each reflects light differently, and makes it difficult to get a clear view of any object in the room, including the walls themselves. It has long been suspected that this effect derives in large part from the limited language we use to discuss our recent past. One savant after another has called for a richer vocabulary,' but no one seems willing to give up on which, for all its vagueness, continues to confer a unique, almost spiritual authority. To demonstrate that a previously neglected or underappreciated author actually a modernist remains, after several decades of this literary game, the most effective means of bringing such an author to the critical attention of the cogniscenti.2 One can talk about versions of modernism, or variations on modern themes, but the notion of a single, overarching Modernist impulse continues to reign amid admissions that its essence eludes definition. Scholars seem reluctant to remove any thing they really care about from the formidable company of the modern. Where else there to go with any aspect of recent intellectual history that isn't (shudder) Victorian? Certain American political scientists, we are told, have accepted a philosophy of modernism. This philosophy based on the reality and social efficacy of scientific knowledge: once such knowledge is accumulated and gained, modernism holds, conflicts thought to be endemic to modern society could be rationally controlled, mediated and containedjustly, equitably and democratically.3 Could anything be farther from the family of perspectives on modern life normally attributed to Kafka, Eliot, Lawrence or Heidegger? This modernism of a major American academic tradition would remain alien from the canonical literary modernists even if deprived of the complacency here attributed to it, and endowed with a greater sense of contradiction and irony. What defines this peculiar modernism its faith in science, its sense that what our civilization requires in order to be rescued from itself more likely to come from communities of knowers than from a succession of artist-heroes. If Joyce's Stephen Dedalus expected to forge the uncreated conscience of a race in the smithy of his soul, Joyce had plenty of