We don’t come here to be reminded about life’s trivial side, we don’t want to think about Berlusconi, the endless troubles of the Italian government, or the reform of national health care... We come to Italy for beauty alone.
~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration
VENICE — Sometime during the pandemic, I noticed that nine out of ten new “classical” albums Apple Music were indistinguishable. Not only was the artwork for each some bland imitation of a Sugimoto photograph, a grey ocean meeting a grey sky whose horizon you’d miss if you didn’t squint; and not only was each named Crows or Walking or Pond; but each offered sixty minutes of some pianist mournfully sinking their feeble fingers into the same muted chords, as though they too had bored themselves to an early death. But boredom, as their titles suggest, seemed to be the point; here was something unimaginative, even unnoticeable, to comfort you while you worked — Satie’s “furniture music” reimagined for the frictionless era.
You can’t eat beauty, but you can starve without it — a revelation only a sudden feast can deliver. But beauty is also lethal, as the late Adam Zagajewski points out in Slight Exaggeration. It’s what kills Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach, for example, on his sojourn in Venice. Catching his first glimpse of Tadzio, the great and distinguished writer “loses his mind completely, and the capacious world of intellectual discipline that had hitherto offered him daily refuge and inspiration loses all its charm.” As with most advice, it seems fatally simple: don’t bite into the wrong fruit, and you live.
Last week, at the Fundação Gulbenkian, I watched Tamara Stefanovich perform Sonata para Piano no. 2 by Pierre Boulez. Written between 1947 and 1948, the Sonata is true to classical form, but — as Stefanovich pointed out — it’s a form Boulez pushes to its limits. From its first notes, it rolls toward you like a frothy Atlantic tide, ice-blue and white-capped. Stefanovich, to her credit, demonstrated for anyone who’d forgotten that the piano is indeed a percussion instrument; she struck the keys savagely, as though she wanted to crack open the casing and hammer the strings herself.
In its twin ambitions, to pay fealty to classical tradition and to grind that tradition into dust, Boulez’s sonata felt blasphemous in the way all great Modernist works feel blasphemous. I was maybe influenced by the shattering effect of her trills, but it felt like watching the beautiful dome of an atrium rain its broken glass over the flowers below. I hadn’t been so thrilled by a performance since watching Kari Kriikku play Kaija Saariaho’s D’Om le Vrai Sens with the Minnesota Orchestra in 2023 — that howling clarinet pacing up and down the aisles in the dark.
A work such as Boulez’s Sonata or Saariaho’s concerto — unlike the furniture music of pandemic-era pianists, but also unlike a pleasurably bombastic symphony of Tchaikovsky’s — combines the nourishing and poisonous aspects of beauty, a beauty you can call terrible.
I’ve mentioned before my long love of Modernism — this is usually what I think of as terrible beauty, even if it’s an artistic movement that tends to get oversimplified by Ezra Pound’s workshopping slogan, “make it new.” If anything, Modernism contains a bulwark against novelty for its own sake. It is not, for example, the novelty-hunger of the Futurists, who accelerated Italy’s descent into Fascism (and which Pound himself admired). Nor even is Surrealism, whose banal novelty springs entirely from the programmatic estrangement of dissociated juxtapositions — e.g. from its form — a Modernist endeavor.
Mrs. Dalloway, on the other hand, is novelty in a familiar, even bourgeois form. Same with Stravinsky; Rite of Spring is “just” a ballet.1 Instead of the monster we’ve never seen, Modernism is the monster wearing a tux, here to speak and dance as well as we’ve trained it. Instead of “make it new,” it would be better to understand the Modernist canon as “make it uncanny”: we are meant to be unsettled, not confused.
The key to this, I think, is contradiction — a duality Zagajewski identifies in thinking of our “ecstatic” encounters between long stretches of life: “We live, by necessity, in two registers, not just in one, we live both in the moment and in duration.” These two registers are what one hears in Sonata para Piano no. 2, whose predictable form offers alienating content — to be played like a hive full of agitated bees, as Boulez once instructed Stefanovich. They are what one reads in Ulysses, a novel that turns one Irishman’s day into a roving epic adventure.
Obviously, Modernism takes its cues from the early twentieth-century revelations in psychology, science, and war.2 Its artistic contradictions are parallel to the “enormity” of the atom, for instance, or the infinitesimal earth drifting alone in the universe. As it develops, so too does the consciousness that everything is malleable: not only the earth but the human personality, which can both transcend itself in meditation or change forever with a tiny, errant shard of metal.
The Modernist respect for form, then, seems an acknowledgment of the gravity of such malleability, of the weight that style can have. Compared to the more cavalier, adolescent, and nihilistic adventures to follow — once again, I’m looking at Surrealism, the artistic sensibility most suited to international consumerism — the Modernist works believed in their own accountability or responsibility, even culpability. If you go around monkeying with the universe, you should understand what you’re doing, not thrash around like a brat.
To make it more contemporary — and to bring it within my wheelhouse — this is precisely the responsibility I find lacking in most anglophone autofiction. It’s why I cringe when Rachel Cusk, for example, tells the Paris Review about “the problem” of “the ‘setup’ for the fictional situation,” and how it “takes you straight into the politics of identity and the difficulty of establishing enough of a shared basis for identity for the objective disclosure of information to become possible”; or when one writer tells another that they had “no choice” as a marginalized individual but to write about their “inherited trauma.”
There’s something fetishistic in this self confinement, in shirking the pleasure of playing with language, in rejecting characterization, in over-crediting oppression, in stylizing nothing but one’s own powerlessness. Admittedly, it’s very, very hard to engage with this sense of history sickness in an aesthetically exciting way.3 But the contemporary work of autofiction seems in thrall to its self-professed inability to engage. What’s fetishized in a lot of these books is powerlessness itself, a sense of paralyzed doom you can get just as easily from reading the news or scrolling through social media. Many, in fact, feel indistinguishable from watching friends and strangers perform their “stand up depression” online as the world seems to fall apart in real time.
These fictions’ suspicion of fiction isn’t incidental: their lack of faith in artifice is their lack of faith in a future, one and the same — as the future itself is a fiction we have to construct. To call fiction “fantasy” in a world in crisis comes across like a childish resignation; the game is too hard, so you just walk away, offended. Style, as I’ve said before, is how the artist wields their agency; writing without style, or rejecting it as false or dishonest, is to surrender agency altogether.
Why are you writing about Modernism when an idiot like Ezra Klein is defending a propagandist’s reputation?
Who cares about the way a piano is played when democracy is racing the Antarctic ice shelf to see which gets to collapse first?
How can you talk of “eating” beauty when Israel is starving Gazans to death?
Believe me, I asked myself these same questions. Like most people who write for the internet, I imagine all the ways they might crop up, as there’s always someone ready to end your moment of pleasure by reminding you of some emergency underway, some awful thing to spectate. And I don’t mean to belittle them, these emergencies; I too spend most of my days sick with worry and horrified by what my country, for which I am nominally accountable, is doing to itself and the rest of the world.
But fear, as Zagajewski says, can be “like a migraine — it disappears and leaves no trace.” This is his conclusion when asking himself “what it must have been like to live through World War Two, the Holocaust, or during Stain’s purges, the years of the greatest terror, and it seems impossible, inconceivable, to survive even an hour in such a nightmare.” However, “for those who weren’t that day’s direct victims of persecution, there was always more reality, always some kind of weather, they were either hungry or well fed, a dog was barking somewhere, a plane flew overhead, Mother was making pierogi in the kitchen, you had to think about buying winter boots...” With all of this reality in their daily lives, “they forgot for a moment.”
Often, on the day after a tragedy, you wake up without it — at least at first. There was no horrific letter in the mail, no unexpected death; you don’t have that diagnosis; that person you love didn’t hurt you more than you thought they ever could. It’s a brief gift, to wake up to any other day — at least until it comes back to you, until you realize today is the day after that day. An encounter with beauty can give us this same lapse in memory. For a little while, the migraine disappears.
Living with the internet is living with a memory machine. This is really what that anticipated comment is about, that someone out there remembers and won’t let you forget — that people are starving while you’re posting about food, that democracy is collapsing while you’re praising literary critics, that this writer you love said a horrible thing a half-century ago. It would be a genuine loss if these things were truly, irreversibly forgotten, but that doesn’t mean we need to hold them in our heads at all times.
Yes, these comments have always been around, but the internet institutionalizes them; it trains its users to make them, to interrupt until every moment is in observance of tragedy, and no part of life is left unclaimed. It’s as if someone has left a note by your bed and the first thing you see, every morning, is that the world is ending and it’s futile to believe otherwise. I don’t find this helpful or motivating; it doesn’t give me any sense of agency, and neither do the novels and other works of art that seek to mirror it, to intimate it. Perhaps it’s naïve of me, but I prefer those works, even of terrible and chilling beauty, which show me what a human being can do, when they focus their powers, not what a human being cannot do, stuck like a butterfly to a board — because if they did it, whatever it was, maybe I can too. And so can everyone else.
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The earliest Dada performances, on the other hand, tended to be disruptions of other works: artists shouting obscenities at poets trying to read their work onstage, or attempting to incite riots in the middle of concerts (likely inspired, ironically enough, by the 1913 debut of Rite of Spring). These are the precursors to the Happenings of the sixties, another genre whose novelty is form, happy with platitudes as content.
In particular, the First World War gets a lot of credit for Modernism — Belgium as Eliot’s Waste Land and Fitzgerald’s “valley of ashes” — but it’s worth pointing out that Proust published Swann’s Way in 1913, the same year as Rite of Spring; or that Herman Melville, for that matter, published Moby-Dick in 1851.
John Cage’s 4’33” is a supreme example, and despite its novelty is endlessly re-performable to new effects, new experiences.
I’m curious about the distinction you imply between anglophone autofiction and, presumably, autofiction in other languages. Do you see a difference? And what texts are you thinking of when you mention anglophone autofiction (besides Cusk)?
Personally, I don’t really agree with the characterization of autofiction as fetishizing powerlessness and oppression, but I also wonder if we’re thinking of different texts. I’m thinking of Knausgaard, for example, which is pretty much the total opposite—recognizing that the world wants to oppress us but fighting back, struggling, to give meaning to our existence. But he’s not anglophone autofiction, so…
this is great