Truths That Cannot Be Offered Outside of Art: On Stephen D. Dowden’s “Modernism and Mimesis”

STEPHEN DOWDEN’S 2020 book Modernism and Mimesis is a major study that reclaims literary modernism from abstruse erudition and places it squarely within an egalitarian framework of aesthetic play. Modernism, in Dowden’s account, seeks to reveal what is true and real, offering essential if evanescent insights unavailable to any other kind of inquiry. Implicit in this urgent argument about art is one about the humanities more generally, for as one goes, so goes the other. “Do we need a beautiful garden of verse,” Dowden wonders, “the way we need serious political engagement or the way we need a well-built house to live in, a reliable car to drive? […] Is poetry undead, living a posthumous existence in university seminars, out-of-the-way journals, and five-minute culture spots on National Public Radio?” Answering his own questions, at least with respect to the priorities of the contemporary university, he observes: “Science and technology, economics, political science, and history are perceived as serious business and so more pressing than poetry and literature.”

No surprise here, of course. But Dowden’s passion to ground the significance of art and to justify its distinctive epistemology is worthy of careful consideration. Because even if we can’t fully agree with his solution, then we at least need to find our own better answer to the conundrum he places before us. He has won us over to the challenge.

Unlike postwar literary theory, which has thus far governed our understanding of modernism (or at least my own), Dowden does not hesitate to emphasize the movement’s unabashed confidence in revealing truth. There is no trace in his analysis of modernism’s wariness about “the real” or its skepticism towards “truth.” Dowden has not made modernism a prooftext of modernist (or postmodernist) cultural theory. Deconstruction does not darken the doorway of this study. The philosophers Dowden engages are, first of all, those who would deprive art of its epistemological autonomy: Hegel, who influentially subordinated art to philosophy and the natural sciences; Kant, who essentially rendered aesthetics a matter of subjective taste; and Max Weber, who celebrated the superiority of the natural sciences to the detriment of religion and the arts — pursuits that modernity has, he asserts, effectively rendered moot. But these thinkers make cameo appearances here mainly to set up the problem that needs to be solved, to help articulate the claim that modernism (and Dowden as its eloquent proponent) will refute.

Those thinkers in whom Dowden finds solace, who in his view offer a philosophical grounding for the modernists’ quasi-mystical yearnings for truth, are Heidegger and, most importantly, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who provides the philosophical vocabulary to explain how modernism is, at its core, all about mimesis.

Unlike its common critical usage, mimesis in Dowden’s terms has nothing to do with traditional realist, verisimilar representation. It is, rather, a way of articulating the modernists’ mode of access to the real: their work, Dowden argues, resonates with being itself, echoing, imitating, and transforming the universe’s own patterns and rhythms into new works of art. The example from Gadamer that most stands out — though one to which I cannot here do full justice — is the reverberation of the Sternentanz (dance of the stars) within the movement of actual human dancers. Modernist art pulses to the “thrum” of the universe itself.

Is this all beginning to sound a bit mystical? It should. Dowden is both boldly direct about this tendency and, on occasion, vaguely apologetic. “The problem with accounts such as these,” he says, “is that they sound so dreamy and mystical.” Yet on the whole, he unabashedly affirms the “spiritual” element that was central to modernists such as Musil, Kandinsky, Wittgenstein, and others. Moreover, he affirms this element as central not only to their poetics but also to his own understanding and experience of modernism as well. Modernism and Mimesis passionately recommends modernism to its readers as the kind of art most likely to produce insight and enlightenment in the modern age. This is thus a work of advocacy, not just dispassionate academic elucidation.

Dowden’s “mystical” account of modernism asks us to set aside almost everything we thought we knew not just about the movement but about cultural theory as well. Jürgen Habermas taught us to be leery of tradition: he carried the day in his famous debates with Gadamer (beginning in 1967 and stretching into the early 1970s). As a result, Gadamer, it is safe to say, has played a relatively muted role in critical discussions since then. In the eyes of many, and for understandable reasons, Heidegger’s Nazi past discredited him as well, and with him any valid insight on art he may have had.

To complicate matters, Dowden cannot easily be assimilated to hegemonic constructivism, a philosophical worldview so taken for granted today that it is often not even articulated. (It has, as Wittgenstein might say, become the picture that holds us captive.) At first glance, however, this would seem to be no problem at all, as Dowden does not hesitate to reiterate art’s core creative function. “Reality does not exist as such,” he says, approvingly citing Paul Celan (but channeling Proust, Renoir, and others); rather, “reality needs to be sought and achieved.” And yet it does exist, powerfully and independently, if elusively. Central to Dowden’s claim is that none of modernism’s truths are subjective fantasies or illusions: “[C]rucial to modernism is the thought that art is […] an active way of exploring, understanding, and knowing the world, of actively situating ourselves within it. Art establishes the real as real for us by making it intelligible.” This brash assertion of ontological verity would make a constructivist blush. Neither fish nor fowl, Dowden’s version of modernism intriguingly straddles the objectivist/constructivist divide that has perhaps too neatly demarcated the landscape of our aesthetic imagination.

To speak, as Dowden does, of reality “thrumming” in modernist art may raise the specter in some readers’ imaginations, especially given the centrality of Heidegger to his thinking, of a quasi-fascist vitalism. “[T]he mimetic is and remains,” writes Dowden, quoting Gadamer, “a primordial phenomenon in which it is not so much an imitation [that] occurs as a transformation.” Elsewhere, he explains that, “[a]mong the modernists, the link between mimesis and instinctive behavior seemed self-evident, which is also to say: an impulse rooted in nature.” This talk of instinctual behavior and natural impulses will raise red flags in the minds of some who may see this as a kind of aesthetic “primitivism” with potentially dubious political affiliations. After all, might not this labile energy flow (Dowden likes to speak of an aesthetic “molten core”) lend itself to nativist politics or violent domination?

The answer, like so much else in this study, emanates from what Dowden sees as modernism’s unique mode of cognition. Mantra-like, he intones lines from Baudelaire’s 1860 essay “The Painter and Modern Life,” which he deems to be a “defining insight into the task of the modern poet,” highlighting as it does “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent; the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” From this ethos of epistemological humility, he derives a modernist ethic of respect for alterity and a refusal of objectification. He spends much of the study casting modernism as the great antithesis of the Cartesian “res cogitans,” the book’s main villain, which rears its ugly head not only in the form of instrumentalizing science and colonial conquest but also in aesthetic realism (the art form most in cahoots with objectifying science) and, in a somewhat more camouflaged manner, in Romantic subjectivity, which sought to evade realism’s objectivist errors but only ended up reinscribing them at another level.

Dowden’s almost ritual reiteration of modernism’s ephemeral nature has two main advantages for his argument: art’s unique flashes of transitory insight are ipso facto indefinable, and thus cannot be compromised or co-opted: “To pin down an exact denotative meaning would be to falsify it, because spiritual realities are transient, fugitive, and ephemeral — but no less real for being so.” Dowden’s modernism emerges as an aesthetic practice of solidarity, sympathy, and nonsentimental compassion; it is, in other words, just plain good, and constitutionally incapable of being hijacked by nefarious actors. Mimesis “models a way of creative, non-authoritarian dealing with the world,” and the resulting art “is cosmopolitan, unpretentious, and egalitarian.”

Yet to some, this will seem just a bit too convenient — goodness by fiat, an ethics more asserted than illustrated or explained. A study that so adamantly insists upon modernism’s cognitive prowess should be able, one feels, to give a more precise accounting of what modernism knows. One might complain that Celan’s hermetic poetry works quite well for an argument such as this, but what are we to make, for example, of Ernst Jünger’s no less obviously modernist, yet indisputably pro-war and protofascist, Storm of Steel (1920), not to mention the work of Wyndham Lewis?

Though I have remarked upon his use of Heidegger and Gadamer, Dowden’s understanding of modernism depends to a much greater extent on modernist artists themselves — specifically Thomas Mann. Indeed, one of the things I most admire about this study is the way he deploys Doctor Faustus (1947) throughout to make his point. Once again, we are invited to look with fresh eyes at an alleged specimen of canonical modernism. For many years, the consensus was that Adrian Leverkühn, the musician protagonist, devolves as a consequence of his deal with the devil into a kind of fascist, his modernist music serving to illustrate his “inhuman” turn. Not so, argues Dowden. What we see instead is an artist who learns to eschew irony and parody (at which Leverkühn, like Mann, quite excels) in favor of a naïve form of composition that expresses profound grief at the loss of his beloved nephew, Nepomuk. Though this reading of the novel has since gained some traction (most recently in an essay in The New Yorker), Dowden was the first to make it. More importantly, it transforms a simple — and, frankly, simplistic — allegory about Nazism into a much more compelling narrative of modernism as a form of art whose directness and, yes, naïveté bring people together, rather than dividing them by class and educational attainment. Entirely at odds with the notion of modernism as grist for elite academic specialists, this reading of Doctor Faustus communicates an alternative, far more egalitarian and positive, image of the movement.

For Dowden, modernism is essentially a game or party, with no prerequisite of expertise. It can only come alive because of us — indeed, it remains a dead thing without us — and we can only participate by shedding our self-consciousness, at least provisionally. The argument involves a massive shift from puzzling over abstruse literary allusions in T. S. Eliot to an emphasis on unselfconscious play, from feelings of frustrated inadequacy and alienation to inclusion and “naïve” delight. But if this reading is correct, it is true of art itself, not modernism only. Here, too, Dowden is ahead of us, conceding the point but arguing that modernism just happens to be the best there is.

Despite this effusive defense of the movement, however, I have personally watched students shrink timidly from modernist poetry (and, frankly, have often felt inadequate myself). Modernism and Mimesis is meant, of course, to overcome that resistance, to bridge that gap, by explaining how modernism works — or how it might yet work. While this study does not address itself to the actual reception of art (except in a hypothetical manner), it implies that, if modernism has thus far failed to live up to its potential, this is in part due to cultural elites (including professors) who have built a wall around it, using it for cultural capital rather than as the life force it was always meant to be.

No study can do everything, or do everything equally well. In foregrounding modernism, Dowden has, perhaps inevitably, slighted realism and Romanticism, movements that, rather than being treated in their own right, serve here principally as contrasts and philosophical antagonists. I don’t think Romanticism can really be reduced to a kind of subjectivity in which nature is made comfortably subordinate to and other than the human observer. And realism is treated here with no greater subtlety — except, perhaps, by admitting Joyce and Proust to its ranks. Used primarily as a foil in his argument in favor of modernism’s rejection of representation — its refusal to be “about” anything else — realism is almost inevitably set up for caricature.

It seems unnecessary, however, to dismiss “representation” (and thus realism) as a second-class kind of knowing, one that merely repeats the insights of, say, the social sciences. For one can of course “re-present” conventional and routinized perceptions in fresh and critical ways, and a realist aesthetic does not necessarily imply (please, god, let us move beyond this tired argument!) an unreflective acceptance of the social status quo. Bertolt Brecht thought of realism as a way of discovering what is truly real, of piercing false consciousness, not replicating it. And Elias Canetti deemed his modernist novel Auto-da-Fé (1935) a mode of “realism” in the sense that it shone a light on a culture that did not yet know itself in the way he had portrayed it. Realism at its best can question, not just mindlessly replicate, what is taken to be real. To exclude art that is “about” society or concerned with social justice merely because it is epistemologically congruent with other ways of social knowing would be to expunge or delegitimize much of contemporary aesthetic practice and experience. It would be to return to the very academic elitism and social aloofness Dowden wants to overcome.

Close to the end of the study, when most of us would be content to wrap up and reiterate what has already been argued, Dowden opens a fresh assault on the critical consensus about language’s failure to capture the real — an “insight” that lingers on in literary and cultural studies long after deconstruction per se has faded from the scene. Clear-eyed about modernism’s indisputable difficulty with language, Dowden sees its real legacy as “not so much to limit, confine, or conceal as to reveal the world. This is its creative and poetic task. Language serves as a shared path into the common world.”

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William Collins Donahue is Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. He is the author of The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, which was reissued in 2020.