Notes on the Modern period - 1 - chronology of the modern

In a course I teach, we have explored – over the past few weeks – some of the main “features” of the modern period. [Over the years, I’ve offered this course in various forms at both Cleveland State and now at Case Western Reserve University. The current version involves less reading and more writing for the students in one of CWRU’s “university seminars,” part of the school’s 'seminar approach to general education sequence' (“sages”).]

We first discussed a list of possible features of the modern, as follows: Autonomy, independence of vantage point and structure of thought. And the related feature of abstraction, both as subject and as abstract form and structure. Primistivism (again as both form and content) or openness to immediacy of the “moment” – also, stripped-down objectivity. As in the above contradiction between “abstraction” and the “moment,” there is a recurrent quality of paradox, contradiction, or ambiguity. A commitment to realism signals the ethos of confrontation, the critique of society from both right and left, and the interest in judging the entire course of Western civilization leading to the modern period. Destabilization of received convention; negation, and/or rebellion, and subversive freedom. The quality of paradox relates to a pervasive perspectivism, relativity/relativism, with an accompanying risk of nihilism. In general, there is an openness to change and experiment across the arts, the natural sciences, and the new social sciences – yielding new forms, concepts, approaches, and achievements. Paradigm shift. A transfiguring unity of being and vision is sought in the face of change and collapse (with the fullness of experience yielding a death of the ordinary self). The modern is beset by a sense of cultural mourning and belatedness.

We then went on to examine a chronology of the modern, which of course has a fascination in and of itself (partly for what it includes and excludes). It began with the early start of Rousseau’s Social Contract in 1762 and ended with 1945 and the end of World War II. The students repeatedly commented on the paradoxical combination of destruction and achievement apparent in many of its items (for an obvious example, the American Civil War’s abolition of slavery yet its massive toll in casualties partly resulting from the increased modernization of warfare – and generally the increasing human toll of war from the Civil War to World War II).

Many comments focused on the remarkably fast pace of technological achievement in the century before 1945 (a natural focus for some of the students at the former Case Institute of Technology). Examples of those achievements include: 1873 Remington’s typewriter; 1879 Edison’s phonograph and incandescent light bulb (and the electrification of cities in later decades); 1882 Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus but, also, the development of the machine gun; 1885 Pasteur’s Rabies vaccine, the discovery of radio waves, and the development of the internal combustion engine; 1887 Daimler’s automobile; 1890 the Kodak camera and the completion of the Eiffel Tower; 1891 the first subway in London opens; 1892 Lorenz’s electron theory; 1893 the Ford auto assembly line; 1894 the gramophone disc; 1895 Roentgen discovers x-rays, Lumiere invents the movie camera, and Marconi develops the wireless radio; 1898 the Curies isolate radium; 1903 the Wright Brothers create the first airplane; 1905 Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity; 1909 the typhus vaccine developed; 1912 the isotope theory developed; 1915 Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity; 1923 television and insulin developed, and skyscrapers begin to shape the New York skyline; 1925 the Copenhagen hypothesis of quantum physics; 1927-8 Penicillin, missiles, sound movies; 1936-9 jet engine, radar, computer; 1945 the U.S. uses atomic weapons in war.

Here are some of the other details from the chronology:

Enlightenment conceptions of individual rights: 1762 Rousseau’s Social Contract; 1776 Jefferson et al’s Declaration of Independence; 1789 French Revolution’s “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” followed by the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars (until Waterloo in 1915); the Godwins (husband and wife) on political and women’s rights.

Romantic ideas of subjectivity and beauty: 1794 and following - Blakes’s poetry (the first gas lights in Britain, even as speech and assembly are suppressed repeatedly in the following decades); 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads; plus the following, which I’ll discuss more soon: 1807 Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit and 1819 Keats’ Odes.

Realist efforts and their complement in Aestheticism: 1833 Britain’s Reform Bills and, in 1836 on the eve of Victoria becoming queen, its abolition of slavery; 1848 abortive revolutions in Europe and Marx’s Communist Manifesto; 1851 the Great Exhibition of Science and Industry at the “Crystal Palace” in London (responded to with horror by Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man in 1857, the year of Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”); 1859 Darwin’s Origin of the Species; 1861-65 the American Civil War, with its uncounted civilian toll and 620,000 soldiers dead in four years; 1865 Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde; 1866 Britain’s second Reform Bill; 1871 the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War with its 200,000 solders dead in one year, and also George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the founding of Newnham College for Women in Cambridge, U.K.; 1872-3 Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; also in the 1870s the first Impressionist exhibition, the poems of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and Ibsen’s Ghosts; 1881 Henry James’ Portrait of A Lady; 1884 Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; 1895 Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, plus Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest as well as his imprisonment for the “issue” of his homosexuality; and finally 1900 Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams; 1902 Britain’s expanded Education Act and Gide’s The Immoralist; 1903 G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folks, and Simmel’s The Metropolis.

The modern period from 1905 (with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity) to 1945: 1907 Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse’s Fauve period; 1909-11 London’s First Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Bartok’s First String Quarete, and Shoenberg’s Second String Quartet; 1913 Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; 1914 D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Wyndham Lewis’ Blast; 1914-18 World War I with uncounted millions of civilian casualties and 10 million soldiers dead (and in 1918-19 a similar number of deaths from influenza); 1915 – the year of Einstein’s General Theory – Lawrence’s Women in Love suppressed; Joyce’s A Portrait, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious; 1917 Lenin’s Russian Revolution; 1919-20 Pound’s Mauberly, Weimar cabaret and Bauhaus, Duchamp’s Mona Lisa and Dadaism, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and in America Women’s suffrage; 1922 Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; 1924 Kafka’s The Trial, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Breton’ Surrealist Manifesto, and Forster’s A Passage to India; 1925 Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Heminway’s in our time, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and in 1927 Heidegger’s Being and Time and in Britain, Women’s suffrage; 1929 the Great Depression begins, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Brecht/Weill’s operas; 1930s Hitler comes to power, Stalin’s purges, the Spanish Civil War, and 1939-45 World War II with its scores of millions of civilian casualties, its 25 million soldiers dead, the Holocaust, and Atomic weapons first used in war. 1945 postmodernism begins.

Then the class turned to some precursors of the modern, including Kate Chopin “The Story of an Hour,” excerpts from Whitman, Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain,” Baudelaire’s “To the Reader,” Verlaine’s “The Art of Poetry,” and a paragraph on self-consciousness by Hegel. Those will be the subject of my next post.

Comment on the Armenian Genocide in The New York Review of Books

   In the December 9th issue of The New York Review of Books, the brilliant historian Max Hasting writes an essay entitled "The Turkish-German Jihad" in which he comments on the Armenian Genocide as follows: "One of Berlin's most egregious mistakes was its decision dramatically to accelerate investment and effort in the Baghdad railway in the midst of the struggle [of World War One]. In April 1915, an Armenian uprising against the Turks in eastern Anatolia - possibly assisted by the Russians - prompted ghastly reprisals, wholesale deportations of the Armenian people to Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotmia, and deaths variously estimated between 500,000 and two million."
   Hastings' operative phrase - "prompted ghastly reprisals" - neglects to acknowledge the role of racism in the slaughter and deportations of 1915. The genocide of Armenians was an act of racial cleansing, the tragic and horrifying culmination of two decades of racially-motivated assaults on Armenians, intent on destroying this Christian minority in Turkey.
   Hastings goes on to write that the Germans "furiously protested" on grouds that were "not humanitarian but brutally pragmatic...The Turks proved indifferent to German pleas: they were overwhelmingly preoccupied with removing a perceived strategic threat to their lines of communication with Syria and Arabia."
   Again, Hastings' key phrase - "removing a perceived strategic threat to their lines of communication" - fails to recognize the racial and religious prejudice at the core of Turkish "preoccupations," not to mention the massive - perhaps 'total' is the word - dimensions of this genocide, which began with the systematic arrest and the summary hanging or deportation of scores of Armenian community leaders in Istanbul (far removed from the railway to "Syria and Arabia") on April 24, 1915 and ended with the expunging of Armenians from Turkish life.
   While Hastings writes of the Turks' "attitude presaging that of some of Hitler's lieutenants toward the slaughter of the Jews almost thirty years later," even this characteristically understated assessment is antiseptic and again fails to find the words to acknowledge the disease of genocidal "racial cleansing" which afflicted Turkey and Germany in these two periods. It is unfortunate to encounter such a blinkered rendering of the historical record in Mr. Hastings' usually excellent writing, let alone in a publication and intellectual forum as ambitious as The Review.
N.B.: A novel of mine about the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide was published in 2015, the centenary of the Genocide. Its title is "The Ash Tree" and it portrays the lives of the family of a survivor, over half a century in America. A record of my reading the first chapter is on YouTube at  https://youtu.be/kkU5Pyx4BM8

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video The Ash Tree chapter 1

Alice, the lady in apartment 6

I must include this youtube link in the blog - Alice is a stirring and extraordinary person, enduring and always affirming. If she were not real, it would be our responsibility to imagine the possibility of her. In fact, I wish she were a part of the imagined world in my novel about pianists and composers living in Los Angeles after World War II, Hungry Generations (see September 5th blog entry for excerpt). There is more information about Alice Somer in the film's website (she was a pupil of the great pianist Arthur Schnabel; Kafka was a family friend; and then there are the events from the nineteen forties onward). Click on the flim link half way into the site: http://www.arttherapyblog.com/videos/alice-herz-sommer-dancing-under-the-gallows/.

Opening of "Conrad and Silence" - on Under Western Eyes

See Conrad Page for more of this essay.

Published in Slavic and East European Journal 45:2 (2001): 231-242.

Conrad and Silence:
The View of Russia from Under Western Eyes

i

In Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad—the English novelist of Polish origin—examines both the West’s images of Slavic life and simultaneously his own imagination of “the Slavic.” The contemporary Western views of Russia in particular are both implicated and illuminated by the novel’s deconstruction of a wide range of assumptions about that country. Conrad’s brilliant, challenging performance here is also one of the culminations of his deepest goal for fiction from Heart of Darkness in 1900 to this work finished a decade later. That goal is to envision human life through the lens of a pervasive, complex, and destabilizing perspectivism, from which both modernism and postmodernism can be seen to proceed—a perspectivism which relentlessly exposes and pursues the question of meaning in human life generally. In this way, the encompassing achievement of Under Western Eyes is to subject the novel’s images of the human to a searching examination and to resist any too easy humanistic recuperation of the imagined lives here. The novel’s still relevant imaginative subversions provoke and intentionally challenge an art made of words, a society based in language, for at its core, this novel’s vision of existence confronts us with the opposition between speech and silence, between meaningful language and its potential erasure by a society based in brutalizing manipulation, propagandistic media, and ruinous violence.

There is a related and even more immediate relevance of Conrad’s novel to con-temporary life, specifically to present-day Russia. The novel’s images of East and West echo and participate with the opposition between silence and speech, particularly speech which is interrogatory or coerced: it is this more specific achievement of Conrad’s which profoundly bears on our contemporary understanding of Russia, and we will turn to it first. I note initially that the paradoxical tensions in Under Western Eyes between speech and silence clearly have correspondences to Conrad’s childhood experience of Poland under Russian domination. After the novelist completed his work, he suffered a profound inner crisis and physical breakdown, for in that novel he reimagines conflicts at the center of his early experience from 1857 to 1874, when he left Poland for Marseilles.

Conrad’s critics and biographers—Fleishman, Hay, Karl, Najder, Said, and others—offer rich insights into the context and details of the writer’s crisis in 1909-10. Particularly Najder illuminates the profound alienation toward Russia felt by Conrad, whose Polish inheritance was opposed to the “Slavonic tradition” (358). As Conrad wrote in “The Crime of [Polish] Partition,” Poland should historically be associated not with Russia but with France as one of the true “centres of liberal ideals” in Europe (117). In his novel of 1910, Conrad confronted in fiction memories of when his family life was consumed by the subjection of Poland by Russia, when his father Apollo Korzeniowski—a patriot and gifted translator into Polish of Hugo, Shakespeare and much else—sacrificed on the altar of his revolt the family’s life, the childhood of his sickly son Joseph and the life of his wife, Eva, who died early in their exile to Russia; Apollo had been sent there in punishment for his political activism, his romantic dedication to agitating for Polish sovereignty. Later, as a British citizen and novelist, Conrad took as his last name the middle name his father gave him, marking himself with the mantle of the heroic figure from Polish romantic poetry, an emblem of his consciousness of Poland.

Five years before writing Under Western Eyes with its vision of human lives driven into silence and negation by Russian subjection, Conrad wrote “Autocracy and War,” the most passionate and delving of his essays about Russia, the Slavic world, and “the Polish problem.” In this essay of 1905, he calls our attention to Bismarck’s comment, “La Russie, c’est le neant!” Russia represents negation for Conrad; it was the region in which the human disappears into nothingness. Nothing “human...could grow” there, he writes; Russian autocracy “succeeded to nothing” and has no “historical future” (97). The force of negation embodied by its rule is expressed through not only its destructiveness toward Poland, but the destructiveness of its effects on all its victims, whether Polish or Russian. In the face of Russia’s “blind absolutism,” no “reform” is possible (96); only a self-defeating “rising of slaves” may occur, never “a revolution fruitful of moral consequences for humanity” (102), for such absolute tyranny is answerable only by absolute, self-destructive opposition, negation by self-negation, in an exfoliating pattern infecting the human universe with the sense of nothingness, of the falsity of all human endeavor. In addition, “every mental activity” is “tainted” there by a Pan-Slavism with its “assertion of purity and holiness” (98). The idea of negation—“le néant”—is finally too tame an indictment of Russia, Conrad asserts, for the word savors of infinity, whereas Russian absolutism tastes of the abyss and swallows the human whole (100). This sense of Russia as a ruinous site, of a failed and negated society has characterized the Western view from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

In such a ruined society, communication itself is seen to be negated, all acts of questioning become hobbled or corrupt, and all answers driven into silence. Language becomes invalidated. For Conrad, Polish—the language of his original culture—had been subjected to a deforming and decisive trauma, so he sought alternative languages, first like so many other Poles in French, and finally English. But in writing this novel of Russia and its impact on human lives, Conrad had to seek new strategies in the language of English fiction to explore the negative universe of silenced lives, and despite his often expressed revulsion for Dostoyevsky, he modeled that part of Under Western Eyes based in a confessional journal on the Russian’s use of deeply searching inside views, his tormented voicings of inner struggle, and his openness to the dark region of psychic suffering; even Conrad’s narrative structure is linked to that of Crime and Punishment, specifically to its parallel action of crime compounded with moral isolation, then extended public as well as private self- interrogation, provisional and protracted upwellings of confession, finally expiation. To note this debt is, however, again to be reminded of the Polish émigré’s agonized crisis in writing his novel during 1909-10, for Dostoyevsky’s vision was—to Conrad—complicit with the Slavic obliteration of humanity and culture Russia represents for him. Among Russian writers, Conrad preferred the “non-Russian” “lucidity” and humanism of Turgenev’s achievement in rendering the “perplexed lives” of “oppressed and oppressors” in Russia; so he writes in an essay of appreciation for that most Flaubertian of Russian writers, admiring his avoidance of Dostoyevskian “extremity” and his refusal to turn his characters into “strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions” (46-7).

Yet to read Under Western Eyes is to encounter just such “damned souls” and “strange beasts.” Razumov, its focal character, is the nearly identity-less illegitimate son of vague ‘noble’ connection; even before he plunges into suffering, we find him profoundly isolated and abjectly dependent on the covert support of his aristocratic protector, as he attends university in St. Petersburg. Conrad appropriates the Dostoyevskian model in creating Razumov and his confessional journal, though the novelist’s mirroring of such a model is ironic and critical. Conrad’s Russian hero possesses a coolly self-protective “English” manner; he is an orphan, himself ironic and temperamentally detached. A vaguely liberal-minded student, he is intent on ‘creating himself’ as a professor, and for the contemporary reader a subversive mirroring is achieved, since—in the English-speaking world—many of the novel’s readers are university students and scholars. (As I photocopied this page, the machine provided by the Administration to the Department obliterated all but the following sentence: Possessing a mediocre soul and an adequate intellect, Razumov planned to become an academic bureaucrat serving what he rationalized to be the necessary order of the current system. Conrad’s text holds the mirror up to interrogate the possibility of betrayal within any academic who would read and face Razumov’s fate.)

The fate of this “damned soul” is to be cut off from origins; initially detached from life and unformed as a human being, he can identify himself with nothing but the abstract patrimony of autocratic Russia; “I am it!” he says at a key moment (148). His detached and uncreated quality of mind is mistaken for profound sympathy by a revolutionary fellow student, Victor Haldin, whose being is utterly focussed on opposition to Russia’s absolute tyranny. Haldin assassinates the head of the Czar’s “notorious Repressive Commission,” he who had written that “‘God was the Autocrat of the Universe’” (8). Haldin arrives then in ill-conceived flight at his acquaintance’s apartment. Razumov is instantly aware that any future career has been obliterated by the suspicion which Haldin’s visit will arouse. In despair about this erasure of his future, he seeks out his protector, Prince K--, who in turn consults with one General T--. With his “goggle-eyes,” the General embodies “the power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible,...the incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness” (61-2). The two men turn Razumov’s fate over to Councilor Mikulin, in charge of ‘undercover’ work. The Councilor interrogates him and finally appropriates Razumov for his own purposes, and this completes the job of erasing the young man.

Conrad’s creations—Haldin with his fate sealed and Razumov with his tortured and disappearing sense of existence—are just such “damned souls” as Conrad protested against in Dostoyevsky; Razumov exists from then on in the moral isolation arising from both his betrayal of Haldin and the destroyed, destructive identity the establishment offers him—as we find out by novel’s end: the identity of a spy working, exiled from Russia, among Geneva’s Russian émigrés (a community which included Lenin before his journey to the Finland Station). The pressure of his moral solitude increases as he faces experiences which constitute “the revenge of the unknown” (239), intimacies at least of communication particularly with the Russian women he is expected to betray in Geneva: Haldin’s mother and his sister Natalia and a brilliant Russian feminist revolutionary Sophia Antonovna. It is of course Natalia Haldin who provides the epigram on the novel’s title page: “I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece of bread” (97). After a series of provisional and deceptive self-disclosures, Razumov finally confesses his betrayal to Natalia and then to the community at large; ironically, then, one of the “strange beasts” among them—appropriately a secret police counterspy—deafens Razumov’s ears: he will live from then on in a physical silence enacting the moral and societal silence already present in his life.

[And here's an Amazon link to this great novel: Under Western Eyes . Conrad is a powerful influence on my own novel about political extremity - my "nuclear fable" about Israel - here's an Amazon link to that novel  Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable .]

Some great performances of Beethoven's last piano sonatas and other music in HUNGRY GENERATIONS

Please see my latest posts on Beethoven and four June 2011 posts about modern music and recommended performances. Also, Beethoven appears as a character in my novel "Hungry Generations" (about the friendship between a young composer in L.A. and a great emigre virtuoso pianist in the early 70s) - an excerpt is in one of my early blog posts.

Piano Sonata No. 29 in B Flat Major (Rudolf Serkin playing the Hammerklavier Sonata);
Beethoven: Piano Works, Vol. 3 (Arthur Schnabel playing the Hammerklavier sonata); also there is Sviatoslav Richter's performance of the Hammerklavier on Praga (not the inferior alternative recordings).

For additional recommendations, look at my recent "modern music" posts 23-25. The following recordings of more modern music, along with the Beethoven below, are important to my novel Hungry Generations.
Murray Perahia Performs Béla Bartók (Piano Sonata; Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs; Suite; Out of Doors; Sonata for 2 pianos & 2 percussion) (Murray Perahia playing Bartok's Sonata)
Stravinsky: Serenade In A, Sonata / Lieberson: Bagatelles / Wolpe: Pastorale, Form IV ("Broken Sequences"), Four Studies on Basic Rows, IV: Passacaglia (Peter Serkin playing Stravinsky's Sonata)
Glenn Gould Plays Schoenberg, Berg, Webern (Gould playing Schoenberg's Suite, op. 25, etc.)
 
Also: Beethoven: The Last 3 Piano Sonatas, Nos. 30-32 (Rudolf Serkin playing the late sonatas)
Richter the Master, Vol. 1: Beethoven - Piano Sonatas (Sviatoslav Richter playing the late sonatas)
Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor Op. 111 (Arthur Schnabel playing the last piano sonata)

Let me add a few more recordings of music important for my novel "Hungry Generations." There is Penderewski's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima: http://www.amazon.com/Penderecki-Anaklasis-Threnody-etc-Krzysztof/dp/B000002S5H/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296338836&sr=1-1. Also, Zimmermann's piano works: http://www.amazon.com/Zimmermann-Piano-Works-Tony-Wirtz/dp/B000CCS9B8/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339063&sr=1-4.

My novel's main character the aging pianist Alexander Petrov achieves some incredible effects in his performances, particularly of Schoenberg, who is one of 'the three bald geniuses' haunting the other main (and younger) character Jack Weinstein's imagination (along with Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok). The significant effects achieved by the playing of the novel's pianist Petrov are suggested by, among others, Vladimir Horowitz's incredible performances (for example, he recorded the Scriabin Sonata #3, which the son Joseph Petrov performs in the novel: http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B0000CF325/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-2 or http://www.amazon.com/Horowitz-Plays-Scriabin-Alexander/dp/B000003EOZ/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296340283&sr=1-1, which contains the third sonata). Similarly, there is Sviatoslav Richter's powerful performance, for example, of Scriabin, Debussy, and Prokofiev (with a range of sound from immensely forceful to terrifically gentle, a range akin to that imagined for Sasha Petrov): http://www.amazon.com/Scriabin-Debussy-Prokofiev-Sviatoslav-Richter/dp/B00000E3ZX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1296340158&sr=1-5

Finally, the first recording I heard of Beethoven's late sonatas was by Egon Petri: http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Sonatas-Egon-Petri-Recital/dp/B00005Q636/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1296339508&sr=1-1