Lev Grossman’s recent article “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard” in the Wall Street Journal reads rather as dejà vu, reminding me of Harold C. Schoenberg’s descriptions back in the 1970s of the critical retreat from musical modernism. At least according to Grossman, the situation in modernist literature—in which the readership mattered little if at all—has been similar to music up through about the 1970s, when “who cares if you listen” was a rallying cry for the academics.
In fact, it seems to me that modernism, once a powerful force throughout the arts, has gone into a large-scale retreat across the board, with the possible exception of architecture. (One look at the new De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park bears eloquent witness that the incomprehensible and monstrously ugly still holds some measure of fascination.) When I was in college the hard-core modernists were gasping their last; the serialists and the Cage-ists were still holding court but, as yet unknown to us in East Coast bastions such as Peabody, out in the West a new music made of simplicity, soon to be named minimalism, was taking shape. Music was flipflopping by 180 degrees, from being inscrutable to being altogether transparent and clear. It takes no great intelligence or training to figure out a minimalist composition, and all are equally bored.
Modernism in literature has always been a sticky wicket for many. Books that would be taught in Modern English Lit class weren’t, as a rule, books that anybody else much wanted to read. John Barth was the reigning academic favorite of my school days. Thomas Pynchon came along and wrote complex, multilayered works that could be nearly impossible to penetrate. Salman Rushdie comes to mind as well; in the aftermath of the flap about The Satanic Verses I took a crack at the book and gave it up after a while. It was the literary equivalent of trying to make sense of Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître. That is to say, I could understand the overall gestures all right, but far too much impressed my ear as random. I wasn’t “in” enough, I guess, to fathom it.
Nor did I want to make the effort, because I suspected that there really wasn’t all that much there to begin with. Only a callow adolescent would think that anything worth hearing/viewing/reading must be grasped immediately, but at the same time an artist who obliges us to dig hard to figure out what the hell is going on is equally obliged to make sure that it’s worth the bother. It rarely is.
Most of the time those experts who give learned expositions on this or that modern artwork strike me as speaking primarily of the contents of their own imaginations, rather than anything actually there in the object of their discussion. As such, they might as well avoid the artwork and just speak directly from their own minds. That’s especially true, in my experience, with abstract art, but the disease infects just about everybody.
In may days playing a lot of modernist music I grew increasingly weary of pomposities and mock-profundities, having suffered through any number of performances which were joyless obligations for everybody concerned. I can live quite happily without ever again hearing a composer refer to some nonsensical bundle of unrelated notes in hideously complex rhythmic arrangements as “the gesture.”
Not being professionally obligated to pretend to an appreciation of modernist literature, I dipped into the occasional heralded novel just to see what the fuss was about, and then retreated. Much like the symphony-goer who suffers through the modern piece in order to hear the Brahms, I put up with the occasional literary assault with some grace. But left to my druthers, I wouldn’t touch any of those books on a bet, much like the symphony-goer who, given the choice, would gladly expunge all modern music from the orchestra’s repertory.
Now the novel seems to have backed off from its own conceits. Even Thomas Pynchon has written a novel with a straightforward story line and, heaven forbid, reasonably clear prose. Michael Chabon is popular both with general readership and the academy, quite an achievement given the typical disconnect of the two over the course of the past century. In the same vein, we have composers writing music that people are supposed to—get this—like. To me one of the signal achievements of the past season at the SF Symphony was a delightful work by Mason Bates, brand spanking new but accessible to all but the dullest of ears. It’s significant, I think, that Bates has a background in more “populist” music and is in fact an accomplished DJ. This, perhaps, is where it all needs to be going—away from the stink and bother of academic formalism, instead happily embracing the vibrant mélange of musical styles that permeate our modern culture.
So let us have paintings that represent objects, novels that tell a story, music that honors harmony and melody and counterpoint.
While we’re at it, let’s have buildings that don’t look like scrap heaps. But maybe that’s too much to ask at present.