Eliseo Vivas once said, “I would not for a minute pretend solidarity with men who do not realize that one of the essential marks of decency today is to be ashamed of being a man of the twentieth century.” He had no desire to turn the clock back; he was simply advocating that rather than playing yes men to the age we should assume the role of critics. In this survey of the culture of our century, Norman F. Cantor is certainly no yes man, but his criticism, generally very reasonable, is sometimes less than penetrating and consistent. At times it is even provokingly idiosyncratic.
Criticism, however, is not the primary aim of the book. Cantor’s main objective is to bring together information from a wide variety of disciplines in order to survey and summarize the principal patterns of thought in this century. Such a comprehensive and systematic overview is not taught in our universities, he claims, and his book is an attempt to remedy this failure while also contributing to a revival of cultural and intellectual history. In previous books, he has applied his method to medieval and English history. One of his special purposes here is to lead readers across the threshold into the fashionable but intimidating chambers of current literary theory.
Beginning with an explanation of its 19th-century roots, he defines modernism and surveys its manifestations across the cultural spectrum, from the arts through science and theology. He then moves through chapters on psychoanalysis, Marxism, and the left, traditions on the right, and structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. He is so comprehensive in his synthesis that individual figures and movements get only brief mention, but this concise treatment is informed and informative. He is mapping intellectual-cultural history, and the book shares the usefulness and limitations of a map. As a reference work for locating thinkers and movements within the cultural territory of this century, the book is invaluable.
But, unlike a map, the book has a specific thesis, one concerning the nature and destiny of modernism. Cantor conceives modernism as a cultural revolution that promised liberation of the human spirit followed by intellectual and cultural progress, but which now is a “paradise lost.” The period of Modernism, roughly 1900 to 1940, was the creative age of our century. It was “beneficent and enjoyable.” Since then we have been spending its intellectual capital. “We are living now in a cultural age of diversity, eclecticism, and uncertainty of consciousness and goals, although skills and learning abound.” We need a new cultural paradigm, he says, and although in this time of uncertainty the academic and literary left is flourishing, he expects new creative movements to come from the right. He advocates “a policy of conservative humanism, of voluntarism under corporate and academic leadership addressed to strengthening the social texture and the solution of critical problems.”
Cantor’s breadth of coverage is impressive. He has done something that much needed doing. Conservative readers will respond positively to his respectful inclusion of rightist traditions; his perceptive appraisal of the New Left of the 60’s; his recognition of the current threat of Marxism in the universities; and his desire, in the face of recent European—particularly French—influences, to protect and cultivate our indigenous intellectual traditions and national culture. Many readers will be either provoked or amused by the rather cranky personal jibes sprinkled amidst the objective summarizing: “How much anyone can owe to Bergson remains a matter of doubt”; “Libertarianism makes little sense until one has to listen to Mario Cuomo speak for ten minutes”; “It is not so easy to ascertain whether de Saussure’s status arises from the intrinsic quality of his work or the fact that it was French.”
But with all its useful information and insights, the book has, in my view, two large and rather puzzling deficiencies. First, in glorifying modernism. Cantor fails to recognize that in very significant ways modernism was midwife for the birth of the later cultural conditions that alarm him. He includes in his list of modernism’s characteristics such things as self-referentiality, a penchant for the fragmented and discordant, moral relativism, the priority of art, and cultural despair; but he fails to recognize their inevitable consequences. Modernism was not a paradise now lost; it was a revolution that generated some dehumanizing tendencies that are still ineluctably working themselves out. For example, the seeds of deconstruction germinated in the later writing of James Joyce, and the recently proclaimed death of the author was adumbrated in T.S. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry and the “intentional fallacy” of the New Critics.
Second, although Cantor, a professor at New York University, assumes a posture of “conservative humanism” for a survey that includes even some rather minor figures on the left and right, he makes no mention whatsoever of Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Eric Voegelin, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, or any other figure that might appear as author or subject in Modern Age. His New York provincialism blinds him to an awareness of a major cultural perspective—a perspective, incidentally, that could have enabled him to evaluate modernism more penetratingly. And this blind spot cripples his useful synthesis of 20th-century culture.
[Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction, by Norman F. Cantor (New York: Peter Lang) 452 pp., $39.95]
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