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Modernism’s Other Work
This page intentionally left blank
Modernism’s Other Work
The Art Object’s Political Life

xwx
Lisa Siraganian

3
 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
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electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Siraganian, Lisa.
Modernism’s other work : the art object’s political life / Lisa Siraganian.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-979655-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—
History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 3. Art in literature.
4. Art objects in literature. 5. Art and literature—United States—History—20th century.
6. Art—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
PS228.M63S57 2011
700′.4112—dc22 2011012545

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations xi

Introduction: Meaning’s Work 3

1. Theorizing Art and Punctuation: Gertrude Stein’s
Breathless Poetry 24
2. Satirizing Frameless Art: Wyndham Lewis’s Defense
of Representation 51
3. Breaking Glass to Save the Frame: William Carlos
Williams and Company 79
4. Challenging Kitsch Equality: William Gaddis’s and
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Neo” Rear-Guard Art 110
5. Administering Poetic Breath for the People: Charles
Olson and Amiri Baraka 139
6. Coda: Universal Breath 168

Notes 185
Bibliography 229
Index 247
This page intentionally left blank
 AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

My fascination with modernism and its complicated commitments began as

an undergraduate at Williams College. There I began to rack up debts to
teachers that I cannot hope to repay fully. I especially want to thank Christo-
pher Pye, Shawn Rosenheim, Stephen Tifft, and the late Larry Graver, who
encouraged me as a first-year student in “Modern Drama” and let me go on
and on about Samuel Beckett as a senior. At Oxford University, Jeri Johnson
and Marilyn Butler made Exeter the place at Oxford to study for a second B.A.
in English, and at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Amanda Anderson,
Sharon Cameron, Jerome Christensen, Brigid Doherty, Frances Ferguson,
Neil Hertz, Steven Knapp, and Ruth Leys brilliantly showed me how it was
done. Michael Fried has been a constant inspiration; his influence will be ob-
vious. My biggest debt is to Walter Benn Michaels who demanded that I
become a better thinker and writer than I thought I could be—a more astute,
committed reader one could never have.
If this book was a hazy glimmer at Williams and Oxford, it really began to
grow from a third-year paper presented in the prerenovated Gilman Hall 148
at JHU. Rachel Ablow, Dirk Bonker, Abigail Cheever, Michael Clune, Theo
Davis, Anne Frey, Daniel Gil, Susie Herrmann, Amanda Hockensmith, Julia
Kent, Jane Lesnick, Chris Lukasik, Larissa MacFarquhar, Tim Mackin, Hina
Nazar, Deak Nabers, Davide Panagia, Shilpa Prasad, Julie Reiser, John D.
Rockefeller V, James Schafer, and Maura Tumulty witnessed this project’s
birth cries and helped it—and me—along in ways that I cannot begin to repay.
In particular, I feel incredibly honored for the friendship, intelligence, humor,
and generosity of Mary Esteve, Jason Gladstone, Vicki Hsueh, and Ruth Mack.
Dartmouth College, and the English Department and Humanities Center
in particular, proved to be a most felicitous spot to spend a couple of invigo-
rating postdoctoral years, and I am grateful to both the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and Dartmouth College for generously supporting my work. In
particular, I appreciate the camaraderie and keen scholarship of Colleen
Boggs, Laura Braunstein, Jonathan Crewe, George Edmondson, Ora Gelley,
Alexandra Halasz, Andrew King, Thomas Luxon, Klaus Mladek, Kristin
O’Rourke, Donald Pease, Louis Renza, Emanuel Rota, Ivy Schweitzer, Eleonora
Stoppino, Peter Travis, and Melissa Zeiger.

vii
 viii Acknowledgments

I could not have been luckier than to have landed among such wonderful,
encouraging colleagues at Southern Methodist University (SMU), especially in
the English Department and Dedman College of Arts and Sciences. I am
grateful to Angela Ards, Jessica Boon, Suzanne Bost, Rick Bozorth, Darryl
Dickson-Carr, Irina Dumitrescu, Ezra Greenspan, Michael Householder, Bruce
Levy, Alexis McCrossen, Dan Moss, Beth Newman, Tim Rosendale, Libby Russ,
Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue, Rajani Sudan, and Jim Zeigler, for their friendship
and support. Dennis Foster, Nina Schwartz, Willard Spiegelman, and Steve
Weisenburger willingly read and astutely commented on far more than their
fair share of this book; their generosity and keen intelligence never cease to be
inspiring. Shari Goldberg, Charles Hatfield, and the entire, motivating DFW
Writing Group crew helped me whip chapters into shape, while the history
guys’ epic tennis matches kept me whipping backhands. My students—at
JHU, Dartmouth, and SMU—urged me to clarify my ideas and provided bril-
liant alternative readings of their own that I wished were mine.
Over the past few years, I have presented sections of this book to various
audiences, and I am exceedingly grateful for the comments, suggestions, and
criticism I received from the following scholars: Charles Altieri, Jennifer Ash-
ton, Sara Blair, Nicholas Brown, Jessica Burstein, Jonathan Freedman, Eric
Hayot, Cathy Jurca, James Longenbach, Mark Maslan, John Michael, Robert
von Hallberg, Erin Smith, Joe Tabbi, and Sharon Willis. The Post45 collective
has been a stimulating source of new ideas; I especially thank J. D. Connor,
Florence Dore, Amy Hungerford, Franny Nudelman, and Michael Szalay.
Anthony Bale, Tracy Dyke Redmond, Sylvia Gross, Leta Ming, Anita Padma-
nabhan, Jane Strachan, Khachig Tölölyan, Ananya Vajpeyi, and Tara Watson
have been far-flung friends and colleagues in body but close-knit in spirit.
For their willingness to give of their personal and professional help, I thank
Michael Basinski and James Maynard at Special Collections, State University
of New York at Buffalo, Tim Dean and the Humanities Center also at the State
University of New York for a generous Charles D. Abbott grant to research the
Wyndham Lewis archives, Paul Edwards and Helen D’Monte at the Wyndham
Lewis Trust, and Melissa Watterworth at The Archives & Special Collections at
the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. I am
grateful for the research support provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Founda-
tion, Dartmouth College, and the JHU Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office and
English Department. In addition, the SMU Undergraduate Research Council,
the SMU English Department, and the Dedman College Dean’s Office gra-
ciously supported my research and writing during a sabbatical, and the Gen-
eral Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church
and the SMU Undergraduate Research Council provided additional funding to
support the inclusion of images in this book.
Special thanks go to the expert editorial staff at Oxford University Press,
especially Brendan O’Neill, for smoothly and swiftly guiding me through the
 Acknowledgments ix

publishing process and masterfully creating a beautifully illustrated book,

and Laura Poole, for her comprehensive work on the manuscript. Thanks to
Katharine Boswell for lending her keen eyes at a crucial moment. I am also
grateful to the three anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful comments and
suggestions undoubtedly made this book better, even when I failed to follow
their advice.
With great pleasure I dedicate this book to my large and extended family—
especially my parents, Reuben Siraganian and Patricia Siraganian, and my sis-
ter, Jen Siraganian, each of whom has supported me and my work in countless
ways. My daughter Isabel’s zest and creativity are an inspiration and delight.
While I was writing these acknowledgments she asked me if paintings die,
reminding me not only of Wyndham Lewis’s discussion of similar questions in
Tarr but that modernist aesthetic queries can start young and, hopefully, stick
around a while. Brian Hewitt has lived with this book nearly as long as I have,
with far more grace, humor, and astuteness. I could have never done it with-
out his love, patience, and faith in me. I only hope to repay the favor one day.
For permission to quote unpublished manuscripts from Wyndham Lewis:
© by permission, The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity).
Previously unpublished works by Charles Olson are copyright © University of
Connecticut Libraries. Used with permission. Sections of earlier versions of
chapter 1 (on Stein) and chapter 2 (on Wyndham Lewis) were published in
“Out of Air: Theorizing the Art Object in Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis,”
Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 4 (2003), 657–76. Material in chapter 3
appeared in “Modern Glass: How Williams Reframed Duchamp’s Window,”
William Carlos Williams Review 28, no. 1–2 (2008), 117–39, and material in
chapter 4 also appeared in “‘A Disciplined Nostalgia’: William Gaddis and the
Modern Art Object,” in William Gaddis, “The Last of Something,” ed. Crystal
Alberts, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2010), 101–14.
This page intentionally left blank
 A B B R E VI AT ION S

AO Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1998).
BP Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones], Blues People: Negro Music in White
America (New York: William Morrow, 1963).
Ch Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London: Methuen, 1956).
CP Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983).
CP1 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos
Williams, Volume 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christo-
pher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986).
CP2 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos
Williams, Volume 2, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New
York: New Directions, 1988).
GS1 Gertrude Stein, Writings 1903–1932, Volume 1, ed. Catherine R.
Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America,
1998).
GS2 Gertrude Stein, Writings 1932–1946, Volume 2, ed. Catherine R.
Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America,
1998).
I William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Shott (New
York: New Directions, 1970).
M Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1983).
OPo Charles Olson, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, ed. George F.
Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
OPr Charles Olson, Collected Prose/Charles Olson, ed. Donald Allen and
Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997).
R William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955; New York: Penguin, 1985).
RL Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock
(Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991).
TWM Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa
Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993).

xi
This page intentionally left blank
Modernism’s Other Work
This page intentionally left blank
 w
Introduction

Meaning’s Work

T his book challenges deeply held critical beliefs about the meaning—in
particular the political meaning—of modernism’s commitment to the
work of art as an object detached from the world. Ranging over works of po-
etry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and film, I argue that modernism’s core
aesthetic problem—the artwork’s status as an object and a subject’s relation
to it—poses fundamental questions of agency, freedom, and politics. I hold
that these political questions have always been modernism’s critical work,
even when—indeed, especially when—writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wynd-
ham Lewis, and William Gaddis boldly assert the art object’s immunity from
the world’s interpretations. In the process, the book sets out to upend our
understanding of relationships between aesthetic autonomy and politics, rela-
tionships that long have been misunderstood in critical studies of modernism.
Theodor Adorno’s theorizing notwithstanding, modernist aesthetic indepen-
dence is too often derided for its political obfuscation and elitism. Modern-
ism’s Other Work disputes this narrative, expanding the political framework
for modernist studies in an altogether different direction than Frankfurt
School theorists envisioned. I examine what a range of writers truly meant by
autonomy and how its operation was conceived simultaneously and deliber-
ately as an aesthetic and political act. The paradox of their accounts of au-
tonomy is at the heart of this work.
We can begin to see this conception in Wallace Stevens’s response to ques-
tions asked in 1934 by the editors of the left-wing journal New Verse: “Do you
intend your poetry to be useful to yourself or others?” He initially affirms the
most conventional account of aesthetic autonomy: “Not consciously. Perhaps
I don’t like the word useful.”1 Yet in responding to the very next question, “Do
you think there can now be a use for narrative poetry?” he reverses himself,
admitting poetic use with the caveat that the heroic poet leads the way: “There

3
 4 Modernism’s Other Work

can now be a use for poetry of any sort. It depends on the poet.”2 These con-
tradictory statements suggest one reason that Stevens serves as a cipher for
both formalists (Helen Vendler) and Marxist critics (Alan Filreis). Stevens’s
writing alternately purports a notion of the autonomous art object and then
questions the very premise of that autonomy by declaring poetry’s use in the
world. The ambivalence long observed in Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar”
(1916) might be framed similarly.3 On the one hand, the speaker depicts his
placement of a manmade artifact utterly removed from the laws of nature (“It
did not give of bird or bush”), “round” and self-contained like the quintessen-
tial organically unified art object. On the other hand, the jar is open enough to
the atmosphere of that world (“of a port in air”) such that its mere presence
transforms nature into slovenliness. “Gray and bare” instead of lushly abun-
dant, the jar is seemingly immune from nature’s order while it is accessible
enough to the “air” to order nature in a different, cultural sense.
Such paradoxes about art’s independence and agency do not signal radical
uncertainty but instead a refashioning—by Stevens and others—of what
autonomy and poetic use can and should mean. Autonomy from the world was
never, for the modernists, a failure of relation to it. Throughout this book, we
shall see how an art object’s autonomy means not liberation from the whole
world but freedom from others ascribing meanings to art objects. I explore
how modernists characterize and put into practice their aesthetic commit-
ments in a variety of linguistic forms enabling and supporting a range of
worldly commitments. In particular, the reader’s or viewer’s relation to the art
object became a way to envision the political subject’s ideal relation to a
changing, rejuvenated, but essentially liberal state at a time when the dis-
course of threatened autonomy pervaded both high and mass culture.4 The
freedom of the art object not from the world generally but from the reader’s
meaning specifically presents a way to imagine an individual’s complicated lib-
erty within yet enduring connection to the state. Autonomy and threats to
autonomy, particularity and universality, detachment and incorporation are
all treated in light of liberalism’s perceived promises or failures.
By connecting literary undertakings to conversations about aesthetics, vi-
sual arts, and politics, a new way of thinking about modernism’s commitment
to its spectators and readers, political issues, and technological innovations
becomes available. In reexamining poetry’s particular attention to collage,
breath, and air as an ontological problem about beholding, the book theoreti-
cally and polemically rethinks the major twentieth-century debate on aes-
thetic autonomy—the notion that art is fundamentally removed from and
even at odds with the world. It does so by selecting from major texts of the
long modernist era (1914–75), including literature, archival documents, and
visual materials, thus providing a new literary critical and historical account
of the text’s imagined frame.5 In the process, we see changes to our conven-
tional accounts of twentieth-century literature’s periodization. Not pre-1945
 INTRODUCTION 5

versus post-1945, not modernism versus postmodernism. Instead, post-

modern debates pitting textual experience against textual representation
emerge from unexpected modernist antecedents. Simultaneously, writing ha-
bitually labeled postmodern avant la lettre (that of Stein, Lewis, and later,
Elizabeth Bishop and Gaddis) will be seen to work as a different version of
high or aesthetic modernism, one at odds with stereotypical accounts of the
modern art object’s independence.
I start with poetry’s relation to the art object—and collage in particular—
because American poets articulate their relation to the art object through so-
phisticated responses to modern painting. As Stevens claims, “Poets must
often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own prob-
lems.”6 When twentieth-century writers discuss the “problems” of the art
object, they often disregard distinctions between genres or media, between
readers and spectators and, frequently, between different kinds of readers or
different forms of spectatorship. In making this point, I want to be clear that
I am not seeking to duplicate their method by ignoring the fundamental inter-
pretive differences between different media and genres, between the work a
reader does (often in a quiet, private, or domestic space) and the work a film
viewer or painting spectator does (often in a louder, public, institutional, or
commercial space).7 Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux discusses how ekphrastic
poetry negotiates between these various communities by focusing on the dif-
ferent relations between poet, spectator, and reader in poems that address a
work of art, thus establishing the importance of the audience/spectator’s role
to modernism and postmodernism.8 My study, in contrast, does not focus pri-
marily on ekphrastic texts precisely because many writers abstracted aesthetic
problems so they could more carefully translate them into the specific require-
ments of their medium. The writers I discuss blur and borrow between genres
and media to forge a clear ideological goal: to illuminate an abstract debate
about the relevance of the material world—in all its historical complexity and
specificity—to art objects. Through a series of forays into the problem of mod-
ernism’s commitment to the detached art object, I map an evolving and
expanding debate about the spectator’s or reader’s role that eventually extends
beyond any single genre, medium, or nation, becoming more fully globalized
by the twentieth century’s close.
To produce such a map, the book tracks two distinct understandings of the
spectator’s relation to the art object to reveal debates about the politics of
detachment or incorporation. The first posits the irrelevance of the spectator
to the meaning of the artwork, and the second posits the necessary involve-
ment of the spectator in the production of the art object’s meaning. Thus, the
book begins by exploring the idea that a work’s meaning can be separated from
the reader’s job in the productions of Stein and Lewis. As Stein puts it, “An
Audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable
always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business,
 6 Modernism’s Other Work

they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own busi-
ness.”9 I discuss various articulations of this idea—that is, the notion of
“meaning’s autonomy,” a phrase I use to distinguish my account from “aes-
thetic autonomy,” the conventional depiction of art’s removal from society.
Because the focus on meaning’s ontological status as opposed to its semiotic
operations can seem counterintuitive, I explain this argument in detail, ex-
ploring the ramifications of the audience’s imagined irrelevance. Gradually,
the second account of spectatorship overtakes the first, as we explore the dia-
metrically opposed, postmodern notion of “meaning’s incorporation”—the
idea that an art object’s meaning inextricably relates to the reader’s breath and
thus her body—in the work of an artist such as VALIE EXPORT, and poets
ranging from Charles Olson to contemporary writers Amiri Baraka, Juliana
Spahr, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In discussions of the work of Mina Loy, Mar-
cel Duchamp, William Carlos Williams, Vincente Minnelli, Gaddis, and Bishop,
I illustrate the range of attempts to negotiate between the major opposing
positions of spectatorship: the art object’s immunity from the audience’s in-
terpretations, on the one hand, and the audience’s relevance to the art object,
on the other.
Modernism’s Other Work, then, has three overlapping goals. First, by recov-
ering an aesthetic dispute about the role of spectators or readers to a work’s
meaning, one long obscured by New Critical and poststructuralist ortho-
doxies, the book contends that the supposed antagonism between aesthetic
autonomy and politics misrepresents the modernist ontology of the art object,
albeit in a manner diverging from Adorno’s account. In 1984, Peter Bürger
reiterated the received wisdom when he defined aesthetic autonomy as “art’s
apartness from society,” following the model of late-nineteenth-century Aes-
theticism.10 But six decades earlier, modernists like Stein and Lewis defined
the autonomy of art as the independence of art’s meaning from a spectator’s
interpretations. This distinction creates the possibility for a discussion of pol-
itics out of a theory of beholding or reading, as autonomous art objects are
imagined not as distinct from the world generally but distinct from spectators
or readers particularly. All of the writers I consider in the book—both those
arguing that meaning must be incorporated into art through breath and
bodies and those rejecting this idea—conceive of art objects in simultaneously
formal and political terms and insist on the trope of breath and bodies to do
so. Second, the book explores how modernism anticipates in sophisticated
and unexpected ways a post-1945 debate about art objects’ relation to the
world. Although my aims are not primarily theoretical, understanding the
earlier dispute complicates later discussions about site-specific art and
post–September 11, 2001, political poetry, as well as the post–World War II
literary theories (reader response, poststructuralism, cultural studies) that aim
to certify the role readers play in a text’s meaning. Finally, Modernism’s Other
Work fundamentally realigns our conceptual map of modernism, shifting away
 INTRODUCTION 7

from modernism as a self-referential critique of realism—where art “becomes

its own subject,” as Arthur Danto puts it—to modernism as a debate about the
relevance of spectators or readers to a text’s meaning.11 Instead of under-
standing modernism as a problematic relation between an object and its rep-
resentation, modernism stands revealed as a conflicted, repeatedly
renegotiated relation between the art object and its beholder that continues
into the twenty-first century.

BREATHING COLLAGE

“[Meaning] all depends on inter-play” writes Stevens in a draft stanza of The

Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), as he attempts to foresee—if not control—
the “final atmosphere” for his poetry by rethinking his role as a poet in the
world and reframing the ontology of poetry in relation to economic and polit-
ical factors.12 He suggests that the art object’s independence is a complicated,
contingent quality with limitations and worldly repercussions. By describing
literary interpretation as “the final atmosphere,” Stevens invokes a surpris-
ingly common trope within modernism—invisible air—to discuss questions
of beholding and meaning. We see this trope in Marcel Duchamp’s allegedly final
readymade, 50cc of Parisian Air (1919), which also takes air as its subject matter,
challenging our sense of how little an art object can be or mean (figure I.1).
Duchamp’s work consists of a glass ampule that he instructs a Parisian chemist
to hermetically seal, in the process trapping 50cc of air—a tiny “breath” of
Paris under glass. Alluding to Paris’s formative role in the development of Im-
pressionist, en plein air painting, he implies that Parisian air is qualitatively
distinct and more valuable than air elsewhere. By measuring out a small, sci-
entific quantity of a substance seemingly and hopefully in endless supply, he
transforms an overlooked resource into a rare and precious element, particu-
larly evocative for an artist displaced from his homeland by war and political
instability.13 But we can expand on his point. Privileging a volume of air, or
any particular substance captured and named by the artist—a piece of news-
paper or a scrap of wallpaper in a collage, a breeze wafting through an empty
jar in Tennessee—transforms the way we think of that “object,” whether as a
work of art or as a thing in our physical world.
The lively modernist debate over the spectator’s irrelevance to the art object’s
meaning often emerges here, around this unlikely topic of air, and, more specifi-
cally for poets, inhaled air. We can glimpse the outlines of the debate by com-
paring Stein’s and Olson’s respective attitudes toward the spectator’s or reader’s
breath. In works as early as Tender Buttons (1914) and as late as Lectures in Amer-
ica (1935), Stein notoriously refuses the use of punctuation, insisting that
commas are unnecessary because they let “you stop and take a breath but if you
want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath”
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