Productive Tension
Laura Frost, The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents
Columbia University Press, 304pp, £24.00, ISBN 9780231152723
reviewed by Ruth Jackson
In his Roots of Romanticism (1999), Isaiah Berlin set out the central tenets of the Enlightenment project in 18th-century Europe:
That all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question;… that all these answers are knowable, that they can be discovered by means which can be learnt and taught to other persons;… [and] that all the answers must be compatible with one another.
In our 21st-century European context, we know better than to be so enthusiastic about the acuity of the human intellect – not least after the failure of economist forecasters to predict successive recessions. Contemporary philosophers, physicists and artists regard such confident assertions about the scope of rational enquiry as suspicious at best and unforgivably naïve at worst. And yet, if the limits of human knowledge – as well as the indeterminacy of the world around us – are notions that we now profess to respect, they are also notions that we have been grappling with for a long time.
The modernist movement is typically understood as a philosophical and aesthetic dispute with this same Enlightenment perspective. In The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, Laura Frost considers modernist literature in particular, offering a lively portrayal of interwar writers as frustrated with the view that humans have a full and unhindered access to the world. She describes modernism’s ‘signature formal rhetorics’ – the proclivity of authors like James Joyce, or Gertrude Stein to ‘vaunt the value of difficulty’ by composing works which are linguistically obstructive to the reader. In Frost’s view, the adoption of such testing styles reflects a desire to stress, vex, and even alienate the audience. And this was an audience accustomed to easily-consumable entertainment – not least the dance-halls, cinemas and cafés of early 20th-century design. Against this backdrop of mass and sensuous culture, Frost suggests that encountering Gertrude Stein’s difficult work was an experience akin to being tickled. Since the reader is teased and ‘tortured’ by Stein’s prose, without the promise of a final release, Frost concludes that Stein was at best ambivalent to the desires of her audience. She did not write in order to teach her readers anything, or to reach out to them with a particular message. Instead, her work is insular. Turned in on itself, it frustrates that relationship between writer and reader which was hitherto assumed to be conventional and uncluttered.
The tendency of modernists to fetishise aesthetic difficulty in their work signals a wider problem: the ‘great divide’ between the social and intellectual classes in interwar Britain. Modernists disparaged the untrained palettes of the masses (the rabble looking for easy, heady, and immediate thrills), requiring instead a cultured élite with the tenacity and training to embark successfully on modernist literature’s difficult ‘pathways to readerly bliss’.
Aldous Huxley’s response to modern film provides a clear example of disdain towards mass culture. The dystopic global civilisation Huxley presents in Brave New World (1932) offers its citizens a series of accessible entertainments designed to divert and placate them. Particularly memorable is the novel’s depiction of the ‘feelies’. In this ramped up version of a cinematic experience, a delighted public is treated to a story which not only involves all of the senses in its telling, but also dulls the viewer’s critical faculties. In Frost’s reading, the uncomplicated passivity encouraged by this purely somatic form of amusement represents Huxley’s own view of the effects of cinema upon an ever-more-easily-placated, 20th-century public.
Frost works the divide between high and low culture into several of her chapters, assessing how the modernists sought to re-narrate and problematise it. However, as the book’s title suggests, her real focus is elsewhere: on pleasure, which has the potential to ‘cast the history of modernism in a way that has not been seen before’. Unsurprisingly, Frost begins her definition of pleasure by noting the word’s diffuseness and the way it has changed meaning across time, place and cultures. Nevertheless, she suggests that pleasure is ‘at the centre of the 20th century’, and that we can see the goal of the modernist project as redefining this concept, or trying to manage it.
The book’s six chapters – comprising six close readings of an author or pair of authors – do not attempt to couch Joyce, Stein et al in terms of a broader intellectual climate, or to describe what we might call their philosophical heritage. Frost splashes about the text references to Freudian ‘Unlust’, for example, rather than incorporating them substantively into her argument. She mentions Lacan’s work on desire only twice, in passing, and excepting a few allusions to Irish Catholicism in Joyce’s work, western religion – along with religious teaching on desire – is also absent. Though the history of ideas is not Frost’s main concern, in her final two chapters she does take an insightful look at some of the socioeconomic factors relating to the amplification of the divide between high and low culture. This is, I think, particularly significant, especially in light of her claims for modernism’s ability to speak to our own age.
Frost’s fifth chapter attends to authors Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, both of whom were interested in depicting the fortunes of lower-middle and working class characters. This word ‘fortune’, with its cosmic and financial connotations, functions ironically to indicate the helplessness and poverty experienced by the protagonists in question. These characters are displaced and disenfranchised in wider society on account of their gender, ethnicity, economic status or class. They are also continually alienated and repulsed by the so-called pleasures which they seem bound to pursue as appropriate to their station, be these drugs, sex, or alcohol.
The chapter on Anita Loos – author of the novel and the screenplay for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the hired wit behind the subtitles which graced a number of silent films in the 1910s – is a brilliantly composed study of early 20th-century cinema as a ‘pleasure industry’, seen through the eyes of a woman who, while ostensibly shaping this industry, was in fact more shackled and shaped by it herself. Particularly interesting here is a discussion of ‘one of modernity’s favourite female icons’: the secretary, or typewriter girl. Loos cast herself, as well as her most famous character Lorelei Lee, in this mould, and in doing so was able to interrogate the miserable juxtaposition of alleged autonomy and passive automation inherent in such a role. After all, the typist is given a voice of sorts – a connection, that is, with the industry of writing. Yet as Lorelei’s comedic spelling errors and pedestrian observations show, the new media was unable to mediate the rift between high and low culture. With her naiveté and precocious glamour, Loos’s typist perpetuates rather than heals it.
The two chapters on Rhys, Hamilton and Loos give a picture of a class of individuals confined to, yet at the same time alienated from, a set of expectations, desires and behaviours. Frost doesn’t explicitly introduce a Marxian critique – although she does describe Loos’s typewriter girls according to Marx’s paradigm of ‘dead labour’. Nevertheless, there’s clearly a Marxian influence in Frost’s reading of how the characters depicted by Hamilton and Rhys struggle not only to reach fulfillment, but also to carve out an individualised and properly human existence. Their limited and debased ‘humanity’ is a result of outside factors.
With this in mind, it is surprising that Frost does not make much of this same point as it features in Aldous Huxley’s work. There are no mothers or fathers in Brave New World: human existence is borne out of a bio-chemical factory, and its parameters are defined by a group of World Controllers. These benevolent leaders aim not only to regulate human education for the purposes of stability and happiness, but also to manage human desire and behaviour. In Huxley, then – as with Loos, Hamilton and Rhys – there is a sense of a humanity tightly defined, stratified and ordered, yet also fundamentally alienated from itself. Humanity, in this sense, is a concept or a collective, rather than something that develops in particular individuals.
Frost claims that these modernist writers’ tortured relationship with pleasure dictates the way they negotiate the gap between high and low culture, and the friction between the content of their work and its difficult form. From here, she reaches a simple conclusion: the modernists ‘disavow, but nevertheless engage with the pleasures they otherwise reject’. In other words, she argues, ‘modernism, even at its most aesthetically radical, participated in the kinds of pleasure it derided’.
The Problem with Pleasure draws attention to modernism’s restlessness, correctly and with great flair. Frost narrates in a new and exciting way the dissatisfaction of modernist writers, faced with the divisions and dislocations of the interwar period. However, by focusing on the theme of pleasure, Frost has denied her readers a deeper look at this dissatisfaction. It is frustrating that her investigation does not extend to the more important ideological and philosophical questions about human nature present in modernist texts. How are we to live ‘meaningfully’? How are we to live fruitfully? And how – since the Enlightenment paradigm of a rational man against a harmonious world has broken down – must we now imagine ourselves as encountering and knowing the world around us?
Another frustration is that Frost too often frames her argument in terms of unhelpful dichotomies: ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, form and content, the cerebral self and the sensuous self. Such dichotomies do not sit well with her declared wish to provide a more nuanced look at the modernist project. The book is replete with friction, resistance, and the feeling of being tossed back and forth within sets of opposed categories. Her conclusion is that the modernist project was and can be a source of ‘productive tension’. This is a compelling suggestion, but I can’t help but feel that it denies modernism some of its ambition. A greater vision of the modernist project – one held by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty – has modern philosophy and art as organs for provoking people into a new way of perceiving and inhabiting the world. And in this way, we might regard a knotty modernist text as open testament to life’s complexities, rather than categorising it as an irritant work of the ticklish type.
That all genuine questions can be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question;… that all these answers are knowable, that they can be discovered by means which can be learnt and taught to other persons;… [and] that all the answers must be compatible with one another.
In our 21st-century European context, we know better than to be so enthusiastic about the acuity of the human intellect – not least after the failure of economist forecasters to predict successive recessions. Contemporary philosophers, physicists and artists regard such confident assertions about the scope of rational enquiry as suspicious at best and unforgivably naïve at worst. And yet, if the limits of human knowledge – as well as the indeterminacy of the world around us – are notions that we now profess to respect, they are also notions that we have been grappling with for a long time.
The modernist movement is typically understood as a philosophical and aesthetic dispute with this same Enlightenment perspective. In The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, Laura Frost considers modernist literature in particular, offering a lively portrayal of interwar writers as frustrated with the view that humans have a full and unhindered access to the world. She describes modernism’s ‘signature formal rhetorics’ – the proclivity of authors like James Joyce, or Gertrude Stein to ‘vaunt the value of difficulty’ by composing works which are linguistically obstructive to the reader. In Frost’s view, the adoption of such testing styles reflects a desire to stress, vex, and even alienate the audience. And this was an audience accustomed to easily-consumable entertainment – not least the dance-halls, cinemas and cafés of early 20th-century design. Against this backdrop of mass and sensuous culture, Frost suggests that encountering Gertrude Stein’s difficult work was an experience akin to being tickled. Since the reader is teased and ‘tortured’ by Stein’s prose, without the promise of a final release, Frost concludes that Stein was at best ambivalent to the desires of her audience. She did not write in order to teach her readers anything, or to reach out to them with a particular message. Instead, her work is insular. Turned in on itself, it frustrates that relationship between writer and reader which was hitherto assumed to be conventional and uncluttered.
The tendency of modernists to fetishise aesthetic difficulty in their work signals a wider problem: the ‘great divide’ between the social and intellectual classes in interwar Britain. Modernists disparaged the untrained palettes of the masses (the rabble looking for easy, heady, and immediate thrills), requiring instead a cultured élite with the tenacity and training to embark successfully on modernist literature’s difficult ‘pathways to readerly bliss’.
Aldous Huxley’s response to modern film provides a clear example of disdain towards mass culture. The dystopic global civilisation Huxley presents in Brave New World (1932) offers its citizens a series of accessible entertainments designed to divert and placate them. Particularly memorable is the novel’s depiction of the ‘feelies’. In this ramped up version of a cinematic experience, a delighted public is treated to a story which not only involves all of the senses in its telling, but also dulls the viewer’s critical faculties. In Frost’s reading, the uncomplicated passivity encouraged by this purely somatic form of amusement represents Huxley’s own view of the effects of cinema upon an ever-more-easily-placated, 20th-century public.
Frost works the divide between high and low culture into several of her chapters, assessing how the modernists sought to re-narrate and problematise it. However, as the book’s title suggests, her real focus is elsewhere: on pleasure, which has the potential to ‘cast the history of modernism in a way that has not been seen before’. Unsurprisingly, Frost begins her definition of pleasure by noting the word’s diffuseness and the way it has changed meaning across time, place and cultures. Nevertheless, she suggests that pleasure is ‘at the centre of the 20th century’, and that we can see the goal of the modernist project as redefining this concept, or trying to manage it.
The book’s six chapters – comprising six close readings of an author or pair of authors – do not attempt to couch Joyce, Stein et al in terms of a broader intellectual climate, or to describe what we might call their philosophical heritage. Frost splashes about the text references to Freudian ‘Unlust’, for example, rather than incorporating them substantively into her argument. She mentions Lacan’s work on desire only twice, in passing, and excepting a few allusions to Irish Catholicism in Joyce’s work, western religion – along with religious teaching on desire – is also absent. Though the history of ideas is not Frost’s main concern, in her final two chapters she does take an insightful look at some of the socioeconomic factors relating to the amplification of the divide between high and low culture. This is, I think, particularly significant, especially in light of her claims for modernism’s ability to speak to our own age.
Frost’s fifth chapter attends to authors Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys, both of whom were interested in depicting the fortunes of lower-middle and working class characters. This word ‘fortune’, with its cosmic and financial connotations, functions ironically to indicate the helplessness and poverty experienced by the protagonists in question. These characters are displaced and disenfranchised in wider society on account of their gender, ethnicity, economic status or class. They are also continually alienated and repulsed by the so-called pleasures which they seem bound to pursue as appropriate to their station, be these drugs, sex, or alcohol.
The chapter on Anita Loos – author of the novel and the screenplay for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the hired wit behind the subtitles which graced a number of silent films in the 1910s – is a brilliantly composed study of early 20th-century cinema as a ‘pleasure industry’, seen through the eyes of a woman who, while ostensibly shaping this industry, was in fact more shackled and shaped by it herself. Particularly interesting here is a discussion of ‘one of modernity’s favourite female icons’: the secretary, or typewriter girl. Loos cast herself, as well as her most famous character Lorelei Lee, in this mould, and in doing so was able to interrogate the miserable juxtaposition of alleged autonomy and passive automation inherent in such a role. After all, the typist is given a voice of sorts – a connection, that is, with the industry of writing. Yet as Lorelei’s comedic spelling errors and pedestrian observations show, the new media was unable to mediate the rift between high and low culture. With her naiveté and precocious glamour, Loos’s typist perpetuates rather than heals it.
The two chapters on Rhys, Hamilton and Loos give a picture of a class of individuals confined to, yet at the same time alienated from, a set of expectations, desires and behaviours. Frost doesn’t explicitly introduce a Marxian critique – although she does describe Loos’s typewriter girls according to Marx’s paradigm of ‘dead labour’. Nevertheless, there’s clearly a Marxian influence in Frost’s reading of how the characters depicted by Hamilton and Rhys struggle not only to reach fulfillment, but also to carve out an individualised and properly human existence. Their limited and debased ‘humanity’ is a result of outside factors.
With this in mind, it is surprising that Frost does not make much of this same point as it features in Aldous Huxley’s work. There are no mothers or fathers in Brave New World: human existence is borne out of a bio-chemical factory, and its parameters are defined by a group of World Controllers. These benevolent leaders aim not only to regulate human education for the purposes of stability and happiness, but also to manage human desire and behaviour. In Huxley, then – as with Loos, Hamilton and Rhys – there is a sense of a humanity tightly defined, stratified and ordered, yet also fundamentally alienated from itself. Humanity, in this sense, is a concept or a collective, rather than something that develops in particular individuals.
Frost claims that these modernist writers’ tortured relationship with pleasure dictates the way they negotiate the gap between high and low culture, and the friction between the content of their work and its difficult form. From here, she reaches a simple conclusion: the modernists ‘disavow, but nevertheless engage with the pleasures they otherwise reject’. In other words, she argues, ‘modernism, even at its most aesthetically radical, participated in the kinds of pleasure it derided’.
The Problem with Pleasure draws attention to modernism’s restlessness, correctly and with great flair. Frost narrates in a new and exciting way the dissatisfaction of modernist writers, faced with the divisions and dislocations of the interwar period. However, by focusing on the theme of pleasure, Frost has denied her readers a deeper look at this dissatisfaction. It is frustrating that her investigation does not extend to the more important ideological and philosophical questions about human nature present in modernist texts. How are we to live ‘meaningfully’? How are we to live fruitfully? And how – since the Enlightenment paradigm of a rational man against a harmonious world has broken down – must we now imagine ourselves as encountering and knowing the world around us?
Another frustration is that Frost too often frames her argument in terms of unhelpful dichotomies: ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, form and content, the cerebral self and the sensuous self. Such dichotomies do not sit well with her declared wish to provide a more nuanced look at the modernist project. The book is replete with friction, resistance, and the feeling of being tossed back and forth within sets of opposed categories. Her conclusion is that the modernist project was and can be a source of ‘productive tension’. This is a compelling suggestion, but I can’t help but feel that it denies modernism some of its ambition. A greater vision of the modernist project – one held by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty – has modern philosophy and art as organs for provoking people into a new way of perceiving and inhabiting the world. And in this way, we might regard a knotty modernist text as open testament to life’s complexities, rather than categorising it as an irritant work of the ticklish type.