Modernism and Region: Illinois Poetry and the ModernDavid Wright The Midwest Quarterly 34.2 (1998). 215-227.
- "The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down
and the poem is dark."
--William Carlos Williams
from Paterson
- Introduction
- Among the many definitions of modernity, the most stable and consistent notion has been, ironically, instability.In All that is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman writes that "modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish" (15). Such a pervasive consciousness of fragmentation becomes the characteristic mark by which we tend to recognize modernist art.
Within this fragmentation, however, are any number of artistic responses, most of which flow from a culturally alienated artist. This artist, in Robert Pippin's words, "claims to celebrate what is truly modern in modernity, the tolerance for radical change, novelty, the unusual, and so forth, but he finds himself vilified, or worse, ignored (or worse still, embraced and lionized) by the public representatives of bourgeois modernity" (41). The modernist artist creates art from fragmentation, from his or her own alienation, only to be, in the end, more isolated--either as an outsider looking in on society or as a commodity contained by the very fragmented culture he or she critiques.
I want to contend, however, that within American literature of the modern period (and since), another response to the "maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal" exists, one which has been seriously neglected as an element or consequence of modernism. Regional art, in this case Illinois poetry, though often modern(ist) in style and subject matter, offers divergent versions of and alternatives to the modernist sensibility of the fragmented individual and culture, alternatives which should complicate our usual constructions of literary and cultural history in much the same way the domesticated fiction of Victorian women challenges our understanding of the literature of the nineteenth century.
Situating Modernity
- In finding modernity, or modernism, or distinguishing between the two, we are in for a good deal of wandering and retracing of historical steps to arrive at a point of origin. Regardless of precisely where (or if) we locate this point, it becomes clear that modernity grew from the Enlightenment and its championing of progress, promotion of scientific and rational thought and goal of, as David Harvey writes, "the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains . . . doctrines of equality, liberty, faith in human intelligence (once allowed the benefits of education), and universal reason abounded" (13).
The limits and failures of such a "universal" project and the reasons for their giving way to the disillusionment of modernity are the subject of Max Horkheimer's and Theodor Adorno's critique in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. They begin by making their most damning, and famous, indictment of Enlightenment rationality, writing that "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. The program of the enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy" (3). Such disenchantment, or what theologian Rudolf Bultmann called demythologizing, of the natural world places human beings in positions of power over their world. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, "Knowledge [read empirical, objective, scientific knowledge], which is power, knows no obstacles" and "Technology is the essence of knowledge" (4). This technology equips humanity to learn what we really want to know about nature, which is of course "how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men" (4).
Among the many consequences of this domination, the most damaging for Horkheimer and Adorno is the totalitarian reduction of life to systems: "The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter" (7); and one can add: myth to anthropomorphism, language to philological structures, consciousness to cognitive processes. In such schemes, anything which occurs can be fitted into a systematic understanding of the whole, which predicts its occurrence. If the system fails to predict an event, it was never a "true" system to begin with, was not objective or neutral enough to take everything into account and must therefore be replaced by a truer, broader system. This is the Enlightenment method: "It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion" (7).
John Bender points out that this critique of Enlightenment rationality and its abstracting systems of thought and the potential dangers of such systems "can be traced through Horkheimer and Adorno back to Nietzsche and Marx" (79). But we should not leave Adorno and Horkheimer there, longing for either a return to a tenuously posited, remythologized past (like Nietzsche) nor depending solely on a materialist dialectic (like Marx).
Instead, as the title suggests, The Dialectic of Enlightenment is concerned with the dialectic relationship between myth and Enlightenment rationality. Myth itself foresees, even welcomes the Enlightenment which displaces it. "The myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were its own products" write Horkheimer and Adorno, who also point out that "The creative god and the systematic spirit are alike as rulers of nature" (8, 9). The Enlightenment replaces such myth with its own mythic tendencies. As Jay M. Van Hook notes, "It is characteristic of desacralizing forces to reconstitute something else or even themselves as objects of veneration" (137). And this is the post-Enlightenment predicament around which "modern" consciousness must function; our myths have been disenchanted and replaced by a myth of disenchantment.
By complicating their discussion of both Enlightenment and myth, and by positing a dialectical dependence between the two, Horkheimer and Adorno escape an easy, totalizing understanding of either phenomenon. They fail, however, to ground their theory sufficiently in praxis, in the historical, cultural ground which is the impetus for any dialectical understanding of reality. While Horkheimer and Adorno certainly critique capitalistic notions of individuality which grew from Enlightenment thought and the controlling ends to which these notions have been put, but they fail to do the same with their own understanding of the functions of myth.
- They appear instead to engage in an abstracted discussion, one which does not enter into the specifics of the particular clashes between mythologies and technologies which might further clarify and complicate their explorations. For example, during their discussion of faith, Horkeheimer and Adorno move from a broad overview of Protestant understandings of transcendence to assert that it is not merely the Enlightenment, but understandings of "the advance of thought itself" which are relentless. They write that:
- The paradoxical nature of faith ultimately degenerates into a swindle, and become the myth of the twentieth century; and its irrationality turns it into an instrument of rational administration by the wholly enlightened as they steer society towards barbarism. (20)
- Which faith? Which paradoxes? Horkheimer and Adorno's discussion of myth, for all its mentions of animism, shamans, language, priests and faith, succumbs to the destructive tendency to reduce myth to abstraction, to see its dialectical involvement with Enlightenment somewhere else than in the specific faiths, myths and cultures where both enlightenment and myth abide.
- While asking "What is Enlightenment?" Michel Foucault insists that any critique of systems of power and oppression "must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical" and turn instead to "historico-critical investigations" which "are quite specific in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses" (46, 49).
A study of particular regional literatures, within and against the received canon of modernism, provides a critique of the high modernist aesthetic and its disenfranchised artists. Study of such literatures places the artist's struggle for effective agency, for self-consciously making art against both fragmentation and commodification, within a "quite specific" landscape and between the desacralized myths of the artist's region and the larger culture's emerging, totalizing systems of modernization. This regional critique must take place, I believe, in this space between the exploitation Horkheimer and Adorno judge so harshly and their call for a resacralization of nature. It must be an attempt to take our understanding of the role of region in modern literature beyond simplistic conceptions of regionalism; to provide a critique grounded in the specific local places and local cultures Foucault directs us towards.
Placing Regionalism
"Regionalism" is indeed a curious label, used most often in regard to rural poets from the South, Midwest or West, and seldom in reference to Northeastern, urban writers. Robert Bray writes that:
- American literary history has usually either denied the existence of regionalism or ignored it as a sort of autistic literary sibling that never grew up and became national. At best, regional literature was said to be full of nature but lacking sufficient nurture. (117)
- Bray adds that "In the expanding universe of the literary canon, among the babble of special pleadings, scarcely any voice is heard suggesting that regional writers . . . deserve their niches and pedestals" (118).
- That lack of a place in the American literary canon reflects more than a political or cultural sleight at the hands of easterners. Much of regionalism has produced work which poet and essayist Wendell Berry admits, lives down to the traditional stereotype of sentimental regionalism: "work that is ostentatiously provincial, condescending, and exploitive" (What 74). At the same time, Berry distrusts abstract definitions of regionalism like those of Mark K. Stengel, whom he quotes at length. In a history of The Southern Review, Stengel writes that the limited acceptance and understanding of regional literature results from "accepted definitions of regionalism [which] have been unnecessarily self-limiting up to now. The gradual disappearance of the traditional, material South does not mean that Southernness is disappearing, any more than blackness is threatened by integration, or sacredness by secularization" (qtd. in Berry 82).
- Stengler's attempt to define southern literature as a state of mind, "without resort to geography" (82) is precisely the sort of systematization Adorno and Horkheimer decry. And it prompts the regionalist Berry to respond that while a sentimental regionalism may treat region as merely a subject matter, as the "raw material" of a writer's industry, the second, abstracted and homogenized version ignores the actual world altogether.
A less totalizing and more challenging answer is to affirm that neither the exploitation of region nor the abstraction of it are acceptable. Instead, we must recognize that literature, like the rest of culture, lives by necessity in particular landscapes and places; the interaction between these places and the writers who write about them does not occur on a national level, but in the local, in the particulars of the places shaped by and shaping their texts. The struggle with this approach to reading American prose is that "regional literature" has often been construed as a pejorative, limiting term. Yet, as Judith Fetterley has recently expressed it, "Regionalism deconstructs the 'national,' revealing its presumed universality to be in fact the position of a certain . . . group of locals" (890).
- Illinois Poetry and the Modern
- The Chicago Renaissance provides one example of a literature growing self consciously out of its region, from the rural life surrounding and giving birth to a city and from the struggle of sometimes alienated, modern writers to find voices with which to write about urban life. The three voices most typically associated with Chicago's literary heyday are Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, whom John Hallwas calls the "main poets of the Chicago Renaissance, and for a time they were very highly regarded and widely read . . . they have continuing cultural significance in their home state (and in America as a whole, to a lesser extent)" (11).
Sandburg's Chicago Poems precede Hart Crane's The Bridge and William Carlos Williams' Paterson as the first modern American poetry to focus almost exclusively on the city. Sandburg's now famous "Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat . . . Stormy, husky brawling, / City of the big shoulders" (35) seemed to grow right out of the optimism of a city rebuilt from a devastating fire and quickly becoming a center of both commerce and transportation.
- But James Hurt maintains that while "[t]he canonical account of Chicago literature represents it as brutally naturalistic, presenting the city as a jungle of male conflict ending in the defeat of the individual" (5), the writing of Chicago is more complex. Hurt complicates this traditional view by surveying a deeper and broader sampling of Chicago's literary past and present, "dismantling the naturalistic myth of Chicago" and representing it instead as more of "an infinitely rich environment of cultural diversity than as a jungle or pit" (106,101).
- A closer reading of Sandburg's poetry demonstrates his struggle to understand the role of a burgeoning industrial metropolis in the midst of a largely agrarian region. His characterization of the city is both skeptical and brutal, yet Sandburg generally embraces the city's vitality and dynamic potential:
- They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have
seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the
farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes it is true
. . .
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces
of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.- And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer
at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:- Come and show me another city with head singing so
proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. (35)
- This is the city not only as "evil' seductress of rural innocents or a haven for the impoverished underclass, but a complex center of song, laughter, coarseness and industry.
Sandburg's representation of the city of Chicago as an essentially vibrant and often contradictory entity continued throughout his poetic career, often becoming darker as he attempted to speak for and about laborers and the socialist causes with which he so powerfully identified. But one important attribute of his understanding of the city helped mediate the pessimism he expressed; Sandburg, as a small-town boy from rural, Galesburg, Illinois clearly understood that the city grew from and was sustained in large part by the non-urban region which surrounded it. This interaction between the rural and urban helps mediate the often attendant dinginess and chaos of city life in his poetry. Sandburg understood that neither city nor country could live without the other, and the relation showed often in both his long poems and his lyric verse. In "The Windy City" he expresses this interconnectedness when he writes:
- Winds of the Windy City, come out of the prairie,
all the way from Medicine Hat.
Come out of the inland sea blue water, come where
they nickname a city for you.- . . .
Winds of the Windy City,
Winds of corn and sea blue,
Spring wind white and fighting winter gray,
Come home here--they nickname a city for you. . .
The winkers of the morning stars count out cities,
And forget the numbers.
- Hurt's contention, and one I share, is that even the regionalistic portrayal of Chicago's Renaissance, the most studied of any Midwestern poetry, reduces the city's poetry to celebrations of urban life or disillusionment with life in the city- modernist themes written large on a new skyline. Carl Smith, for example, says that "Many Chicago writers came from the towns and villages of the Middle West and the East, and they were convinced that the future of American civilization, such as it was, rested with the city. Among their criticisms of urban life were only a few fond backward glances" (11).
Again we turn to Sandburg, the city's greatest celebrant and critic, who never ceased to write poems of the prairie, of rural life or, of course, about the most iconic of Illinois' mythical figures, Abraham Lincoln. In the 1918 collection Cornhuskers, Sandburg combines weaves his poetic love of the prairies with an urban future. He writes of the Midwestern landscape:
- I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of
its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a
slogan . . .
The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the
night I rest easy in the prairie arms, in the prairie heart. (45)
- Yet in the next breath, Sandburg seemingly embraces the myth of progress and the promise of urbanization:
- I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of tomorrows,
a sky of tomorrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown:
Tomorrow is a day. (46)
- As Sandburg's poetry demonstrates, the poetic life of this one state in one region is too diverse for reductions or homogenizations. Even the conflict in Sandburg's own work reflects a modernist struggle between the romance of rural life and the allure of technology and the city. But this struggle is not the mere turning of a city-boy's back on the country, as Smith implies.
The struggle, as in most regional literatures, is to somehow come to terms with the legacy of a place while at the same time finding a voice for its future. Certainly the concern is an individual one, reflecting personal alienation and shifts in consciousness, as for example in Edgar Lee Masters' monologues satirizing and exposing small town life in his Spoon River Anthology. But on the whole, literature which is firmly placed takes up the landscapes, legacies and voices of its region in tandem with concern for its future, not viewing the region primarily as something to distance oneself from, but rather as a continuous construct, in need of both tradition and revision.
- Though Bray believes that such poets "tend to value place over history and the personal over the social; to notice the city apocalyptically if at all; and to personify the land tragically as a deeply shadowed garden with fallen tenants" (118), I think the work of Sandburg, as well as the work of other Illinois poets (Lindsay, for example) contradicts this isolated vision. Yet the typical response of critics and readers to literature self-consciously grounded in specific regions, particularly those regions beyond the usual centers of our "national" literary life, is still a dismissive or simplistic one. Fetterley attributes this response to a kind of critical fear of the values implicit in the texts of literary regionalism, values which complicate, challenge and destabilize our very definitions of "margin and center through shifting our perspective" (889).
- That is why I am insisting on a different approach to regionalism and to Illinois poetry in particular, one which resist posits the relevance of both rural poetry and landscapes and at the same time acknowledges the complexity of urban literature which grows from the very same landscape and is dependent on rural produce, people and resources. The dawn of modernity began a maelstrom of artistic alienation, but the work of those artists did not occur in the abstract; it happened in place, in specific regions and landscapes which, like modern alienation, are inescapably significant and too little studied for their impact on American writers of the period.
- Modernist poets have indeed focused their attentions on the instabilities and fragmentation of modern life. Their responses pushed aesthetic traditions and celebrated the avant-garde. But, as Dan Guillory skillfully puts it, "Illinois poets of the twentieth century have been forced in a special way to heed these dialectical forces of tradition and innovation" (43). Attention to landscape, skyline, farmer and city dweller do not at first glance appear to rival the drawing room of T. S. Eliot's "J. Alfred Prufrock;" the avant-garde language play of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons; or the epic Cantos of Ezra Pound as products of modernity.
- Nevertheless, the myths and presences of the prairie and the growth and activity of Chicago find their way into Illinois poems in ways which struggle between the very same clash of disenchanted myth and disenchanting rationality which Horkheimer and Adorno represent as the Enlightenment's legacy. Carl Sandburg's work is but one way that clash is worked out, with attention to both the voices and places of Illinois. Yet these poems also move beyond this abstract struggle and into the specific myths and needs of Sandburg's place.
- In poems from the sangamon, the contemporary Illinois writer John Knoepfle sets "snowflakes and recorders" in Vachel Lindsay's Springfield home, and summarizes the modern condition with these lines, invoking the deceased poet:
- vachel we don't know
what to do with our lives
how fill them up
how not even to be self conscious
our successes squeezed from us
despite our failings and yet
there are some like figures
on a cave wall
and when we find them
they teach us and we change. (66-67)
Regional poetry, the continued writing and study of it, does not relieve the modern condition, does not take fragmented worlds and "fill them up"; it does not rescue us from the often oppressive self-consciousness of modern (or postmodern) life. It does, however, when studied with care and an avoidance of either sentimentalized myth or exploitative, abstracted homogenization provide a way into our country's landscapes, rural and urban, where "there are some like figures / on a cave wall." Those figures have known these places before us, and when we see with greater complexity the range of their responses to our region and to modern life, it may indeed "teach us and we change."
Works Cited
Bender, John. "Eighteenth-Century Studies." in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds. New York: MLA, 1992. 79-99.
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Berry, Wendell. What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point, 1990.
Bray, Robert. "The Regionalist Tradition in Midwestern Poetry: Minor Leagues or Minor Key?" in Studies in Illinois Poetry. James Hallwas, ed. Urbana: Stormline Press, 1989. 117-143.
Fetterley, Judith. "'Not in the Least American': Nineteenth-Century Literary Regionalism." College English. 8 (December 1994): 877-895.
Foucault, Michel. "What is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 32-50.
Guillory, Daniel L. "Tradition and Innovation in Illinois Poetry." in Studies in Illinois Poetry. James Hallwas ed., Urbana: Stormline Press, 1989. 43-59.
Hallwas, James. "Before the Chicago Renaissance." in Studies in Illinois Poetry. James Hallwas ed., Urbana: Stormline Press, 1989. 11-41.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. 1944. New York: Seabury, 1972.
Hurt, James. Writing Illinois: The Prairie, Lincoln and Chicago. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1992.
Knoepfle, John. poems from the sangamon. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1985.
Pippin, Robert B. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Sandburg, Carl. Harvest Poems, 1910-1960. New York: Harcourt, 1960.
Smith, Carl S. Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1984.
Van Hook, Jay M. Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays. Clifford G. Christians and Jay M. Van Hook, eds. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981.
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. 1946. New York: New Directions, 1963.
- This essay Copyright David Wright, 2002.