MODERNISM AND THE METROPOLIS

For a number of social and

historical reasons the metropolis
of the second half of the
nineteenth century moved into a
quite new cultural dimension. It
was now much more than the very
large city, or even the capital city of
an important nation. It was the
place where new social and
economic and cultural relations,
beyond both city and nation in their
older senses, were beginning to be
formed: a distinct historical phase
which was in fact to be extended, in
the second half of the twentieth
century, at least potentially, to the
whole world.
-Raymond Williams, The Politics of
Modernism: Against the New
Conformists, Verso, 1989
SPIRITUS MUNDI
The Second Coming
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at
last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?






William Butler Yeats spent years
crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of
the universe that he described in his book
A Vision.

The theory of history Yeats articulated
in A Vision centers on a diagram made
of two conical spirals, one inside the
other, so that the widest part of one of
the spirals rings around the narrowest
part of the other spiral, and vice versa.

The Second Coming was intended by
Yeats to describe the current historical
moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in
terms of these gyres.

Yeats believed that the world was on
the threshold of an apocalyptic
revelation, as history reached the end of
the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and
began moving along the inner gyre.

The Second Coming is a statement
about the contrary forces at work in
history, and about the conflict between
the modern world and the ancient
world.
THIS STAR CALLED PARIS
The sun of Art then shone only on Paris.
- Marc Chagall

For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living
is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists
have come here and called it home. Brother, if you cant paint in Paris,
youd better give up and marry the bosss daughter.
-Alan Jay Lerner, U.S. composer and lyricist

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best
American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent
country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow
older intelligence and good manners.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Quoted in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic
Grandeur, Ch. 33

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then
wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a
moveable feast.
-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway


IMPRESSIONISM IN PAINTING AND MUSIC
The name of the movement is
derived from the title of a Claude
Monet work Impression, soleil
levant (1872)

Characteristics: open composition,
emphasis on light and its
changing qualities (often
highlighting the effects of the
passage of time), ordinary subject
matter, movement as a crucial
element of human perception and
experience, experimenting with
visual angles

In music: Maurice Ravel and
Claude Debussy
LES SALONS DES REFUSS NEGATIVE REACTIONS
TO NOVELTY
Such salons were mounted
in 1863, 1864, 1873

The refuss celebrated
qualities of spontaneity and
originality in painting
qualities manifested in
sketchy and incomplete
surfaces

Edouard Manets Djeuner
sur l'herbe (1863) is
emblematic of the refuss

FROM DEBUSSY TO STRAVINSKY PARIS,
1912 - 1913
The last orchestral work by Debussy,
the ballet Jeux (1912) written for
Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,
contains some of his strangest
harmonies and textures.
Jeux was overshadowed by Igor
Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring,
composed in the same year as Jeux
and premiered only two weeks later
by the same ballet company.
The refined innovations of Debussy
were one thing, but these primitive
rites of Russian tribalism another.
There was a riot among first-nighters,
and Diaghilev called the scandal le
moment de la musique moderne
Innovators like Diaghilev, Stravinsky,
the Cubist painters, Apollinaire,
Gertrude Stein gathered in PARIS
OF ALL PLACES.
THE RITE OF SPRING PRMIERE
After undergoing revisions almost up until the very day of its first performance,
the ballet was premired by the Ballets Russes on Thursday, 29 May 1913 at
the Thtre des Champs-lyses in Paris, conducted by Pierre Monteux.
The premire involved one of the most famous classical music riots in history.
The intensely rhythmic score and primitive scenario and choreography
shocked the audience that was accustomed to the elegant conventions of
classical ballet.
The evening's program began with another Stravinsky piece entitled Les
Sylphides. This was followed by, The Rite of Spring. The complex music
and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first drew catcalls and whistles
from the crowd. At the start, some members of the audience began to boo
loudly. There were loud arguments in the audience between supporters and
opponents of the work. These were soon followed by shouts and fistfights in
the aisles. The unrest in the audience eventually degenerated into a riot. The
Paris police arrived by intermission, but they restored only limited order.
Chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance. Stravinksy had called for
a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. Fellow
composer Camille Saint-Sans famously stormed out of the premire
allegedly infuriated over the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet's opening
bars (though Stravinsky later said "I do not know who invented the story that
he was present at, but soon walked out of, the premire.". Stravinsky ran
backstage, where Diaghilev was turning the lights on and off in an attempt to
try to calm the audience.
After the premire, Diaghilev is reported to have commented to Nijinsky and
Stravinsky at dinner that the scandal was "exactly what I wanted."
The Rite of Spring and The Waste Land
The river's tent is broken; the last
fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank.
The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard.
The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end
my song.
The river bears no empty bottles,
sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard
boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer
nights.
The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs
of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down
and wept
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end
my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I
speak not loud or long
But at my back from time to time I
hear
The sound of horns and motors,
which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs.
Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs.
Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant
dans la coupole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.

Part III The Fire Sermon

WALTER BENJAMINS THE ARCADES
PROJ ECT

Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the
Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a
monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years.

Benjamin called it "the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris - glass-roofed rows of
shops that were early centers of consumerism - Benjamin presents a montage of
quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging
them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion,"
"Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising,"
"Prostitution," "Baudelaire," "Theory of Progress."

His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things - a
process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the
bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history.

In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is
broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a
distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost
time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

The Shopping Arcades of Paris Temples of
Commodity Capital

These arcades, a recent
invention of industrial luxury,
are glass-roofed, marble-
panelled extending through
whole blocks of buildings ,
whose proprietors have joined
together for such enterprises.
Lining both sides of these
corridors, which get their life
from above, are the most
elegant shops, so that the
arcade is a city, a world in
miniature.
-Walter Benjamin, Arcades
Project

ARTIFICIALITY; MASS-PRODUCTION; THE DECLINE
OF THE AURA

On Baudelaires Crpuscule du soir: the big city knows no true evening
twilight. In any case, the artificial lightning does away with all transition to night.
The same state of affairs is responsible for the fact that the stars disappear from
the sky over the metropolis. Who ever notices when they come out? Kants
transcription of the sublime through the starry heavens above me and the moral
law within me could never have been conceived in these terms by an inhabitant
of the big city.
-Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Mass production is the principal economic cause and class warfare the
principal social cause of the decline of the aura.
-Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

Benjamin used the word "aura" to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one
presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. According to
Benjamin, this aura inheres not in the object itself but rather in external attributes
such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized
authenticity, or its cultural value. Aura is thus indicative of art's traditional
association with primitive, feudal, or bourgeois structures of power and its further
association with magic and (religious or secular) ritual. With the advent of art's
mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in
which there is no actual original, the experience of art could be freed from place
and ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience,
leading to a shattering of the aura. "For the first time in world history,"
Benjamin wrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from
its parasitical dependence on ritual."

Ghost-ridden streets
Swarming city city gorged with dreams, where ghosts by day accost the
passer-by.
-Charles Baudelaire, Les Sept Vieillards

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

How often have we found ourselves in that square where everything seems
so close to existence and yet bears so little resemblance to what really
exists. It was here, more than anywhere else, that we held our invisible
meetings.
-Andr Breton, Le surralisme et la peinture

INSECURE LOCATIONS AND IDENTITIES
Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by peelings and breadcrumbs.
I have tried to break off this bunch and hand it to you; but whether there is
substance or truth in it I do not know. Nor do I know exactly where we are.
What city does that stretch of sky look down upon? Is it Paris, is it
London where we sit, or some southern city of pink-washed houses
lying under cypresses, under high mountains, where eagles soar? I do
not at this moment feel certain.

And now I ask: Who am I? I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny,
Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not
know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead;
we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us.
There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt, I am you.
-Bernard summing up in Virginia Woolfs The Waves (1931)
DE CHIRICOS REALITY-DREAM-PRESENT-PAST:
Garre Montparnasse
ANDR BRETONS PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF PARIS IN
NADJ A (1928)
The images of Paris in Andr
Bretons Nadja are actually a
sort of anti-guidebook. Sites are
included because of what
happened in these places, either
to Breton himself or between
Breton and Nadja, or because of
the uncanny emotions they
create in Breton. A private city
has been created within the
public city, occupying the same
space, but differently, more
intensely.
IDENTITIES IN CRISIS AND THE METROPOLIS:
ALIENATION, DEHUMANIZATION, DISQUIET,
ANXIETY
Starting with the notorious fin-de-sicle and its
decadent aestheticism, European cultural thinking and
writing seem to be dominated by the explosion of
issues connected to problematic identities be they
collective, national or individual, purely personal.
-Cristina Cheverean, Wounds and Deceptions
WHO AM I?
Who am I? If this once I were to
rely on a proverb, then perhaps
everything would amount to
knowing whom I haunt. I must
admit that this last word is
misleading, tending to establish
between certain things and
myself relations that are
stranger, more inescapable,
more disturbing than I intended.
Such a word means much more
than it says, makes me, still
alive, play a ghostly part,
evidently referring to what I must
have ceased to be in order to be
who I am.
- Andr Breton, Nadja
Statue of Etienne Dolet, Place Maubert, Paris
FASCINATION AND DISCOMFORT
When I say that the statue of
Etienne Dolet in its plinth in
the Place Maubert in Paris
has always fascinated me
and induced unbearable
discomfort
Andr Breton, Nadja

DISQUIET AND THE METROPOLIS SPLIT
IDENTITIES: PESSOAS LISBON
My God, my God, who
am I watching? How
many am I? Who is I?
What is this gap
between me and
myself?
-Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet
THE HAUNTING LITHOGRAPHS OF THE CITY:
PESSOAS ANXIETY
BUT HOW DESCRIBE THE WORLD SEEN WITHOUT A
SELF? V. WOOLFS LONDON
But how describe the world seen
without a self? There are no words.
Blue, red even they distract,
even they hide with thickness
instead of letting the light through.
How describe or say anything in
articulate words again? save that
it fades, save that it undergoes a
gradual transformation, becomes,
even in the course of one short
walk, habitual this scene also.
Blindness returns as one moves
and one leaf repeats another.
Loveliness returns as one looks,
with all its train of phantom
phrases. One breathes in and out
substantial breath; down in the
valley the train draws across the
fields lop-eared with smoke.
-Bernard summing up in Virginia
Woolfs The Waves (1931)


BERLIN AND THE SCANDINAVIAN FEVER OF THE 1890s
According to Ibsens biographer Halvdan Koht, a long five-stanza poem
appeared in Berlins Der Zeitgeist to testify to the impact of Ibsen on the
life of Berlin, part of which ran:
Ibsen, Ibsen, everywhere!
Theres nothing like it!
Over the whole globe Ibsen fever rages.
The whole world is Ibsen-mad, even though unwillingly,
For the entire air is full of Ibsen-germs!
No salvation! Fashions and advertisements everywhere proclaim Ibsens
name, trumpet his praise.
On cigars, ladies trinkets, pastries, bodices, ties
Is flaunted the word in letters of gold: Ibsen! A la Ibsen!

Scandinavians resident for shorter or longer periods in Berlin in the early
nineties included the painter Edvard Munch.
BERLIN, STRINDBERG, ICONOCLASM AND BOHEMIA
VIENNA AND PRAGUE ON THE EASTERN FRINGE
OF THE MAP OF EUROPEAN MODERNISM

KAFKAS PRAGUE AN ARRESTING CITY
"Prague doesn't let go. Either of us.
This old crone has claws. One has to
yield or else."
-From Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak,
12/20/1902

"...the Prague that I not only love but
also fear.
-Letter to Ottla, 10/8/23

MATEIU CARAGIALES BUCHAREST AROUND 1910
"Reality is transfigured, it
becomes fantastical and a sort
of Edgar Poe-like unease agitates
[the main characters], these good-
for-nothings of the old Romanian
capital.
-G. Clinescu

Caragiales Bucharest offers the
perfect frame for the wanderings
of his paradoxical princes, since
the city itself is as wonderfully
repulsive and as angelically
infernal as its dwellers. Urban
space and human nature appear
as multiform, unfolding on
different, often contradictory
levels. // It is against this sordid
background of Balkanic
provenance that the Western
idealism of the princes projects
itself, rendering them all the more
complex
-Cristina Cheverean, Wounds
and Deceptions


BUCHAREST BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS: HORTENSIA
PAPADAT BENGESCU AND CAMIL PETRESCU

NEW YORK AND BOHEMIA
-A magnet attracting peasants from
Sicily and the Ukraine, as well as the
worldly, sophisticated graduates of Yale
and Harvard

-Wallace Stevens (a Harvard
graduate) found New York fascinating
but horribly unreal, being ambivalently
absorbed by the spectacle of disorder
and energy on such a profuse scale

-What the immigrants brought with them,
from the Mafia to the Yiddish Theatre,
deeply altered the culture of New York

- The experimental spirit was
particularly visible in Greenwich
Village NEW YORK BOHEMIA

CHICAGO AND INDUSTRY
-A small number of giant
industries whose oligarchs were
Chicagos leading citizens

-Roughness and corrupt
insatiable materialism

-The novelists and poets of
Chicago cared ultimately for
matter over manner, and made
little or no advance beyond the
canons of realism

-The works of Chicago writers
give us nothing like the
programmes, manifestos or
obsessive concern for technique
which existed in New York and
the cosmopolitan centres of
Europe.