Peter Gay's 'Mornism' Wields a Heavy Yardstick

Contents:

• PETER GAY’S ‘MORNISM’ WIELDS A HEAVY YARDSTICK
• PETER GAY (1923–2015)
• JAGUARS ACH KEV MAXEN OUT AS GAY HISTORIC ANNOUNCEMENT

PETER GAY’S ‘MORNISM’ WIELDS A HEAVY YARDSTICK

Surprisgly, the anecdote don’t appear Peter Gay’s “Mornism: The Lure of Hery, ” a massive history of the movement all s artistic forms — patg, sculpture, fictn, poetry, mic, archecture, sign, film (though, bafflgly, not photography, one of the chief talysts of the mornist revolutn).

PETER GAY (1923–2015)

But bee Gay needs the “lure of hery” to thematilly stcture his book, he often ends up not jt rercg the riture of mornists as unhappy outsirs and elist malntents, but flatg is almost as if Gay were perversely termed to unrme his own profound awarens of mornism’s multifaceted and ntradictory nature.

Yet although Gay wr betifully about Kafka, about Prot on grief, about thentic middle-class hunger for mornist liberatns and about the fal scene of regnn and unspeakable shame Chapl’s “Cy Lights” — to take jt four exampl among many — he seems to fd more eful to traffic rdboard simplici.

JAGUARS ACH KEV MAXEN OUT AS GAY HISTORIC ANNOUNCEMENT

But is wrong for Gay not to add that durg his one meetg wh Hler, Hamsun so aggrsively prsed the Führer to stop executg Norwegian ristance fighters and to loosen his reprsive hold on the untry that Hler loathed Hamsun for his solent for Gay’s Parisian mornist “outsirs, ” if the French provid the most extreme asslts on Wtern ratnaly — Rimbd’s “disorientatn of the sens, ” André Breton’s celebratn of primal stcts stored the unnsc, André Gi’s enthiasm for the “motivels” crime, Anton Artd’s “Theater of Celty, ” Mrice Blanchot’s claratn of the ath of the thor — the reason was simple. ” He seems to have momentarily fotten that Yeats, Elt, Pound, Lawrence and Céle on the right, and Pisso, Gi, Breton and the Rsian mornists (barely allud to by Gay) on the left, were about as far om liberalism as a Cubist patg is om an iPod — not to mentn the toxilly snobbish Woolf, who was neher right nor too much left.

Conversely, Gay’s survey of postwar Amerin art almost exclively refers to the tensely biased and partisan — toward his own dub theori, that is — Clement Greenberg, which is like quotg a Ju on the character and history of Prottantism. ” So Peter Gay nclus the fal sentence of “Mornism: The Lure of Hery From Blaire to Beckett and Beyond, ” his sweepg survey of the poets, playwrights, paters and archects who set out to rewre the l of art, transform nscns and, wherever and whenever possible, shock the placent middle class. Gay, the ement historian of the European Enlightenment, Weimar culture and Sigmund Frd, has spent the greater part of the 1980s and ’90s chroniclg the sensibily and cultural life of the Victorian middle class his five-volume seri, “The Bourgeois Experience.

A Sterlg Profsor Emer at Yale Universy, a historian traed Frdian psychology, and the thor of numero books cludg an exhstive study of Enlightenment thought (the wner of the Natnal Book Award) as well as fascatg monographs on Frd, the Victorian bourgeois experience, and the culture of the Weimar Republic, Peter Gay has time and aga proven himself to be the posssor of a keen tellect, an satiable cursy, and an admirable manner of exprsn. In his latt book, Mornism: The Lure of Hery om Blaire to Beckett and Beyond, Gay tak on a project that he claims has never been acplished before: a one-volume discsn of “mornism” the arts – all of the arts (well, all of them asi om opera and, most shockgly, photography).

Rather, Gay has selected certa paters, thors, posers, sculptors, archects, signers, playwrights, and movie directors that he believ may be treated as “exemplars of dispensable elements the mornist perd” and he has ma his choic an attempt to create a “able fn of mornism”. Gay f the mornist perd as nng om the 1840s to the 1960s, th approximately 120 years gurated by the sndalo poetry of Charl Blaire and molished by the treachero (at least acrdg to Gay) machatns of the proponents of Pop Art, who sought to dismantle the sacrosanct divi between high art and popular entertament.

It will immediately strike alert rears that Gay’s fn (while may, at first, appear reasonable) do not rive om the vtigatn of the artworks, their creatn and receptn, but rather serv as the basis for judgg beforehand who and what should be clud that vtigatn. Th some artists uld nnibalize past styl (such as Stravsky’s return to tonaly his “neo-classil” perd) or refe to accept the notn that their art reveals their subjectivy (aga Stravsky provis a fe example his sistence upon an “objective” mic) whout losg, Gay’s book, their “mornist” crentials.

Th, we return to the rather tired platu that 20th-century mic is a dialectic between Schoenberg and Stravsky, but whereas Theodor Adorno (one of the greatt proponents of that platu whose wrgs almost reem ) brgs out the ep divergenc between their posnal and athetic outlooks, Gay rc them to differg exprsns of an unrlyg bland “mornist” sire to shock and to “live fully one’s time”. The “lure of hery” (one mt at least cred Gay wh a wonrful turn of phrase here) uld jt as easily scribe the shockg imag employed by Caravagg (the brilliant Italian pater of the early 17th century who amply monstrated his exploratns of a tortured subjectivy by sertg his own visage to one of his patgs as the pated Goliath held by the triumphant David) or the dissonant experiments of such late-Renaissance posers as Carlo Gualdo or Cld Monteverdi. In the sectn on lerature, Gay clus Henry Jam as one of only four novelists (although Kafka later as a fifth) but lims the discsn to a flimsy two paragraphs which we learn ltle more than that Jam’s last three novels are rarely read but masterpiec nohels.

One of the text’s more bewilrg moments is an examatn of the self-portras of var mornists meant to monstrate their subjectivy — even Gay seems to register the banaly of such a ploy by assurg the rear that he is aware that artists predatg 1840 also pated self-portras. Spendg years workg wh the Enlightenment philosoph, and more years wh Frd — which yield a Frd bgraphy and anthology, and the five books that formed The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Frd — Gay got ed to beg wh the very bt. Maybe Gay was tired of the people; maybe he felt nostalgia for the pany of the bt, and wanted a chance to be wh them aga, to nnect wh the most creative spirs many untri, many discipl, over a span of more than a century.

Gay the longtime teacher of historgraphy would surely have alerted his stunts to sound stant alarms when giant metaphors get wheeled to the foreground like great siege mach — not to mentn, when theology and blogy appear on the page as sudn alli. Peter Gay appears to spair at Pop Art and nsir a bad thg bee – this is jt a gus – although the artists were still whe mal, they weren't anguished, and they loved low culture (and spent their time eagerly rippg off). Overall, seems that this book, Gay has cid on a fn of Mornism and marshalled an array of work om artists workg var art forms (patg, sculpture, fictn, poetry, mic, dance, drama, film, and archecture) to apply his fn to.