ABSTRACT
To theorize on modernism in this age of the postmodern might seem akin to speculating on the theological arguments for the existence of God in a post-Nietzschean, post-theological era. It may nonetheless be argued that only in retrospect may the project of modernism be identified, all the more clearly, perhaps, for having failed or, at the very least, run out of steam. Fredric Jameson has implied that, in Western culture, modernism accompanied a process of incomplete scientific and industrial modernization which, in its incompletion, still offered the artist not only a sense of endless novelty but also a mission. If not spiritual leadership, this posture undoubtedly retained the appurtenances of elitism associated with the artist no less after Rimbaud’s embracing of the role of ‘poetseer’ than had been the case for Baudelaire as ‘decipherer of the Universe’. In both cases, an ultimate sense of failure in no way diminished the powerful legacy bequeathed to a later generation of poets. A social as well as a spiritual dimension pervades the writings of Mallarmé, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Rendre plus purs les mots de la tribu, however, all too easily became associated with a purity of tribe rather than of words. The risks, politically, are well summed up in the following exchange between Octavio Paz and Leszek Kolakowski:
Kolakowski: Religion, philosophy, art and politics, were somehow part of a unified order voted by the divine wisdom. Now this order, this cosmos, was gradually crumbling and this is precisely what modernity is about.
