Kunapipi XXVI:2

RAJEEV S. PATKE
Literary Modernism in Asia: Pramoedya and Kolatkar

I MODERNISM VERSUS MODERNITY
Modernism is a large, loose, and baggy monster of a term, which struggles to encompass a diverse set of creative practices and cultural assumptions with European origins and a field of reference that has since become unevenly global. I propose to use the example of two writers from outside Europe in order to argue that the tension between artistic modernism and societal modernisation characteristic of European culture in the early part of the twentieth century is reproduced — or, more precisely, transfigured — in postcolonial contexts during the latter half of the twentieth century in differential ways that go beyond the initial correspondence or indebtedness to European forebears.

My argument is based on the widely recognised distinction between modernism as a phenomenon which found its most concentrated expression in European and American art during the early decades of the twentieth century, and modernity or modernisation as the historical realisation of the European Enlightenment project of instrumental rationality, with progress as its goal, and the technological rationalisation of nature and human institutions as its means.

Modernism as a cultural referent suffers from the effect of several ironies. Its efficacy as a descriptive term remains overshadowed by the fact that it is a retrospective nomination, described vividly by Stan Smith as ‘a movement constituted backwards, like Beckett’s series of doggy obituaries, the new dog endlessly buried for the sake of dogs to come’ (240). The notion of ‘modern’ implies a link with the ‘new’, the ‘contemporary’, and ‘the avant-garde’. Yet, as Raymond Williams noted laconically, ‘What was ‘modern’, what was indeed ‘avant-garde’, is now relatively old’ (Williams 52). Thus ‘modern’ is balanced equivocally between a denotation that is historically specific and a connotation that evokes perpetual novelty. More seriously, theorists of diverse ideological persuasions, ranging from American New Criticism to the European intellectual Left as exemplified by Lukács and Adorno, have identified aesthetic autonomy as one of the principal traits unifying most forms of modernism. However, as noted by Peter Bürger in the 1970s, the post-Romantic modernist myth of the autonomy of art inhibits analysis of its aesthetics as ‘the normative instrumentality of an institution in bourgeois society’ (lii). This repression becomes particularly noticeable when modernism is transplanted outside Europe, where its role as an aesthetic principle cannot avoid engagement with the very different social formations and political ideologies it encounters in postcolonial societies and nations, as I hope to illustrate later.

The autonomy imputed to modernism is misleading in yet another respect: as a movement affecting the arts, modernism is often treated as if it were largely unrelated to the older and concurrent phenomenon of European colonialism. Yet, as many commentators have reiterated, modernist art provides ample evidence for a significant relation between its aesthetic strategies and the impact of colonialism on the cultures of the colonising nations.