Modern Milestone

...Professors Ellmann and Feidel-son present French existentialism as the most important contribution of the past quarter-century to the modern movement...

...This is not to quarrel with the editors' selections, but simply to suggest possible perspectives from which the present can judge its past...

...They have organized the modern movement under nine major themes—symbolism, realism, nature, cultural history, the unconscious, myth, self-consciousness, existence, and faith—and divided each into several sub-topics...

...Until we doubt we never know what we believe...

...But as others have suggested, the doctrines of existentialism represent the way stunned French intellectuals caught up, in a wartime atmosphere, with long-standing cultural developments elsewhere...

...Anthologies by nature simplify and make systems...

...It may come as a surprise to some that we no longer live in the midst of the great cultural and literary revolution of modern times...

...The Modern Tradition performs an important cultural function by presenting the "modern movement" in a form that can be comprehended and criticized...

...Reviewed by Robert Sklar A new anthology, The Modern Tra-dition, marks an important cul^ tural milestone...

...Any reader familiar with the cultural and literary movements of the past century must stand in awe at the order and coherence Ellmann and Feidelson have constructed out of such chaos and complexity...

...On the evidence of The Modern Tradition, 1939 is as good a symbolic date as any to mark the end of the modern movement—with the beginning of World War II, the publication of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the death of Freud...

...Our present "postmodern" age may wish to retain the modern tradition, but it will never know what parts to discard and what to keep until it tests them all severely...

...The "modern movement" in arts and thought has enjoyed a long and distinguished career, longer and more favorable than many cultural movements that preceded it in quieter and more stable times...

...The Modern Tradition gives little attention to social conditions or to political ideologies as "backgrounds of modern literature," though the modern movement surely was shaped by social conditions —and modern artists embraced political ideologies more avidly and uncritically than many other social groups...

...In recent years a few critics have begun to argue that the '.'modern movement" in the arts and thought has ended, and the present generation belongs—for lack of a more distinctive character—to the "post-modern" era...

...If this is so, the consequences will be exciting and incalculable...

...Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., the editors of The Modern Tradition, have now documented this claim with a thoroughness that is likely to make it an accepted dogma of contemporary cultural and literary self-awareness...

...To a surprising degree, what passes for cultural innovation today in the New York cultural world is simply a reflection, if not a direct borrowing, from that Parisian culture of French resistance days nearly a generation ago...

...So our "post-modern" era lives not merely in the shadow, but in a shadow of the shadow, of the great intellectual and artistic revolution...

...Pablo Picasso and Ezra Pound are thankfully still with us, to be sure, but the great majority of selections in The Modern Tradition come from the half-century from 1880 to 1930...

...For tradition is nothing but a burden if accepted uncritically...

...In Axel's Castle, Wilson looked forward to a time when artists turned away from a self-centered aesthetic to an aesthetic more securely rooted in the needs and realities of society...

...Their aim, of course, is to be exploratory and suggestive, but the inevitable effect is to make it all accessible, assimilable, and perhaps even a little boring...

...We have hardly moved a step in the thirty years since Axel's Castle, where Edmund Wilson was arguing already that the modern movement, in its original and creative aspects, had run its course...

...The surprise is that four-fifths of the documents in this book were probably read by Edmund Wilson when he was preparing Axel's Castle for publication in 1931...