Ekphrastic, eh?

American Modernism: Cultural Transactions conference, Oxford Brookes University, 22-23 September 2006

Nothing as stale as yesterday’s modernism.  The architecture says so and so does the politics, but how about the literature?

Such was the thought already in my head when this conference came up.  Time to fill in some of the blanks.  When I have read all of Willa Cather’s novels I will be perfect (I haven’t read any of them so far).

Hurriedly checked Wikipedia for Edith Wharton, Marianne Moore, Pietro Di Donato, Jorie Graham and George Oppen.

The conference was organised to bring together PhD students and grown-up academic by Dr Catherine Morley, Academic Fellow in the Cultures of Modernism at Oxford Brookes University, herself expert on Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Cather and Dos Passos.

Youthful and enthusiastic, no relation to the Victorian politician and biographer, Catherine Morley turned out to be Irish, having started out at UCC, a place I knew well.  (“Let’s go over to Nort’ Gate Bridge and feed our own bloody swans!”)  A fantastic spread of food and drink was laid on; if the conference did not quite burst forth as an intellectual Riverdance this was mainly due to the anxious mumbling reticence of the English participants, many of whom spoke as if afraid they were going to be arrested for crimes against feminism at any moment.

No one was dogmatic on their own account but shrieking voices from the wider academic world seemed to reverberate in the air.

The conference followed a parallel structure which meant it was impossible to attend all the sessions, which was a pity.  There is still so much more I would like to know about Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein.

Francesca DeLucia (Oxford University) spoke on Pietro Di Donato’s “ghetto pastoral” Christ in Concrete, a proletarian novel of the Thirties, but not his later Christ in Plastic. Both somewhat hard to come by today.  Benjamin Bird (Leeds) on George Oppen.  Two disillusioned former Marxists wrestling with the problem of form.  I was sufficiently moved to shell out £14.95 on the Carcanet edition of Oppen’s choppy poetry.  Recommended.  A thick book full of poems of haiku brevity - he even shortened his own name.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary theme visual art was much considered.  Louise Mousseau from Sheffield talked on ‘Reconsidering Abstract Expressionism; Narrative Ekphrasis in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard’.  Much was made of Clement Greenberg’s assertion that all representational art is kitsch.

Was he really that sweeping?  I extracted his original 1939 Partisan Review article from the Internet later.  He mentioned “pulp fiction, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.” as the offending articles.

I had to check the basic terms.  Literary criticism has moved on from C. P. Snow’s two cultures: ekphrasis (a dream within a dream), mimesis (what they used to do in Covent Garden).

Robin Peel (Plymouth) and Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan University) disagreed, very mildly, as to whether Edith Wharton was a Modernist.  She loathed Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner and wrote that the writer should be concerned with the mind not society.

Breaks brought a chance to socialise.  I announced I was working on Syd Barrett, the tragic guitarist, eclipsed by his own image, the man who had “forgotten how to love” - but would give up if I could not get to see David Gilmour.  Francesca DeLucia confirmed his popularity in Italy but came up with no theory to explain why.

As I guessed John Sturt a mature Brookes student helping to organise the conference had seen Pink Floyd, complete with lightshow, at The Ricky Tick Club in Hounslow, probably 25 February or 24 March 1967.  “They were the loudest group I ever heard.  The whole audience were pressed into a ten-foot area at the back of the room.”

The problem for absurdist moralists such as Tom Paulin is of course that Modernism should have been a left-wing movement yet its kings Eliot, Pound, Hulme and Lewis were anything but.  This was hinted at by Professor Steven Matthews (Brookes) describing Eliot’s “hand-in-glove” support for J. M. Robertson’s crank ‘disintegrationist’ view of Shakespeare.

Anxiety levels seemed highest when Dr Jude Davies of Winchester spoke on Theodore Dreiser.  A slightly camp figure in red tie and red cufflinks, Davies worried over “the appropriating gaze” which could be a postmodern form of surplus value (Camille Paglia out of Clement Greenberg?)  Sister Carrie “unequivocally nominates the dominant gaze male”, a marvellous sentence, worthy of Dali, full of gazing gazelles and grazing giraffes.

With slides he delivered himself of statements that would have delighted Tom Wolfe, such as “I really don’t have time to unpack this image” (Roberta in death) and referred primly to a Dreiser article apparently entitled ‘N-word Jeff’.

Surely the aspirant Starkey of his field.

Proceedings concluded with a plenary lecture by Professor Cassandra Laity of the Modernist Studies Association, a surprising figure complete with Bella Abzug-style hat, flown in specially by the American Embassy.  She saw a continuity running through Pater, Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites to the supposedly modernist HD.

My frame was giving way at this point.  Spine creaking under information overload.  Wishing I knew more I hastened away through the unlovely sagging rectangles of the Brookes campus.

©  Roger Howe  2006