Capa de Banda Base

Crisis is a word commonly used in discussions of Modernism and modernity: crises of meaning, of representation, of form, of tradition, of reason, of consciousness, of imagination, of legitimation, of sovereignty, of epistemology, of metaphysics, of ontology…

Crisis is central to most definitions because of the idea of Modernism as a break or rupture, and numerous political, social, and economic events of the late 19th _{and early 20}th

centuries contributed to the sense of crisis. Michael Levinson puts it colorfully in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism:

Crisis is inevitably the central term of art in discussions of this turbulent cultural moment. Overused as it has been, it still glows with justification. War! Strike! Women! The Irish! Or (within the popular press), Nihilism! Relativism! Fakery! This century had scarcely grown used to its own name, before it learned the twentieth would be the epoch of crisis, real and manufactured, physical and metaphysical, material and symbolic. The

catastrophe of the First World War, and before that, the labor struggles, the emergence of feminism, the race for empire, these inescapable forces of turbulent social modernization were not simply looming on the outside as the destabilizing context of cultural

Modernism; they penetrated the interior of artistic invention. They gave subjects to writers and painters, and they also gave forms, forms suggested by industrial machinery, or by the chuffing of cars, or even, most horribly, the bodies broken in the war. (4)

but my primary concern is with a specific type of crisis within the conception of Modernism for metamodernist writers particularly: an assemblage of crises, really, in which a (fundamentally personal) aesthetic crisis arises in response to a socio-political crisis in the writer’s world. It is this crisis that Woolf names in her diary and illustrates in her Daily Worker essay, a crisis of purpose that puts aesthetic ideals in conflict with lived realities. Julio Cortázar described such situations as creating a distinction between writers and readers “who opt for political literature and those who confine themselves to pure creation,” a distinction that becomes acute when (as in Latin America in the 1970s) “this choice collides with a reality which rejects it” (30). For artists of any sort, such moments can make art feel trivial and irrelevant, as life itself is jeopardized. For Modernist artists who abjure didacticism, such a feeling may be especially sharp, and for writers working “by means of modernism” (to return to Furlani’s definition of metamodernism), the means may feel inappropriate to the situation.

The idea that propaganda, preaching, and didacticism are anathema to art is an idea Modernists and metamodernists take as a given, and critical analysis of the idea has been hindered by what Mark Wollaeger identifies as “an intuitive sense that modernism and

propaganda must be antithetical in ways that do not require much elaboration” (xii). That sense is as old as Modernism itself — perhaps not surprisingly, since proaganda and Modernism

“emerged concurrently as interrelated languages of the new information age. Propaganda has always existed, but modern propaganda, operating through techniques of saturation and multiple media channels, developed contemporaneously with literary modernism” (xiii). In a 1933 article titled “Literature and Propaganda”, Joseph Wood Krutch identified the propagandistic impulse of younger writers as one that returned to literary conventions the Modernists had pushed away: “young men are not, to be sure, on the side of the conventions, but they have taken up the

position once maintained only by the conventional. They do, that is to say, insist that it is the business of literature to teach and they have nothing but scorn for any art which professes to be detached or neutral” (793). While Krutch says that propaganda is “not incompatible with literature; but it imposes on the work of art a heavy handicap” (797-798) and “a good three- quarters of all the attempts to define the function of literature have resulted in the conclusion that it does teach” (795), his idea of how to evaluate a work of literature is staunchly aesthetic, saying that “the thing which has made all books great” is “a delight in the thing itself, a contemplation of the struggle for its own sake, a determination to pass on to the reader an aesthetic experience” (802). A few years later, writing from a position more in sympathy with younger writers of Marxist and Communist inclinations, L. Robert Lind asserts that “there is no real need for avowed propaganda in literature. While it is rightly conceived of by those of the left as an instrument of great power in the class struggle, it is doubtful whether the openly propagandist writer achieves his purpose as fully as he might by allowing an implicit expression of the views he holds and the side he has taken to become clear in his work” because “heated argument has always been a notoriously poor way to convince; yet avowed propaganda is not far from heated argument” (202, 203). For all the apparent differences in their assumptions and tastes, Lind’s position on the evaluation of literature, ends up not far from that of Krutch: “literature as propaganda cannot be criticized merely as propaganda and thus dismissed; on the other hand, literature which has at the same time a propagandist purpose must first be discussed on the basis of its merits as literature”, though he notes that the latter will be a task “difficult for critics to whom the slightest hint of propaganda is as a red rag to a bull” (199).

Both of these critics assume literature and propaganda to be separate modes of communication, and they then prioritize literature over propaganda, with their disagreement

being only the extent to which propaganda weakens literature, not whether it does so at all. How much they assume these modes of communication are separate becomes clear if we reverse the infiltration and imagine how, to a politically committed critic like Lind who is not hostile to the idea of propaganda itself, literature might weaken propaganda. For all his political commitment, Lind shows no desire for literature to infiltrate propaganda; he does not, for instance, advocate for Soviet ideas of socialist realism, with literature’s ambiguities, complexities, and artistry being seen as anathema to the unambiguous exhortation that is propaganda. In these formulations of literature/propaganda and propaganda/literature, the two terms make each other possible. Hence, they must remain separate, and the artist, by definition, must always side with literature over propaganda while the political activist, by definition, must side with propaganda over literature. The opposition sets limitations, enforces roles, and creates impossibilities. If a third way is possible, it must exist outside this schema. While it is difficult to imagine that Woolf, Delany, or Coetzee would ever want their fiction to be called propaganda, even in praise, the ways they experiment with social commitment and didacticism reveal some impulse toward undoing the opposition of literature and propaganda — less to redeem either than to unsettle the assumptions that construct those categories in the first place.

We have plenty of evidence for what Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee think about propaganda. For Woolf, propaganda limits the writer’s freedom and simplifies the text, thus reducing its artfulness. In one of her last essays, “The Leaning Tower”, she says that the novelist who can “shift from his shoulders the burden of didacticism, of propaganda” might, through such efforts, allow readers to “look forward hopefully to a stronger, a more varied literature in the classless and towerless society of the future” (Essays 6: 275). A propagandistic, didactic literature is for Woolf one that is weak and lacking variety, one that we know (from her Daily

Worker essay) that she thinks is a limitation on the writer, a violation of the imagination’s

freedom. For Delany, propaganda is “the ultimate aesthetic no-no” (Starboard Wine 141), though the “argument for the social value of art over propaganda” is one that easily becomes “tedious” and “familiar” (Jewel-Hinged Jaw 32). “Propaganda” is not a word that occurs often in

Coetzee’s writings, fiction or nonfiction, with a clear exception: his first novel, Dusklands, where in “The Vietnam Project”, Eugene Dawn is writing a report on propaganda methods for a boss named Coetzee.

Dawn’s report in Dusklands points to another reason propaganda is a negative term for these writers: its association with the violence of war, a violence Woolf and Coetzee address (and condemn) repeatedly. As Wollaeger (6-7) notes, before World War I, “propaganda” and “information” were generally used interchangeably, but after 1917, neutral or positive references to propaganda became fewer and fewer. After the growing sophistication of both propaganda and advertising, after the rise of the Nazis (and especially Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda), and after the propaganda saturation of World War II, the word became, for the English-speaking public at least, inevitably linked to ideas of lying and manipulation. While it’s not difficult to find essays published in the 1930s arguing about the need for propaganda in literature, after World War II, most discussions of aesthetics and politics include the word “propaganda” only as an insult, which is one reason why the word is more rare in Delany and Coetzee’s writings than Woolf’s.

Woolf tended to link the words “propaganda” and “didactic” (also “preaching”), and while a good case can be made for differences between the words, I will usually keep them linked in this dissertation (partly to preserve my particular use of the word “pedagogy”, as discussed below). Didactic texts exhort the reader toward specific stances and actions beyond

reading. The writer’s great hope for the reader of a didactic novel is that they will close the book and then go out and change the world for the better.15 _{The didactic text is an instruction manual}

for activism, and the propagandistic text seeks an audience that acquiesces to it. That’s not what Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee seek to use their novels for, nor the relationship they desire with their readers. Instead, each uses the novel form for ethical and epistemological purposes that are revealed via rhetoric that is too ambiguous to be called propagandistic. The rhetoric guides and questions, but it does not insist on a single path forward, a single way of thinking. By framing rhetorical choices within the metaphor of pedagogy, we are able to see how these texts address themselves to social and historical crises (and, indeed, sometimes take clear sides on crucial issues of the day) without their falling into the monological, authoritarian, one-way

communication of propaganda.

One of the important rhetorical moves common to these texts is that of destabilization. “Rhetoric,” Wayne Booth claims, “is employed at every moment when one human being intends to produce, through the use of signs or symbols, some effect on another — by words, or facial expressions, or gestures, or any symbolic skill of any kind” (Rhetoric of Rhetoric xi). We must ask, though, what becomes of rhetoric when the effect that it seeks to produce is not only obscure but also dependent on significant choices made by the reader when reading? We will see this destabilizing effect in works by Woolf, Delany, and especially Coetzee, an effect that is

significantly different from that of didactic/propagandistic rhetoric, which, as a necessarily stable text seeks to limit a reader's choices as fully as possible and to avoid whatever ambiguities are

15 _{The most famous example from the 20}th _{century is Sinclair’s The Jungle, which led to changes in food safety}

regulation in the United States. This example shows the difficulty of controlling the response to didacticism, though: Sinclair’s goal was not primarily to change meat regulations but to expose injustice and inspire readers toward socialism.

avoidable, because the didactic text fears nothing so much as the reader missing the point or thinking wrong thoughts. The risk that Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee all allow their readers is the risk of being in conflict with the text itself.

It is my contention that Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee each created destabilizing texts first by strengthening the idea of Modernist pedagogy — the text teaching the reader how to read it — and then by pushing fictionality to (and sometimes beyond) its limits, thus creating texts that are pedagogical and often essayistic but not didactic in the sense of propagandistic. As I will show, the meaningful difference between the pedagogical and the didactic is a difference of power and authority, a difference that will be mapped onto a distinction between authentic and ersatz ethics.