Intersect Conversations: Robert Lehman

In the introduction, you acquaint the reader with past discussions of the essence of poetry and history and their relationships to one another. More specifically, you identified three past couplings of history and poetry: Aristotle's Poetics; Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire; and Friedrich Nietzsche's early writings. Why did you choose these specific events for the introduction

I'd say for two reasons. One was that they are pretty well-known. In this case, I think that's probably something in their favor. Rather than picking something obscure that might be interesting for other reasons, it was helpful for the argument that I was making to be able to say: “Look, these significant figures who everybody acknowledges are taking these things up.” So that was one reason. 

The other is that they all have interesting things to say about this issue. Aristotle: It's interesting because he's right at the origin of so much Western thinking about poetry in particular. Less people would say that he's at the origin of thinking through historiographical problems. In the case of Marx, because it's surprising that he turns to poetry at all and turns to it at this moment of crisis in his work. And in the case of Nietzsche, because we're right on the cusp of modernism. Nietzsche died in 1900. I think I read somebody described him as the “sacrificial lamb of modernity.”

And so Nietzsche gets us into this modernist moment after history has become a problem for this tradition of continental philosophy and, especially, German thinkers who are less well-known. I mentioned people like Ranke, Burckhardt, Michelet and so on who are the people who are behind the codification of history as a discipline in the universities. 

Something always happens when I do these interviews, which I really enjoy, which is that stuff connects, stuff that relates between different scholars’ works. So one thing I noticed was that included, also in the introduction, Nietzsche's essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” which I read for Daniel Bowles' class on German modernism for the first time. And that was a revelation for me because he's writing in the 19th century but in this relativistic way about aesthetics, which seemed ahead of its time. But what is the relationship between different strands of modernism in different countries? Was there a reason why you chose Eliot as an exemplar of English-language modernism and Benjamin for German-language modernism?

Working on Eliot, especially in an English-language context, there's nothing especially controversial about choosing him as this avatar of modernism. He's such a central figure, not just to the way that modernism gets taken up in the English-speaking world, but also to the way literature gets taken up –– modern literature in particular.

In the case of Benjamin, I don't think it's weird really to call him a modernist, but he's not obviously the figure that one would work on. What brought me to both of them was that I saw them working within a similar set of problems. For Eliot, centrally there's this question of tradition: How is tradition preserved? How does something new come out of tradition? For him, that's ultimately going to be an aesthetic question or a question for poetry in particular. For Benjamin, it's ultimately a political question, but I thought that they were both turning to similarly literary operations in trying to think through this problem or to solve it. 

So that's why the book is kind of organized like it is. So with Eliot, I think the three master categories are lyric, satire, and myth; for Benjamin, it's order, anecdote, and allegory. So that's why I was thinking of both of them. It wasn't so much that I was thinking: Well, you can say everything about German modernism through Benjamin, or you can say everything about English-language through modernism Elliot. There's plenty of other ways to describe what modernism is, or what it does, that wouldn't necessarily square with what their projects are. But this specific problem about the relationship of modernism to history or poetry to history came through really clearly in their writings.

Yeah, I guess the person par excellence for German modernism might be someone more like Thomas Mann. 

Something like that. Yeah, Mann or Musil or there's other figures and there's people who Benjamin was especially interested in. Benjamin, in some ways, is not the most German German modernist writer I could have picked because so much of his literary interest was bound up with what was happening in France. So he was interested in Proust and especially in Baudelaire, kind of famously.

So moving more into Eliot. For me, modernism has been my favorite literary movement since I read Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway in college. Those two canonical texts that probably most English majors confront in their education. And then, starting from Anglo-Irish modernism, I eventually branched out, discovered German, French, Spanish, all those different other strands. And what I found in all of them was this profound propensity for rumination, this sense of anxiety. You talk about it as the “inability to decide” in “J. Alfred Prufrock.” So what, for you, epitomizes this modernist aesthetic and what differentiates it from different movements?

Well, I like the idea of anxiety that you mentioned. And it's one of the things that I tried to bring out in the discussion of Eliot in particular. You mentioned “Prufrock," which I think is usually recognized as an experience of anxiety, even if it's not necessarily written out of an experience of anxiety. Though I think it absolutely is written out of an experience of anxiety. And I think in the first of the Eliot chapters, I describe it as also a source of anxiety for Eliot. Pound, people whose opinions he took seriously, were telling him: “This is great, do another one.” And it wasn't that easy. And he fretted about this

I feel like his problem with his own past opened onto this question of his problem with the past more generally, with the great tradition. There's a reading of modernism that's out there, and maybe it's less prevalent than it was, but this reading of modernism as something triumphalist, that we're heroically turning our back on the past, we're breaking with it, we're going off and doing other things. And again, you can find that in some modernist writers, but I was more interested in this anxiety vis-a-vis the past, this anxiety over what's still possible, what's no longer possible because it's already all been done. Not to look ahead to my post-Impossible Modernism-work, but I think that this is also true in some ways just for contemporary subjects of aesthetic experience more generally. 

What I mean by that is this anxiety around whether something is really art or whether we're being fooled, whether we're being taken in, because we're judging now without these classical standards of beauty, harmony, etc. So the sense of: What actually is possible? What now seems redundant? Have avenues been closed off for us? I think that one of the reasons why modernism is interesting is not just that it's a break from the past, but it's this deepening struggle with history. So for me, that becomes something really central, so that to history is central, but also specifically this kind of comportment to history in terms of anxiety.

OK, that makes sense. Was it Harold Bloom who talked about the ‘anxiety of influence’? That was his thesis about it?

He means something very specific and kind of weird by that, but it is touching on something similar. His argument is that you have strong poets at certain moments in history, and what they have to do is sort of come to terms with the strong poet who preceded them. Milton is the epitome of strength. Sometimes it sounds like this declensionist narrative where we're falling away from these heights, but it's a way to think about tradition in a manner that's kind of different from the way that Eliot thinks about it, but still maybe is addressing a similar set of problems.

I want to move to Benjamin for the sake of time. So I'm considerably less familiar with Benjamin than I am with Eliot. The extent of my familiarity with it only extends to reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in a cafe in Paris, which was a very nice experience, but that's kind of the extent of it. Apart from a vague remembrance of discussions of an artwork’s aura, its uniqueness –– his famous thesis –– I don't know too much about him. So what are the essential contributions you think that he makes to continental philosophy and, more particularly, aesthetics?

It's actually a hard question because he was not a systematic thinker. There are a lot of great quotes from him that allude to being a non-systematic thinker and why it's important to be a non-systematic thinker. I had a professor when I was working on my master's who liked this one quote from Benjamin where it was something along the lines: “A stamp on an envelope tells you more than what's inside” or something like that. These surface details become the center of the philosophy. There's a line where he says: “Now is not the time to speak over much of competence… All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.” Again, it’s this sense of the particular, the contingent, an interest in indirection. All of these things are going to work against him giving us a [totalizing] system. 

But for Benjamin, one of the things that's really interesting in his work is that he's probably the strongest critic from within Marxism of historical progress, the sense that things are getting better and better. Whether he himself is a teleological thinker, people come down on different sides with that. But for Benjamin, there's no question that, for him, the idea of a march through history is a problem, and it's actually a politically deleterious stance. So a lot of his work, and work that was unfinished at the time of his death, was devoted to coming up with a model of critical historiography that didn't fall on the notion of progress. 

“But for Benjamin, there’s no question that, for him, the idea of a march through history is a problem, and it’s actually a politically deleterious stance.”

His great unfinished work is the Arcades Project, which is thi history of 19th century Paris that's constructed almost entirely of quotations from other works. In a way, it looks like a modernist text –– all of these juxtapositions of different things. So I think, as a historiographical thinker, he's really significant. As an aesthetic thinker, I do think, in some ways, probably the most interesting and interestingly worked-out aesthetics that you get in Benjamin is The Work of Art. 

He has extremely interesting things to say about Proust and Goethe, and especially about Baudelaire. But he's pretty close to the text themselves. So you don't really get the sense that you do in The Work of Art essay where he can pull back and proclaim on [everything] –– in that case, this is what photography and film does, this is how everything changes with it. He's influenced by Bertolt Brecht, who he was friends with. He was his chess buddy at one point. So it's out of that Marxist tradition. I find a lot of the categories in that essay really fascinating. In terms of the application of the ideas, I'm not always totally sure what to do with them. But I find it really interesting, and I find it interesting as an intervention in the history of thinking about art.

This question just occurred to me about this book, but I think there's a Villanova professor called Gabriel Rockhill. He just published a book about how the Frankfurt School are all sellouts or something like that. Has that been a stir within the field, or is that tangential to your field?

Yeah, I don't know how seriously people are taking it. It's one of those things where it seems like it's been discussed on Facebook and Twitter, but I don't know if academics are really looking at it that seriously. I haven't read the book, but it seems like he's doing a version of Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. It’s good. It's a book about how abstract expressionism in particular was complicit with Cold War capitalist anti-communism. It seems like he's doing the same thing except with the Frankfurt School, with Western Marxism. And, as you can imagine, this is going to piss some people off. There's been some ongoing dispute with Sebastian Budgen, who's an editor at Verso, Jacobin, and Historical Materialism. He doesn't like Rockhill’s book. I'm not convinced that it's going to be a great argument or anything. But it's one of those things guaranteed to piss people off.

I want to go to your new book. So I have a special place in my heart for Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station because I also spent time gallivanting around Madrid after college. He's the only figure you include –– at least in the email I saw –– that's from the 21st century. Is there something about him that makes his novels special? Do you think he's one of the preeminent novelists of his generation? 

I haven't thought about where I would rank him. The book of his that I discussed the most is 10:04. It's cool. The conceit of the novel is this quotation that he actually attributes to Agamben, but it's a quotation from Benjamin that Agamben takes from Benjamin, which is that: “In the world to come, the world after the coming of the Messiah, everything will be exactly as it is now, only a little bit different.” Then this becomes a way to think about everything from what New York City is like before and after this warning of an impending hurricane to a way to think about what Pluto is before and after it's been demoted from planet to plutoid. And it also ends up being kind of a way to think about art. 

Within contemporary aesthetics, one of the big philosophical problems is what Arthur Danto, though he's actually following Leibniz and all of these people, refers to as the ‘identity of indiscernibles.’ So the ‘identity of indiscernibles’ would be two objects that are formally, phenomenally identical, but one of them is art and one of them is not art. His example is Andy Warhol's Brillo Box, which looks just like the type of Brillo Box you'd get in the supermarket. Nonetheless, the ones in the supermarket aren't exhibited in the museum. 

“ So the ‘identity of indiscernibles’ would be two objects that are formally, phenomenally identical, but one of them is art and one of them is not art.”

So they’re completely the same, phenomenally identical –– only somehow different. The whole novel is a reflection on this problem. And it's one of the things that interested me in it initially is because this is a problem that's been around for a while in aesthetics. It became a problem for philosophical aesthetics, I think, with Danto in the early 1960s. But, in a way, you can already see how it was a problem with Duchamp in the 1917 ‘urinal.’ I feel like Lerner in this book manages to wring some new ideas out of it.

The book manages to be really funny and entertaining as well. So I do think Lerner is interesting. And I think that, even though he's grouped with a lot of autofiction –– which is this movement in contemporary literature where it's first-person, the narratives themselves tend to be kind of formless, following someone around for a really limited stretch of time, usually written in first person, the narrator and the author tend to fairly indistinguishable –– I think that Lerner actually does some really interesting things with that subgenre that most people who are doing autofiction aren't really doing. So I think in that way, if he's a great contemporary novelist, part of it is that he transcends the subgenre within which he's most obviously located.

I'm trying to think of autofiction that I've read… I think Cusk and Knausgaard.

Actually, I'd say that they're probably the other two that I find the most interesting. So I don't know, you know, I'd have to think about it. But I'd be tempted to say that it kind of falls off after that. Rachel Cusk is great and really unusual. Second Place is great. It's weird because it's written in her style so it's very recognizably Rachel Cusk but it's also based on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s autobiographical work about her time with D.H. Lawrence. And if you actually read her work, you can see how Cusk comes out of it. But again, it's still very much Rachel Cusk's own voice. So if you're interested in modernism, she's taking up this modernist text in it, so it's interesting.

For the sake of time, I'll just go to my last question. So I remember you distinctly recommending Nightwood by Djuna Barnes to me as an undergraduate, as an encapsulation of the modernist aesthetic. I don't know if you'd stand by that? I've read some of it. I didn't get to finish the whole thing, but I was grappling with it for a while. “Transgressive” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s transgressive in a cool way. So for the uninitiated, which modernist texts would you recommend?

So to go back to Nightwood, maybe I shouldn't have recommended it as an encapsulation of modernism. I mean, it's very much a modernist text –– you have expatriates, Eliot liked it –– but it's actually one of my favorite novels from that period. I've actually taught it a number of times in “Studies in Narrative,” which is the Boston College gateway to the major class. It always has taught better than I've expected, which is kind of a back-handed description of it. But I teach it because I like it, because I think it's interesting. But it's always something where, the night before I'm going to teach it, I think: Oh, this is a terrible idea. This is just going to crash and burn. 

And then people always do things with it. So whatever that says about the quality, it's fruitful for people, it's productive. If I were going to make a list of modernist works in order to know what modernism is, at least to say what Anglo-American modernism is. Some of them that have already come up are probably the ones that I would recommend. So “The Waste Land,” you mentioned Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. So I think either Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse in order to cover Woolf. 

“I feel a lot safer telling people to read T.S. Eliot or Jane Austen or something like that.”

Barnes: Nightwood. I love that novel, but she is kind of an outlier, too. She's a strange figure. If I were going to have one on the list that is the more personal pick rather than the more canonical pick maybe I'd go with Nightwood. Maybe, on that list, something a little earlier, like everybody knows Conrad's Heart of Darkness. So maybe I'd say Lord Jim, or something like that, to pick a slightly less familiar example, depending on who I'm talking to. For a modernism canon or for texts that I always try to teach when I teach a class in modernism, those would all be on the list. Usually when I teach modernism toward the end, I'll teach something by Beckett. Endgame is probably the one that I've taught the most. But sometimes if it's a class that's more focused on the novel, I'll teach Molloy.

It's harder to say anything in terms of contemporary literature. Because you're always kind of waiting. Maybe I should be more bold, but I feel like when I'm recommending not just to one person, but to a number of readers, a list of texts, I'm always waiting for history to sort some of the stuff out. I feel a lot safer telling people to read T.S. Eliot or Jane Austen or something like that.

Professor Robert Lehman specializes in British and American modernism, intersections between literature and philosophy, and visual culture. He is the co-chair of the Dialectical Thinking seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. Also, he is working on a current book project which examines writers as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, H.D., and Ben Lerner and their attempts to stage “scenes of recognition” within their own works.