The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Samuel Jay Keyser

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Samuel Jay Keyser Mark J. Bruhn The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. By Samuel Jay Keyser. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2020. Instantly intriguing, the subtitle of Samuel Jay Keyser’s latest book is somewhat misleading, for this work is not about why but about how the sister arts of music, painting, and poetry changed at the outset of the last century. In other words, Keyser aims not to explain the creative phenomena of modernism but rather to characterize the nature of their epoch-defining departures from long-held conventions such as tonality in music, mimesis in painting, and meter and rhyme in poetry. For Keyser, a generative linguist in the tradition of Noam Chomsky (to whom the book is dedicated), the prevalence of such conventions throughout history and across cultures indicates that they are based in “shared-rule systems” that emerge from innate cognitive endowments, much like natural languages. Hardwired in the brain, these rule systems constitute a “natural aesthetic” that constrained art production through the nineteenth century and thereby ensured the accessibility and intelligibility of the artifacts so produced: however they might subsequently evaluate it, audiences could (and still can) immediately recognize a pre-modernist poem, painting, or piece of music as such. Resisting and subverting these natural aesthetic constraints, early twentieth-century innovators introduced unprecedented difficulties of access and intelligibility for their audiences, who could no longer rely on entrenched predispositions in their uptake of artistic presentations and performances but were forced instead to confront a problem of “general intelligence”: namely, if not in the shared-rule systems of the natural aesthetic, in what exactly does the artistry of modernist art consist? An example will clarify the distinction Keyser means to draw. Comparable to certain sections of J. S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue (1742–49), the fourth movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Quartet no. 2 (1907–08) opens with a motif based on a notational transcription of the composer’s own name. The (literally) key difference, however, is that where Bach develops his private musical pun within the tonal framework of the natural aesthetic, so that it is constrained within an acoustic space governed by natural pitches, octaves, and key signature intervals, Schoenberg abandons that framework and its constraints, leaving the private pun itself as the sole raison d’être for the structure of the resulting sequence. Thus, while a self-referential Bach sequence is immediately identifiable as music thanks to its dominant melodic line and regardless of whether one recognizes the pun at play in it, the self-referential Schoenberg sequence will likely make “musical” sense only if one gets the pun through an effort of reflective intelligence that is supplemental to the act of auditory intuition. For Keyser, abandonment of the shared-rule systems of the natural aesthetic in favor of a “private format” of the composer’s (or painter’s or [End Page 266] poet’s) own invention is the hallmark of modernist art and the chief reason for its notorious difficulty. This puts the matter rather unsubtly, and though early on Keyser appears to be mounting an either-or, once-and-for-all argument, he ultimately arrives at a more nuanced position that recasts “private” cognitive formats as more or less so and modernist experimentation as, historically speaking, not so much a singularity as a recurrence or even continuity. A too strict, either-or application of Keyser’s rule-based thesis would lead one to conclude that formal poets such as W. B. Yeats and Robert Frost, representational painters such as Franz Marc and Egon Schiele, and tonal composers such as Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky were not modernists, or, equally problematically, that one and the same artist was sometimes more modernist, sometimes less so. A case in point is Keyser’s discussion of the cubist paintings of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Cubism is, presumably, a modernist mode par excellence, but as deployed in individual paintings its degree of abstraction from a mimetic standard varies. Keyser argues that...