Franco Moretti’s stimulating contribution to the debate on Marxism and Modernism (‘The Spell of Indecision’, NLR 164) unfortunately elides, in its very opening sentences, a crucial aesthetic distinction—with the result that his critique of modernism is of much less general validity than he assumes. Frank Kermode long ago insisted, in a now famous essay, on the necessity for ‘a discrimination of modernisms’, and it is this that Moretti signally fails to provide. His critique of modernism is thus, ironically, as one-dimensional as the recent euphoric celebrations of it that he rightly deplores; his position is the mere mirror image of that of his antagonists, Lukácsian rather than Lyotardian. And this need to discriminate is all the greater in that we now have to hand, in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, a powerful attempt to shift the debate on modernism beyond the frozen polarities of a simple for or against. footnote1

Moretti’s slide from ‘the attitude of Marxist criticism towards Modernism’ to ‘Marxist readings of avant-garde literature’ in his first two sentences must be resisted. Except in some blurred literary-historical readings (where both terms simply denote everything that has happened since 1848), ‘modernism’ and the ‘avant-garde’ are not synonymous terms—or at least should not be after Bürger’s book. Modernism, one would now incline to argue, is the avant-garde standing on its head—the latter being the rational kernel within the modernist mystical shell. Far from being simply another, accelerating stage of post-1848 (Baudelairean, Flaubertian or whatever) aesthetic modernity, another spiralling twist in the dialectics of ‘making it new’, the avant-garde movements of the early decades of our own century (the ‘historical avant-garde’, to use Bürger’s own term) are rather the negation of that project. The avant-garde may indeed have on occasion coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to modernism; but that does not prevent it from being on the whole, in intention if not always in achievement, the first movement to present the general forms of motion of aesthetic modernity in a comprehensive and conscious and, crucially, radicalized manner.

Moretti points out the survival of Romantic irony in a modernism which often—and especially in its Anglo-American inflection—presented itself in militantly classicist forms. But this particular ruse of History is a function of the survival within Romanticism itself of certain key structures of classicist aesthetics which it thought it had surpassed. If the progressive moment of Romanticism is its journey from the polite to the popular, from the country house to the country tout court, from an ornately formalized poetic diction to the language used by ordinary men and women, this must be set against its deep counter-impulse towards a transcendentalism that it usually found on Alpine mountain tops. To ascend the mountain was to shed locality, particularity, specific social identity, and to move towards an awed contemplation of totality, a God’s-eye view of the universal order. Far from being the committed spokesman of a particular, local rural community, the poet now stood resolutely outside it, his social isolation being the precondition of his contemplative access to totality. But by now the constitutive structures of classicism had been reinvented, no matter how many of its trappings had been discarded: from the mountain top, poetic truth was general not particular, timeless not historically specific, essential not contingent, objective not mediated through an individual subjectivity—it would, in short, have warmed the heart of a Samuel Johnson or Joshua Reynolds.